Doppelschwert

Great Abjuration states that it only kills creatures below your level. If there was a boss fight, the enemy in question would surely have its level adjusted. The big damage value is obsolete, as it's simply the instant kill, and the 40-70 damage are most likely relevant if it's not below your level.

I'll just bump this thread until the bug is acknowledged.

This still doesn't work, and apparently wasn't even tracked. It's impossible to have AI customization like this for smaller resolutions, so this should definitely be fixed before release.

Has something changed in the AI department? In particular, does the UI now properly scale with screen resolution? The AI customization screen still doesn't scale with resolutions, which makes it unusable for lower resolutions. Also, what does the spell resistance on the Mage Slayer actually mean now? If it doesn't scale, 5% resistance is pretty pathetic as bonus.

march 2016 for the david byrne reference. can't help but take as a compliment to see Enoch ascribe to Gromnir such perverse obliqueness. HA! Good Fun! ps to forestall any heroic forensics, this post carries no hidden meanings. we were tempted to throw in a complete random siddhartha quote, but decided to choose a path o' restraint. It's no fun if I don't get the joke; someone care to explain? Also, because I'm a nice guy, here is some contribution to the actual topic of this thread: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/170317224881/deadfire-intellect-and-area-of-effect Also, josh apparently doesn't know what exponential means.

Mine was a bear mage in NWN2. It was a horrifically gimped build, but it was also a bear that could cast fireballs. Pillars captured a lot of that craziness, but not all. The last time I played through SoZ, I made it a point to make every character as ridiculous as possible. My main character was simply called 'the harvester': A ranger/fighter with two-weapon fighting and monkey grip, swinging two two-handed scythes, one in each hand, while his dinosaur companion distracted his sorry prey. The build was utter trash, summing up all those penalties to base attack, but there was something magnificient to a dude that wielded two scythes and turned into a whirlwind of scythe blades with 7 (?) attacks each round. The only other character of that party that I remember was a bard/blackguard, which was mechanically gimped as well.

^ I think it would be more intuitive to have 'Target: In melee range' and take care of the opposite through negation.

That's an average of approximately 4.5 hours every day since release... that's like a part time job.

I was finally able to access the UI customization by downsampling (please make the AI editor scale with resolution in the next patch!). The framework really is amazing; given my laziness with regards to micro management, writing even a simple AI has increased my combat performance considerably. That being said, I hope the devs can turn the system even more expressive over the next patches / expansions. I'll echo that it would be great if chosing a new target for autoattacks could be implemented as action for the AI, since the targeting could then be completely controlled by the criteria in the last column. Either way, it would be great if the AI could finally ignore dominated allies; having the party members fight back against their former allies instead of fighting the enemies responsible for the domination was rather annoying in Pillars 1 and is still the case. Even if it does'nt end up as part of the normal AI routine, we would be able to write a script around it if choosing new targets was available. Out of curiousity, a question for the devs: Can you reuse the implementation of the AI system to help you with building the enemy AI?

I just stumbled over Vela myself and thought I was the first one finding her, being able to make a big announcement on the forums for karma; good thing I checked this thread first, otherwise I would've looked like an idiot The more important lesson here is that the companion portraits can be easily used for player portraits by copying the contents from the companion folder to the player folder. Have the portraits for all the new companions and sidekicks been there before the patch already? EDIT: Nothing was added to the companion folder with the first patch (I checked the last date the files were changed).

Yeah, I was refering to priests and druids since the discussion was about those classes lacking the versality for tactical considerations due to lack of trinkets.

As a clarification for those without access to the newest patch: Each instruction set consists of a condition and a matrix consisting of 3 columns. The condition that triggers the instruction is a logical expression built by using AND and NOT operations on individual conditions from an exhaustive list. Column 1 uses your active class abilities with neither modals nor equipment as entries. Column 2 uses target categories as entry, which is determined by the viable targets of the ability in column 1; so far, I've seen (Self / Ally / Self or Ally / Enemy) Column 3 has criteria as entry which are used to determine the target for your ability if there are multiple options. It's not explained what the rows of the matrix do; I take it that the first row that can be used will be executed, but I'm not sure, since the preset AI has base abilities listed above their upgrades. Additionally, you can set a cooldown for the instruction and decide whether engagement is allowed to be broken to carry out the instruction. Multiple Instructions form a Behaviour, and you can equip up to 2 behaviours, with some additional functionality on which behaviour is chosen for each action (Randomly, Alternatingly, the one with higher power level or the one that fits the best to the current situation). I have no idea which instruction is chosen from a behaviour, but I'd guess that it's processed from top to bottom and takes the first applicable one. My suggestion above would be to break down the elementary conditions into two components: A first component defining who or what you are checking for a condition, and a second component with the actual applicable conditions for the object you've chosen in the first component. Right now, there is stuff like "Self: Has affliction" and "Target: Has affliction". Turning these into [self / Target] [Has affliction] would help considerably with building them in an efficient way while keeping track of what's available.

The helwalker works pretty well with Dance of Death and dual wielding scepters with their modals enabled from afar; you get a magic missile machine gun. Might be even more fun with either ranger for the ranged talents or fighter for the improved auto attacks.

I think it makes sense to gather the relevant feedback in a single place. So far, I can't really play around with the customization because my resolution cuts off about half of the menu, but I already saw that the lists are pretty exhaustive, and it's hard to keep track of what's there. Nevertheless, I'm pretty excited about this and think that the people behind it can be very proud about what they've accomplished so far, since the expressiveness on the conditions is quite elaborate. Now to the feedback: So far, you can only select learned active abilities in the AI routine, so I'd like to suggest the following additions to the available actions: - Switch to Weapon Set X - Activate / Deactivate Modal X - Use Item on Quickslot X I'm aware this is only the first version, but some organization of the conditionals would greatly help: Separate tabs for categories ( Self / Target / Available Ressource / Other) would aready help a lot with this, as well as just hiding of unavailable conditions (right now, you can check if you have various amount of each power sources, even though you can only have at most 3).

My resolution is 1280 x 1024 and when I open the AI customization screen, it is cut off at the left and right border, making actual customization hard to impossible. I have had some problems with this resolution in other windows/menus before the patch as well, so I'd suggest to just play around in the less common resolutions to experience the UI issues.

So, what happened to the hotly debated big change regarding proficiencies and general talents? Is that in, or has it been postponed / scraped? I don't see it in the changelog. Also, is the Devoted Bug fixed that just applied the devoted bonus to all weapons? Won't be able to look into the beta myself until after work, which is in 10 hours (your update schedules aren't very kind to people in europe...).

I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree entirely; since spells scale with level, you should always have a valid choice between all the spells you unlocked so far, and the situation should demand that you make different decisions on the order you cast them. No matter how many abilities and spells I have at my disposal, if the game doesn't force me to use a different setup, I'll just find one that works reliably and spam it throughout the game. If there is no tactical choice involved, that implies that either the game does a bad job at forcing you to prioritize differently on different encounters, or your tools are too similiar to each other that there isn't a proper choice between them, which goes back to either your strategic choices or bad design of the tools in the first place. Ideally, you choose your abilities strategically at lvl up so that you have a wide repertoire of abilities across all characters so that you can make tactical choices, and the game forces you to utilize them. Having all spells automatically unlocked in PoE just meant that you could always select the appropriate counter to everything, so I actually think there should be more tactical considerations now.

To be fair, wizards lost flexibility as well, since you were able to permanently learn spells from grimoires in PoE1, and now you can't. Priests will get one more spell per level in the next beta update, and Druids have the whole shapeshift mechanic as compensation. Personally, I like the reduced flexibility because it makes the spell choices more meaningful and decreases the disparity compared to martials, and it's also less overwhelming.

Yeah, I was wondering about those as well. I don't think that casters other than the wizards will get spellbook equivalents though, since versality was one of the defining features of wizards, but I guess it will be something that helps with their designated role (maybe it's extra spells per level or increased stats for spells for casters).

Can confirm, that happened to me as well a while back. I killed some NPCs, the whole village became hostile and the NPCs out of sight attacked each other as well. Guess I should've checked the forums, I thought it was already reported.

An attribute spread of 8/10/12/14/16/18 is perfectly serviceable, makes for good roleplaying, and if you want to build a tanky fighter, you should (and can) invest into resolve anyway. Wizards are hardly the new tank-lords, in particular if you consider their endurance values.

I don't know why, but most people here seem to ignore that the classes have different base values for deflection. Recalling from memory, the fighter enjoys 30 deflection while the wizard enjoys 15... no amount of resolve will bridge that gap if you try to build a 'good tank'. While I don't particulary like the change, I don't hate it either. This is a nerf to casters: They trade weapon damage for deflection, which, depending how well you keep them from harm, is a loss. They'll also have really weak fortitude defenses, which was less of an issue with the high might. Martials don't lose anything except the healing maybe, and most hybrids can do fine with one way of dealing damage as well. The cipher is probably the only one really at loss here, and even then, they can just shift to spells which don't deal damage.

Hmm, interesting. So if you just pick a second class, but then go bananas with your first class, you get rewarded for it? I haven't checked, but if true, this is objectively worse than one level dipping in D&D 3.0 and 3.5. I'm not saying it's bad - I love these systems - but I'm saying it's contrived. I wouldn't say rewarded as there is a trade-off. You trade 33% more class talents for the loss of 2 power levels and the corresponding talents - if that's worth it is anyone's guess. Keep in mind that this means a lot more talents per power level: You're looking at 26 talents distributed on 7 power levels as compared to 20 talents distributed on 9 power levels. The ratio shifts from 2.2 talents/PLVL to 3.7 talents/PLVL, which means you can learn everything you think that you'll need. Martials can learn more passives this way and casters can memorize more spells, but of lower level, and at a later time. By choosing the second class solely to manipulate your base stats, you can also slightly rearrange your defenses, but that's it. The first character I made ended up this way (Devoted / Monk) since I didn't like anything from the monk talents for my kensai concept, so I just stacked more passives on the fighter side. What does it mean to take 3 levels of ranger? You'd multiclass cipher/ghostheart to ignore the pet, take one of the active starting abilities (which you could completely ignore.. or use) and be on your way. I looked it up: You'd lose 5 points in will and get 2 points in reflex (there is a strange logic to how the base stats are arrived - you should come out at a sum of 0). Later on, you take marksman and gunner when you unlock power level 2 and 3, learning cipher spells at *every* level, just as you would with a single class cipher. At LVL20, you end up with access to the same cipher spells you had in PoE (power level 7), and 4 additional cipher spells that you got when unlocking power level 4, 5, 6 and 7. That results in ~2 spells more for each power level on average, which might have some tactical merit. Summarized, you trade versality (the ranged talents + more spells per level) for power (lower power level). I think that is reasonable, but YMMV.

I agree that it changes everything, but I don't think that 'everything' amounts to too much. I just looked it up: Class determines starting values of Endurance, Deflection, Reflex, Fortitude and Will. Each of the later four differs by at most 15 points between classes and has a fixed progression independent of class (the base values should all sum up to 85). Since multiclasses use the mean, these values will shift at most 7-8 points from your original class, and that's it regarding stats. Endurance is more noticeable, I give you that. My conclusion is that the stats are only slightly reordered (the change involves less than half of the interval from attributes at CC), and they most likely would support the role that necessitated the multiclass in the first place. I'll also agree about the forced passives on lvl 1 multiclass, which I forgot when I wrote the post; those get in the way if you want to ignore the second class. However, I think it is easy to ignore the forced lvl 1 actives when you multiclass. If that's acceptable or not, is, in the end, everyone's own decision. Personally, I think ignoring the second class in a multiclass is a viable way to play a variant of the single class that has broader talent selection (all chosen from the first class!) in favour of higher power level. It's a nice side-effect.

No, it's different from how grandmastery was different. Multiclassing changes your character; it changes their progression path, it changes their endurance, their accuracy, their deflection, etc. Multiclassing isn't *just* about access to talents; it's a much broader alteration of the character that causes that character to play very differently. Changes to grandmastery were ultimately just about different number progressions and names with differing damage amounts; it didn't actually change the fundamental nature of your character as a whole, while multiclassing *does*. A ranger/cipher is an entirely different character from a cipher with marksman, from their endurance to their accuracy to one of them having a pet. It's a *much* larger change that creates an inherently different character, and it's not the character that I want to play. In contrast to PoE, accuracy is the same for all the classes in PoE2. Also, I find it contradictionary to argue that Grandmastery just changed a couple of numbers and the progression path when multiclassing... does the very same. The little redistribution of defensive stats is most likely lower than the impact of the talents you want to differentiate your character, so claiming that those talents are hardly interesting for their mechanical part while claiming that the multiclass changes the fundamental nature of the character seems a bit of a stretch to me, at least regarding stats. Again, if you multiclass, and ignore almost all of the talents of the other class, you end up with a slight alteration of the single class that trades higher power level for strictly more talents. It's almost like a completely new mode to creating single class characters - trade power for versatility (given a couple more class talents, so that there are more choices, of course). Regarding the loss of powerlevel in order to continue the character from PoE1: If you hit lvl 20 as a multiclass character, you'll have acess to the same tier of abilities your character from PoE had (since the level only went to 16), so you can recreate your single class character from PoE as a multiclass character in PoE2 and you will still have access to all the abilities you had back then.