Doppelschwert

I prefer hording unique items over generic crafting materials.

I can't help but observe that for all the complaining you did on something you got completely for free, you are sounding extremly entitled.

I think the game would be great if they deliver on all of what they promise, but I somehow have my doubts about that. I'm cautiously optimistic - everything so far sounds very much like PR talk instead of actual facts, in particular because a lot of details are (understandably) missing.

Sorry for double post.

Only got the 25$ tier, but still, 3$ saved. Compared to PoE, my incentive to spend unreasonable amounts of money on this is much lower. I wonder why Avellone is not listed as 'has worked on PoE' on his past projects.

You can always wait for a sale.

Looks like this was announced last night:

The Assembler sounds awesome But the class names alone imply I'll have to play the game in english again (not that I mind). When PoE was released and I started a chanter in german, the name was translated to what would be 'Singer' in english. It was immediately mocked when I shared a picture of the character I made, and I continued to play the rest of the game (e.g. everything) in english. I think conjurer would sound nice.

I also disagree, but I think that WotR is the closest to RotR, in the sense that the main objective of both sets is to succeed at combat checks. There is not much need for non-combat checks, as the worst thing they will do is make the combat checks harder, and as long as you can reliably defeat any monster you encounter, you can easily win most games. On the other hand, both SnS and MM heavily rely on non-combat checks, so pure combat characters often suffer during some of the scenarios. The difference is that SnS almost necessitates to examine in order to have a good chance at encountering stuff your character is actually good at, while MM is top balanced and gives you multiple tools to deal with stuff your character may otherwise suck at. Contrary to popular opinion, I also consider SnS much more frustrating than WotR - WotR has its own shenanigans, but it's way less random and doesn't demand any non-combat skills that make the game that much harder if you lack them (like Survival and Craft in SnS). I'm writing this from memory, but the siren on steriods AD6 bane of SnS that demands 'Wisdom 12 THEN Wisdom 12 THEN Wisdom 12' alone is much worse than anything you encounter in WotR, given the tools available. Even with Wisdom: 1d12+4 , your chance of winning is 125/1728 = 7.2% prior to playing anything, and if you miss a single check, you suffer massive mental damage. Good luck with an average character of d6+0...

While I was aware of the kingmaker AP, I wonder why they took exactly this one, given that it's very much like a sandbox afaik, in complete contrast to most of the other ones. I'm also wondering where there is a need for a lead writer when they will most likely just implement the AP. Unless there are huge additions in terms of content, what will avellone exactly contribute to an already existing storyline?

Doesn't look like Paizo, given this.

http://paizo.com/paizo/news/v5748eaic9voe?First-CRPG-Pathfinder-Game-in-Development-by https://owlcatgames.com/ Thoughts? I was sure this was going to be Obsidians thing

Yeah, I agree with both of you. Tyranny wasn't balanced, but it supported several options for archetypes that are not really supported by PoE, in particular choosing how to mitigate damage. I don't want the broken stuff, but at least some static bonus that gives an edge and feels like a significant investment. Even when its not available as a general talent, just a single subclass of some class with a focus in this would already enable a lot of archetypes through the multiclass system - could as well be the rogue instead of the monk. That's really all I'm asking for here.

You can play any class with any selection of gear and make it work somehow in PoE, that's not the point. Also, Iron Skin and Iron Wheel stack with armor afaik, so it doesn't give you any incentive to go without armor on its own. I guess it boils down to this: I think the trade-off between DR and attack speed is conceptionally bad as it completely kills off the concept of dodging as a means of defense. I would've vastly prefered a trade-off between deflection and DR and I'm not aware of any way to have such a trade-off in the game. You can buff various values like DR or deflection but you might always just buff both, the only tradeoffs are with regards to offense vs defense. Transcended Suffering is an example for weapons that should've been available for armor as well: Your fist scale with level and are gear independent, but you can always equip a weapon. That's a class feature of the monk in DnD 2 and 3.X as well, but those monks also had the same class feature in terms of armor - scaling with level and gear independent, but you could always equip an armor if you wanted (at least in DnD 3.X, though you lost access to a lot of class abilities then). All I want is that iconic class feature back in some form, and it's not even an obscure wish because of a lot of fantasy archetypes revolve around the heroes not getting hit in the first place instead of soaking up blows with their armor, which becomes quickly apparent when you read a lot of fantasy novels. Why PoE doesn't properly support this concept is still beyond me, even tyranny had talents with this in mind.

I played twice through the BG2 saga, once with a kensai and once with a monk. As one can see, their main feature was not being overly gear dependent and not having any armor, and I'm still dissappointed that both mechanically and thematically, there are no talents to support such a playstyle in PoE. My only wish for PoE2 (beyond what is already confirmed) is to have subclasses dedicated to that concept again, and I'll be very dissappointed if they prefer some other subclasses for the monk instead. Unfortunately, a lot of powerbuilds were based around combining the Kensai subclass with Wizards to yield characters that were both very capable at melee and magic, up to the point that I blame this as the sole reason that the Kensai is an archetype for the magus class in pathfinder, which is quite far away from the initial concept.

Well, if confusion doesn't imply that the AI takes control and overrides your own commands, then a friendly fire mode doesn't seem too bad. Actually, does sound like a lot of fun!

Here is the same link, without having to navigate through facebook and twitter first: https://www.pscp.tv/w/1mnxeVBXbzbKX

The proposed system for martial classes seems strange. When all your active abilities compete for the same resource, and you can choose between learning an active or apassive ability, the passive abilities become much more lucrative once you have a set of basic active abilities. In particular, situational abilities become much less worthwhile, unless the situations they are needed in really necessitate them, and specializing in certain active abilities seems much more worthwhile than having a broad set of skills. I can already see myself investing heavily into passives in favor of active abilities. I can only see this working in one of three ways to not lead to natural min/maxing: - active abilities do radically different and desirable things so it makes sense to take several of them - acquiring active abilities increases your resource pool (I don't see that happening) - you only choose between different active abilities instead of active vs passive (I don't see that happening either) PoE used the second option, but if PoE2 blocks this option, I honestly hope they will open up the first one with proper encounter design.

Might as well be a fatigue mechanic; abilities scale with resource and usage decreases it, although that's probably unlikely. Regardless, it will be interesting to see if this apparently new mechanic will make the game feel more tactical.

Wow. Can you cast reaping knives on yourself? If yes, Monk/Cipher as my main confirmed. EDIT: No, you can't in PoE 1, just tried it out. Makes me sad

The sidekicks will probably end up similar to the cohorts you could get in NWN2 SoZ for the most part, which often needed you to solve their quest in order to recruit them as well. I guess the point is this: The quest will be in the game no matter what, and they have to do some line recording for these npcs no matter what, so they might as well increase the line recording a bit and let them join them. From this point of view, their cost seems marginal, so I'm sure its an economical sound way to enhance the game. Many sidekicks are also better than a single new companion in the sense that the probability that at least someone is interesting is much higher.

From a gameplay perspective, the monk is versatile, fun to play and a great addition to the game, but the lore is quite debatable, even if original. Personally, I think the detachment between lore and gameplay doesn't work very well - the lore focuses on mortification of the flesh and is clearly inspired by christian monks, but the active abilities still focus on tropes that are tied to eastern martial artists, which doesn't feel fitting to me at all. Introducing the drug tropes on top made matters even worse, imho - the whole concept of serious self improvement that was inherent to the DnD monks goes right out of the window for me. Imho, it would've been better if they just called the class 'Flagellant', made the abilities look less martial artist like and most importantly, made the unarmed fighting a talent chain open to every class, and everything would've been perfectly fine. It's kind of bad that the game makes a point of making every type of equipment available to everyone, but restrict the unarmed option to one class. The unarmed talent from WM would've already made the trick if it wasn't a watered down version of the actual ability. I understand the OP insofar as PoE really lacks the archetypes of a skilled fighter that is adept at dodging as his main defense. Fortunately, there will be subclasses in PoE2, so I really hope they will have mercy on people that like martial artists and make a monk subclass that caters to them. Even if they don't, the multiclass will hopefully be robust enough to make a character that feels mechanically like a proper martial artist.

The way josh described it, most things will scale on class level / class ressource (can't keep up with the names), so I guess the subclass bonuses all are available at the first level, and are either balanced against a downside that is also immediately available, or scale slowly, on a case to case basis. From a systemic point of view, they probably only operate on class defining things that you get on the first level, since, judging from PoE, every class talent afterwards is optional anyway, and modifiying those wouldn't make much sense. I doubt we will see complicated things like rebalancing of later talents based on subclasses or similiar considerations; for the Ghost Heart ranger, it's probably just less beneficial to pick up the pet boosting talents, even though you can. Currently, I consider the subclasses as additional bonus talents which almost exclusively shift some values around to incentivice certain playstyles. I'd be positively surprised if we even got one optional additional talent for every subclass to pick from (like paladins and priests had multiple of in PoE), lest a lot of active ones like the ghost heart ranger would receive. That would amount to roughly 30 optional talents alone, and given the very few addition in WM with regards to new talents, those seem to be a lot of work.

Secret mummy companion confirmed?! I hope there'll be a personal quest to unlock a special bandage skill for her.

I don't think my party was as extreme as you make it sound. I had a Fighter, a Monk, a Barbarian, a Chanter and 2 Paladins, and I especially took care to learn higher resistances to status effects and various tools for the chanter / paladins to support the party. The only thing I was really lacking was unlimited hard CC or ranged/elemental damage, as the monk, fighter and the chanter have CC options, just not enough to disable 10 Lagufaeth at once at the start of battle. I agree that running nonstandard parties, different encounters should have different difficulties, and that was the case. But the stun encounters were a very binary thing, as also described by other posts in this thread, and felt relatively awkward as a result. I also don't see how "Stun them all to death myself instead" or "Use the one spell in the game that buffs your defenses to absurd amounts" would have made for nuanced or interesting new tactics in this context, which is basically the only thing that would have gotten available in a standard party. When I can brute force my way through the stuns on hard but need to rely on a very small toolbox on potd, something is definitely wrong imho.