AndreaColombo

My concern is not that this will be the last balance pass, especially because Josh said on SA there will still be some time to tweak things after the expansion comes out (my uneducated guess would be 2-3 more patches after that; if they do 4, hats off to them for fantastic post-release support.) My concern is that this balance pass in particular was simultaneously uncalled for and too heavy handed. Ciphers were good, and yes—some of their powers were maybe too good; but they weren't game breaking. A small tweak to those individual powers (Echo, Amplified Wave, Tactical Meld) would have been understandable; a tweak to those powers + a significant increase in Focus cost for all powers + an unjustified nerf to Focus-generating drugs is too much. Note that their sub-optimal 7th level powers haven't been touched in the slightest. They were already not worth their Focus cost in 2.03; much less now.

Sounds about right? If there's no burn damage to increase, 20% of 0 is 0

It stacks with Devotions for the Faithful, but probably not with Scroll of Valor and Zealous Focus.

4400 reference, FTW. I loved that series.

Womanizer I moved here because my wife is Hungarian

Short answer: Yes. In Pillars of Eternity, tactics and strategy are generally worth a lot more than character builds—and that's especially true at difficulty levels below PotD. The class and attribute systems are flexible enough to allow the creation of any character you may like, and the game is structured in a way that makes virtually every build able to beat it (this was one of Obsidian's early design goals, btw.) So yes, you can definitely beat the game on Hard difficulty with that Barbarian build (or any other, pretty much.) What you need to keep in mind, however, is that PoE barbarians are very different from D&D barbarians. In PoE, barbarians are not good single-target damage dealers, and they cannot take a lot of punishment. Those are the purview of Fighters and Monks. Barbarians are AoE damage dealers and crowd controllers, and their bread and butter is the Carnage ability (which incidentally benefits a lot from INT.) If your goal is single-target DPS, a Fighter or a Monk will suit you much better than a Barbarian; conversely, if you try to play a Barbarian as a single-target damage dealer, you're probably not going to enjoy it very much. Food for thought.

You'd be surprised how many Hungarians can speak Italian—but that's beside the point that I'm Italian myself Thank you, though Budapest isn't really "mine" so much as "the place where I live." I wasn't born here

HawkSoft— keep in mind that Scion of Flame will only increase the burn damage from Turning Wheel after it's been calculated. I.e. it is not 25% (Turning Wheel) + 20% (Scion of Flame) = 45% burn damage; rather, if you deal, say, 20 crush damage, then it's 20 * 25% = 5 burn damage from Turning Wheel, plus 5 * 20% = 1 burn from Scion of Flame, for a total of 20 crush + 6 burn. That said, there is of course a chance that Scion of Flame is not working at all with Turning Wheel—just wanted to point out the workings because, as with most mechanics in PoE, they tend to be unobvious

I thought the original Act III was for characters around level 10-12 and the scaled-up version would be for levels 14-16. Josh did say it was meant for people who are "really amped up" from the expansion and levels 10-12 were easily attainable on a non-completionist run of base game.

Not really. It's mostly just a list of known features from patch 3.0 and TWM pt. II. The only new bit of information is about the new stronghold-related quest, where he says, "The new quest focuses on your status as Lord/Lady of Caed Nua. Even though the castle is located in a remote area in-between Dyrwood and Eir Glanfath, the Aedyrans have historical interests there and would see you removed from your role, and what looks like a simple argument rapidly escalates into a large-scale conflict." (very poor on-the-fly translation, but you get the picture.)

^ I think leveling up in PoE is pretty easy as it is—my characters feel like they level up often enough. 'Sides the game's pretty easy already; a higher level cap would make it boringly easy (not to mention how poorly the current system would scale at higher levels.)

... and every other action your character undertakes. Besides, there are combat actions (e.g. sipping a potion) whose recovery time isn't affected by your weapon's Speed enchant or Durgan-refinement. DEX reduces the animation and recovery duration of those actions.

Speaking of fun, has anyone tried the new Act III scaled-up content? I'm interested in both the level scaling and the encounter redesign. Is it more challenging now?

TWM pt. 2 should have a level cap of 16.

You could use a console command to move to a different area outside of the pit, but the Stronghold UI would still be disabled.

I think QA already acknowledged this as a bug (in fact, I'd be surprised if this wasn't fixed in 3.0 as it was reported back when TWM pt. I came out.)

Most Cipher powers now cost more Focus than they are worth. If I'm to play a Cipher never to use their powers, I'd rather roll a Fighter. Mental Binding already underwent a nerf in 2.03—there was no need to increase its cost; 7th-level powers were already fairly useless as they were, without the massive cost increase. If the argument in favor of the nerf boils down to Amplified Wave, it would have sufficed to nerf that power. Which was done, alongside a cost increase for all powers and the elimination of any convenient Focus booster. Now Ciphers are weak.

Or, you know, you could use the console to get what you want right away (with the IE Mod if you're into achievements)

Shields provide no Damage Reduction; are you sure you're not getting confused with Deflection (which armors provide none of)?

Actually the drugs balance pass includes another Cipher nerf. Prior to 3.0, Ciphers could get +2 PER and +20% Focus gain from Blacsonn, or +4 Focus gain from Carow Golan. Now they can only get +20% Focus gain from Carow Golan if they also suck up a -4 INT penalty that massively shrinks their powers' AoE and shortens their duration. Ciphers really got the hate in this patch, for some reason...

I never swap Grimoires. Seems like an unnecessary waste of time and DPS.

I wished I knew how to build an optimized single-target DPS machine, because that's how like my main to be. It took me months of playing until I figured out the mechanics well enough to make a build to my liking, and I'm still perfecting it as I learn new things. POE sure has some fair deal of mechanical depth

We did, but I never really used the ability anyway so I felt it much less. Appreciate people playing defensive Fighters got burnt quite a bit with that one.

...indeed, and that was already unwarranted! I mean, I love this game and I like most of the changes they're making, don't get me wrong; but the Cipher and Constant Recovery nerfs are just out of place.

I used to do this all the time when playing Starcraft. Some of the ticked off lines were epic in that game. "This is not Warcraft in space!" "It is much more sophisticated!" "I know it's not 3D!" XD