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I remember you from when the Black Isle forums switched to the Bioware boards in late 2001/early 2002, when we were both excited for Neverwinter Nights to come out. Even earlier than that, you'd become a presence in BG2's expansion, Throne of Bhaal. Why are you doing this with your life? What's the endgame? I remember deducing you were late twenties/early thirties then, so you have to be in your fifties now. What do these boards even still offer you? Haven't you seen enough of life by now to not bother posting here? Why do this ****? Let me give you an example from my own life. I've grown up with you. You and Karzak, Chosen of Shargaash were my first experiences with internet trolls back in 2002. Going back to newsgroups I now realize you must have had at least a 10 year advantage on me. Even so. You're still doing this. Since first encountering you I've obtained a bachelor's degree, a doctorate, and I've learned two new languages. But you're still posting in a fake orc dialect on isometric rpg forums. Who are you? What do you do? This keeps me up at night.

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Prima facie, a tactician/psion seems like a slam dunk. The tactician regenerates discipline based off interrupts and flanking, and the psion gets abilities that let you interrupt and flank every x seconds. Given the strictures on tactician it can't solo, and in group play you have to make sure it's your off-tank, not your main tank, but even so, it basically gets to spam warrior abilities the entire fight, considering the regenerative abilities of its power pool. +2 discipline gauntlets are extremely common, and the DoC breastplate will even add 2 more. In any party that has a main tank, this seems to be an extremely powerful combo.

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? The powerlevel of both classes. My comment about nature godlike powerlevels was in reference to the suggested +1 pl the special class would provide in the scenario the poster imagined in his original quote. Given your lack of reading, I'm not gonna bother responding further. Apparently you lack reading comprehension, because I accounted for that in my response. +1 PL from nature, +1 from that proposed subclass = +2. Not something that can be "replicated" by nature godlike, because class bonuses don't replace anything or get suppressed; they stack additively. The power level of both classes in an illusionist/priest of berath is fine and is no different from any other multiclass. and again, there's no relevant penalties. At this point given your flippant flouncing, I have to assume you actually know very little about what you're talking about. ok

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing. what's wrong with illusionist/priest of berath? The powerlevel of both classes. My comment about nature godlike powerlevels was in reference to the suggested +1 pl the special class would provide in the scenario the poster imagined in his original quote. Given your lack of reading, I'm not gonna bother responding further.

This is a draft, I could not use the Sorcerer, since one of the subclasses has this name (Wizard+Druid). The name is not the relevant thing here. Mechanically, it would be a horrible choice. It'd be like playing an Illusionist/Priest of Berath. No synergy whatsoever, and penalties hampering both things you're supposed to do: healing and debuffing.

No-one would pick this. The penalties are way too harsh, and the bonuses can be replicated investing in dex, picking nature godlike as your race, and setting up the AI to cast "infuse with vital essence" at the start of every combat.

Why? The sub-classes of wizards are bad. You lose access to 2 schools for 2 power levels. If it were +10 PL, i would say ok, but +2 is not enough. That needs a complete rework. Because, other than Evoker, the wizard sub-classes are bad, and wizard is my favorite class. I have hope that the new wizard subclass will be interesting to play.

This has been the dlc I've been looking forward to the most since they were first announced. To hear that we will be getting an extra wizard subclass out of it as well is great!

I gave up on potd during the bull**** shades fight. No matter what I did I could not get them to stop gangbanging my wizard and my cipher. I guess you're supposed to use daom and kite them around? Whatever. I then went back to a normal difficulty save and crushed all the fights at level 15/16. Potd was too hard, but normal was too easy.

For the choose your own adventure sections, I've found that it pays off to have decent amounts of athletics, stealth, and survival. They rarely check anything else. In regular dialogue, intimidate, diplomacy, and bluff are the ones you'll see most that have the best payoff. Metaphysics, history, and insight usually only give you more lore (with one significant exception in the water shaper's temple), streetwise gives you more money, and religion lets you pray at shrines.

I always wondered whether the in-game damage meter counted animal companion damage for the ranger it belonged to in PoE 1. It definitely appeared like it didn't.

I think you might like a bleak walker/evoker

Because main OP idea buff Druid spirit-shifting, not only for special multi-class combinations like Streetfighter, but in General, i.e make druid class viable without multi-classing as monks, wizards, rangers ... etc Streetfighter Druid sounds like an extremely odd combination from both a RP and combat perspective. Tyler Durden is a streetfighter/druid

Arkemyr's Capricious Hex is very good not only because of its effects but also because of its giant area, and once I got it I started almost every fight with it. Wall of many colors is really really good on larger enemies that don't move as much - they'll keep standing in the wall and will keep getting hit with debuffs over and over. As mentioned above Ryngrym's spells are also great, especially if you quickly want to take a couple of enemies out of the fight. I found Gaze of the Adragan less useful, it seemed to mostly not land and when it did it only lasted a short while. I used Tayn's occassionally but not as often as Arkemyr's Capricious Hex.

I just don't like having to wait that long for seventh level spells, and lose out on things like Wall of Many Colors or Meteor Shower. So, my initial testing has been kind of plagued by the animation loop bug that's been cropping up, but I've noticed that my hits tend to be pretty big, but I run into problems as far as penetration is concerned. I suppose that's what things like Expose Vulnerabilities are supposed to be for, but still, 10-12 Penetration seems somewhat low. I only remember penetration being a concern with the lvl 3 and lvl 4 missile spells, or when fighting higher level groups. In those cases, I either had the other members of my party do the work, or I would cast combusting wounds + wall of fire (or I would go do something else and try again a couple of levels later). And of course, always make sure to target the lowest armor rating a creature has, if you can.

I just finished a playthrough on potd with a wizard, and I would suggest picking up Arkemyr's Capricious Hex instead of arcane reflection. ACH is great CC, better than Tayn's in my opinion, and I found my wizard was almost never targeted by spells so arcane reflection is kind of useless. What would happen instead was that enemies would just ignore all my other characters at the beginning of combat and rush the wizard. Especially during ship battles this was highly frustrating. Get the boots of leap (and DAOM, which you already have) to mitigate this. At the later levels, other than the obvious missile salvo and wilting wind I also found the wall of many colors to be very useful and would prioritize it over ACH on boss mobs. You might also consider picking up concussive missiles, which has great synergy with pull of eora.

I don't normally play potd because I've found that battles last much too long for my tastes, but I'm playing on potd now because I want to unlock the god challenges, and I've found that far more than any stat you can increase the number one thing to focus on to make combat go your way is to split-pull. This doesn't really answer your question directly in the sense that it has no usable information about deflection or ar thresholds, but it lets you go through the game much faster than answers to your original question would. You can't get the levels you'd want for both deflection and ar on your entire party, but when you're only fighting three or four dudes at a time that doesn't matter. So far there is only one place I've discovered where split-pulling doesn't let you get out of combat (the fampyr crypt, way up NW), but even so by running your tank back and forth you can set it up so you only fight a couple of dudes at a time.

How are pure barbarian's what?

No I am not. These forums and the internet in general is full of people playing this minigame. Your intentional withdrawal from reality doesn't change that at all.

What are you talking about. I spend all my time hunting down ships right after leaving Port Maje because they drop great loot and with the right tactics you can take out enemies 10+ levels higher than you. You can sell the loot for better ships and ship upgrades, which allows you to accumulate even more loot even faster, until you're level 7 and your entire party is decked out with superb and legendary gear and you have the best boat in the game. And I'll tell you one thing, you can't do that by immediately going for boarding. Personally I like the long range cannons. I advance to the 500-450 range, and then just blast, jibe, hold, blast, jibe, hold, blast, and then usually the ship is sunk. Sometimes the ship will try to flee, especially if you're in the 600-500 range, and sometimes you have to spend a turn sending deckhands around instead of holding, but that's about it. Super easy.

My assassin/bleak walker playstyle hasn't changed from level 1 to level 20. Stealth, flames of devotion, one shot a dude, repeat. Berserker/devoted, assassin/devoted, assassin/soul blade, shapeshifter/monk, etc. etc. All of them play the same at both ends of the levelling scale. This thread is mostly people complaining that they don't understand the various systems of poe 2. All the most powerful builds are multiclasses, with evoker being the only exception. Multiclassing is extremely worth it, you just need to actually read the text the game displays for you. Check out the builds forum some time and tell me that multiclassing sucks.

Yes ok but why are you telling obsidian about it? Once it gets nerfed how am I supposed to get the metaphysics staff on nemnok island right out of tutorial isle?

In a subject verb object questioning sentence, you get a form of 'do' before the subject. And after a use of do/does/did, you always get the infinitive. So 'say', in this case. -> "Why did Josh say they are very powerful? Specifically considering all the cool new loot we got in-game." Seriously? I'm not a native speaker of English, and I've been posting on internet forums since 2002, since bioware's Neverwinter Nights boards came out. I tell people about do/does/did because it makes my reading experience more pleasant. I don't care about them, I don't care about anyone else, I only care about what I read. Nothing is as bad as entering a server and having everyone speak Russian or Polish. If you're gonna have a go at it in English, I might as well help you.

As a rogue, what you're going to run into most in combat is that enemies will target you even though you've sent your high hit point tank in to target them and stick to him. As the game goes on, you may want to invest in skills that turn you invisible to combat this. Rogues have an excess of those skills to invest in. It is also more optimal to use either two ranged weapons or two melee weapons. While it's cool to have a dagger and a gun, it's not very useful combat mechanics-wise.