Odd Hermit

The Goal - 1. Make strong enough talents requiring a minimum attribute score to add value/options for less min/maxed characters. 2. Give more active options for all classes. Rough ideas/examples - 1 Passive Bonuses Overpowering: Requires 12 Might: +10 Accuracy to Fortitude targeting spells, abilities, and powers (Knock Down for example) Toughness: Requires 12 Constitution: +3 stam, health, and fortitude/level, -10% Recovery Penalty from armor, -30% damage taken from criticals Evasive: Requires 12 Dexterity: -15% damage taken from AoE attacks Awareness: Requires 12 Perception: +7 Accuracy and +30% of your Reflex defense to Will and Fortitude Saves Exacting: Requires 12 Intellect: +20% damage and duration on your attacks that graze Determined: Requires 12 Resolve: Roll twice on all concentration checks, taking the highest roll 2 Active Abilities Precision Strike: Requires 12 Might and 12 Dexterity: 1/Encounter: Your next attack gains +30 accuracy and stuns for 3 seconds Find Weakness: Requires 12 Perception and 12 Intellect: 1/Encounter: Your attacks target the lowest defenses of enemies for 10s Perseverance: Requires 12 Constitution and Resolve: 1/per encounter: Your next action cannot be interrupted and you take 20% less damage until it is completed.

Nature is hands down the worst. You can't wear helms, and your racial is only active when you're low health and it's not that substantial anyway. As for culture bonus, we get skills and an attribute from culture already so I was confused and picked other.

Ranged combat is the safe route. You can use shapeshift as well though, I got decent mileage out of it this build. It depends on the fight for me, so I try not to focus too much on one or the other and keep it mainly caster except for a few high value talents(Vulnerable Attack for Shapeshifting is a big increase in damage). Blunderbuss is good still, if you want a gun. Arquebus is now kind of weak and Druid doesn't have great accuracy to make up for the penalty. Blunderbuss gets a chance to hit w/each projectile which is nice. If you use anything other than Crossbow, Arbalest, or Arquebus though I think you'd want Penetrating Shot which needs to be managed(toggled off) to avoid its speed penalty to spells when you're not shooting. I'm going resolve over dex. I tried dex this build now that it isn't borked and was underwhelmed. Casting faster is nice but I rather have more interrupt resist + I imagine resolve will get more dialogue play. Might and Int are what I'm maxing first and foremost though. Here's what my Druid looked like by level 8: http://i.imgur.com/n81zT04.jpg I did take Two Weapon Fighting here to try out Shapeshift damage. I think Vulnerable Attack is more important but Two Weapon Fighting does help a bit. I'm on the fence about it vs. taking Penetrating Shot for ranged damage. Not a big deal though, since these are convenience talents more for the fights where you're not relying on your casting.

Without the full game it's hard to judge skill checks - there are some in the BB but they're not too frequent or high. I had to min/max mechanics in the beta, but got by with middle values of everything else on other characters. I think going for very high lore will be the route I go in the full release though, for dialogue. Weapon focus isn't worth it for druid IMO. I suppose for a shifter build if it ends up being good enough to bother you could take peasant if unarmed affects shifting - it might not though I haven't tried), but peasant weapons suck right now so it wouldn't do much for you in human form. If peasant had a good ranged weapon it might be worth it. I'm against per rest on shifting personally, but I prefer per-encounter for everything at this point so that's my bias. They are buffing wildstrike talents, they just didn't get that change into the beta build. Druids are so good as a caster though, I'm okay with shifting being a longevity/versatility tool rather than an entire alternate playstyle. And if it were per-day that'd ruin that aspect of it for me. Not sure about low level spells becoming per-encounter. I really hope they do, but we get up to level 8 in the BB without seeing this so I fear that may've been scrapped. I think they should come into play earlier personally. Though some low level spells are very strong right now, there's nothing to stop us from resting when we're out anyway, and health limits us from going on indefinitely.

There's cheese that interferes with normal gameplay and/or prevents valid tactics from being "legit", blurring lines between what is/isn't an exploit. Some things are clearly cheats. That's fine. Console command yourself all you want. But they shouldn't leave in things that negatively affect combat balance.

Wizards have some nice combo spells and have to really build up their damage/use control/debuff. You can Eldritch Aim to get high accuracy first, use Combusting Flames one things taking frequent hits, decrease Fort/Will/Reflex before using spells targeting those, etc. etc. While Druids just cast one spell and everything takes a ton of damage straight up. Which means they get way more mileage per-spell cast and last through more encounters most of the time.. It's like they were each balanced for entirely different games. Druids are suited for the quick fights which PoE has, while with Wizard's it's like they're balanced for something much slower paced - outside of a few spells that are very strong. Druid AoEs are also huge and don't do less damage than harder to place and smaller and shorter range Wizard spells. It's definitely very, very off.

Best item I've found so far - Holy carp. Going to nuke things so hard with my Druid.

Hailstorm appears to be fixed - http://i.imgur.com/CMFVEO7.jpg O_O (Secrets of Rime and 20 might huehuehue)

I often have a character who can pick a lock that I have a key to. The game chooses the key over picking the lock by default, so I lose XP. Can't drop keys from inventory to avoid, have to simply not pick them up. It's a little thing but a bit irritating. I think it's been this way pre-480 but I just decided it was worth a complaint now.

Beetles on hard are pretty challenging in my experience. That might not be the case on other difficulties, but as I have no intention of playing lower than hard, I'm going to say Beetles are still pretty tough. As to the state of the game, I think we're going to have to wait till after the release of the expansion pack and some major patches to that before we get to highly polished. Would like to be pleasantly surprised, but am going to be realistic. They're predictable and very CC-able. I killed them with 3 characters on hard - granted though that they were very power-gamed characters(Paladin Tank, Chanter, Druid). The Wood Beetles go down fast. The Adra's lightning attack you can interrupt with a knock down or whatever, and those who aren't engaged can just run out of the way of wherever it's being aimed. The stone beetles aren't very dangerous, if you have at least one or two decent deflection characters. Maybe I've just done them so many times though that it's become easy for me. They did give me trouble the first time I was trying out the beta.

One thing I would like to know is why there's still an Aumaua portrait with a beard - ...but no beards for Aumaua character models. I'm in favor of letting Aumaua have beards personally, as the solution.

Better to use summons, and just try to keep combat-status rolling. No health damage taken. Will-O'-Wisps are particularly good for it, and they charm stuff. Some areas are easier to do that with than others though. I burn through the Skaen pretty fast without using many /rest resources or health.

Druid can remove poison and the spell also gives a lengthy resistance to it. Called Purge Toxins. It's nice 'cause poison goes through DR I believe, so being able to defend a tank against it mitigates a lot of damage from the spiders especially. Beetles aren't that bad now, or at least their poison isn't - the Adra beetle lightning is still crazy but preventable.

If a single min/maxed tank covers all of your tanking needs compositions will generally favor gathering up and AoEing enemies around the tank which is dull. I am fine with a single high deflection tank being an asset particularly for very tough single creatures, but I think we should need at least some backup melee to keep groups off casters. Otherwise it feels like farming trash in an MMO where you control all the characters.

Right now nerfing tanks would just push us toward 100% offensively built parties. But, in the long run, I don't think it's good balance that you can sit a single character in a swarm of enemies and have him survive for so long while everyone else AoEs the mob down. Granted, if AI went after non-tank characters that would help too, but again we'd have a situation where damage and CC> everything else if it enemies actually targeted weaker characters. It's a complicated problem. I also don't think flanking does enough right now, -10 deflection isn't much of a penalty. But of course I'd say deflection isn't balanced well in the first place so... IDK.

If they wanted to nerf tanks they could make flanking penalties stack. That sounds evil and would hurt other classes as well but it would make sense in the long run, with other balance changes of course. I've got a 21 Perception + Interrupting blows + 19 Resolve Orlan Paladin tank right now and he is a laugh. It's totally giving me IWDII Svirfneblin build vibes. And he slayed the Ogre with a 2 damage hit from a hatchet hehehehe - http://i.imgur.com/y0O1aFS.jpg

I haven't had any either but keep in mind performance issues aren't necessarily due to older hardware. Sometimes the difference is something like AMD vs. Nvidia. PCs are hard to optimize for since there are so many different possible builds.

Yeah this is why I wish more of the combat effectiveness was shifted toward talents and we got more of them and more to choose from. Blanket % bonuses just end up all over the place.

That's where I was going with it, IDK.

I've spent most of my time w/a Druid PC character so far and done more druidry than another classry. My current "best" druid is - Coastal Aumaua for +2 might and prone/stun resist 20 Might (18 + 2 from race) 8/8/8 Con/Dex/Per 19 Int (18 + 1 from Old Vailia culture) 15 Resolve However there's some potential variation - if you wanted you could put more in Dex rather than Resolve, I like having decent resolve for interrupt resist, but sometimes casting faster helps as well. Might/Int are your staples though, it's best to prioritize maxing them. Other race that's good is Dwarf again for +2 Might, Poison/Disease resist is more situational and usually less worrisome than full CCs like Prone/Stun though, and Druids have Poison/Disease removal anyway. I'm taking a Dwarf 'cause I like their look better than Aumaua myself though. Skills it doesn't matter too much, but Lore is a good choice for a PC for conversation options probably and Druid has a bonus to it. I'm not a big fan of survival but since Druids get +2 to it you could pump that up to meet certain skill checks to. Some stealth (~2-4) and athletics is a good idea to have on all characters too. The BB isn't too big on skill checking so it's hard to judge what'll be most valuable in the full game. Weapons it depends on talents - Talents: Secrets of Rime is the big one, +20% damage to Icy Wind, Blizzard, Hail Storm which are your heavy hitting large AoEs. Heart of the Storm is worth considering too just for Returning Storm which is an awesome Shock Damage spell. Scion of Flame and Spirit of Decay don't seem worth it to me, not enough strong or stand-out spells of those types. Penetrating Shot is a decent choice for putting out damage while not casting but toggle it off when you are as I believe it reduces spell cast speed. Could pick up gunner if you choose a Crossbow or Gun sort of weapon for ranged damage - if not I'd pick War Bow probably, which is cheaper talent wise and still decent output with just Penetrating Shot. Vulnerable Attack is a no-brainer if you plan to use shapeshifting a lot which is pretty good damage now. I don't think the form is worth specializing in more than that though - we'll see how it performs when they buff wildstrike but I'm skeptical. If you really like shifting you could add two weapon style for +20% attack speed making up for -20% from vulnerable attack. Otherwise 2h talents are probably better(Savage Attack/Two Handed Style), I'd go with Pike and be the back-up melee rather than front-line personally. Bonus Spells are alright when there's nothing else exciting. Spell levels 1 / 2 have some workhorse spells that can never have too many of. 3 and 4 aren't bad either. Bloody Slaughter is also just a +Crit Damage buff, and converts some hits to crit vs. low damage targets. Can't hurt if you just want more damage output, although Druid isn't a very crit-heavy class since their base accuracy is low so I'm not a big proponent of this one. Most notable spells: 1: Tanglefoot, Icy Wind, Sunbeam, Nature's Vigor on occasion. 2: BLIZZARD! Can never have too many Blizzards. Otherwise uh... nothing else is amazing here IMO, so cast Blizzards instead. 3: Returning Storm, Stag Horn, Beetle Shell on occasion if somebody is in trouble. Purge of Toxins also situational for Poison/Disease removal/resist. 4: Calling the World's Maw for knock down/good damage. Moonwell is good for defense+healing. Hail Storm was bugged but if it's fixed it's a strong AoE.

The changes Josh was talking about a couple of days ago are not in v480. The BB was made from a build generated earlier in the week. Which means we won't see them until release. I figured. Barnacles!

Low level wizard self buff/defensive "gish" spells don't seem to've improved unless I'm missing something. I'm still taking the obvious "real wizard" picks. Eldritch Aim is still really good especially since accuracy is gone from attributes as of 435, but that's not for gish reasons.

Wizard wasn't too bad. I used Fast Runner, seems to be the key to run away and come back and ambush from stealth. If you go the dialogue route anyway. Fan of Flames with maxed might hits hard enough to clear them in 2-3, you may have to rest and come back. High int is also important for Slicken AoE. Slicken is the not-really-a-secret to playing Wizard in this game. I think Druid is probably still a bit better since you can go beast-mode after getting a single enemy away from the pack. Wizard is still kinda doomed if anything follows and gets into melee.

One of them now has Perception too. I reported it as a bug instead of posting it in this forum, and they finally changed it Sadly I don't see more variation in the skill bonuses though. No stealth + mechanics that I could find. Or +2 of either. Still lots of +2 lore everywhere. :/ They ruined nature. Instead of considerable amount of extra gain from HoTs, they now get +1 Might/Con/Dex while under 50% stam. I strongly disapprove! I'd remove all the "when under 50% stamina" racials though if it were up to me.

Con still sucks there(adding concentration to it is a good idea though) and I'd think a Dex/Int stacked tank would be incredibly cheesy with those stats as well. Think of a Godlike with +38 deflection. My Orlan Paladin tank is already starting at ~90 deflection and trivializes many encounters. Add 19 more deflection to that ... I'd also say duration on resolve would make more sense to me, due to focusing on keeping an effect active or something. IDK, it's a bit vague but it feels right. Anyway, I think the best way to balance the attributes is to carefully add talents requiring certain attributes. Con sucks? Put a talent requiring con in there that's good. It's hard to balance stuff you can stack to extremes without diminishing returns as well. If they made the point buy a little more difficult to stack things that could help cut down on min/maxing being the best approach too.