forgottenlor

If you avoid wandering off the roads he isn't hard to get. Just don't get close to the lions on his map.

My guess is that it's an easy-to-implement feature introduced to make it possible for players to change their portraits in order to take advantage of newly added portraits. Different people work on different stuff. You can't have everyone working on the AI all at once. Also, the AI in the game is crummy, but there's actually much more important systemic issues to address. But I'm sure someone is working on the AI, too. So it's not so much a matter of priority as much as a matter of reality. Crappy AI seems commonplace in computer games. I'm guessing good AI is one of the more difficult things to implement.

I hope interrupting blows gets fixed in 1.05 as my main character is walking around with a useless talent.

Interrupts slow attacks and on slow attacking monsters it can be devestating. On monsters with fast attack speed, interrupt rarely are useful. I'm sad that my main character took a broken talent, but what the heck, I'll probably be still be playing this in May.

Just for the record, I am 8 hours into the game with an interrupt Barbarian. She has a 16 perception (17 from a helm), Morning star, weapon focus-knight and interrupting blows. She is currently level 5. I find the combination to be utterly devestating to some opponents. For example trolls almost never got an attack off on me. On the other hand against some opponents like shadows it was utterly worthless. They attack too fast, and its much more effective to dual wield (in my case with a sword and axe-my off hand weapon set) so I'd say its a viable build, but not overly powerful and somewhat situational. If you want to play the most powerful character, you'd probably be better with a pure damage build, but I'm having a lot of fun with it on normal difficulty, and I think it works decently.

Thanks for the advice so far. Anyone know the reach difference between morning stars and on the one hand a pike and on the other hand a stiletto? Or the attack speed difference? The one thing that appeals to me about a morning star is that it is the same weapon group as the estoc, so I could switch out if I really need to damage.

I'm looking to build a high intelligence, high perception barbarian, and am pondering which weapons to focus on. My Barbarian will only have average scores in resolve and constitution. I will probably have good good might and average dex, though if someone can give me a good reason to flip the scores, I'd consider it. Where I'm really stuck is which weapons to go with as my primary ones. Here are what I'm considering: Stilletos pros:fast, piercing cons:poor reach, low interrupt. Morning Star pros: very high interrupt. cons:slow. Pike pros:reach, meaning my barbarian can maybe avoid being hit. cons:slow Estoc pro:piercing cons:slow. Any advice or alternate suggestions?

I'm pondering a high perception/intelligence barbarian. Perception for interrupts and Intelligence to increase carnage. I also think high resolve/ perception are decent on any tank character, whether monk, fighter, or sword and board ranger.

I'm at least glad they've fixed a number of the problems with this class. Not all classes have to be equally good, but it would be sad if one class was a terrible liability to play.

I would as well, though extrapolating from interviews with Fergus, the next Obisidian kickstarter will not be PoE 2

So many games end this way, so I'm used to it. Money has no meaning in the late game. The OP likes the idea of having to ponder the best way to use his resources in a meaningful manner, which only works when resources are scarce.,I admit that I like this as well. That said, I've enjoyed a number of RPGs where money loses its importance in the 2nd half of the game.

The Monk is supposed to be very active,

Do we know for a fact that our characters can enchant in POE? Or is someone doing the enchanting for the characters? The enchanter in Throne of Bhaal was a crazy imp, so I don't see how having a hired enchanter with unusual abilties doesn't fit into POE. It seems POE has a lot of animancers (or whatever they're called) who are mixing science and magic and people our willing to pay money for their crazy experiments (the explanation for undead in the world goes along with this.) Its like how some very wealthy people in the real world will fund cutting age, experimental, and often risky medical or technological research to fill their special needs. I don't see why it couldn't fit into the lore. edit: I agree this shouldn't be a reason for farming. I'm just saying it could be an effective money sink. I didn't actually like Torchlight 2 enough to bother with farming, and skipped most of the side quests in the 2nd half of the game.

Isn't Torchlight in a slightly different category though ? I haven't played it but I picture it as one of those endless diablo-like that feature insane costs for high level craft for the sake of kicking the player's butt to go venturing forth again and again in order to collect money to be more powerful to be able to collect more money and my brain is melting. I don't think such a logic fits a game like PoE. I still believe the best, and most lore-friendly, solution is to feature the same kind of shops/dudes selling some noteworthy, mighty and magical stuff. With the nice item description that goes with it where you actually realize you've been fooled and it's a damn painted wooden stick you just bought for 12000gc. Yes it is. It is an insane Diablo like clone. I still don't see though why a professional enchanter charging insane costs wouldn't fit into lore. I also think it fits into the real world. Rich people pay insanely for little boosts in quality as do businesses. Paying 3X as much for first class in a train in Europe yields a cup of coffee, slightly nicer seats, and a guarenteed plug for your laptop. Is that really worth 3X the price? Probably not, but if you have money to burn, who cares?

Strangely enough I found an answer to this problem in an ARPG which I didn't find all that great, Torchlight 2. I was never actually poor in that game, but I could enchant all of my equipment, remove enchantments, and reenchant for massive amounts of money. The enchantments weren't usually all that sizable, but sizable enough to make a small difference at the price of obscene amounts of money. And why not? I didn't have anything better to do with the money. In Oblivion you could waste tons of money on trainers, which also wasn't so bad. Again if you trained intelligently you could get a fairly minor gameplay bonus for massive amounts of money. The problem with most RPGS is they don't offer a really worthwhile way for one to spend their money. I like the idea of paying someone massive amounts for a kind of magic service that is rare and hard to come by.

Is it effective/possible to make a gun or crossbow ranger in the current beta?

Why do you insist on shoehorning a quest into every possible source of xp, as if adding the quest contributes to the mechanic in any way? If it does; I would sure like to know what it adds. EDIT: Dang it! I was supposed to stop talking about this! Bad me! BAD! The main complaint which lead to exploration XP was the lack of regular XP. Early players of the backer beta complained about playing for an hour with no xp gain. Whether its part of a quest or not is irrelevant if the XP is coming in at regular intervals. Having an explorer's guild, archeologist, or cartographer ask you to look for places makes the process more immersive, if done well.

as we said, it's funny. the exploration xp would be handled much better via a quest that sent you to look for your "secret" areas. could than have alternate ways to complete as opposed to mechanical and mindless click on object or walk through door. *shrug* 'course same applies to bestiary. HA! Good Fun! I completely agree that would be an interesting way to do it. It would have been an elegant solution, but they implemented the non quest xp as an afterthought (and mostly due to community complaints) and its there to have the psychological effect of constantly offering rewards. There have been a lot of studies done on this subject. It is, for example, one reason people play MMOs like World of Warcraft or Hack and Slay games like Diablo for 100s of hours and why they repeatedly do the same actions again and again. Even very minor acquisitions are psychologically rewarding if given on a regular basis. I agree though that a really cool quest could have been done with this. Even if it was relatively simplistic, Might and Magic X had a pretty straightforward bestiary quest given by a traveling chronicler. That added character to a relatively mindless task.

I have no problem if consumable are powerful, provided they are priced to reflect this. It would be ridiculous though if consumables are constantly being used in place of abilities.

Ever play Legend of Grimrock?

I think then the mechanic was described poorly. If it works like Sensuki says then it is +20% to your base interrupt. If your base interrupt is 40%, then +20% gives you 48% to interrupt. I'm guessing this varies from weapon to weapon or from spell to spell. That would make it a pretty complicated formula, and also difficult to convey. Is the base interrupt soley based on the attack type? Say does one base attack have an interrupt of a 40% and another a base of 50%? If so the +20% would yield a +8% or a +10% bonus depending on attack type (48% or 60% depending on the base attack) or is there a base 40% interrupt + the attack type? I think in this case the developers have to be very clear about the mechanics. If people don't understand how a stat works, one of three things will happen. Either people will leave it at "10" because they figure nothing really bad will happen if they mess with it or people will dump it, and add to stats which they understand will work well for them, or people will try to make a character with high perception with the idea of experimenting a bit and then decide if they like it.

I agree but in a party of six characters don't you think an interrupter could be quite useful? A barbarian or fighter, for example, or maybe even a wizard seem like they could function well in this role.

Thanks for the information. I think you could build some useful builds around it. If 40 is the base interrupt, a 15 perception grants 52 interrupt and a 20 perception would grant 64, which seems like it could be pretty useful for characters built around that concept. I agree though that its a good dump stat for priests and other classes which are concentrating on things like buffing.

So interrupt only works with weapons? Or does it effect damaging spells as well? Would it be useful for a wizard, for example? Also if I understand correctly, a weapon with 10% interrupt would have 13% interrupt in the hands of a character with a 15 perception or a 7% interrupt in the hands of a character with a 5 perception. Is that correct?

I completely agree with you. I see interrupt as being possibly very useful. I could see a fast attacking high interrupt character really messing up a warrior wielding a slow two handed weapon. I just think explaining how the mechanic works is very difficult. If my characters is doing circa 50 damage, then I understand that +10% damage yields 5 more points on average, or how +5% critical hit chance works. Explaining how interrupt works seams a lot more challenging.