Katarack21

I see this stated quite often, but I don't agree. Sure, as a percentage of your base Accuracy +6 becomes smaller and smaller as the you level up, but that's not what matters when it comes to Accuracy. What matters is the difference between your Accuracy and the enemy's Deflection. A +6 bonus is equally good whether you have a base Accuracy of 20 or 60 when you're facing enemies whose Deflections are 20 or 60 respectively. Since enemy Deflection increases as you level up then, give or take, +6 remains equally beneficial throughout the game. Now, in Pillars there were loads of other sources of bonus Accuracy so it was true that Weapon Focus would, at high levels, become less powerful, but one of the things Josh has mentioned that they want to limit is the number of sources of bonus Accuracy in Deadfire, and given this I suspect +6 will remain equally good throughout the game. Doubtful. Perception still influences accuracy, and by the time you get to high-level buffs and debuffs they make far more of a difference than a static +6 does.

Technically, I suppose we could. I would question, however, how much sense it would make. Let's assume Weapon Focus as it currently is becomes a general talent that everyone can take. +6 Accuracy at the cost 1 talent point would already be a pretty good deal; at the cost of 1 proficiency, it is a total no-brainer. Everyone who needs to hit their enemies (e.g. every non-support character who doesn't rely on spells to cause damage) would take it; not doing so would be willfully gimping oneself, which most players won't do (only veterans in search of a challenge via self-imposed rules would, in fact.) At that point, we have two scenarios: Everything stays the same (i.e. monsters are not rebalanced around the assumptions that most characters would have Weapon Focus.) This preserves the essence of the Weapon Focus talent, which is to give you an edge in combat versus the "normality" (which is not having a +6 Accuracy bonus on every attack.) However, everybody and their neighbor would take Weapon Focus because it's up for grabs at what amounts to no cost, and gives a very good advantage. Suddenly the game is too easy—and certainly easier than intended by the developer at any rate. Everything is rebalanced around the assumption that most characters have Weapon Focus in order to retain the challenge. This makes Weapon Focus a de facto must pick or you would be factually gimping yourself, since monsters' stats are such that you are expected to have it. Weapon Focus goes from being a talent you choose to gain an advantage to a talent you must pick to not be at a disadvantage. I'd say both scenarios are equally undesirable. Josh mentioned in one of the Q&A streams that for Deadfire they tried to limit the amount of things that could increase Accuracy specifically because it is such an important stat. Everyone would jump at the opportunity to increase their Accuracy, and it becomes harder for designers to balance the game and provide a challenge without being unfair to players. Now, let's assume you'd still give Barbarians an exclusive talent called Superior Weapon Focus that gives, say, +8 Accuracy instead. I see at least two problems: The game would still need to be balanced around the assumption that most characters would get a +6 Accuracy bonus, so my point about Weapon Focus becoming a must to avoid a disadvantage still stands. Barbarians would have a ridiculously high +14 Accuracy bonus from taking both, which would make them far superior to most other melee classes, if not all. The solution would be not to make the two stack; Barbarians would still get a +8 Accuracy for 1 talent point deal, which is a bit too good. Perhaps we could make Weapon Focus +4 and Superior Weapon Focus +6, mutually exclusive, to ameliorate the issue—but it would be too much work for too little benefit, imo, as the previous point would still be a problem. I definitely advocate for Weapon Focus to stay where it is now. It's OK as a Barbarian talent. Weapon Styles can become general if Fighters get something unique in their talent tree in exchange. Similarly, Bull's Will, Snake's Reflexes, and Bear's Fortitude should probably be general and replaced by something different in the classes that get them; and by all means, let's bring back the elemental talents for the general talent pool—they were flavorful and interesting, and it's a pity not to have them in Deadfire. Getting a +6 accuracy bonus from weapon focus will not have a significant impact on game difficulty. It did not in the first game. Why would it be different in Deadfire. It's good at first, but it has declining impact over the course of the game.

The "No Pen Bloom", as I call it, really makes me a sad panda.

Knockdown was really nice in PoE 1; in early to midgame I relied on it extensively for CC and, along with Into the Fray, enemy placement control. The lack of prone in PoE 2 really screwed up my game at first.

So... why do swords damage characters? Why can't our characters run infinitely fast? Why are there so many simulated things in the game if "because this is a game, not a simulator" justifies the abandonment of any and all simulation whatsoever? Mule packs then? DUNGEON SIEGE FTW!

I don't *know*, but going on trends I wouldn't be surprised to see it priced at 50 bucks at release. Honestly, backing it at 35 and getting the twenty dollar DLC season pass will probably save you money over buying at release and getting each DLC as it's released.

Personally I'm leaning towards wanting to build a fighter that focuses on engagement. Keeping engagement, holding engagement, *forcing* engagement (experimenting with Into The Fray), and disengagement attacks. With engagement now being a sometimes thing, I think there's real potential in that a class-defining feature.

So your Cipher bowmaster misses out on Marksman or +5 accuracy at range greater than 4m. That's it? And for this you are going on a crusade to change the game???? I don't think a conditional change of +5 accuracy fundamentally makes a Cipher gimped. Nor does access to Marksman fundamentally make rangers awesome ranged DPS. The talent is far to generic to fulfill that goal for *anybody*. Not having it doesn't gimp you and having it doesn't make you awesome. On it's own merits the talent is meh; it's major use is to "flesh out" a ranged damage dealer for an RP player or provide an exceedingly minor bump to an optimizer. And no, I'm not going on a crusade to change the game for +5 accuracy at ranges greater than 4m. I'm simply arguing my perspective that having a pool of general talents that allow one to nudge your character's role in one direction or another outside of multiclassing provides greater build diversity and that multiclassing does not in any way solve the problem of desiring greater nuance within single-class builds.

It's a big nerf to knockdown if true, as well. Knockdown was one of the better abilities in early game and really helped make the fighter useful in an active way.

Oh, please. Let's not pretend that having weapon styles be exclusive somehow makes fighters less boring. They are boring talents. I'm all for fighters having interesting and unique talents that reflect a role in the battlefield and make them fun to play. Weapon styles are not those talents. Not to mention that marksman and gunner being exclusive to Ranger is just as much a problem. These talents being made exclusive feels like a cheap way to throw a bone to a player base without doing much work, and it takes away from build diversity *within single classes* to do it.

In the first game you can play a cipher who is particularly good with bows. In this game you *cannot* do that. You can only play a cipher who is also a ranger. Multiclass is *great*, and all the various options it opens up are *awesome*, but it shouldn't *force* me to multiclass. That's not fun. Multiclassing should never be the default way to create nuanced specialized characters--it should always be an option to create different characters entirely. You should never *have* to multiclass to do something as generic as "learn to use a bow better". Multiclassing is much more basic and fundamental to a character.

Hmm, interesting. So if you just pick a second class, but then go bananas with your first class, you get rewarded for it? I haven't checked, but if true, this is objectively worse than one level dipping in D&D 3.0 and 3.5. I'm not saying it's bad - I love these systems - but I'm saying it's contrived. I wouldn't say rewarded as there is a trade-off. You trade 33% more class talents for the loss of 2 power levels and the corresponding talents - if that's worth it is anyone's guess. Keep in mind that this means a lot more talents per power level: You're looking at 26 talents distributed on 7 power levels as compared to 20 talents distributed on 9 power levels. The ratio shifts from 2.2 talents/PLVL to 3.7 talents/PLVL, which means you can learn everything you think that you'll need. Martials can learn more passives this way and casters can memorize more spells, but of lower level, and at a later time. By choosing the second class solely to manipulate your base stats, you can also slightly rearrange your defenses, but that's it. The first character I made ended up this way (Devoted / Monk) since I didn't like anything from the monk talents for my kensai concept, so I just stacked more passives on the fighter side. What does it mean to take 3 levels of ranger? You'd multiclass cipher/ghostheart to ignore the pet, take one of the active starting abilities (which you could completely ignore.. or use) and be on your way. I looked it up: You'd lose 5 points in will and get 2 points in reflex (there is a strange logic to how the base stats are arrived - you should come out at a sum of 0). Later on, you take marksman and gunner when you unlock power level 2 and 3, learning cipher spells at *every* level, just as you would with a single class cipher. At LVL20, you end up with access to the same cipher spells you had in PoE (power level 7), and 4 additional cipher spells that you got when unlocking power level 4, 5, 6 and 7. That results in ~2 spells more for each power level on average, which might have some tactical merit. Summarized, you trade versality (the ranged talents + more spells per level) for power (lower power level). I think that is reasonable, but YMMV. I literally just made this character--cipher (no sublcass)/ghost heart. Marksman and Gunner are Power Level 2. You don't get a *choice* on having to take level one ranger abilities. You don't get a *choice* on having a pet (or a pet-summon ability). You don't get a choice on all the stat boosts. So I end up with three abilities I *don't want to have*, a bunch of stat boosts *I never wanted*, and shorted on *end-game progression abilities* all for the sake of having a cipher with marskman. I. Don't. Want. To. Play. A. Ranger. I don't like rangers. I have no intention of playing a ranger. I don't think it's fair that I have to sacrifice all my end-game progression and be *forced* to take cross-class abilities *I don't want to have* in order to play a cipher who is good with a bow.

Ah, that is another topic. Changes to number and statistic aren’t all at exciting in an electronic game, where those calculations are happening “under the hood”. Adding +2 after doing physical roll of dice doesn’t have the same impact when those things are done for you. I think Deadfire made a step in a right direction by unifying a lot of statistics between classes and trying to differentiate them through active abilities. It reminds me of Tim Cain’s talk that was posted a while ago on these forums. An example he gave was shotgun: rather than increasing base damage of a shotgun you can allow player to upgrade recoil control. That way shotgun doesn’t magically do more damage, but you still increase DPS fulfilling same design role, while feeling more natural to the player. The corollary to that is that in a game like PoE where the actual actions taken are automatic and I just tell the characters to do it, something like a damage bonus is much easier to see and feel the impact of with every use of that weapon. If I was aiming and dealing with the effects of using the weapon directly, it would be a different story. Something like straight stat bonuses are much more impactful in a game like BG2, where the strength does more than just effect damage and scripted events but directly impacts the player themselves through the inventory, something like Oblivion where your dex impacts how high you can jump. Similarly, although the bow you get in WM 2 produces it's own ammo, not having ammo in the game means that magical ability doesn't have any impact, while the bows that produced their own ammo in the BG games were *amazing*. The coolest items in PoE are the items that have unique spell effects or abilities attached to them. Things like summoning skeletons, or overbearing wave when critically hit, or making you frenzy. But each of those requires it be made special by the coders, doesn't it?

Marksman and Gunner are Level 2 ranger abilities. In order to replicate my character from PoE 1--a ranged cipher--I would have to take three levels of ranger and get two useless abilities that I would then have to ignore for RP reasons before I was then able to take the one ability I actually care about for my character. *THEN* I get to ignore ranger forever and take all my cipher levels, minus two talents and with a lower ending level...plus a bunch of stat boosts I didn't want and a pet.

Remember, physical traps are also viewable on the screen by you, the player yourself, prior to setting them off. Their just, you know...hard to spot.

Personally I really enjoy the early struggle and difficulty, followed by slow achievement, and eventually *steamrolling everything in my path like a god*.

Maybe, but it pisses me off that my refusal to give them ten bucks means I miss out on half the updates provided by Josh lmao

God I hate that SA paywall. >.<

Ehh, arguably... if you want to land hard cc - you want hard cc, even if for just 3s such that you could recast it. The point is to prevent target from damaging your party completely. And if's not feasible... bye bye high-dps-heavy-cc party composition =( hello tank and spank style. Right, but given the tier downgrade, you wouldn't end up with the hard CC you planned on, just something close. Say you cast paralyze on a target and you graze--you'd immobolize the target instead. Useful, but it's still dealing damage to the dude it was up on. Or you go to cast confuse, graze, and end up with the target dazed (or whatever the downgrade is). The downgrade tier system allows a graze to still have some useful effect, but not the full effect you were planning on. Of course you could always try again, but so could you on a miss.

You just had a bad roll with your first shot, man. You had a *REALLY* good likelihood but rolled a 3. It happens. One of these days I'll tell you about the cybered-out troll I was playing in Shadowrun 3rd Edition who got sniped from across the street. I rolled twenty-six body dice and critically failed.

Lowered duration for those. But those are things like hobbled and whatnot that generally have pretty small effects, and the enemies can dismiss tier-1 afflictions entirely with tier-1 inspirations or whatever, so I don't think it's as large an effect on overall gameplay. I believe the big concern was for hard CC's.

It's been suggested to use the new tier-based system and, on a CC spell graze, simply lower the effect by one tier, so paralyze becomes imobolized, etc. I think it's a very good compromise.

No, it's different from how grandmastery was different. Multiclassing changes your character; it changes their progression path, it changes their endurance, their accuracy, their deflection, etc. Multiclassing isn't *just* about access to talents; it's a much broader alteration of the character that causes that character to play very differently. Changes to grandmastery were ultimately just about different number progressions and names with differing damage amounts; it didn't actually change the fundamental nature of your character as a whole, while multiclassing *does*. A ranger/cipher is an entirely different character from a cipher with marksman, from their endurance to their accuracy to one of them having a pet. It's a *much* larger change that creates an inherently different character, and it's not the character that I want to play. In contrast to PoE, accuracy is the same for all the classes in PoE2. Also, I find it contradictionary to argue that Grandmastery just changed a couple of numbers and the progression path when multiclassing... does the very same. The little redistribution of defensive stats is most likely lower than the impact of the talents you want to differentiate your character, so claiming that those talents are hardly interesting for their mechanical part while claiming that the multiclass changes the fundamental nature of the character seems a bit of a stretch to me, at least regarding stats. Again, if you multiclass, and ignore almost all of the talents of the other class, you end up with a slight alteration of the single class that trades higher power level for strictly more talents. It's almost like a completely new mode to creating single class characters - trade power for versatility (given a couple more class talents, so that there are more choices, of course). Regarding the loss of powerlevel in order to continue the character from PoE1: If you hit lvl 20 as a multiclass character, you'll have acess to the same tier of abilities your character from PoE had (since the level only went to 16), so you can recreate your single class character from PoE as a multiclass character in PoE2 and you will still have access to all the abilities you had back then. 1) My bad about accuracy. 2) It still changes *every single aspect* of your character. Literally *everything that can be changed*. Every time you level you'll get more endurance and deflection than you would as a single class. You limit how far you can progress. For most classes you *inherently* obtain various abilities (such as sneak attack or a pet or carnage) that alter the entire way your character plays. To liken multiclassing to grandmastery is straight-up disingenuous. It's like comparing being nauseous to having food poisoning. Grandmastery is a change to a specific stat. Multiclassing is a broad and general alteration to every aspect of your character. The only reason to try and compare the two is to artificially simplify multi-classing into a small and minor change, when it is not in any way small or minor.

Which, in fairness, we do see with the paladin NPC companion at least.

Rogues should have access to Two-Weapon fighting, no? O don't necessarly see why? I think Katarack21's is making the same point as I do: We have established lore for the classes, and if the very canonical description of them says something about how they behave themselves in combat, such options should be readily available to them. It makes the most sense. Otherwise, we'll get stuck explaining bits of the lore description away as inaccurate mood delineators. Exactly. I feel it's best if there are at least talents and abilities *available* to reflect the lore description. That way you can build a direct stereotype-from-the-lore class archetype *or* make a member of that class that's a little distinct from the run-of-the-mill.