Katarack21

Cast times really make my summoned weapon wizard/devoted fighter concept not-fun to pay.

This is why I was hoping for a shifter class that dedicates more time to one chosen form, rather than multiple forms. I wanted to run around as a bear *all the time*!

They complained about this in the PoE 1 beta and they didn't change it then.

Quadratic equations can have multiple optimal solutions. This is of course incredibly pedantic, but it's also a point about how the more complex the system the less likely you are to have definitive outcomes, especially when working with large numbers of variables.

Grimoire special abilities don't seem to be implemented yet, and that'll go a long way towards making them more interesting.

Have the Scion talents grant +penetration with the available elements and available to mages. It would go a ways towards helping.

Take Marked Prey/Takedown. Focus on pet passives and use a saber (or two). Pick Stalker for the defensive passive or Sharpshooter for the +pen under 4m. It's a pretty good low maintenance, minus managing the pet, damage dealer from what I tested. Why? Everyone has the same base accuracy and medium shield modal is a pretty good defensive tool. They can also self-heal pretty well. Can you use the Priest weapon summon as your main weapon? Is that a viable option?

No joke. For something a subclass is based around it's *incredibly* bad.

That is completely different than what I've been arguing and what you've been telling me. It's supposed to push you towards resting, whether you do rest or not is your decision. A decision that has already been proven to exist even for players playing for the first time. What's the point of this thread now, then? No. It's literally what I've been saying *THIS WHOLE TIME*. I have been saying that it pushes you much to hard towards rest--that the push is so hard that it takes away a meaningful choice. Yes, you still have a choice--you still have a *choice* of continuing onwards with -75% health, no empowers, and with no bonuses. There's nothing stopping you--but the *entire point* of injuries causing health degeneration is for the injuries to push you towards resting, my argument has *always* been that the amount of pressure created by the -25% health loss per injury is *to much of a push*. My point, since the beginning, has been the greater granularity in the injury system--and thus *less pressure to rest per injury*--creates a better play system by providing the opportunity for more meaningful choice on when to rest, as opposed to that -50% health at two injuries creating relatively *intense* pressure to rest. That *all I've been saying*. I would *prefer* this be done by adding additional wounds created by different weapon types and amounts of overkill, with wounds varrying in amount of health removed. So you could have three or four injuries that don't equal up to 100%, but you could also have three injuries that do, depending on what type of injury and how you got it. That way you would *sometimes* have that intense pressure to rest after a couple knockouts, but other times have to make choices about how likely it is you'll get another injury that might be bigger and how far you think you can go. As Josh said above, the pressure to *not* rest comes from rare high-quality foods that provide big bonuses. He *didn't* say anything about inn bonuses and shrine bonuses, but I presume those will be there, too. Right now the beta only has low-level foods, so some of that is missing.

I've been saying "pushes you much harder towards rest" since 6:20 AM on November 17th...since before you entered the conversation, dude. "Moving the goalposts" indeed.

Was just trying a fighter/wizard with summoned weapons yesterday. The casting time for summoned weapons is a problem.

Is there currently a talent for wizards to gain increased spell pen? Because that seems important.

He's missing the point of the injury system entirely, it's not about granularity, choice or difficulty as you can rest whenever, it's about telling you when you suck and that you have to improve. There's also a video where a guy with many more injuries than Katarack claims to be impossible to continue defeated the adra dimension fight, so he's demonstrably wrong even by his own standards. You can also see that he eschews any kind of confrontation by blocking me instead of arguing my points, so I don't think he's the person to go to about challenge advice ;p Crikey, man, I'm not ignoring you to avoid debate--I'm engaging in debate with plenty of people, including those who disagree with me. I'm ignoring you because all you're doing is insulting me and saying "get good", you're not actually debating. You only want to defend your "If it was up to me, you'd just die" mentality and mock everybody who disagrees with you as inferior players. I don't have time for that crap. I never said it was "impossible" to continue with -50% health, I just said it's an *incredibly* strong push to rest because you *really* should. Most people will heal however healing is done if their main character, main tank, or significant portion of the party is at -50% health or less. It's just sound strategy. You don't have to, and certainly you can go forward with that going, but it's a *very significant push towards resting*. I doubt *very* much if the development team is designing much gameplay design resources around showing the player when they suck. I think they're probably just designing encounters of logical progressive difficulty and engaging design and trusting failure itself to show you when you suck, rather than designing whole mechanics around that core concept. That really seems to just be you. For what it's worth, this is what Josh says about injuries and the food-to-remove-injuries mechanic: "When characters receive injuries or run low on/out of Empowers, they can be replenished by consuming food while resting. Food is no longer consumed directly from the inventory or quick item slots in Deadfire. When the party rests, there is a resting interface where the player can specify which food items they want each character to consume (it remembers the last choice). Food items always grant bonuses, but common/cheap food grants modest bonuses. The party is not restricted in how much food they can carry, but if they rest frequently, they’ll be operating on those “lesser” bonuses or burning through their really good food/better bonuses." It seems the intent of injuries and eating food to heal those injuries is more complicated than "this is when you suck".

The problem for casters right now is that between long cast times, penetration issues, and a lack of grazes it feels like a lot of sitting around just for a really high chance of doing not much. That's a balance problem, and I have faith it will be solved.

Then they just graze like a weapon, with reduced damage.

With the new tier system, that's *perfect*. That's a viable solution, IMHO.

Honestly they need to have every weapon and every armor available so we can do proper testing. >.<

Found out "AddTalent" doesn't work. Wondering what the replacement command is lol

So....I'm seeing a Devoted Fighter/Streetfighter Rogue in my near future.

The arrival of the beta inspired me to go back and finish my final definitive replay of PoE, and I am finding the very thing you like to be a huge annoyance to me. I am playing a non-min-maxed melee type cipher build, and the limiting factor on everything is my health. Not Aloth's spells, not kana getting knocked out every other fight, but watching the bar turn to yellow and red without my character getting knocked out or even losing large chunks of health. I know it helps simulate an attrition sort of process, but I find this apparent nod towards realism annoying, and successful combat management does not pay off. Why should I struggle to keep everyone conscious and time my skill and spell usage when I am going to have to rest after the same interval with no benefit or penalty? You lose health when you lose endurance. You can prevent health loss--by doing the same things that prevent endurance loss, that prevent you from being damaged. People here are using "git gud" to defend the injury system--you can use the same thing to defend *any* system, by just saying "get better at it and it won't suck so bad!" Stack defense. Use hard CC (cipher has plenty) and break engagement (cipher has lots of that, too). Stack engagement on your tanks so the enemy can't break away, blind them, and attack from behind while their attempting to swat your tank in the face. As you get better at this throughout the game, you slowly learn how far you can push through an area before it starts to get dangerous. And because health has a high degree of granularity, you don't have a hard threshold where rest becomes the default but a gradually building degree of how much you need to rest.

I'd do it a bit differently. Have your survival, lore, or perception--depending on the event--dictate the likelihood of those items appearing on the overmap, but still require you physically go and get them.

The extra 30% damage for exceeding an enemy's AR by 5 points is harder to get unless you are building your entire (custom) party around stacking AP and/or are purposefully fighting under-leveled foes. Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that the 30% bonus is so hard to achieve that its only purpose is to make it easy to mop up low-level enemies if you decide to go back to a low-level area and play god. It's basically just a little cookie you get to make it less tedious and to make you feel like you've grown in power. I think the chances of anyone getting this bonus in level-relevant fights is so slim in the current design that it's not even worth discussing compared to the rest of the issues with the system. I don't understand why a few people are so hung up on it. That extra 30% damage actually comes into play with crits, which give a penetration bonus.

That's to some extent an artifact of the beta. Good inn rest bonuses, high-quality food bonuses, high-quality shrine bonuses, they simply aren't implemented to any great extent--only two inn rests bonuses, one shrine bonus, and a bunch of low-level foods. The impetus to *not* rest can come from trying to save and conserve those bonuses. The impetus *to* rest can come both from wound clearing, from Empower being out, and from items that have per-rest abilities (like the Bounding Boots). The problem right now is that there is a *very* clear point where you should rest (whenever you get two wounds), that condition comes up with some degree of regularity and no granularity of any sort, and there is *no* impetus to not rest. So you get rest spam.

Well, here are the thoughts on the current racials: Resistance to X Afflictions: - as already mentioned it is not intuitive enough plus these talents are accompanied by a quite vague descriptions. - also some of these resistances can easily turn way more important than the others. For example in PoE1 having an extra defense vs stun would be much more impactful than a similar defense amount vs hobble, because a hobbled caster can still keep tossing spells. - additionally it depends on average encounter design. In PoE1 we had to face much more paralyzing enemies than pronning. Not to mention that stunning and pronning enemies were usually already easier to deal with, and that's one of the reasons why I never used a Coastal Aumaua. - and as usual: the interaction with similar effects, like barbarian's Unflinching talent is still unclear. Heya MaxQuest (and everyone else in this thread), Thought I'd drop in and try to explain what "Resistance to X Afflictions" means. I know we're going to release a comprehensive explanation eventually, but maybe I can help ya understand it for the beta since a lot of people have questions about it. So in PoE2, Afflictions have both a "tier" and an "attribute"; the "attribute" is what attribute it affects, and the "tier" is how strong the affliction is within that attribute subset. For example, let's look at Dexterity Afflictions: "Hobbled" is the tier 1 dexterity affliction. It gives you -5 Dex, and is the weakest affliction that affects Dex. "Immobilized" is the tier 2 dexterity affliction. It does everything hobbled does with the addition of some other stuff. It's strictly better than hobbled, since it's a higher tier. "Paralyzed" is the tier 3 dexterity affliction. Again, it does everything the previous tier (immobilized) does, with the addition of more. It's the best of the dexteritiy afflictions. With that information in mind, resistance is actually pretty huge: it downgrades afflictions to their previous tier. So if your character has resistance to dexterity afflictions and gets hit with a paralyze spell/ability, they will be immobilized instead. If they're hit with an immobilized spell/ability, they'll be hobbled. And if they're hit with a hobble spell/ability, they'll resist it entirely and not be affected at all. Resistance does not help your defenses against spells and abilities that apply these afflictions, it only downgrades the afflictions once they've actually hit you. I hope that helps! =) That explains a hell of a lot.

I agree about the little pickups on the world map; unless it's something cool that's guarded by a tough encounter, like the Bounding Boots which you have to defeat the Stalking Terror to get. The random stuff like food scattered around is sort of boring. Concur. You need *some* of that stuff--there are after all abandoned camps, etc. where you can find stuff left behind--but there's to much of it. Hopefully that's a beta artifact.