Breckmoney

Having the expansion out into the middle of the game does make it a little incongruous, sure. I still think I prefer it there rather than being end game only content that not many get to experience. I just think there needed to be more adjustments to the rest of the game when the expansions came out to bump it back into line difficulty wise. I guess I just don't think of Pillars 1 as being a game about being an epic hero. It was far smaller in scale and more personal than that which I loved. I expect Deadfire to branch out a bit in that direction and even more if Pillars 3 happens, but I hope that they do what they can to keep it as little about saving the world from A Big Bad Guy as they can. You can still feel like a very powerful and accomplished warrior/wizard/whatever without creating some scenario where you're all that stands between Eora and Certain Doom or whatever.

Well I think those parts were rushed by Obsidian's own admission, so no real surprise there. Pillars 3.0+ with the expansion was were they finally nailed it imo and put it up there with the cRPG greats.

I mean, the fun tap was opened pretty far by the end of Pillars 1. Barbarians were leaping into groups and one-shorting packs with HoF, Ciphers could make your party basically invincible, Paladins were just a walking column of flame, monks were splitting into multiple aspects, kicking people all over the place or punching people from range with mystical energy, druids turned into a werecat and tore through enemies while a storm raged around them. I don't think I ever had a problem with progression in PoE1 after the expansions came out and got us out of the mid levels. I'm all for ramping it up a bit more but I don't think we should undersell the first game either.

I don't think anyone wants OS length battles, just maybe longer than they are now combined with further tweaks to casting times. Like I don't play min/maxed at all and my wizard probably gets to cast 3-5 spells in a normal combat as well as moving a bit, auto attacking etc., and that feels pretty good. So my thought continues to be that melee scale too well in optimal situations if people are really running into combats so short that their wizard only gets off one spell before everyone else cleaves through everything. If combat was 30ish seconds of non-pause time instead of 10-15 I don't think we run the risk of combat being drawn out and tedious and casters actually get to cast more. The idea of long cast, high risk/reward spells is cool and id like to see it worked out rather than removed.

Not necessarly. If you don't get to utilize your skills per encounter then sure - something is off. For me thats not the case. Longer encounters would mean just staring at people hitting each other for longer, as I would be out of resources anyway. BG combat was very brief as well. You kill enemy or they kill you. Well yeah I don't think many should be that long. But 10-20 seconds of combat isn't getting there. That's a handful of spells or a couple abilities and a few auto attacks.

POE1 in PoTD = 90 % of the fights under 15-20 seconds for me. Glass canon style obviously. (Without tank) I don't count the pause time (Ingame time only). So with POE2, with a full damage system, 15 seconds is totally normal actually. The greatest approach is mini-boss approach (Ghoul, sparkmaster, Twins by fire Joined etc.). Like original Sin. With that, you have longer battle more frequently, with less trash mobs. Also, don't forget : this is my warning : We are hardcore gamer. So 15 seconds for us, guys who redone the first game 10 000 times, it is more for others players. I remember that my first part in the normal mode of POE1, I had more difficulty than my last parts in PoTD. We master perfectly the wheels and all the mechanics... If that's only unpaused time then sure, that sounds more reasonable. Though I do think that, with all else equal, the encounters would benefit from being longer than Pillars 1, because that hopefully implies that the encounters are more interesting and require more tactical consideration.

Eh I don't think 10-15 seconds would feel good on anything except maybe easy or really trashy fights in normal. I'm not an amazing player so I usually stick to Veteran and if every fight would be that length it would just feel pretty trivial no matter how well designed it might be. I think the average fight for me right now takes about 60-90 seconds in total and that feels good. I get to cast plenty of spells and use a number of abilities.

Bringing down cast times on more spells makes sense to me, but I also feel like weapon damage is maybe a bit high right now. I don't think weapons should be any slower but it seems like they could do with a bit of a damage decrease. That said I'm not seeing any fights last only 10-15 seconds?

I think it's fine if they're flexible in terms of options without necessarily being able to exploit all of those options to the fullest every battle. Just having the ability to adapt to lots of encounters is pretty powerful already.

It doesn't really make them better tanks. Just slightly less likely to be hit. They'll still likely have flimsy armor, and now armor can matter way more with the huge penetration falloffs, and relatively few HPs. I understand why it's weird for a wizard to build high deflection I guess but I don't think it makes them crazy good tanks.

There's no reason to think this change happens in a vacuum so I don't know that we can say anything about builds just yet. Even if Ciphers are weirdly dependent on lots of stats you could just tweak their focus gain independently and suddenly everything would work again. % increases from strength and resolve could change, items could change. Maybe Cipher damage spells scale very steeply with stats or they just become more of a buff/debuff focused class and you do more damage that way rather than through nukes.

It should definitely add to your character's history. I'm not sure if they want to punish people for not having played the first game, though. Presumably those people would make the same choices in the pre-game Pillars 1 scenario generator. My guess is that you won't have them at the start but may reclaim them as you progress through the story and save your soul.

I spent a long time playing a warrior in EQ1 and I think some of their abilities could be fun in PoE for Fighters: Furious: For x number of seconds the fighter ripostes every blow aimed at them Crippling Blows: Critical hit damage is doubled when below 40% health and will stun enemies unless they pass a Fort check Flurry: x% chance to strike two additional times with your mainhand weapon (monks already kinda have this I guess)

Precisely. To appeal to some "slow players" (no pun meant), they took away the enjoyment of others. This is so infuriating, they break the game for no reason. Why take away the choice? Can you believe I cannot play the Beta because of how frustrating is to see those 5 dummies staring at the enemies? I am Not a pro, but I almost never slowed down time in POE1. I just Paused few times. So are you saying that fast combat speed is even too slow?

If this is true then is really bad. How can be the game designer became so bad at game designing out of a sudden? This is silly. The game is months away, this is the first week of beta testing. Lots of stuff is broken, unbalanced and unfinished, just like it always is. Many melee classes are currently attacking about 3x faster than they should do to a bug.

This also isn't set in stone. It could change before launch or in an update afterwards. Josh said it was more of a technical problem that takes time and resources to crunch through rather than a hard design decision.

Something like Mindweb should be moved to the single-class only power levels IMO. And powers for other classes should be a similar scope in terms of how good and unique they are if possible.

The incentive is to not burn through your high quality rations by resting all the time. We just don't have any food options implemented yet that aren't common and cheap. That is what the dev said. But I did not care at all about resting bonus in the first game because i don't need them to win. Why should I care about food bonus in this game if I don't need them to win. For the same reason anyone playing an RPG like any stat boosts? I don't even really know what to say to that. This is effectively no different than the previous system except you are rewarded for playing well.

The incentive is to not burn through your high quality rations by resting all the time. We just don't have any food options implemented yet that aren't common and cheap.

Because, as the community stated, it breaks the flow of gameplay a bit too much often.Besides, you can always rest if you wish, I merely suggested 2 ways to punish less a small mistake, while punishing increasingly more repeated misdoings. Why not bring back the old system with camping supply then. Backtracking to get more camping supplies would break the flow of gameplay way more than resting often.There is no consequence to the actual system because you can make injury disappear at will. At least before you had the consequence that it would be boring and tedious to constantly go back to buy more supplies. It seems that some people could not realize they should lower the difficult if they had to constantly do that. Now as a result we get a pointless system. You answer your first sentence with the second. Lots of people did it all the same and it was a bad experience, this the changes. There are still incentives to going as long as possible without resting but without the downsides that drove people away from the game.

If nothing else this seems like a pretty big buff to the Devoted subclass.

I just don't think this changes much in the end. Either monsters or items or something else need to be rebalanced around people now having access to more damage (which they're almost sure to take) or the game gets a bit easier. Meanwhile classes that had these abilities just become less interesting.

I feel like Eothas has traded in the upstanding parts of his portfolio for those more vengeful in nature.

Giving fighters some unique cool abilities and just getting rid of two-weapon/two-handed/one-handed/sword and shield specialization from the game altogether would be great.Almost. I would simply make weapons styles general proficiencies and then give the fighter cool new abilities to replace the loss of boring buffs. Edit: The stances were such a neat idea for fighters that they could simply add an upgrade talent for each stance or maybe an active for each stance that can only be used while using a specific stance. But wouldn't it be even more fun if you just got rid of generic +number abilities and gave everyone new abilities that were thematic to their class? Like I understand it's a lot of work and if Obsidian decides to just make a generic talent bucket that's fine with me too, but I'd prefer if they were more tailored to individual classes.

Giving fighters some unique cool abilities and just getting rid of two-weapon/two-handed/one-handed/sword and shield specialization from the game altogether would be great.