Matt516

2 things: 1) PoE takes place during the very beginning of Eora's industrial revolution - it fits just fine. Not every fantasy world is set in the equivalent of the middle ages. 2) The bit about untrained peasants making archers and spell casters obsolete is true, and is a major plot point in the recent history of Eora. Durance will tell you all about it.

Which sucks, because she seems somewhat interesting. I just can't stand the VO. So much hissing.

Tested it - looks like that's how it works for sure. Regular attack goes up against full DR of the appropriate type, and the lash goes up against 1/4 of the DR of the appropriate type. The lash damage pre-DR isn't shown, however - just the post-DR lash damage.

PotD doesn't add more enemies from Hard, IIRC - it just ups most of their stats by 50%.

Ah, must be another one of those abilities where they forgot to flesh out the details. It took me a really long time to realize that some spells have details you need to know in the "flavor" text at the top. The effect description is NOT complete for a lot of stuff. I really wish they had done a sanity check on this stuff. For example there are a couple spells that say they deal 1000+ damage but don't qualify in the effect description that it only applies to enemies with low endurance, and even where it mentions this in the flavor text it still doesn't DEFINE "low endurance". These kinds of mistakes are frustrating when trying to learn the strategy of a game. Honestly I haven't even tried either of those two spells referenced because I have just assumed that there is more wrong with their descriptions that I haven't caught yet. Yup. Tooltips are super helpful when they appear (really, Obsi did a good job here on most of them) but incredibly frustrating when they don't. "This shield grants 'Bashing 2'. I wonder what that means. Let me hover over - oh. Nevermind..." - That happens all too often. The unofficial wiki on orcz.com has a lot more information in many cases, though is still very incomplete and still rife with errors. It's still better than the official wiki, though. I've just been making edits as I play and notice things are wrong.

*I* think *I* know better what *I* mean. That is how *I* perceive these classes lore-wise, and that is why *I* discard monks. You're free to perceive things however you want, but the fact remains that Eora's monks are not the Eastern-influenced monks that D&D uses. If you dislike the monk because you can't get past the mental image of the Eastern martial artist, that's fine - but it's not a problem with PoE. I agree with Ganrich that they're a sleeper class. Fists are ridiculously powerful. If you play monks correctly, they wreak havoc. If you don't, you perceive them as weak and pointless. It's a higher skillcap class.

That's what I would expect... but then again apparently there's a high-level Chanter chant that grants AoE +25 fire damage to everyone, which would be ridiculously more powerful since you A) don't have to put yourself in a risky situation to make it happen and B) it affects everyone, not just one character... so who knows?

Is this new? As of last night the description for this ability in my game did NOT say anything about bonus damage, only that you cannot be flanked unless there are 3 or more enemies. Where is the bonus damage from? Is it just missing from the in-game description for this ability? It should mention bonus damage in the description, just without any specifics as to how much. You might check again? Perhaps it's been changed if that isn't in there anymore - but it was last night when I checked.

This is (possibly) straight-up incorrect. The amount of additional protection you get from one additional point in Deflection is dependent on which regime of "Accuracy minus Deflection" you are in. There are 2 significant "break points" for this value - when ACC-DEF equals 15 and when it equals 0. +/-50 are also break points, but less important since that's not super likely. Anyway. The important thing is that within the range where ACC-DEF is between 15 and 0, each point in Deflection reduces average incoming damage by 1.5% of whatever the base damage is because it converts one roll out of 100 from a miss to a crit (or vice versa). 1/100*150%=1.5%. Outside of this range, you're converting grazes to crisis or misses to hits, so each point is only worth 1%. Now - what I said above is correct. Factually and mathematically true. The reason I said you're *possibly* straight-up incorrect is that percentage of base damage isn't necessarily the best metric for measuring this since that makes up a different relative amount of how much damage you were taking in the first place - it's usefulness is not linear. The correct metric for this sort of thing is effective HP (or effective endurance, whatever) - which is literally how much incoming damage you can take before dying. The usefulness of 1 effective HP is the same no matter how much you had in the first place. I know the equation for eHP in this case (worked it out during a class because.. yup), but I don't have the chance to put it into a spreadsheet until tonight. I'll do that and throw some graphs up here later tonight, and then we'll see what we see. *yes, I know DR changes things. I also know exactly how it affects the eHP equation - it adds an additional (additive) term that results in a recursive equation due to the eHP from DR depending not only on enemy weapon attack speed but also your survival time (which is tied in turn to eHP). So my first graphs won't take that into account, but that's the price of easy algebraic answers. Might take it into account later. **yes, I know that the minimum damage from DR changes things as well. For now I won't worry about that, because this discussion is about a tanky dps class that will be wearing Medium armor (and thus will hardly if ever actually reduce damage to minimum). ***fun fact, as your Deflection goes up the eHP you get from your DR decreases because enemies will be hitting you less often and therefore your DR won't absorb damage as much. ****that said, the above may be untrue because due to enemies hitting you less often your eHP (and survival time) goes up, meaning more chances to hit you and therefore let DR absorb damage. This is why recursive equations make things complicated. *****last edit, I promise. I said "recursive" before - I misspoke. Just looked at the equation again and I'm pretty sure it just ends up being a quadratic equation in eHP. We'll see. Might be solvable analytically, though. This will be fun. It feels good to be doing PoE spreadsheets again.

Prerendered and painted-over backgrounds are great, huh? :D So glad someone's brought this style of game back. 3d is overrated.

Enemies can have a variable number of "engagement slots".Move your cursor over an enemy and you'll be able to see red lines going from him to your characters. Those indicate the characters that are engaged. Also note: RED line means the enemy is engaging you. GREEN line means you are engaging the enemy. The two can (and often do) happen at the same time, but don't have to. Each character can only engage one foe at a time without special talents or abilities. No red line means you can move away without eating a disengagement attack.

Your rogue stops because he got engaged once he ran next to enemy and by default it is turned on that AI stops anyone that gets engaged so they don't suffer disengagement attacks automatically. You can turn it off but I would not advise it because characters love to chase others around and with it off they will get hit a lot from disengagement attacks. There is a "hidden" queue system in the game but only for using special abilities. I would love a waypoint system for movement to be implemented, with engagement mechanics (and flanking mechanics) it is a must have. You CAN q movement, same way as abilities. Hold shift and click everywhere you want to move in order. The waypoints don't show up, but they're there.

Just think if it as spells being cast partly from the caster's physical strength. Quite a common trope in fantasy settings, actually (just not D&D). If you're miffed that big tough guys can be simultaneously weak (maxing Con and dumping Might), well.. fair enough. But that's not unique to PoE, it's a possibility in any RPG system that separates an attack-y strength from a toughness strength. It's weird, but meh.

It is weird that the bonus from this ability is an integer bonus though. Makes it heavily HEAVILY favor dual wielding over anything else. Wonder why they did that instead of the additive percentage modifiers almost everything else is?

Heh. No idea. They're both hyperbolic words and I don't think either is really objectively more intense than the other - Obsi just picked one, I guess. Not something I'm really concerned with. ;P

Con needs to be changed to 4% or 5% to reflect its status as a purely defensive stat - having it grant the same percentage bonus as the offensive stat (Might) doesn't work. Dex is fine because, as you said, it helps EVERYTHING. So it's going to have to be a bit weaker - it's the jack-of-all-trades stat. Haven't found as much use for Per as you have but I'll take your word for it. I agree Res could use a bit of a boost. Might and Int are both very strong. Too strong? Probably not.

Fair enough. I'll rescind the OP comment. Not like I want to see my favorite class nerfed or anything - was just a bit taken aback. xD Let's call it "extreme risk, extreme reward" instead. I still took Brutal Strikes in prep for Threatening Prescence. Nerf Chanter and Cipher instead!

Ah right - some things happen in game time and some happen in turns. Forgot about that silliness.

Yup. Lock/trap xp, while insignificant in the grander scheme of things, is still completely unnecessary and should be removed. And bounty xp needs to be toned waay down. No one's posting this information so it's hard to tell, but I'd bet that the difference between the people who say "yeah, I did most of the sidequests and didn't hit the cap til the middle of act 3" and the people who say "I hit the cap in the middle of act 2 obsidian nerf xp pls" boils down to one main thing: bounties.

Really though. Has anyone used this talent and actually tested the increased damage? +20 sounds like a little.. much.

Certainly sounds like a bug...

The bonus/malus for Constitution isn't big enough - you only lose 24% endurance for dropping it to 2 and only gain 30% for upping it to 20. That's just not significant enough. Change the scaling to 4% or 5% per point, and Constitution suddenly becomes actually significant.

One thing I haven't seen hardly anyone mention is the bounties. Are those of you who are reaching the cap halfway through act 2 doing a lot of bounties? Because from what I've heard, those give ludicrous amounts of experience. It would be very helpful if people would post that information when giving anecdotal evidence. Could be that it's just the bounties that are pushing people over the edge. If so, the solution is just to greatly reduce the XP from bounty quests. There, problem solved. No huge rebalance needed.

Thing is, there is no 2H crushing weapon in the Soldier specialization, forcing you to take another talent. Whereas Estoc partners perfectly with the Poleaxe in Adventurer. If Estoc were moved to Noble, the problem would be mitigated at least. As is, its stats and positioning in weapon focus talents just makes it the best. Don't get me wrong, I'm still gonna use Grearswords. But out of stubbornness and role-playing reasons, not because they're better (they aren't).

There's plenty of people talking about this or that they dislike about the Stronghold. This is not one of those threads. This thread is for making this simple suggestion - make Stronghold building, hireling pay, etc all take turns. Or make everything that currently takes turns take time. Let's do away with this business of some Stronghold things taking turns and some taking time. It's confusing and counterintuitive. Just - use turns for everything (would probably work best) or use time for everything (would be better than current system at least). There are plenty of things to gripe about if one so chooses with the Stronghold. I don't see the point in that. But this dual turn/time system is confusing and unintuitive - it needs to go. Would be a big QoL improvement to the Stronghold. As it is I have no idea if I should be resting for days to get everything built or waiting to do quests to save turns or what have you. It's stressful. Just balance it for turns or time, then there's no confusion about if one is progressing at the right pace or not.