Answermancer

Yup. Items with charges that can't be restored (at a price would be fine) may as well not exist. In fact they don't exist, as far as my brain is concerned anyway.

I hadn't appreciated the 0.5 cast time (and wide radius) on Phantom Foes enough. I've just always relied on Eyestrike for half the focus. But with tons of focus, the quick cast time is great, I agree. And oh yeah, I use Mental Binding enough that I shouldn't have panned level 2 spells. It is good. > It just sort of sank in that - contrary to many other RPGs - only Wizards have access to their entire spell canon in POE2 (with the abundance of grimoires), while all other classes have to pick spells when they level up (at the opportunity cost of not taking things like "Tough", or "Snake's Reflex", etc.) I'll probably have to respec to try some of these good cipher suggestions. And/or future playthroughs. I think Secret Horrors is quite good too. At least I used it a ton on Serafen when I had him in the party, admittedly mostly to set up my rogue main character, but it has a decent AoE that can hit a lot of enemies and both of its afflictions are quite useful.

Yeah, it's kind of ironic that "They Shielded Their Eyes 'Gainst the Fampyr's Gaze" does very little to protect you from a Fampyr's gaze, lol. It reduces dominates to charms, which is okay, but considering that they can just chain charm you constantly (because of this bug) it's not much of an improvement. I suppose with the patch change that makes Charm break on damage from your "new team" it might be more useful, but probably not since the AI probably won't attack a character that it charmed.

Until this is fixed, the only real counterplay is to trivialize them by eating Captain's Banquet which gives total immunity to Intellect afflictions.

I wish that I could like these two paragraphs more than once. Spot on. I'd rather play 20 games of varying quality with varying strengths and weaknesses than 1 "perfect" game for 20 years. For the people who seemingly think that BG2 is the best game ever made, and compare everything else to it, what's the point? At that point BG2 isn't a game to you, it's a religion, nothing else that comes along is going to beat it for you.

What's wrong with building a class in different ways? We should be able to build a class to fit any roles though it might be inferior to classes specialized in the role. I don't see the issue of a tanky rogue, it's not obliged, you can build one is not equal to you have to build one. In case it wasn't clear from the extremeness of my reaction, I wasn't entirely serious. ;P I just don't think Streetfighters are for me. This post looks amazingly in-depth, I don't have time to read it just now but I will later. Awesome work!

Really? I don't know man, sneak attack (and eventually deathblows) gets you pretty far along the power curve imo. Also streetfighter = most fun I've had with a rogue-type in quite a while. Can someone explain to me why Streetfighter is good, or fun even? The downsides seem way too annoying to me. I'm a rogue fanatic and play a ton of rogues in every game, but I don't see why everyone loves Streetfighter. In my Swashbuckler (Rogue/Devoted) playthrough, I was flanked maybe 5 times over 100 hours of playtime, and unless you have a ton of Con (which I don't want) then staying Bloodied for more than a few seconds seems like a death sentence. I'm clearly missing something here but the downsides seemed way too annoying for me to try it. I love the micro of afflicting things and then Sneak Attacking them, but having to constantly micro to put myself in bad positions (flanked) or suffer a slower attack speed doesn't sound the least bit fun to me. Edit: Or is it for like Riposte builds with high Res? A super tanky high-Res rogue also sounds like heresy to me so maybe that's why I'm not into it. Edit 2: So after some reading, high Con, high Res builds with ****ty other stats? That like, literally offends me. That's disgusting, you should all be ashamed, Obsidian most of all for allowing it to happen. Tanky rogues, /vomit. I need a shower.

Yup, well said all around. On my Swashbuckler my most-used and most useful abilities were pretty much PL1-2, on casters you end up using a much wider range of abilities. They've improved on this a bit but I think the sheer range of ability costs is probably excessive. This is probably just another of those silly psychological things but a 4-resource ability feels risky and underwhelming most of the time. 1 and 2 resource abilities feel great, 3 is pretty situational, but I look at a 4-cost ability and have a really hard time justifying ever using it.

I wasn't gonna go it alone until I realized that joining any of the factions required me to murder or blow up a bunch of people from one of the others. And that it would potentially make me lose party members and piss them off permanently. Realized that part when I tried to side with the Huana with Pallegina in my party. I wasn't into any of that so I went off on my own. I'm gonna have a hard time picking any of them in a followup play through either, I'll probably have to roleplay someone who's really into one of the factions to force myself to do it since assassinating heads of state and blowing up powderhouses are just not things that I can easily justify to myself. It even made me consider going with the Principi since at least their quest just involved killing other pirates and potentially undead.

Yup, I hate consumables for this reason. I do end up using some, but only in the very hardest fights, and only if I'm confident I can craft more. Now I'll probably never use figurines; items with limited charges, without any way to get the charges back, are incompatible with my brain. I agree. Especially since changing from a guaranteed 100% chance to 25% is a much more impactful change than just changing the magnitude of a flat number. You're taking a reliable ability you can plan around and replacing it with an extremely unreliable one. That sucks, a whole lot. I really dislike when abilities are too random, and this is an example of that, how many enemies do you realistically expect one character to kill in a fight? Even if they kill 4, there's still a roughly 30% chance that it will never proc. Even if you kill 6, there's a roughly 18% chance it will never proc. Even if you kill 10, there's a roughly 6% chance it will never proc. I really hate stuff like that, making a cool ability you can plan around into something that just happens randomly and has a good chance of never happening when you need it. Please don't do this kind of thing.

I like a lot of the ideas here, especially the idea of making full attacks do special stuff for the non-DW fighting styles. What I don't like are ideas going back to D&D adding penalties to DW or worst of all, a different penalty for mainhand vs. offhand. Anything that incentivizes tedious **** like swapping which weapon is in the offhand between fights (even if the incentive is tiny) is awful and has no place in modern game design IMO.

Personally, I agree that PL should impact more abilities. Towards the end of my first playthrough I looked more closely at various abilities and so few of them are affected by it (outside of casters) that it really limits the appeal and impact of the thing. On the other hand, once I realized that Sneak Attack scaled with PL, it made me excited to try a pure Rogue again (my first playthrough was a Swashbuckler), even though the last two tiers of Rogue abilities look very lackluster to me. I think at minimum every martial class should have something important that scales with PL, like Sneak Attack does. Does Carnage scale with it? I don't think anything much does on Fighter.

Yeah I mean, if I do this fight again before it's fixed, I'm just gonna have everyone eat a Banquet. I know that now, but it's still almost certainly a bug and should be fixed. I posted my save from when I first hit this earlier, and at least when I was trying it, my rogue literally spent the entire fight charmed. I would break the charm with Pallegina and a second later the rogue would be charmed again. It's silly. It either needs an internal cooldown or some sort of counterplay besides "make everyone immune to Intellect afflictions".

No one except yourself has argued that everyone is a mage or that wizards aren't special. So you've effectively won an argument against yourself, with arguments you made but no one else has. Exactly.

It is pretty hard to argue against your point because you cherry-pick the things you like as "great works that inspired the entire genre" and ignore everything else. Constantly moving the goalposts or arguing totally different things while saying everyone else "just doesn't get it" also helps. How does your view of magic as science in any way match great works like LoTR where magic is strictly the purview of gods and angels (who happen to look like Wizards) and there's nothing scientific about it? But the part that really shows how self absorbed you are and how much you need everyone to agree with your very narrow definitions, is this: You constantly talk about how magic should be like science and Wizards the noble nerds that are smart enough to study it. And yet, when lots of people point out that Wizards are exactly that in Eora, they are researchers, animancers, they have labs and try to study how soul energy works, you ignore this because you personally find the abilities of other classes too flashy or too magical. Multiple people have pointed this out, but your criticism comes down to not liking a truly high-magic setting. Eora is a high magic setting, magical energy (soul energy) is everywhere in some form, and anyone can tap into it to some extent as part of their lives and their jobs. Wizards are exactly what you complain they are not, they are scientists concerned with the minutiae of magical power, who study it and find practical "technological" applications. Like many other people have pointed out, if you equate Magic with physics, anyone can learn a little physics knowledge and apply it in their jobs, and they are the non-Wizard classes, but only Wizards are "PhD physicists" winning Nobel prizes. The fact that you constantly ignore this point makes it clear that mostly you're butthurt that anyone else gets to use cool magical effects (even though their usage is highly specialized and "intuitive" rather than deeply studied). If magic is so widespread and easily attained, and any Joe Smoe can use it, what need is there for someone to research or specialize in it? It is everywhere and easily used by anyone. What is special about a wizard? How does a "wizard" even exist in a setting where magic is so easily obtained and used. Where essentially everyone is a "wizard" and the term simply means someone who plays with it as a hobby. Because everyone else is using a very small bit of it intuitively, the same way that in the real world we use physics intuitively to throw a ball or fly a plane or whatever, while an actual physicist is concerned with theory, much deeper understanding and utilization (think particle beams or lasers or something, still just physics, but so far removed from throwing a ball) and much broader application (including technological application). Again, it's a very, very simple metaphor: Magic in Eora is to Physics in the real world. It's a high magic setting. This is a very simple concept that everyone keeps explaining over and over, but you just discount it because you don't like it, even though it actually perfectly supports your desire for Wizards to be studied nerds devoted to knowledge and research. That's exactly what Wizards in Eora are and do. So no a Wizard is not "someone who plays with it as a hobby", the exact opposite in fact. Tell me, if you wanted to sneak up on someone in dim light, would you not "step through the shadows"? The animation in game is utterly mundane You're totally wrong about this too, btw. Shadow Step in WoW is literally a ranged teleport, not utterly mundane in any way, you're probably thinking of the Stealth ability.