Eleshar_Vermillion

I agree with the OP... Being on level 6 (end of first chapter) I have difficulties using other spells. Fan of flames is usually the way to go - more or less sure way of distributing significant amounts of damage to a large number of targets that are reasonably far from the caster. The other spells are much more situational and often very risky and with questionable usability. 1) Their range is usually god-awful compared to FoF. Ok, I may be exagerating a little bit but the range is usually shorter and we are talking about ranges so short that it activates the positioning algorithms of the enemies, which, considering the fact the most of the time the group is largely outnumbered, produces cataclysmic results (e.g.: my wizard closes in to put a debuff on a few enemies; one of the enemies disengages from my tank... the tank is engaging this enemy uses an attack of opportunity and then... decides to follow the repositioning target, disengaging from a group of several other enemies and being put down promptly as a result... now my wizard needs to deal on a very short notice with a close single enemy while being in the middle of a casting of a debuff on a group that is no longer on the place he is aiming at...) 2) their effects are insignificant - I am fully aware that reducing deflection by those 24 points by blinding an enemy is an accomplishment, in reality the usefulness is questionable, even if I hit multiple targets (which I wont because the AoE is incomensurable to FoF), whats is the point? my only consistent damage dealers are the tank (Edér) who can attack only so many times due to having a heavy armour and Chanter (Kana) who is fighting the stragglers and trying not to go down, so before an affected target is killed off, the debuff just expires. While there may be uses for most of the spells, for me it is just not worth the associated risks and uncertainties... it is just safer substract 3-4 significant chunks of health from a large group of enemies by casting 2 FoFs by 2 mages (as was pointed out - actually killing enemies is also a very efficient crowd control).

Just started the game and what struck me first as a rather large inconvenience was the dialogue representation in the game. PoE apparently chooses to go the way Planescape: Torment did (as opposed to BG series) and along the regular dialogue replicas, it gives you also some fluff information around, describing the general circumstances (i.e. that you interlocutor shrugged or that he is looking at you very strangely or some such). Now I admit I am not a huge fan of this, however I respect this design choice. However I think it is implemented rather poorly. I beleive the fluff text and dialogue text should be distinguished much more than by quotation marks and a very slight degree of brightness. The distinction should be either by different font colour (e.g. white and light blue) or different font type (italics / non-italics). I am aware that e.g. in PsT, there was no such distinction and it did not pose any problems, however first of all this game was much more text heavy and, more importantly - there were comparably much fewer *voiced dialogues*. Now this is where the real problem enters the scene in PoE. On one hand, you have the text dialogue that gives you the dialogue replicas *and* the fluff text of various lengths, on the other, you have the voiced dialogue that gives you the dialogue replicas only. You are forced to follow the text dialogue because it gives you more information in the fluff (some of the fluff descriptions are quite lengthly) but you are disturbed by the voice dialogue that *does not* follow the text you are reading at all and you get desynced very fast: Text - Sound fluff replica replica replica replica replica fluff replica You either need to stop reading the text and just listen to what they say (at least for me it is difficult to read fluff text and try to perceive what the character is saying aloud) or frantically try to find the text the character is saying (can you imagine the experience of people with not that good English?). For the future, I would propose to forgo entirely the fluff text in all voiced dialogues. The information provided by the fluff text should be conveyed in a different way, i.e. combination of the contents of the dialogue and voice acting (or an actual animation if you feel daring), however this is obviously impossible for the existing dialogues, where I would go for a decent colour distinction. This should not be too hard to patch in since most of the speech is already pre-parsed very clearly by quotation marks.