Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

I'll put it this way; I think the stronger argument in favor of buffing Con further (in addition to the 5% bonus) is the fact that pretty much everyone dumps it a little bit. This seems especially true now that there's no longer the endurance/health split and there's no need for a high "max" health. All you really have to have now is "enough health to survive between heals." That said, almost nobody ever takes Con to 3; it's still useful; so I don't think changes & improvements to Con should be a priority, just maybe a long term polishing goal.

I haven't seen trinkets yet for any other classes, just Grimoires. There's currently a kind of imbalance since Wizards have Grimoires and nobody else has that kind of alternate power selection, so we'll see what happens there.

Yeah, I'm really not going to get into a semantics debate or go through and count exactly where I think all forty-odd subclasses fall on the relative power scale for you. There are a lot of subclasses and a lot of them have balance problems. :shrug:

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing. Paladins don't even have a "base class" to compare the subclasses against. Right now a lot of subclasses are just flat out worse than the base class (for example, cipher's Ascendant, or Fighter Black Jackets). I didn't say all subclass penalties were too harsh, I said a lot were, i.e., "some", not all. It's just easy to forget the crappy subclasses because nobody plays them. You are correct that some subclasses are too powerful and are distracting from the base class. It's two sides of the same coin; lots of subclasses need balance tweaks vs. the main classes and vice-versa.

Yeah there's a little bit of proof of concept stuff on this in the beta but so far it feels like something that's not fully implemented yet. Which is probably fine given the state of things at the moment.

Just checked -- it debuffs an enemy by -10 Resolve in order to grant the Steadfast inspiration, +5 Resolve. Base duration is only 20 seconds though, not long at all. Accuracy vs. Will. 3 second cast time, 3 second recovery. You probably could do a damage build using it but it'd be weird -- you'd have to build up a lot of focus first so you could cast PVS first then whatever else you wanted to cast next.

Well, one difference is that other classes can choose not to take a subclass, but paladins and priests cannot. So I can see the argument for not forcing players to take a negative when they just want to Paladin. I feel like a lot of the subclass penalties are too harsh across the board.

Those are good thoughts, I hadn't really considered Psychovampiric Shield. Your post about wizards makes me remember/realize another big issue Ciphers face at least currently; they just don't have many powers. Wizards can swap out grimoires for huge versatility, but everyone else is limited to one power / level, which means Ciphers are getting only 2/3rds as many powers as they had in the first game. Plus, some of those "power" slots have to go to passive abilities (draining whip, etc)., so functionally you have about a third as many powers to play with as you did in the first game. Net result is that you have to really heavily specialize your character and fights lose a lot of variation and tactical depth because you're always doing the exact same thing ("ok, this is the fight where I cast blindsight and auto-attack . . . because those are my only options"). They need to find a way for non-Wizard casters to gain some additional versatility. Extra power slots or something. The problem is ameliorated a bit for Priests by their bonus deity spells but Ciphers face a real lack.

I don't think it's necessarily bad so long as the character loses something or risks something by dropping it that far. Like, dropping Con to 4 on a backliner is a real choice -- you're making a glass cannon. Stats have a smaller impact on the game than a lot of people think, so having maxed stats doesn't really break the game. The real issue is that Resolve (and, admittedly, but to a lesser extent, Con) don't have many positive reasons for a lot of characters to take them -- if you're a backliner there's not much cause to take Resolve. That'll change a bit with the new announced str/res changes but it's more spreading out the problem than solving it (it'll just mean some characters dump Res and some dump Str instead).

Yeah, this is why Constitution needs something that isn't either more hit points or mathematically equivalent to more hit points (i.e., incoming graze to miss or whatever). There needs to be a reason to take each additional point of Constitution, that isnt' just hit points. A percentage chance to resist injuries might do but seems insufficient. Best idea I can think of might be something like reducing incoming affliction duration by 1% / increasing inspiration duration by 1% per point., but that's just stealing an idea from the Resolve thread.

I'm not sure there's a way to buff Constitution any further. The problem seems like almost anything you do to fix Con is either giving it "hit points with extra steps" (i.e., incoming critical hit reduction) or something that some other stat (Resolve?) probably needs more (incoming debuff duration reduction, etc.) I feel like they should get resolve and per sorted out and otherwise leave Con like it is for now. It's not a *bad* stat and health tanking can be really solid if you build for it. Maybe down the road give it some gravy once the other stats are sorted out. Some interaction with the injury system could work but you have the incrementation problem; you can't heal ten percent of an injury.

Eh, you can generally get away with leaving one defense relatively low without it being a big deal, especially as a back rank caster. In emergencies there are buffs.

The biggest losers are ciphers, followed by shapeshifting druids and muscle wizards, then anyone who wants to play any kind of weapon/caster hybrid (ranger/ciphers, fighter/wizards, etc.) It also makes things hard for scroll based casting builds but that might work out in play depending.

Just to add another perspective on what's been said above, there have been a number of mechanical changes that have made it harder to play single-class casting ciphers and especially single-class ranged ciphers in the current beta. Some of those we know are changing, some they haven't commented on apart from acknowledging feedback so we'll have to see what happens. Main issue right now is lack of grazes and other changes in the attack roll calculation (crits going from .5 to .25 % damage, etc.) mean that everyone just puts out less damage overall, which in turn means Ciphers generate less focus less quickly. Less of a problem for melee because right now the weapon balance is currently a little slanted towards melee (for various reasons some of which are known issues being fixed). Grazes are coming back next patch though so this might be ameliorated a bit. A lot of the weapon talents got moved into Rangers and Fighters, which left Ciphers kinda in the cold, but those are getting opened up next patch we're told, so no longer an issue. Main issue next patch will be the splitting of Might into Strength and Resolve, which will make it much harder for Ciphers to do damage with spells -- if they stack resolve for spell damage, they'll lack weapon damage from Strength, and therefore also lack focus gain (and the same is also true if they stack Strength and then lack resolve for spell damage). Past that, everyone's spell casting times and durations etc are badly out of whack in the current, initial, beta; they've said wizard and priest and druid powers are getting a rebalance but I've never heard them specifically mention Ciphers. Presumably though Cipher powers are getting rebalanced along with everyone else's so we'll see. Past that, there's the general issue that the focus mechanic -- which was an advantage when all the other casters were Vancian -- is now a disadvantage because everyone else is per-encounter; a beta wizard can dump their whole grimoire before a cipher has gotten two casts off, just because the Cipher has to gather focus and the Wizard doesn't. Honestly the devs haven't talked much about Ciphers at all in the streams, to the point where I've been wondering if they're looking at a redesign on the class. Since you mention pistols, guns are suffering a bit too from these same kind of "side effect of other changes" issues; the "blunted criticals" effect they have wasn't a big deal when the critical damage modifier was .5, but now that it's .25, guns get almost nothing at all from a critical hit, which is just sad. I would keep watching though because I suspect all these issues will get some degree of attention during the beta, I'm just not sure what form that attention will take.

Mine is over 9,000

This was really interesting, thanks. That's exactly why I'd never completed a melee cipher run in PoE -- I could never figure out a way to build them where they weren't crazy squishy.

Yeah, I feel like 50% is the floor and then past that it depends on whether or not that's the only thing Per does or if they add anything else to the stat, which there's still room to do depending on how they rework concentration and interrupt. Yeah, I kinda want to see how things play out in the next patch before I say anything more than "increasing the crit benefit to 50% would be a good idea." Obsidian tends to use an iterative dev process where they tweak things a bit each patch till the balance gets juuuust right, so yeah, let's see how things turn out next patch.

Yeah, I'm not sure they really thought that through. Blunted criticals seems like pure fun-hating

currently the lack of ubiquitous grazes still gives perception a significant relevance, because the difference between a 0% effect and a 100% effect is huge (way huger than 100% to 125%). Of course, this will change depending on how grazes get reimplemented. Yeah, right now, relatively speaking, a point of Per gives a 02.5% damage bonus, because no grazes and adding a 25% crit. That's still significantly lower than the benefit from Might or Dex, but it's in the same ballpark. When grazes are added in in the next patch, though, it'll give - 50+(25/2)+(1*1.25) == 63.75 % expected value on each attack normally (Sawyer confirmed on SA that 100 = crit post-patch), then 50+(25/2)+(2*1.25) = 65%; then 65-- 63.75 = 1.25; 1.25/65 = 01.9 % DPS increase for that first point of Per. If you increase the value of critical hits back up to 50% though that increases significantly: 50+(25/2)+(1*1.5) = 64 expected value normally 50+(25/2)+(2*1.5) == 65.5 == 1.5 difference; 1.5/64 = 02.3 % dps increase for that first point of per (still below might/dex, but much improved) Yeah, i t's situationally useful but it's one of those things where if you're in that situation you've probably made some other mistake first (not having a penetration debuff available, using the wrong weapon vs. that target, etc. ) We'll have to see how the more graduated penetration system plays into this too; remember next patch it's not .3 -> 1, it's .3 -> .5 -> .75 -> 1.

The possibility really isn't that high. You have to double the opponent's AR to get the overpenetration bonus, and in most cases that means you either 1) Are using so many armor debuffs that the opponent's AR is reduced to near-zero and you'd get the overpenetration bonus regardless of the critical hit, or 2) Are using armor debuffs and very high-penetration weapons, which all do about 30% less damage than standard weapons -- compare the Greatsword and the Estoc -- so you're functionally pre-nerfing yourself. The penetration bonus from critical hits is a nice bonus but if you're relying on criticals to penetrate or overpenetrate you're probably screwing up because criticals are unreliable. Meanwhile, the reduction from 50% criticals to 25% criticals is functionally a huge nerf to the DPS value of Perception. Think about it: you're trading +25% on every critical hit for +30% on some edge case critical hits in the rare situations where the armor values line up just right.

Technically speaking Perception already does this to a degree: each point of accuracy shifts the combat roll over one and gives you an additional percentage chance to get a critical hit.

I think it's way too early to make these judgement calls, mostly because spell balance is obviously broken across the board right now. Judging by pure party power, right now, the all wildrhymer beckoner party is just hilariously good.

I don't think a lickstarter game has ever hit the initial announced calendar target. I'm expecting May / June ish.

If I'm picturing this right, you're saying that if, using my right hand, I swing from right to left, I then have to wind back up to swing right to left again. If, instead, I use the fact that my right hand is to my left to swing left to right, then I'm not really losing any speed compared to using one in each hand. No time is wasted bringing my arm back to the right, I can just swing again immediately. But I'm not an expert in melee combat, so I don't know if that actually works. Yeah, basically. A lot of martial arts teach this as well. Think of the human body as rotating about a central axis; enemy strikes at your left, left rotates back, right rotates forward; enemy strikes at your right, right rotates back, left rotates forward, etc. Or think of it this way: when you punch, you punch not just with your arm, also with your hlps and body and legs. So, punch right the right, right arm/hip rotate forward, and thus left hip rotates back; punch with the left, left hip rotates forward, right rotates back, etc. I mean it's not the only technique out there or anything but it's definitely a thing.

Yeah, depending on how they rework Interrupt/concentration, then giving critical hits a chance to interrupt and Resolve a chance to reduce incoming crits * could* be a "way out" for this issue; per would still be the worst overall dps stat, but good for crit or interrupt builds. I'm not sure how the numbers would need to work out on Resolve to achieve parity though. edit: yeah the extra penetration bonus etc. from critical hits isn't easily factorable into this analysis. Presumably it'll be pretty rare unless you're stacking the deck in a bunch of ways to get it, but as rough shorthand, we can probably assume that it's not enough to bring Per at 2.4% per point up to the value of Dex at 2.7% per point. I also think there are strong arguments for returning to a 50% bonus for critical hits regardless of this change. As I understand it, the reason for the reduction was that CC crits were considered too powerful -- but just as with grazes, that turns out to be less of a concern than you might think, because CC overall isn't as powerful in this game due to the altered Affliction system. Similarly, if Resolve got a "reduce incoming criticals" function, that would also work to minimize the issue.