Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

I like this but durations for a lot of powers are already mega-short relative to their casting time; you might need to proportionally lengthen spell durations a bit first (which would, ironically, make Resolve more important!)

I'm trying to find a compromise that isn't "everything is universal." I think some talents do make sense on certain classes when you consider the lore and the class' description. Also - if Ranger is going to have "best class at ranged weapon damage" taken away so ALL classes can be good at ranged weapon damage, they need compensation. In my mind, the slayer talents are a way to do that. I don't think people care too much about losing those... do they? Fair point. I do think Rangers are going to be the best at ranged damage regardless, mostly due to things like Driving Flight and (presumably) Twinned Arrows. They did have a lot of their core abilities taken away to become weapon proficiencies though.

I've been playing a multi-classed Cipher in the beta and I'm pretty happy with the abilities they have right now. Has your experience been different? I think there are other classes that need reshuffled talents more than Ciphers do. There are a few multiclass cipher builds that are very effective right now, but they tend to play weird (i.e., soulblade/assassin is great, but you never actually use cipher powers, you just use the soulblade raw damage special to burn focus for megadamage). If you try to just play a single class cipher it's very difficult -- focus gain rate was reduced vs. the first game, plus lack of grazing means it's harder to gain focus. On top of that, you have all the problems that other casters have (most cipher powers now have cast+recovery times equal to the effect durations, lack of grazing, etc.) plus you have to gain focus first before you can cast -- so a wizard or priest has usually dumped their whole spellbook by the time you've worked up that focus; the same focus mechanic that made Ciphers more versatile than Vancian casters in the first game makes them more restricted than the otherwise universal per-encounter format everyone else is using in Deadfire.. Multiclass ciphers tend to have less of a problem because the other class gives something to do while building focus and the soul whip power augments the first class's attacks effectively.

Side topic, but am I imagining it or was there any other big change to stat effectiveness, with intelligence? In the first game there was a long-term bug, which I don't think ever got fixed, that Int multiplied the radius of the area of effect, not the area. Is it my imagination or is that something they fixed in the backer beta? The int bonus to AoE's feels a LOT smaller.

That's a great overall list but I want to nitpick it to death! -- I'd roll Gunner and Marksman together into a "Ranged Weapon Focus" and treat it the same as the other weapon focuses (i.e., open to all). -- Why does everyone forget ciphers when they make lists like this? Penetrating Shot was added to Ciphers (indirectly and renamed/redesigned as a general +1 to weapon pen); everyone forgets that Ciphers need passive weapon and damage talents just like the other weapon classes, or they can't gain focus! -- There seems to have been a general design decision that modals are weapon proficiencies and not much else. I kinda agree with that. You can only deal with so many modals at once. A lot of those modals were either shifted to weapons or if they WERENT shifted to weapons would be better toned down and made into a passive or toned up and made into an active one-shot ability just so you odn't have to deal with multiple modals at once. -- the various ____ slayer talents, ok, yeah, not bad to let rangers take them, but why class limit them at all, apart from "these are junk to take unless you REALLY know what you're doing, so let's keep people from making stupid mistakes?" -- the various passive +stat/stat-resistance talents -- why not let everyone have those? If I want to make the World's Strongest Cipher or the World's Most Resolute Wizard, why gate that behind a multi-class choice? -- Similarly, the various elemental talents -- why not let people make fighters who do extra shock damage or ciphers who do extra flame or whatever? Those talents led to a lot of creative builds in the first game. Open that barn door wide, let people get their elemental thing on how they want, it's their game. -- I'll play devil's advocate for a second and argue that *everyone* should get Quick Switch given the new emphasis on weapon switching under the new penetration system.

Maybe small-percentage broad-spectrum damage resistance? like 1% per point?

Yeah it needs to do something, right now it's a dump stat for everyone that isn't a tank. Still, a lot of builds need dump stats!

Well, it's one thing to miss with a bow or a sword swing when you can just swing again. It's another to whiff completely with a spell you only get one cast of. Then if you're a cipher all that missing compounds because all the misses mean you can't get the focus to cast anything and even when you do your casts miss too! In the abstract more missing just means longer fights, ok, that's not necessarily a bad thing, it means more space for tactics and gameplay that has time for thinking instead of just spamming clicks. Great, in theory. The problem is that the higher miss rate hurts casters a lot more than it hurts the weapon classes.

More seriously: There was a good post here https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94797-a-case-for-not-adding-general-abilities-to-proficiencies/?p=1957186 listing a number of potential fighter abilities. I think it's important for a passive fighter to be viable, but more actives wouldn't hurt either. A few AoE abilities especially could really help -- as it is I almost feel compelled to give all fighters a barbarian multiclass just because Carnage is so useful for weapon procs and on-hit effects. Fine line to walk though because you want barbarians to retain their AoE dominance.

Pommel Lance Pommel Beam Multipommel Octopommel

Same - Eder was a staple in my party. But I'd never make my Watcher a Fighter, and I don't spend much time on my Fighters in combat. This isn't necessarily bad... it means I can focus more on making my Rogue and Wizard do cool stuff! Fighters don't do cool stuff currently. They are reliable and low maintenance. Yeah, part of the issue is that in a single-player, party-based, real time with pause game, you can't pay attention to every character simultaneously, and you need to be able to set some of them to autopilot. Fighters, Chanters, Rangers, and a few other classes kinda got left holding the bag in that regard in the first game, which wasn't the worse thing in the world but also wasn't the best. Chanters seem to have gotten a lot of "love" since then (they needed it the most!) but fighters and rangers could still stand to see a few active options added to their trees. Obsidian basically recycled a bunch of talents and redistributed them instead of making cool new active abilities for Fighters and Rangers. That's lazy and a slap in the face to fans of those classes. Harsh! I wouldn't go that far. I think the weapon proficiencies system probably took up a lot of creative room (several good ranger class abilities, rapid shot, powder burns, etc., went that route) and the current (initial beta pre-patch) system isn't bad if it's seen as a first draft . . . it just makes some choices that, well, I'd characterize them as "seemed like a good idea at the time" choices. I'm glad Obsidian is rigorous enough to step back and take a second draft.

I disagree with this from a few different angles, I think. Fighters have all the same active abilities they had before, and a few passives (that they also had before and . . . will still have post change) aren't the reason fighters are any more interesting in this game than they were before. To the extent fighters are more interesting now, it's because: 1) Multiclassing means you can build more interesting fighter/x combinations 2) everybody else is pretty broken because the game hasn't been balanced yet so the absence of grazing and longer power cast times are hurting everybody else, but aren't a problem Fighters currently have to deal with, so they're currently more functional than most other classes. Again, the notion that anything is being "taken away" from the Fighter is just demonstrably false. Fighters had these abilities in the first game (as open talents), they'll still have them after the next patch; in fact, they'll have more access to them than other classes, since they'll be able to take them as power slots or as open proficiencies. And to come at this from the other side, if fighters do need something more to make them interesting, a few passive talent slots aren't going to cut it. Fighters already have a whole host of unique abilities: universal grazing, stances, constant recovery, knockdowns, etc. If they need something more to make them more interesting, then what they need is more active ability choices. Passives . . . aren't that interesting. If your problem is "fighters are boring and they need more stuff to do," hoarding passives away from other classes isn't going to solve that problem. If you think Fighters are boring, what active things would you like them to be able to do, that they can't? I never had a problem with Eder in the first game -- he always did his job and was a star party member, almost always the first into the fight and the last to fall. I haven't seen anything to show that fighters in Deadfire will be any worse at that job, or that anyone else will be any better.

The funny thing is SA used to be a %^&@hole relative to the rest of the internet, but these days, because of the paywall, by internet standards it's a relatively highbrow polite place

From what Sawyer has said on SA, the reasons they minimized grazing were: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3807509&userid=17931&perpage=40&pagenumber=8#post478490287

Chanters in PoE 1 weren't that impressive but they were substantial and got better the longer the fight got. In PoE 2, in the current beta at least, for a lot of different reasons, Chanters currently feel about as important to have in your party as priests were in the first game. They might be too good right now, some of their abilities seem near-mandatory (Hel-hyraf's, the affliction resistance phrases).

Draego -- I'll have to think about that. In one sense (I hadn't thought about this) the weapon proficiencies are the new "open talents" -- in fact, a lot of things that were previously class abilities, like rapid shot or powder burns, got moved to become weapon proficiencies now, which is one reason they had to fill in the ranger tree with open talents! I'm still playing with that part of the system and don't have a firm opinion on it yet -- on the one hand, I kinda like that each weapon has a unique thing that sets it apart, on the other, i can kinda feel it driving me to make various weapon choices. The design team has clearly put a lot of work into the new proficiencies system though and I can sense some real potential so I'm inclined to give it a chance. End of the day though . . . if they can balance all those weapon proficiencies, they can balance the open talents too! Get enough options in play and if the system is designed well they'll mostly all even themselves out (and if not players will find the weak spots for you!)

One other thing that just occurred to me -- Does this mechanic change mean that Dex is a more valuable damage stat now than Might, clearly? In the first game, statistically, over a long fight, Dex was clearly the better overall damage stat; the problems were just that 1) high dex builds ran into armor problems due to the threshold mechanic, and 2) damage from might was more "front loaded" (especially if you could one-shot an enemy) whereas dex got more valuable the longer the fight was. In this game though: 1) Might doesn't seem to effect penetration at all, so it no longer has that role of pushing past armor 2) fights are a lot longer (pacing decisions, new increased miss rate, etc.) I haven't run the numbers myself but I suspect that these mechanical changes mean that Dex and possibly Per are far better "damage stats" than Might is. The only exception would be builds that somehow broke the action speed calculation and got a lot of "free" attacks from somewhere.

I went over this above in detail repeatedly -- the open talents weren't just the weapon style stances, but also things like Marksman, Gunner, Shot on the Run, etc. There's a reason I keep bringing up Rangers; just like they decided to flesh out the Fighter tree by yanking all the melee open talents and putting them in the Fighter tree, they fleshed out Rangers by yanking all the ranged open talents and putting them in the ranger pool. So now if you want to make a ranged weapon character you have to dual-class ranger, just like if you want to make an effective melee character you're very strongly encouraged to dual-class fighter. If you want to stick with fighters though feel free to make a single-class melee cipher too. Same arguments either way. ([i should warn you that I put the same challenge to a poster over on SomethingAwful and he took it and ended up basically agreeing with me afterwards, so this wouldn't exactly be a blind experiment].) As to Quick Switch and Arms Bearer, Weapon switching gun users were always a gimmicky niche build that never really worked up to billing and took far too much micromanagement to be worth it; weapon switching isn't a build, it's the first ten seconds of a fight (and if you don't have grazing you'll probably miss anyway!). As far as that goes, given the new penetration system, it would probably be better to just give all characters both those talents automatically, the new game places a much higher premium on weapon switching than the old one did. Past that . . I just don't buy the "power creep" concerns. These are single player games; balance doesn't matter that much as long as there's a basic degree of challenge, and even that basic challenge is something most players choose to turn off anyway (statistically, relatively few people played on Path of the Damned). Past that .. . I look at the beta and, relatively speaking, the fighters are doing just fine right now, and everyone else is hurting. Fighters have an ability that lets them conveniently graze; nobody else does. Melee classes are absolutely dominating spellcasters in effectiveness; cast times for many spells are longer than most fights, and then the spells miss! Basically all the concerns you're raising about open talents seem really theoretical and nonspecific to me ("power creep," "hard to balance," etc), while the harm from not having open talents seems clear and obvious. People can't make the characters they want to make, they can't replicate their PoE 1 characters in Deadfire, the overall framework of possible builds is much more regimented and "on rails", etc. It's not like we're operating in a vacuum here. PoE 1 had open talents, the system worked, so we know it can work. Taking it away isn't going to magically give fighters (or rangers, or any other classes that managed to snag some former open talents) anything extra. It's just limiting the options of everyone else. EDIT: if your argument is "fighters could use a few more abilities to broaden out their tree" then sure, I have no objections to fighters getting a few additional bubble options in their tree. Meanwhile, though, you'll still be free to take a power at level 2 and a proficiency at level 4 . . .

I agree about Island Amaua. Slog Zones don't seem common enough to warrant the racial. There are a few other racials that need tweaking too (Moon Godlike's heal needs to scale with level, etc.) Past that though .. . I don't think "power creep" is a concern at this stage. We're still in beta, they can still make changes. That's especially true right now when, mechanically, the classes that got all these passives are dominating in effectiveness, and the ones that lost access are hurting. Try playing a ranged-weapon single-class cipher right now if you don't believe me!

re: Sequels mattering -- If it matters little then . . it matters. "little" is a nonzero value (and a subjective one; such things will matter more to some players than others). I also think the "spiritual successor" argument matters less than it did in the first game. Sure, we're locked into a few decisions because that's the first game was marketed and sold on kickstarter as a "spiritual successor" to the BG games, and that's why we can't have turn based. But this game was marketed as a successor, not just to BG, but to PoE 1. PoE 1 was a success in its own right, and established its own brand; a lot of the people backing and (hopefully) buying this game did so or will do so because they liked PoE 1, whether or not they even remember BG. Those people are going to want to port their characters over and are going to expect & hope for an "as good or better" overall experience. If nothing else, fairly or unfairly, PoE establishes the benchmark for PoE 2 to match or exceed. That said, your more substantive point seems to be that the more important thing is whether the change is an improvement or not. In that you're correct. I'm not really sure that the new Deadfire changes do actually provide more player options. There are eleven PoE classes; so that's. . something like 110 possible class/class combinations. Each of those new class combinations, however, has a fairly heavily restricted class tree; by picking, say, Barbarian/Priest, you're locking yourself out of a lot of passive skills that are locked into other classes. The math for that would be fairly complicated, but it'd also be a fairly limited number; end of the day, you're looking at probably a few tens of thousands of possible character builds. On the other hand, the PoE open talent system allowed for . . let's see . . 11 classes, any one of which could, theoretically, take up to .. what, eight? of the (45 or more) open talents. So that's 11 classes x (45X44X43X42X41X40X39X38) = if I did my math correctly which is NOT something I guarantee = 95,602,153,046, 400 possible combinations of classes and talents, not counting class-specific talents, class powers, or the cross-class talents added in White March. That may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it: In the first game, you could take any eight talents with any one class. Now you can . . take any two classes. In the first scenario, you're multiplying one class by the whole list of possible talents, multiple times; in the second, you're multiplying one class by just one other class. It's inherently a shorter list. So . . objectively, mathematically, the PoE 1 open-talent system allowed for far far far more builds than a pure multiclass system with no open talents would. Sure, a lot of those builds would be inferior or "non viable," but when there are that many builds, it doesn't really matter, half the fun is in going fishing for new character designs anyway. As to the "ease of balancing" issue . . . balance isn't all that important, it's a single-player game, and to the extent that it IS important, they managed it decently well in the first game, which already had (again, if my math is correct, which no guarantees) literal billions of possible combinations. They did it once, they can do it again. Adding in multiclassing is just taking things up a notch. And that brings us back to your core point -- which is absolutely valid -- if they aren't progressing and moving the game design forward, then that's bad. The open talent system in PoE 1 was in a lot of ways a masterpiece, possibly the game's strongest feature from a design perspective (the "no useless stat" stat system perhaps taking precedence). If they toss that open talent system out and replace it with a much more constrained and restricted, "on rails" multiclass system, that isn't a step forward, it's a step back (or at least I'd think so). On the other hand, add some open talents *on top of* the multiclass system . . great! then that's even more possible combinations and builds. If it's harder to balance . . . well, that's why we're all here in beta, let's figure out how to make it work. Even if they can't, I'd rather they tried.

That is a valid criticism, no doubt. I agree, that probably would happen, and people probably would complain. That notwithstanding, it doesn't seem like an NPC encounter that triggers the first time you approach dungeon X telling you that a party meaner than yours was killed in dungeon X should be an insurmountable obfuscation. It probably would be though: games have gotten to a point where players are no longer expected to observe the game world or consider in-world hints. Everything has to be spelled out. It's kind of sad for those of us who grew up playing games that weren't so hand-holdy and designed to appease that "wtf game is broken!!!one!" crowd. I'll just leave this here.. The problem with this is that in-character explanations seem to always be heard by players as meaningless fluff, whereas out of character explanations ("HIGH LEVEL AREA") break immersion.

I've noticed stat and skill based checks in the beta, for what it's worth.

So what's the simplest / earliest available way to get a perception inspiration / perception resistance so that I can go to town with the blunderbuss?

At first I thought that was how it was going to work. I think it would probably be pretty exploitable though because some classes get inspiration buffs fairly early, and then could theoretically recast the same buff multiple times to quickly top out the system.

One thing that's interesting about this discussion is that both sides are framing it as if something is being "taken away" from their characters; on the one hand, what are at the moment fighter-exclusive abilities are being handed out to everyone else, on the other, people whose characters had those same abilities in the first game feel they're losing them in this one. So everyone feels like they're at risk of losing something. The problem with that framing is that only one group is actually at risk of "losing" anything -- the people who wanted to carry over characters from the first game, as intact as possible, or rebuild their first-game character in the sequel. The fighter classes aren't actually losing anything at all -- all they're losing is exclusivity! They'll have the same ability to take two-weapon or two-handed fighting or whatever, as anyone else does! But the people who wanted to bring their two-weapon melee ranger or their ranged cipher or their two-hander barbarian forward into this game . . ok, they've got a real mechanical problem if open talents are gone, because suddenly their only option is to multiclass. Multiclassing may be fine for some of them, but for others, it probably won't -- for example, if I want to re-make my same ranged gun-specialist Cipher from the first game, I'd now have to multiclass into Ranger. And suddenly I'd have to explain how I both gained (and, if i went ghost heart, lost) a pet bear in between the first game and now. As I said above -- Eothas must have really done a number on my character if now she's hallucinating ghost bears everywhere. The fact that this game is a sequel matters -- people want to carry over their characters from the first game to at least some degree, and the characters in the first game had open talents. If people can't access open talents in the second game, they're going to feel like they're losing parts of their characters (and, in a very real way, they will be). And if people are forced to multiclass just to remake their characters -- well, at that point, they aren't necessarily the same characters any more. And that's the thing -- with open talents, relative to the first game, nobody really loses anything. Fighters still have all the class-defining abilities they had in the first game. Constant Recovery, Stances, Knockdown, etc., it's all still there. Rangers -- well, ok, Rangers probably need some love, since they lost some abilities like weapon modals to the proficiencies, and some of their abilities are now coded ranged-only and no longer function with melee. Everybody else has the same choices they had before plus multiclassing.