JerekKruger

This video demonstrates, at least to me, why this isn't true of medium shields.

I don't think Bleak Walkers are hired all that often, they're very much a last resort. I'm also not sure they care all that much: they're not mercenaries in the traditional sense, rather they are true believers in the idea that the best way to end conflict quickly is with brutality. You might even view then as bizarre pacifists since if they are successful their mere existence should dissuade wars.

Not necessarily. They rely in large part on their reputation for cruelty and mercilessness. Whilst many Bleak Walkers wouldn't, I could imagine some seeing slaughtering the caravan as a means of furthering this reputation, particularly if they are new to the area. A bit of a stretch perhaps but not completely out of character.

Yep, it's a very well done quest. There are a few others that stand out during the early game.

Yeah if you are going to equip casters with shields they should be small shields (one should eventually carry Little Savior for the aura, which stacks with Outworn Buckler and, in fact, stacks with a cloned Little Savior or Outworn Buckler if you use the Helwax Mold). Larger Shields are almost solely the preserve of tanky Chanters.

Yeah a lot of what he is saying is either wrong or supposition. He mentions power levels but clearly hasn't looked in depth into how they actually affect various abilities and ends up over valuing them. He also talks about the powerful high tier abilities despite the fact that in PoE these were often lacklustre and highly effective builds could easily be made that didn't use them. Also: "it can make early parts of the game harder until you're all geared up" - I think, if anything, multiclass characters will have an easier time in the early game as many of the basic abilities of a class are very powerful. I'll take having both Sneak Attack and Soul Whip over access to power level 2 and 3 abilities earlier any day.

Apart from making character creation more complicated there really isn't any reason to go single- rather than multi-class. It really isn't a double edged sword right now: multi-class is significantly better than single class. Not sure who these beta streamers are, but I think they're paying too much attention to Obsidian's "new players are recommended to go single class" warning and not enough attention to the actual game balance.

What Raven said. I basically never use consumables and had no problem beating PotD with the story companions. In the early game (Act I and the start of Act II) you might need to wait on doing fights that, on normal or hard, you would do straight away but otherwise PotD really isn't that hard once you get used to it.

Empower increases the power level you cast at so for summoned weapons it merely increases the duration.

And making sure that all abilities scale in a meaningful way with them *cough* summoned weapons *cough*.

Shields are useful for classes who intend to do no weapon damage (casters, Chanter tanks, some Paladins) as you're not really losing anything by using them. They're also good when they provide something beyond the standard Deflection bonus e.g. the Outworn Buckler's +5 to all defences aura. However for, say, Fighters there's basically no point using a shield. Even if you intend to primarily tank you're probably better off with a two-hander or dual wielding.

All casters have encounter based spells by default now. There are no per rest spells anymore.

Actually outside of a small number of builds using either Badgradr's Barricade or Dragon's Maw the enchantment didn't just lag behind, it caused the character in question to do worse damage than they would have done using a non-bashing shield. As for shields in general I'd agree that they're not where they should be. There's a reason that until the advent of full plate armour almost everyone who was expecting to fight in melee (and many who weren't) would armed themselves either with a shield or with a polearm, and dual wielding was incredibly rare. Yet going by PoE's mechanics you'd expect everyone to do the opposite.

I voted for the third option, although it doesn't accurately represent my view. My real answer would be "I don't know". I want multiclassing to remain as flexible as it is now as I like the options it provides, but as it is right now I think it's going to be hell to balance. I don't mean perfect PvP style balance, I simply mean making it so that players don't feel like their choices are bad in comparison to others. It might be that the only way to achieve this balance is to limit multiclassing.

That was exactly the situation that led me to find this out. I was creating a Devoted/Wizard using summoned weapons, and I wanted to find out exactly how they scaled with Power Level to see whether Conjurer was the best class for the build (also how useful Nature Godlike would be). A bit of testing later and I reported what I thought was a bug and was told it was intended behaviour. Seems very odd to me.

Well as a huge micromanager I probably won't use the customisable AI to anywhere near the extent some people will, but definitely for things like this and keeping Swift Strikes up it'll be great.

The stated reason was to ensure that a melee/wizard multiclass wouldn't have a weaker version of those spells which seems to defeat the purpose of power level. Surely a specialised Wizard would summon more powerful versions of those weapons than one who had to split his time between Wizardry and martial training, and surely a Conjurer would summon even more powerful version of them than non-Conjurers.

What do you think dead fire is: it's ice

With good enough Wound generation (perhaps Shattered Pillar for a Long Pain build) and the new customisable AI it should be possible to keep the Long Pain up nearly constantly with very little input from the player.

And the only reason I know if because of one of your runs (probably your Paladin/Cipher/Chanter run)

This came up before and I think the answer is Boeroer doesn't close Pillars all that often, even when he isn't playing it.

I'd prefer Might to revert to its Pillars form and Resolve to be buffed in some other way, but having Healing moved to Resolve whilst Might retains Damage wouldn't bother me that much. It makes Resolve the more defensive stat, and fits well with tanky Fighters and Paladins benefiting for their healing abilities whilst not messing up the hybrid damage dealers. It's also unlikely to require people to significantly change the attributes of imported characters, which is my biggest problem with the change.

I predict this thread will go good places and have plenty of civil, reasoned discussion

The short answer is "it's complicated". The long answer is contained in Jojobobo's link.

With microtransactions and loot crates of course.