JerekKruger

I believe one of the goals when designing Pillars attribute system was to avoid the sort of situation where certain values would offer significantly bigger bonuses than most. Making Penetration work like this would go against that aim.

It is indeed. Even without penetrating I managed to do some pretty decent damage with an Echoed Minor Missile after casting Fleet Feet to activate Wellspring of Life. However, playing around with this is what made me realise I'm not fond of the changes to Vancian casters. Two spell casts per level is too restrictive to my mind.

To be a little more precise, in a world where magic exists magic would be part of nature. Magic itself wouldn't be science, much like gravity isn't science; but the study of the laws governing magic would be. Questions like "why is there magic?" would, much like "why is there space and time?", be questions of philosophy rather than science.

Yep. They also have a max focus cap so even if they could it wouldn't allow them to spam nearly as many powers as Wizards. Another thing I'm not particularly fond of in the new Deadfire system is the loss of niche powers. In Pillars the spell Charm Beast was great when fighting beasts and useless otherwise: it still exists in Deadfire but I can't imagine any Druid ever taking it since it's a waste for all those fights where you aren't fighting beasts. In fact I suspect that only a small selection of spells for each of the Vancian casters will ever be taken.

I think the point is the Cipher has to spend time building up Focus, whereas the Wizard can simply cast Spells uninterrupted. In PoE this was balanced by the fact that Wizard Spells were per rest whereas Cipher's could use their Powers as often as they could gain enough Focus to do so, but now that Spells are per encounter the Wizard has no reason to hold back from emptying their spell books. I would say however that the Cipher is likely doing pretty good damage whilst building their Focus up, so it's not like they're getting nothing during their non-casting time.

I believe that we were told it'd be two per level all the way till max level (with the exception of when you first get access to a given level, when it's one rather than two).

Good point. Same with Chanters I guess, although at least their Chants do something whilst building up their second resource. Two casts per spell level just feels so limiting though.

Probably. I'm not a fan of it though for the reasons stated (I actually didn't mind it when it was per rest, but the new system of only 2 per encounter casts per level just feels too restrictive) and I'm interested in what others think. I'm guessing daven isn't a fan of the change to per encounter in the first place from his comment. To be honest I quite liked per rest but I can't see Obsidian changing back to that now.

First, before anyone points it out, I know that Druids, Priests and Wizards weren't true Vancian casters in Pillars, and that they are even less so in Deadfire. However for simplicity that's what I'll call them. In Deadfire the Vancian casters have had their spells changed from per rest to per encounter, and they can now only cast each spell level twice per encounter (rather than the four times per rest of Pillars). I was thinking that a better system might be to assign each spell a casting cost (presumably equal to their spell level) and give each caster a unique resource like other classes. This way a high level Wizard could, for example, choose between casting lots of Minoletta's Minor Missiles or a fewer Minoletta's Concussive Missiles. Part of the reason I'd prefer this, other than the greater flexibility it would provide, is that there are some spell levels with a greater number of useful spells than others (particularly when you're a specialist wizard), and there are also some spells that you might only want to cast once per battle (some buffs for example) and others that you'd want to cast multiple times (things like Minor Missiles). For example I created an Evoker who only took one second level spell, Infuse Vital Essence, and only ever cast it once per battle (to activate the Nature Godlike's Wellspring of Life), but who would have loved to be able to cast Minor Missiles more than twice. It also seems odd from a lore perspective that a highly powerful Wizard can't choose to cast their lowest level spells more than twice. Thoughts?

I was thinking "padding" is a good name for it.

In much the same way as I only ever ate food once in Pillars of Eternity (before the first time I killed the Adra Dragon on PotD) I suspect I will rarely ever use high end food (particularly if it's tied to a crafting system). I'll just have a mountain of hardtack in my stash and, under the system as it currently is, will rest every time one of my characters gets injured. Feels very much like a step back from Pillars' camping supplies system.

Why has this been moved to the Pathfinder forums. Surely it should be in the Pillars of Eternity forums. Otherwise what Sedrefilos: check your stash and, if it's not there, post a bug report in the Pillars of Eternity 1 forums.

Just because someone's your Sworn Rival doesn't mean you're going to pull out all the stops to defeat them

I've done just that

As far as I can tell Wizard summoned weapons (Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff and Citzal's Spirit Lance) gain a scaling bonus to Accuracy, Damage and Penetration at power levels 3, 5 and (presumably) all odd power levels after that. This should mean that when a level 3 Conjurer summons Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff it should have +4 Accuracy, +15% Damage and +1 Penetration (since it's a Conjuration spell), but at the moment it has no bonuses and they have to wait till level 5 like non-Conjurers. The same is also true of the bonus power levels given by the Nature Godlike's Wellspring of Life ability. If, at level 2, you cast, say, Fleet Fleet to activate Wellspring of Life your power level is 3; but if you then cast Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff it summons the version with no bonuses i.e. the power level 1/2 version.

Yep. To be fair, if the scaling for summoned weapons continues in with the same pattern as in the beta (beyond level 9) then this would allow a Conjurer's summoned weapons to hit Mythic quality (power level 11) rather than being limited to Legendary (power level 10), and a Nature Godlike Conjurer could theoretically hit the next quality up at power level 13 (Divine?). That said, as far as I can tell the bonuses from Wellspring and the Conjurer subclass aren't currently being applied to summoned Wizard weapons.

Just tested it with Concelhaut's Staff and no, the damage doesn't scale. I used a Nature Godlike Conjurer to test this: At level 1 (power level 2 for Conjuration spells) the staff does 19-25 damage. At level 2 the staff still does 19-25 damage (as expected since the power level hasn't changed). However if you cast Fleet Feet to activate Wellspring of Life (raising your power level to 4 with Conjuration spells) the damage remains at 19-25. This happens both if you cast Concelhaut's Staff before and after Fleet Feet. The same happens at level 3, so it seems the bonus power levels from Wellspring of life and the Conjurer subclass aren't being applied to Concelhaut's Staff at all. Once you pass levels 4 and 9 the staff gains Fine and Exceptional and hence gains +15% and +30% damage respectively, however it doesn't gain any damage beyond these. I haven't tested this but at level 6 your power level should be 5 with Wellspring of Life so +2% seems like a strange bonus. Possibly a bug?

No I thought the same. Magran is the god of fire so having her priests able to summon a flaming sword seems fitting. Obsidian should drop the specification that Eothasians get elemental druid spells and Magranites get fire based Wizard spells and just say both get a selection of spells from other casters.

A bit of testing tells me that the quality enchantment on these weapons scales with every two power levels, so for levels 1-4 it's normal, 5-8 it's fine, 9-12 it's exceptional. This perhaps suggests that they max out at Legendary which, if Legendary items are rare in game might make them a little more appealing at high level. Also it seems that all the Priest summonables get a 60% Corrode lash. I hope that at release the type of lash varies with each deity (e.g. Eothas and Magran should have burning).

Let's rename Intellect to "biggening and longening" as well :D

I also hope that Strength is made to govern spell damage and Resolve physical damage.

Sawyer's answer to a question of the latest Q&A stream make it pretty clear that currently this is not how it works:

The higher Accuracy thing probably offsets the loss of the guaranteed Exceptional enchantment at early levels, but I don't agree that access to Weapon Proficiencies should factor into this. Wizard's had access to Weapon Focus (what Proficiencies have replaced) talents in Pillars just like everyone else. I don't agree that the ability to multiclass as a martial class should factor in to the reduction in damage however. One of the stated goals of the devs was to ensure single class characters should be competitive with multiclass characters so a Wizard who uses these weapons shouldn't be punished just because they could multiclass as a Fighter. Yeah, I linked to Boeroer's bug report in the OP (I found it when I was about to post the same bug). Improving casting times for these weapons would help a lot in making them useful too however I think they'd still be underpowered. Think about it this way: the two Wizard summonables currently give you a normal version of their respective weapon type with a scaling quality enchant and a unique enchantment (Draining or pseudo-Carnage). It seems likely that at the same sort of level you could simply equip your Wizard with a non-summoned version of these weapons with the same quality enchantment, so the question is whether it's worth using a spell cast and waiting whatever the casting time duration is for the unique enchantment (with Draining I'd say no, with Carnage the answer is maybe). If you've got a staff or pike with the same quality enchant and its own unique enchantment then it becomes even less worthwhile. Yeah, the Priest ones seem better. I was wondering about the Skaenite Priest's sneak attack stacking with the Rogue's. That's interesting.

I'd like to see that too, but I doubt it'll happen. Spiritshifting is the Druid's unique mechanic, and (almost?) all of their passive abilities are related to it. I'd also have preferred it if the Shape Shifter subclass had a modal version of Spiritshift which, while active, disabled spellcasting (or perhaps disabled most spells): for those who really like the shape shifting aspect but dislike its limited duration.

What difficulty? I got two on veteran and the main way difficulty was scaled in PoE was changing the number of enemies (only PotD had improved enemy stats).