Beta patch 1.1 important changes

[Camonge]

Yay corpse eater now viable

[Balbanes]

However:

 

 

Watery Doubles now Join Team rather than Join Party.

Substantial Phantom and Essential Phantom now Join Team rather than Join Party.

Dichotomous Spirits now Join Team rather than Join Party.

 

 

Dichotomous Spirits already weren't all that good; now I'm definitely not gonna bother*.

 

Not sure whether this was fixed for release, but in the beta patch Watery Doubles and the Phantoms were just auto-attacking—which, needless to say, made them completely useless. No idea how they plan on making them useful if you can't control what spells they cast, when, and where. Regardless, you're better casting literally any other spell of the same level.

 

*Oh, wait, I actually am gonna bother since I'm restoring 1.02 files to avoid all balance changes. Except it's very sad that I need to resort to this and miss out on all changes I agree with.

 

Isn't switching from Party to Team a good thing?  Sure you probably can't control them directly anymore, but I never bothered to control my meatshields valuable contributors to the cause.  More importantly, being Team means my AI buffers and healers won't waste precious spells buffing/healing dudes who are utterly disposable invaluable.

[Esajin]

Thoughts on 1.1 version of Nemnok

 

I loaded a save halfway into the dungeon, level 17 party of fighter, Serafen-Witch, fighter, fighter & ranger, I thought I'd be fine with just the AI like on live

 

AHAHAHAHAHA

 

I couldn't even make it to him,

 

The Fire Nagas before them were bad enough, had disable the AI and up my game, but the Eoten Dweller horde with their Flame Bat pets along with the Acolyte son of a bitch shooting binding web three-pointers from downtown just so you can't run outside of the fireball spam radius. Eoten is Mighty, Eoten is Mighty, indeed, overpowering that will require some work.

 

I feel schooled. Pre-1.1 that fight against the Eoten miniboss was "cool", now it's actually worthy of respect.

 

Overall it's very much a high level zone. The weakest mobs were 18 in there. 

 

Observations:

 

- It's balanced still. My party had a terrible composition, gear, and absolutely no optimization was done. The winning tactic is literally written on the mob pack tooltip, and I didn't bother reloading and checking if I had the adequate tools available. Still that's a hefty amount of raw power we now have to face later on. It's a good surprise.

- Disengages don't work, at least for the Flame Nagas. You engage them, you autoattack them, they run away from your tank to go cast their finishing blow on your character far away, and even a fighter with guardian stance and the improved disengage attack talents will simply chase the mob, not doing anything. There's something bizarre happening here but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I should have stopped the autoattack, but would that count as me breaking the engagement or as the mob breaking it? And why don't we have an "engage" action, for that matter? Looks like mobs can choose what to engage at any time, but not us.

- The buff/debuff tooltips have become so large and take so much of my screen at high level that I can no longer read most of them.

[Myztik]

 

Huh? What the heck is complicated about 'ignore one interrupt'?

It's complicated enough that you didn't seem to notice (?) that you can have multiple layers of concentration for example.

 

 

Or that something like the phrase of a chanter can remove ALL layers at once while a simple interrupt only eats up one layer. Stuff like that seems to make things fairly complicated. Then what does prone do? It's described as "more powerful interrupt"...

 

Multiple layers changes absolutely nothing about how easy it is to understand. Next you'll be telling me it's too difficult for new players to understand how Mirror Image works.

 

That is a problem with chanter phases, not concentration being confusing

Edited June 7, 2018 by Myztik

[Ganrich]

Honestly, the Chanter phrase (Thick Grew Their Tongues) in question has an awkwardly worded tool tip. That should be remedied. imho.

 

Otherwise, Concentration works somewhat like Interrupt Armor from a few different games I have played. Although, they Interrupt Armor usually protects from CC, but here it just ensures you dont get interrupted when casting spells. It is fairly simple.

[thelee]

Controversial opinion: upon reading the 1.1 full patch notes, I fully support this patch.

[AndreaColombo]

Controversial opinion: upon reading the 1.1 full patch notes, I fully support this patch.

 

You weren't kidding about its being controversial!

[Raven Darkholme]

While I don't agree with the amount of changes at all, most of the stuff nerfed did not need a nerf, I don't really think the nerfs make the game less enjoyable.

I guess I'm too used to adapting to nerfs in multiplayer games.

[Aramintai]

Is dot breaking invisibility fixed? 

[Boeroer]

Yup!

[Aramintai]

Yup!

Is it? I'm not seeing it in the patch notes.

[gkathellar]

 

Yup!

Is it? I'm not seeing it in the patch notes.

 

The patch notes are very clearly incomplete, and fail to mention bug fixes that we know, for a fact, were implemented even in the beta patch. In general, they've only bothered to mention adjustments and rebalancing.

 

I find it a bit frustrating.

[mosspit]

Ah crap, turns out I could not complete my current playthrough for the new patch to hit after all

 

I missed the boat on experiencing the imba OSA from PoE1 and I could not be in time for experiencing Brilliant too.

 

For that huge amount of changes in the patch, they decided to roll it live out a little too quickly imo......

[thelee]

A very curious change that is not a nerf is that at least looking at the priest/wizard ability tree, "prone" in the above-the-fold ability description in Slicken, Pillar of Faith, and Repulsing Seal has been replaced with "interrupt", though the below-the-fold ability description still says "prone."

 

I just tested it out and it is solely a text change - Repulsing Seal, Pillar of Faith, and Slicken all still prone instead of just interrupting. I assume something similar has happened with various other prone abilities like fighter Knock Down.

 

My best guess is that people were getting confused that "prone" is also an interrupt, and can be blocked by concentration. But um, it certainly adds some ambiguity to what abilities actually do...

Edited June 7, 2018 by thelee

[Wolfzenberg]

Well, to be honest, all the nerf were needed we can argue about some being too hard but some combos were so strong.

 

And now at least for the beginning, the game provides a true challenge in potd.

[thelee]

Also, an unlisted change appears to be a severe reduction in the number of empowers available.

[Braven]

While I doubt it interests many of us, “classic” difficulty was also increased. I noticed that some encounters have more enemies. I mean, it is still easy, but I thought I would mention since the patch notes only mention Veteran and POTD.

Edited June 7, 2018 by Braven

[thelee]

I was in the middle of a POTD game right before hitting ukaizo, so got to experience the new difficult boss fight. To my surprise it was actually sort of a challenge, even at level 19, whereas my first run I facemelted it at level 13 (and it probably would have been way more of a challenge if I weren't cheesing Potion of Impediment on a dual-wielder to basically interrupt-lock the dragon 90% of the time). Looking forward to doing a third run on POTD with the new difficulty all the way from the start. I anticipate as we all get better at the game, the challenge will still melt away, but then I guess I'll start running smaller parties like I did in poe1.

Edited June 7, 2018 by thelee

[1TTFFSSE]

They boosted enemy defenses a lot so it seems "penetration" is king now. also easier to get overwhelmed by a pull of enemies if one is sloppy and does not plan out the fight. I am half way through the game in potd now in beta 1.1 with the extra difficulty mod deadly deadfire and it feels kind of like wm/wm2 poe1 difficulty - have not pulled the dragons yet though just did the Poko Kohara quest at lvl 10 party. 

 

notes from run: light spoilers but not really just notes on some encounters.

 

1.) starting island was discussed a lot but I actually feel later in the game there are more annoying enemies (packs of undead risen with insane defenses, wraiths/sirens and their teleport bs)

2.) doing the fort deadlight dungeon at party lvl5/6 is a challenge - the fight in the secret docks is tricky there

3.)good luck taking on steele garrot/ woedica clowns in that pyramid temple bellow lvl 8? even lvl 8 you pull all of them and their bs priests are gonna buff everyone so much untill they just gank you. pretty much had to lay traps/ have Maia's pet pull them little by little there - was extremely annoying.

4. Doing Poko Kohara bellow level 10 may be a big challenge. I did it lvl 10 and some fights were "grueling" - nothing my party could not handle at that level but at several levels lower and it would be impossible with the insane defenses of some of those undead knights.

[tonpix]

Has anyone issues with generating wounds on Shattered Pillar? Seems to be barely generating for berserker/shattered, getting 2-3 wounds at the combat end, without spending on monk abilities.

[Mazama]

Reloaded to an earlier save to complete a couple of quests that were bugged. I noticed a new high level enemy ship, hullbreaker cannon was buffed (didn't see it in the patch notes), stealth damage is greatly reduced, and high level combat is still easy. Soloed the final boss. PotD with upscaling and Galawain's bonus. Its pretty much the same fight, but you'll want high penetration.

 

Edit: The final boss' grab attack animation glitches out sometimes causing it to get stuck. Old ruin has a few extra enemies. No changes to old ruin boss.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Mazama

[Boeroer]

What is "stealth damage"?

[Mazama]

What is "stealth damage"?

 

Backstabs with 2h melee weapons mostly. My damage with FoD backstabs went from 300+ to around 240. My sneak attacks with an arquebus dropped from around 270 to 200. 

[Shadenuat]

It’s just scales bad with current system. Imagine you have already get some exceptional weapon at lvl 5, then u decide to cast firebrand and you get a weapon with 6 penetration. Congrats u waste 3 sec to summon that crap.

Firebrand is Fire/Pierce. It penetrates mobs weak to fire regardless (PoTD+Level Scaling). It's supah against trolls/shadows. They should make every summon spell like this.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Shadenuat

[Verde]

Lol don't understand the Beckoner or Rogue changes. As a Rogue player they are already plenty powerful as single or multi, now even moreso. Oh well guess I shouldn't complain