Trying to play a wizard - what am I missing here?

[Gfted1]

So I only skimmed the backer beta announcements, but what I'm gathering from these comments is that the wizard should basically just be considered DPS in PoE? Not really crowd control or illusion-y magical defense? That's a little disappointing I guess, and actually brings to mind more of planescape: torment's terrible arcane spell selection than the other IE's magic system.

The opposite actually. They are considered mob rulers.

[Infinitron]

 

Except you're comparing two very different systems for rolling to attack - from what I gather (from parsing the PE wiki) - *many* attacks will hit, simply because the d100 roll has very few opportunities for missing - just a lot of grazing. In addition, the AD&D system had limited attacks / round (i.e. 6 seconds) as oppossed to continuous attacks.

 

 

That's true, but it would have been equally true if PoE used a carbon copy implementation of the D&D mirror image, all other things being equal.

[aeonsim]

 

If PoE is a isometric party based MMO than so were the IE games. Party roles is the basic of every party based RPG ever released and you will always have a defending frontline and a ranged backline. How these work has some flexibility though.

 

No. The Fighter in the IE games were more flexible. They could dual or multi-class. They also had DPS. The Fighter in PoE is a straight up front line tank, inflexible and more to the MMO/4th edition type. They aren't the DPS of the party. Classes like the Rogue in MMO/4th ed are.

 

While you do have some similarities, the classes play quite differently. Fighters are pretty bad with ranged weapons in PoE. So they usually stick with melee and they aren't the DPS of the party, so their damage output isn't that great compared to other classes, like the DPS classes. The Fighters in the IE games could be very good at ranged weapons and have the DPS, and can contribute to a barrage of ranged fire power with the rest of your party, and could take out enemies before they hit your front line.

 

 

 

If your multi or dual classing a fighter they're hardly a fighter any more.

What your doing is taking a more flexible class and adding damage and health to it in exchange for a few levels, it's an entirely different mechanism and system from PoE and does not prove at all they were more flexible in AD&D. If anything it would suggest they were less flexible as you had to change their entire class or add another to get them to do what you wanted (Kits are similar).

 

The Ranged fighter build is a fair point though that does appear to be lacking in PoE.

 

In PoE at least there are a couple of different ways to build a fighter just by playing around with the stats and equipment, fighters focused on Highish DPS (lighter-medium armour 2H weapons, mig, dex, con), high Interrupt (lighter armour, fast attack, dex, per, res) or high survivability (heaviest armour max con, res, mig, per). Though with the way the combat appears now it'd be pretty hard to tell how effective the high interrupt build is. They're all going to have a talent for holding the line and keeping enemies away but how they do it at least differs or should once things are properly balanced.

[morhilane]

 

 

 

Question 1: An enemy melee engages my wizard = inevitable doom?. 

 

At times PoE feels very MMO-ish (namely tank and having to "pull" enemies).

 

From my limited experience with the beta.

 

1. Pretty much which is why I always play a ranged Wizard and have my Fighter, Rogue and Priest on the front line. You also have to aggro an enemy with your Fighter first otherwise the enemy will dog pile onto your Wizard.

 

And PoE is better viewed as an isometric party based MMO. You're quite right in thinking that. The default strategy at the moment in the beta is send defender in to tank, other characters to help with dps and crowd control. Rinse and repeat.

 

Tip: Play as a ranged wizard. Ignore any melee type spells. I've found Wizards are quite poor in melee situations and aren't really designed for it. There's a good strategy with playing a ranged Wizard. Don't wear any armour. Wearing armour incurs penalties, and as long as you're playing a ranged Wizard without armour, you shouldn't get hit while your defender is tanking. And combat is better and faster.

 

 

If PoE is a isometric party based MMO than so were the IE games. Party roles is the basic of every party based RPG ever released and you will always have a defending frontline and a ranged backline. How these work has some flexibility though.

 

Saying that, if you use the "pause on enemy sighted" you can pre-plan most encounters in advance. This mean place you party members, decide who will do the opening salvo, etc. I never have anything attack my wizard despite him casting spells all the time that way.

 

 

Have you ever played an MMO?

 

None of the IE games has remotely this kind of all-against-the-tank gameplay, except when you need to degeneratively need to stack on AC to survive Heart of Fury mode for IWD. It's also far less punishing, 95% of the time, for a non-"tank" to recieve "aggro" in the IE games (case in point, priest classes could also serve as a meat shield, and with the right set up so could rogues (bards more than thieves) and wizards).

 

Here, so far I've found that everything needs to go against your designated tank - that constant stamina recovery essentially means that no one else is going to be able to withstand a remotely similar amount of punishment (whereas in D&D, the difference in damage soak between a d10 and a d8 was not too huge). Melee engagement essentially acts like aggro. *Unlike* an MMO, there is no way to cancel engagement (except for the really buggy "Escape" ability), and the healing possibilities on a tank are extremely limited (because they only treat the per-battle Stamina). Much *like* an MMO, however, if my tank goes down, it generally means a party wipe.

 

I'm not sure I like this kind of gameplay. I stopped playing WoW (with its incredibly specialized class roles and over-prescribed combat flow) for a reason.

 

 

Considering I've played my first playthrough of PoE with everyone mostly on ranged weapons (using CC spells/abilities to stop mobs from swarming the party) I fail to see the requirement to have a tank in every fight or how the Figher needs absolutely to be played has one.

 

I do find it extremely funny that everyone who seem to have issues with the combat are always talking about how they need to use the Fighter has a tank and play the game like a MMO though.

 

Also, the only time any of my characters lose a lot of health in a fight is when I encounter the DT bug. I wonder how much people complains are actually a failure to detect bugs at this point.

[Mr. Magniloquent]

 

 

 

 

 

With the almost complete removal of rng and hard counters, wizard is a lackluster class indeed. Just look at mirror image.   Also a lot of the wizard's arsenal was stolen by other classes. Summons for an example.

 

Mirror Image in AD&D wasn't a hard counter. It's a pretty iconic example of a soft counter, actually.

 

removal of rng and hard counters

 

edit: Actually I don't know enough to say for sure, anyone is welcome to correct me. Is the deflection bonus from mirror image enough to make it do the same function as the dnd mirror image? Or is it just a "minor" bonus to make "muscle wizards" more tanky. In theory with a high enough deflection bonus it could do the same thing, no?

 

 

The PoE mirror image sounds like it might be stronger than the D&D one, actually. Doesn't each individual image in D&D have the same AC as you do? That means it's easier to cut them down one-by-one than it is it break through PoE's mirror image.

 

 

Except you're comparing two very different systems for rolling to attack - from what I gather (from parsing the PE wiki) - *many* attacks will hit, simply because the d100 roll has very few opportunities for missing - just a lot of grazing. In addition, the AD&D system had limited attacks / round (i.e. 6 seconds) as oppossed to continuous attacks.

 

A wizard with 8 mirror images in the IE games could, even against a fighter who crit all the time, take 0 damage (with no impact/interruption) for several rounds. Mirror Image also granted immunity to many direct damage spells. Combine that with Stoneskin, Protection from Magical Weapons, Improved Invisibility, etc. and a single-class wizard had better (burst) defenses than any other class in the game. (This situation was significantly toned down in IWD2 which lacked many of the stupidly powerful abjuration spells and had the nerfed version of stoneskin.)

 

 

My experience with Mirror Image in PoE is that my wizard gets a couple grazing hits and then gets knocked out pretty rapidly thereafter. GREAT.

 

So I only skimmed the backer beta announcements, but what I'm gathering from these comments is that the wizard should basically just be considered DPS in PoE? Not really crowd control or illusion-y magical defense? That's a little disappointing I guess, and actually brings to mind more of planescape: torment's terrible arcane spell selection than the other IE's magic system.

 

 

They are supposed to function as providing moderate (Not the most!) AoE damage and AoE debuffs. Right now the only part of that design goal being met is the part where they don't do too much damage. Doing too-much-damage is part of the Rogue and Ranger class design. The Wizard's moderate damage capability, coupled with DT and a whole lot of grazing makes for very lowly damage though. You might occasionally eek out mid 70s damage with a critically hit Fireball or Fan of Flames, but that's about it. It would be easier to stomach if their spells were as plentiful as the Cipher's. Whereas Vancian casting in D&D was the trade-off to reality manipulating power, Wizards in PoE just get their hamstring cut.

 

Except you're comparing two very different systems for rolling to attack - from what I gather (from parsing the PE wiki) - *many* attacks will hit, simply because the d100 roll has very few opportunities for missing - just a lot of grazing. In addition, the AD&D system had limited attacks / round (i.e. 6 seconds) as oppossed to continuous attacks.

 

That's true, but it would have been equally true if PoE used a carbon copy implementation of the D&D mirror image, all other things being equal.

 

They should have departed further then. Right now, many things in PoE are Not D&D, *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*. The classes epitomize this. Whereas Pathfinder was a kind of enhanced D&D, PoE is functioning as Not D&D--with some very questionable results. This conflict is very evident in the Priest, Druid, and especially Wizard classes. Conversely, melee oriented classes and combat function very well, and in many ways superior to "the old ways". I think they need to exhale and take the plunge to depart further from D&D standards and conventions. I'm thinking in the direction of spell points/mana systems.

[nipsen]

Question 1: An enemy melee engages my wizard = inevitable doom?. Related: the "mirror image" icon spells and other defensive spells are useless?

 

Can I do anything about an enemy engaging my wizard? Almost any enemy so far (Beetles to Cultists) can take my wizard from healthy to knocked out in a manner of seconds. I don't understand what good Arcane Veil or Mirror Image are when - if I cast them as soon as I see an enemy charging toward my wizard (either due to a bad pull or a bad confusion, see below), by the time they finish I've already lost half my stamina. I also don't see the point of any of these defensive maneuvers if I can't safely disengage from melee - all these spells do is delay the inevitable by a few seconds. At times PoE feels very MMO-ish (namely tank and having to "pull" enemies), but in an MMO, a tank would have some kind of Taunt ability or the DPS would have some kind of de-aggro or disengaging spell for these cases. Even 3e D&D had some kind of mechanism to safely avoid attack of opportunity.

 

Question 2: Debuffs are pointless?

 

At least at the start, I'm not sure what the merit of the various debuff spells are. First, and I've already made a post about it - I honestly don't understand the point of confusion. All it does is cause enemies to disengage from my tank--and generally try to engage my wizard. That is definitely not an effect I want to waste time and spellcasting slot on! I've tried a few others, and apart from having only the foggiest notion of what they do (enemies really need a debuff display like your party members do that you can hover over for tooltips), I rarely ever see an obvious effect in battle. 

 

Question 3: What spells are actually party friendly (if any)?

 

I've been led astray several times by spells that imply that they either only affect one enemy, or jump to just enemies, or target just enemies in AoE only to see hapless BB Fighter get grazed or hit or critically hit with effects. The converse is true about BB Priest, BTW - a lot more spells are party friendly than I expect (or are just bugged - I feel like the glyph of warding-type spell is either party friendly or is really buggy about when it actually hurts things).

 

Question 4: Am I missing something about how the pseudo-turn-based-system works?

 

I'm not exactly sure what that little bar that empties from right to left and the pips and the little circle that occasionally has a sword in it mean. I *thought* it was like a Final-Fantasy-style active time bar, and when it emptied my character would do an action. Yet sometimes I can use an ability while the bar is still not empty, and still other times my character will gaily keep auto-attacking even after I've repeatedly selected a spell and a target. Is it like World of Warcraft where some abilities respect a universal cooldown and some don't? Still other times, I feel like it acts like a queue and when I click on an ability, the character will start doing it when the bar empties, while still others I feel like the character does an attack and then starts using the ability. Or is this just really buggy.

 

Question 5: Is the "Spell cast" auto-pause buggy?

 

For some reason, I feel like the tooltip strongly implied it would pause for enemies casting, but not the case. And it doesn't seem to always trigger when my characters cast spells, or triggers as they are casting a spell but no effect has started (so I'm unclear whether or not it's safe to do anything).

 

1. Well.. say you're wearing a scale armor, and have minimal bonuses. You should be having a damage threshold at about 13, maybe. Cast the veil, and you suddenly can't be hit by anything other than a critical hit or a very strong/extremely high might build. Which is usually a build that can be interrupted or slowed, unless it completely breaks the point distribution. So if it comes to that, a basically free cast and a mirror image will make you a difficult target for 20 seconds at least. Normally giving you time to cast a few spells, or retreat. (Not against the beetles, though )

 

But the biggest advantage of playing any caster class in PoE is that you can "engage" and block incoming mobs with the fighters, or a strongly buffed druid or priest, and so on. The ai generally obliges too, that it wants to avoid taking extra damage in the short term to avoid a massive and targeted critical strike later. So as long as you have a fighter in the front with reasonably high perception, the AI normally won't disengage from that threat.

 

So this actually does work. It's sketchy with some mobs and the "teleport" thing, though.

 

But hopefully there's going to be something like a phase-shift or a blink spell.. perhaps short cast time. And a teleport spell for other people with a long cast time. And ai that uses this once in a while against you.

 

2. I think this is going to be more obvious when we really figure out the damage resistances, damage thresholds, and exactly how reflex and so on interferes with attacks of opportunity, dodge, and ability damage.. and when it's easier to read out the combat rolls. But adding a debuff to intelligence and perception, for example, will reduce the enemy's chance to interrupt you, and it makes critical hits and abilities less powerful. Just the knockdown can go from lasting 9 seconds to 5 seconds on something like 8 intelligence points. So just these "daze" instant abilities, or very low level wizard spells can actually be extremely powerful. And the status knockout effects have debuffs associated with them that are even worse.

 

I'm hoping for something on top of this, though. Like "distracted" reducing dodge bonus and perception (so reducing critical range and lowering interrupt). And bloodrush reducing intelligence and dexterity but increasing might (reducing critical damage output, but increasing base damage). And things of that sort. But I suspect it's difficult to add these without suddenly making one particular spell a complete wipe.

 

But it's an attempt at making a narrative consistency between the rules and the gameworld. Most game-designers probably wouldn't bother, settling for just giving you something plausible that looks ok at a glance.

 

3. I think indirect spells generally are part friendly. Forced soul power channeling to create objects isn't. I sort of got the impression as well that priest prayers were more of an improved "turn" ability as well. That they're actually affecting everyone, but only allies get positive effects (unless they're completely at odds with the priest's faith and morality, and the priest isn't skilled enough to lessen that effect). Practically none of the typical wizard spell are indirect, so they can target everyone. In the same way, the cipher and chanter seems to have multiple spells that only target enemies for channeling soul force projections. Effects drawn from their own soul are more discriminate. 

 

Not sure if this was the intention, though.

 

4. I'm pretty sure any action gains an extra standby/bar drain pause after an active ability. So any attack counts down, basically. And all actions, including the insta-casts, can be interrupted, so you could risk that your priest has the active ability canceled, and they go on to continue attacking with the normal attack. But since it's an active ability, it's not getting "lost". And it happens so fast it seems like nothing happened. Could also be this is bugged at the moment. That the action is interrupted if an attack triggers and it draws the priest into an action, or something like that. Perhaps against characters that have very fast attacks. But difficult to test this when you don't have debug, and so on.

 

5. Yes, was wondering about that as well. Anyone know? I could have sworn I actually used that auto-pause in that way before turning it off again. But when I went back to check, it didn't seem to work after all.

[thelee]

 

 

 

 

Question 1: An enemy melee engages my wizard = inevitable doom?. 

 

At times PoE feels very MMO-ish (namely tank and having to "pull" enemies).

 

From my limited experience with the beta.

 

1. Pretty much which is why I always play a ranged Wizard and have my Fighter, Rogue and Priest on the front line. You also have to aggro an enemy with your Fighter first otherwise the enemy will dog pile onto your Wizard.

 

And PoE is better viewed as an isometric party based MMO. You're quite right in thinking that. The default strategy at the moment in the beta is send defender in to tank, other characters to help with dps and crowd control. Rinse and repeat.

 

Tip: Play as a ranged wizard. Ignore any melee type spells. I've found Wizards are quite poor in melee situations and aren't really designed for it. There's a good strategy with playing a ranged Wizard. Don't wear any armour. Wearing armour incurs penalties, and as long as you're playing a ranged Wizard without armour, you shouldn't get hit while your defender is tanking. And combat is better and faster.

 

 

If PoE is a isometric party based MMO than so were the IE games. Party roles is the basic of every party based RPG ever released and you will always have a defending frontline and a ranged backline. How these work has some flexibility though.

 

Saying that, if you use the "pause on enemy sighted" you can pre-plan most encounters in advance. This mean place you party members, decide who will do the opening salvo, etc. I never have anything attack my wizard despite him casting spells all the time that way.

 

 

Have you ever played an MMO?

 

None of the IE games has remotely this kind of all-against-the-tank gameplay, except when you need to degeneratively need to stack on AC to survive Heart of Fury mode for IWD. It's also far less punishing, 95% of the time, for a non-"tank" to recieve "aggro" in the IE games (case in point, priest classes could also serve as a meat shield, and with the right set up so could rogues (bards more than thieves) and wizards).

 

Here, so far I've found that everything needs to go against your designated tank - that constant stamina recovery essentially means that no one else is going to be able to withstand a remotely similar amount of punishment (whereas in D&D, the difference in damage soak between a d10 and a d8 was not too huge). Melee engagement essentially acts like aggro. *Unlike* an MMO, there is no way to cancel engagement (except for the really buggy "Escape" ability), and the healing possibilities on a tank are extremely limited (because they only treat the per-battle Stamina). Much *like* an MMO, however, if my tank goes down, it generally means a party wipe.

 

I'm not sure I like this kind of gameplay. I stopped playing WoW (with its incredibly specialized class roles and over-prescribed combat flow) for a reason.

 

 

Considering I've played my first playthrough of PoE with everyone mostly on ranged weapons (using CC spells/abilities to stop mobs from swarming the party) I fail to see the requirement to have a tank in every fight or how the Figher needs absolutely to be played has one.

 

I do find it extremely funny that everyone who seem to have issues with the combat are always talking about how they need to use the Fighter has a tank and play the game like a MMO though.

 

Also, the only time any of my characters lose a lot of health in a fight is when I encounter the DT bug. I wonder how much people complains are actually a failure to detect bugs at this point.

 

 

What difficulty are you on? How is this even possible? If my fighter doesn't engage everyone, whomever gets engaged by an enemy is going to go down soon.

 

Caveat: now that  I discovered Conscecration (or whatever that level 2 priest spell is that restores stamina in a gigantic aoe for a while), every fight in the game has now turned into "cast consecration, slowly win" though that still doesn't apply to my squishiest characters getting hit, though currently I am in glass-cannon mode (no armor for my wizards) so that may explain it at this point. It would be helpful to know just the scale of everything in this game. In other words, I have no idea how effective e.g. DT 6 is since I don't know how much damage I should expect average enemies to be capable of doing (or how much of a damage penalty "grazing" actually means).

 

What's the DT bug?

 

Personally, I keep wavering between "I'm disappointed in this game" vs "I still don't understand this game system and that's why it is frustrating." I guess this is one of the downsides to a Beta/not following the emails/updates as closely. At least when I first picked up BG I could spend an hour reading through the manual to learn the system, here it's *just* different enough from many other RPGs to confound my expectations but also in such a way I cannot tell if certain behavior is a bug or intended gameplay mechanic.

[morhilane]

What difficulty are you on? How is this even possible? If my fighter doesn't engage everyone, whomever gets engaged by an enemy is going to go down soon.

 

Caveat: now that  I discovered Conscecration (or whatever that level 2 priest spell is that restores stamina in a gigantic aoe for a while), every fight in the game has now turned into "cast consecration, slowly win" though that still doesn't apply to my squishiest characters getting hit, though currently I am in glass-cannon mode (no armor for my wizards) so that may explain it at this point. It would be helpful to know just the scale of everything in this game. In other words, I have no idea how effective e.g. DT 6 is since I don't know how much damage I should expect average enemies to be capable of doing (or how much of a damage penalty "grazing" actually means).

 

What's the DT bug?

 

Personally, I keep wavering between "I'm disappointed in this game" vs "I still don't understand this game system and that's why it is frustrating." I guess this is one of the downsides to a Beta/not following the emails/updates as closely. At least when I first picked up BG I could spend an hour reading through the manual to learn the system, here it's *just* different enough from many other RPGs to confound my expectations but also in such a way I cannot tell if certain behavior is a bug or intended gameplay mechanic.

 

 

Difficulty: Easy/Normal (I started on easy because everyone was saying it was super hard and buggy, moved to normal soon after and it's probably still too easy, but I generally play my games on normal so haven't bother going higher). I used a lot of CC: Crippling Strike, Binding Web, Halt, Repulsive Seal. Basically, used everything that have blind, paralyze, slow, stun, daze in the spell lists. I also use "pause on enemy sighting" which allow me to plan my attacks and surprise mobs most of the time.

 

The DT bug is probably what most people are encountering right now that turn their games into a slow nightmare. Basically, sometimes, mobs will get a boost to their DT (and Deflection I believe) to the point where it is impossible to do anything but craze and minimum damage on them. So a mobs with 100 stamina will take like ~100 hits to go down. It makes fight last longer than supposed and cause your character to get hit more often and lose more health than expected for the encounter. I once encountered it against Medreth's group, the fight took almost 20 minutes and 3 of the 5 party members were at half health afterward (yeah for buff/debuff).

 

The wiki has a lot of info on the gameplay mechanics.

 

edit:

 

About the Wizard. I rarely have anything aggro him, but that's because I changed a my strategy after a while. I used to open combat with a fireball, but I changed it to opening with the Priest's Divine Terror. Then I have the Wizard cast spells. Once they change the AI, it's probably going to be a worthless tactic though.

Edited September 12, 2014 by morhilane

[thelee]

 

What difficulty are you on? How is this even possible? If my fighter doesn't engage everyone, whomever gets engaged by an enemy is going to go down soon.

 

Caveat: now that  I discovered Conscecration (or whatever that level 2 priest spell is that restores stamina in a gigantic aoe for a while), every fight in the game has now turned into "cast consecration, slowly win" though that still doesn't apply to my squishiest characters getting hit, though currently I am in glass-cannon mode (no armor for my wizards) so that may explain it at this point. It would be helpful to know just the scale of everything in this game. In other words, I have no idea how effective e.g. DT 6 is since I don't know how much damage I should expect average enemies to be capable of doing (or how much of a damage penalty "grazing" actually means).

 

What's the DT bug?

 

Personally, I keep wavering between "I'm disappointed in this game" vs "I still don't understand this game system and that's why it is frustrating." I guess this is one of the downsides to a Beta/not following the emails/updates as closely. At least when I first picked up BG I could spend an hour reading through the manual to learn the system, here it's *just* different enough from many other RPGs to confound my expectations but also in such a way I cannot tell if certain behavior is a bug or intended gameplay mechanic.

 

 

Difficulty: Easy/Normal (I started on easy because everyone was saying it was super hard and buggy, moved to normal soon after and it's probably still too easy, but I generally play my games on normal so haven't bother going higher). I used a lot of CC: Crippling Strike, Binding Web, Halt, Repulsive Seal. Basically, used everything that have blind, paralyze, slow, stun, daze in the spell lists. I also use "pause on enemy sighting" which allow me to plan my attacks and surprise mobs most of the time.

 

The DT bug is probably what most people are encountering right now that turn their games into a slow nightmare. Basically, sometimes, mobs will get a boost to their DT (and Deflection I believe) to the point where it is impossible to do anything but craze and minimum damage on them. So a mobs with 100 stamina will take like ~100 hits to go down. It makes fight last longer than supposed and cause your character to get hit more often and lose more health than expected for the encounter. I once encountered it against Medreth's group, the fight took almost 20 minutes and 3 of the 5 party members were at half health afterward (yeah for buff/debuff).

 

The wiki has a lot of info on the gameplay mechanics.

Oh man. This wiki will help a lot.