In progress patch notes for 1.0.5- big buff for Wizards and buff for Ciphers (lol...), a lot of strange nerfs to everything else, couple of fixes.

[Atchod]

Patch notes clearly suggest you should go for wizard on your next playtrough

[MadDemiurg]

Barbarian changes are not even balancing. They are bug fixing. It was never working as intended in the first place. If you don't agree you can use the same argument and set your might to 100 via console.

[basketofseals]

 

 

I REALLY don't understand this trend of MMO style patches in single player games. If an ability isn't completely useless or horribly breaking a game, does it really need changing? I can adapt and change to patches easily, but I can't really say my experience has been improved by any patching.

 

Not sure that's actually what's going on here, even if the actual gameplay kind of feels somewhat MMOish at times.  It's more like they are fixing issues that weren't noticed or simply not commented on as much when there were way less people (beta) playing the game.  Or there were things that they didn't feel were quite right just prior to launch, but didn't have the time to fix yet.  I don't really see it so much as a "nerfing" a class into the ground and more like actually bringing them closer in line to the other classes, so they aren't always the "obvious" choice for most situations.

I'm pretty sure what basketofseals pointed out is exactly what is going. This feels very much like the changes MMOs make: they're nerfing things which were powerful and buffing things which were weak in an effort to get more abilities to be close to average. I don't like it at all, but I've given up on any hope of the game being different in this regard. Despite having mechanics that are similar to Baldur's Gate 2 (six person party, real time with pause, etc.), the philosophy behind combat in this game (balance, items, etc.) is completely different from that of BG2 and is in fact very similar to that of MMOs. This patch is merely the logical extension of this philosophy.

 

Why act as if we are living in 1998 still, where one-and-done was about all you'd get?  Do you honestly believe that if BG and BG2 had been developed just now that they wouldn't be getting similar treatment?  Bioware has progressively been doing this with their more recent games as well.

 

Both of your posts just come off as whine posts, because you seem to enjoy using blatantly much stronger abilities to get you through the game and you don't want there to be parity among classes.  Even with these changes, you still have classes like the Chanter, Ranger and Paladin.  Would you rather they remained as bad as they are, just so you can keep playing with the same "broken" abilities?

 

Balance has nothing to do with competition in this case, aside from the fact that there are multiple classes vying for your attention.  It seems to me that you would be fine with having just three or four classes in the game that are super strong, instead of having nine or eleven that are comparatively strong.  The former sounds super boring to me.  Plus, why did they even bother creating the other classes if no one is going to care about using them?  This isn't like the previous IE like games where you had a very large pool of classes to draw from.  Even if a handful truly stunk, you still had a wide selection of those that didn't.

 

I would like to state that I am on PotD and using cleric PC, Aloth, Eder, Kana, Hiravius, and Sagani. I am in no way using super OP abilities/classes, and I stated that changing outliers was fine. What I merely stated was that I feel that doing incredibly nit picky details such as nerfing stag horn damage is waste of development which should go towards fixing the problematic classes like Ranger and Palading.

 

What's wrong with Chanter?

[Atchod]

Ranger is fine , that little ****er animal companion is what need's fixing .

Edited May 2, 2015 by Atchod

[MadDemiurg]

Chanter being underpowered is the new joke of the day.

[Atchod]

Wasn't chanters like one of the first classes to do TCS 

[MadDemiurg]

Chanters have only one problem in a party: they are SLOW. Which is not fun for many people, and leaves them not doing much on lower difficulties. Otherwise they are incredibly powerful.

Edited May 2, 2015 by MadDemiurg

[BrickleberryPi]

*Sigh* Level two wizard spells are still lacking in terms of offensive power, but the change to concelhaut's is a good start. I wouldn't mind seeing it's ranged increased to at least 8m though. I love me some medium/long ranged spells

[MoxyWoo]

*Sigh* Level two wizard spells are still lacking in terms of offensive power, but the change to concelhaut's is a good start. I wouldn't mind seeing it's ranged increased to at least 8m though. I love me some medium/long ranged spells

 

Yeah, I always thought lvl 2 spells were about CC and self buffs.  Basically, when things go wrong, you can hit +15 elemental DR, +50 health, and/or +30 deflect in less than 1.5 seconds.  Or just confuse a monster in a group as an opener and let them fight among each other to thin them, then use a lvl 1 spell for damage or CC/dmg like chill fog.

[The Josip]

Chanter being underpowered is the new joke of the day.

 

Chanters have only one problem in a party: they are SLOW.

 

Which in a situation where every class can finish the game (in a group) - is the definition of underpowered.

 

Chanters aren't even underpowered though, they are useless. Underpowered would be a class that uses abilities but they're not good enough. Chanter is a class that doesn't use abilities. By the time they can use an ability the battle is over or decided (or would've been decided if they weren't idling).

[MadDemiurg]

Dunno, chanter can provide +25% fire damage by just being there. If you have 4 dps chars that's an equivalent of bringing a fifth one. While chanter can tank much better than a fifth dps char would. They don't FEEL powerful, but they surely are, even in a full group. They also have good synergy with slow but steady groups with no glasscannons composed of tanks or other chanters. 5x chanters and a paladin is an easy way to do lazy PotD ironman without even trying much.

Edited May 3, 2015 by MadDemiurg

[Raven Darkholme]

Yeah I don't think people realize how good the passive effects are when I first picked up Kana in my first playthrough ever I thought he plain sucked  because I didn't  really understood what different attributes did.

[Venatio]

Under New features: 

• There's a new option to reset newly recruited companions to level 1 (without losing the experience). This will allow you to level up companions to your liking.

 

Oh my gods, thank you

[abaris]

Under New features: 

• There's a new option to reset newly recruited companions to level 1 (without losing the experience). This will allow you to level up companions to your liking.

 

Oh my gods, thank you

 

Yeah, but how does that work?

 

I'm on the beta and haven't found the option. I would especially like to redo GM, since her faculties really aren't up to scratch.

[b0rsuk]

Dunno, chanter can provide +25% fire damage by just being there. If you have 4 dps chars that's an equivalent of bringing a fifth one. While chanter can tank much better than a fifth dps char would. They don't FEEL powerful, but they surely are, even in a full group. They also have good synergy with slow but steady groups with no glasscannons composed of tanks or other chanters. 5x chanters and a paladin is an easy way to do lazy PotD ironman without even trying much.

 

And there's more than one way to build your chanter. You can chant Blessed to rush into combat QUICKLY, next phrase is Thick for reduced Concentration and stunlock. 8 seconds, 2 phrases chanted.

[rheingold]

Chanters are darn good, my first play through, when I didn't know what I was doing, was with a chanter. And, oh my goodness was he good. Not flashy, just really good. The two fire chants are insanely powerful, frankly he doesn't have to do anything, except stand there twiddling his thumbs while he nukes... The ogre summons are pretty useful as well. Oh and the fact that chanters are awesome tanks.

[Narla]

 Outside of the sanguine plate change, the cypher start focus reduction, and the cypher soul shock range reduction, I think I like everything in this patch.

 

 Those are pretty unhappy changes though but I'll manage.

[Climhazzard]

Seems like the problem being caused by the Noonfrost Paladin's "Deprive the unworthy" (it stripped your passives) actually was fixed even though I didn't see it in the notes.

 

Sanguine plate still has retaliation on it, along with frenzy...  unintended maybe?  

[abaris]

A great feature is the rest in Brighthollow option without having to go through 4 map transitions.

[Sanctuary]

Under New features: 

• There's a new option to reset newly recruited companions to level 1 (without losing the experience). This will allow you to level up companions to your liking.

 

Oh my gods, thank you

You can already do this with IE mod, but the notes don't state whether or not you can actually adjust their attributes besides their talents.  IE mod lets you adjust the horrible companion attribute spread.

[MoxyWoo]

One time I made Eder into a barbarian, was pretty cool and that grizzled look seemed to fit the class.  Second chance + his good might score and average int was decent for one and when he popped a Savage Defiance when low, he was pretty cool to me.

 

Durance then became my fighter, and Aloth became my priest (his dex was good for casting buffs) and I played the wizard main.

 

This was before attribute changes were allowed from IE mod, just the class ones, so thought it was a good spread this way....  Arguably, its annoying most of the default stats don't have dex for some of the casters.

[abaris]

There's one thing I wasn't aware off before 1.0.5. When you lay a trap and for some reason the enemies don't trigger it, although they're standing right on it, you have to be very careful where you click. It happened to me several times that one of my characters disarmed it instead of attacking, even though the sword or spell icon was active when gving the order.

[Minttunator]

I have to admit I'm not a fan of constant nerfs in a single-player game (this isn't an MMO and I don't think it should be treated as such), but whatever - good thing I managed to finish my PotD playthrough before the 1.05 nerfbat hit.

[taek]

 

Under New features: 

• There's a new option to reset newly recruited companions to level 1 (without losing the experience). This will allow you to level up companions to your liking.

 

Oh my gods, thank you

 

Yeah, but how does that work?

 

I'm on the beta and haven't found the option. I would especially like to redo GM, since her faculties really aren't up to scratch.

 

 

Took me a while to find as well. It's not in an intuitive menu.

 

OPTIONS -> DIFFICULTY -> Uncheckmark the "Auto Level Companions" box

Edited May 4, 2015 by taek

[abaris]

 

 

Under New features: 

• There's a new option to reset newly recruited companions to level 1 (without losing the experience). This will allow you to level up companions to your liking.

 

Oh my gods, thank you

 

Yeah, but how does that work?

 

I'm on the beta and haven't found the option. I would especially like to redo GM, since her faculties really aren't up to scratch.

 

 

Took me a while to find as well. It's not in an intuitive menu.

 

OPTIONS -> DIFFICULTY -> Uncheckmark the "Auto Level Companions" box

 

 

Yeah, I found it, since another user pointed me to the menu, where I really didn't expect to find it. He got the category wrong, but once pointed in the right general direction, it was only a question of time to figure it out.

 

Thanks anyway. It certainly will be usefull for other to know where to find it. Make sure that you uncheck the autolevel option as soon as you start a new game though. Otherwise you're collecting the same old autolevelled folks.