Barbarian carnage, mutli-class balance

[boffmoffet]

I am very interested to see how Obsidian will balance the barbarian ability carnage. If a single dip into barbarian gives access to the ability as it exists in POE1 it would be invaluable for any melee focused character. I wonder if it will be less powerful to start then scale with level to avoid being overpowered.  

[George_Truman]

I think they suggested already that carnage would scale off of the number of levels put into barbarian (I forget their word for it)

[Ericles1557]

Oh sure.  Anything that gives force multipliers should scale appropriately with Class level.  Perhaps cap the damage of the extra attacks with Class level, so that if you invest in Barbarian levels, you can make full use of it, but it wouldn't be totally useless if you dipped into barbarian a little

[blotter]

Likewise with Sneak Attack, Soul Whip, and other class staples for the most part. The abilities are tied to a particular class' power source, and the rate at which that scales is based on whether you're actively advancing in the associated class or not. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpKyazh8mUI for details.

Edited February 27, 2017 by blotter

[hilfazer]

I am very interested to see how Obsidian will balance the barbarian ability carnage. If a single dip into barbarian gives access to the ability as it exists in POE1 it would be invaluable for any melee focused character. I wonder if it will be less powerful to start then scale with level to avoid being overpowered.

Everyone cares about 'overpowered' only. But things can be 'underpowered' too.

I'm really interested to see what OBS will do to prevent lvl 1 chars from sucking.

 

For Cipher it's not a problem becaue we can just leave Soul Whip as it was in POE. It may sound surprising  to some people so i'll explain: Soul Whip depends on max focus in two ways, it's required to cast more powerful spells and it prevents the cipher from getting extra damage. And max focus did scale with Ciper level. So 1lvl cipher dipping will limit a character to weaker PSI powers and will limit time when you're getting extra damage unless you actively spend your focus. So 1lvl cipher dipping won't work as "permanent extra 20% damage for your weapon user class".

 

Obs wants to make Rogues do more damage from their active abilities. Maybe it will work.

[Mygaffer]

Balancing will be a much tougher task with true multi-classing but Josh "Balancer" Sawyer is surely up the challenge.

 

Monk/Barbarian, with crazy unarmed damage hitting multiple enemies around me? And I want to be surrounded by enemies to stack wounds? If I multi-class I'm thinking Monk/Rogue to be a kind of Eora analogue to the Hashashin with great single target damage, or that monk/barbarian, with carnage and berserker rage to deal damage in the middle of a group of enemies.