Casters are still slow...

[MaxQuest]

I love to play casters, but in this state i dont even bother....

If someone would tell me before beta that I would have a party of auto-fod-attacking paladins, and have not 2, not 1, but 0 ciphers in my party, I wouldn't believe him

[dunehunter]

 

I love to play casters, but in this state i dont even bother....

If someone would tell me before beta that I would have a party of auto-fod-attacking paladins, and have not 2, not 1, but 0 ciphers in my party, I wouldn't believe him

Btw can u stack Eternal Flame and Shared Flame if u have two Pals in party?

[MaxQuest]

Btw can u stack Eternal Flame and Shared Flame if u have two Pals in party?

I don't think it stacks. Gotta check it.

But 3 moon-godlike berserker-wayfarers with shared flames, seem to always be at close to full hp.

Edited December 26, 2017 by MaxQuest

[Wormerine]

I feel don’t want us to clear encounters by spamming fireballs. Those big AOE spells seem to be designed to target large mobs of weaker enemies, while those tougher ones will shrug AOE due to high penetration. Some of the single target spells hit harder. Maybe it’s very much intentional, rather than a flaw?

 

I don’t find casting time that bad now when weapons got slowed down.

[dunehunter]

Another reason Casters feel underwhelming to Melee is because now Str/Res is now a multiplier instead of an additive. This change has little benefit to casters because spells don't have other additive bonus like melee (melee has a lot additive bonus like sneak attack, soul whip, weapon enhancement and etc), the only additive bonus spell has is crit damage bonus and that is nerfed from 50% to 25% too.

 

So imagine a spell that does 100 damage will do 130 damage with 20 Might, the benefit he got from Might is 30 damage no matter if it's a multiplier or additive.

 

A rogue/cipher who does 100 basic damage, will do 100 * (1 + 0.5 + 0.4) = 190 damage and 220 damage if Might is an additive, but will do 247 damage if it is a multiplier, so he gets 57 damage bonus from 30 MIght now. And the more additive he stacks, the further he leaves a caster behind. And I haven't include Lash here, a meleer with Lash will get even more gain from Might than caster, but you get my idea.

 

Thus melee feels much stronger than spells, plus the cast time is very slow now. Therefore we will feel casters are slow, weak and not fun to play. Even if we give spells higher basic damage, I don't think this will solve the problem because a min-max player will still try to stack as many additive bonus on melee to get the maximum gain from high Might, spell damage will still be far behind melee.

 

To solve this problem eventually, I really hope they can revert the change of Might and go back to PoE 1 additive style, and I don't believe it will cause more trouble than it has now.

Edited December 27, 2017 by dunehunter

[Aramintai]

Damn, I tried spell casters in the new beta patch and I have to agree - they still suck. It may have sounded good on paper to make spell casters slower but more powerful, but in reality when they stand toe to toe with melee classes they get completely outclassed because of how sluggish and impotent they feel. Devs need to either significantly buff spells damage and/or penetration or make spell casting significantly faster. Personally, I'd prefer the latter, it worked well in POE1. 

[NerdCommando]

I'd say that the biggest problem of current spellcasters is not even their speed - it's their accuracy. You can say that debuffs got really debilitating right now and whereas previously, say, Hobble was mostly for lulz, now it's a much more impactful ability. Ditto for sickened - sickened is insane. Ditto for Dazed. Some abilities just were good and remained good - Blinded, for example.

 

The problem, however, is that the amount of casts is really limited while the accuracy of casts is atrocious. And while physical fighters have tons of accuracy boosters available, casters have pretty much none remaining. And that's with spell defenses generally being much higher than the Deflection. And while previously you could've easily switched to attacking the correct one (like, this monster has low WIll, high Fortitude - ok, let's not sicken him, let's daze him), right now you have few spells available so, well, you're not having that will-targeting spell.

 

On current PoTD (even with level scaling applied which makes it easier) your caster can throw spells through the entire battle while barely hitting anyone.

[AndreaColombo]

I too wish we get Might back as it was before, but not as additive. MaxQuest’s proposal is a lot better:

 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94949-should-might-stay-multiplicative-or-return-to-additive/page-4?do=findComment&comment=1964087

[dunehunter]

I too wish we get Might back as it was before, but not as additive. MaxQuest’s proposal is a lot better:

 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94949-should-might-stay-multiplicative-or-return-to-additive/page-4?do=findComment&comment=1964087

I think u didn’t read his suggestion carefully. In the version 4 he suggested, Might is working as an additive with bonus like soul whip and sneak attack. Not a separate multiplier.

[AndreaColombo]

I did. He’s proposing multiplicative coefficient buckets with MIG falling into one of them. Simply returning to additive MIG without the rest of his proposal would not be good; as he explains, there was a reason for the change

[dunehunter]

Yeah anyway you get my point here

 

Let Might be separate multiplier will just make gap between melee and caster bigger, simply because melee has more bonus to damage.

[Boeroer]

It's def. casting speed that is the main issue.

You can have 6+ spells per encounter pretty quickly - but you just can't use them all in battle because it's over after 2 slowish casts. A paladin with 6 uses of FoD has no problems applying them all.

 

You can see that builds that use fast casts (self buffs for example) are rated very useful these days while every char who mainly uses slow spells (which are supposed to be powerful) just blow. They are so bad, it's really upsetting me although this is only a computer game.

Edited December 27, 2017 by Boeroer

[JFutral]

"Might" made sense affecting spells since "Might" did not have to equate to strength. But I do like "Resolve" as a modifier better, especially with remaking "Might" into "Strength".

 

I don't understand why the need to rethink spell casting at all, though. That was one of the things that worked in PoE I. I felt like my casters were actually contributing as opposed to BG where, other than Magic Missiles or Chromatic Orbs, there wasn't time for the caster to contribute much to a fight that was usually over before somethings could be cast. Or worse, cast only to find out the enemy was immune. Oi!

 

I like per encounter vs per rest to help alleviate the Rest spamming issue. The whole limiting of two casts per level seems excessive, but I guess with the increased casting time, you can't expend more spells than two anyway.

 

I like more spells being available outside of Combat mode, although the whole Combat mode concept still make no sense to me for much of anything.

 

Casting speed inversely proportional to power makes sense, though one more thing to make spell casting even more complex is a tough sell.

 

All that to say increasing casting times seems totally unnecessary to game play or RPG considerations. It's just a joy kill.

 

Joe

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

 

making spell casting even more complex is a tough sell.

 

increasing casting times seems totally unnecessary to game play or RPG considerations. It's just a joy kill.

 

 

Two great points that cannot be overlooked when tweaking the spells and caster abilities available in Deadfire.

[dunehunter]

My dual wielding Wizard/Monk with Minor Blights + Lightening Strike is acting like he is throwing fireball with his auto attacks, doing 60+ aoe damage, but with 0.4 ‘cast time’ and 1.5 recovery time

[dunehunter]

Making caster time faster will mess up the new interruption system I think. If they turn back to PoE 1 cast time, then all weapon need to roll back to old system that has an inner interrupt value, also all abilities causing interruptions need rework. I think it’s too much work for the team.

 

So can we keep cast time slow and remove all recover time for spells? This change will reduce the casting cycle for a lot Spell by half.

 

I know this will favor heavy armor casters, but it’s easier to fix. For example, make armor penalty affect both cast time and recovery time.

 

Recovery time for swinging a sword make sense to me because one need to regain balance after swinging weapon. For spells, I never understand why they also have recovery time.

Edited December 27, 2017 by dunehunter

[AndreaColombo]

Even then, who’s gonna sit through 6 seconds to cast a Fireball instead of rolling a melee guy who wreaks havoc right away?

 

I’d try something in-between the first game and what we have now in terms of casting time, with 0.4/0.0 for summoned weapons. Let’s see what that feels like and fine-tune from there.

[Boeroer]

Even if they want to achieve more "tactical depth" (who needs that anyways?) - with longer casting times vs. interrupts - and thus can't shorten the castin times a lot, they could still go and make the damn effects more powerful. Casting Whisper of Treason for (what feels like) ages in order to charm one enemy for mere 10 seconds is just a biting whiplash in every cipher's face.

 

Casting a lenghty fireball that might get interrupted or has to be retargeted all the time because enemies run around like headless chicken during 6 seconds and then doing nearly the same damage as you would do with an attack of a rod + blast is just meeeehhh!

Edited December 27, 2017 by Boeroer

[JFutral]

Recovery time for swinging a sword make sense to me because one need to regain balance after swinging weapon. For spells, I never understand why they also have recovery time.

 

IDK. This never made much sense to me either.

 

Just like any good pool player, each shot should also be about setting up the next shot. There aren't many fighting styles out there that don't teach that principle that I'm aware of. The only things that should really affect recovery time is skill level and the skill of the other fighter.

 

But, whatever. It's kind of like complaining about umpires in baseball. You take the home plate ump's peculiarities into account when pitching or you are screwed.

 

/OT

Joe

[KDubya]

What made casters powerful in PoE?

 

I don't think it was damage spells and fast casting. No one rolled wizards who blasted out multiple missile strike spells.

 

Casters were powerful in PoE because crowd control spells with massive afflictions were powerful. 

 

Now afflictions are vastly reduced in power so that they are hurtful but not a death sentence like they used to be. Add in slower casting times and greatly increased power for melee and casters become the step child on the team instead of the MVP.

 

I think to balance things you need to look at melee and slow it down. Also dual wielding needs to be toned down as it is near 50% better than two handed.

[Aramintai]

I think to balance things you need to look at melee and slow it down. Also dual wielding needs to be toned down as it is near 50% better than two handed.

How I hate when there is one thing in a game that is bad and devs nerf everything else to the same bad level, instead of tweaking that one bad thing. It's not gonna be fun, trust me, I've seen it many time.

[KDubya]

 

I think to balance things you need to look at melee and slow it down. Also dual wielding needs to be toned down as it is near 50% better than two handed.

How I hate when there is one thing in a game that is bad and devs nerf everything else to the same bad level, instead of tweaking that one bad thing. It's not gonna be fun, trust me, I've seen it many time.

 

 

Currently a properly tuned melee team absolutely destroys PotD. If I went the extra mile and coded FoD to work via the behavior editor instead of manually controlling it I'd be ending combat even faster instead of having unspent resources remaining after a fight.

 

Dual wielding does like 50% more damage output than two handed. That's not even close to any sort of tradeoff, its self gimping to use anything else. That's a problem that only a nerf bat can solve as adding 50% damage to two handed weapons will just further break the game.

 

I'm a big fan of melee, in fact I rarely use a caster but I'd still be in favor of a serious power reduction in melee. In PoE going without casters, especially Priests, made the game much harder, now going without melee is the harder path

 

Bring melee back to a reasonable power level and then see what can or needs to be adjusted for casters.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Half-heartedly played a bit and have to agree, my Battlemage (Devoted/Vanilla) and Warlock (Berserker/Vanilla) did much better than the merc wizard or priest just by casting the lvl 1 speed boost and other quick buffs, both in terms of killing stuff and not getting hurt. This also pushes melee mages into buffs and/or summoned weapons because casting offensive spells takes too long for what you get, which I'd say makes Evoker + melee multiclass a bad build.

[AndreaColombo]

Sigh. Watch the ability to reach 0 recovery as it is taken away from us so bad casters look less bad in comparison to melee...

 

To be honest, a fully custom party of optimized melee guys deserves to steamroll the game. It’s your reward for studying and implementing five optimal builds.

 

That none of those optimal builds is a pure caster speaks to how bad casters are, more than anything. I agree with Aramintai—making melee as bad as casting is a worse solution than the other way around.

 

If the game is too easy as a result, buff enemies or sharpen their A.I..

[dunehunter]

Let's make some summary on the issues of casters so far, shall we?

1. Cast time still need some adjustment, at least most of us agree 6 second casting time is not fun at all, not to mention 9 second for spells.
2. CC are not as strong as they are in PoE1, the main reason is the change of afflictions. The main victim of this change is casters like wizard, cipher and druid.
3. Might model currently benefit more to meleer than casters. As a suggestion to fix this issue, MaxQuest has a good suggestion linked here https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/94949-should-might-stay-multiplicative-or-return-to-additive/page-4?do=findComment&comment=1964087
4. Lack of accuracy and penetration booster. A 'Empower' modal that trade cast time to power level might be able to help solve this issue.
5. Crit damage nerfed from 50% to 25%, since caster already lack damage additive bonus, this change hurt casters more than meleer.
6. Bring melee back to a reasonable power level, like dual wielding being superior to other style. Here is a good example shows that the weapon system is unbalanced. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/95289-weapon-balance-and-comparison/

Edited December 30, 2017 by dunehunter