Schyzm

yah I don't think you people are using the word blind correctly. it doesn't even make sense, the game is complicated enough are we suppose to believe you intuited all the optimal solutions first time through while eating nachos? yah, no.

just no consumables(or figurines), you think wizard could do it?

yah maybe but there's a lot of issues. like how do you split up the thaos fight w/o summons, or how do you kill the phantoms in caed nua w/o summons or scrolls?

oh I thought of that as gear, so I didnt think of being naked, though going naked would certainly be amusing too.

very impressive. I'm usually pretty cynical but I believe you.

how many? could u do it w/ 1 caster and 1 monk?

has someone done this solo? could any char(I guess chanter) do this all the way through? if its too much for one char could 2 chars do it? or even what combination of chars does anyone think would be clever and good at it. for clarification no items means no items, no food, no figurines, no potions, no scrolls, and none of anything I'm forgetting.

I dont see the fun in making the higher phrases take longer, woulda preferred balance around 4 second phrases.

the thing I would like to be worked on the most is ai pathing, encounter diversity and more disruptive abilities for bad guys.

except its massively inferior to moon godlike, but yah accuracy is pretty crucial and wood elves deliver it so its a reliably quality racial.

My front line just doesn't take damage? That is a much larger problem with AI, and combat mechanics. If you design a super-tank that through stacking skills, attributes and equipment achieves near unhittable defense, and then combine that with abusing the AI mechanic of the enemy bunching around instead of disengaging and going after your backline, you will have in effect broken the game. If that is your playstyle then a ranger is useless for you, in fact anything other than a super-tank and a team of ranged glass cannons would be useless for you. To fix that they'd have to: 1.) Have monsters disengage from your non-damaging super-tank, eat a disengagement attack and then mob your glass cannons. 2.) Have more monsters have a teleport ability to get past your super-tank and hit the glass cannons. 3.) Give monsters an ability to teleport your backline into melee range like the high level fighter ability can. 4.) Give monsters an alternate ranged weapon set and have them focus fire down your backline. 5.) Players could self regulate and not use builds and tactics that trivialize encounters. Since, I believe, that someone has soloed the game with every class on PotD, the tools are in the game to overcome all challenges posed by the AI if the player goes all out to win, even without using a full party. Based on this the only sure way to address the problems are option 5 and self regulate. self-regulation has a long history in these types of games and I practice it to some extent, but to propose it as a solution is an inferior way to conceptualize things. games should (and are mostly) getting better at becoming more balanced and shaving off things that are really abusable, and people should demand games be even more balanced in the future (like say poe 2). I think there are a number of ways to cut down pretty massively on the current nature of the abuses, not to say there won't be some left, but fewer is still better.

yah I once had found 4 fine arbalests by the time I finished raedric, there's also a 1.2 attack speed for sale and a fine arbalest that will continuously refresh for sale, it feels like the easiest weapon to get in quality early by a mile. I wonder if that was intentional kinda poking people to use arbalests so they dont' get mad at their min damage hunting bows.

I think a nice system might be something like <50 graze, 50 or more hit, and then do miss/crit on the rolls of the attacker, so like <10 attack roll miss, >90 attack roll crit or wutever. it would devalue accuracy some but that's kind of the point.

I agree that like DR. the other defenses should have a way to grant them diminishing returns as it is now the marginal value you get from 1 point of deflection increases as you get more deflection. so 20-21 deflection is ok 120-121 deflection is many times better to the point of course where some portions of the game you can become unhittable. I also like the way of doing it basically the way DR does it in that you always allow something to get through. completely missing is kinda lame anyway.

Marked Prey and Sworn Enemy have been set to 0 recovery actions, so they can be used and the Ranger/Paladin can immediately act again. A slight buff, nothing major, I dont think they will ever buff Paladins. That's crazy to me. It's hands down the most in-demand class for seeing improvements. Wizard was a popular one too but I think it carried more of a tone of "Wizard is amazing when you fully utilize it but it often feels lackluster for the average fight" and had a tone of "why not bring a Cipher" (which falls flat in practice) similar to Ranger vs. Rogue, but the class itself was still solid. Don't get me wrong, improvements for Wizards sounds cool, it's just kinda weird to see so much focus on them and next to nothing for Ranger and Paladin. Ranger just needs some simple pet improvements and they're good to go, Paladin needs a world of help. I will say this, at the bleeding edge of optimization paladins are the best tanks. once your defenses get truly absurd you really do have no equal.