Zwiebelchen

There is no, I repeat no companion AI in this game. Every step and move they make must be manually ordered.

You indeed read that wrong. What I had in mind was, that when we reduce the gap between tanks and non-tanks and allow classes that are equipped with appropriate gear (for a classy example: a mace & shield mail-equipped priest) to offtank properly (at certain obvious penalties like not being able to cast quite as good anymore), then we could effectively nerf tank defense (and on the same time buff their offense) without making the game neccesarily harder. The idea is to get rid of the hardcore MMO roles and go back to the idea of defined classes not neccesarily being pigeonholed in one purpose. This could ideally allow a tank to hold 2-3 enemies at best and allows rogues and everyone with a plate or mail armor to offtank quite well without sacrificing too much damage. Basicly, make the tankyness of a character tied to armor and equipment selection, not to attributes and an arbitrary base value on class choice. A cleric in D&D was exactly as tanky as a warrior except for the max constitution bonus. Even a mage had the same defense scores as a warrior when equipped with armor. The difference is: a warrior can hit hard while taking hits, whereas the cleric basicly hits nothing and has to deal with spell interruption. This is imho how it should be and the reason why there even is a concentration score. Remove the unneccesary class-bound deflection bonuses and put everything on equipment (it's okay to keep some deflection on attributes, as long as there's some kind of diminishing returns active here). This is why I don't regard PoE as broken beyond repair: the mechanics for all this to work are already there. We have concentration, we have interrupt, wie have splitted defenses. It's just the numbers that require tweaking.

The question is how you solve a systemic issue like that. If you just increase the Accuracy of the enemies, you are only really putting even more emphasis on +Deflection as the go-to way to tank, and the game already suffers from overspecialization in that regard. You either stack Deflection or you go home. Increasing enemy Accuracy would just mean that the importance of Deflection is even higher. I think this might actually be quite hard to solve, at the end of the day, due to the underlying simplicity of the system. Accuracy is a scale that affects everything from Miss to Crit, and the only thing that affects it is Deflection, working in the opposite direction. I don't have a solution, and I'm not criticizing you or anything, I'm just musing on the challenges. Actually, to fix this I would apply a rebalancing on all fronts: - Nerf constant recovery of fighters (or just remove it... it just creates in imbalance between melee classes that is hard to fix) - Increase endurance and health values of DPS classes - Reduce deflection scores on tanking talents by 20-30% - Nerf shields - Reduce deflection and DR scores on enchants at least by 30% - Add a reduction to armor recovery penalty to the constitution stat to allow viable offtank builds for non-tank classes - Add diminishing returns to attributes at character creation - Make the flanking bonus stack - Reduce the overall damage of encounters to balance out the lower overall deflection scores of tanks - Remove the gap in base deflection of tanks and non-tanks ... the gap created from itemization and skills is already enough ... so with all these changes; what will happen? 1) Tanks are a lot easier to hit, but will also deal more damage now (diminishing returns on attributes encourages a better stat spread) 2) The gap between tanks and non-tanks deflection-wise is smaller 3) Constitution now serves as a suitable stat for "offtanks" like clerics in mail armor 4) it is now viable to offtank with other characters, especially due to the changed flanking bonus and lower overall defenses of tanks making it impossible to tank a large group of enemies with just one character.

See? And this is exactly the problem I am talking about: mono-tanking is just way too effective and needs to be nerfed with the power of the eternal pillows. If I'd forced to bring one or two offtanks into battle, the situation would change dramatically. Not only would it look more realistic, but it would also instantly create new tactical situations that weren't there before. Suddenly, my AoEs wouldn't be as easy to position as before. Suddenly, the concentration score matters more. Suddenly, a mage learning defensive spells might be a good idea... Having a sniper (as you brought up that example) hiding behind the stairs absolutely makes sense RP-wise. However, having 5 snipers and only one tank-to-rule them all is broken. However, there's a difference in view here between everyone discussing this: There's the guys that have given up on the game already and those (like me) who think that a little bit of rebalancing might already go a long way. I think there's no reason for both sides to be upset at each other - rather, we should discuss the most sensible possible changes for this as - mind you - obsidian DOES read the forums after all.

Known problem: accuracy values of later enemies in the game don't keep up with the ridicolous deflection stacking possibilities the game offers. A nerf to tank builds and talents is probably required.

Come on, really? THIS is what you picked out of my post to comment?

... so you mean ... despite enough common sense that a monk probably didn't infiltrate a heavily guarded castle alone...? ...why would that be cheesing? I think it's a pretty reasonable thing to do and expect. The fact that the game can't deal with it is part of the issue. I don't think they can balance it without making some pretty big changes in the system, or tanks will just be replaced by DPS since they can't perform their function(s) and it's better to just kill things as fas as possible. Just think of it in a more realistic scenario: would you send in a lone person (that is probably a friend of yours) to talk to a group of heavily armored soldiers while your other folks stand way out of sight, ready to strike, willingly accepting the potential death of a party member? Just because it makes sense from a gameplay perspective doesn't mean it's reasonable or expected behaviour. And I'm not advocating for tanks to become pointless, I'm just saying that for a more tactical experience, the gap between tanks and non-tanks in terms of survivability should be reduced. Make DPSers less squishy and tanks less tanky and tank & spank will immediately become way less popular. The ultimate fault in the encounter design of PoE is not really the AI not prioritizing DPSers, it's that dogpiling enemies with a single character and surviving the onslaught is possible. In fact, I'm always for predictable AI behaviour, because it encourages tanking as part of a "problem solving" task. An AI that suddenly switches targets is unpredictable and mostly frustrating, especially if the trigger is pretty much random. It's also not even required to make encounters interesting if the gap between tanks and non-tanks would be way smaller. If, say, a tank can tank and survive 3 enemies tops, but a mail/plate equipped cleric will also be able to take 1-2 enemies and survive, then we will almost instantly go towards more IE-esque situations (note: the balanced IE, as in Icewind Dale*), where the entire group is pretty much in the middle of the action. *Btw, in BG2, I mostly used enemy-dogpiling on my Kangaxx-ring equipped unkillable PC maintank aswell ... and it worked just as good as it does in PoE [if not better due to prebuffing resistances and immunities]. I still wonder why anyone thinks BG2 was any different here...

^^^ this. I mean, in the IE games you could make another party member the leader. But here the PC is obviously the driving force in all interactions with the world. Sending Eder in to be some sort of ambassador/mouthpiece while you sip tea downstairs and wait for everything to go to hell in handbasket and come running to mop up the mess is clearly not what should be occurring. ... but it would definitely make for an awesome satire fantasy movie.

Bump!

Sending in your tank only to initiate a dialogue that should clearly involve your PC and other party members is cheese tactics, no matter how you view it. But I agree that the game should prevent said cheesing from happening more effectively. As I said: nerfing tanks and tank & spank tactics should be a main balancing priority of Obsidian.

In Finland it was male only parliament and male president that decided to add compulsory military service for male citizens of Finland in our constitution and every single parliament after that one has been male dominated in numbers that would allow them to change our constitution, but only propositions to change that law has come from our feminist politicians that drive through law that allowed women to do voluntary military service and currently their efforts to make military service compulsory for women too has been blocked by male majority in our parliament. But still every time males remember rise it as an issue which men had to suffer and women don't when topic of gender equality comes up. Same goes for other things like child custody cases, although in Finland studies about subject show that men win majority of cases that go in court, even though public belief about subject suggests opposite result. Somehow, I find all that very hard to believe. Obviously, politicans are jerks without any sense of reality. And we both know that. But I find it hard to believe that finland is absolutely the opposite of germany in that regard with just a few hundred miles distance from each other.

Sorry, but this is not the best fight in the game. I sent Eder in to initiate dialogue, all enemies attacked him and then I creamed them all with AoE damage, ranged damage and my Rogue coming in late with dual spears. Foe only AoE makes it a breeze to just sit your tank in the middle of all of the enemies in the room and then carefully aim stuff like Fan of Flames over and over again. Those guys also get minced if you use Eder with a Jolting Touch scroll. I also beat it on the first try. It wasn't even hard and didn't require me to adjust to anything they did at all. I won simply by using the same strategy I use to beat everything else. If spellcasters could actually protect themselves properly like they can in the IE games, then it might be a different story. So... you basicly metagame'd this encounter hard by sending in your tank alone to trigger the dialogue. Come on, really? The fight is fun and challenging when doing it the way it was intended.

Sorry, but this is not the best fight in the game. I sent Eder in to initiate dialogue, all enemies attacked him and then I creamed them all with AoE damage, ranged damage and my Rogue coming in late with dual spears. Foe only AoE makes it a breeze to just sit your tank in the middle of all of the enemies in the room and then carefully aim stuff like Fan of Flames over and over again. Those guys also get minced if you use Eder with a Jolting Touch scroll. I also beat it on the first try. It wasn't even hard and didn't require me to adjust to anything they did at all. I won simply by using the same strategy I use to beat everything else. If spellcasters could actually protect themselves properly like they can in the IE games, then it might be a different story. So... you basicly metagame'd this encounter hard by sending in your tank alone to trigger the dialogue that you couldn't know would turn out to be a battle. Come on, really? The fight is fun and challenging when doing it the way it was intended. Ever wondered why the NPCs are placed in a half-circle? That's because the dialogue triggers at a distance in which you are surrounded by those guys.

I feel like the SFX should highlight the potential danger and significance of the effect: Stun and confusion effects should be clearly visible. Very dangerous debuffs aswell. Stationary AoE effects like storm gusts should also be more visible, whereas effects that you can not really counter should be tuned down. A LOT. It makes no sense that single target damaging abilities have such flashy effects and spells that require the player to react are often almost invisible. It feels like the SFX design was made from a lore-perspective, not from the gameplay perspective. This, however, is a no-go in tactical combat games.

I think the general problem of PoE and the reason why a lot of IE lovers might dislike the combat of PoE is that both tanks and DDs are heavily overtuned in their roles. In other words: tanks are too tanky and DPSers are too DPS and encounters are balanced around this concept. This basicly enforces MMO-style combat by default, leaving almost no room for reactivity in combat (your tank got CC'ed? Reload...). If we compare the IE games to PoE in that regard, we will notice that tanks in the IE games (fighters, paladins, monks, barbarians) had a lot higher offensive potential than properly specced tanks in PoE, but also didn't tank much better than clerics or druids. This created a dynamic that allowed continuing a battle even if your maintank or main DPS got disabled. After all, your cleric or fighter/druid was an equal substitute for your fighter in tankyness and your tank could still effectively bring the enemy down, even when the mage ran out of spells. Battles in PoE by default do not allow the level of "bull****" that the IE games allowed, as all those mass CC spells from the IE games would absolutely break the game and after all your spell slots have been used, you are pretty much forced to rest unless your group only consists of cheesy barbarians or ciphers. But I am positive that with a proper amount of rebalancing, PoE can fix this issue. There is nothing wrong with engagement either, I feel it just has to be tweaked a little to make the mechanic more usable (spells that play with it rather than avoid it and enemies "taking" the disengagement attack given the proper attack priorities). Deflection stacking needs to be nerfed... armor choice should clearly play a bigger role than it does currently. Recovery penalties should be adjusted so that you can't just spam spells at absurd speeds if you wear cloth only. Enemy AI obviously needs some changes aswell. I agree that there's some (in other fields more) tweaking required before the combat in this game feels tactical, but I don't agree with you in the way that the underlying systems are fundamentally wrong. After all, battle already feels interesting for several well-designed encounters in the game: - Spore cave battle - Raedric's Hold final battle - Lighthouse battle - Shades ... but less of them. The concept is nice, but it got repeated way too much to be interesting. All these battles have a certain mechanic that makes them interesting; the Raedric's battle is imho the best of them, as it replicates the epic feel of the BG2 group battles almost perfectly (given the low level of the encounter, this was a very challenging task to begin with!). Spores are a perfect example on how just a single enemy ability can change the whole combat - I wished there were more battles like this that had an "ability theme". It's exactly the kind of "problem solving" that I miss in many of the other battles in the game. So ... basicly ... just give us more of those and tweak the tankyness and AI in the game and we have an fun and challenging tactical experience.

You know, I've always been supportive of your suggestions throughout the backer beta and I really appreciate all the work you did for the community. But reading this I can't but think that you're probably letting out your disappointment about a game design that clearly isn't in it's final stages. It's not all as bad as you think. Your largest critics are in the encounter design and NPCs, after all... nothing that an expansion can't fix, really. I see PoE more of a framework and a piece of established workflow, than a finished and completed product. Which is kind of the way game developement works nowadays. A possible expansion doesn't have to deal with actually developing a game engine anymore, which allows higher quality content to be created. Think of it like this: BG1 didn't really have interesting combat or interesting locations either. Most encounters were exactly the same type of copy & paste as they are in PoE. You battle wolves, bears, gnolls and ogres 90% of the time. The only interesting fights in BG1 were against the human parties and assassins. And mind you that those were rare. PoE showed exactly the same symptoms here: battles against monsters are forgettable, whereas human parties are interesting and fun (the Raedric battle was probably the perfect rolemodel for how epic battles in possible expansions could look like). It was the expansion material (Durlac's Tower) that really added the actual fun into BG1. BG2 had interesting battles right from the get go - but then again, we did not start at level 1 here. A truly epic story needs a buildup. BG2 pratically already had the past buildup of BG1. It's natural that encounter design in BG2 would be better as it could assume a wide selection of skills and abilities available right from the start (and a minimum character level) ... mind you that the level of characters in most of PoE combat could vary from level 4 to level 10 depending on when you visited those places. Also, there's one more thing that makes me positive about the quality of future content additions: If you enabled developer commentary, they will often explain which areas got designed first and which got designed almost at the end of the game developement. Those that were designed last usually had a much higher feel of quality to them (basicly, large parts of Act 1 were made last, whereas most stuff in Act 2 was designed early). I think all PoE combat needs to really improve the tactical aspect is: more enemy spellcasters. Those few fights against mages were pretty interesting. Especially those few that CC'ed or used stationary AoEs. The AI wouldn't even be a problem if there was something that could mess up my tank pretty badly if I won't move it away manually. A well-placed stinking cloud could do so much for the game...

If we play the "men benefit more than women" card, then why are men still forced into military service in plenty of industry nations across the globe (note: it was only 7 years ago that germany dismissed the law of civil defense service) and why do women mostly by default win courts about child custody? There's unequality on both sides, good and bad. Yes, men usually have more opportunities, nobody denies that, but equality also means looking at those cases where the status quo is in favour of women. And child custody is serious business. Far more important than inheritence.

Those with the loudest voices typically only want to hear the sound of their own voice.

Bump for visibility!

Vorschlag: "Normale Wirkungsradius-Effekte die Schaden bewirken, verletzen Verbündete nicht, wenn diese mit genügend Intellekt im äußeren Ring stehen." --> "Normale (negative) Wirkungsradius-Effekte betreffen Verbündete nicht, wenn diese im äußeren Ring stehen." Der Originalsatz impliziert, dass der Intellekt des Verbündeten in der Kalkulation eine Rolle spielt. Tut er aber nicht, es zählt nur der des Casters - außerdem gibts auch Items die den Radius erhöhen. Es ist eine sinnlose Zusatzinformation, die keinen zusätzlichen Erkenntnismehrwert hat. Wenn es gar keinen äußeren Ring gibt (weil der Intellekt-Wert zu niedrig ist), dann kann logischerweise auch kein Verbündeter drinstehen. Hier wird etwas erklärt, was keinerlei Erklärung bedarf. Zudem impliziert "Effekte die Schaden bewirken", dass das nur auf diese Zauber zutrifft. Es trifft aber auch auf alle anderen Zauber wie debuffs oder crowd-control Zauber zu. Daher lieber "negativ" benutzen.

Sorry, but you missed the point entirely. I was not denying gender-unequality in STEM. I was just pointing out how bad those "scientific" (heck, a sample size of 64 per gender... any serious scientist would laugh about the expected p-value ... I don't get how anyone can publish such "science" without being ashamed of himself) papers fail when making statistic and then put them out of context. There is a big gap between payment based in gender everywhere. It's not exclusive to STEM. Then again, here in germany, the gap in payment based on where I live is much larger than the gender-based gap. Yes, my female collegues get paid 10% less than I get. Does it bother me? Yes. Would I instantly support any argument that demands that woman should be paid equal? Definitely! Would I support a forced male-to-female quota in STEM fields? Definitely not, because it just supports the gender-prejudice it's trying to fight ("She was only hired because she is female"). Then again, my female collegues wouldn't support that either. It's just self-proclaimed women-rights activists that try to push this on their political agenda, while in reality, the rest of the world disagrees. Saying that stereotype gender roles are because of "men not accepting any woman in their men's club" is just stupid. You can support false gender equality all you want, but there are biological differences (and thus also preferences) between men and women that no cultural or society revolution will change. Saying that the choice of academics should be 50:50 and everything else is prejudice is just baseless. Guess what: there are almost no men in social fields, despite all nursery schools desperately looking for more men in this field. Also, again, engineering. There is zero entry requirement for mechanical engineering where I live. Everyone gets in. In fact, the average graduation ratio of women in this field is higher than that of men (almost 80% of women that start academics in engineering get a degrees; whereas only 60% of men do) and the average unemployment rates of women in said field are lower aswell. So where are all the women then? I'll tell you: in biology or lectureship. My daughter plays with LEGOs and plays computer games. She was never interested in dolls or anything that is typically considered "girly". And literally all her friends do the same. Why? Not because of gender expectations, but because LEGO and games are ****ing awesome. This doesn't change that she wants to be a teacher, not an engineer like her dad. And you know what? I'm totally cool with that. Why? Because I don't force my idea of society or what men and women should and shouldn't do upon others, like militant feminists do.

I'm judging this completely from a gameplay perspective: With the 4 major characterizing factors being: gender race attributes disposition ... I'm glad they went with the latter two primarily. It just isn't feasable to account for all four. The amount of required extra-dialogue would skyrocket to absurdity. Attributes and disposition make for brilliant RP-possibilities. And while I feel there could be more dialogue based on race and gender, I think it's better that they concentrated on attributes and disposition instead, simply because those two choices matter more gameplay-wise. Of all races, I think Orlans get the most flavour dialogue. And that is fine with me, considering elves and dwarves are mostly commoners in the game and nobody would really blink an eye (and you definitely don't want to upset a shark-person ...). For that matter, I wish they had excluded godlikes from the selectable player races. It certainly breaks immersion to be able to create a party of 6 godlines when godlikes were clearly meant to be rare. I get that they were trying to add something cool to the game with godlikes, but I think in the end it was more trouble than what it's worth.

... which entirely ignores gender-based preferences of the research field based on their interests. Seriously, I'm a mechanical engineer. In the first semester of ME, only 5% of the students were female. How are you going to put more females in STEM positions if they literally don't exist in the first place? A 50:50 quota for females in mechanical engineering would mean that 90% of graduate male engineers would be unemployed. And saying that female students match or overperform their male counterparts is equally as sexist as saying the opposite. I prefer to see men and women as equal in their performance, not one clearly superior to the other. You can't just compare the male-to-female worker ratio in academic positions without comparing it to the number of students in the first place.

This is definitely part of the problem aswell. Certain classes are certainly overpowered due to some mechanics, whereas others are significantly weaker. Prime example: Wizards vs. Chanters vs. Ciphers. Due to the focus mechanic, ciphers are way stronger than the other two. Chanters are basicly just auto-attackers with some slight buffing potential until they accumulated 3 stacks (which usually doesn't happen until the critical part of the battle is over). Wizards have huge disadvantages over the other two: restricted spell uses per rest, restricted spell selection through the spellbook mechanic, weaker stat gains, lots and lots of friendly-fire spells (most cipher and chanter abilities are foe-only!). Ciphers are imho the single most powerful class in the game. If I were to play a game with 6-of-a-kind just for fun, I'd probably take cipher and steamroll everything. It's ridicolous how strong Grieving Mother is, even with her absolutely terrible attribute selection. Other than that, I'd like to copy & paste something I already posted in another thread: --> adjust the XP curve beyond level 7 slightly upwards towards exponential progression (I'd say change the 66.000 XP total to reach max level to 85.000 XP total). --> drastically reduce bounty rewards ... those are just way overtuned. --> reduce trap disarm XP by at least 30%. This is heavily overtuned anyway. You get almost 1000 XP from traps in Raedrics Hold alone. The quest XP reward is only twice that! --> increase accuracy values of all hard mode enemies in act 2 by 5 and act 3 by 10. This will also affect PotD, so that's a pretty elegant solution in combination with... --> ...a rebalancing of all defensive talents granting deflection. Tune down the deflection bonuses awarded by those talents by at least 30%. Because of the way deflection works, the bonuses are way too large (You can get a flat +30 deflection bonus through talents alone! ... this means all crits get converted to hits and all hits get converted to graces... this is just way too much impact). This will also help to reduce the enormous deflection gap between tanks and non-tanks. --> nerf shields and shield enchants. Seriously, they just got way too much deflection on them, especially when enchanted. Again, a difference of 30 deflection means that all attacks against this target get reduced by one damage tier. Deflection is just way too easy to stack with the current OP shields in the game. 16 base deflection on large shields? --> change Constitution to reduce the recovery penalty of armors. This will also help a lot to reduce the gap between tanks and non-tanks, by allowing casters to wear light and medium armor without too much penalty in DPS. --> nerf constant recovery. Seriously, this ability is just way too strong. Fighters should be at least comparable to monks and paladins in terms of tanking capability. Due to the way endurance works, constant recovery is just overpowered. All these fixes together should greatly help to fix the balancing of the game. All those are number changes, so wouldn't be hard to implement imho.

See? And that exactly is your problem: You state everything as a fact and simply refuse to accept other oppinions on this. The limerick didn't even mention a trans-person at all. In fact, it is much more likely that both persons in this limerick were just alcoholized and just didn't notice that the other one was a (heterosexual, possibly white) man ... you know ... stuff like that happens. I'd even go as far to say that this situations happens more frequently than actually hitting on a transgender person without knowing, considering the low percentage of trans people.