Zwiebelchen

I don't see any sentence in my post that was disrespectful. If it looks to you like that, then I'd say this was "lost in translation", as they say. English is not my first language. And I didn't contradict my own argument. A half-sentence is a half-sentence. Put the second half away and you lose the critical bit. This is the fine and delicate difference between reading and understanding. In this example and my response, the clear focal point is on worshipping, not on created by the people. I explained how that causality is different and why it matters here. It's the chicken and egg problem. Gods in PoE are not about faith. They are about control. This is completely different to the Discworld universe, where gods are basicly at the mercy of their followers. I like where this is going. Keep it coming! 1) Adra was explained poorly throughout the game, I agree on that. From what I could extract out of the game context and the very few mentions of Adra, it seems like Adra is nothing but a "conduit" and "storage room" for souls. 2) I think it wasn't clearly mentioned that the Engwithians themselves merged into the gods. They could have also just tried perfectioning their creations from the outside. Which makes a lot of sense, considering that the gods are not physical matter to begin with and they couldn't manipulate the soul machine after merging themselves with the gods. 3) This is more or less confirmed by the Godhammer and Waidwen's death, yes. 4) They succeeded, yes, but if they intended the direction they got in the end is questionable. Looks to my like the Engwithians were kind of the greek philosophers of Eora. I think they initially designed it with a more "perfectionist" view. 5) Wael always wins. For if there wouldn't be a mystery, there wouldn't be a story. So Wael can more or less only lose off-screen. Unless we consider solving a riddle a loss for Wael. You know what would make Wael sad? Watching a season of Detective Conan... :D

Central european? What does that even mean? German accent? Swiss accent? As a german, I can tell you that germans talking english sound just horrible. And if you go farther east, poland, czech, then you'll instantly go back to russian language territory. Most people won't be able to tell the difference between polish and russian accent. Balkan accents don't have that north pole vibe either. Maybe some icelandic accent could do ... fits the theme, at least: http://www.soundboard.com/sb/icelandic_accent_sound

I think the amount of attacks happening is based on the security level? In that case, there should be some "secure downtime" after defeating a group of enemies, so that you can't "break" the game by not having enough security at one point of the game, getting stuck in a loop.

More like: moral of the story - enemies having endless spells is bull****.

No they can't. You aren't overlevelled by the time you leave Defiance Bay. Look at the diagram in the TO. I was about level 7/8 when I completed Def Bay, which I consider intentional, due to chapter 3 and 4 being rather short. Also, I didn't finish the game much later than when I hit max level. The XP is properly balanced now. The encounters are not.

Believe me, if you can do nothing but defend the stronghold for three real time hours straight, the fun part kind of wears off. Most attacks give you a 5 day time frame to respond. I don't see how that can keep you occupied in your game where resting takes 8 hours and travelling 24 hours?

The situation we have in PoE is absolutely and fundamentally different to the Discworld franchise. If you think they are similar, then you didn't understand either of the sides. In discworld, faith is what makes, creates and maintains the power of gods (or any other non-godly entity, like the tooth fairy or Death). In PoE, gods were created by men through engwithian machines. Neither to they draw power from faith or followers, nor can they vanish without followers. They are quite literally just huge stockpiles of souls. They are mechanical and "physical" (as in: they actually exist somewhere on Eora, not in the way that they have a physical body). So your conclusion is basicly the complete opposite of what we have in PoE: Gods were created by people for very worldly reasons. The worshippers came afterwards. The causality is reversed.

I don't agree that Sagani should have an accent. Actually, I think she's kind of special in the way that she doesn't have an accent or a weird way of talking, as all the other characters have. And what accent would suit someone who comes from the Eora equivalent of the north pole? Skandinavian accent? Well, duh, skandinavians aren't particulary known for actually having an accent that carries over to the english language. Scottish? Sorry, but I'm sick of all the scottish accents in games and movies. Heavily overused. Canadian? I couldn't take her seriously then. Russian? Sorry, again, overused. Especially in the BG games. And it would feel weird to get reminded of Minsc and Edwin when talking to Sagani. British? I beg your pardon? There is not really any popular accent in this world that just oozes that "north pole" vibe and is destinct enough. And you might have some trouble finding a voice actor that can do the inuit accent. Maybe that's just me, but for me, inuit or north/south pole people don't really have any accent that would work well with the english language. Also, since when does a character desperately need an accent to be likeable? I know I liked Katara and Sokka in The Last Airbender. Both fully accent-free. Both from the south pole.

I agree with this. As stated, flat DR is hard to balance and easily leads to boring situations if you make optimal choices. Fast weapons being next to useless against meaningful enemies, plated tanks being pretty much completely immune to hordes and so on. Pure % DR is even worse as it makes all weapon type choices irrelevant like many of you already said, but a combination of those lets weapon type be meaningful while also dodging the annoying edge cases of flat DR system. The problem of fast weapons being bad vs. all the cool enemies could be partly solved even with the current system by giving some of the tough enemies larger health pools with low DR. But we have both percentage and flat modifiers. Percentage = deflection Flat modifiers = DR The system works exactly as you described. The second part of your post is actually the critical aspect here: What we need are more varied encounter designs, not a change to the game system.

I now just finished act 2 on my second PotD playthrough. This time, the party composition is: PC - tank/melee wizard Pallegina - Paladin tank, then specced over to DPS with rising level Sagani - Ranger with Warbow GM - with the sick Hunting Bow from Od Nua level 5 A custom priest Kana - specced as whatever, because on chanters the spec literally doesn't matter ... And I got to say that this playthrough was way easier than the first for the first two acts, despite one and a half dead-weight character in board (Pallegina should rather lay eggs than go out adventuring... and Kana is a chanter. Chanters suck.). Might be meta game knowledge, but I doubt that. It's not like you desperately need any metagame knowledge at all with all the copy and paste encounters. I'm playing a little different with this party as I did with the last. I have to rest a little bit more often due to the nature of tank wizards, but I always try to keep it within the limits of the limited resting supplies for fairness. I never go back to an inn to restock before finishing a dungeon or zone completely. This probably shows that one or two good characters can totally make or break the difficulty in the game. It almost feels like having Sagani, GM and a tank wizard in the same party is cheating. And seeing the insane accuracy and crits on Sagani, I really wonder how anyone could ever think that Rangers are underpowered.

From your link, second sentence or something It seems you do not understand what they did, namely making item stats more manageable, which has nothing to do with point based system in general or with integer dr in particular. The reason for that is again scaling so it wouldnt be possible to eqiup 100 junk items with 1% evasion and become 100% immune to damage. In a way in Wow, they removed point based system, so it wouldnt be possible to stack them, so exactly the opposite of what you are saying. The problem with evasion is it doesnt prevent spike damage, so bg2 it was possible to get 95% evasion, and it was pretty pointless, because alternative ways offered better protection w/o sacrifices. And in general evasion tanks are the weakest in all games. You took that sentence completely out of context and drawed the wrong conclusion out of it. And no, it isn't percentage based. It's integer based, as it compares your rating with the rating of enemies, instead of applying only the raw percentage that you had on items regardless of comparison. Old system: A level 10 Item had for example 23 DPS +1% block. A level 60 item had for example 69 DPS +1% block. New system: The same level 10 Item had for example 23 DPS 4 block rating. The same level 60 Item had for example: 69 DPS 20 block rating. Note that 1% of block wasn't converted into 4 block rating in both situations? It actually is roughly 5 times higher at level 60, yet still only blocks 1%. The block rating is a mysterical thing in that you can't really convert it into a flat percentage. It's based not only on the difference in levels, but also on a complicated diminishing returns calculation. All this was done to make sure that your equipment doesn't suffer from power creep and that the item treadmill could basicly go endlessly without powercreep. That 12 block rating translates into a lower block percentage the higher you go in levels, giving you a feeling of inverse progression: instead of getting stronger, you actually become weaker with going up a level - as long as enemies also go up a level. This is classic behaviour of integer based damage mitigation systems. A 12 block rating at level 10 is easily 4% of block chance. A 12 block rating at level 60, however, is less than 1%. So, no, the system is not percentage based. Not by definition. It's a linearized formula in that it changes with level. And this is what the quoted sentence was implying. You seemed completely in denial that WoW ever had a flat percentage system. I linked this to show you that you were wrong. And yet you still insist it's not even true? The wiki article even mentions the exact same reason I've been explaining the entire time.

I got kind of the opposite experience in my last game: Only 3 attacks total. And I wished there were more, because I found fighting with the NPCs pretty fun. It was the only situation in which I felt my choices on the stronghold actually matter (selecting the NPC guards). Unfortunately, it seems like the variety of attacking groups is very low. Of those 3 encounters, 2 were troll groups and 1 was a group of bandits.

Great idea from a narrative perspective. But from a gameplay perspective next to impossible to pull off. Losing ones mind means losing ones grip on reality, getting a different insance perspective. That would mean to constrain the player character with certain dialogue and gameplay options no longer being available and being replaced by others. More passionate maybe, maybe more cruel and certainly more aggressive. Every other approach would just be another half baked attempt. I would role with that, if there's a chance to redeem the character, but many others wouldn't. I was more thinking of adding subtle elements outside of the actual gameplay. Remember all those scripted mini-encounters with Thaos where he questions you about your past life? Why not make mini-encounters with a mirror image of yourself, where you basicly confront a PC that gives you ideas based on opposing reputations and a sort of "what could have been had you decided different" view? Not hard to code, imho; just a little bit of extra writing. Basicly, a clever deviation of the age old "talking to the devil and angel on your shoulder" thing when a big decision is presented to you. And what about visions/dreams? The early game has those (2, to be exact; one at the first encounter with Thaos, the second one at the Inn in Gilded Vale). Why not expand on that like in the BG games? It's weird that at first you are haunted with visions and then after going to that tree, those visions suddenly stop. Plus, it would be a perfect opportunity to add more of those text adventure intermissions. There are way too few of them anyway.

Definitely. CON is dead weight on almost all characters (even tanks). No real reason to go beyond 10 imho. Invest those points into DEX or MGT to improve his weapon and scroll damage.

Yeah I also had that bug yesterday. The damage stopped and the visual SFX vanished, but the debuff remained. But only on the PC. Seems like this bug is not 100% fixed yet or got re-introduced.

I like the rule proposed in one of these posts and I think that should be the general idea behind all rebalancing propositions: Casting the highest level invocation at max level should take exactly as much time as casting the lowest level invocation at level 1, as average encounter length does not scale with level. This is the underlying problem that we are trying to fix. And this should imho be adressed in all suggestions. Suggestions for achieving that design philosophy have been plenty already. I'll try to list those that I feel would be most effective in solving the problem with minimal coding involved: A) Have chanters start with a fixed amount of chant stacks depending on level: Level 1: 0 stacks Level 5: 1 stack Level 9: 2 stacks Result: Fixes the initial premise, however, does not adress the problem that you can build up stacks faster with low level chants. B) Have chanters gain more chant stacks depending on the chant level: Level 1 chant: 1 stacks Level 2 chant: 2 stacks Level 3 chant: 3 stacks Result: Fixes the initial premise, however, would result in a bias in favor for higher level chants, as they get more stacks/second. C) Decrease Invocation costs with level: Level 1: level 1 invocation: 3 Level 5: level 1 invocation: 2 - level 2 invocation: 3 Level 9: level 1 invocation: 1 - level 2 invocation: 2 - level 3 invocation: 3 Result: Fixes the initial premise, however, doesn't solve the problem that low level chants build up stacks faster. 1) Shift the duration of chants with progressing level more towards linger time: Level 1: first level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration Level 5: first level chants: 3 duration, 5 linger duration - second level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration. Level 9: first level chants: 2 duration, 6 linger duration - second level chants: 3 duration, 5 linger duration - third level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration. Result: Elegantly fixes the problem that higher level chants have a longer duration, without making lower level chants insignificant. However, would allow building up stacks insanely fast by using only first level chant. Also, doesn't allow extending the system beyond level 12 in future expansions. 2) Normalize all chant durations and invocation costs, but increase linger duration of lower level chants with progressing level: Level 1: first level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration Level 5: first level chants: 4 duration, 6 linger duration - second level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration. Level 9: first level chants: 4 duration, 8 linger duration - second level chants: 4 duration, 6 linger duration - third level chants: 4 duration, 4 linger duration. Result: Elegantly fixes the problem that higher level chants have a longer duration, without making lower level chants insignificant. Adresses the problem of building up stacks insanely fast by using only first level chants. Allows extending the system beyond level 12 in future expansions. However, no more incentive in using lower level Invocations. A) and 2) combined would imho be most effective. A) and 1) combined also work good together, but cause issues that you are able to use level 1 invocations almost instantly and gain chant stacks extremely fast with level 1 chants. B) would be a standalone solution, which however would greatly devalue lower level chants. C) and 1) would be insanely OP and probably a terrible solution. C) and 2) however seems to have no obvious drawbacks and looks like the idea solution to me. You could say that a 1 phrase cost first level invocation might be OP, but due to the fact that you can't have more than one summon anyway and that most non-summon invocations are pretty terrible, I think this is fine.

Do you know of any (recent) game where the story was not average off the stock material? Games are not the next great novel and I've got no real problem if the story feels rather seen before. The question for me is rather, how deeply you as the player, are immersed in any given story. I didn't have access to the old games of the genre, since I was on a mac back then and companies didn't port their games to mac systems in the days, but of all the games I played, I never found a story that awed me for it's originality. To be honest, I wasn't disappointed in the story at all. I liked the whole souls theme and the hollowborn crisis and even the solution. It was more how the narrative was presented to the player that was the problem. The pacing significantly drops after the first act and then picks up at the third act again. The second act felt more like a continued exposition to me when the game didn't even need any more exposition. Basicly, between leaving the tutorial region and entering twin elms, not much happens in terms of story progression. Which is kinda odd, considering that all the twist stuff that comes in act 4 could have easily been added to act 2 instead. Also, I felt like that whole insanity thing for the watcher didn't play out very well. I never really felt like I was getting more and more insane throughout the game. I never felt an initial threat for the life of my PC. In Baldur's Gate, you had the progressing awakening through getting access to bhaalspawn powers (and eventually, the slayer transformation). Granted, you also gain more abilities in PoE, but it didn't feel the same to me, as there was no connection to dreams, visions or anything indicating why I just got that ability. I think they should have added more narrative elements supporting the claim that the PC gets more and more insane with every day here and there. Maybe in the form of dreams or cinematics, or simply by starting to talk to yourself in certain situations. I never felt like I was becoming more and more like Maerwald. Which was odd, considering that Maerwald pretty much exactly defined what would happen to the PC and that that could have been easily delivered to the player.

As long as the Something Awful and badgame forums support the mechanic (which they do) it will not be removed. Those are Sawyer's home forums and the mechanic was designed for their preferences. I also never thought that disengagement was a bad idea in general. I mean; it makes sense that you get hit hard if you turn your back to an enemy, right? A redesign to be a little less restrictive would already go a long way. Allowing repositioning without disengagement and ways to escape without disengaging.

If this is true, then I am pretty much amazed by how the Codex works. You get one review for venting butthurt and one review for venting the butthurt of people who are butthurt over the previous review. Where is the actual review? Will there be any? You get the actual review by taking both reviews together and building the middleground on every oppinion. As always. So if one person says that the attribute system was crap and another person says that it's great, then it's average in reality.

Believe me, I can understand your frustration very well... But this is basicly what you're up to when supporting a kickstarter campaign. You take all risk, knowing that you do not get your money's worth of stuff out of it. Ever. Because that's not what kickstarter is for. It's about supporting an idea and helping it become a reality. And it did. Be happy that most of your money went into the production of the game, not into the production of additional goodies. Thanks to guys like you, this game has actually become a reality. Tell your disappointment the thousands of people out there that supported games and products that never actually saw the light of day and never saw a refund. The bottom line is: It could have been worse. Really. You didn't like the game; which is fine. But at least you got an actual game.

1) WoW was percentage based in vanilla. Gear could for example have +2% evasion on their stats. Also, it does suffer from power creep. I gave valid examples and arguments for it. You can't just say "no it doesn't" and then provide no real argument about why you think so. 2) You missed the point. Or the definition of power creep for that matter. And no, those cases are not comparable. To overcome DT completely, I just need twice as much damage. To overcome a 95% DR, I need 20 times as much damage. I think anyone can see the problem with this. DT vs. damage is a linear progression, while DR vs damage is exponential. Exponential systems don't scale very well. 3) Percentage is percentage, no matter how you use them. You can't extend a percentage based system endlessly without eventually running into power creep for all the reasons mentioned above. 4) You see, the problem is that we have a general disagreement here: I feel that uneven results are desirable, as it creates clear purpose for different weapon types. Not all weapons are created equal and that is what makes this game interesting. I'm sick of all the "which weapon do you want to use? Ahh... doesn't matter, both the dagger and the greatsword have 100 DPS" MMO bull. WOW isnt percentage based. It is, and has always been, using formulas. It shows you dont understand what a percentage based system is. You obviously refuse to read my posts or actually look up the facts. Which makes all further discussion pointless. But just because you insist on telling me that I'm wrong, even though I have been playing WoW since Vanilla beta, I looked up the patch that changed percentage modifiers to the rating system we have nowadays. And guess what; turns out the reason for that was power creep. Who would have known? http://wow.gamepedia.com/Combat_rating_system EDIT: Since you've edited your post, here's my response to that: Your examples are a matter of taste. A lot of people (including me) like exactly this behaviour about the game. And to prevent becoming immune to small attacks is why we have a DR bypass stat. But let's just take the dragon example you provided to show you another reason why a percentage based system is flawed: A dragon dealing 100 damage was deliberately designed to deal that damage. If it was not meant to deal that much damage, the devs would have just given it less damage. If it was meant to deal only 20 damage to a tank; the devs could have just changed the initial damage number with the average gear DT score for an equipped tank of appropriate level. If an appropriate tank given a percentage based DR system would have a 50% DR and barely survive an attack with 100 base damage, that would mean that a caster with zero DR (due to wearing cloth), would take twice as much damage and pretty much die instantly, whereas a difference of 10 DT on a point based system just increases damage by 10 for an unarmored character. Which is way less dramatic. A point-based progression allows much better fine-tuning and balancing of encounters, as you can make sure that the difference between tanks and non-tanks for lethal attacks is not completely lopsided towards the tank. And besides; PoE actually has a percentage based (but still linear, due to stat and counterstat resolution) damage mitigation mechanic: Deflection and Defense scores. So it's actually mixing up the best of both worlds.

1) WoW was percentage based in vanilla. Gear could for example have +2% evasion on their stats. Also, it does suffer from power creep. I gave valid examples and arguments for it. You can't just say "no it doesn't" and then provide no real counter argument. 2) You missed the point. Or the definition of power creep for that matter. And no, those cases are not comparable. To overcome DT completely, I just need twice as much damage. To overcome a 95% DR completely, I need 20 times as much damage. I think anyone can see the problem with this. DT vs. damage is a linear progression, while DR vs damage is exponential. Exponential systems don't scale very well. 3) Percentage is percentage, no matter how you use them. You can't extend a percentage based system endlessly without eventually running into power creep for all the reasons mentioned above. 4) You see, the problem is that we have a general disagreement here: I feel that uneven results are desirable, as it creates clear purpose for different weapon types. Not all weapons are created equal and that is what makes this game interesting. I'm sick of all the "which weapon do you want to use? Ahh... doesn't matter, both the dagger and the greatsword have 100 DPS" MMO bull.

If you do the maths, you will notice that there is no difference between those two possibilities you mentioned. The result is the same. I don't think that's right in all cases. Let's say my accuracy is so high against some enemy that I graze on anything between 1 and 5 (so over 5 is a hit and so on). If we now add a "10%" graze to hit mechanism to that, it will do one of the following: A) Adjust the range by 10, which would eliminate grazes entirely B) Proc a 10% chance of conversion when you roll a 5 or less, which is of course much worse You're right, I haven't thought of that possibility. But it's neither A) or B). It's as described above.

If you do the maths, you will notice that there is no difference between those two possibilities you mentioned. The result is the same. It works like this: Accuracy + d100 - deflection = X X: 0-14: miss 15-50: graze 51-100: hit >100: crit So basicly a 30% graze to hit bonus shifts the turnover point by 11 points [35*30%/100% = 10.5 rounded to 11] and will change it to this: 0-14: miss 15-39: graze 40-100: hit >100: crit. So it's basicly equal to 11 points in accuracy. But only within the graze range. Outside of that, it has no effect. Which is why the 1H talent is so weak, since you rarely graze with 1H weapons. Btw, a 30% hit to crit bonus would come to this [50*30%/100% = 15]: 0-14: miss 15-50: graze 50-85: hit >85: crit. So this is actually worth 15 accuracy within hit range. Which is why most hit-to-crit bonuses are smaller than the graze-to-hit bonuses - most of them have only a 20% bonus, which coincidently also equals 10 accuracy.

Intelligence affects the size of the beam.