Zwiebelchen

I a game where you don't get kill XP from humanoids, whats the point in killing everyone? The cheap trash loot? Most of the time, you will actually cut you off from some quest XP by just murdering everyone.

The robes will only "protect" you on the second floor. on any other floor, you will be attacked, even with the robes on. If you have trouble stealthing around the guards, better use the sewers entry. It will also bring you to the priest quarters where you can pick up a sixpack of robes.

I used the strategy window in DA:O, but it still needed constant management, since if you ordered any character to down a healing potion when falling under a certain percentage of health, they often froze in that animation, since constant hits and the cooldown period prevented them from carrying out the order. Also the switch weapon command often resulted in an equip/unequip loop, since conditions were changing that rapidly. But it rendered the character useless, since it never really attacked or defended. Where it really did shine where orders like protect PC Y if surrounded by enemies and stuff like that. But DA:O was far more forgiving concerning disengagement than POE is. I think engagement actually makes AI scripting ala DA:O easier, not harder. Just let disengagement be a thing that the player has to order manually and you're done. I'd say it could look something like this [red marked parts are drop-down choices]: Conditions (you can check one or more) [ ] Endurance over/below X% [ ] Health over/below X% [ ] Health equals endurance [ ] Suffers from Status effect [ ] More/less than X Enemies within Y range [ ] Engaged by X or more/less enemies [ ] Damage resistance of current target is lower/greater than X for currently selected weapon [ ] Endurance of a party member is over/below X% [ ] Health of a party member is over/below X% [ ] Health of a party member equals endurance Actions (these can be queued up multiple times): [ ] Cancel all current orders after current action finishes / immediately [ ] Use ability on: current target / target with lowest endurance within range / target with highest endurance within range / target with status effect / target without status effect / ... [ ] Switch to weapon set [ ] Move towards party member [ ] Attack: current target / target with lowest endurance within range / target with highest endurance within range / target with status effect / target without status effect / ... [ ]... You get the idea. The cool part: devs could practically use the same engine to define scripts for enemies aswell. Especially the "under status effect" condition would be really cool to for example have enemies that use the second level priest spell that suppresses status effects (suppress affliction or whatever it's called ... you know, the one that cancels the annoying insect swarm) or uses abilities intelligently.

Awesome! Ich bin immer wieder erstaunt wie ihr Leute es schafft mit der Korrektur im Content weiter zu sein als ich mit dem Spielen...

There are some locations which actually change their appearance after the player is done with them; the Lighthouse is one of those zones. But I agree that there should be way more of this stuff. Because it's awesome. It's actually quite interesting to see how many zones in this game have literally no interactivity. The beautiful coastal cliff zone south of Defiance Bay is a prime example for this. It has only two minor quests and that's it. I can't believe how much effort they put into designing the landscape and then ended up not using it at all.

I don't get why most people feel that on the sliding scale of "What you see is what you get" and "What you see is totally unrelated to what you get" there is no halfway-through that could be the perfect solution for an RPG. For some weird reason, RPG producers tend to think that the choice of loot systems is binary. It's not. What I actually regard as the perfect solution for a game like PoE is what I call "filtered loot". It's practically inbetween both extremes: You get exactly what the mob is using, minus filtered-out trash loot that nobody cares about. In reality, this would work like this: When fighting a group of 6 Xaurips and a Xaurip Chieftain, you will always get the unique loot of the Chieftain, but you will only get one non-magical Xaurip Spear and Xaurip Shield on top (compared to 6 spears and shields with the current loot system). In the grand scheme of things, a system like that would work on the principle of "no duplicates". Which means that every item will only drop once per encounter. This would still generate enough trash loot to sell for those that enjoy selling loot to vendors, but will also significantly reduce the spam of pointless items aswell. Plus, it wouldn't be frustrating for guys that enjoy WYSIWYG loot, as you will always get that cool blade from the boss you killed, no questions asked.

They were not building it from scratch for that difficulty though, they were working with what was already there and then upping the difficulty. And it still doesn't disprove my point that they cannot know what order you will do the quests in or what quantity of the quests you will take up, and just making it stupidly hard that it would actually be impossible will result in people complaining about it, no matter what you personally may want. You're basically asking for level scaling for PotD. It's not about making it "stupidly hard". Not at all. It's about preserving the difficulty curve from the beginning of the game to carry over to the endgame. There is nothing wrong with making zones that have level appropriate challenges even when you hit them way before their designated levels. BG2 also had this. Several dungeons in the game could practically be done after leaving Irenicus dungeon, yet they simply weren't all on the same level. Planar sphere, for example, had much harder battles than the Trademeet grove. De-Arnise Hold was pretty easy otoh. Nobody complained about that. As long as the warning signs are there, it's cool to make it higher level. There is nothing stopping you from leveling up in other zones first, after all. And there is always the option to add optional side content that is higher level. Again, the beginning of the game does this perfectly: The temple of Eothas practically serves as a "you know, you can always come back later" dungeon. It's amazing, as it made players all over the world go "No, **** you! I can do this on level 3!". Or the bear cave and wolves on the road to Gilded Vale when you're alone. Warning signs all over the place. The NPC literally tells you that you shouldn't go in there alone. You can decide to try anyway, but it wasn't designed for this. I'm fine with Dyrford being on the same level as Defiance Bay difficulty wise - if it had optional content to entertain higher level parties. And again, there is no excuse for the low difficulty in Twin Elms, as this zone is chapter-gated. I'd also like to add the following: the difficulty drop starting on Dyrford wasn't just a gradual drop off due to the rising character level. It was a pretty much bottomless free-fall. Except for heritage hill, almost all of Defiance Bay content felt "right". Dyrford, on the other hand wasn't just "a little easier in comparison"; it was literally like a switch was flipped from "use all resources" towards "blazing through via auto-attacking". This is not just about being overlevelled. There definitely is a fundamental flaw in the encounter design here.

This would make characters with low constitution and low endurance/health gain per level virtually being insta-killed. Sorry, but no. The last thing we want is more insta-gibbing of squishies. The solution for CON is simple: add another benefit to CON beside the health and endurance bonus. All stats have both a defensive and an offensive effect. And while PER and RES affecting interrupts are somewhat less important than the other stats, at least they offer something for everyone. CON is literally the only attribute that is a dump-stat for everyone. Again, recovery time of armors. It makes sense!

I agree. Ability queue scripting in DA:O was the single best feature of the game. If anything, Obsidian should think about implementing this. It fixes a lot of the tedious micro-managing and nobody could ever complain about PCs not responding in a fashion they don't want. Because it's up to the player to define the conditions and responses.

This. Smart AI is actually not even needed for a game that is about tactical combat. Smart AI makes battles too unpredictable, which limits tactical choices of players. In order to create a tactical challenge, you need an AI that is in no way acting random or unpredictable. The IE games had satisfying tactical combat despite it's dumb AI. This was achieved by clever encounter design. Pre-defined spell casting cycles were designed in a fashion that they were devestating if you didn't respond to them in time. Better AI would only do one thing: preventing players from cheesing too much. But cheesing isn't the problem. I play my games without cheesy tactics as I enjoy the challenge. It's a single player game, after all. There is no competition. If people like to cheese to feel powerful, more power to them, but preventing cheesy play should never be the main focus in encounter design. Rather, it should be to provide an interesting challenge for players that cheese exactly the amount they see fit for the game. You misunderstood the point of this thread. This is not about how the game was too easy on PotD. It wasn't. It was that the later content in this game is heavily undertuned, no matter what difficulty level was selected. The game has a heavily frontloaded difficulty curve, as is represented in my graph. Until Defiance Bay, it feels totally "right". It's post-Defiance Bay content that is the problem. Due to the way the different difficulty levels in the game are constructed, the devs have all the tools to fix this problem without creating an unwanted backlash towards the casual crowd playing on "easy" or "medium". After all, if "hard" suddenly becomes too difficult for you, you can always drop the difficulty back to "medium". If PotD is not hard enough for me, unfortunately I have no option to increase it further (without artifically gimping my group). And again: the difficulty levels are not fundamentally wrong. It works great for 60% of the game. It's only the remaining 40% that I am criticizing. Hard and PotD are meant for veterans that enjoy the challenge. Both difficulty modes are not meant for casual players per se. According to the ingame description of these difficulty levels, they require the use of item resources and a more "completionist" playthrough, doing way more sidequests that you would in an easy or medium game. PotD, imho, is meant for full-completionists, meaning you skip almost none of the sidequests. This can be easily achieved by adjusting the "hard" difficulty creature sets. PotD combines all creature sets into one, which means that PotD is also affected by changes made for "hard" difficulty. And while I agree that Defiance Bay and Dyrford might be a problem to balance due to the non-linearity of the game, there is absolutely no excuse for why Twin-Elms content is so easy on Hard or PotD difficulty, considering that the expected level range for these areas at hard and beyond is set to level 10+ (remember: hard and PotD, by definition, should require a good deal of side-quests to complete before progressing the story). You should re-read my post then. Not only did I only do the first set of bounties, skipping the others, but I also did them post-1.05, when the XP for bounties was reduced. Also, when you check out the graph, you will notice I was not overleveled by the time I hit Dyrford/Twin Elms.

This thread is awesome. I definitely want more Avellone content for the expansion. I hope we will see mind dungeons in expansion or sequel content. Or at least for the "read soul" situations to use the scripted intermission events with the neat drawings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=WYSIWYG Yes why on earth would you want to actually converse with other humans about things that are posted on a forum when you can just avoid conversation all together and type into google - because you know interaction with others of your species is just so outdated today when we have the internet at our disposal - smh Yeah, because looking up an acronym you don't know is an absolutely terrible lifechoice... Yeah but the point is it IS a choice and not one you should be demeaned for if you choose to ask the real people who may have used it instead. Sorry, but I don't see any value in a discussion about acronyms when the topic is clearly about something else. Googling an acronym takes 3 seconds. Waiting for a response takes a day.

That's about the level I was when I reached it and done the quests. Just like Raedric's hold, I did it right after Gilded Vale at level 3 or 4 I think, on Hard. I'm quite happy that I managed to beat him without pulling or retreating, like it was "supposed" to be; I did end up with only two or one people alive, if I remember correctly. I guess that's the problem with (semi) open world, since you can do everything when you want, if you go to a location that was designed for a level lower than your actual level, it may be problematic... To be clear, I do not blame you for coming back later, but it's not an easy task to balance everything. I guess level scaling is probably the least bad idea While I agree that the missing level scaling definitely is an issue here, it doesn't really apply here, because we are talking PotD difficulty, which was meant for completionists and min/maxers. Rushers that reach Dyrford as low as level 5 always have the option to pull on the difficulty slider if the content is too hard for them. But we are talking the highest possible difficulty level here. I can't "turn it up to eleven" when there's no option to do so. The tools to fix this issue are there: we have different encounter designs depending on the selected difficulty level. Literally all this game needs is adjusted encounter designs in Dyrford and Twin Elms for the encounter sets at "hard" difficulty. "Easy" and "Medium" can stay the way they are. Adjusting the "Hard" sets will automaticly apply to PotD aswell, so it elegantly fixes two problems at the same time.

You got to hand it to luzarius: he knows how to properly derail a thread.

I agree with some of the earlier fights being difficulty spikes. I was a little surprised at how many Boars/Wolves I was facing at Magran's Fork. Ended up taking a good deal more damage than expected for a 4-person party. Took quite some damage as well to get through the room of Skuldrs and the 4 Will of Wisps in Temple of Eothas. The Shadows were not too difficult but the Shades were irritating with their ranged attacks and summons. Found them harder to deal with in Caed Nua, facing a good number of them on open ground with no choke point. Maerwald wasn't too difficult, though he probably made it easier for me by casting Chill Fog on his Blights. Yes that happened Spread out to prevent getting AoEd, focussed/disabled him and he went down quite fast. Raedric's Hold was difficult, especially the last battle. I'm glad I did Defiance Bay first before going back for it. With a 4 or 5-person party at level 4, I very much doubt if I would have made it, or at least would have required a ton of rests.Not the most natural course of action to pursue though in a first game. Ondra's Gift lighthouse is brutal at the level it is thrown at you. Other challenging fights at Defiance Bay include the one against the Forgotten, Leyra/Missing Sentries, etc. I was thinking Helig should be a tough encounter. He was a pushover though Od Nua levels 3-4 for me were a good deal easier than level 2 (mostly slow, kiteable enemies or situations where you can pull one at a time). I cleared L2 halfway, went down to have a look and am glad I did. Haven't done the Drake at level 5 yet, he looks scary. I'm not quite at L9 yet but I'm wondering if the difficulty drop that you experienced at Dyrford may be partially due to casters getting a very significant boost at L9 (being able to cast L1 spells every encounter, as Chill Fog and Fan of Flames spam would put a dent on massed mobs fast) and you did list having 3 casters in your party (Aloth, Hiravius, Durance). The difficulty drop at level 9 is not due to the first level spells becoming per-encounter. I rarely even used the first level spells for all encounters post Dyrford. The problem is not that the general difficulty of the game is too low. In fact, everything until defiance bay feels perfectly balanced. I made this graph to demonstrate how the difficulty problems are more related to undertuned encounters on a per-region basis. Basicly, it feels like Twin Elms and Dyrford Village were initially designed to be mid-level zones, then changed to be endgame content at a later point of developement, but weren't adjusted for the increased character level. Leveling is king in PoE. Remember that each character level offsets your accuracy and enemy accuracy by 6. You gain 3 accuracy and 3 deflection (which is comparable to a losing 3 accuracy when attacking this character). Dyrford village feels like it was tuned for level 5 characters. If we now take a look at this graph; then I hit Dyrford village at an average character level of 9. Which means that party/enemy combat accuracy receives an offset of 24. This is almost enough to convert almost all grazes to hits and halfway through to convert all hits to crits. Add two more talents and two more class abilities on top of it (which mostly further buff accuracy or deflection) and the problem is pretty obvious: Encounters in Dyrford and Twin Elms are simply undertuned. And while their specific encounter levels might already be level 9-10, their stats won't reflect that. Several enemies in Dyrford and Twin Elms actually have less accuracy than enemies in Magran's fork and surroundings (boars and lions are among the hardest hitting enemies in the game). What we can extract from this graph is that applying a band-aid fix that affects all encounters equally would ultimately break the game. Instead, what is actually required would be a whole encounter re-design of Dyrford and Twin Elms.

Wow ... that must ... really feel awkward. :D Action queues are already in the game. Just hold shift.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=WYSIWYG Yes why on earth would you want to actually converse with other humans about things that are posted on a forum when you can just avoid conversation all together and type into google - because you know interaction with others of your species is just so outdated today when we have the internet at our disposal - smh Yeah, because looking up an acronym you don't know is an absolutely terrible lifechoice...

So, I recently finished the game on PotD with my Monk (full tank) PC. Rest of the party was Aloth, Eder (specced as offtank), GM, Hiravius, Durance. This is how the perceived difficulty of the game looked like, documented by level and notable landmarks. Notice that I didn't do the second and third set of bounties, as I didn't want to trivialize the game further after reaching Dyrford Village. 1.05 happened around level 6 for this party. As 1.05 mostly nerfed some OP spells, it's expected the game got slightly harder in those lower levels. Discussion: - Difficulty is mostly fine until reaching later parts of Defiance Bay: Gilded Vale wilderness content and dungeons are challenging, The Raedric's Hold final battle is great, the first levels of Od Nua are actually challenging at their designated levels. The first set of bounties at level 7 is nuts. Two of the bounty battles took me dozens of reloads to win. Awesomesauce! - Most major battle zones of Defiance Bay are challenging enough: Catacombs, Sanitarium, several event battles in houses, Lighthouse island -------------------------- - And then everything goes downhill. First major drop of difficulty happens at Heritage Hill. Compared to almost every single battle before Heritage Hill, there is a huge drop in difficulty here. You can mostly blaze through all of the battles except for the one guarding the tower outside - Dyrford Village and surroundings have a huge drop in difficulty to almost ridicolous levels. I could suddenly equip my tanks with 2H weapons, switch to lighter armors and overall could do well just auto-attacking everything - The only noticable spike of difficulty after reaching Dyrford village at level 8/9 were the lowest levels of Od Nua. Everything was a breeze. Conclusion: Twin Elms and Dyrford village are heavily undertuned. Up until this point, the game is almost perfectly balanced. The crit path needs a severe buff in difficulty. Considering Dyrford village was part of the Backer Beta (and thus, the most tested content in the game), I can not understand why the Dyrford village content is so ridicolously easy, compared to everything that comes prior to Dyrford. It's also worth mentioning that there is a severe flood of unique items happening once you reach Dyrford Village.

Sanguine is great on PotD. On hard, you hardly get critted so you might not see it proc much. I have it equipped on Edér, specced more or less as an off-tank wielding a 2H sword at 85-90 deflection. It procs basicly every fight.

Most people don't quite realize that there are multiple hidden quality of life features in PoE: You can map F-keys to your spells and abilities freely, by hovering your mouse over the button and then hitting the key you want to assign it to. This will also show a new quickbar on top of the command card of the character containing all hotkey abilities. You can also shift-click aim your spells to build an order list. So, for example, I mapped Minolettas Minor Missile to F1 on my mage, Arcane Assault to F2 and the accuracy buff to F3. I want this mage to use the accuracy buff, then use Arcane Assault twice, then use Minoletta's on the enemies: I hold shift, then press F3, press F2, click enemy, press F2, click enemy, press F3 and click enemy. Then I release shift. --> Mage will use all those spells in order --> Takes only a couple of seconds to do --> Absolute no second pausing involved until everyone used up it's entire order queue Especially when first and second level spells become per-encounter, mapping spells to hotkeys and using the order queue prevents a lot of headache.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/portraits-for-poe-thread.98127/page-3 http://www.jasonseow.com/poeportraits Check out his other work, too. Also, notice the scales on Sawyer's armour. Yeah, I'd want to see Cain, Avellone, and all the leads as well (Adler, Brennecke, ect.). We should start a pool and have them commissioned. It's too bad Kaz has a steady job.. well.. uh, not for him, of course, but it would be fun if he freelanced and took commissions. 100% in-art-style portraits custom-made. Now, if only I was a millionaire.. It's not like artists make a lot. You'd be surprised how low commission rates are on average for the skilled folks on deviantart. I know I wouldn't want to work for that.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=WYSIWYG

But it has a bear companion with the most epic epilogue of all time...

You, sir, should get your work featured as official portraits for the PoE expansion. Like, seriously, Obsidian should pay you a commission for your work. It's that good. Is it just me or is there is an uncanny resemblance here with Rebecca Black...?!

To be fair, Edér is a pretty solid choice. It's worse for men, who could only choose between a married dwarf girl that has five kids, a bird-woman who probably doesn't even have humanoid genitals and a weird mind-control woman who rarely talks and tricks everyone around her into not being aware of her presence.