tdphys

I've been playing with Serafen full cipher. POTD alot of the spells just seem underwhelming in the amount of damage they do... especially higher level spells that take 1/4 of the fight to actually get to. Paralyze constantly misses, and the durations seem shorter than they used to. I avoided the charm/dominate route, just for fun.

You should try Darkest Dungeon if you haven't yet. I've looked at it, but I need spatial puzzles in my combat, dungeon-crawl stone-soup is my fallback.

You had to go hunting for that encounter, and punch above your weight to get to it and enjoy it. A good portion of the rest of the game is going to be what seems to be trivial combats. The design challenge is to somehow maintain experience gain and play difficulty at the same rate, so that the player feels that the game stays challenging throughout. This is obviously a challenge (see pillars 1), and especially for open world style games, since you can get over-levelled for content that still gives meaningful experience which worsens the problem. For deadfire it's even more of a challenge, since the experience level doesn't seemed to be tuned to be challenging. For what its worth, I think the per-encounter game play is actually quite nice in deadfire, when you're at an appropriate challeng level. The combat is easier to read, seems more fluid and responsive, and the pathfinding/movment is much improved.. but I also fall on the attrition loving spectrum, and deadfire seems to be designed for the single encounter side. So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design. It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too. Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce, or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it. Maybe in the DLC we'll get a delicious long slog dungeon, but unless we have someway to restrict resources, it still won't mean much to us. I'm not motivating the one true way, just looking for ways to make Deadfire compatible with both playstyles. Unfortunately, I'm also waiting for t POTD tuning, so here I am posting on forums instead of sailing the archipelago. Edit, wow , what did I do, I don't know how I managed to timewarp this forum...

You had to go hunting for that encounter, and punch above your weight to get to it and enjoy it. A good portion of the rest of the game is going to be what seems to be trivial combats. The design challenge is to somehow maintain experience gain and play difficulty at the same rate, so that the player feels that the game stays challenging throughout. This is obviously a challenge (see pillars 1), and especially for open world style games, since you can get overlevelled for content that still gives meaningful experience which worsens the problem. It would be nice if easier quests gave less experience the higher your level became to subvert this. Overlevelling is probably one of the biggest problems with these games. For what its worth, I think the per-encounter game play is actually quite nice in deadfire, when you're at an appropriate challenge level. The combat is easier to read, seems more fluid and responsive, and the pathfinding/movment is much improved.. but I also fall on the attrition loving spectrum, and deadfire seems to be designed for the single encounter side. So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design. It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too. Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce, or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it. Maybe in the DLC we'll get a delicious long slog dungeon, but unless we have someway to restrict resources, it still won't mean much to us. I'm not motivating the one true way, just looking for ways to make Deadfire compatible with both playstyles. Unfortunately, I'm also waiting for the POTD tuning, so here I am posting on forums instead of sailing the archipelago.

Unfortunately, your initial post logically creates instant clash of philosophies... Due to leveling up, low level fights become cakewalks. With the current per-encounter design style, those are meaningless cakewalks ( well made point in your OP) As far as I can see there's only really 2 ways to address this: 1. auto level up everything lower to your level. 2. have some kind of attrition that makes even low level fights meaningful. These two solutions appeal to incompatible psychologies, hence the discussion degenerating into drawing lines in the sand. I'd be interested in hearing if anybody else has any other suggestions (asides from "better encounter design" which isn't meaningful)

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG. The consequence and difficulty comes from mitigating the chance of injury. It makes in combat buffing important, it makes in combat healing more important. You might need to make the injuries a little less... injurious, but I think in this sense it increases consequence of actions ( where healing and per encounter actions have reduced them). However, I get what your saying that if it's low probability and somehow the computer rolls 3 graze injuries in a row, that would leave someone fuming. Dota 2 has an interesting mechanic where each hit modifies RNG chance, so you're guaranteed a "random chance" in a certain numbere of hits, something similar could be done. IE , 5 crits increase injury chance. I still see that as a bad thing because it would pigeonhole the player into always beginning combat with the same sequence of buffs. It would undermine more aggressive openings and other playstyles by necessitating defensive buffing or running the risk of suffering random injuries. I simply fail to see how that would be a good addition in any way, especially with the game not allowing pre-buffing or long-term buffing. The same mechanics still exist currently, either buffing is meaningful or its not, whether or not that means more crits for you or less grazes for the enemy (currently) or more injuries (suggested). I think its the magnitude of the injury that puts you off, and that can be mitigated by making injuries not autokill and maybe nerfing them a bit. The most important thing is somehow adding more elements to the current combat that are meaningful for the next one. I'm also a big fan of making combat results thematically meangingful, rather than having an auto health bar go up and down, injuries are far more interesting. It links the combat to the story to have your character push through a broken rib and a bruised eye to finish of a deep dungeon, rather than auto healing each time. How about every time a character suffers 3 crits, ( with 3 hits being 1 crit and 3 grazes being 1 hit ) = one injury? Yes, I prefer the current state. It's not the magnitude; it's the whole idea of receiving random injuries from normal blows in a game where fights are spent mostly standing still and trading blows. You're doing nothing more than introducing yet another RNG-element which the player can only minimally influence by casting defensive buffs and upgrading armor. It adds nothing more than a redundant inconvenience of an RNG-lottery into the game. It adds no tactical depth whatsoever. There's no "fun" here nor does it incorporate any interesting gameplay. All it adds is a potential annoyance that occurs every now and then, that the player then has to deal with or be hindered by. The only counterplay to that is casting defensive buffs and equipping armor, both of which you will probably do anyway. So all your suggestion essentially adds is a chance to receive random injuries for the sake or what? Artificial difficulty? Artificially increased use for medical supplies in order to remove the injuries? I see no gameplay added whatsoever unless you count opening the resting menu and removing the random injuries gameplay. Adding elements is one thing, but adding for the sake of adding is not conducive to good combat. As for your second point, yes, I can see how that makes sense from a realism standpoint; I mean, you should get injured in combat. But I'm afraid it doesn't contribute enough in terms of interesting gameplay to warrant this change. (IMO. I'm not trying to assert absolute truth here. These are all just ideas after all) Nah, a good counter argument helps to refine ideas. I agree that too much randomness makes a game less fun. If you ask me to play chess or monopoly, I'll take chess everytime for that reason. I still contend that you can mitigate random injuries, same as mitigating regular damage, but you're right that this is adding somewhat redundant randomness. Maybe a character should get an injury every time they're critted and below half health?

I killed I'm going to have to disagree with this characterization of how dungeon crawls went down in much of the original game. A number of dungeons did not have typical trash mobs leading up to one final boss fight. As I said in the OP, the temple of Eothas is one example. Another pair of dungeons like this are the catacombs below Copperlane and the Ciant Lis (sp?) ruins. Neither dungeon has a traditional "final boss". Moreover, even dungeons/sequences that did have a true final fight such as Raedric's hold also had several fight where you most definitely had to engage at a higher level even if not total max effort, such as the animancer in his dungeon, some of the guards on the rooftop areas, should you chose to engage in those fights. And again, I think you should trust me on this. The "fun" of seeing "all the awesomeness of your characters" in *every single* fight is not going to be a sustainable kind of fun, at least imo. My most memorable moment in POE1 was finishing off the ogres in stalwart for white march at level 5 or 6, and having Eder die on me in the process. Took quite a few saves, but since resting wasn't allowed, it was much more satisfying, and added meaning to the companion death. I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel by the end, but each ogre encounter definitely took a measured approach to conserve spells/abilities, with not much left for the end fight.

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG. The consequence and difficulty comes from mitigating the chance of injury. It makes in combat buffing important, it makes in combat healing more important. You might need to make the injuries a little less... injurious, but I think in this sense it increases consequence of actions ( where healing and per encounter actions have reduced them). However, I get what your saying that if it's low probability and somehow the computer rolls 3 graze injuries in a row, that would leave someone fuming. Dota 2 has an interesting mechanic where each hit modifies RNG chance, so you're guaranteed a "random chance" in a certain numbere of hits, something similar could be done. IE , 5 crits increase injury chance. I still see that as a bad thing because it would pigeonhole the player into always beginning combat with the same sequence of buffs. It would undermine more aggressive openings and other playstyles by necessitating defensive buffing or running the risk of suffering random injuries. I simply fail to see how that would be a good addition in any way, especially with the game not allowing pre-buffing or long-term buffing. The same mechanics still exist currently, either buffing is meaningful or its not, whether or not that means more crits for you or less grazes for the enemy (currently) or more injuries (suggested). I think its the magnitude of the injury that puts you off, and that can be mitigated by making injuries not autokill and maybe nerfing them a bit. The most important thing is somehow adding more elements to the current combat that are meaningful for the next one. I'm also a big fan of making combat results thematically meangingful, rather than having an auto health bar go up and down, injuries are far more interesting. It links the combat to the story to have your character push through a broken rib and a bruised eye to finish of a deep dungeon, rather than auto healing each time. How about every time a character suffers 3 crits, ( with 3 hits being 1 crit and 3 grazes being 1 hit ) = one injury?

Sure, but getting random injuries just from getting hit doubles it. It's like taking random, undodgeable homing bullets in an FPS game that cripple your aim just to make the game harder. There are ways to introduce consequence and difficulty. This isn't it. This is simple random inconvenience and annoyance that's outside of the player's influence other than by upgrading armor—and even then you're at the mercy of RNG. The consequence and difficulty comes from mitigating the chance of injury. It makes in combat buffing important, it makes in combat healing more important. You might need to make the injuries a little less... injurious, but I think in this sense it increases consequence of actions ( where healing and per encounter actions have reduced them). However, I get what your saying that if it's low probability and somehow the computer rolls 3 graze injuries in a row, that would leave someone fuming. Dota 2 has an interesting mechanic where each hit modifies RNG chance, so you're guaranteed a "random chance" in a certain numbere of hits, something similar could be done. IE , 5 crits increase injury chance.

The whole combat is based on RNG.... that's what the whole deflection/accuracy mechanic is.

I very much agree with the OP.... My Solution (For at least Path Of the Damned): Every attack has a chance of doing injury that rises with miss->graze->hit->crit. (this is the tunable part, of course) No limit on injuries (no death dependent injury), but resting with decent food only gets rid of 1 injury / rest . Sleeping in a tavern clears injuries. Being knocked down in combat with 3+ injuries is instant death. This will make #1 the pre encounters leading up to a final one relevant, and even easy ones will be meaningful in order to avoid graze injuries for no reason. #2 make the infinite healing a little less powerfull, as long combats will increase chances of incurring injuries. However, healing will be circumstantially more important, when somebodies about to die, for example... #3 make the game more like dwarf fortress, which is nirvana. On POD I'd say 2% graze chance 4% hit chance 8% crit chance. Veterans half those values. Normal, forget it... that's story mode in this game ( unless you try and punch too high, of course)

Yes this worked, thanks everyone!

I've tried starting Deadfire on my arch linux laptop, and I'm getting the window decoration with just a blank screen / no rendering. I get this when running on both the descrete nvidia card (1060) (using optimus via bumblebee) and the regular intel gpu. POE1 starts just fine for me using both. If anybody has any ideas, I'd love to hear it, I don't want to post a bug yet, till I've verified it's not my side or something in my setup.

I seam to recall said that the crit path is probably easier, and if you stray off, then you find the more challenging encounters, I think that was said by somebody (Josh?) once on a stream...

I think this will always be a problem; primarily because of the linear amounts of XP needed to go to the next level. I wish they had made the scaling higher, with harder quests giving more xp. Either that, or implement a sliding XP return, where easier quests return less XP to higher leveled characters. I just think its odd to "scale the encounters" rather than scale the XP said counters give.