prodigydancer

Are you complaining about spell selection or spells per day? I don't remember IWD that well (it's been a long time) but neither was such a big issue in BG. You could easily buy spells from Thalantyr in High Hedge and rolling a specialist mage (why not?) gave you a decent amount of spell slots. And of course there was an easily accessible Ring of Wizardry - pretty big deal at low levels but some people would say that using it amounted to cheating.

I haven't played Skyrim much for two reasons: 1) Simply don't have time to explore huge sandbox worlds anymore. 2) TES combat system isn't my favorite. I don't like first-person view and real-time combat in CRPGs. This being said, the game is amazing. It looks fantastic and feels awesome. And the selection of mods... leaves me speechless. Again, I'm not even a TES fan in general. But hearing people say that Skyrim is a bad and dumbed down game just makes me sad. Count me troll'd.

Before we buy this excuse let's see some numbers. PoE Wizard spells 67 total, 33 DPS. Non-DPS effects are mostly limited to CC, debuffs, self-buffs and self-protections. BG Wizard spells 58 total (w/o TotSC), 15 DPS. Non-DPS effects include various party buffs (really various, e.g. non-detection), invisibility, summons and non-combat spells (Friends, Luck). So what gives? They have more arcane spells than vanilla BG and yet there's less variety? How can this situation be justified? They didn't even try to be overly original - they simply copied half of IE spell list and padded it with bland DPS spells. Would it be so hard to add the other half then? Again, I'm not even talking fancy BG2 stuff like Find Familiar, Farsight or Polymorph Self. How about basics like PfE or Armor castable on anyone? /sigh

And I thought we were discussing wizards here... Read my post. I'm not attributing it to Sawyer, I'm attributing it to people who say that PoE wizard is "more interesting" than IE (AD&D) wizard. But I do wonder what Josh's honest take on the matter is. Does he himself believe he did well? --- My point is there's no reason to include Wizard just because Fireball is a staple of the genre. Nobody wants to play a dull class. D&D has eight magic schools. Eight. And Evocation is hardly the most interesting to play with.

Good for you. "Boredom is fun" is exactly the kind of attitude you need to appreciate J.E.Sawyer's games. /sigh I think good old times are gone for good. It's time to stop dreaming about the triumphant return of IE and embrace the contemporary value system where the appeal of an arcane caster class in a CRPG is measured solely by the said class DPS potential.

This passage shows that you don't understand what "artificial limiting" means in RPGs. Let's start with some examples. "Ability X is overpowered, don't use it" is artificial limiting. "Class Y is godmode, don't roll it" is artificial limiting. What does "artificial" means here? It means that it's natural to assume that all abilities and classes are reasonably powerful. Without metagaming you can't know what is overpowered because at role-playing level nothing is. Imagine that a mage character is a real person who obtains a spell that proves to be devastating in combat. For simplicity's sake let's assume there's no catch (plain overpowered). Should the mage use this spell to get an edge against a dangerous enemy? Absolutely, why not? You can't reflect metagame knowlegde at RP level and that's why metagame-based limits are artificial. But "don't rest every 5 minutes" is not metagame, it's common sense. You wouldn't do that IRL especially if you were in a clearly hostile environment half-expecting to be jumped upon at any moment. Doing something that is common sense from RP perspective doesn't qualify as artificial limiting in a CRPG. In fact, rest-spamming is itself a cheat based on purely metagame knowledge that the game world is static and reactive. And, well, nothing stops you from using cheats in any single-player game.

We won't fight about engagement. We'll just discuss it. This is of the key points of anti-engagement point of view: often moving away is an attempt to win some time (to get a healing spell off or bounce aggro to an off-tank). Engagement makes this impossible thus limiting tactical options and encouraging players to avoid tough fights.

DA:I crack released by 3DM. I still feel zero motivation to play the game even for free (EA would have to pay me in this case) but it's nice to see their "uncrackable" DRM brought to its knees. StarForce 3 held much longer (took more than a year to crack) so Denuvo is nothing special after all.

You know what's funny? I haven't noticed any bugs in SoM. Call it heresy but SoM is indeed a wiser choice for a casual player who doesn't care about classic CRPGs.

Depends on how you do it. One of the more common bugs is various NPC going hostile after the HCC vote.

Err. WL2 is an awesome game that was kneecapped by nothing but its own gamebreaking bugs at release. Now - after four patches! - it's a much smoother ride but Hollywood quest line ending is still somewhat broken.

I remember the time when patches actually fixed issues and improved stability...

Indeed. The real problem with engagement is not that it's exploitable. It's bad because it breaks otherwise viable playstyles and doesn't give us anything in return. The stand-your-ground-no-matter-what-happens playstyle does not depend on engagement in any way.

I take solace in the fact that their profitability is currently not at my expense. I didn't buy DA:I and I'll never buy another BioWare game. Just as I'll never buy another Blizzard game.

They were profitable back when their top priority was making quality games instead of releasing a cash grab "blockbuster" every year. And I'm not sure they're quite as profitable these days especially if we adjust for inflation. Caring about money and only about money is always bad for business in the long run.

Apparently it's all one big misunderstanding.

Movement is never free unless you can attack while moving. Sorry, your example isn't even in the same league. Firewall is an active cast, so the wizard has to spend his "turn" on it (and a spell slot) and even then it may expire before the party retreats. Disengagement attacks are passive procs that just pop out of nowhere for zero resources spent (time, casting slots, etc.) every time when a very simple condition is met. Summary: disengagement attacks are reusable indefinitely with no negative consequences whatsoever and the whole mechanic is a very definition of anti-tactical crap.

When you out of arguments, argue semantics.

Did you even read the dictionary article you linked? Propaganda is about making others believe what you believe. To achieve your goals you may spread incomplete or biased information but it's not the point. Even if you don't withhold information or misinterpret facts it's still propaganda if you're actively pursuing any kind of political agenda. --- But I think criticizing DA:I for pushing LGBT supremacy ideas and having correspondingly tokenized CNPCs is really not necessary. I hate SJW crap as much as any sane gamer next to me but we must admit that DA:I is just a terribad game with or without its political agenda. Even if stripped of all controversial content it would be just as bad. The combined weight of other issues would still drag it down to garbage level. Heck, "gather X of Y" quests alone are enough to never touch this game with a 10-foot pole (unless you like the idea of playing a singe-player MMO for some reason).

Congratulations on not reading any of the topic-related threads before posting. There's no better way to make a complete *** of yourself.

Well, yes. But ironically the fixes mentioned by Josh all amount to deemphasizing the role of engagement. They're going to remove abilities that increase range and, if I understand correctly, add some sort of internal cooldown. When you feel that an obvious solution to something is having less of it you need to stop and think if the better solution is having none of it. P.S. I seem to remember some heated discussions just recently re. the attribute system for instance. So what's happened? Is it perfect now of has everyone simply give up?

This may be fun to watch but in the long run it's counterproductive. Attempting to fix engagement that is. PoE isn't some self-funded indie vaporware, it's a commercial project that has to be released within a reasonable time frame so they don't have all the time in the world to experiment with one broken combat mechanic. And that's why I find Josh's comments deeply disappointing. He obviously wants to compromise in a predictably hopeless attempt to please everyone at once. It'll take time and effort better spend elsewhere. They should have let backers vote on "Do you think melee engagement is important enough to keep it and dedicate additional resources to its development?" Wording could be different - the point is that I doubt the pro-engagement crowd would even win such a simple vote. They're pretty vocal but they have very little of substance to offer in defense of their point of view.

A part of making something really great is finding wisdom and courage to acknowledge that some of your ideas were just bad and scrap those bad ideas before they seriously damage your whole project. I sincerely hope Obsidian will do the right thing.

I'll summarize it in one sentence: melee engagement mechanic is here to harshly penalize player characters who are within the range of an enemy melee unit for any attempt to move away. Long version: 1) Melee engagement (I think we should use an acronym - how about MEE?) favors standing still over tactically repositioning party members during the course of an encounter. The funny part is that if you like mindless combat and standing still, your experience will be exactly the same with or without MEE. This is also the part the pro-MEE crowd seems to not understand: MEE removal won't change their experience in any way. Anyone who already chooses to stand still will never trigger an AoO anyway. 2) MEE works both ways and is proven to be exploitable by bouncing aggro between the party members. 3) MEE is not affected by action cooldown and has no internal cooldown. It just happens whenever the requirements are met. Which means MEE is the ultimate "it's magic" anti-movement tool. It's here only to prevent the combat from being more tactical via reactive repositioning. It serves no other purpose. 4) Combined with high movement speed that most enemies currently possess MEE promotes the abuse of various CC mechanics and strong openers in order to resolve fights as quickly as possible - ideally before enemies are able to get close. This in turn promotes metagaming and powerplaying over role-playing. Sensuki is going to post a thread with a more detailed analysis. P.S. I can see how MEE could be a legitimate tool in a pure real-time game with active dodge. But in PoE it's just out of place.

@Osvir I'm not a backer so no BB for me. I understand what you're talking about but BB tries to be a "no spoiler" beta making it hard to experience the game through beta. We know many things about the setting but almost nothing about the story. So far there's no reason to doubt that (mechanics aside) PoE will be a nice, content-heavy CRPG with at least acceptable writing but such topics belong in the General Discussions area. This is a beta board and here people mostly discuss features that fall short of expectations, bugs, problems and suggestions. Of course. And you can see that people don't criticize the combat system in its entirety but only certain parts of it such as pacing (mostly related to movement speed), melee engagement, defense <-> combat speed tradeoff (aka naked ranged characters) and balance issues (with attributes and classes).