Rumsteak

Some people here are worried about the current talent UI which is kind of a long unhandy list, and I agree. I've read from unreliable sources somewhere on these forums that it will be improved. Hopefully this is true. Anyways, I wanted to talk about talent images. Here's what they look like at the moment: Is it planned to have unique images per talent, instead of the generic ones above? Talents are the equivalent of other games' feats or perks. They give you a new capability or greatly improve an existing one. Every other level they should feel like a nice little gift, like "Whoa, what kind of awesome stuff am I gonna choose?". I think unique icons, or better yet, unique images (bigger than icons) would improve that feeling. I guess what I have in mind is something like Fallout perks, which gave a nice touch: Of course this would be different to fit the PoE world. Otherwise, maybe just having unique arpg-style talent icons could do. On top of the real in-game bonuses talents provide, images or icons would make them feel more real and enjoyable. How cool would it be to have a badass hand-drawn dude carrying a crossbow/sword/axe in 3 hands, to illustrate the Weapon Focus Knight talent? Anyways, just giving my two cents, in case a talent UI reshaping is in the dev pipeline.

Rejoice!

Good suggestions Gairnulf. Yep. We basically want the same brevity as the BG2 log. 1 attack = 1 line. No fuss, no details (or details in the tooltip only). Also, what's with all the color and stuff, I can't see anything. Just do the same as IE games: colored names and white for the rest. Pretty please?

It was my understanding that you could make a muscle mage or an intelligent fighter, but those classes would still have the same class role that they would be supposed to do. I.E. casting for a mage or meleeing for a fighter. Not sure that a melee mage could be viable but I may be wrong

Just finished the engagement thread too. I think everyone agrees that engagement needs to be greatly improved or scrapped. I didn't even notice that the beta had engagement (and did not know what it was) until I read about it on the forums a couple months ago. It should come as something obvious when playing, we should not need to look at the logs for that. Easier said than done though, so I'm curious about what will happen in the next patches.

As well intentioned as they are, I usually ignore threads like this and mark them as read, because tl;dr. However it has been recommended on the Casual Gamers Redux thread so I made an exception and gave it a try. Finally finished reading it after falling asleep once in between. These are good suggestions Razsius, kudos. My opinion is either engagement should feel very good and natural (thanks to better visual and mechanics such as the ones proposed in this thread) or it should just die. No compromise, because it is an important part of combat. I am also concerned by how engagement should feel good visually. I understand that visual cooldowns would be useful but it may add to visual clutter of combat, so these will need to be added very carefully in order to avoid mass rejection from the players (putting aside the fact that combat is already cluttered with high/low contrast fights on grass and over-the-top VFX, because some of these will be fixed). This is going to be tricky but this is a nice challenge for the devs. As the saying goes, go big or go home. Good luck!

I like to think that a quick/automatic way to save time, if it was possible to know that a prefab is some sort of humanoid, would be "humanoids drop whatever they have, whereas anything else do not". Of course this would prevent edge cases where we want non-humanoid creatures to drop loot, such as "epic sharp hippo tooth" or "legendary armor of the beetle king".

Bumping this thread one last time to make sure nobody has missed it. Also, I fixed a rare bug where developer posts would sometimes appear hours later instead of 5 minutes later.

Whoops, I did not know that! Haven't tried to reproduce the problem with wood elves (and I don't have access to my personal computer right now).

[Description of the issue] Elves can have beards [steps to reproduce] 1) Go to character creation 2) Choose any kind of elve as your race 3) When customizing the elf appearance, select a beard in the facial hair section [Expected behaviour] Elves should not have beards

As much as it hurts my self-esteem, I think you're right, I'm gonna try on Easy.

Yeah, character contrast has been brought up several times in the past months but it does not hurt to remind the developers about it! I hope that something will be done in a future patch.

I got killed on normal on Dyrford Crossing, on my way to the statue island. I thought I was gonna fight 3 beetles but in the end 8 or 9 (or more) of them came by surprise. Not sure that having so many of them in such a tiny location was normal. Maybe they were guarding the statue? *shrug* Graphically-wise, textures feel too bright on the grass so it's hard to see everything that is going on in combat. I don't like the new enemy targeting graphic, I find it confusing with arrows everywhere. I preferred the targeting reticle from the previous patch. So, overall I'm not impressed by this build. I'll wait for the next ones.

If you want your PC always on the front (via pre-made or custom party positioning), that is totally fine by me. It then makes sense that whenever you move to a given direction, your party positioning gets rotated so that, in your case, your PC stays on the front. This is what I have been talking about.

Well not only is this good design in this particular case, but it is also common sense. I mean, who would not want to have his tanks on the front line most of the time?

I use right-click+rotate at the moment, but it is really tedious to do it all the time, this is very bad design. Like in BG, the initial party position should roughly be good wherever you go. I should only use right-click+rotate when I need to fine-tune my party position (btw in practice I almost never needed to to this in BG). I suspect the current behavior is a bug but it seems so obvious to me that I am not sure. Maybe there's a catch.

This probably has nothing to do with the latest update but I still noticed this when playing this morning: - is it normal that elves can have beards? - is it normal that the front line in your party is not always at the front when moving the party to a given direction? The party position setup is often always the same wherever you go; I think it should be automatically rotated so that the front line is always the one at the front when you order your party to go to a given direction. Otherwise this defeats the purpose of party positioning! I want my fighters to be at the front at any given time. I do not feel confident enough to file these points as bugs (maybe some of them are done on purpose?) so I am sharing them here.

Yeah or at least being able to disable those clicking sounds would be nice

If nothing else, I'll enjoy the story.

+1. Again, I totally agree 100% with Lord Wafflebum. In BG1, the only thing I had to wrap my head around back in the day was how AC worked. Then I could just sit back and enjoy the game. On the other hand, in the PoE beta, even after wrapping my head around lots of new things and trying to optimize my 5 people party by switching weapons and carefully pondering new spells and talents (spent a lot more effort on this beta than on BG1), I stil got pwned when casually engaging 6 beetles at a time on normal. It was fine when isolating one or two of them at a time "Shevek style", but found that so soul-crushingly boring and unchallenging that I tried to attack a whole group. I thought I would have my chances since for 3-4 months I had been scouring these forums threads and watched many Youtube videos and noted their points, so it's not like I was unprepared for a tougher fight. And yes, I could recruit a sixth companion and yada yada, but I think my party setup was okay enough for this kind of combat. When my party got crushed (this was after 40 minutes of playing), I just rage-quitted and decided to give only UI feedback on these forums. I haven't played the beta since. I am now waiting for the next patch, though I think I'll have to wait for several months before I can enjoy the game, if at all. I am not a number cruncher and I may be rusty RPG-wise or just have bad analysis skills, but my experience in BG1 was totally different even at level 5: if I wanted to, I could fool around in normal mode. I was just 13 and didn't spend time on understanding stats. I feel like I cannot make a single mistake on tough fights in PoE's normal mode, while I could do that in BG1. I believe that the problems mentioned above will be fixed by the time the game is released. The next imminent patch may even address most of them. I just sincerely hope that I can play the game on normal when it gets released, without getting bored. I played BG1 and Torment on normal and had a ton of fun. I wouldn't say that I am an IE veteran but I did play these games for a long time, so I think I am eligible for normal mode according to Josh Sawyer in this tumblr post: After reading this quote, I would be really upset if I was forced to play on Easy since it's supposed to be for people "new to this style of game". </rant></butthurt>

I didn't notice the washed out effect until you talked about it. Now this is the only thing I see! They apparently went for a watercolor effect of some sort, but I would prefer a sharper map too.

+1 for multiclassing in the expansion. Adds a nice dimension to the game and makes soloing it easier.

I assume that you are talking about the mage companion Jesse finds at the end of the stream. Jesse skimmed a good part of the dialogues for this encounter. This lack of context may result in a false feeling of emptiness or superficiality, but I think it will be better when taking your time. Like, this mage made a lewd remark to some dude about his sister and you can discuss this with him. Personality-wise, he is fine by my standards! I mean, he is as good as you can get for a random guy that you meet in a fight outside the inn. It is a bit unfair to compare him with Imoen, who's been a friend of the main character since childhood. Give him a chance.

You'll have to weave the patch first. Then decide whether to sew it or stitch it. With great power comes great responsibility.

Yeah if they do a solid UI option (and I go for it) or improve the UI somehow, I'll be fine with moving with LMB + RMB, "IE style". If not, I'll just remove LMB moving. Good stuff!