View619

Well, the next patch should tell whether the devs plan to address difficulty balance-related issues, or just stick with what they have and move on to the expansion.

It was pitched as a spiritual successor to games like BG, so yes.

Not sure why you're arguing over real life implications of a soldier losing his animal companion in battle. For the game, to ensure that half of the ranger falling unconscious is meaningful, you are stricken with Bonded Grief. The alternative to this used to be that the Ranger would fall unconscious, maybe Obsidian should go back to that implementation? The pet provides bonuses and is another body on the field, there needs to be some negative to it falling unconscious. What happens in reality is irrelevant here.

So, instead of abusing the fact that the AI is so bad and units so underwhelming that I can trivialize encounters by setting up a choke point, I should abuse the fact that the AI is so bad that if I send my tank forward they'll ignore the rest of my non-engaged units even while they rain death on top of the enemy. Yeah, that definitely solves the problem. /sarcasm If you are able to trivialize encounters in Hard and POTD with a very basic tactic, there is a design problem regarding encounter difficulty; this is even without min-maxing of any kind.

In agreement here, the game has lost it's appeal after the third restart for me; every time I get into Act II the interest dies off. Honestly, if there are no dev plans to improve the AI and encounter difficulty\variety in some way I may just drop it until the expansion. Maybe it will be a jump in a similar vein to Shadowrun Returns -> Dragon Fall. Great ideas all around but bogged down by the fact that this is a first attempt, imo.

Trial of Iron does not increase difficulty, it just forces you to play more conservatively. And POTD suffers from the same issues that you'll find in Hard, ensuring that a handful of tactics make battles easy every time. Unfortunately, POTD is the only mode with any sort of difficulty at all but that doesn't make it as challenging as the description suggests.

I could swear that I've seen Interrupts break Engagement, just that it's not nearly enough to matter. It disappears for a split second, so I've never been able to actually even try to take advantage of it. I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually do it even if it appears so by the visuals. You'd see "Foozle engages Hero in melee" in the combat log pretty much after every interrupt, since they would re-engage almost immediately. Yeah, I'm fairly certain that I read about a design decision to make interrupts break engagement. However, I read about Wound mechanics working a lot differently than they do now and that didn't happen, so... It's not a bug. It's been like that since forever and the issue has been mentioned countless times. And with that being said, I have now lost all hope for the engagement system. No attempted simulation of the 5 ft safety zone for movement AND disengagement attacks when I'm no-where near you? No thanks.

I really hope this doesn't happen. With the lack of difficulty in most encounters, making one of the most notable even easier isn't a good thing IMO.

Attack of Opportunity is in 5e, but you have room to move without triggering it (within 5 feet of the attacker iirc). I'm hoping the current issue where moving a pixel triggers disengagement attacks is a bug, though. Also, aren't interrupts supposed to break engagement?

Most of the "negative" threads are already full of discussion on what can be done to improve the state of the game.

The rest will attempt to mob the tank, ignoring your back-line unless somebody engages. That's not been my experience. Anything not engaging my tank/fighter just bypasses them and makes a beeline right for my Cipher. Every time. My Cipher has more knockouts on her record sheet than any other party member. You haven't experienced enemies running circles around a crowd that surrounds your 1 or 2 tanks because they can't engage, instead of targeting a different unit?

Notice that I was addressing the fact that, in the current version of the game, enemy units will attempt to mob the tank regardless of whether they can reach it. Engaging with another unit will force that enemy to re-focus.

The rest will attempt to mob the tank, ignoring your back-line unless somebody engages.

If you successfully manage to pull this off, please feel free to send info to the OE devs regarding how you did it.

The first two alone would make a huge difference, especially if we can get push/pull attacks that target a range of defenses. That way, deflection will no longer be the god defensive stat and you'll need to react and adapt to different encounters and enemy moves. Also, I'm a fan of enemies having some sort of ranged ability that they default to using if the path to a target is blocked by his party members, something like Guls using vomit blood, Beetles spitting poison, Wolves howling (buff or debuff), etc. Give enemies something that they can do from the second row, be it abilities, spells or reach attacks.

I'm pretty sure that the original thread got their attention. Just a matter of patience now, imo.

I still think Obsidian needs to figure out what it wants to do with this game/series . Just looking at some of the different combinations of equipment, skills and abilities (guns and arcane veil, for example), it's obvious that they had a goal in mind at the start, but then somebody went in a completely opposite direction mid-way and ruined a lot of good ideas. Middle of the road games tend to turn out badly at the end of the day, imo. It's like they went from "we're going to make this a challenging crpg with different enemy tactics to overcome" to "this needs to be easy to understand and complete for anybody, so no tactical problem solving".

Or just a damage threshold. Isnt that already ingame though? Just function/status effect so if a hit does <10 damage, if isnt going to do any damage or so. DR reduction excluded. Minimum damage means you can whittle them down even if DR should negate all damage. I would be all for removing minimum damage, it doesn't seem necessary at all.

Trolls weren't really immune to anything though. You want things like golems that can only be damage by crushing attacks, undead that can't be blinded or feared, slimes that can't be knocked prone, etc. Maybe having trolls that regen health would be interesting. So, you couldn't just whittle them down with low dr penetrating attacks.

Yeah, +50% exp requirement is feeling about right to me so far as well. It makes rushing through caed nua significantly harder... dropped my win ratio for some of the harder battles to like 33%, so I reloaded a previous save and I'm doing some side-quests first ::shock:: -- WHICH IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. Great news, happy to see it's making such a huge difference. I'll probably try it out myself. Are you playing on Hard or POTD? Hard. I don't feel like potd is balanced for normal people like me. I usually don't play difficulty modes that just increase the numbers. Cool, let us hear how Act II goes when you get there.

Yeah, +50% exp requirement is feeling about right to me so far as well. It makes rushing through caed nua significantly harder... dropped my win ratio for some of the harder battles to like 33%, so I reloaded a previous save and I'm doing some side-quests first ::shock:: -- WHICH IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. Great news, happy to see it's making such a huge difference. I'll probably try it out myself. Are you playing on Hard or POTD?

To reiterate, IE mod. Console commands are enabled without disabling achievements. All of you should be using it. There's no guarantee that we'll have an IE mod for the next version, since the main modder has stopped working on it. It's better if people get used to using the "iroll20s" command included in the base game.

Well, I'm sure they'll do something regarding the lack of difficulty, this thread has branched off into a second part after all. Honestly, it shouldn't be very difficult to do.

Why the Wu-Tang pictures? O.o @Shadow_arms For the record, hard mode is not even close to being difficult. Maybe key points in Act 1, but after that it's a cake walk. Regarding people dropping POE, not everybody is going to like it. Honestly, having a handful of people dislike it for xyz reasons should mean nothing to you if you find something to enjoy yourself. It's not about the exploits, some people just do not think it's fun. It's not a game meant for everybody, unfortunately.

I think Knockdown targets fortitude, it's possible that the wizard spells were targeting another defense or just missing. It could be bug....I went to City and attacked ordinary citizen. 1/ Cast Call to slumber (1 hit, 6 critical hits) 2/ The animation of going to prone stance and then going out of prone effect. 3/ Checked conditions: nobody has prone effect applied.... Maybe the prone effect now only works if its targeting Fortitude. Slicken is reflex and Call to slumber is will. Could somebody try the same test? Just go Copperlane (Defiance Bay), attack neutral PC and cast those spells.... I have confirmed its bug related to item. There item in game which is supposed to apply prone reducing time on yourself... Instead: 1/ When put on my Wizard, my spell are now applying 0.0 second prone effects on enemies. 2/ Removing the item will not fix now broken slicken, call to slumber spells. 3/ So right now i have Wizard and his prone effect spells are not working at all. I have to wonder how broken the game must be internally to something like this happen....I mean you just need to equip this item once and then it will broke your character spell-casting??? Removing item does not work, reloading game does not work...... Create a bug report about it. With all the different class and gear compositions, it's inevitable that specific item-related bugs will slip through.