View619

Really hoping the devs are taking these things into consideration. The underlying encounter system is great and has so much potential, but if it remains like this, with all these issues, then it will be a disaster going forward.

Funny enough, pre-buffing and removal of the combat-only state would actually make defensive mage spells useful. As they are now, there's no point in wasting a spell slot on a Wizard's Double or Stoneskin as a pre-caution against being attacked.

We should not need to gimp ourselves in order to make the "difficult" modes a challenge. I can understand the argument for Normal, but Hard and POTD make the claim that a challenge will be provided throughout the campaign, which is currently false. At this point, I'm starting to wish that melee units would just take the disengagement attack from the tank instead of sticking to him like glue.

Could just as easily be spell, talent and class balancing. No real guarantee that difficulty will be touched at all, which would be a shame since an easy game kills all replay-ability imo. I really hope they look into difficulty balancing though because the descriptions for Hard and POTD don't match up to the actually challenge levels at all, I don't think BG2 core difficulty was this easy to trivialize without cheesing the system.

My faith is restored.

Let us know your thoughts once you've gotten far enough? It would be interesting to hear how that changes overall difficulty and level progression. I'll wait until 1.05 to see if the devs have managed to implement any solutions.

I don't know, it may help if we had an idea of what levels the developers balanced the crit path around. For all we know, they balanced Dryford Village around level 4 parties.

That's if you're working out specific values. You can work out a formula without knowing the exact number of exp points by making the total some static value x, then applying it.

Or make a custom Ranger named Jon Snow with a wolf named Ghost. Give him low int and lore because "you know nothing, Jon Snow".

Only problem with Ranger is that Ygritte isn't a warg, so the animal companion wouldn't really match up. She's essentially a dexterous fighter specializing in archery, as far as I can see.

Use a Rogue or Fighter specializing in bows. Put her in hide armour and boom, instant Ygritte.

Cool Matt, I'll take your word for it and stick to looking around source code for curiosity/knowledge purposes. Also, I want to see what the devs plan on doing regarding difficulty and balance in the patches to come; maybe modifications won't even be necessary by the end of it.

Yeah, it's unfortunate but POE was never going to be the second coming of BG2. Still, IE mod was great and I'm also hoping that someone else is motivated enough to continue.

So, a better formula for experience limits when compared to : ((currentLevel * (currentLevel + 1)) * 500) would be what in your opinion Matt? You do seem to be the Matthematician. Edit Beat me to the response. Yeah, it's really just curiosity at the moment, looking at how different things work, etc. I'll let you know, though.

Yeah, it looks like the quest files are referencing some id values to determine how much experience should be awarded. I'm trying to figure out exactly where the exp tables are; if it's something that can be modified in VS then that would make it a lot easier. A good start would be linking the different quest files to their in-game counterparts. From there, you could start playing with the "ExperienceType" and "ExperienceLevel" values. Or, just create a script that ensures that no quest outside of the crit_path has an ExperienceLevel greater than some number. So i asked one knowledgeable dude, and apparently there is no xp table. But there is a formula located in PillarsOfEternity_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll in CharacterStats class ExperienceNeededForNextLevel method. It is : ((currentLevel * (currentLevel + 1)) * 500). Also the guys that made iemod already made some framework to change that kind of stuff https://bitbucket.org/Bester/poe-modding-framework A shame its not in xml, i'm not sure i'm up to getting visual studio with all the additional stuff required just to change this. Also i wouldn't be surprised if its very easy to f something up with that decompiling stuff... Yeah, it's a shame that it's a hard-coded formula in the dll, especially since it sounded like the game would be mod-friendly. Decompiling probably won't be an option, hopefully something comes up that makes it easier. Just looking at the formula though, you can see why levels are so easy to gain. Many thanks though, I'll definitely give this a look.

If you mean xp requirements for each level, see here. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75906-seems-like-xp-balance-is-out-of-whack/page-7?do=findComment&comment=1648191 Many thanks, I'll start looking into that.

I hope one or two devs give this a look, at least. Very good representation of some of the major issues with the game currently.

It would be nice to get some information regarding how individual experience requirements are stored. Maybe that way, a mod could be created to mess around with the experience requirements with minimal effort on Obsidian's part. Honestly, this would be the first thing I would try for myself.

I think changing the camping supply capacity depending on difficulty would actually be a really good way to up the challenge on higher difficulties. Make it 3 on hard and 2 on PotD. It's already two on hard and POTD.

Not really. Being forced to do tons of side content is oppressive game design. The better route is to scale back bounty xp rewards and possibly scale back xp rewards on minor (read easy) side quests and side quests that you have massively out-leveled. Forced to do tons of side content in order to beat critical path with low difficulties so that if you wanna rush it, it will be very hard. Actually, even doing only critical path, is too easy (i skipped WHOLE Caed Nua and WHOLE Twin Elms), I wonder how it is when doing also all side content. What difficulty are you playing on? And are you using death over maiming? I've been playing on normal and I definitely see the inverted difficulty curve (going to play hard next, then PotD, and then mess about with trials of iron and death instead of maiming), but I have to wonder how people are having such an easy time with hard or PotD without xp grinding, or cheesing and/or min/maxing. And I have to wonder if they are using death over maiming. Death over maiming doesn't really matter if your units are never at risk of losing all hp. Acts 2 and 3 are just tuned badly, no matter what difficulty you play on; I hit Dyrford at level 6 on Hard twice and it feels like I'm over-levelled both times, even more-so the second time since I know what I'm doing in combat now. It just gets easier as you progress, even without xp grinding or cheese.

Definitely agree with the difficulty adjustments, at least on POTD. Not liking what I've heard about the lack of POTD difficulty past Act 1. It just looks like Acts 2 & 3 haven't been tuned properly.

Hmm, it could be a case where the devs didn't have enough time to properly tune Acts 2 and 3. The final stretch could have been focused on squashing bugs and not difficulty balance, which would be a good reason as to why mid to late game mobs scale so poorly overall. Many teams seem to have this problem when deadlines are looming. Early to mid-game is great, then you just become gods walking among mortals; at least it fits with POE lore!

I enjoy POE too, but let's not delude ourselves. =/

Don't make dedicated threads and eventually it will die down. Just ignore it now, the issue has been resolved.