Vold

They killed the old geezer... Deckard Cain! Shaman was used on World of Warcraft, so they just got creative and gave it another name.

I have played DBTS and SG Combat Demo, and I can tell that there is a world of difference between them. Considering that in games like PoE you have to control 6 players, it is indeed not a good match for it.

Well, it seems like the best idea would be to let us arrange the UI as we please.

After reading several posts discussing attributes and their effects, I've figured that none of them talk about the main difference between PoE and old DnD based games: Equipment does not have an attribute requirement. In BG's for instance, Weapons and Armour had a base strenght requirement. Here is a link to BG's wiki about strenght. Talents do not have an attribute requirement. In NWN1 for instance, feats had attribute requirement. Here is an example. Skills do not have an attribute specific bonus. In NWN they were tightly related. Attributes had a huge impact on builds in games like BG, NWN, etc. But, in PoE Attributes have an effect on basic traits: Health, Stamina, Damage, Interruption, etc. Also, they do have an implication on dialogs/story line. But, bottom line, they do not have a real impact on builds. I am not saying this is good or bad; My point is, stop talking about attribute modification as if it would really make a difference.

After reading several posts discussing attributes and their effects, I've figured that none of them talk about the main difference between PoE and old DnD based games: Equipment does not have an attribute requirement. In BG's for instance, Weapons and Armour had a base strenght requirement. Here is a link to BG's wiki about strenght. Talents do not have an attribute requirement. In NWN1 for instance, feats had attribute requirement. Here is an example. Skills do not have an attribute specific bonus. In NWN they were tightly related. Attributes had a huge impact on builds in games like BG, NWN, etc. But, in PoE Attributes have an effect on basic traits: Health, Stamina, Damage, Interruption, etc. Also, they do have an implication on dialogs/story line. But, bottom line, they do not have a real impact on builds. I am not saying this is good or bad; My point is, stop talking about attribute modification as if it would really make a difference.

After than giving it a second thought, we may be ****ting out of the potty. First of all, all the build diversity based on attributes of games like BG, NWN... was not exactly due to the impact of it on basic traits: AC, thac0, etc; But what really did the difference was the following: Several feats had a base attribute requirement, this in NWN also affected multiclassing (pre-requisites of some prestige classes ). Attribute modifier affected various skills directly, NWN at least. Equipment's base attribute requirement. Besides, in PoEt the attributes don't even increase upon leveling. So, the point is build diversity is this game is not based on attributes at all; it does not matter really, whether if they increase the impact the attributes have on the basic traits or not; in the end the build diversity will remain the same.

I honestly do not see the problem of min/maxing, actually I think it would be a good idea to allow it because a lot of people likes to play that way. An option to reduce the possibility of bad builds due to erroneous attribute selection, is to allow the player to auto-select the attributes if they are utterly clueless about the mechanics. This was possible in NWN. If they do not go high/moderate reward vs high/moderate penalty with the attributes, they better get rid of them.

D:OS allows some variability of builds, but it's very limited, in comparison to games like NWN or BG. For example, in NWN you could create the following builds with the monk: Monk/Cleric/Fighter (Unarmed Melee High AB Magical/Elemental Damage) Monk/Cleric/Paladin (Caster high AC and saves) Monk/Paladin/Cot (Unarmed Melee very high AB to Knockdown) Monk/Ranger/Rogue (AKA Corner Sneaker) Monk/Sorcerer/RDD (True Strike Devastating Critical Monk) Monk/Druid/Paladin (Stun Fister Dragon) Monk/Sorcerer/Arcane Archer (Fast High AB Archer) ... and many more. This is just 1 of the 11 base classes; and all of the builds I mentioned before were played very differently.

Alright, clearly I didn't arrange my thoughts. D:OS is a good game in general, many aspects of the game are excellent, but it lacks what I think is fundamental for games like these, replayability (others may disagree), because of the following reasons: The story, quests and dialogs are not so engaging, specially after Cyseal. It does not have as much choice and consequence as it claims. The mechanics of the game are not complex and do not allow a variety of builds to reroll. The combat after the first gameplay may become tedious (it did for me, some combats are too slow). Replayability is barely mentioned in most of the reviews that I have read about D:OS, and this is the first reason why I think it is OVERRATED. The second reason is that most of user reviews, are based on the first hours of gameplay (Cyseal); and the quality of the game diminishes greatly after the first area (cyseal), due to that it was the only area which was thorougly beta tested. Lastly, the third reason is that the most of us were starving for a good old style game, which lowered our standards slightly towards D:OS. I hope that this clears up what I wanted to say, If there is still something you do not understand is because english is not even close to my native language.

D:OS is overated, don't get me wrong the game is refreshing and fun, but after than you finish the game, it does not have much to offer ("replayability"). The most of the critics are a little biased because we all were starving for something like this, besides, the most of the user reviews were made before completing the game (the first chapter is excellent, but the rest is... fair).

The OP should never have posted this thread in PoE forum, because obviously it was going to be flamed to death, and that game does not deserve that at all. If you want to know about SG I suggest you to read this: #1, #2, #3. I asure you that you will find it very intresting. Let me say that all the videos on youtube are very old, they have done a lot of improvements to the animation. Btw, they already released a combat demo for their alpha and beta backers, I donated like 4 weeks ago and I tried the beta and I can tell you that it's really awesome and worth trying. Anyways, I just wanted to share my hype about this game with you; hopefully those links will inform you better than the video posted by the OP. Edit: I suggest you to scroll down in the #1 link and read about: World, Combat, Attributes, Skills, Thaumaturgy, Itemization and Multiplayer.

NWN 3

Have you actually looked at the current attribute system? PoE allows for fighters who are intelligent instead of strong. And it works quite well, except for one small problem: The values have to be tweaked a bit. Also nobody's saying that the intelligent fighter should be as good as the strong one in every circumstance. It might be that, all in all, he's not as good a build. Nobody (who you should care about) wants perfect balance. But if I can actually roleplay as an intelligent leader instead of a dumb brute while still being quite good in combat situations, then that's enough reason to play this build. Current attribute system allows everything, because it has no a real impact on builds; that's the problem.

Each subtype has a different passive bonus that is a little more powerful than passive bonuses from other races.(wiki)

Barbarians look badass. ^^