Valeris

I think you are wrong with your basic assumption that PoEs combat is inferior to that of any other IE game, and nothing what you could say is going to change that. Shocking, I know.

Pardon me? Lvl 5-7 combat in Baldurs gate 1 / 2: Fighters: Miss Miss CRIT DEATH ONE HIT KILL miss miss. Mage: Casting cloud spell X and abusing the ai OR casting overpowered melf´s minor meteorids OR casting elemental damage spells and hoping for the next resting opportunity. Rogue: Trying 5x to get into stealth mode, missing one of three sneak attacks OR doing lethal ONE HIT KILLS and then micro manage the hell out of them OR shortbow for minor damage. WoW. So much fluff and flow. Take off the nostalgia goggles please!

In traditional MMOs CC may be a necessary evil but balancing combat in a single-player game around heavy reliance on CC is bad design. This is a claim, and not an argument. Can you back it up? If you do so, I have a few questions for you two consider: "When" is balance required? In the early, mid or lategame? Why should you have access to CC-abilities if you don´t need them to win encounters? Leading to: Does this mean that only damage, buffing and outhealing is a legit way to win? And finaly,why is a game balanced around CC iif CC alone doesn`t kill enemies? We have cooldowns to consider here, so DPS always is important. You can spamm autoattack, but you can not spam "stun for eternity".

Please, stop it. It doens´t matter if it were "two beetles" or "Lord Hellfire of Doom" himself. You can not expect us to take this stream or your "argument" seriously when you complain about taking too much damage while, at the same time, no CC like stuns or knock downs is jused. Even a medicore player from a pseudo-(MMO)RPG like World of Warcraft could succesfully tell you that "cc is king", and not damage. You don´t win most encounters by zerging them down, at least not in the beginning of the scaling-curve, and this is a good sign (btw, there is a reason many bosses in many rpg games outside of PoE are "immun"/or resistent to any or most forms of cc, because it would make the fight TOO EASY). Seems the streamer is just too lazy for doing more than the minimal amount of micro management and has no clue that CC is superior to damage in most cases.

So she just autoattacked, didn´t use any form of CC or "any ressource because no point and not needed" and yet you are suprised she is resting all over the place? What a bias.

I couldn`t care less if Fighter is "bland" or not. There are other, more important issues at hand regarding classes; if a class is effective, good. Making it "sexy" comes second. Instead, people should start to wonder if Obsidian expects us to have a cleric in every party in every walkthrough higher then "normal", or becoming healing potion addicts. (hint hint: More healing utility for paladin and druid). I guess some people really have to stop being nitpicky about minor concerns like "warrior is effective yet boring" or "my lvl 7 wizard without any plus-might-equipment has limited use of lvl 1 spells" or "I prefer my combat log in the middle".

Though I appreciate the OPs article, he commits some fallacies; most importantly - even in "gread awesome D&D", Wizards of level 7 were, damage whise, hardly usefull. They had some weak crowd control and AoE spells, but melf`s minor meteroids aside (which were consideres OP by many) they were garbage. Some sort of nostalgia bias working here. Further more, in D&D or the way Black Isle implemented it´s ruleset in BG2, wizard didn´t scale all that well with equipment (robe of vecna aside) or stats, but with level. In PoE, it is already obvious that they will scale with Equipment ("plus might, plus intelligence"), and since the beta is a low level adventure, you can not expect to find awesome stuff.

The rogue class is translated with "Dieb" in the current beta version. This literally means "thief". So. If someone without prior knowledge of the game creates a "rogue" in german, he expect to get a "Thief". And as we all know, there is not a single "theftlike ability" within the rogue´s class kit. He can´t pickpocket. He can´t open locks (everyone can!). He cant disable traps (everone can!). This is not just myself making things up, I´ve already seen two streams/youtube clips from german beta players literally saying: "Well, seems rogue is bugged, can´t find any option to lockpick/pickpocket a merchant". Please reconsider renaming rogue from "dieb" to "schurke", what makes much more sense. Btw, in the three dictionaries I lookd up, not a single translation "rogue = dieb" is offered.

This, exactly.

Once I´ve completed a rp-game for the first time, doing the same trash mobs over and over again just for the levelUPs!-sake became boring pretty soon. On replays, I skipped as much trash content as I possibly could. What matters to me were differencies in dialogue, quests and ending.

Obviously people who refer to the Staff of Magi as "OP" would restrain themselves from using it in the first place. But this is no vindication for bad gamedesign. I mean, a pure, singleclass Wizard/Mage is OP in the first place. So what about restraianing yourself and don`t play any arcane magic class in the first place? It should be the developers job to eliminate such OPness. If the player is forced to restrain himself, something went terribly wrong. I mean, I´ve heard this argument a dozen times on the Skyrim Forums alone. People who like the fact that you could craft weapons that three-hitted Alduin in Master would simply reply: "If you don´t like them, don´t use them, it is a single player game kk?"

Following this poll, the system as it is currently implemented has been rejected by the player base.

No, it doesn`t. Because having a pure Wizard that can chose between Melee and Range-combat is already more character diversity than you could have ever hoped to achieve within the framework of BG2s pure class system (not talking about Multiclassing here, obviously). A pure Mage from BG2 would never turn into a melee fighter. That was not possible (besides Tenser´s and such). Yet you can do that in PoE, and there IS a difference between a Might/Int-Wizard and a Might/Con-Wizard. And btw. We still don´t know anything about the feats which are yet to be announced. Not only will those fear enable more diversitiy, they may even come with some restrictions like "requires 18 int and 18 resolve" or something.

If Might is supposed to be the might of your soul, then why in character interactions is it used only for tasks of physical strength, while Resolve is used in dialogue to express the force of personality? Because it was obviously names "Strength" in the first place by Obisidian? I am talking semantically here, and semantically speaking: The Expectation that "Might" strictly refers to physical strength only is false. Its simple as that. I won`t deny that the attribute system needs polishment, yeah, even improvement. But I hardly see a reason why so many people are upset with "might = weapon damage, spell power and healing power", even when there is no connection to maximum carry weight or so.

Even if "no unique enchantments" stays till release, Obsidian can still make it so that Uniques have higher numbers on their enchantments than you could ever hope yo reach with crafting, thus making them still enjoyable.

No, they are not. Because "Might", again, has nothing to do with being a bodybuilder.

I want muscle wizards. I am pretty sure many others want that , too. Not everything has to be as restricted as as DND rulebook from the BG2 Era. The problem is, might wizards should by all means give up something to achieve their goal, which is to fight in melee. Excuse me, perhaps I am just stupid or something, but..WHY? Why "to fight in melee"? Might has nothing to do with melee combat.

I want muscle wizards. I am pretty sure many others want that , too. Not everything has to be as restricted as as DND rulebook from the BG2 Era.

Watching these arguments, you begin to understand where Sawyers "No hardcounter - items" - credo actually originates from.

No it didn't. lol? Pardon me, but are you SURE you´ve ever played BG2?

Ya/No. It WAS their fault, cause they decided to make a product on a rather strict DND license / chose to stay as true as possible to the license for marketing or what ever reason they chose. Black Isle COULD have created an entirely free game on their own, like Obisidian is doing now with PoE, but they didn´t. They didn`t even take much away from the core rules of the Edition. This all is "someone`s fault", ofcourse. Things like this don`t happen out of nowhere. That`s why I praise Obisidian for at least one thing: They dared to make something new. Obviously many people are not happy with the way this "new" thing turned out, while some are. I guess if they polish the Itemization and take a step back from this Diablo 3- ish approach with abandoning it entirely, everything will be fine.

This is not different than what I was saying. If you are bad at the game, it's okay, because you get better, or you keep trying and you reload. It's not a major setback or a big waste of time. You can continue to progress, if slowly. If, however, the attribute system is designed so that it's easy to make a terrible build, full of traps and requirements you may not be aware of (like "a Wizard without 18 Int is useless"), you can end up making a character who seems okay at first but then 10+ hours later turns out to be terrible as he develops (a 3rd Edition Wizard with 12 Int may not seem terrible until you get to the point you should be getting high-level spells and realize you can't have any). That's the part that is a major setback and an unnecessary trap with no benefit. That's what some of us would like to see avoided by making all stat configurations useful, albeit only with different playstyles. You can always try adjusting your playstyle if what you were doing isn't working. You can't, however, change your stats 10+ hours into the game if it turns out they made you useless. You can only start over, which is a stupid waste of time, especially to inflict on new players. I wonder how 3rd Edition Players managed to avoid this problem... Mh. I guess they read the manual before creating a new character. But yeah, I favor the current system more than the "bad old DND" System, though the attributes need polishing.

I guess many people here (and on RPG Codex and similar sites) are outraged about the attribute system cause it kind of "ruins" their expectations - they wanted clear classes in the style of BG2, where mages could never wear armor or use a sword. Ofcourse, this approach has a problem. It´s premise is: Casters "have to" be physically weak. But there is no rule for that. People have to realize that PoE has an entirely different lore. Magic here is not comparable to DND. And I approve this. Further, people are against this entire "balance"-**** Sawyer took, but on the other hand, DND and BG2 had balance, too, ofcourse: Mages couldn`t wear armor for a reason. It was there to prevent OPness. But the system, or the way this system was implemented in BG2, made the unability of Mages to wear armor important only in the beginning of the game. Once a mage had access to stoneskin (and the like), armor was trivial, not needed at all. I assume people have to get used to the idea that there CAN and WILL be "Muscle Wizards" , even if the influence of attributes like might is not SOOO big like someone would have hoped for. Morrowind had Mages casting in plate mail, and it worked fine, because it FITS to Morrowinds Lore, Game design and spell system. No reason why it shouldn`t be fine in PoE.

Though I can see why Obisidian was so focused on "Balance" in terms of character creation and - development, I fail to see their reason for doing an item system as bland and unappealing as this one. Diablo 3 has proven dramatically that people HATE generic +XY% Items. Peoples want Items, epics! so to speak, that distinguish themselves. I hope Obsidian will be able to correct this approach and make weapons more to the BG2-style.

Though I agree with the notion that the attribute system needs a revamp, 30% differemce IS actually noticeable, especially on higher difficulties / hardcore-modes turned on. It is just pointless, cause the BETA is easy as **** and the attribute system as such is uninspired.