Fiebras

1. Ranger-Bear 2. Ranger-Stag/Lion 3. Ranger -Bear 4. Priest/Wizard 5. Chanter Seriously. On the other hand: 1. Ranger-Bear/Paladin - Second Front Liner + Ranged DPS/ Second Healer+ Second Front Liner 2. Chanter/Wizard -AOE spells and CC. Chanter doubles as Third Front Line 3. Barbarian/Fighter -Main Front Line Fighters 4. Priest/Druid -Healing and CC + Third/Fourth Front Liner 5. Rouge/Cipher -ranged DPS And if we include a 6th member it would be any of the ones listed but not selected.

I began playing Baldur´s Gate Enhanced Edition last night. As nice it is to roll a 96 overall score the frustration of skiping over a 90 roll because youre clicking so fast due to sheer tedium of rolling for a long time is cringy to say the least. And thats every new character. Yeah, its not a feature Im gonna miss anytime soon.

Just a heads up, Corrosive Siphon affects allies as well. I wish you used Expose Vulnerabilities there, its such a good spell (minus deflection and DT for all enemies in the area and it only seems to affect enemies) as well as the Burning/falming wounds spellw which amplifies the damage the Wizard does. Ghost Blades and Chill Fog are also pretty good since the damage is over time in their AOE and Slicken inflicts AOE Knockdown. Though I guess net + double fireball is also good. Id like to see someone try the battle Wizard that uses all its self-buffing spells to take on the beetles solo. Its probably doable, though you would end up blowing all your spells in a single encounter. Parasitic Staff, Eldritch Aim, Spirit Shield, all seem to aid you in this.

I still find it strange that you cant access that stash with just your current haul of ingredients outside merchants. Im guessing they made it like that so you arent thinking "I have X of this ingredient, what do I use it for" and instead think "This is the enchantment I want, I need X amount of this ingredient", or something like that. And the trade window showing the stash is probably so you can easily see what ingredients you have when buying more of them.

Its not gonna go away if you ignore it. I agree that you get a bigger feeling of attachment to your gear with a self-made weapon. My problem with it is that as things are now you can pretty much have the best gear for you made by you and that makes unique and legendary items feel cheap or just useless. At least mid-late game when you will probably have enough money to enchant everything. I argue for an NPC enchanter simply because to me it feels weird to have my party stop in the middle of the wilderness to craft and enchant items. @Yonjuro: I agree with everything you said. Tabs or filters would be great. Though the recepies already tell you the ingredients so I wouldnt know how much more useful it would be.

I wish more people instead of using the very vague term of "IE games" used the specific IE game they are talking about. All of them have different mechanics and design.

Have you tried crafting yet? What do you think about it and enchanting? I think crafting and enchanting shouldnt be done by your adventurers. Food and SOME potions and scrolls are fine since you have wizards, druids, chanters, priests and such but I think some recepies should maybe be tied to the survivalist and lore abilities (make a party-wide check to see what the highest ability score is). I honestly think towns should have an "Enchanter" merchant though. It could be the person selling you the potions and ingredients in the village for example.Sure you have wizards, druids, chanters, priests and such of your own but it would feel weird if a team of fighters, rogues, and rangers would be able to enchant. In games that have crafting and enchanting I always hoard materials first and then in-between quests or locations I sit down, have a good think and craft/enchant. It feels unecessary to be able to do it on the fly. To me it should be a ritual thing done during moments of pause since it tends to be a big deal, and giving a face to those moments via an NPC that facilitates the craft as a service would help flesh out the system and give it more personality and inmersion, imo. This is of course my issue on how the mechanic is implemented and presented, not about the mechanic itself and the metagame of it. Feel free to give your opinions on that.

Crafting feels weird atm.

Beetles are hardy. Even when the DoTs get fixed people forget just how hard Stone and Adra Beetles hit. Its a case of armored enemy encounter. Its fine. The only reason people are finding it repetitive is because its the one encounter everyone does every time. Spiders are fun and a good excuse to use aoe spells. Crystal Eaters have an AOE stun which is fun. Also need to have abilities (DoTs and Petrify) fixed. Forest Lurkers are a nice variety of mob in a "secret" place. The root is interesting. Hope to see them paired with more plant mobs as the root can be pretty devastating to back row fighters. Wurms are Xvart village tier. They are intended this way so its fine. Lions are the same as Wolfs: mid-low/high-low tier enemies that are weak enough to be considered "thrash mobs" but not weak enough that if you agro a large group or two groups of them or you let them get to your casters you arent gonna have a very very hard time. I like it. Pjak or whatever in the adra weapon ruins are interesting but they die too fast for them to make an impression on me beyond "enemy spellcasters". Spectres are fun. The spell that scrambles your party formation is really interesting and forces you to be on your toes. It looks cool too but im wondering if its suposed to look like bones/rock spikes coming from the ground or a gust of wind. The texture may need some clearing. Enemy humanoids are always fun. Cultists are too numerous and not packed together enough imo. Overall pretty satisfied with the encounters. Though I do have a problem with spiders and beetles and spectres having "instant teleport to your back line" abilities. It feels rather cheap. If they want to get to my back lines then they should go through my front line and suffer disengagement attacks like my front liners have to. The rogue may have a teleport ability but shes squishy, while the spiders and beetles that can teleport, arent by any means. Makes sense for spectres to teleport though so thats ok but I hope its not a common thing.

As Tartantyco said, the plants are easily identifiable. Once you find them. Until then you could be looking at a colectable plant right next to you and you wouldnt know because unless you mouse over it (either on accident or actually pixel hunting every 2d plant you see) you wont know if its a background plant or an actual resource. And while I find the idea that you are foraging and learning of these plants as you go along, I can see myself pausing every screen to run my cursor over every piece of vegetation and then some which can get a bit tedious. Maybe add a a few "book on forest/plains/coastal/desert/underground plants: a guide" that lets us see them highlighted once read? It would be a neat feature.

It was probably a silly mistake. Its just a first impressions thing and with these types of games that have a lot of information to process its reasonable to make mistakes like that. Hes not talking about the lore but the overall game experience so Its understandable that some details passed them by. Not to menton most "first impressions" people that go into an early beta arent gonna invest themselves into the game because everything might be subject to change and are just giving it a passing glace. They arent discussing the game everyday and re-playing the beta, unlike us. Cut them some slack.

I think thats refering to the Orlan being able of getting the same stats and class as the Aumaua and human but not the racial traits.

Summons should probably have less health and last only as long as it takes the chanter to be able to summon them again, maybe less/more depending on the summon. Though I think the summons lasting forever isnt a problem and you can work around it. It is pretty nice to just walk around with a skelleton pose and have them for a long time. I like that necromancer feel very much and its something ive been wanting games to do for a while. But they should probably be more brittle so the Chanter cant use them to facetank everything for the party. Dont know how high the engagement limit of the skeletons is but it should only be 1 per skelleton and they should be pretty low on the agro list. Id like to keep the eternal skelletons if possible, but nerf them in return.

When my party was strong enough to just autoattack the skaen cultists to death I stopped caring about tactics and just charged into them with little injuries. Part of it is due to HOW MANY cultists there are (a ton) and part of it is that the beta XP is set to "a lot" on purpose so theres no way to not be overleveled for the area (which is fine for the purpose of testing) and part of it is due to how having to unravel the combat becomes tedious when you are doing it every step you take (as combat is atm). Thats something Id like to avoid happening in the final game. Ps: im fine with mob density and variety in Dyford Crossing and other areas of the game, but Dyford ruins has not only a lot of enemies but they are all "the same" even though you have like 3-4 different types and all of them are very close together so the progress through that area ends up feeling like youre "stuttering"/constant disruption as oposed to the more flowing outdoor areas. Also the Adra weapon area is fine because you face only a few big diverse packs as oposed to many small packs (some even having only 1 mob).

@ MC: I can agree with the road bumps aproach but Ill also say that every person will have diferent interpretation of road bumps. But yeah theres a difficulty slider for a reason so that should be enough for most people, me included. @ Ink Blot: I agree there should be varying levels of dificulty. The thing is we dont know what the easy or hard encounters are yet. We got a very small sampling here, so we can make asumptions with it. My personal hope is that normal encounters are like the beetles and cultists, easy encounters are like the Wolfs, whiping the floor encounters like the wurms ( maybe a bit harder) and hard encounters are like the Spider Queen and Ogre while optional really hard encounters are like...well, I dont know. I share your hate for hate for scaled encounters. I also hope the trash mobs are rare and I feel more of a badass after taking on a difficult enemy than just mowing mooks, but thats just me. @Sylvanpixie: what difficulty setting were you on?

Its a matter of learning the game system. The beetles arent actually hard, its just you gotta manage your party positioning, agro and focus fire. The same with the spiders (hint-kill the big spiders first). And the same with the cultists. You need to learn the encounters and the enemy types. Its just people are having a hard time because of DoTs and the "what is going on" stat of combat. Combat Clarity is needed. I enjoy every combat not being just wiping the floor with the enemy. I enjoy no-thrash mobs. I enjoy a bit of a struggle. And I enjoy that its likely I will need to use some daily spells in conjunction with per-encounter spells/abilities. I much prefer it to just autoattacking everything and resting without having used a single spell. I enjoy feeling that I do need to optimize my gear a bit and one way if acknowleging that is to have encounters I cant just mop up without a care in the world. Those are my opinons and tatstes and I can understand others not sharing them. Also, what happened to the desire to overcome a challenge? Do you really want just a passive mmo grind fest? Ok thats being binary as MC said but I do feel like people are basing their opinions too much on "Its too hard because *I* cant do it!". Its probably untrue but thats just the feeling I get from some coments. Or maybe this isnt your idea of a challenge or maybe some dont want a challenge. Thats fine. Theres many difficulty options thankfully (though I dont think setting the game to impossible difficulty were the only thing changed are numbers and number of enemies constitutes a challenge). I TPK like 4 times on the Spider Queen and loved it. But thats just me and I understand if people want an easier time for feeling of empowerment or whatever reason. I respectfully disagree. If every battle is challenging and the challenge is scaled/managed properly its a pretty fun experience. Difficulty helps set the tone of the game. It makes combat feel more like combat. Im just going to be lazy here and point to Dark Souls and Demon´s Souls and say "like that!" in terms of design. Also BG did not have that many thrash mobs (Ankegs anyone?) and there was always the posibility of you going into a high level area and have a real hard time if you didnt know what you were doing (and since everyone here is basically a BG expert of course the game is much easier in your minds).

Cant edit my post anymore, welp: Also heres the ability that terrifies everyone AKA Deep Wounds: Its an 8th level Rouge passive that gives a DoT to all your attacks that ignores armor. Thats why characters die so fast againts the Skaen. With this ability theres no reason not to get a very fast ranged weapon and apply the dot to every enemy and just watch them die. Until DOTs get nerfed a bit its gonna be pretty OP. Then again we dont know what enemies await us at 8th level.

4th Level Wizard spell Essential Phantom would probably be pretty good if only it didnt currently delete the wizard from the party as extensively detailed here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68416-v278-essential-phantom-spell-deletes-wizard-from-party/ Shameless plug. I think the purpose of stealth is exactly to scout ahead and only avoid some encounters. I think this is fine aproach to it and is working as intended. But as it is right now you can scout ahead, position your entire party, and throw a huge spell at them before combat even begins. Preemtive strikes should probably be limited to autoattacks or low-key single target abilities, not spells (priest, cipher, druid, wizard, etc). Or make it so you either cant use abilities while in stealth mode or stealth mode gets inmediately cancelled once an ability is queued.

The combat isnt exceptionally difficult atm outside dealing with DOTs (Deep Wounds, Widowmaker Poison, Wood Beetle Poison). Challenging yes, which is good. My impression is that parties of humanoid oponents will be the more interesting fights due to the different abilities you have to face, but wildlife encounters dont fall behind (beetle and spider variety) which is very refreshing to see. The amount of variety in encounters in Dyford Crossing pleases me greatly.

@ Primejunta: Oh I agree that "more" feedback is probably necesary though we probably differ in just how much more is needed. And I think that by making the feedback clearer we would need less extra feeback. Its like nutrition. If your meals are not nutritious then you feel you need more of it to make up for it. Or maybe that was empty calories. Sorry, Im not a nutritonist lol. I hope you get what Im getting at. @Cantousent: Im just nitpicky with how people word things. It can mean a world of diference. The dramatic part wasnt being aimed at you, it was just a broad statement regarding internet posting in general. Seriously, dont think too much on it and sorry if it sounded heavy-handed.

At first I found the area and the character of Wymund pretty silly. "An entire temple full of cultists rigth under a small village? And no one knows anything? That is silly! How do they even feed themselves?" "Why does he care about the noble? Why is he experimenting on people? That is sily!" But then It dawned on me that everything made perfect sense. The temple people have Trygil to get everything for them and keep people away from the temple entrance complete with stinky leather shop no one wants to enter. They have the wilderness exit to forage, hunt and smuggle in supplies and people and they do venture outside of the temple as the corpse in the ogre cave showed. Skaen of course has his own temples and they would be in a hidden place due to the very nature of Skaen. Skaen being all "fight the MAN!" would have followers that would always want to undermine authority or people in priviledged positions. And since skaen shows disfavor to people who rise above their status, the head priests would be actively trying to disrupt nobles and such as much as possible as thats they are already in an "in charge" position. Also, what better place to build a temple for skaen than in the very ruins of a former noble´s castle inhabited by the people that overthrew her? I quite like attention to detail like this. Though I hope we see some skaen devouts that arent all presented as "chaotic/nerutral evil" (aka the mordor effect) and dont attack you on sight (though the temple thing is also justified as its supposed to be a secret place you just barged into without wearing the uniform) or are meant to be your enemies.

I think saying its a philosophical issue is being needlessly drastic. The current clarity of combat feedback is an issue with the design in which that feedback is transmited to the player and its definately improvable without drastic changes. To use an architecture example: If the in-progress floor plans that will be used to build a building have all the information (levels, quotes, axes, signs, linetypes, etc) but its placement is poorly designed or its overlapping, the architect revises it and fixes it. He doesnt need to re-design the whole building for it and it isnt a matter of his architecture philosophy. And I believe we have enough feedback but it simply isnt being broacasted to us in the best way possible. Thankfully this is still a work in progress and thats why we are providing feeback. Its very easy to use hyperboles on the internet, particulary about our own opinons or opinions we agree on. Its even easier to go "scrap this whole thing and re-design it". I would argue for more surgical changes that dont require ovehauls. Minimum change for maximum impact. Think a lot to work very little. A scalpel instead of an axe. Lets work with what we got now and improve it. Feel free to agree or disagree.

I think hit/crit/graze/ miss is fine as you have the combat log for it. Maybe simplify the wording/report even if that means hulk speech reports. You could also color-code the reports depending on graze, miss hit or crit but that could create more overwhelming information. Simplicity means you only care if you hit or miss and how much but if you want to see if its a graze crit or plain hit you have the comat log. But I think we should have this discussion elsewere so as to not continue to derail the thread which was suposed to be about simple statements.

So to parraphrase Gromnir's wall: combat feedback. Everyone seems to be in agreement on wanting combat feedback but maybe the issue is that people are actually getting overwhelmed by the amount of combat feedback (flashy spells! Your time bar! Your stamina! Your health! The enemy time bars! The enemy health! What spells are being queued? Watch out for that big wizard aoe! Loud noises! Etc.) We got plenty of combat feedback. What I think everyone is asking for is Combat CLARITY or feedback clarity. Characters already have icons next to their model health bar in combat describing what they are doing and what actions they are queuing, but its basically transparent and tiny. You cant easily see who your fighter is engaged with. An artor or line or chain linking the circles would help. And you also have to select each character to see some information when it would be easier if they just made that information available when you pause or hit the slow key. Combat clarity/transparency, not more feedback(ok maybe just a little more feedback but with clarity)

Its probably the *Missing String* Archers. They use Deep Wounds so a portion of the damage you do to them gets redirected to the party member they are targetting. I had a chanter so everything was directed to skeletons but you can actually have your wizard facetank it with Corrosive Siphon if you are fighting a large enough group. That thing heals for so much I was constantly having my Wizard´s stamima going up and down like a pogo stick. He had literaly no health at the end though. It seems ranged warbow monks might be the thing to go. Also, Skaen enemies drop so much good loot on Hard. Im rather grateful for the stash mechanic and am starting to find it less and less annoying with each playthrough. Now if only consumables and scrolls actually worked in combat I can see the "this is your quickbar, not your inventory" design working. Though I still think there should be larger individual party member inventories instead of quickbar inventories. Though the quickbar inventory size is probably so as to not clutter up the main abilities bar with consumables. But you could always have a separate ability sub-menu for consumables and scrolls for every character like we have for spells which even if they maintain the current inventory system I wish they would implement. @Cantousent: You can very easily get level 6-7 before you even get to the ogre cave just following normal quest chains without even entering the Skaen Temple/Dyford Ruins. I would actually say that the XP values are a bit bloated for the purposed of the beta which is fine. At level 7 everything becomes much easier, particulary if you hired an additional party member. Though I was playing on Hard so Im not sure if you get a hidden XP bonus from doing that.