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Emptiness

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Posts posted by Emptiness

  1. But I have find morally questionable side from all the companions

     

     

    Durance: God killer, support genocidal actions, has questionable about many of population groups in Eora, etc.

    Grieving Mother: Is willing to do quite questionable actions to save children (or what in her opinion saves children).

    Edér: Is in some cases and willing to look other way one questionable acts are done around him and is quite uncaring towards lots of things that other people see as bad.

    Sagani: Leave her children and husband behind for several years to go hunt something that she don't really even believe that she will ever find, mainly because she feels boredom towards her life.

    Kana: Seeks mainly ways to get name for himself, but tries to hide it behind excuse that he is doing it for his country and seeking knowledge for next generations. Although he has lots of naivety in him and he seems to be willing to put his head in sand that face the reality.

    Pallegina: Has strong belief that results are more important than means, has often quite little care towards people that she don't find living up to her standards and she seems to often think that she knows better than others what is good and what is bad.

    Hiravias: He lets his belief that he is wronged or that he is unworthy or maybe both to over shadow everything in his life and reject everybody in his life and make him wander world alone.

    Aloth: He is member of Leaden Key, he is willing to kill people instead of telling truth of his condition because he finds it embarrassing.

     

     

    Of course every character also has their morally upright side.

     

    Speaking of morally questionable actions: You do know that this is a "NO SPOILERS" section of the forum, right?

    • Like 2
  2. The fact that you can't pre-buff in this game also reduces strategy and combat dynamic IMO.

     

    Buffing before combat, especially buffing before every combat, was one of the things that made the IE games more tedious.  Once you got into ToB, for example, if you weren't resting and then fully buffing before each battle you were probably dying and restarting until you did rest and buff.  Limiting rest and removing pre-combat buffing were two changes that were made in the design of this game to try to eliminate that tedium.  Permitting pre-combat buffing (or eliminating rest restrictions) would make the game more tedious, not less, because all of the encounters would have to be rebalanced to account for the increase in the party's power level as a result of not being limited - which would mean that one would then have to spend the time pre-buffing in order to be able to face the encounter without a severe disadvantage.

     

    The encounters are balanced around the idea that you are not pre-buffing, so pre-buffing should not be necessary.  If you are finding yourself unable to win an encounter, and the only way you can think of to win it is to be able to pre-buff, then either you need to try a different tactic or you need to come back later and face the encounter at a higher level.

    • Like 3
  3. Two of my active playthroughs are with less-than-good protagonists.  One is amoral, the other is outright evil.  So far, I haven't had any problem getting the npcs they have chosen to accompany them to happily support their amoral or evil actions.  So, I'm not really clear on why this thread exists.  Are players asking for an npc option that is evil-only, and won't stay with a good pc?  If so, I'm not sure of the point.  I think I prefer npcs whose morality flexes to match the morality of the pc, so that the player is not restricted with regard to which companions they can play with.

  4. I don't understand how someone can fail to understand that your brain can initiate an attempt to pause the game when the game is not paused, but then have the game auto-pause an instant before your hand actually pauses the game, resulting in a pause-unpause sequence that is faster than any human reaction time.  I don't understand how someone can fail to understand that if you are trying to pause the game and the result is that the game is not paused then something may happen before you can repause the game that you were trying to pause the game to prevent.  I don't understand how anyone can have extensive experience with real-time-with-pause games and not have encountered both of these scenarios many times.

  5. I like your suggestions, and agree that what happened was not the ideal behavior for the game, but don't restart a Trial of Iron run on account of the game being weird.  It isn't like you knew the game was going to do that, and were deliberately abusing that behavior to win an encounter that you couldn't have won if the game had reacted as it should have.

  6. Yeah? Hard to see how those 100,000s of people that played those IE games with the exact same pause system ever finished them huh? Oh wait let me guess - you weren't one of them... :no:

     

    You are clearly making mountains out of molehills and I stand by the concept that this system is not broken at all but is functioning exactly as designed and there is nothing wrong with that design in spite of the fact that you might lose 15 frames by not paying enough attention to whether the game is paused or not when you press the spacebar just look at it as part of the challenge and move on!

     

    That may all be true (although in my case I did play most of the IE games), but none of it is a reason not to add the ability to bind Pause and Unpause to different keys.  It's okay for newer games to innovate and provide features that were not present in older games.

  7. Take Second Chance as an example.  It is so strong that I use a suit of armor just for it, instead of using better armor more appropriate to my character's role.

     

    If it was a talent, then every member of my party would have it.  It would overshadow every other option.

     

    I agree that more diversity is better, but that is not the same thing as saying every possible option is a good option, and it doesn't solve the perception that there are limited choices.  There only seems to be limited choices because many of the options have been ruled out as inferior.  They could triple the number of options available...indeed, they could even triple the number of classes available...and the system might still feel restrictive as a result of the drive to make only the best choices.  I'm not objecting to more choices, I'm just pointing out that it won't solve the problem.

  8. Your argument is to bother try because there will always be room for more options...?

     

    I assume the "try" to which you are referring is to try to increase build diversity by adding or rebalancing aspects of the game.

     

    In itself, that isn't bad.  A certain amount of balance is necessary to promote the use of different classes and abilities.  Perfect balance is impossible, and pointless to pursue, but some imbalance is stark enough to merit correction.  For example, is +10 Will worth spending a talent on?  If it clearly is not then it is productive to try to determine how much +Will a talent is worth.

     

    I don't really see this thread as approaching the question of balance from that direction, however:

     

    He's a suggestion of what I think could help:

     

    You can get enchantments that provide Retaliation, Second Chance and whatever the self-healing one is....why not offer these as talents? Why not give a Talent that provides Second Chance? I don't think it'd be too OP since all this effectively acts as is another enchantment slot, but would a talent that provides a character with Second Chance be tempting? Dear lord yes. As it stands now, no one in their right mind is having trouble debating between grabbing Psychic Backlash or Bear's Fortitude....

     

    Retaliation and Second Chance are great examples of very powerful abilities that are deliberately limited to specific items in the game; abilities that, were they available to every character as talents would instantly overshadow most of the alternatives (for appropriate characters).  This isn't a "some of the character options under-perform and could use some adjustment to make them competitive" thread, this is a "there aren't enough overpowered choices available, so they should add more" thread.  Or, at least that is how I read it.  That's where my response comes from: increasing the number of build options by adding more overpowered options is doomed to fail because only the most powerful options will satisfy the need to be the best.

    • Like 2
  9. The problem is that tanks generally wear heavy armour and a shield, so even with a high interrupt rate, I think you'll find the sluggish attacks of the tank will interrupt less than the high dex dual-wielder next to him who ignored perception. Perhaps even worse than that, since the tank getting wailed on by three people is going to get interrupted himself rather a lot.

     

    It's a nice perk, as you say, if you stack Perception for the deflection, but I don't think it's worth investing in Perception to get. Probably better to get Resolve first and cut down the interruptions the tank receives.

     

    The Tank isn't there to do damage, so enemies who interrupt the Tank are generally not going to be a problem.  Strictly from that standpoint, I would say that Perception would outweigh Resolve.  Of course, Resolve also increases Will defense, and an incapacitated Tank is a very bad thing, so Resolve may come out ahead of Perception in the end - if you're having to make a choice between the two.  Having both maxed on a Tank is very nice.

     

    Interrupting with a DPS character may happen more frequently, but investing in Perception to boost the interrupt chance is probably not worthwhile.  For a DPS character, interrupts aren't good enough to merit sacrificing other stats to improve.  Might, Dex, and in most cases Int are going to be better investments.

     

    Interrupts aren't good enough for a Tank to sacrifice stats for, either, but in the case of a Tank the relevant stat is one that they would want to raise anyway.

  10. Limited build diversity is the child of the min-max mindset.  First the system gets torn apart to identify "the best" options available, then all other options are rejected, then the system is criticized for lacking options.  This has nothing to do with the system itself; for any system, a given person will only find a limited set of choices to be "the best" because "the best" implies stratification of the available choices and rejection of all but a limited number of them.

     

    The only solution to this problem is to be content to make suboptimal choices.

     

    Nonsense. There's plenty of ways to encourage build diversity by simply offering more diverse benefits.

     

    The problem currently is that most of the talents are arbitrary stat bonuses. The class talents are better because many of them add or modify existing abilities, the all-class talents are crud because they just give +10 Will or something like that, which simply won't mean jack against the toughest opponents and will hardly be noticeable in normal fights.

     

     

    Take for example the Monk's talent that reduces all hostile effects by half. This? This is a good talent. This is flexible and can universally help your monk across the board. But no such all-class talents exist. There needs to be more like that.

     

    Yes, there need to be more options like the ones that you consider the best.  But then you won't be able to take them all.  So for the ones you aren't taking to compete, they'll need to be more like the ones that you are taking.  Ad infinitum.

    • Like 1
  11. Limited build diversity is the child of the min-max mindset.  First the system gets torn apart to identify "the best" options available, then all other options are rejected, then the system is criticized for lacking options.  This has nothing to do with the system itself; for any system, a given person will only find a limited set of choices to be "the best" because "the best" implies stratification of the available choices and rejection of all but a limited number of them.

     

    The only solution to this problem is to be content to make suboptimal choices.

    • Like 3
  12. I had an event that "Nyry the Deft Hand" appeared at my stronghold. I got rid of him by killing him myself. 24h later he reappeared with the same event.

     

    I had the same thing happen with The Dread Pirate Roberts.

     

    Edit: It is really complicating my efforts to manipulate Guilder into a war.

  13. I have also seen this sort of misbehavior.  I have this configuration:

    □□□1□□□
    □□□2□□□
    □□3□4□□
    □□□5□□□
    □□□6□□□
    

    but what I get is more like this:

    □ □ □ 1 □ □ □
    
    □ □ □ 2 □ □ □
    
    □ □ 3 □ 4 □ □
         5
    □ □ □ □ □ □ □
    
    □ □ □ 6 □ □ □
    

    The character in my #5 slot is Hiravias, who was the last to join my party, and has been manually dragged to slot 5...so it is possible that he is actually in the "6th" character slot, depending on how the game's database handles characters who are dragged to a different position in the party UI.

    • Like 1
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