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Emptiness
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Posts posted by Emptiness
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If you are planning to play all three of them, then I would play BG + BG2 first, simply because if you play PoE first then your experience with the BG games will be soured somewhat in that you will probably miss the quality-of-life features and improvements that are present in PoE.
Personally I recommend the enhanced editions of BG & BG2 over the originals. They do add some new content, but that isn't the reason for my recommendation. Several others have suggested using the original versions + mods, and one of the main reasons to do this is that the unmodded original versions are clogged with quest-related bugs. Using the right mod(s) helps with that, but there are so many mods out there that finding the "right" ones is a daunting task. The community doesn't agree on what the "right" mods are, so you'll get different recommendations from different people, and then also you'll have to get the ones you pick to work together - which isn't always easy. I feel that messing with mods is something that should be reserved for BG veterans. If you play the games and like them enough to want to play them again and again then you can delve into that aspect of the game. To start off, I would stick with the EE versions because they fix virtually all of the quest bugs, and many non-quest bugs, all in one package.
Whichever way you go (original or EE), you definitely want to play BG and then BG2 with your character imported over. The two games are one story arc, with the events of BG2 finishing the story that BG begins. Taking one character through both games is an extremely satisfying experience.
If you were going to pick just one of the three to play, however, then I would play PoE. BG2 is great, and larger, but PoE isn't done yet so who can say where it will end up?
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Okay, maybe the constitution bonuses are added after the endurance -> health calculation is made!? BUT even
then is would be not differ from the 82.6 * 5 calculation and his health should be 413. I know, this would mean
that there is only an one point difference. But why? And is this last assumption about calculation right?
When the observed value of a formula where rounding takes place is 1-off of the predicted value, the cause is almost always going to be a rounding error.
My guess is that something like this is happening (using Eder as an example):
Endurance = Base (42) * ConMod (1.18) + PerLevel (14) * ConMod (1.18) * Levels (2) = 49.56 + 16.52 * 2 = 49.56 + 33.04 = 82.6 -> rounded to 83
Health = Base (42) * ConMod (1.18) * ClassMultiplier (5) + PerLevel (14) * ConMod (1.18) * ClassMultiplier (5) * Levels (2)
= 49.56 * 5 + 16.52 * 5 * 2 = 247.8 + 83 * 2 = 247.8 + 166 = 413.8 -> rounded to 414
The 83 is the source of the problem (assuming my theory is correct)...it should be 82.6 but has been rounded up when it should not have been.
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This problem also affects Whispers of Yenwood.
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If the game is paused while the screen is shaking then the screen continues to shake while the game remains paused. I'm seeing this very frequently in combat in the Heritage Hill Tower (with autopause on target destroyed turned on).
This problem was not present in the previous version.
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Yeah, something off is happening there. This graze is 8.4 damage before DR, then increases to 11.7. It should have been reduced to minimum damage, which should have been 20% of 8.4. That would have been 1.6 or 1.7 damage, depending on rounding.
What version of the game do you have? What OS does your computer use? Can you provide a saved game where these damages can be replicated?
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I commend you on your well-presented feedback. I don't agree with all of your points, but I agree with some of them and everything you said is food for thought.
This is where you lost me, though:
I also felt that combat at times could feel rather random. I was a bit of a perfectionist and would often reload if I felt my party took too much unnecessary damage. I did this mainly to avoid camping, which I consider extremely immersion breaking, especially when used inside dungeons. Point being, I could do the same fight 5 times and while 4 times my party might lose 40% of it's HP, the 5th time it would barely lose 10% without any discernible reason why.
Using the ability to save and load games to subvert the rest mechanic is going to alter your perception of the game and prevent you from experiencing the game as intended. I feel that this may be part of the reason for your negative feedback about several aspects of the game, including per-encounter and per-rest abilities, the health system, and of course the rest system itself. I would recommend trying the game again, without using this "tactic". Use your abilities when you need to use them, rest when you need to rest, go back to town when you need more supplies. The rest mechanic should be immersive, not immersion-breaking. In any case, it should be less immersion-breaking than reloading saves until each battle goes perfectly (no wonder you found combat tedious).
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I support the addition of a retraining system. It is handy for hardcore players who want to swap out things that have lost their luster, handy for casual players who want to try out different things, and handy for new players who make a build mistake because of a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Everybody wins.
Also: A way to exchange powers
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I get what you are saying, and I had the same mentality earlier on, but as I've progressed I've realized you can hit the cap while leaving huge amounts of stuff untouched. And considering you don't need to reach the cap to beat the game (not even close), it seems rather clear that optional content is giving too much xp. Bounties in particular are just absurd at the moment.
Fair enough. I haven't done any of the bounties, so they haven't influenced my viewpoint yet.
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The bottlenecks are necessary because a story is being told. They are also necessary because the foes you face in this game do not automatically adjust to your level. You may think you want to walk your level 2 character over to Twin Elms, but the things you will encounter on the way there will kill you with a glance. If you did manage to get there alive then you'd be confronted with one broken quest after another, as you would find yourself interacting with story elements that had not been introduced yet. Without spoilers I can't give any specific examples, but I can illustrate with a generic example not related to the game: imagine a game that presents the player with a murder mystery and allows them to follow the clues to determine the identity of the murderer - what you are asking for is the equivalent of being able to walk to the end of the story and see the murderer being arrested before the murder even takes place in the game.
Of course, if this game had been designed as a sandbox game then you'd have what you want without a problem. You'd be able to walk to any area and it wouldn't mess up any quests because the quest system would have been designed to gate the quests behind events instead of behind locations. If you want to criticize PoE for not using that design, that's a fair criticism. It's too late to change it, though. It isn't just a matter of removing the bottlenecks; they'd have to redesign the entire quest system and every area related to the main quest in order to make that change. (Also, they'd have to make every encounter scale to the level of your character.) Realistically, Obsidian isn't going to do that; they're going to move forward with what they've got. Maybe if there's enough community feedback in favor of a sandbox design they will consider that for the design for their next game.
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You're comparing the results of people playing as completionists (ie hitting level 12 before act III) with a quote that specifically talks about non-completionist play (ie finishing the game before getting to level 12).
I can appreciate that people want to be able to do "everything" in the game and still continue advancing until the very end, so that they can feel that they are being awarded appropriately for their efforts. Adjusting the rate of xp gain to make that happen will cause the game to fail in one of its design goals, however. The idea is that a casual player will be able to play the game without needing to be a completionist and reach the end of the game in a state where success is possible. If a completionist gets to the end of the game and hits level 12 just before the final encounter, where will that put the casual player who opts to do only the main questline? Level 9? I'm not sure, but clearly there would be a difference. Trying to balance that final encounter to be equally challenging to parties with such a wide level range doesn't sound possible to me.
The alternative solution would be to have enemies scale to the level of your party. Then they wouldn't need to restrict player advancement at all, because (in theory) any group of enemies would be an appropriate challenge for any group that encounters them. There's nothing wrong with this design strategy, but you have to build it into your game from the initial design stages because it will affect almost every aspect of the game's design. Changing to this system would probably make a lot of people happy, but I don't think that it is realistic for Obsidian to rebuild the entire game system and every encounter to make this change.
Personally, I look at it like this: As a feature, the game includes a great deal of optional content that allows players to decide what their character will or will not allow themselves to be distracted by as they pursue the main questline. The player is free to pursue it all, if they desire, but the intent is that players will primarily focus on the main questline and only deviate for those sidequests that are most compelling for their character. This design acts to preserve the replayablilty of the game, in that playing the game with two different characters doesn't necessarily involve doing all the same things with them, but can potentially be a very different story depending on the paths they are drawn to. Consider the difference in the story of two characters, one who fully explores the Endless Paths and one who chooses not to do so.
Adjusting the rate of xp gain would necessarily change more of the optional content into required (to achieve the same level at the end of the game). At the extreme, it would make all of the content required. The more this happens, the less room there is for the story of two characters to vary. At the extreme, every character's story will be the same (with the exception of variance with regard to the order that things are done). So, the point of my rambling here is that "fixing" the xp situation to reward the completionist player for their completionism will come at the cost of punishing the casual player for wanting to be able to just play the game without having to dot every i and cross every t.
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I wouldn't mind seeing the ability to alter level-up choices on subsequent level-ups added to the base game.
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Bye bye! Yourself. I'll see what's in the latest patch thank you!
So, less calling it quits and more a dramatic attempt to convince Obsidian to redesign the entire game to your preferences in the next patch.
Mind you I am 40, so a younger child might persist.
Has "give me my way or I'm taking my toys and going home" been working for you all this time?
Please understand, I'm not criticizing your feedback; that's what this forum is for. You opinions are just as valuable as mine, or anyone else's.
Your presentation, however, is something that has been tried online since the early days, and it never really works because no one cares if one person goes away. We all have our own toys now that we are grown up, and there are literally millions of other people to play with. If you have valid points to make they will stand on their own without the need to add weight to them with empty threats.
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Without Deep Faith:
Her defenses are on par with Eder's. I expect that if I pick up Deep Faith and get to 4 in Benevolent and Passionate that she will be the party's main tank.
PS: He's using a shield and weapon-and-shield style, whereas she is not using a shield, and her deflection and reflex are currently higher than his.
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Engagement doesn't really force the enemy to fight the engager, so if you move another character close the enemy can just switch to fight that character without moving and suffer no penalty. Still, it should help you control how many foes your barbarian is fighting. You might be stuck with one enemy attacking your barbarian, but that's better than three enemies attacking him.
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So, basically, you're saying that PoE is NOT for Infinity Engine fans who used to trust the party A.I. to reduce tedium in uninteresting battles, it's for the neurotic types who enjoy micro-managing their whole party all the time?
Funny, I thought PoE was specifically made for I.E. fans.
The glaring lack of Party A.I. is not the real problem, it's a symptom. The real problem is the vast over-population of trash-mobs that make the game incredibly boring to play. Micro-managing a party of characters to win an important battle is one thing, having to do it over and over for every other group of junk-spiders, for zero reward, is another.
No game is going to satisfy everyone. If automation of your party members' combat actions is critical to your enjoyment of this type of game then naturally PoE will fail to satisfy. I defend the devs decision to skip party AI because if they had added it then instead of threads about there not being a party AI we'd be seeing threads about the party AI sucking.
In other words, satisfying the "we want party AI" players was never going to happen, because a good party AI is impossible. The party AI in the IE games was awful, but you might be able to tolerate it because of the fact that you could rest after every combat. In a limited-rest situation like PoE presents, nothing short of human-level intelligence will do to answer important questions like "Do I use this once-per-rest ability now, or save it?" or "Do I knock out my own teammate with AoE damage to take out those four enemies at the same time?".
Even if somehow the devs had written a human-intelligence-level AI to help us play this game, and somehow it was capable of being run on your home computer, you'd still be unhappy because then you'd have to debate strategy and tactics with it.
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Thank you for volunteering your time to moderate the forum.
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On the up side, you're not ending that species; they are alive and well elsewhere.
Sorry, trying to be positive and that's all I've got.
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I think it's working as intended, more or less. The dialogs with the various factions warn you that doing quests for one faction will displease the other factions. The obtuse part, I think, is that it doesn't affect your reputation with them directly, which makes it possible for you to have a good reputation with multiple factions but have those factions not willing to work with you. It would probably be better if gaining reputation with one faction automatically lowered your reputation with both of the others by the same amount, such that you would realize immediately what was going on. A side benefit of this method would be that you would be able to see whether a faction was willing to support you by looking at your reputation with them (because positive relations with more than one faction would be impossible).
As it is now, you have to (somehow) know that having a good reputation with a faction is only part of the equation, and that not having a good reputation with other factions is also important. If you don't realize that, and you are nice to more than one faction, then you can end up getting blocked out of your faction preference. You may have to work with another faction, or not get faction backing at all.
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This problem was supposed to be fixed already: 1.03: Hotfix for Problem with Adventurer Hall Companions
What version of the game are you playing? (The version is displayed at the main menu screen, in the lower-left corner of the screen.)
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I fought him with a party of five guys (pc + 4 standard companions). When I walked up to the throne I looked around and knew immediately that the fight was doomed to go badly, so I ended up cheezing the fight.
I positioned the four NPC's (Eder, Kana, Durance, Aloth) in the room stage right, and then had my pc initiate the conversation. The conversation went as expected, and combat began, whereupon my pc was almost instantly locked down and knocked out (I did try to run but I only managed to take like two paces). Then the rest of the party proceeded to pull the enemies out of that room in three chunks, which was more manageable. So it was three tough fights that I won instead of one very nasty fight that I would not have one. Yeah, my pc spent the whole battle unconscious, but her sacrifice was the key to victory.
If I were going to attempt that fight in earnest I'd want to be higher level and/or have 6 party members, possibly with two of them being custom tanky-type npcs. Better players can probably do it with less, though.
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Int has no effect on the accuracy of spells. It affects the size of AoE's and the duration of effects.
PoE doesn't have saving throws, so it is very difficult to prevent an enemy effect from taking place. Raising your defenses is the best you can do, because that will decrease the odds of a crit (which will increase the duration) or a hit (which has normal duration) and increase the odds of a graze (reduced duration) or an actual miss (which is what it takes for your character to be unaffected).
Fortunately, the reverse is also true, so you can charm and dominate enemies and there really isn't anything they can do about it.
PS:
When fighting mushrooms, note that some of the mushrooms are mobile and some of the mushrooms are not. If you fight the ones that can move somewhere other than where the ones that are immobile are, then the fight becomes much easier.
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Ditto... Also who gets this talent... everyone in the party? Or just the main character?
Only the main character gets it.
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wait, what? I thought myself to be a completionist, but I never got one of those three bonus talents. What the hell did I miss, another bug? lol
Kindly answer this gentleman's question, someone! For it is also mine.
Check your main character's character sheet. If you represented one of the factions in the hearings then you should have gotten one of the faction's faction-specific talents. (I believe it is possible to get none of them, if you aren't friendly with any of the factions and get into the hearings the fourth way.)
For those out there who consider themselves completionists, sorry, but you can only get one of the three on any given playthough. Maybe playing the game three times and side with a different faction each time will satisfy.
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The expansion needs to include the corpse of a horse named Limerick, with the special quality that players are able to execute attacks against it.
Pause + Pause = Unpause? (Suggestion)
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted · Edited by Emptiness
Please no. Unpausing when you are trying to pause is annoying, I agree, but so is failing to pause or unpause when you are want to because the game has locked you out.
As an alternate solution, how about making three pause-related keybind options: pause, unpause, and toggle pause? (Pause while the game is paused would do nothing, unpause while the game is not paused would do nothing, toggle pause would unpause if the game is paused and pause if the game is not paused.) Players who like how it works now can use toggle pause. Players who don't want to risk unintentional behavior can bind pause and unpause to different keys.