LeonKowalski

If there is a good balance between high damage reduction and damage sponge enemies then balanced parties will do fine ... the heavy hitters would be chipping away at the damage sponges while the fast attackers would blender it. Min/max'ers will debuff DR and/or make switch hitters and will do better than fine. What Obsidion needs to get rid of is the mindset that "everything should be solo'eable" and "every build should be viable" complete and utter bull****. Until tripple crown solo becomes plain impossible without cheating this game will never be balanced.

It's hard to balance but unless you are making a multiplayer game you have to try, because contextually overpowered abilities are great fun. Occasionally your tank needs to be able to stand in the middle of an army and eat an apple, occasionally your cleric needs to be able reduce an army of skeletons to dust, occasionally your rogue should be able to open the encounter with a stun on the big bad and turn the encounter into a cake walk. Occasionally your fast hitter should hit harder than the heavy hitter and vice versa, that's fun ... it boiling down to the same thing is anti-fun. Sacrificing all hard to balance mechanics is simply not worth it in a single player game, or a pen and paper roleplaying game for that matter ... that road leads to 4e. So what I'm saying is there should be damage reduction in the game ... percentage based DR however doesn't really serve much purpose, just increase HP or defence instead. Works out the same math wise. The mistake was focusing so much on damage reduction ... not having it in the game period.

Link me to a post saying so not related to a discussion about random loot in some other game ...

Still think they should print them on something with a slightly finer weave than the equivalent of jeans ... next time at any rate.

No good asking me, I think achievements should just go away ... I'm just pointing out some facts, until this post I made no value judgement.

It counts towards Perfect game, like every achievement.

Shrug, I don't know about plenty of games ... I only know about PoE. You can get any achievement you want by googling a bit (I'm not going to link the program, Valve might not care but I dunno if Obsidian doesn't care). Including the Kickstarter one if you're one of those people who wants to 100% a game.

You can get every achievement you want without playing the game (Valve doesn't care about cheating in single player games, including achievements).

Dreamscarred Press has Path of War, but unlike Psionics they couldn't do a straight adoption so it's in the same spirit of ToB but it doesn't have the same classes and manoeuvres. PS. small warning, the game gets a bit more deadly at the lower levels ... and adepts share some of the same problem as psionics, it's easier to be effective. This makes it a bit more powerful in the hands of people who wouldn't ever build a wizard which actually plays to the strengths of the class.

Why do you care so much whether it has penalty or not? Do the mechanics reward some huge advantage for going from -1 accuracy to +1 accuracy?

Solo'ing relies on broken AI for the most part, so they aren't allowed to fix the AI either? I personally would applaud if the tripple crown solo became plain impossible without outright cheating, then the game might finally get sufficient difficulty.

Ehh, you get achievements for starting the game up these days. Any way, the question is ... what makes Obsidian more money? Unattainable achievements do create a lot of whining, but I'm not sure in actual sales numbers it will make more than a few dozen difference (I have in observed some devs deriving pleasure from pissing these people off, so the non monetary rewards might be relevant too). Some companies have removed unattainable achievements after the fact, but that has non zero cost too. It will piss off some of the people who have it. In the end it's probably best to not do this for future games ... and leave it be in this game for now and occasionally kick Valve to implement something like an obsolete achievement class which doesn't count for 100%. PS. anyone who truly wants to achieve the kickstarter backer achievement can achieve it of course ... you get both the kicktarter achievement and a small victory over your neurosis, it's like a double achievement if you simply cheat to get it

Some monsters should have immunity, but humanoids generally should not ... For NPCs we need better AI and massively better buff/removal abilities.

Then they should use diminishing returns, or at least warn you that reapplied spells don't prolong duration.

Had the same problem, thanks for the solution ... this should probably be stickied in the beta forum until the next patch goes live.

Don't both those spells hit friendlies? (Targeting on Antipathetic field is foe, but description mentions it hits everyone.)

This game makes rooky mistakes in rules design ... D100 being the most obvious one. It's uselessly fine grained with the only real benefit being "it's not D20". You might think it makes the math more intuitive, but you would be wrong because most people don't have a feel for absolute vs. relative percentages to begin with. D100 is one of those things naive designers think will have a benefit, because they don't truly understand the downsides of flat RNGs ... D100 only feels like it would solve any of them, but all it can do is make the numbers bigger. There is a lot of NIH syndrome as well (or simply a complete lack of knowledge of RPG rulesets). Things like bonus type names (there are still bonus types, but it's completely obtuse to the player) and the concepts of tumble&ACP (people in light armour should be mobile) should just have been copied.

They make Larian look good, only took them two weeks to get me my box ... of course I still waited a couple more weeks to play it while the patching died down (and they got the two extra companions in). Still haven't finished act 1 on this one either, waiting for the patching to die down. Or in other words, I know it's a small consolation ... but you're probably better off not playing this yet ...

The spell descriptions are equally incomplete ... The whole game is stupidly obtuse, while pretending to shower you with information ... I shouldn't need to endlessly experiment or dig through these bloody forums to find out how the DPS breaks down for which weapons, how grazes/crits/endurance affects certain spells (ie. death spells). It's ****ing annoying.

The basic game code loop is entirely alien to Unity ... if it's spaghetti it's because Obsidian made pasta.

So the relative balance shifts to Vancian for high difficulty and/or solo play, whoopdedoo. Those are not the players you want to balance the game for, you want to balance it for the intended mode of play ... which is group based without the Vancian casters going nova all the time. PS. it would be nice if the intended mode of play was enforced a little more by the game's structure, especially as far as resting is concerned, but that's a different matter.

Is this in the beta patch? Don't see it in the patch notes.

It's a strange decision for sure ... but hey, their audience is old BG players right? None of us can hear anything over 15 kHz any way

Just get rid of fatigue ...

The game pushing you to turn some of your companions into crafting/blacksmithing mules is not exactly a positive in my opinion. Non combat/face abilities should not use the same resource pool for advancement.