MountainTiger

Dwarves too skinny, give me some bearded squares.

I have heard of this part of parental leave before and look forward to giving it a shot.

Is there a text summary of the current attributes somewhere for those of us not in the beta? And man, I love the BG series as much as the next guy, but I'll never understand the level of 2e nostalgia required to want more games to use it.

Your screenshot cuts off the total, but it seems to be 64, which is consistent with only one focus actually being applied.

So the first things to keep in mind are that stats aren't that important, and you can respec pretty easily if you're unsatisfied. Don't feel like you have to hit the optimal array out of the gate. Intelligence and dexterity are good for pretty much everything you do as a priest: dex helps you get more spells off, and almost everything you cast has an AOE, a duration, or both for int to boost. Might is useful both offensively to boost damage and defensively to heal. Most healing spells are bad, but the good spells are quite good, so it's a decent investment even if you're going for a buffbot and essential if you want to emphasize offense. Resolve is generally pretty lackluster, there are lots of ways to boost deflection and concentration usually isn't that important. Perception is entirely a role question; it gives you accuracy, which is very valuable if you want to be primarily an offensive caster and not important at all if you primarily want to be defensive. IMO, you lose less building a non-min-maxed buffbot than offensive priest; the array here is an example. There are some min-maxed offensive arrays here; you won't lose much by moving a few points from the maxes to the mins.

Story companions are just fine. I do think that running a melee MC is a big advantage in the early game, since the early pickups tend towards the squishy side.

If you go Mountain Dwarf with high might and con, you can be a drunken master whose companions dump poison AOE attacks on him while he's engaged with the enemy.

In the big picture, your base attributes aren't all that important: while they will be your main source of bonuses and maluses for the first few hours of the game, you quickly get to a point where talents/abilities, resting bonuses, gear, and consumables are much bigger factors than base attributes. This is also a big part of why complaints about the story NPCs are overblown: while their stat arrays aren't ideal for most builds, stat arrays are a small part of most builds anyway. With that said, I don't think min-maxing is generally stronger than balanced arrays, for two reasons: 1. Most stats have diminishing returns. Consider accuracy: each point effectively switches 1 attack in 100 from the worst available outcome to the best (e.g. with accuracy equal to defense, you miss on 15% of attacks, graze on 35%, and hit on 50%; with accuracy 1 higher, you miss on 14%, graze on 35%, hit on 50%, and crit on 1%, effectively swapping 1% to miss with 1% to crit). But the difference between going from accuracy = defense to accuracy = defense + 1 is much bigger than going from accuracy = defense + 50 to accuracy = defense + 51, since miss to crit is a much bigger change than hit to crit. 2. Balanced defenses are usually better than unbalanced. Defenses actually have increasing returns, for the same reason that accuracy has decreasing returns: every point added to a defense effectively removes a 1% chance of the most dangerous outcome and replaces it with a 1% chance of the least. But many encounters include enemies that target multiple defenses, and even for those that focus on one defense you're stuck with your base defenses unless you want to respec for that particular encounter. Some role-based emphasis makes sense (e.g. melee characters usually want deflection and fortitude more than reflex and will), and there are particular builds that try to stack one defense (like Boeroer's Bilestomper wizard), but usually you want to be prepared for attacks against all four. Attribute allocation can make a difference, but I wouldn't worry too much about trying to find the optimal choices.

I'll take Q4 2018

Mercy and Kindness Followed Where'er She Walked is a phrase that boosts healing received by 100%. I think it was added in WM 2.

Yeah especially old BG1 or IWD1 version of haste = diablo That's not fair; in Diablo, you have to click more than once on most enemies.

health potions aren‘t infinite and excessive use of them won‘t help against several creatures in BG2, like say vampires, liches, dragons, illitidhs, beholders … If people don‘t like using potions during combat, that‘s fine, don‘t do it then. I've never run out of potions in a fight in BG2. Pillars quickslot limits do put a somewhat lower limit on potions, which is good, but the health limit is a much more meaningful limit on tanking through healing. Beyond healing spam being monotonous, its availability influences encounter design. These problems are evident in the BG2 creatures listed. BG2, especially in later parts, is heavily based on attacking on axes other than HP (save or die spells, level drain, etc). These abilities tend to be countered by immunity spells and items, which turn extremely dangerous encounters trivial (the demiliches are the worst offenders here). While this design does encourage preparedness from the player, it doesn't encourage interesting combat: instead, encounters become primarily a question of whether the player knows about and has used the right protective spells.

I've found the strength of this kind of tactic to fade later in the game. Opportunity cost gets much higher with more spells and good weapons.

The POE health/endurance system is good. It puts a limit on how long you can stand in front of bosses chugging health potions and pushes the player to bring fights to a conclusion.

The flip side of this is that a smaller party probably implies smaller numbers of enemies in encounters, which tends to strengthen single target abilities compared to AOE/multiple target abilities. Overall, balance arguments based on one isolated component of the system are not very strong; we will have to see what the full system and encounter design look like.

I'd be interested in seeing more weapons that don't just gradually unlock upgrades. The Unlabored Blade's slow decline before becoming great is a bit of a gimmick that doesn't really need to be done again, but maybe one goes through three entirely different forms before reaching a fourth version that combines all three. Or maybe one just infinitely cycles between versions.

The Unlabored Blade nerf was sad; a player who goes through the trouble to unlock it deserves a treat. Really should be a 100% proc chance, tbh

But powers are soul-powered, so… why? Something about attunement to a particular body or something

I think Tyranny suffered because of shortness. There was no city, just the lord's palace, not much world exploration just go to point X solve the situation, go to point Y solve the problem there and so on. It was mostly a military simulator than an adventure and it couldn't have been one if it was that short. Of course a short rpg could have good mechanics etc but won't have enough time for them to unravel and shine. I don't see how any of these things would have solved Tyranny's problems. Tyranny had both mechanical problems (combat and character progression were not all that compelling) and narrative problems (I think the first two acts work reasonably well, but Act 3 doesn't do well at showing a major transition in your character's role). Adding another town or more wilderness areas does nothing to address those problems; all it does is stretch them out over more encounters. The mechanical problems are entirely independent of length (frankly, they might even be worse over a longer game, since a short game can retain the novelty of new systems for more of its length); the narrative problems do have solutions that involve lengthening the game but are left unaddressed by just adding a few more areas.

Hehe, I'm not familiar with that system. Its just weird to me that people go out of the way to hamstring casters under three layers, two of which are caster specific, that other classes don't have to deal with: "You have a finite amount of casts, and you shouldn't be able to replenish them whenever you want/need, and it shall cost you a resource (that for some reason is limited in carrying). The reward is that you get more powerful and versatile abilities. If casters can regenerate their abilities with the same ease as other classes, they need to be radically powered down.

I vehemently disagree with "short is not good for rpgs". I play long games and I like long games, but not every game needs to be long. Tyranny's pacing at the end was weird, but I don't think it needed to be significantly longer.

About half of the first game's quests involved zombies of one kind of another, so really nothing new

It's a shame that, if we ever get a Jade Empire sequel, it will be a 200 hour super-serious open-world game from the slimy tentacle of EA.

No need to time limit the entire critical path, just a key quest now and then

This is how the BGs work, though: the natural recovery rate of a character without superhuman constitution is minimal. It just happens that the setting has lots of readily available magical healing, so 1-2 rests worth of spells will fix whatever ails you (up to and including death once you unlock those spells).