Daemonjax

D&D 5E is a great foundation if your DM is willing to put the time into world building and adding flavor to the classes. Thankfully, there's plenty of resources from previous editions to draw inspiration from.

PST combat was terrible. Terrible! The game had a lot of other things going for it, though. DAO has better character animations and spell effects.

Each stat would need to be made valuable to both kinds of character types: DPSers and Tanks. They had the right idea... they just didn't take it far enough. I'd like to see a mod that doubled the length of interrupts, and doubled the constitution bonuses/penalties. Even then, resolve might be weakest stat due to crowd control abilities. Maybe add a momentary free disengagement on interrupt? That would go into AI rework territory, though.

A lot of the variance is caused by different attack animations. Each melee weapon has two different possible animations, chosen randomly per swing.

It's hard to test damage in this game. Would be nice if the actual calculation was shown on mouse-over. We'd need to mod a weapon to have the min equal the max damage to properly test.

You can mod in low int dialogue using notepad... and time.

With a party of 4 or less, classes with pets become more valuable. Not that it matters in this game, but thought I'd mention it. There's no reason to use less than the full amount of party members (6) except for bragging rights (imo).

Yeah, that would be one way to do it. I just think we should stop looking for the devs to fix these kinds of "problems", because it's not going to happen.

IE mod 4.14 now has a checkbox to increase exp requirements by 50%.

cipher gets a .40 class damage boost while rogue gets a .50 class damage bonus. Not really that much of a difference. Rogue does get another damage boost when a mob has two debuffs, and that's a great talent to have and probably rogue's best talent... so the rogue class is strictly better in single target melee dps than the cipher, but that doesn't mean weapon swapping to dual melee never makes any sense for them. Style has to count for something, too.

Different people draw the line in different places for what's considered an exploit. For some people, if it's in the game then it's not an exploit. Until actually patched. If you don't agree, you could say the person is an exploiter. He'd say you're playing the game badly.

I'd rather mod the game to make hard harder in other ways, and then save potd for next year or whatever when I get the itch to replay it. Hard's pretty close to where I want the game a lot of the time, and where I think it falls short on difficulty potd won't solve (too much exp, class design problems, over-abundance of camping supplies, free rests at inns, over-abundance of coins, etc.).

Depends on weapons with unique enchants you find. If you're asking what weapon focus to get early on, I wouldn't do that... trading flexibility and two talents for just +6 accuracy and + 0.15 damage mod is usually a bad idea.

It's not like the OP was asking for some solo run melee tank cipher ownage build. With 5 other characters in the party, you can be a melee cipher when it's appropriate and used ranged when it's not. The ideal situation to switch to melee cipher is against an easy to crit target target that's paralyzed and debuffed (preferably trying to attack someone else), dual-wielding spell proccing weapons -- and the faster the better. Why melee at all? Because you already used your blunderbuss and don't want to waste time reloading it. Plus style points.

Yeah, good ideas. Basically, the game shouldn't let you do things that a DM in a pen-and-paper game wouldn't let you do without consequences -- like leave a dungeon and come back later fully healed... again, without consequences.