Daemonjax

With the current rest system, the power of your party is determined by the player's ability to deal with the tedium of traveling back to town to buy more supplies. I don't understand how no one understood that before the game was released. At the very least, the difficulty needs to increase the cost of camping supplies and there should be no option to rest for free at inns. I wouldn't stop there, but doing anything more (interesting) with the system would require more development time.

The difficulty is about the same, and this game has more potential to make a sub-optimal character... but you get 6 characters in your party so your main character can afford to be 100% ineffective in combat.

Would be cool if we could see the queue like in kotor.

I really thought int did increase linger, but I just double-checked and you're right... it doesn't.

Yeah, full attack just means the effect applies to your next full attack (so next two swings if dual wielding). It doesn't make you attack faster than you otherwise would be able to or anything like that.

Intelligence does increase the linger of the chant (so 2 seconds times int bonus). I'd not pump intelligence on a chanter, though. By the time you can use an invocation, you've already won the battle (either actually or you're just cleaning up). It starts at 12 seconds for the low level ones and just gets worse from there... 6 seconds would have been early enough to feel the effect of the invocation. Edit: I was wrong -- int doesn't seem to increase linger.

I believe the effects of blinding strike (both the blind and the x1.25 damage modifier) apply to both strikes while dual-wielding. I'll fire up the game and check... I'll update this post if I'm wrong.

Plate armor was made to stop swords not bullets... not that many people could afford plate, anyways.

They should of just made spells moddable, so we could balance it ourselves. Have the game read all item/ability/talent/spells/class features from an xml when the game launches and let us decide how balance it.

@kmbogd Good ideas. @Akos I don't think anyone would disagree that flat damage increases benefit faster attacks more than slow attacks. There's just not many sources of flat damage bonuses in this game compared to other RPGs. The only thing that comes to mind is DR reduction from stilettos (drawback: must use stilettos) and the DR reduction from a talent choice (drawbacks: costs a talent and lowers attack speed). IMO any penalty on a talent is ridiculous. I plan to wait until after patch 1.03 (there will probably be some code changes they're not going to advertise) before doing a frame by frame analysis with all weapons with both a dex 10 and dex 20 character. Since nothing affects animation frames except dexterity, that should help me to determine what's what. It's possible there are frames during the attack which are not affected by any attack speed modifiers (aka a global cooldown).

I'd be worried they lose all their equipment due to some bug.

Camping supplies are only 75gp, so I don't see how it prevents anything.

The only way to do it right is to have different attributes for different character classes, so each attribute can be tailor made to be useful to that particular class in its own unique way. That's not going to happen, but would make for an interesting rpg system. I agree. It's a strange design decision that actually encourages min/maxing. High stats should cost more points, and the stat minimum should be 7 before adjusting for racial bonuses. While nothing forces anyone to optimize their attributes that way, it's the same as saying no one is forcing you to even spend all your attribute points.

You can rush and get the other companions right after exiting the first real dungeon, so you can get them all about an hour into the game, and then backtrack to visit all the areas you skipped.

The game's mechanics don't support building characters that can both tank and dish out high dps.

It's just a percentage damage increase, not a flat damage increase. Hard to say how much... I imagine somewhere between 15% and 50%. Would be nice if tooltips displayed accurate information, though. Noticing that a lot in this game, but I've come to expect lying character sheets and tooltips in rpgs.

Added cooldown to NPC Rogue's Escape ability usage so they won't use it back to back. Glad they're going to nerf this because Rogues using Escape was really trivializing the game. /sarcasm EDIT: Nevermind, it's just for NPCs. I'd like to see all classes buffed up to the cipher's level of usefulness.

I don't have enough free time to play so my game progress is limited so I don't know what effects some of the weapons have but if you add added stats and effects 2 weapons will catch up. Also the elemental damage and such helps with the dr We'll need a full-blown dps calculator with a character builder (including enchants and gear) that could run simulations within user-defined scenarios (starting with single-target would be easiest) to know for sure, but off the cuff I'd say dual-wielding fast weapons makes the most sense for when you want to maximize effects that proc on hit (like the cipher's draining whip) that aren't percentage-based (all of the rogue abilities and features are percentage-based). If you'd want to maximize interrupt chance, then you'd want to dual-wield fast weapons (not saying that focusing on making an interrupt character is optimal). There's also items in the game with unique enchants that may make you consider dual-wielding. It's different from D&D because there's basically no flat modifiers to damage (Ranger's Marked Prey is not a flat damage increase, btw) and the damage reduction system favors heavy hits (because that IS a flat modifier to damage). So classic archetypes (like a high dps dual-wielding stealthy rogue) are not favored by the game's mechanics.

You can have a party of 6 when at the first dungeon if you hire a merc at the inn for 250 gold. That should help. If the shadow gets behind your line, you have to burn it down quick and/or cc it. I believe at 4th level the cipher gets a handy spell to help with that situation.

I know, right? Luckily there's not many weapons.

Some weapons seem to have a couple frames variance... the largest I found was with the 1h sword... it alternated between 85 and 87 total frames between landed hits (the frame in which the damage numbers come up). You may be right about different animations for different races (like the animations for orlen and dwarf may actually be different from the ones the other races use). It would be cool if mpc/vlc could just display the current frame number, but I can't find that option. There's probably free video editing software that would do it like virtualdub or vlmc. Just tested virtualdub and it does make it easier when you can see the frame number :D

Yeah, I've been comparing what I'm finding to your results. I'm using fraps and then advancing frames one by one using media player classic. VLC has that feature as well. I'm actually mentally counting the frames as I advance them. I believe war bow actually has 47 attack animation frames (observed), and 78 (52 * 1.5) recovery (47 + 78 = 125 total observed). Which is close to your 130. I'll have to count the number of frames I can see yellow on the recovery bar to confirm. Yellow is visible on the recovery bar for a total of 72 frames, then there's 6 frames of idle animation before the attack animation sequence observably starts again. Should we count those extra 6 frames as recovery time or something else... I wonder if all weapons have 6 frames of padding after the recovery bar is empty.

Oh, that's code I wrote. It's not from the game. Sorry for the confusion. I counted exactly 47 frames from the beginning of the war bow attack animation to when the yellow recovery bar becomes visible. It looks like I'll need to test every weapon to get the exact count of attack animation frames since dexterity affects it while other attack speed bonuses do not. I think I'll use: timeBetweenHitsLanded - timeYellowIsVisibleOnRecoveryBar = attack animation times. Every weapon likely has a slightly different number of attack animation frames than is expected, so the general rule of 20 for fast and 30 for everything else isn't going to be accurate enough for me.

Warbow is consistently at 125 frames. It's also the only weapon tested so far that causes me to consistently die against the two wolves. Probably bad luck on damage rolls.

Edit3: 2h swords alternate between 86 and 89 frames between landed hits... only 1.5 frames slower than a 1h sword (also verified the attack animation time was in fact 30 frames). Although I didn't mention it earlier, all tests were done using a naked character. Code incase anyone cares: double getAnimationTime() { switch(this) { case FAST: return 20; default: return 30; } } double getRecoveryTime() { switch(this) { case FAST: return 20 * GLOBAL_RECOVERY_TIME_MULTIPLIER; //1.20 case AVERAGE: return 30 * GLOBAL_RECOVERY_TIME_MULTIPLIER; default: return 31 * GLOBAL_RECOVERY_TIME_MULTIPLIER; // 31 correct? Seems to work with 2h sword } } double getDPS() { double damage = 0; double time = 0; time += weaponA.animationTime; //System.out.println(time); damage += weaponA.averageDamage; if (isDualWielding) { time += 2 + weaponA.recoveryTime; time += weaponB.animationTime; damage += weaponB.averageDamage; time += 2 + weaponB.recoveryTime; } else { time += 2 + weaponA.recoveryTime * 1.5; //System.out.println(weaponA.recoveryTime * 1.5); } //System.out.println(time); return damage * FPS / time; //using fps = 30 by the way } Edit4: Hunter's Bow is consistently 84 frames between hits landing.