manageri

Omg. Yeah let's not fix glaring holes in AI/mechanics because some ****ty players depend on them. Yeah, that's reasonable. And I'm so ****ing tired of the ITS A SNIGLE PLAYUR GEIM argument. Well guess what, SP does not mean YOU ARE THE ONLY PLAYER IN THE WORLD. I mean if you can't see why that's a retarded argument I just can't even believe you have the intellect to use a keyboard. Quite ****ing obviously it's absurd that a group of dudes would not ****ing notice when everyone else like 10 meters away starts shooting their guns at something. But let's just forget the realism angle, and get to real point, which is that if the encounter is designed to have 10 enemies then QFO you BREAK THE GAME if you manage to pull less. If you want less difficult fights then use the goddamn difficulty slider. As for "dont do it hurr durr", again QFO I cannot magically will the entire group to aggro when the first of them see me, so if I want to make sure they all do aggro, I would literally have to stealth or run PAST THEIR FRONT LINE to make sure all the enemies are awake. Is that as simple as "just don't do it hurr". No. If you want an option to cheat, then by all means, I support your freedom to have as many lame ass cheater options in the difficulty screen, including individual retard aggro AI, as long as I don't have to deal with this garbage.

I think the simple idea of higher level chanters starting with more and more phrases already up is a good one. Also I really think phrase duration needs to be normalized so higher level phrases don't take longer to perform. If these changes make something OP (like early summons) then adjust those invocations individually. Also, if this makes low level phrases bad at higher levels, then you can simply give them a longer linger time as you level up. Wouldn't it be more fun anyway that you could build slightly more complex songs as you level, with some less powerful but long lasting low level phrases mixed in between the higher level stuff?

If you make it % based then all weapons will simply have to follow the exact same x damage / y speed formula. Yes, that would be easy to balance, but do we really want all weapon choise to be purely cosmetic? I have no idea how well PoE actually accomplished the goal of the armor system (which is fast weapons vs low DR, slow weapons vs high DR), but it seems to me any issues are a matter of tuning the numbers, and not some fundamental flaw of the system.

You can't just slap on random bonuses to random things for aesthetics. I mean come on.

This has nothing to do with balance exactly, but the reason I hate rangers is the pet. I do not want to micromanage two chars for the price of one. An option to exhange your pet for something else at char creation would be great.

In other words you have no arguments left. Kthxbai. Again I feel the need to point out that YOU don't search for secrets, the characters do that as long you put them in scouting mode. If pushing one button to find all secrets seems interesting, challenging, or in any other way a meaningful gameplay mechanic for you, then I really don't know what to say. Might as well have an "efficient combat mode" button that you have to remember to push before every fight or all your stats get cut in half. Super boring checklist bull**** is all it is. We're not talking about the kind of secret searching you have in games like Legend of Grimrock where YOU actually have to find the secret switches in the wall and click on them. In such scenarios the slowdown comes naturally because YOU are making an effort to look for stuff. To enforce a slowdown ON THE PLAYER (because the slowdown is 100% irrelevant to the characters) is basically cargo cult game design that entirely misses the point.

But somehow it is roleplaying to wait, I dunno, an extra 30 seconds per big area due to the slow down of scout mode? And yes, that's ALL it is, a wait, since nothing at all is required of you since the characters do the spotting on their on their own, you simply move them to the exact same areas you would anyway regardless of whether scout mode slows you down. So you explain to us then why 30 seconds of pointless waiting is super awesome but 5 hours is not. What the **** is the difference, besides quantity? That's right, there isn't one, so why the **** would you make the player sit there doing NOTHING for ANY amount of time? All you're doing with slowing the player down is wasting actual time when the game requires nothing whatsoever of you besides the movement orders which you do anyway, so there's no reason not to just keep the speed the same for player convenience. Stop being silly. That's right genius, too bad I never said anything remotely like that, I said the EXTRA TIME caused by the slowness is a waste. A waste is a waste, the quantity does not change what it is. I'm just gonna stop you there because quite ****ing obviously 90% of things in the game aren't "mandatory" by this standard, so it's ridiculous to define it this way. It is mandatory TO find all secrets/traps, and since there's no in game downside you'll want to do it all the time.

Cool, I'll get to work making a "slow everything down by 99% mod" for you so you can get rid of all the "instant gratification". It's gonna make the game sooooooooo deep and tactical and immersive and increase the RP factor by at least 5000%. You shouldn't be handing out these awesome tips on the forums dude, you should make your own RPG that takes like five years to even boot up and all the instant gratification haters like you are sure to shower you with money.

Oh, you mean we shouldn't ever critique anything? You do realize that is the logical conclusion here, as the same ludicrous non-answer applies to anything and everything: "Why the hell does my car's engine get set on fire every time I change gears, that's ****ing retarded." "Obviously the engineers disagree." "Oh, nevermind then!" There are more than enough GungHo hack and slash games on the market that don't waste your precious time on something as useless as exploring. They usually even give you big shiny quest markers, so you don't miss out on secrets. Pitiful strawman. Yes, because every single player always comments with their view on every single thread on every forum, so if only one guy says something somewhere then no one else on the planet can feel the same way.

Then I'm sure you also wait the appropriate amount of real hours when traveling on the map, right? I mean it's just be horrible ROLEPLAYING to move from Defiance Bay to Gilded Vale in 5 seconds, RIGHT? What kind of supercharged magical being can do that? If you want to waste your time then guess what - you can spend as many real hours walking around in every room "looking for secrets" as you want. That's no reason to impose idiotic wastes of time on everyone else.

One of their abilities is ****ing with your bestiary. Sneaky bastards.

The fact scouting mode makes you slower influences none of that in any way, you'd still send them to check the exact same places. I have no idea why you think the char must move slowly to detect stuff. There are no periodic (per round or whatever it was) checks like in D&D games; Stuff gets spotted when nearby instantly in PoE. All the slowness does is, amazingly enough, slow it down for you. So that adds what to the experience exactly? Right, I forgot that everything tedious and pointless in RPGs is instantly made perfect by just calling it "roleplaying". By all means do all the "roleplaying" you like, I'd have zero problem with that if they simply had the options to disable all this crap. Luckily there's IE mod to fix this, but who knows whether that will be kept up to date forever when new patches come, so I'd prefer an official option. Which, once again, has nothing to do with the speed at which chars move when scouting.

I'm always in favor of more difficulty options. I don't see any reason why just about every game can't have a super easy mode for those who just wanna play for the story and stuff, as well as something that only the most dedicated players have a chance at, and like 5 options in between.

I'm rather tempted to call this a stupid comment, since by your logic, your characters based on their skills do the whole game. Ironically yours is the stupid comment since the characters can't do **** all in just about any situation without your input. It is however factually true, as I said, that in the specific scenario of the characters walking around (after you've given them the command to do so, durr) detecting secrets takes absolutely zero skill/effort/anything else from the player. You can literally just as well be in another room. The only variable there is whether scouting mode is on or not, and since there is no cost for the characters whatsoever in having it on, the logical thing is to have it on all the time, which adds nothing to gameplay but a waste of time. I'd say I'm amazed everyone can't see this but it's not really even close to the top tier of daily internet stupidity. I think you definitely have potential in that regard though. Another bit of ironic stupidity since there is no feature (without mods) to have the characters find all the secrets they can without wasting the player's time for no goddamn reason with a movement speed penalty.

YOU don't have to pay attention to a goddamn thing, the CHARACTERS do the spotting. all YOU do is press the "find all secrets kthx" button, which has no consequences whatsoever for the CHARACTERS when they're just randomly traipsing around town, it only wastes YOUR time. If you want an option for idiotic time wastes, go right ahead and make a mod that makes the character move 99.9% slower when in scouting mode for all I care. While you're at it wait 12 real hours when characters travel 12 hours on the map, such immerse/rp/MeaninglessBuzzWords wow.

You can always rest anyway so the spells may as well be per encounter. The only thing running out of camping supplies means is that you must now endure a pointless ~30-60s of walking and loading. If you don't care about achievements you may as well just use the console to rest in those situations. commands are "iroll20s" and "rest".

Or you can bump up your Mechanics and roll with whatever you find, if you don't want to bother searching for secrets. It doesn't defeat the purpose of the change, the purpose is exactly to allow people who cba searching but have some Mechanics to find some stuff, while reserving other secrets for those who actually want to search for them. I do want to find secrets, everybody does. The issue is that this is accomplished, as everyone knows, by simply running around everywhere in scouting mode. Does this add anything challenging or interesting to the game whatsoever? No. It does nothing but waste YOUR time by slowing the party down. Does wasting player time for absolutely no reason sound like an awesome mechanic to you?

Yeah, so you still have to sneak around everywhere all the time to find all secrets, which rather defeats the whole point of the change. Really wish they'd see reason and just eliminate the detection crap from scouting mode entirely and have it just be stealth.

This is what I'm talking about, why does MB have to be good at all for dps when paralysis is a much more versatile affliction for stuff like interruptions, breaking engagement, etc? Clearly spells that have no utility beyond murdering things should be better at murdering things hands down, which is why I brought up spells like recall agony. And yeah, the aoe blinds provided by wizard/druid are superior, but we're not talking about cipher vs other classes, at least I'm not, as I said. Which is a good example of another OP spell. Aaaand another. At least the high focus cost tethers this one a bit, but it could still use a duration reduction. Maybe lower damage a bit as well. Long term (as in probably not for this game, but for sequels) I think they should also really consider changing the focus system somehow so that all spells of all levels aren't always competing for the exact same resource, which makes it much harder to balance spells within the class for ciphers than for other casters.

Yes, that's why I suggested it lasts 0.5 seconds. Oh wait, no I didn't. 4 seconds on hit + intellect would be more than enough time for the entire party to benefit with an attack or two, which is all it needs to do to be perfectly fine for a level two spell. With coordination that even leaves you time to utilize a graze. What, is stunlocking things to death the criteria for usefulness? Especially when it's just one spell that doesn't even need to be useful at all times. There's plenty of situation where even a short paralysis can be extremely helpful. It doesn't need to be the spell that you use in every fight to help murder things, especially when there are other spells that are designed to do exactly that (like Recall Agony) that are completely overshadowed in their one job by this multi-tool. Depends on exactly what kind of accuracy boost the paralysis is giving you. If we do a simple comparison of no afflictions on the target vs paralyzed, that's a gigantic -40 deflection. If you had it already blinded, which is very common, then it's just half that, but still great. No, I'm actually fairly sure Whisper of Treason would be the go-to spam spell at low-mid levels if MB didn't exist and it may need a small duration nerf as well, or perhaps just a one target limit. Yes, the "real" casters are more powerful, which has to do with the rest system's failure to...well, it's complete and utter goddamn failure at everything. I'm not saying MB makes ciphers OP, I'm saying it's a very noticeably OP spell within the class, which makes the class less fun. In fact I think it's likely the class could use a little bump at low levels if they nerfed MB.

Which is fine for a level two spell. Which doesn't matter when a graze is perfectly sufficient time to toss some nasty reflex spell and/or have your rogue shank their face off. Well obviously the caster classes will be aoeing but you are always choosing one target as the thing you kill first with the guys who aren't aoeing. Right, so if you charm something instead of casting MB, you're not getting that gigantic focus boost from attacking the paralyzed target, which naturally balances charm a bit. This in effect makes the focus cost of MB very low since it grants you more focus on your next attack(s). This is most noticeable in lowish-mid levels when starting focus is low and other casters don't have tons of spells yet that can replace the cipher's paralysis with an equally powerful deflection penalty.

Actually I think the patch notes there simply failed to mention secrets, I'm like 90% sure I've detected secrets without scouting too now.

Maybe that'd make it garbage, maybe not. The fact is that right now it's much too good because: - It is a party game. A well organized barrage of spells/attacks on that massively debuffed deflection/reflex can be devastating. With the current duration, even a graze leaves more than enough time to mangle something severely. - It lets you lock down the most dangerous enemy at the start of the fight, which is of course the most important part of most fights. - You're almost always focusing on one enemy at a time, at least in non-trivial fights, so the fact it'd be a single target effects is really not as big a downside as it may seem on paper. - In addition to being a great help in letting the rest of the party murder something, It's very good for the cipher himself since ciphers depend on targeting (the now severely debuffed) deflection in order to gain focus. Note that other powerful effects a cipher can inflict like charm/domination do not have this kind of feedback loop. There's just so many good things about it I really don't see even the severe nerfs discussed as being a downgrade into the garbage tier, considering what only a level TWO spell should be able to do.

I agree that Mental Binding should just have it's paralysis removed completely and remain an AoE stuck. Or alternatively, if the paralysis has to stay, then cut duration in half and remove the aoe stuck. Most of the time you don't even care about the aoe stuck anyway (much at least), you just want to lock out one enemy and make it easy to murder, which even a few seconds of paralysis can aid in a lot.

Obviously the gap in expertise needed for ironman and normal playthroughs is pretty big, especially if one doesn't want to avoid as much combat as possible. So why not have something in between? How about a mode that uses the same single save system as ironman, but instead of one wipe meaning you're done, have it reduce one "life" from a predetermined number which the save file keeps track of, and which the player can decide when starting the game from a number of options. When those lives are all used, the save is destroyed. Thoughts?