manageri

I really want to change Grieving Mother's Phantom Foes spell since it's a buggy PoS (yay). Any way to do this that doesn't have a good chance of making the game explode? PS: They should add spell switching to ciphers during level up, obviously.

Does a spiritshifted druid benefit from the unarmed accuracy boost in weapon focus: peasant? What about two weapon style?

During the recovery time before using a melee ability, a character stops qualifying as a flanker. Or at least my barbarian does when using barbaric blow. If that wasn't clear enough: My paladin and barbarian flank a target. Everything works fine. At some point after my barbarian has attacked and is in the middle of recovery, I queue up barbaric blow on the target, which immediately causes the target to no longer be flanked. After the barbaric blow the character becomes flanked again. Presumably the game simply treats that barbaric blow as a "spell" and therefore thinks the barbarian is no longer attacking the target.

My mistake, thanks for clarifying.

Not in notes but they said not all fixes are, hence I'm asking.

Yeah, this is bull****. I mean I understand if the devs make the descriptions vague at first, because numbers probably change a lot during development and they don't wanna change the descriptions every time, but ffs people, start making a pass before launch to provide proper goddamn numbers on these things. It's absolute horse**** that players don't have such basic info readily available as weapon speed. Imagine if you didnt have RPM numbers for your guns in online shooters. "This gun shoot kinda fast, this one is pretty fast, this one is even fastier".

My old fashion hard disk times seem similar. Has anyone actually done a proper comparison for how much an SSD affects load times in this game?

Ugh, no. MP just doesn't work with pausable games. If Obsidian wanted to do a proper MP game with the PoE universe, something that played more like Dungeon Siege 3 for example, then ok, maybe, whatevsies, just don't cram that **** into PoE expansions/sequels.

Even if it's a bug, at least it's one of the nice ones that you can work around by simply leaving a weapon slot empty. Not sure how I feel about this myself, though I'm erring on the side of exploit if it just mysteriously appeared with a patch with no apparent intent.

Some good criticisms, others not so much. Apart from the conclusion (of the game being **** overall, which I don't think it is at all), I mostly disagree about how he thought everything about the combat system is ****e. I think it just needs serious tweaking in many places but has solid potential. Story criticisms are always more or less 100% subjective so no point arguing that. Long review, but at least he spent the time pretty well and described his issues in detail.

I find 4 a lot more manageable mentally. With 6 it's sometimes like you start giving orders, and by the time you're finished you're not sure what you told the first character to even do anymore (only in fights where microing is really needed of course, but those are what counts). It's definitely a valid point that 4 is more restrictive strategically, since it leaves a lot less room for characters who aren't extremely specialized. Maybe 5 is the sweet spot, I dunno.

Affecting two of my self made characters. Totally killed interest in the game (again).

Want.

Nerf starting focus and seriously tune down CC ability duration. Class fixed.

A lotta headgear is simple stat increases. Since there are other items that also have the same stats, and they won't stack of course, and you can enchant your chest item to have whatever stats you want, the helmet slot doesn't seem like a gigantic sacrifice to me.

Achievements aren't all part of core gameplay, many of them are meant only for the most skilled (or at least dedicated) players. So you're for devs balancing things you want balanced, but complain about them balancing other things? How dare you try to DICTATE spells for other players!? And who are the devs to dictate these things for us either? Clearly there should be no damage numbers for anything in the game, and we should just have to input those ourselves whenever we find a new spell/weapon/whatever. It's not like it's the devs job or something to figure that **** out.

Because playing with god mode on is boring. Overpowered classes/abilities/whatever are the same thing in principle, just less extreme. I play games because I like being challenged, which is not happening when something's overpowered and makes the game a cakewalk. Likewise, it's not fun to find you're failing only because you picked the useless class, which you had no way to know when you were starting out. Yes we did because the game wasn't that hard, so even if your main char was literally a retarded monkey with one arm, the rest of the team could easily handle everything without you. That doesn't mean it's fine to design some class to have the power of a retarded monkey with one arm. Because it's the devs' job to cut overpowered stuff out of the game, not mine. All I should be doing about combat in the game is trying to win it, not worrying about how hard and in what ways I need to gimp myself so the enemy has a chance.

No, you're meant to think about how to position your guys. I used mind lance just fine without hitting my own party. Maybe your problem is that you're assuming you need to literally hit (almost) every single enemy for these spells to be useful or something. Also, with high intelligence, you can use spells like fan of flames to fry a bunch of enemies from behind the tank and not hit him thanks to the enemy-only portion of the AoE. It often takes micro-management but there's nothing wrong with AoE spells in general.

I love it when people say the resting "limits" keep the game balanced somehow. Wasting the player's time IRL = game now harder, apparently. With the same logic it would be making the game easier if Obsidian managed to bring loading times down. Oh well, I've wasted enough of my time trying to make them see reason in other threads. We can only hope Obsidian has someone with some sense in charge for PoE 2 and removes this idiotic mechanic there. As for PoE, I'd be amazed if someone doesn't make a mod for this at some point.

Do correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't everyone get revealed anyway when combat starts? That being so, I see little reason, gameplay-wise at least, why you'd ever not want everyone stealthing if one guy's doing it.

How? Why? I can see no reason as to why that statement would be true. The argument he's putting forth is the same one that Josh puts forth when you grill him on this topic. The idea is that by eliminating pre-buffing, you force the player, during combat, to make a choice between spending his turn buffing, or spending his turn attacking. Thus TACTICAL! And sure, I suppose that makes sense Indeed it does. Wish you had stopped here. This whole section is based on nothing resembling logic as far as I can tell. Do elaborate on WHY any of this is so, rather than just asserting random stuff, thx. No, the purpose of pre-buffing in IE games was to make you stronger so you can win. That's it. And guess what: the exact same thing is accomplished by eliminating prebuffing on the player's side and bringing down the power on the enemy side, thus preserving the power ratio. And here's a fun fact about doing that: It frees up all those spell slots to be used in combat, and amazingly enough, casting spells in combat is in fact much more fun than watching buff animations for 2 minutes and then watching those buffed characters auto-attack everything to pieces, which is a lot closer to the reality of combat in IE games than that check list of (largely made up) stuff you wrote. Thanks to no pre-buffing you now have to actually THINK about whether you should buff at all in any given situation, rather than use an offensive spell or do something else entirely, and if you do decide to buff, you must choose which buffs you want up first. This alone makes the numerically smaller selection of priest spells in PoE compared to IE games feel similar, if not broader, since many more of them are now realistic options in combat. No, you can't have your brainless "buff up - chunk everything" gameplay back.

It's a (crappy and stupid) modern trend to make the UI as small as possible, which is why we have those tiny char portraits and the super tiny status effect icons. It's especially disappointing after Obsidian had the right idea with NWN2's vast amount of hotbars. They should also have stolen the custom char ring colors idea from BG:EE to help you find specific chars more easily. -"Turn spell effects off on pause" Yes, either turning them off or making them vastly less opaque on pause would help. "Clearer markers for status effects" Any time a char has any effect that makes them unable to act, this effect should be VERY clearly displayed on top the character portrait along with a timer, not hidden among the ****loads of other effects. "Separating buff and debuff icons" Yes pls.

Yes.

There's a wand with the same property and it's OP as hell. Like the cipher of item properties.

And let's not forget that when you walk 12 hours between locations in game the loading screen should last 12 real hours. In fact they should have sold us treadmills with the game that you have to hook up to your computer and walk that distance for real before you can continue playing. I just can't feel immersed at all without this, so unrealistic.