manageri

I'm personally disappointed that the permanent health increase bug is not among the fixes, since it's apparently still happening a lot even after 1.03. Since I've completed the game once on hard I really just want all bugs that make the game easier fixed so I can have a hopefully at least somewhat challenging PotD run.

Wait just a second there. If youre gonna hoard traps for the entire game... Implying you need all the traps in the game to make an encounter trivially easy, which is simply not true, especially when we have merchants with em and gold coming out of our ass. Yes, and it would be terribad design to give the players that choise because it's absurdly overpowered compared to other "choises". You could say the exact same thing about anything, like ok, let's give wizards this spell that lets them do 90000 points of damage because it's the player's "choise" whether they wanna use it. Well no, genius, it's not a real goddamn "choise" when everything else is pathetic in comparison. You either do it or you suck if you're given that "choise". I beat my first playthrough on hard (yes, I know, hard is more like easy, but still) effortlessly without using a single trap, so this is hardly an issue, and like I said, it doesn't take anywhere near "all the traps in the game" to lay down enough for a fight to be made much easier. Indeed, which you seem to lack.

Allowing setting 50 traps to make an encounter trivial would be absurd design. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see this.

Guys, I'm using a monitor to play the game. Is this cheating? Should I be doing it blind?

If the buff wasn't needed because the fight is very easy then you don't need the spell slot either. This is beside the point anyway since what you're descibing is a player casting an inferior spell (the buff) rather than a superior (offensive mid-combat) spell, which is a tactical mistake they can make in combat as well and hence has nothing directly to do with pre-buffing. And if all you mean is that it's possible for the player to cast 50 buffs to fight 2 xaurips and and end up with no spell slots left for the next fight against 20 drakes, then again, bad spellslot management is also a mistake the player can make in combat and is irrelevant to the specific topic of pre-buffing. The fact players must do something tedious less does not make the tediousness of it any better. I'm sure there are really ****ty players out there who actually struggle with the game, and if they could pre-buff they would feel mandated to do so. It would also be a real issue for me if/when the game gets some good difficulty mods. There's nothing to account for since this only forces the player to spend time running all over the place lugging loot around. It's entirely up to the player if they want to enable this moronic "please waste my time for no reason" feature, it doesn't affect balance in any way. Maiming is the same thing as the difficulty slider. Difficulty is about...umm, difficulty? I don't even know what to say here because this is so far off topic. And yeah, the devs have in fact accounted for the fact you can get your guys permanently killed by having the whole endurance system, so getting your dudes knocked out is perfectly safe. Ok, as long as the option to be able to pre-buff also comes with buffs to the enemies any time you use this feature, then you're absolutely right, it would be just fine as an option.

You can forget about any complex AI kiting solutions, that's simply way too hard. Realistically the solution would have to be somehow stat based, very possibly giving the enemies capabilities that the player doesn't have. Someone mentioned something like giving enemy casters longer spell ranges, and I think that could work. That should help the enemy casters' AI more easily punish you for having all your dudes huddling at that door, while simultaneously allowing those enemy casters to stay a bit further back, preventing your from so easily gathering the enemies into one big fireball shaped cluster. In that scenario for example, you'd have to balance the risks of fighting the enemy on open ground while being able to more easily engage their dangerous caster dudes, against having that nice door tanking spot which would keep your own squishy guys safer but you'd have a harder time quickly killing their casters. Or something else entirely, but it'd definitely have to be something less complicated than "hey guys why don't you just quickly make the most awesome AI of all time". I'm sure even the spell range thing would be far from a perfect solution too, but maybe it could be a part of it. If these things were easy to fix they'd have been figured out by someone a long time ago.

Ok, let's see, I can decide between waiting the extra 10-15 minutes to download that ~700 MB, or I can wait DAYS like we've waited for the hotfix now. Yeah, clearly a tough choise. Wish I'd have gone with Steam.

Beside the point. I talked about limits on the mechanics (and the lack thereof), you talk about choosing not to utilize the resting system to the fullest, voluntarily gimping your IN GAME performance in order to avoid OUT OF GAME tedium for the player. Everything I said stands. Yes, I do. And it's an easy choice. If the game allowed me to rest wherever I wanted with no in- or out-of-game cost so that I'd just have to impose limits on myself, then I might complain, because human mind is imperfect and easily tempted. But as it is, the game makes running back and forth sufficiently tedious, that I'm not tempted to rest spam (hell, I didn't do in in BG series either). Therefore I'm "forced" to play more tactically, and as a result, I end up enjoying the game more. As long as you admit that this has nothing to do with adding challenge to the game, and is simply a voluntary self-gimping, there's nothing more to say. Gimp yourself if you want but don't pretend the game in any way "forces" this. Hilariously, the very next sentence you write after saying I have no point IS my point. No in game cost = resting is limitless to anyone who will endure the tedium of the inn walk. Devs saying "lets bore the **** out of the player if they don't play our way" is absurd. If this isn't obvious to you then I pity you. The problem is that when the game DOES actually present a challenge, which, based on the reports I've seen of PotD's easiness (which I've yet to test myself as I'm waiting for more patches) is probably only going to mean doing PotD + trial of iron, it will be mandatory for anyone who wishes to maximize their chances of success to rest spam. Since the only penalty for doing so is boring the player, this will make the game boring, as in bad. You ever played XCOM in ironman mode? Imagine how bad that would be if you could spend like 20 turns running all your guys to some point really far away from the aliens to recover all their abilities and hp for some nonsense "cost" like 2 credits. Now tell me such a mechanic would not make you feel forced to use it, and if your poker face is still strong, tell me it wouldn't make the game tedious as hell. Dragon age got it right with eliminating this antiquated resting concept entirely. I sincerely hope the devs get their **** together for PoE 2 and design abilities as per encounter only.

Which is ridicilous design because it has no in game consequences, adding zero challenge. And why stop with the rest system? Let's take it further so every time you play the game in a way the devs didn't intend, let's punish you, the player, in a different way. Say you rolled a party with 6 wizards. Well the devs COULD balance the game so wizards can't handle everything very easily, but hey, why bother, let's just give the player an extra 5 minutes to every loading screen for every wizard in the party above 2. Imagine if this is how games were designed. Or maybe, if you equip every single character with only melee weapons, ignoring ranged weapons entirely and again doing something the devs didn't intend, well of course the perfect way to "balance" this is rolling a d100 after every fight, and if it comes up 100, PoE Immediately uninstalls itself, making the player waste time with a reinstall. Reasonable? Or ****ing retarded? This is EXACTLY the same as the current rest "limit", but more extreme. Wasting player time instead of balancing things IN GAME is an absurd design philosophy. Now imagine someone requesting mods to remove these features and people on the forums accusing them of being lame ass cheaters. Priceless.

Beside the point. I talked about limits on the mechanics (and the lack thereof), you talk about choosing not to utilize the resting system to the fullest, voluntarily gimping your IN GAME performance in order to avoid OUT OF GAME tedium for the player. Everything I said stands.

Good job evading the question as usual. Let me break this down for you people who don't understand why resting is ALREADY limitless. There's two kinds of limitations you can put on something. Hard ones, and mushy crappy ones. PoE has mushy crappy rest limits. This is so because absolutely nothing prevents you from running back to an inn after literally every fight, as long as you have the tiny amount of money needed for the inn or camping supplies. Since we get tons of money, and because rooms in the early game's inn when money may actually be tight cost nothing, this is never a real problem, and thus my claim that you could rest after literally every fight remains a FACT. a ****ing fact. you are factually wrong if you claim that the game limits resting in any way, other than puny inconsequential amounts of lost money. So now that we've established there are no REAL limits, what kind of mushy limits are there? The answer is, only one kind, and that is making the game not fun for the player if they rest a lot, because then they have to go through that tedious process of walking back to an inn/shop/something. Note how this targets the PLAYER and not the PARTY, which is absurd. There are no IN GAME consequences whatsoever for this. How devs can think that boring the player into compliance with arbitrary soft nonsense "limits" like this is a good idea is truly a mystery for the ages. So to summarize these "limits", apart from the money which we already determined to be inconsequential, the only way in which PoE attempts to limit resting is making the player sit there waiting for the party to move to the inn and back. Since there is absolutely no challenge or meaningful content in this, we may as well be staring at a loading screen for the entire time, and having that 75 cp camping supply cost deducted from us. Therefore it is, again, FACTUALLY true, that apart from the tedium imposed on the player in a stroke of true developmental genius, the resting system we have now would be IDENTICAL in terms of IN GAME mechanics if we could simply rest whenever we want, and just had 75 cp deducted for doing so. If anyone disagrees with anything here, please explain in sufficient detail why anything I wrote is not factually true.

But you're not gonna kill the adra dragon remotely as fast with fire, so if you're casting those spells you're prolonging the fight, which is kind of a big deal since it WILL eventually murder your tank (unless he's blessed with the super health bug, which seems to be almost universal right now). You'll be doing a ton more damage by using frost instead. The sad thing is that this is one of the few truly challenging fights in the game where you have to care about using the right element (at least on hard, I've yet to try PotD), but it certainly does reward you for picking frost spells over fire. Indeed it could be said that if the dragon was immune to fire, it would take less thought, since even a retard can figure out that when you see those immune messages popping up you have to switch elements.

Indeed it would be nice if these descriptions get updated. I mean there aren't that many abilities in total and it shouldn't take your most leet haxxor to quickly check whether the code matches the description.

My loading times aren't that bad but I agree, it does get a little bit tedious at times. The keep merchant cluster suggestion is definitely good to work around the issue.

Haven't heard about anything like that, and this crap usually gets reported on by games media. Not that it prevents anything since pirates will just do an update to overcome such things. Wish GOG would learn from them and update their version already.

Still seeing lots of bug reports for specifically the new patch so I'm waiting before starting my second playthrough.

I'm not really sure what to think about this. A few immunities would seem logical and all, but then there's always the fear that too many enemies with immunity to X effect makes builds that heavily utilize X effect crappy. For example, half the damn NWN2 campaign was against undead so rogues were kinda crap most of the time. I think the concept of some enemies having really high specific defenses largely does the same thing, at least in theory, which is forcing you to change your tactics. Only problem with that currently is that the game is generally too easy and many abilities are just OP. If you couldn't murder everything in 5 seconds at higher levels then it might actually matter that you can only reliably land glancing knockdowns on those high fortitude foes and such.

The only way casting buffs can be a waste is if those buffs are really bad. I already explained this. If that's the case, then it's a moot point whether precasting is allowed because you wouldn't ever do it then with those crappy buffs. Also, the fact that prebuffing has no opportunity cost makes pre-cast buffs vastly superior, relatively speaking, to the same spells cast mid combat. If pre-buffing is possible then it's mandatory for the devs to account for that possibility. How the hell do the devs account for the possibility, if not by raising the challenge of the fights, thereby making it mandatory for the players to do it. Really, please do tell how they are supposed to do that in detail, we're all waiting with bated breath. No one's claiming it's mandatory in ALL fights, but the tougher ones (because not every single fight is meant to really challenge the player, but the boss fights etc typically are). Ignoring the impact of opportunity costs is absurd. This is the equivalent of putting your hands over your eyes and pretending not to see the evidence. Having a buff cast before the fight leaves the character free to do other things. A priest buffing in combat is doing nothing else. In the most extreme example, which would be a character buffing throughout the entire fight instead of having all those buffs precast, this would the same thing as whether or not the character is paralyzed for the ENTIRE fight. Are you saying it's not a big deal whether your priest is paralyzed all the time? Even half the time? A quarter of the time? Because ignoring opportunity costs is that idiotic. I already explained why it's the game that limits the tactical options if prebuffing is enabled, not the player.

Gee, yeah, I really can't figure out whether it's better to be buffed than not. Oh, yeah, I also really can't figure out whether the devs might ever expect me to be using all those big buffs they gave me for the hardest fights. Such difficult questions. It's not a valid TACTICALLY SOUND option not to show up buffed for a fight when that's permitted. Theoretically it could be that all buffs are so ****ty that it's better to save spell slots for offensive spells, but in that case the ability to prebuff would be pointless, duh. The fact is that IF buff spells are worth casting then it is ALWAYS better to cast them right before combat than during combat, as doing so does not take away time in combat, again, DUH. If prebuffing is permitted then it's a must for the DEVELOPER to balance things with that in mind. failure to do so results in a badly balanced game. It therefore becomes a must for players to do it to meet that challenge. Duh. Saying "no" is not an argument. Nonononnononononnononononoononono. See? I might as well smashed the keyboard with my face and posted the result. Many, if not most, good buffs in NWN(2) are long lasting. If it's a particularly tough fight then casting round/level (which is more or less the shortest duration that the vast majority of spells have) spells before the fight starts is also greatly effective, which means the fight is either balanced for that, which makes it too tough if you don't do it, or it's not balanced for that, and it becomes a joke when you do it. We all know this from experience so why are you pretending it's not the case? Indeed, if the game lets me choose between a sword and a 21st century assault rifle that does 900 damage per second, well it's just the player's own damn fault if they choose the assault rifle, right? No blame whatsoever belongs to the devs for bad design, RIGHT?

The fact the buffs are short is irrelevant, it only affects how many buffs you can cast. If the buffs last something absurd, like in D&D games like 10 minutes, you can cast as many as you want. The only difference in PoE is that if you have, let's just say for the sake of simplicity, all buffs lasting 25 seconds with 5 sec cast+recover time, You can only throw up a few. This changes NOTHING about the fundamental nature of the argument, just how long the mandatory pre-fight buff dance lasts. Even with PoE buff durations you could drastically boost your party's stats with multiple casters, especially with that priest spell that prolongs all your buffs. It's you who's evading the argument. I look forward to your next butthurt non-response.

Ok, since some people still don't understand why prebuffing takes choises away rather than adding them, I'll explain it in tedious detail (which you pro-prebuffers should enjoy). Having buffs castable before combat gives you two choises - you can cast them before combat, or during it. If you're 7 years old, this may at first seem like - oh my gosh, that's two options so prebuffing is more options!!! However, what we're actually trying to figure out here is whether there are added GOOD TACTICAL options, not simply more options in theory, so this level of scrutiny in insufficient. So let's see if we can figure this out, by pretending PoE has prebuffing as an option: Option 1: I wait until combat to start using my buffs. But oh snap, its ****ing combat, so all those enemies are now also doing stuff! How did I not see this coming!? So after those three buffs I wanted to cast with my priest are completed, a good 10 seconds or so has already elapsed, during which I not only did not have all those buffs up to boost my party, I also was unable to use the priest for anything else, like poking the enemy with my kill-stick. This option thus doesn't seem all that awesome, so let's give it a sad face =( Option 2: I cast those three priest spells right before combat, then charge the enemies. Bolstered by their awesome new stats my heroes are much more effective right away, and I can even use the priest to cast offensive spells, making the enemy even weaker! Why didn't I think of this before!? Verily, this option deserves a big ol' smiley face =) So why would I then, given these "more options", ever not buff before the fight? How does that EVER make sense? And no, saying "well sometimes you wanna use all your spell slots to cast offensive spells hurr" is not relevant, because on those cases it's not about WHEN you buff, it's about whether you buff at all. The fact remains that IF you buff, you want to buff before the fight, and the only reason you wouldn't want to buff at all is if those buff spells are terribad, which would be a larger balance issue, especially when those buff spells don't take away time in combat and hence have infintely less opportunity cost. Since many buffs in the game are decent, it sure as hell would be a more effective option to spend some spell slots on buffs prefight than it would be to save all those slots for offensive spells if prebuffing was an option. We've seen this **** countless times with D&D CRPGs so let's not pretend prebuffing wouldn't be a no-****ing-brainer, duh. Therefore the devs would have to balance the fights with the assumption that the party shows up with 600 buffs up, and be forced to make the enemies tougher, which defeats the whole ****ing point of prebuffing in the first place. And since we now figured out, even the 7 year olds, I trust, that prebuffing is the way to go ALWAYS if you're trying to play smart, we can also deduce that since we show up to the fight with all of our desired buffs up, the actual tactical choises we now have for the priest once combat starts are reduced, since we already got all the buffs up. Therefore prebuffing = less tactical choises = dumbed down, AND it makes the game more tedious by having you do the stupid ****ing buff routine before every (serious) fight. Clearly Josh figured this out (like a decade ago, I'm sure), and decided it makes no sense whatsoever to make the players endure that crap. Thank you, Josh. For those of you who miss prebuffing, I suggest the following: Before every fight where you would like to buff, pick up your keyboard and wave it around like a magic wand, chanting appropriate blessingy-sounding words. Imagine - and this is really important now for that IMMERSION you so desperately crave - that your party is getting buffed! Now imagine that the devs anticipated this, and made the enemies appropriately tougher too! Now do the fight exactly like before. Congratulations, you now wasted your time doing the stupid buff ritual and ended up with an otherwise identical game experience, just like if they'd have added prebuffing - enjoy.

Make a mod for yourself that gives you a 60 second loading screen and removes 75 cp when you rest, and voila, you have your awesome strategic dimensions back. Please explain why this is not exactly the same if you disagree.

Yes, it's stupid. I think Obsidian knows this but were afraid to deviate too much from IE games, since they promised a spiritual successor. There's always hope in the likely to come sequel (and perhaps mods, as you said).

You realize these two answers directly conflict with each other? Now that you admitted it is indeed not optional, tactically speaking, to prebuff, the only question is why the hell would we then make the player go through the same stupid routine of standing there for X rounds buffing before every tough fight, when we can instead just lower the enemy's difficulty so the difficulty of fighting them unbuffed remains the same. You have absolutely no GAMEPLAY related answer to this. And no, your nonsense about immersion doesn't matter, especially when most of the time it's metagaming, which is the exact opposite of immersion, that informs the decision of when the player chooses to go all out with their buffs/consumables. There's nothing truly limited about the resting system in this game. No, because with prebuffing you're doing BOTH, you're buffing the party (before the fight) AND THEN you can start using that buffing character to nuke. Long term buff spells are simply not optional in D&D CRPGs; You either use them or you're playing badly. Only when the fight starts without the possibility of having buffs already up does it truly become an option whether you cast that bless, or throw a pillar of faith to knock those enemies down, as an example.

Not to me it isn't. It breaks immersion, leaves fewer tactical options, and for the rest see the other reply I wrote to Caerdon. If you think it "breaks immersion" then ok, whatever, seems like mushy nonsense you made up to defend your position against all sense, but sure, buddy. As for tactical options, no, having prebuffing means you MUST use prebuffing which means fewer tactical options. This is so because the ability to cast spells which affect the fight before the fight actually starts is the equivalent of getting free actions in the start of the fight. Is it a valid tactical option to choose to not utilize such an advantage? No, you either use it, or you did something wrong. This is quite obvious to anyone with any experience with D&D CRPGs, so please don't insult our intelligence and your own intellectual integrity by suggesting otherwise. Now that prebuffing is not an option, it's ACTUALLY a tactical choise whether you choose to start the fight by having the priest cast a buff, or whether you'd perhaps like him to cast something offensive instead. This ACTUAL added tactical depth stretches even further into character build considerations, as you can, for example, choose to keep your priest's strength low if you want him to only play a buffer role, and vice versa. Good job on this issue, Obsidian.