Tigranes

I think the current system makes it too difficult to balance the different abilities and classes, especially if POE2 goes to even higher levels. I have no sympathy for people who voluntarily waste their time saving and loading repeatedly in a single-player video game - designers shouldn't need to worry about that, such people will game the system one way or another.

What I'd really like for POE2 to do is come up with its own restrictions mechanic. I like Vancian but I'm not blind to its problems, and the weird mishmash they've got going in POE serves nobody particularly well. The latest spell mastery change is a futile effort to tinker with what's more fundamentally screwed up. The system needs to have real attrition and tactical cost and discourage boring spamming, so it can't be cooldowns (hit that button when it's lit up hurr dudrr), and it can't just be per encounters. Possibly there's a way to have per-encs be the core of the system, throw out the resting, and then build in supplementary mechanics. I always liked the upkeep mechanism in Arcanum - where a given character could only maintain a limited number of duration spells at a time. One might consider cases where casting too many spells in quick succession gives a kind of magic overload and risks bad results, like the bad rolls in wild magic - always more interesting to have failure content - as well.

Duplicate thread, continue discussion here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/84448-spell-mastery/page-2

Metaknowledge where you know exactly what is coming up wouldn't be meaningful strategic choice, since that means you're just going by rote memorisation. In fact, that would be much more similar to resting after each battle, where you eliminate the uncertainty and the risks and the attrition, and play as if each battle happens in some kind of space vacuum. It doesn't have to be Vancian. It can be non-regenerating mana with costly mana potions, for example, or a more sophisticated fatigue/wounds system. Whatever the case, I like playing a dungeon like it's a dungeon, and I prefer a game where you really feel like you're going to a dangerous and unknown place and you have to survive not just the 3 orcs in the next room but the rest of the area. Another point: such forms of attrition add to the diversity of play when done right. If you rest all the time or everything is per-enc, you can rinse & repeat each battle because you're always starting off with the exact same maximum resources. Whether it's BG or POE or whatever, the most fun and memorable scenarios are when you are running low on spells and abilities but you think you can take on that next group (or you have to), and then you start going creative. Maybe that's when you have to rely on that rare consumable. Maybe that's when you use those abilities you never used before, but now you dont' have Haste and Fireball you're exploring new options. Maybe that's when you finally get your D&D wizard to break out that Staff of Striking, hoping he has the AC to dodge that golem. To be sure, there's always pros and cons. You don't want to balance it so badly that everybody's casting half a spell a battle (which, by the way, never needs to happen in any D&D CRPG or POE). And the way POE has mixed up per-encs and per-rests are not great - I think the spell mastery change didn't fix the real problem, and didn't even fix the problem it was trying to fix. But while I'm sure some players just want to have a relaxing romp casting all those powerful spells every battle and watching the explosions, and fair play to them, I would find it very dull and repetitive. Those people wouldn't be playing POE in the first place. Not sure how this matters.

Im on the phone so brief and messy but 1. The apple case is a bit different from prism and the rest of the surveillance apparatus. If as the fbi claims this case is just about a crimunals phone, i have no issue, crack away. The problem is, its not just a generic sluppery slope - the fbi and the gov are on record as specifically having tried hard to create universal back doors for years (google the clipper chip controversy in the 90s, and of course james comey doing pr these days trlling everyone encryption is evil). The state had been very blatantly pushing and thats why it is realistic to look at this as not just about one phone. Ideally we would find some way to unlovk that phone without setting a dangetous precedent but im not sure how. 2. The fundamental concerns with prism and other programs isnt 'privacy' in the bourgeois sense of let me watch my porn in peace. If it was this would be a no brainer. The founding principlea of all liberal democracies, especially America, is that you need people to congregate, communicate, and deliberate freely without fear of manipulation or punishment. Innumerable studies and real life applications show that people behave differently given the most innocuous of observation mechanismd. The problem of surveillance is always about the very core of political citizenship. 3. The 40 number you keep citing from a well known conservative think tank, ok, but as ive said above nobody has be3n able to actually prove the exact efficacy of, say, prism. The NSA admits this. But i have some synpathy for them. It is ignorant to demand specific individual cases where prism has caused someones ruined life or has caused the prevention of a terror attack. Prevention and deterrence are by nature resistant of such proof. Intelligence activity is complex and missing one program you can never say is or is not crucial. E.g. nyc subways spent millions after 911 to install new cameras and surveillance. At least of 2012 it has not been linked to a single terror attack prevention. So is it useless? Should it be scrapped? Hard to say. It is a risk game and it is a just in case game. To say we should OK prism just because of terrorism is to say we should also OK curfews and martial law and police states and closed borders and whatever else. You can never eliminate danger and you can never show exactly whether something makes us safer enough to be 'worth' the harms. You do have to make informed guesses, and you also have to work on broader moral groubnds, because it is indeed about stopping people getting killed and it is lso about the basic elements of democratic society.

I welcome it. Maybe then Bio will make a game that isnt RPG lite with zero difficulty or tactics (i.e. every bio game since DAO).

You sure did. Did I say that's not true, or that you were wrong, or that recent changes are wonderful?

In full agreement. It's besides the point to witch hunt average joe cops or NSA analysts for the various current controversies.

This line has been trotted out a lot by people. As someone who's doing some related research, let's make it very clear: based on publicly available evidence, the harms of programs like Prism are 'potential' - in exactly the same way that the benefits of those programs are 'potential'. I don't have time for a long post and citations, but the simple point is that you can't take one without the other. If you want to say that it's paranoia to be afraid of Prism until we know for sure that somebody's life has been ruined, then surely we must admit that there is no concrete evidence of Prism's benefits, because despite some wild claims (famously the '54 cases stopped' cited in 2013 by Keith Alexander & others), it has been shown (e.g. by the White House committee) that there are, at most, one or two cases where these programs have made a difference. And if someone wants to say, as Dianne Feinstein did in 2013, well of course Prism has actually helped stop a lot of attacks and such but we can't tell you about it because of national security - OK, so now you're imagining potential evidence. *shrug* there might just as well be secret evidence we don't know about that Prism has caused harm. The argument that you have to show Prism has specifically screwed someone over is ignorant of the structure of this entire problem as a whole. The US government has consistently used this argument as an excuse to try and shut down legal challenges and other forms of debating the problem - or even revealing details that would be relevant to the problem. See the catch-22? It's easiest to see in the case of Stingrays (devices that mimic cell tower signals to spy on your phone location): the government has a track record of pulling out of numerous court cases specifically because they did not want to reveal any details about the use of Stingray (and often the very existence of Stingray they refused to confirm). It would be narrow-sighted to just argue that the public, which is denied a lot of confidential information, must first prove that Stingrays have caused specific harm, before the state can be induced to release information or to not dodge the court cases. And we haven't even gone into the definition of harm or abuse. A rubber stamp secret court which, by its own admission, has no ability to audit the intelligence agencies: is that a problem? Or is it only a problem when we find out someone's been killed? Police officers routinely damage and purposefully obstruct the use of cameras and mics. Is that a problem? Or is it only a problem when we can concretely show that a camera was destroyed to conceal the fact that they shot an innocent man? (If you can ever concretely show that without camera footage?)

You don't need to rest all the time. Nothing is forcing you. It's not even intended design, whether in IE or POE. These games were never made so that the player uses all the best spells in a single fight, and then rests 8000 times. Neither is it necessary to do this to win. By the same token, nobody is forcing you to save all your spells and just sit there firing arrows or swinging staves all day long. Just like people who end up with 900 potions/consumables because they were afraid of using them up, it's just the player's idiosyncrasy rather than the game 'forcing' them to hoard. POE battles tend to be pretty quick - the winner is generally decided in less than 10 rounds. Having, say, 2 mages in the party cast 20 spells in that timeframe is kind of overkill. At the same time, there are plenty of camping supplies and resting spots, such that you don't need to go ten battles without a rest if you don't want to. You can throw several spells per fight. It just comes down to: do you want each battle to basically take place in a vacuum, completely irrespective of the rest of the dungeon, as if you're in an arena, and do you want to be able to smash enemies with a non-stop spam of spells? Or do you want to your dungeon to actually feel like a dangerous trek, where you are thinking about the next fight and your party's resources when you battle, and the decision to use a high level spell is a meaningful one? (That said, I don't really find the current change a particularly good solution. There was nothing hugely wrong with the old spell mastery. What we need for POE2 is a better per-enc/per-rest balance to begin with.)

It's pretty easy to, up to 50%, but my memory is fuzzy. Definitely 25% isn't a big deal for completionists.

The idea of a printed strategy guide has been pointless for at least ten years. Not just the patching, but 'official' guides are generally made by people just doing a half-arse job for a buck and producing little more than glorified manuals. Obsessive players who play the game extensively will always be the better way.

Devs aren't obligated to anything, but we're talking specifically about widely requested, basic functions; or at least most of us are. The amount of people using the IE Mod isn't really relevant to the discussion, except as something to point to as evidence that it can be implemented fairly easily. There's really no excuse for the UI to still be locked into a horrible mockery of good taste, and there never really was an excuse for Neutral NPC:s not having their own selection circles, and there's still no excuse to not have an option for better experience pacing, or Favoured/Disfavoured bonuses not working for CNPC:s. Or not having a walk toggle, for that matter. In some cases, the IEMod mucks about with core functions and assumptions, such as Per-Encounter Abilities and Resting Supplies and stuff like that. It's understandable that no such options would be included in the base game, for obvious reasons. But most of the stuff people want are either considered straight-up fixes - fixes which could be optional or not - or largely cosmetic issues or issues of pure usability. Basic stuff. All of this just hinges on how you think the features at hand are so crucial that they should be in, which is really neither here nor there. At the end of the day arguing that devs are lazy and are outsourcing critical features to a mod is overkill, and I'm confident that the point is pretty clear already. *shrug*

The actual features aside, the fact that a given mod is popular really doesn't mean a dev is obligated to put that mod in the game. (Heck, we'd have to figure out what's 'popular enough'. Do 10% of POE users use IE mod? More? Less?) IE mod isn't really fixing anything that is broken, it's a nice mod that we should appreciate the creators for, and if anything, push POE2 to become more moddable.

You can, you know, just go somewhere, and if it looks like your party isn't up for it, just go somewhere else and come back later. Push the Endless Paths as far as you can, have fun with the challenge, and then when it gets frustrating or too difficult just go back to the main quest. It's not really necessary to write an order down in a piece of paper and obey it. But sure, if it's really troubling you, that order seems to me like it'll be OK.

Lol, maybe, but god made makes you invulnerable to damage, right? I'm not afraid to die or lose a battle, I just don't want to be bothered with all the PoE mechanics I don't like. Also, Id like a "un-cluster" toggle for the battles. Don't worry, with all those changes you listed, you'll basically be throwing an unlimited number of spells around every milisecond, so it's pretty hard to die anyway! Anyway, from memory, IE does let you disable camping supplies, and to turn all per-rests into per-encs, but I don't think 3) and 4) are possible. Someone who's actually used those features may have more accurate information.

It's got nothing to do with honour to old modders, or some arbitrary loyalty to the original version. At the end of the day they took it upon themselves to re-release an existing, very good, very playable, game for twice the price, so the onus is on them to provide a superior product. If you feel that they did, go ahead. Some people appreciate the ability to zoom, even at the cost of blurry environments (or like the blurry environments, I guess?). Apparently at least one person likes the new UI, something I could not have imagined humanly possible given its hodgepodge mess of spreadsheet visuals and clashing stylings and badly sized elements, but hey just goes to show I can't speak for everyone. And maybe you really really hate installing mods, even when they are as streamlined as WeiDU are, and would prefer to pay. *shrug* Ironically, I probably would have appreciated the EEs if they did less. Just implement tablet compatibility, HD resolutions and modular installations for key mods like Ascension, and sure, chuck in a couple new NPCs people can choose to take or not. Cool. The problem came when they started making things worse. At least, after a very buggy BGEE release, I hear that by their third effort (IWDEE) that is no longer a problem, and a couple of years down the road after release, they've made EEs compatible with a good bunch of mods. (As for discs, the originals are half the price of EEs on GOG and have been for years.)

You probably just need a god mode, dear old friend.

I think you're imagining that stuff you consider crucial or basic is also true for everybody. All I use IE mod for is the UI and XP scaling, but those are pretty big. Would love to see it updated.

Half the spells aren't useless, only the ones that were comparatively crap in the first place. Many builds are viable, and story companions are just fine. It makes tactics and preparation much more important.

Who really cares about bragging on the Internet? Enjoying the 10,20,30,40 hours you spend is probably more important for most intelligent human beings - and if you only cared about bragging you could just lie. I always thought 'bragging rights' stuff is just BS that other people make up to attack folks who like harder difficulties - it's often a reflection on people who use it as an insult. (Though I'm sure there's a legion of sad fellows who really do care about bragging rights.)

I'm pretty happy not knowing all the answers. It would cheapen the story as delivered within the game to have a 'what really happened' synopsis. Stories aren't about facts, they're about experiences and problems.

The value proposition of Beamdog's Enhanced Editions have little to do with "being faithful to originals" or any such abstract allegiances. Do you want to play it on tablets? Do you really, really want a limited zoom ability, at the cost of having blurry graphics? Do you really, really hate installing any kind of mods, even if BG mods are highly streamlined via WeiDU? Or perhaps are a couple of new companions and 15 minutes of new original content exciting for you? Are you OK with an ugly UI, a raft of new bugs (which I think has mostly been fixed after all this time), and paying twice the price? If you answered yes to all/most of those, then EE might be worth a buy. If not, then.... well, they don't really offer much else. The criticism about EEs is not really that they are super terrible or that they horribly ruin the original experience... they didn't really do enough to qualify as significantly changing the experience either way. Which is the point. You want to pay $20 for a couple things they made worse and a couple of added features? It's a free country.

In, say, AD&D games like BG2 they're based on saving throws - although of course save for zero effect is different from, say, save for half damage. And 'bosses' aren't immune because most of them operate by normal rules. You can FoD Firkraag with enough Lower Resistances and Malisons, for example. Always a great moment.

TOTSC and TOB are both munchkin adventures for me, and I was fine with that. Durlag's Tower alone would be an excellent expansion, even if, yes, the others were mixed at best. TOB has all the hallmarks of a story that was originally written for a different pacing and scope, but I felt like they did succeed in depicting a Bhaalspawn situation that was getting out of hand and hurtling towards a conclusion. It's also fun to play around with epic levels, which is something we would never properly see again in IE.