Tigranes

Durance has that head start as mentioned, so can be good for locks and traps early on.

Most people in early game will use tactics of "engage with fighter, throw my highest damage abilities with everyone else", because that's what seems obvious. Shadows in particular are resistant to this tactic because of their DR / Resistances and teleport. They are super difficult if you persist with the same tactic, but very manageable if you adapt to the situation. E.g. with a cipher, charm a shadow and hopefully have two shadows duke it out; with high INT charm will often last until one dies and another is almost dead, taking out two in a flash. Durance' anti-undead abilities are extremely powerful. Fire is a good option.

Not necessarily. I just stomped Maerwald in about ten seconds with a level 4 no-customs party. I thought it was far too easy, then I died to some spiders in the next room. Maerwald's pretty squishy so if you have any paralysis spells then you're good to go. My cipher paralysed the fire elemental while Aloth paralysed Maerwald (both level 2 abilities), then Kana's arquebus and cipher's crossbow can get in ~40 damage per each (slow) hit. Maerwald barely got anything away. If you can't do that, then I suppose above poster's tips might help too.

I'm under no impressions - I was trying to answer your questions. But as for the actual code that drives AI selection of targets, I have no idea, so I can't help you there.

It does make the game more challenging, because you have to go into some battles with lower health and missing some spells. This is clearly different from entering every combat at full health and full complement of spells, which makes the game drastically easier - and more than that, qualitatively changes your experience of combat. Oh, and no, the solution is not to make combat harder. If you made combat much harder and then allowed unlimited resting, it would become far too difficult to play without resting. In that case you might as well also make health heal instantly after each battle, just like endurance. And you might as well make every single spell per-encounter. Of course, when you do that, you diminish the fun of the combat, because now you just blast through your most powerful spells each battle every time in the same way, and you just go in gung ho not caring about damage as long as it doesn't kill you. Ironically, POE is already a bit like that compared to IE games, because endurance resets and some abilities are indeed per-encounter. I don't know about you, but I don't want to play a game where I am supposed to be going deeper into a dangerous dungeon but there is zero concept of attrition and I am always as fresh and prepared as I just got out of bed. I want fun situations like running low on camping supplies and spells and having to devise different tactical solutions to the last remaining fight. The system works best when you're not trekking back to town every 3 fights to get more supplies, obviously. If you choose to use such an inconvenient solution, that is not the problem of the feature. It would be like saying "it sucks that I can't save during combat, now I have to run away from enemies after killing some of them in order to save, and that takes way too long."

I don't know MMO language, so I may be getting it wrong, but: (1) Just checking: you do know that 5 skuldr bashing Eder doesn't mean Eder is engaging them all, right? To begin with Eder is only able to engage one enemy; he can make this two with the defensive stance; he can make it three with a talent; and so on. Enemies engaged by Eder is noted by the green line between their selection circles. If a monster is bashing Eder but not engaged by him, he can break off at any moment without penalty. This is what makes a large number of even weaker enemies dangerous in a different way than a single monster. (2) I've noticed some enemies break engagement and just go for weaker characters, but in those cases, the combat log will show that they suffer a free hit from the engaging character. Well, that's just how it's meant to work - and you can do this too, by the way. If monsters NEVER broke engagement combat would become far easier and also more boring. You need to have strategies for dealing with that. For example, Alroth can invest in Grimoire Slam, which pushes back the enemy - giving him a free broken engagement and letting him run. Rogues have Escape. You can paralyse or knockdown enemies then get away in the meantime. Or, sometimes, you might just run and take the free hit from them. Every character has some way to get out of engagement, though of course there's costs to everything.

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Halsy: You made a thread for that more general issue, so feel free to talk about it there: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72747-your-rpg-system-sucks/ Delryn: yeah, many of the tactics from IE don't work so well - it's clearly a very different system. Vanilla BG1 was basically winnable with sneak backstab, web and ranged weapons on haste, for example. None of that is true here.

True. Tagged & moved.

All firearms in POE world are Renaissance era, so none of them are fast, similar to historical cases. The pistol takes several long seconds of reloading as well.

I haven't decided myself, so currently (level 4) I go both melee and ranged. I go ranged if the fight is particularly dangerous, if I'm using a chokepoint, and/or if the enemy has high DR so I need to punch through it with a high damage weapon. If there are numerous squishy opponents I might join in the flank and beat them up, since the higher attack speeds of weapons like rapiers let me build up focus quickly as well. I never tried cipher in BB, but those who did claim blunderbuss ciphers are pretty awesome.

Dated art style:

Whenever that enemy breaks engagement from your fighter to run off, you should get a free attack on him (check your combat log). And I've been able to have Eder keep engagement on enemies that Eder can't really damage effectively. Is your fighter continuing to attack the enemy? Does the enemy do this all the time, or just some of the time? Are you ever using chokepoints?

1. Hover over the item, and wait, until it shows you tooltip of current AND equipped item. 2. Right-click item to see description. Click compare at the bottom of screen. THis works for currently selected character, which you can change in that screen by clicking on portraits.

You can still take your rogue while in stealth and have him do his thing - e.g. in an area where you have to sneak through some people, your party can wait by the entrance and your rogue can go in, steal things, talk to people, etc. (Maybe he can get into combat, too, I think?) What you can't do is have your rogue enter stealth during combat and backstab someone. Hence all rogue abilities were designed with flanking, etc. in mind instead of the IE style sneak attack. It is not true that rogues are useless or broken - they were simply never made to do IE style backstabbing, because of how the stealth system was designed. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to design IE style rogues then have this stealth system. The way stealth and rogues would work was also advertised before release. I loved IE style though, so hope it makes a comeback. It would be a superior stealth system to what POE has now, by any metric. But that kind of system takes a long time to build and implement, especially because of how it changes so many other elements of gameplay. It's not the kind of change that you'd normally see in a patch for any game - just like BG1 players had to wait for BG2 to have higher levels, the Sorcerer and Barbarian, higher monitor resolutions, and so on.

Day 1 patch was already applied.

I've been using it and I'm not sure either, might be bugged. I thought it was meant to do 30% of all damage taken during that period.

If you're having to rest after every single encounter, that's usually a pretty good sign that it's too difficult for you for one reason or another.

In all fairness, though, I never ran into this problem just following the main quest line. Sure, if you head straight north after visiting the Friendly Arm Inn for the first time and come across a couple Ankhegs you're gonna be in a world of hurt, but there were plenty of times I went into the Nashkel Mines as fresh level 2s and while it was tough, it wasn't constant party wipes. I'm not trying to be defensive, I'm just pointing out that im going to the places the game naturally points me to go. Yep, you're right about that. What you have to consider though is that you might be currently pretty bad at the game. That will go for many of us. When I fire up BG2 now, I've played it, and other D&D games, so many times that I'm starting from a pretty high level of competency. With POE, sometimes I find out basic things after dying several times because it's got several new rules and mechanics. Arguably that means the game should have been balanced to be easier, but I like it this way, since when we play for a bit more and develop a competency it'll still have challenging options.

If you have, say, a cloak that gives +5 Reflex and gloves that also give +5 Reflex, it doesn't stack. Just like you couldn't equip a +1 Protecting Ring and Cloak in IE games.

I described the changes that are confirmable based on the video (not wild speculations), and I explained why those changes fundamentally change the tactical experience of D&D CRPGs, and then gave a comparison to show how the combat experience demonstrated in that video is closer to Dragon Age, Diablo and MMOs than IE games or Gold Box. "Built in suck mechanics"? Yeah, again, you're unable to separate the issue of "is this game D&D?" with "do I like this game?" Look, you personally don't like many IE mechanics. OK. I like them. OK. None of that is actually relevant to the question, to what extent is this a D&D game? I gave an analysis based on the evidence we have. You can choose to provide a different analysis, or you can, as you have done all this time, say "whatever man if the devs tell me it's D&D it's D&D, if they tell me it isn't it isn't." Commenting every post how the mechanics you don't like suck a lot doesn't prove you right. POE is again a separate issue. But hey, you're fine with SCL as long as it has something called "Magic Missile" even though it works quite differently from a D&D Magic Missile, right? SO maybe you'd be fine with POE accuracy as long as they called it THAC0. Wait, but you're telling me you don't like POE accuracy because its mechanics are quite different from D&D. Oh, right, just like SCL's Mordekainen's Sword or whatnot have quite different mechanics from D&D...

Reroll? Why would you restart just because you took one suboptimal talent? That way the only way you could ever finish the game is by reading several walkthroughs. Extra spell feats were often useless in D&D CRPGs as well and I suspect they're really a convenience option for people who really want it, just like an extra quick item slot talent.

I think any ability can be interrupted unless it's specifically stated. I'm playing a cipher that sometimes goes melee with high Dex, and I think the main deal is that faster attacks don't get interrupted as much, and faster attacks mean faster focus gain. I do find that my cipher can't really handle proper frontline combat, it just likes to flank whoever's engaged with someone else to generate some focus.

Each tombstone was written by a Kickstarter backer of a certain level. It was a promised KS reward - just like the various characters, books, etc. you find in Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2. I don't think it's a wonderful idea either, it sort of ends up looking like product placement.... by the consumers. But I can understand why it ended up being there.

Spoiler tags: [ spoiler ] blah blah [ / spoiler ] without the spaces. 1. If you're level 3 and Caed Nua you're not really underleveled, though some players will be level 4 after having gone through some more side areas and quests. Do you have the 3 NPC companions you'd be expected to have at that stage? Did you complete the Temple area in the Gilded Vale? 2. We all remember a certain difficulty with IE games, but taht's often after several playthroughs. Difficulty varies a lot on, say, whether you really understand the combat system yet (things like engagement, damage reduction, accuracy, etc. work quite differently than D&D and therefore IE games); whether you use crafting and potions and consumables; whether you have enchanted your gear; and so on. I'm not saying you are doing this, but trying to just play it like an IE game will make things a bit harder. That doesn't mean you have to study manuals and guides for hours, but approaching combat as a new game with new rules will help. 3. There's no problem with going down to Easy if things are frustrating right now, and bumping it up later, too. You're not expected to use custom adventurers, it's meant to be 'balanced' without them.