wanderon

I like them myself - not a powerhouse but with some synergy with your pet can be relatively effective - I've had pretty decent luck recently with antelope - (best defenses of pets or so the game claims) and it does seem to stay alive relatively well making it a sort of mini tank (if you stretch it a bit)

You mean besides "be awesome"? Well I'm hoping it will be awesome because at some point it will do something besides randomly walking around like a piglet... If not then perhaps we can introduce the POE world to the wonders of BACON!

In spite of the fact that the space piglet is supposed to be a "bonus" ?

Do you suppose the "space piglet" (if that is one and the same) is going to "do" anything in the full game?

Perhaps I'm just not buying/trusting that the math that concludes there is NO reason to choose mid level armors is in fact correct That it is not skewed to make it fit the awesome vs useless concept so popular with the min-max mindset anyway - or perhaps the conclusions drawn are just incomplete because I have no clue how all the variables involved in a 6 man team battling other mixed teams could be boiled down to such a degree that the numbers involved with armor and weapon use show this concept (all or nothing) to be the only possible conclusion - no exceptions. Instead I am simply satisfied with the fact that they seem to work fine for me and that they seem to offer choices (higher DR vs slower attacks at various break points) that also seem to work for me. After playing each party for a time I can "feel" those differences in the way characters function in battle after making changes - how well/often they hit vs how they fare defensively for each class type I use them on and occasionally back that up with some references to the combat log to see what it has to tell me. Anecdotal to be sure but it certainly serves the purpose of telling me what is likely to work FOR ME in the final release and that's really all I care about. As for why I might doubt the "Holy Math" well Mark Twain suggested there were three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics - and my 88 year old mother who was in labor relations towards the end of her working life told me that one of the first things she learned about statistics was that they could be made to argue either side of almost every argument..successfully... And that's that - I am done here...(waits for the cheers)

Only works as long as you don't get crit hit sadly, then it's mostly irrelevant and the reasoning is that since backliners will have low DEF, they'll get crit hit a lot, therefore on anyone but characters with high DEF, any armor is just not worth it. My playtime (on hard) in the BB did not show that and I doubt it had anything to do with my playing skills - I used almost all armor options at one time or another.

I'm not sure if you're actually this dense, or if you're just trolling. And at this point I'm afraid to ask. However, I'd like to rephrase something. It's not useless. It's meaningless. Subtle but important difference. That's just it - it's NOT meaningless - it's an option that works and what is ridiculous is to keep telling people that your only options are full plate or naked when that is clearly not so!

Yeah back to the awesome or useless trumps workable across the board after all just because it works fine is no reason to use it...smfh

Even if that were the case... The game is very punishing for anyone besides a tank to take damage. If your mage starts getting attacked it doesn't matter what armor he wears... he is going to have a bad time. For example, say your mage/rogue/whatever has ~75 health. The mobs in this game hit hard. Having a DR of 6/8/10 compared to 12 isn't going to do anything to keep you alive. You are far better off just doing as much damage as possible. Actually wouldn't that 6/8/12 be half as good as the 12 and twice as good as 0? And wouldn't the penalty also be less than it is at 12 and more than it is at 0? Oh wait I forgot this is the internet so everything has to either be either awesome or useless with no middle ground anywhere - sorry my bad... It's not that there is no middle ground. It's that the middle ground is useless. When you get struck reliably for 40 damage, it's not going to matter whether you have 6 or 12 DR. What is going to matter is whether you can kill the thing before it kills you or not, or at least do enough damage to it so your next team-mate up for the grinder doesn't die. Or the tank, for that matter. There it is again - awesome or useless - I've been playing the BB on hard for a lot of hours with a lot of different PCs + BB team + adventurer teams and have outfitted all of them in various forms of mostly medium armors (no naked adventuring and virtually no plate either) and I rarely have party wipes and while I might lose a team member or two in battle we win much more often than lose. I have also avoided almost all enchanting because I am more interested in what the basic weapons & armors are going to do and these partyies have for the most part done just fine. So I'm sorry but I just am not seeing the whole "useless" thing.

Even if that were the case... The game is very punishing for anyone besides a tank to take damage. If your mage starts getting attacked it doesn't matter what armor he wears... he is going to have a bad time. For example, say your mage/rogue/whatever has ~75 health. The mobs in this game hit hard. Having a DR of 6/8/10 compared to 12 isn't going to do anything to keep you alive. You are far better off just doing as much damage as possible. Actually wouldn't that 6/8/12 be half as good as the 12 and twice as good as 0? And wouldn't the penalty also be less than it is at 12 and more than it is at 0? Oh wait I forgot this is the internet so everything has to either be either awesome or useless with no middle ground anywhere - sorry my bad...

Maybe they should have been wearing more armor

It will be interesting to see how much detail is spelled out in the manuals and guides when we get them

I really wish we could just buy stats all separately and then choose our characteristics for dialogue checks separately. If I don't value AoE and duration abilities on a certain class, now I should have a dumb character! If I don't value Deflection and Interrupt on a class that mostly hangs in the back, now I've got an oblivious character. /sigh. Having talents that related to dialogue and/or other non-combat skills would be another way to handle this - especially if they were available separately from combat related talents

Pretty sure someone posted on this saying after testing it appears to be the mechanic skill that determines finding "hidden" items (not perception) but it is generally agreed that perception is likely to be used often in scripted events. will see if I can test this myself (or maybe not ) LOL

If you have the whole party selected when you grab the loot then the closest party member to the loot will be highlighted and you can click on any party member or the stash button to determine where the loot goes and/or you can move pieces of it individually (click a portrait - click a single item - they get that item - wash rinse repeat) That said when you choose the stash button for the loot it will always choose the stash as default again going forward until you click on a character portrait again to receive loot then it will default to showing the character closest to the loot again. I really like the way this works (once I figured it out )

I tend to use a mix of armors in the BB myself just because I can but then I don't pay all that much attention to the numbers I just want it to be viable (usually on hard). So I have been rarely using plate (BB fighter in fine breastplate), PC generally in Night Stalker (?) armor for the perks for most classes, BB rogue in fine padded, BB priest in either leather or scale, BB Wizard varies between Breastplate, leather or robes and now clothes options, and adventurers vary by class with the bulk of them falling into some sort of medium armor altho yesterday I did a tanky Barbarian in plate that I enchanted to fine (plus large shield). I have not had any extreme issues with this - folks sometimes die sometimes not - I rarely have full party wipes so I consider the choices viable (if not optimal) and of course some of my choices are based on what is available "free" so I can save my loot for other goodies.

I always assumed it determined all combat based actions - (I do however know how to spell ass-u-me)

Different attributtes perhaps?

In the backer beta I never put more than 3 levels of stealth (and I did it for everyone) and it was effective to the point of being able to see enemies and remain hidden at a distance and based on the traps in the BB I didn't see any issues in building a combination scout/disarmer - altho in the real game you could certainly run across places where even a character maxed out for your level would be in over his head off the critical path.

Agreed - take out food from Inns or the Stongholds' executive chef - packaged to go!

Gauntlets? (monk only?)

I think he's roleplaying character called Gromnir from BG2: ToB. It's the other way around. As crazy as it sounds. That's interesting. Are there any other forumites from the olden days who got their own character in BG? Mencar Pebblecrusher - IIRC this was the result of some sort of contest

Question on weapon sets - I have a monk with weapon focus peasant - unarmed she has 45 accuracy showing for each hand - if I drop a fine dagger with +5 accuracy (not part of peasant focus) in her main hand she has 58 (nothing in off hand) - if I drop it into her off hand she gets 55 main (fist) and 58 off hand. Any chance these are correct??

This really has nothing to do with the issue and does nothing to reinforce your previous points. You can play any way you want, and you can feel free to roleplay a drooling idiot that runs up to dragons dressed in robes made out of hay and dried straw, but that really has nothing to do with the rest of us. And a lot of us wants to be able to understand the system and make informed decisions; some of us because we we have no interest in the roleplaying aspects, and simply want to do the best we can, and others want to be able to roleplay and make decisions based on what would make sense in the world as our character knows it. Neither of it hinges on or has anything to do with what you want to do, and what you want to do in no way hinges on the factors being discussed being obfuscated or obtuse. But it's important to the rest of us that it isn't. Sometimes I get the feeling that you're being wilfully obtuse or contrarian on purpose. So only people who have opinions that mimic yours or other players should be contributing to these forums? I thought this was a discussion about armor and how to determine what's best - my opinion is that you can overthink this stuff and that there are other viable ways to determine what to use that have little to do with diagnosing all the math - I'm not saying everyone or even anyone should play this way nor saying it's better or worse just offering my input and then responding when people respond directly to my posts!

As to unlimited stash there's nothing I can do about it but about all I use it for is storage until I get to a merchant to convert it to cash or goods. I pretty much NEVER change armor or other gear (nor cast protection against __________ in the IE games) to deal with something I have metagame knowledge of nor do I tend to carry extra sets of armor for that purpose - generally speaking I only switch armor or other wearables when I find something better than what I'm wearing. I do scout sometimes extensively but mostly use that knowledge for positioning and/or weapon choices which I do sometimes use general knowledge of based on facing the same sort of creatures before (crushing instead of piercing for skeletons in IE games for instance).