Loren Tyr

Something like this would be good I think, though I'm not sure I would go with the depowering. I'd probably just use it to buff the single class casters. One somewhat similar alternative (though not mutually exclusive to spell mastery) would be that single class casters could use their higher level spell slots to cast lower level spells at a higher power level (maybe just the difference in level). Aside from powering up your spells and giving additional value to lower level spells later, it als gives the flexibility of casting more than two of a particular spell if you want to (which I've always felt should be possible anyway).

Evading yet again, who'd have seen that coming *gasp*. Just to clarify though, those weren't rhetorical questions, they were very much meant to be answered. The fact that you are apparently incapable of doing so doesn't change that. But sure, go ahead and dismiss everything you disagree with as 'lacking evidence' or 'personal attack'. I've no doubt that's an attitude that will serve you well in life. What is an "independent verifiable source" in this context? You sputtered out a word salad in that post, but I don't think you even know what it means. It's an absurd list of demands you made in that post, and you should know better. I encourage you to go back through this thread, page by page, very carefully. I was *not* the one who first intimated that there is an objectively superior set of mechanics. Other people argued that Deadfire's system was objectively easier to balance. I merely pointed out that real world evidence does not support this claim. It's peculiar that you didn't hit anyone else with your anti-objectivity jeremiad. The original game had launch issues, but it had nowhere near the difficulty issues of Deadfire. This is doubly troubling because Deadfire didn't have to labor through creating an entire world and set of systems from scratch. Balance *should* have been much easier in Deadfire. The *fact* that it wasn't requires explanation. And to assert that its core mechanics lend themselves to easier balance? It's to double down on un-truths, something far too common today. I will end by noting that you managed yet another post that doesn't mention Deadfire, its predecessor, or any game. All while maintaining some high horse attitude. I guess personal attacks are allowed when you do them. *yawn*

Clearly that's what you want, but it seems rather a considerable stretch to suppose that this is in general 'what people want'. Given the recent theme of real-world evidence, and the fact that this actually is a quite distinctly empirical claim, might I ask exactly what you are basing that on? Because to me it seems rather more plausible that what people want from a game, what they gain satisfaction from, and what they consider a serious challenge (supposing that serious challenge is what they are after)... that those things will tend to vary quite considerably across those people. Which makes it quite presumptuous for you to speak for all of them.

Evading yet again, who'd have seen that coming *gasp*. Just to clarify though, those weren't rhetorical questions, they were very much meant to be answered. The fact that you are apparently incapable of doing so doesn't change that. But sure, go ahead and dismiss everything you disagree with as 'lacking evidence' or 'personal attack'. I've no doubt that's an attitude that will serve you well in life.

Ah, your classic approach of utterly failing to engage with what other people are saying. You're certainly consistent, I'll give you that. Just curious though, you do realise that there are quite a lot of topics of discussion that are not actually matters of empirical fact, right? Or has that rather basic observation somehow managed to escape your undoubtedly towering intellect (burdened down perhaps by its vigorous and unrelenting fact-finding)?

Who's rule of thumb would that be, exactly? Because I don't quite recall this 'standard target' being mentioned in the game. Which rather invites the possibility that many players, not having gotten this particular memo, either undershot or overshot that target in practice. In which case they would either run through a bunch of too easy encounters (because they were using more per-rest abilities and such than they were 'supposed' to, than the encounter difficulty was balanced for), then run out of resting supplies and have to slog back through a bunch of loading screens to get more; or, they would hoard their per-rest abilities too much get encounters that were more difficult than they wanted at their chosen difficulty level, and getting frustrated by both the unwanted difficulty and the fact that they felt unable to really use their cool big spells often enough. This might also be interspersed with occasionally far too easy encounters when they got to a point where they really needed to rest soon to regain health and such, and had no incentive not to unload massive overkill of hoarded spells on some random oozes or whatever. Balancing a game on a (supposed) rule of thumb that is not actually enforced or even explained at any point... I wouldn't exactly call that a brilliant design decision.

I agree in part, but the other side of that is that plenty of people at least on this forum were also complaining that post-launch the game was far too easy. Of course, how representative that is of the game's audience in general is hard to say, but if the game is indeed considered too easy by too many players then that's going to be damaging to the game as well. They'll probably not stick around to buy the DLC, for one. Now of course, ideally balance and difficulty would have been better at launch. But given that they weren't, there is much to be said for fixing it sooner rather than later. After all, a major rebalance with the DLC is still going to potentially disrupt people's existing builds and characters, and at a moment as well when they'll probably really want to be using them for the new content.

No, it doesn't. You guys have no real world evidence for your arguments. In fact, the real world evidence points in the opposite direction. But yall continue to assert that somehow it must be true. You keep banding about that phrase, but all you're doing yourself is either referencing the fact that certain games were praised in their day / sold well (which by itself proves nothing about, say, the quality of per rest systems as such); or, as in this post, you're just using your own particular interpretations of games and game design to support your point of view. Which would be fine in itself, if you weren't pretending that it is some kind of objective fact, and being an enormous git about it to boot. But just to engage with your fondness of objectivity and evidence for a second, regarding these *meaningful* encounters. What definition of 'meaningful' are you using here? If we're talking evidence here, you probably ought to be more specific. And is this an industry standard for 'meaningful encounter' you're referencing? If so, could you cite, let's say, three independent sources? If not, why is this particular definition of 'meaningful encounter' relevant? What are its merits relative to other plausible definitions of 'meaningful encounters', and do you have objective and verifiable sources to support those? Is there empirical data on the degree of development effort required to implement such 'meaningful encounters' as a function of other components of the design, such as the relative preponderance of per-rest versus per-encounter abilities and items? You know, when we're talking about 'real world evidence'. Just some questions that spring to mind. And by the way, I have no particular need to cite extensive real world evidence. Myself, I am merely arguing for a particular view on the quality of games (in this particular genre, and more generally), and what I would see as fruitful and less fruitful in obtaining such quality (and in which I see no role for a per-rest system in anything like its existing forms). It is a personal point of view on topics being discussed in this thread, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a discussion forum. Unless you're actually prepared to present the kind of evidence you're yammering about, perhaps you should drop the pretense that you are anything more than that (though admittedly discussion actually requires engaging other people's arguments and point of view, something you have so far rather emphatically failed to do; probably work a bit on that as well, would be my suggestion).

I actually was just tinkering around with this myself, and indeed for pistols one-handed is probably better than dual because of rushed reload. To give you some figures I jotted down for illustration, with a 19 Dex character. This is with the Two Weapon Style perk, no armour or other speed effects, times are for the total attack cycle. - 1H: 4.7 seconds at +12 ACC - 1H + Gunner: 4.1 seconds at +12 ACC - 1H + RR: 3.0 seconds at -3 ACC - 1H + RR + Gunner: 2.8 seconds at -3 ACC - DW: 3.5 seconds at +0 ACC - DW + Gunner: 3.2 seconds at +0 ACC - DW + RR: 2.5 seconds at -15 ACC - DW + RR + Gunner: 2.4 seconds at -15 ACC So with Rushed Reload on 1H is actually faster than dual-wielding without it, at the cost of 3 accuracy points (but with the benefit of 1H +20% hit-crit conversion). Dual-wielding with RR is obviously fastest but not by an enormous amount and at a relative -12 ACC penalty. Of course numbers will vary somewhat depending on other effects and stats and such (though clearly with RR on, due to the way speed effects stack other speed-ups aren't going to add too much). And this doesn't take into account the advantage of dual-wielding with Full Attack effects; though of course 1H has its crit conversion, and potentially +12 ACC at the cost of speed if you really need it.

This annoys me too, don't think it's fixable though. Best thing you can do I think is reorder your characters so the squishy ones are last, those will tend to end up in the back in these situations too usually (though it's annoying still, I prefer to have my main character be in the 1 slot). I get that the custom formations may cover too much of an area to always fit at the entry point of a map, but it would be quite simple technically to at least maintain the same general front-to-back order. Somewhat relatedly by the way, but when I get off my ship and the companions are added back to the party this is always in a different order to how I had them before. Does anyone know whether that can be changed so you don't have to reshuffle them every time?

Says who? That may certainly be part of the target audience, but while coasting on nostalgia has certainly been quite lucrative in a number of different markets (both gaming and other media), I would expect that Obsidian is very much trying to appeal to other audiences as well. Niches being inherently small and all that. Besides, as you already noted yourself, the old school cRPG players are hardly a homogeneous group. So even if that were the entirety of the audience Obsidian is aiming for, how best to cater to that audience would still be a rather open question. How many of that group would care much about a more difficult PotD, for example? Not sure we have much data on that, as it stands.

Mostly I very much agree with this, though I would be somewhat hesitant in making quests and such time-critical. That is, the whole aspect of time and time-management would have to be woven into the gameplay sufficiently well for this to work. Because having the game just going "quest failed" at some point and you having to reload an older save (or just not succeeding the quest, if it's not main path or something) would be just annoying, probably. But if done properly, and the game has a building sense of urgency as time ticks down, that could be great. Especially if it's not a binary failure, but a progressive deterioration. Eg. you're supposed to help a keep under attack, and the longer you wait to rest (but for example also to scout), the more the defenders are pressed, wounded, running out of supplies, what have you; and obviously fail at some point, but not as a binary event but as something you are aware of happening more incrementally, and making your decisions and priorities actually matter in it.

No, it doesn't.

I did, played those games quite endlessly at the time. Already wasn't a fan of the per-rest thing then either though, regardless. And as thelee said, you'd just quicksave before hand and reload as needed. Not that I'd necessarily reload in case of ambush, but it was just put in too simplistically and invariably your characters would have been rearranged with the squishy mage now in front and getting shredded (this tended to happen with beginning-of-map ambushes as well, and you'd have to reload from before moving to that map and reorder your characters so they'd end up in a vaguely sensible formation). Definitely a better version of having ambushes and such, that would help a bit. If you have some ability to prepare for it, find a good spot to camp and have that actually matter, maybe can opt to keep a watch or have no campfire (and no bonuses), etc. And more generally, have the game world move on. Perhaps don't necessarily have an ambush happen right at your resting spot (and if it does, that should definitely be at much more of a disadvantage), but somewhere later on the map. Or just shore up defenses later in the map, because your pre-rest activities were discovered and in reality an enemy would actually respond to that in some way. And have areas actually repopulate over time in general, rather than it remaining a deserted wasteland once you passed through. Obviously much of this would probably work much better in an open game world, which can much more easily be made dynamic, and have a variety of different routes and solutions to a given objective, etc..

Yeah, it's working properly for me as well (Greatsword Devoted character). I hadn't even noticed the -10 Devoted conditional bit until I checked just now, you only even see that if you hover and hold shift to show more. Otherwise it'll only show the currently applied and relevant ones. So if there is a bug with it, it's at least not an overly general one. In the character sheet summary, is the Weapon Proficiency for your chosen weapon showing up properly? Which weapon did you choose? I can whip up a quick Devoted character in my game to see if it's specific to that weapon type (assuming it's not Great Sword or Estoc).

While I'm not much of a fan of empower myself, why should it need to be removed? If you want to make the game more challenging, you can easily just opt not to use it, after all.

Assertion which you have conspiciously failed to address. There are plenty of examples of game mechanics and designs that were praised in their original games that have not remotely stood the test of time (I remember the likes of Quake and Goldeneye being highly praised as well, just to name two examples), so the fact that things were done in a certain way before doesn't mean it's a good idea now. Or, for that matter, that it was a particularly good idea at the time; it may just have been the best they had thought of, or could technically achieve.

I second this, give us layers! Also, separate eyepatch slot.

I agree, I'm fairly sure they're not (though obviously they're felt more strongly as the difficulty level gets less forgiving). It looks very much aimed at obtaining better balance of classes/items/abilities relative to each other across the board. Imbalance in that sense is ultimately bad for any level of difficulty, after all. Obviously it figures into overall changes in the higher difficulty levels that coincide with it in 1.1, but I very much doubt that was the specific aim of those nerfs.

Ahh, the sweet smell of entitlement...

I just noticed something weird with scrolls: the player character seems to get a smaller base "per level" damage bonus on scrolls. I looked at some old saves from a couple of different characters and it was the same for all of them. So eg. for Fan of Flames, at level 5 or 6 (multi-class; in this case either fighter-rogue or fighter-barbarian) the damage listed when I look at the description says +10% level for the player character. However, when I move the scroll over to another character (same level, also multiclass, no Arcana skill), it becomes +20% level for them. Then looking at the same characters upped to level 7, my main characters show +20%, but my companions +30% (though oddly, at level 4 it's +10% for all; again comparing to other multiclass, and with no Arcana skill involved).

They don't, no. As far as I can tell party assist does not work on anything inside of combat (which makes sense of course, people are probably otherwise occupied).

But I would say that DM is the crucial difference there. I have never done any P&P roleplaying but I have no doubt a per-rest system can work very well in that context, because you have the DM there who's probably not going to have you take a nap after every fight (and presumably, in that sort of setting the roleplaying component will be much more pronounced so most people wouldn't want to either). But of course P&P also offers much more flexibility in getting around a fight and such. If your party is exhausted and your casters low on spells, and they spot some unfriendly ogres on their path, they can maybe just go around, or prepare an ambush, or attempt to scare them away / convince them to leave (using an illusion spell maybe, or just a really convincing / intimidating character). Hell, they could set fire to the surrounding forest and drive them off that way. And I should imagine that in P&P gaming, beating a tactical retreat is actually possible as well (realistically, having seen you off the ogres are probably not overly interested in chasing you to the ends of the earth). I would love for this to be actually possible in computer games as well. But you'd need an equivalent of a DM in the game to be able to do that, and in general an engine that allows for vastly more flexibility. That is very hard to actually do, of course. I seem to have side-tracked somewhat, but yeah... per-rest systems work just fine in that context. To me, it never felt it translated at all well to cRPG. The cost of resting and time elapsing is just too ambiguous for it to balance very well. Which isn't to say that per-encounter doesn't have flaws, it clearly does. Having longer-term tactical aspects and being incentivised not to use the same abilities every fight are certainly things I would like to see very much as well (and in general, more organic design than discrete resource pools and spell levels and power levels and such). I don't thing 'per-rest' can properly accomplish that though.

Make Corpse-Eaters better. I've been trying one out for a bit and I think they can be really fun to play, but they are still a bit too situational, in some encounters there's just nothing to chow down on. Which is fine to an extent, but maybe add one of Primordial or Vessel to menu too. And one other aspect that can really hinder the build is the fact that you cannot eat bodies that were critted on the killing hit. It creates a situation where you essentially don't want to land a crit because you lose your Rage and health boost (which of course rather poorly synergizes with for example Barbaric Blow as well). Being able to snack on the chunks as well would really help. Also, could be really fun if each different creature classes gives some additional effect when consumed. Doesn't have to be large, but just for added flavour. And perhaps potentially for balancing too, eg. add both Primordial and Vessel as menu options but with some negative effect when consuming them.

Agreed on explosives, having a dedicated or semi-dedicated grenadier can be very useful indeed. Alchemy also considerably boosts the effects and durations of drugs and potions, and the potency and accuracy of poisons (and indeed on several spells, though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that gets nerfed at some point). And really, same deal with Arcana as well.