Gregorovitch

I agree with every word of that. Except I found out about Obscuro's mod for Oblivion which fixed monster levels throughout the game, made it epic at the beginning. I especially agree with Gothic 2's approach. IIRC the further you got from a road and the further that road was was from a village, town or settlement, the nastier the mosters got. That worked really well for me.

So my first PoE run I was L12 by the time I arrived at Twin Elms and just finished the game ASAP at that point. White March run was the same really except higher level. So I never really did everything there was to do in Twin Elms 'cos no point really. So now I see a picture on game options offering level scaling at none/crit path/all. I am undecided as to which option will play the best. With Deadfire advertised as being both bigger and more open world/exploration driven that PoE I can see this deecisionm might be quite important. But I don't have much info on how level scaling works so I am unsure what to do. Any more detailed info on level scaling available? What level scaling option are you considering?

It will be ready when it's ready. I want to play it for the first time when it's ready. I'm totally OK with Obsidian taking as much time as they need to make it ready.

IIRC correctly missile ammo came in stakcs of 20 in BG/BG2. I recall last playing the Beamdog EE version. Ammo stacks increased to 80. Yay! No more worries running out of ammo, more space for carrying loot across the party. I know some people will see the original restricted inventory as cool and strategic and all, but fact is I saw it as a PITA and I suspect the vast majority of players probably feel the same. Bascially it's not fun, it's just an annoying irritation. The logic of this is inexorable: go up to 80 per stack and there are no problems any more, so why have ammo stacks at all since they are now pointless? Bean count special ammo? Yeah, OK. I suppose. Under protest. Crafting is a perenial problem in RPGs IMO. It's just not possible to get it right becasue it's bascially a zero sum game: either you can craft better gear than you can loot or buy, in which case crafting is the only game in town, or you can't, in which case crafting is a total waste of time. The side effect of crafting being the only game in town is that it devalues all the loot you get and everything available in the shops as happened in Skyrim. The effect of crafting being inferior to looted and bought equipment is obvious. Only two games I cite as having got this right are Morrowind and PoE1. This is becasue you are totally free to enhance any gear you find or buy as you wish but you need to get hold of decent base gear therrfore there is no devaluing of looted and bought equipment by the crafting system. It sidesteps the zero sum problem neatly. Morrowind was of course a lot more interesting with it's much more powerfull (than PoE) enchanting where, if you had the gargantuan amounts of cash required, you could make rediculously powerfull weapons and gear - too powerfull by far really - and it wasn't that hard to make the cash either. But it was ludicrously unbalanced and removed any challenge from the late game really. PoE's little enchantments may have been boring but at least they didn't ruin the challenge of the game.

One of the problems with reading up on lore etc for PoE before playing it is that anything you find will probably be stuffed full of collateral spoilers. This is especially bad for PoE because in the beginning of the game and for quite a way through it exactly WTF is going on is not known to you (i.e. your main character). You don't know who you are, why your there, what you're supposed to be doing, anything really. The game narrative is set up as a kind of mystery story that slowly unfolds as you edge towards the truth during yourt adventure. For this reason it is not recommended to jump start your undersrtanding of the lore and history of the game world by reading about it in advance. You are supposed to learn about it during the game at a certain pace as the plot unfolds and you will be drip fed information at the appropriate speed by NPCs and books you will find all over the place. Once you learn about something, if you don't fully understand it, it is then reasonably safe to Google that specific subject. Just my 2c anyway.

So it's getting to make your mind up time I guess. Wow this is great info! I'm leaning towardss this at the moment, be great if someone could point out my idiocy if I got any my assumptionds wrong: Me: Straight Druid. Mainly for the killer returning storm. From what I've seen on beta play this is a canine's gonads type spell. Plus some heealing and buffing. Eder: Swashbuckler. I need someone to open the damn locks as well as handsomely slit throats. Palegina: Heraki. Uber tank with uber buffs and uber summons? Er, yes please! Aloth: Straight Wizard. Mainly for the killer fireballs. I've seen what they can do maxed out. The thing I'm banking on is that the ability to redirect spell casts is going to be a big thing in Pillars 2. Like adjust a fireball trajectory so it gets the whole lot of them perfectly for a crap ton of damage every time? Er, yes please! Xoli: Contemplative. No priest? No thanks! A priest that can also kick arse? Er, yes please!. I'd like a ranger too for the extra dude, but I can't see how to fit Maia in

Allowing something doesn't mean it is required. In the case of prebuffing, yes it does. As has already been explianed to you sevveral times in the thread: * if a game is designed to allow prebuffing then the encounters have to be balanced on thre assumption the player had prebuffed their party, i.e. they must be harder. * if a player then does not prebuff then they will find the encounters extremely difficult or even impossible to win * therefore all players will have to go through a prebuffing rigmarole prior to every single encounter which is incredibly tedious and adds exactly nothing to gameeplay. In addition to this alowing prebuffing removes a significant element of tactical depth from the game as you no longer have to decide between casting buffs or casting debuff/offensive spells in battle. You are persiting with an arguement you cannot win here.

Just to say I'm having a blast with DOS2 playing SP right now. Some people are whining about the new armour rules that stop you applying debuffs and effects before you've chewed through the armour, but really what that does is stop people pressing their favourite "I win button" on turn 1 of every encounter, it makes the game harder and more interesting basically. Makes you think hard about both builds and tactics. Some are whining that Explorer difficulty is way, way too hard for them. Others are whining that Tactician difficulty is way, way too easy. Well tactician difficulty is a few steps harder than PoE PotD, utterly brutal and unforgiving eearly game. Explorer diffuculty is a signifiacntly harder than PoE story mode simply becasue you actually have to take your turns and decide for yourself what to do, PoE you can just turn on party AI and watch to a large extent I beleive (although I admit to never having played other than hard and PotD so I don't really know). Someone suggested DOS2 was dumbed down? Piffle. Although I loved both I preferred PoE over DOS1 mainly because on balance I slightly prefer RTwP but mostly becasue I found the DOS1 story and dialog a bit too tongue-in-cheek, cheesy and cartoony for my taste. DOS2 has fixed this for me big time. It is still sometimes hilariously funny but in a more adult and less cheesy way, but it also has a much darker and more serious edge to it than the first one. DOS2 is a bangin' classic hard core cRPG IMO. Fully voice acted, and very well too. No pressure then Josh

Unfortunately unless you remove the concept of meanigfull specific weapon profficiency altogether there is no perfect solution to this issue. The main problem with usage based improvement is it encourages pointless grinding and locks out future change of direction. The main problem with ability/skill based level up advancement is it encourages meta-gaming. Then main problem with a respec based solution is (for me anyway) a character is a charcter and it is immersion breaking to just turn them instantly into another character for a bag of gold or w/e, I don't think I've ever used respec options a system in an RPG. The meta-gaming problem is that there is a huge temptation to look up all the weapons in the game and where/when you can find them in order to plan out your character's development paths optimally in advance, a temptation hard to resist for anyone whao has experienced selecting a weapon profficiency andf then immediately found a top drawer item from a different category they can't really justify using now. A seconday problem is that the game cannot be balanced for pre-knowledge of items and their locations so must perforce be balanced for slightly sub-optimal character equipment loadouts or initial blind playthroughs will be extra difficult. As a result further playthoughs become even easier as this pre-knowledge comes into effect.

Considering that this community is probably the most hard core, and therefore niche, community for eternity games it is worthless as a measuring stick of what players want. That said, the fact that the posts in this thread are 50/50 at worst indicates even the supposed "hard core" aren't that worried. The cold truth is this, to the majority of people who end up playing Eternity 2 won't even stop to think about 5 versus 6. Even if they do, they will be highly unlikely to think 6 is somehow inherently better. I expect some reviewers will mention it if they are big RPG sites, but that's about it. The concensus is 50% expressing concern and 50% "I don't know, we'll have to wait and see". There is virtually no direct support for the reduced party size. Nor is there any real arguements made as to why a five charcter party might be better than six. I have three main issues with it: 1. I am going to have me (druid), Eder, Aloth and Pallegina so I will only be able to use one other charcter, and that will be whoever the priest is. I am obviously unhappy that the game has already predetermined exactly who is going to be in my party first playthrough. 2. I almost always select a specific team and stick with that in any one playthrough, that's just hop I roll. Having only four companions is obviously an unwelcome restriction on using new recruitable NPCs 3. The magic of PoE1 for me was the tactical depth involvedd in holding a front line against numbers trying to kill your backline on PotD. Losing a charcter from the party leaves me worried that that depth will degenerate into a simplistic toe-to-toe ability-clicker slug fest a la Tyranny. That would be just....bad.

Personally I would guess that your problem with Pillars can be summed up right there. There is a lot of combat in Pillars. I absulutely love it and I think it's a master class in RPG combat design. But if you didn't like it then so much of the game is going to grate on you that every last little niggle in the rest of it (you mention the stronhold issues for example) is going to seem that much more dissatisfying or annoying whereas for me they where hardly worth mentioning. It's not hard to see why you didn't enjoy the game as a whole.

Most RPGs have a problems with balancing what you can buy in shops with loots and drops and the overall amount of gold you get in the game. Unfortunately it's a zero sum game whether found items are or are not better than those you can just buy in a shop. In the one hand stuff in the shops is devalued and on trhe other loot and quest rewards are devalued. One of the best balancing acts in IMO was Dragon Age origins. There you had a fairly large selection of uber-items around the shops sold for exhorbitant sums of gold. In general they were better and there where more of them than you could afford to buy with gold earned In normal gameplay, you had to choose between them, and you only got a few top quality items from looots or drops IIRC. You had to quest hard to make enough to get any of them, and you had to pay close attention to dialog options/quest solutions that might make you extra gold. Then for some inexplicable reason they put in the Lyrium Potion exploit that allowed you to mint as much gold as you wanted easily. I guess it may be Bioware worried people would get upset not being able to buy all the good stuff, so felt they had to put in a back door to it. Many games have made a mess of this. Witcher 3 for example. Outside of the first hours of the game there is nothing in the shops, except a few runes and Gwent cards perhaps, that you have any interest in at all. There is tons and tons of fancy gear to be bought, looted and found in the game but all you are intersted in is Witcher diagrams to craft Witcher gear, i.e. the best gear, which in the scheme of things in the game is cheap as chips to do. You have no interest in loot or shop inventories and no need of money for anything. Another problem I believe bedevils this issue is that playing first time blind the whole question of gear looks very different to what it does on a second or third run (or if you make etensive use of Google to guide you shopping expeditions). I think it is reasonable to say it is best practice to design and balance quipment availablity for the first time blind playthrough having no idea what equipment is available where as you progress. However that almost necessarily means that the a player on their third run who bee-lines preferred specific items, as you do, will end up with a) a mountain of useless gold and b), overwhelming disappointment at the stuff offered in the shops. A final issue which I think contributes to people who play a lot of a game feeling the equipment available to buy in the shops is distinctly lacklustre is the necessity of scaling the power curves of equipment and ultimately capping them at some point to balance end game challenges. Let's face it if a piece of equipment is not significantly more powerful than what you already it is by definition lacklustre. Personally I think Pillars did a pretty amazing job on this front considering how hard it is to get right. There are a lot of exiting loots and drops to be earned. There are also a number of excellent items available in most shops. I typically use both over the course of a game. There is no one piece of equipment of any type that is demonstrably and indisputably better than all others of that type in the game but they do have very different attributees and charcteristics and suit different approaches. I still find myself mulling over whether I want to use this or that items for a character, and the decision is sometimes pretty tricky. Which to me is saying Pillars has done a pretty good job equipmewnt-wise on the whole. The one thing I would say is I would like to see some sort of solution to the mid-to-end-game gold mountain problem. In the end the need to make a bit of coin is a good reason to get out of bed in the morning and go questing, and if there's nothing to spend it on, well, a bit of the magic is lost somehow. Yes, you can put in "gold sinks" (such as a few things that happen along the way at the Stronghold for example) but the fact is, and here I agree with the OP's general drift, this is not the same as unexpectedly finding a fanatastic weapon, suit of armour of ring to spend 100,000 of yopur hard earned on. Not the same thing at all.

My view is PoE got this right and that the inability to prebuff is a huge improvement. Three main reasons: 1. Prebuffing is a godawful chore 2. Having to choose between buffs and decide cast order in-battle adds tactical depth and choice to the game 2. You either balance for a prebuffed party, in which case prebuffing is mandatory (and therefore pointless), or you don't in which case prebuffing is simply cheese. I played Mask of the Betrayer again three years or so ago and it really brought home just how boring and pointless prebuffing is. [edit] Almost forgot, prebuffing in Tyranny was also a godawful chore and one of the seriously bad design decisions for that game - a step back. Prebuff: RIP as far as I'm concerned.

The term "dumbed down" is not meant in a perjorative way, at least as far as I am concenred, as in "game is dumbed down for filthy casuals". Not everyone wants all their games, or any of their games for that matter, to be complex, challenging and hardcore, and there is no reason on earth why they should either and no reason to critisise them for it. The point is that the most successful cRPGs by far from the new RPG Renaisance, Pillars and Divinity Original SIn, are uncompromisingly hardcore whilst those that have been dumbed down (I told you already Greg, Stop it!!!), er sorry, "streamlined", have been much less successfull. The brunt of the "dumbed down" slight is therefore aimed at developers who believe they have to do it to reach a wider audience when in fact it does precisely the opposite and seriously ticks off longterm fans to boot, leading to widespread critisism from this harcore fanbase across the interwebs which further depresses sales. It is aimed at the devs, not some sort of notion of "filthy casuals" and , as far as I am concerned anyways, it is certainly not aimed at you for enjoying Tyranny. Why do you find it dumbed down or streamlined, though? I will agree that it was not very challenging in terms of combat, but that can be chalked more to poor balancing than bad or "easier" mechanics. Also it's hard to claim a game like Tyranny is aiming for a "wide audience" when it is so overtly working towards disturbing and morally challenging the player, in a Milgram sort of way almost. This game is pretty much inherently working against mass appeal. Yes, it's the combat bascically for the twin main reasons of lack of friendly fire and reduced party size. Otherwise Tyranny is a very good game, but combat is really crucial in an RPG for probably a significant majority of players IMO. The effect of the changes is to dramatically reduce the tactical depth of combat and no amount of balancing can put it back IMO: it becomes essentially a question of raw power in terms of defensive and offensive stats - can I nuke you before you nuke me?

The term "dumbed down" is not meant in a perjorative way, at least as far as I am concenred, as in "game is dumbed down for filthy casuals". Not everyone wants all their games, or any of their games for that matter, to be complex, challenging and hardcore, and there is no reason on earth why they should either and no reason to critisise them for it. The point is that the most successful cRPGs by far from the new RPG Renaisance, Pillars and Divinity Original SIn, are uncompromisingly hardcore whilst those that have been dumbed down (I told you already Greg, Stop it!!!), er sorry, "streamlined", have been much less successfull. Other majot surprise successes such as Factorio, Stardew Valley and Rimworld that are similarly complex, challenging and harcore, serve to emphasise the point. The brunt of the "dumbed down" slight is therefore aimed at developers who believe they have to do it to reach a wider audience when in fact it does precisely the opposite and seriously ticks off longterm fans to boot, leading to widespread critisism from this often very vocal hardcore fanbase across the interwebs which further depresses sales. It is aimed at the devs, not some sort of notion of "filthy casuals" and , as far as I am concerned anyways, it is certainly not aimed at you for enjoying Tyranny.

Indeed. My take on this is that that devs are looking at what two small vocal minorities are saying and reaching the wrong conclusion and I think these numbers show that. I call these minorities the Grumpy Grizzled Old Grognards (me being a prime example) who go ape at the slightest hint of dumbing down, sorry, making more "accessible" their favourite franchises, and the Whining Entitled Snowflakes who in the case of Pillards whine about per rest abilities, micromanagement and so on. The conclusion reached, one feels, is that the Grumpies will buy your game anyway but you've got to dumb down, sorry, "streamline". to get the Snowflakes on board. I don't think it works like that. The vast majority, the silent majority, play a lot of Witcher 3, Fallout 4 and yer Dishonoureds, Deus Exs and Tomb Raiders etc, in fact they mostly play stuff like that, but they also like to play something with a bit more substance and challenge to it now and again. But they don't have that much time for this kind of game, so they want to play the best examples of cRPG, strategy/4X games, other genres of substance and challenge. With limited time, they want to make sure the time and effort they know they will have to put into a title like that is going pay off, to be worth it, that it's the real deal, the Full Monty. This is why millions played Civ5, well over a million played PoE, and why CK2, five years after release and about as complex a game as you can get for your money, was in the top 10 of the main Steam charts again a week or so ago after selling what, 2m copies now?. It is also why second string games, such as the new Master of Orion 4X, Tyranny and so on, sell a couple of hundred thousand if they are lucky even though they are not that bad. They are just not the real deal, they have been dumbed down (Stop it, Greg!), sorry, made more "accessible" and that's not what people are after. They get that from Deus Ex etc complete with big budget graphics. But how do this huge silent majority know which of these games is the real deal? They know when the Grumpy Grizzled Old Grognards grudgingly grant the game has some merit and the Snowflakes are whining in full chorus. Thhe Grognards grudging approval is a mandatory requirement, but the Snowflakes whining is the clincher. That's when you know you've got a million seller on your hands.

So my party coming to the end of WM2 right now @ L13 on PotD looks like this in terms of damage dealt: Eder (1H, shield, crossbow)...............................................62k Tia (custom fighter, 2H, arquebus).....................................84k Pallegina(1H, shield, pistol)................................................50k Lavinia (MC, Druid, pistol)...............................................,,142k Aloth (wand).....................................................................168k Durance (rod)....................................................................26k As can be seen Lavinia and Aloth are resonsible for 58% of total party damage output as well as debuffing and disabling enemies right left and centre. They can do this becasue in almost all circumstances Eder, Tia and Pallegina are capable of controlling the battlefield and preventing the enemy from interfering with them whist they reap havoc and devesation. They are built and equipped to cast fast and effectively (but not min-maxed as such) with high mobility to flank mobs, attack enemy backlines and evade engagement etc. So if in Deadfire I am forced to fire one of them, who should it be? In practivce as far as I am concerned (i.e. in my play style) Pallegina's place is mandatory (story companion palladin for the auras and efficient resurection), Eder's place is mandatory (story companion tank) and Durance's slot is mandatory, or rather his replacement's is, as priest is IMO the most powerful class in the game and mandatory for all sorts of reasons. So we are down to a choice between Tia, Aloth and Lavinia (my MC) for the chop. In practice, again for me personally, Aloth is coming with me whatever becasue he is a key story companion I will not travel without, so really the choice is between my MC Lavinia and Tia. This decision is going to boil downb to one simple question: can Eder and Pallegina control the battlefield (i.e. confront, halt and herd the enemy mob) by themselves in the absence of Tia? To do so two conditions must be met: a) enemy mobs must be scaled down in numbers somewhat compared to PoE1 b) the space available for enemy mobs to evade Eder and Pallegina must be reduced and/or all encounter locations must contain plentiful environmental obstacles that can be routinely used to restrict enemy movements in lieu of Tia's absence. Although I think consition a) will probably be met, I suspect condition b) in practice will not be as it would place too great a burden and too many restrictions on environment design. So a party of Eder, Pallegina, Lavinia, Aloth and Durance's replacement will not be viable as is and I will perforce have to change Lavinia's, Aloth's or Durnace's replacement's builds significantly to compensate, possibly all three if things turn out like a straight up toe-to-toe Tyranny slug-fest all the time becasue of this change unless I drop my MC Lavinia and roll a new one (which I obviously don't want to do). Obviously one approach would be to model Lavinia on Jaheira in BG2 guise to cover Tia's absence. But much as I love Jaheira, and almost always play with her in both BG1 & 2, the fact is for me she's just a half-baked fighter who never seems to get to the really good stuff in the druid spell book who's main saving grace was her heals (which of course druids in pillars don't have in straight forward on demand form). In fact Jaheira is one of the main reasons why I learned never use muti-classing in these games. I do not want to turn my beautiful, deadly moon godess Lavinia into a half-baked fighter with a restricted druid spell book. It's not her. She is not Jaheira. I like to build specialised characters that are as good at what they do as they can be, not hybrids. But if my reading of this situation is correct, I am in practice going to be forced to do just that, which is why I am so disappointed and unhappy about this change. I've gone through all this so hopefully people can get an idea of where my concerns are coming from, how play and why I feel this change may affect how I play, force me to change it effectively under duress.. Now if we glance at the evidence from opinions expressed on this thread and others, and the poll there are two roughly equal camps: * those that Deadfire will play just fine with 5 person party becasue it will be designed and balanced to do so, it'll be be fine on the night, don't worry, just trust. * those that like me are afraid the change will alter the dynamics of combat and character building such that they will not be able to play the game the way they want to play the game. I am going to conjecture that most people in the latter camp play somewhat like I do, and most in the former camp play differently, perhaps enjoying experimenting with muti-classing and hybrid charcters etc. If that is so then the situation is that for half the community it doesn't really matter one way or the other between 5 and 6 and for the other half it matters potentially a great deal. Which seems to me to be a slam-dunk arguement that there should be a very, very strong positive reason to reduce the party size to five, one that objectively deepens and improves gameplay, and frankly I haven't heard one yet or anything remotely like one.

Many prefer six as it is the tried and tested party balance in a ton of CRPGs going all the way back to the SSI gold box games, the Wizardry series and of course what PoE was supposed to the.... heir apparent to the BG series for starters. For Fantasy CRPGs look at most of the 'greatest of all time list' and see how many six man party games are in it. It's a lot. It is was people want. Has there been a poll on this forum about this topic? "A lot of good games had X, so clearly X is great, and changing it to Y sucks." Sorry, there's no logic there, just cliches. I strongly disagree. As has been pointed out 6 character parties have been extensively used in many of the best cRPG over the years and there is a reason for that, as there is a reason why people like and are comfortable with 6 character parties. They work very well for a particualr style of RPG like Pillars. There are also a number of classic RPGs that use smaller parties, such as KotOR, NWN2 MotB and Tyranny for example, and there is nothing wrong with that, but the important issue is that these games play very differently to PoE1, BG and IWD. IMO there is nothing either illogical or cliche about pointing this out and saying "Make Tyranny with 4 character parties by all means, I'll even play it the way it was designed to be played, but Pillars is Pillars, it is different, and I don't want you to mess with it. It is tried and tested at 6 characters since Baldur's Gate, it works, it's great as it is. I don't want it play like Tyranny or MotB. I want it to play like Pillars 1 and BG did."

The two main reasons I am very, very dissapointed about this party size reduction are: Firstly It will weaken the ability of the party to control the battlefield by making it that much more difficult to prevent enemies infiltrating your lines. Not as much a Tyranny but obviously in that direction, and the factors that made Tyranny's combat lacklustre in comparisson to PoE will therfore adversly affect Deadfire. If you cannot control the battle field (or mostly, even often, can't) then each character must per force be able to survive in direct contact with the enemy. This is Tyranny's "Stand & Deliver" problem: in the end every character must be built to withstand damage and simply dish out damage faster than they take it. You just stand where you can attack the most enemies at once and deliver as much damage as you can. There is little tactical interst and finesse in this. It gets boring and repetative quickly. You also have the "Lantry problem". In Tyranny, certainly on PotD, in the early game when you recruit him enemies relentlessly target Lantry and he dies quickly and often. There is no reliable way to protect him tacticaly so the answer is give him the heaviest armour you can lay your hands on. It slows his casting but heavy armour makes him harder to kill and reduces his priority for the enemy AI. It works but it is boring and is not how I expect my RPGs to work. Secondly it will severely limit options in party makeup. For me there are four mandatory positions in a party: Two melee specialists, a priest and a wizard. I know some people play replacing a priest with a druid and palladin, make tanky wizards and chanters, use cipher plus druid to cover wizard role etc, but I'm a boring conservative when it comes to this and I like to play traditional roles. I am not interested in multi-classing for example (although I know a lot of people are). I play PotD so two specialist melee (fighter/monk/palladic/barbarian) is a bare minimum and I always play with three in practice becasue I don't build tanky/melee casters. In PoE this left two slots available for two of ranger, druid, chanter, rogue and cipher. Two out of five is not too bad. In Deadfire this is threatened to be reduced to one. I am very unhappy I will only be able to play one of those classes per playthrough (yes, I always take the same party through a game, I don't swap characters around). What makes this worse is that my party has already been fixed in stone for my first Deafire game. We have Eder, Pallegina and Aloth comming with us and I have always played with them in my party anyway so they are mandatory picks. I am just finshing up my WM2 PotD run whichh will probably be my finakl Deafire save and I am a druid this time (thank God, otherwise unless I was a priest one of the main companions would have to go) so the only question is who is Durance's replacement is in Deadfire? That's literally all I have to look forward to in terms of new characters. So why? With all these downsides to it and probably a lot more besides, what on earth are the upsides? I can't think of single upside, not one.

I think the health/endurance system coupled withh the camping supplies restriction in PoE was an excellent system. Sure, some people got fed up with running off to the shops all the time to be able to rest, but bascially the system encouraged developing good combat tactics enabling experienceing the combat system to the full and accuracy and economy in spell/ability selection. In short it worked very well. It dealt with the BG rest spam problem brilliantly and it encouraged people to learn to play well in all departments, and playing well increases your enjoyment of a game IMO. My benchmark for PoE on PotD was 3/4 standard encounters per rest or one major boss battle to start with. Later I got better than that and could drive through 5,6,7 encounters per rest, [edit] which, just to be clear on the point, meant that, with most dungeons and areas having the odd additional camping supply avaiable via loot, Iwas able to complete most of them within the two camping supply allowance, but not without accuracy, care and economy, and that is in my view exactly as it should be - it was very well balanced. Injuries that debuff the charcacter and need a rest to fix are going to be an absolute PITA. One lucky crit from some miserable Xaurip archer and bang goes another rest, and off to the shops it is /sigh/ If it ain't broke don't fix it.

I was somewhat torn between voting for "PoE1 was fine" and "bit less than PoE please", but opted for PoE was fine on the grounds the latter might be taken too much to heart by Josh and team for my taste. My real view is that there are some levels in PoE where there are too many copy/paste trash mobs in copy/paste square rooms. It's not the overall number of encounters that matters, it's the variation that matters. Variation can come from different mob composition or from difference in tactical situation. Icewindale had some exceptional encounter design that never got boring by adhering to this principle. No bad idea for every level designer on the team to play Icewindal again asap IMO. IMO In PoE1 Ciaban Rilag was an example of almost faultless environment and encounter design, beautiful area full of sustained interest, whereas some Endless Paths levels, not all by any means but some, had examples of three/four/five indentikit mobs in rectangular indentikit rooms to wade through afore you got the boss. PoE was not broken and doesn't require fixing, just a little tweaking perhaps. But the OP's point about suddenly being thrown up against a boss or elite group with little or no warm up training against trash mobs is well made. This is a no-no.