Ymarsakar

Planescape Torment does not cater to the same audience as CRPGs. They are closer to the card game sub culture, table top role playing and war gaming cultures, notably Shadowrun has a similar niche vibe. The target audience is slim cut of the one RPGs normally have, but on the other hand, it connects with the "hidden unseen" audience, which is the novel reading grand fantasy/sci fi audience. PST will never appeal to the average gamer or even average RPG focus group. Rather than the mainstream, it's opposed to the mainstream. Before Kickstarter came out, companies had little clue about what marketing group they were appealing to. All they saw was sales numbers, it didn't accurately reflect which meta culture, which mainstream culture, or which sub culture they were dealing with. Without that targeting information, they don't know why people like what they like. One settled upon answer was mainstream AAA games like FPS shooters, massive RPGs like Mass Effect, and various other semi niche games like Minecraft or Sim City. The audience that Planescape Torment, and now Tides of Numenera, has to develop aren't the people who read the game and thought "there should be less text", they instead need to push to target the sub cultural groups off the beaten track who wanted more content and more depth. When a certain demographic doesn't have a name for itself, it's even more invisible than niches like 4x or city builders or survival simulators. The people exist, but the advertisement managers have no idea where to find them or how to get money from them. Until crowd funding proved that these people existed. They weren't just nebulous "cults" that grew up around certain games like BG2, Wasteland, or PST, that are now loyal customers of big AAA plus games that satisfy their cravings. These people existed and they had money to fund a project. Not enough for the movie makers and AAA makers to triple their investment, but enough to do business. Pillars has a similar target demographic and group, although not precisely the same overlapping boundaries. Japan, of course, already has a name for these demographics that like visual novels. They even break them down into sub genres. Audio books, also have some overlap in the target audience. But computers can do more. They can combine art, music, voice, reading, and gameplay all together. Eventually the money investers are going to figure out that there's an entirely different media that can be constructed out of all these restrictive genres and niche classifications. Usually they wait for some proof that the numbers exist, but the numbers takes time to grow, culturally. But when something achieves that status, like Lord of the Rings, all the big money guys will want to farm it and rake it in, even though they had nothing to do with generating or growing the audience to begin with. When a niche product becomes mainstream, it's nice and pulls in a lot of popularity, although it dilutes what made the niche truly special. Ideally, this can be setup to run parallel, so that the mainstream culture does not merely absorb the sub cultures that made things special. Mutually advantageous trade instead.

I was on that bridge in Lord of the Rings Online, after it broke off. Funny atmosphere. Don't feel too sorry for Gandalf when he fell. That chasm in Moria is so deep they were doing a 1v1 duel all the way down. Up until the Balrog died, I think. What do you call a wizard tank that is floating down into the core of the world and has to fight a Balrog in mid air? That's like Dragon Ball Z there. Gandalf didn't have enough time to self buff on the bridge. Bet he did when he was falling though. That Balrog missed, he should have gotten the ring bearer.

Right now I'm having a really difficult time dealing with enemies. My Paladin Tank usually gets two shot before she can even heal herself or use Last Stand, in fact, the Tank companion you get at the first town last longer then she does. She's using a Hatchet/Shield and is in Medium Armor and pretty much get wrecked every encounter. Maybe I'm not good at CRPG's or something, I pause almost every other second and focus enemies down but normal named enemies or "bosses" usually destroy my team. Like right now I'm on the second level of the Temple in the first town and the ghost just faceroll my groups almost instantly. The spirit ghosts are always tough. Which is why I ignore the temple until I'm level 5 or 6. I think I finished some city sectors in D before I went back there. I'm currently on another playthrough, to get past Caed Nua. Used a few rests to clear out the spirits above ground, and 2 rests got me to Maer in my grasp. It's important to keep going on the critical quest path, in order to get hiravias and the other npcs in your party. You'll get more xp from the main quest too. If enemies are too tough, leave them for later and just try to go around them while doing quests. Even a single level makes a big difference in Pillars. And for ghosts, level 4-6 is about right to take on swarms of them. My party is level 3, with an additional level 2 silver tide priest. So it's just PC Monk, Eder, Kana, Aloth, Durance. Taking on 2 shadows, 3-4 phantoms, at the beginning of the keep, wiped out half of my party. Thought I was going to die, but somehow killed em. I was freshly rested then too. The phantom touch stun, their high defenses and deflection, are tough to get through. You need additional levels to increase your accuracy and probably better equipment. Full plate is in Raedric's Hold, and the area south of Gilded Vale, Anslog Compass, has some easier content. Just stay away from mushrooms in caves. They're bad. It feels a little bit easier now getting past Caed Nua without doing any side quests to get to level 4 party. The first time I went through Caed Nua quest, it was with the old wizard and chanters. Wizard didn't have aoe daze raw damage back then. Also, I think I refused to level up my party to 3 the first time, as well, which required a lot of rests to clear out the keep. I think 3-4 from Gilded Vale to clear the top, and a few more to clear the bottom dungeon. The only way I killed all the spiders and paladin group was because I pulled them into each other first. The priest and wizard were always out of spells, and they didn't even have level 2 spells. Hilariously hard. They should have had a hint to tell me which room the key was in though. If I didn't know in advance from hearing about it, I think I would have cleared out the entire dungeon still, lacking mechanics 3.

Might be nice when stacking dangerous implement plus deleterious alacrity.

Paladin or chanter main tanks are easy to use starting off in PotD. I only play POTD since the 1.0 days. The thing about DR is that you need to self adjust it. Increase it as much as you can, until you notice your armored characters are not taking damage, then slowly reduce it. If you are learning new game mechanics, then go as high a DR as you can get, plus hatchet/shield combo for many as an emergency save. Then you can slowly decrease it to robes or nakedness when you have a comfortable mix. Because there's so many stat difference builds and what not, I just decided I was going to go with builds that didn't care about stats, other than Might and INt that is. Using a 4 int monk atm. Very fun. Stats are mostly balanced. 16/14/15/15/4/12. Something like that. For cipher, they changed some of the focus and focus gain stuff, as well as carow. Not that I ever used drugs and food to begin with... but I suggest taking amplified thrust and detonate later on. Amplified thrust regains some of your lost focus, which is an alternative dps method than just using antipathetic and echo all the time. The paladin's lay on hands is pretty useful early on, especially due to per encounter on POTD. I prefer the chant's aoe death chant and later Dragon slash aoe, because it's easier to build, easier to use, easier to keep track of chants because of the dragon visual, I love summons, and the aoe damage keeps enemy aggro and attention without engagement. Something the paladin will have issues with early on.

Why not buy a custom NPC from a tavern, test it out after leveling it up, and then reloading?

Their culture helps provide stability and ability as well. They try to keep nepotism down as well, since that produces stupid talent in a few generations for short term benefit. They post test scores in public, for everyone in the school to see, including peers. What I found most surprising and critical is that the voice actor for one character is stable across all mediums. It's like they have a copyright or stake in the character, Right of First Refusal. It provides amazing stability and "branding", much the same reasons why Simpsons was popular. Same voice actors, that people only saw recently that is. Japan capitalized on that human branding, the fact that humans could recognize voices and faces very easily, it takes up a different bandwidth channel in the brain.

That's not a problem with the writing, that's a problem with people in general. The only way to get all humans to agree is when you point a gun at their heads, apart from that, they disagree about all kinds of things. So some people want short term benefits, at the sacrifice of long term. Others are the opposite. Others don't care either way. Some family may have the patience to work their way up the social ladder from immigrants to blue collar to something higher up, over generations. Other families may just be satisfied with tv, public transportation, and a food stamp system for about 4 generations. Changing the product you offer to people isn't going to change people's priorities. That's up to their own choices. There are plenty of people online and on youtube who just skip through [written] dialogue. In a sense, they are more audio learners than visual linguistic. 71 different ways to learn.

It should still be possible to modify the in game values that is used to fix NPC stats. Unless, of course, Unity does not allow the externalizing of such things and one needs to decompile or open up some program coded files. I was surprised back when they were doing retraining and companion stat changes (the companion stats were changed a couple of times as classes were rebalanced before White March 1 2.0), that this didn't already happen before. The other hotfix method, would be to have IE Mod or what not, run a command console script to refix all the characters stats based on custom values in a text file, each time you load a save file. It's already feasible to copy/paste from the command line in game, but running a batch file program to run sequential commands in sequence probably needs something external, like a mod. Another method, more aggressive, would be to allow retraining of npcs the way the main PC is retrained, with changes to their stats. Perhaps only available on POTD, and only after you finish some initial quest arc. Of course, that would raise the companion stats from a C - priority to something akin to Planescape Torment levels of customization content, almost. I surmise that the save/load area change "optimizations" had something to do with this extra OC change to companion stats. The script or whatever they used before, only seemed to change it once per game. There must have been quite a lot of "aggressive" cleaning up of save game files since then, what with all these talent changes and what not working with old save files and retrains.

Durance is like the male version of a yandere. I would have enjoyed some post ending, epilogue dialogue with the companions, given that the main plot arc would have impacted some of them more directly than others. A dialogue, an interaction, rather than just reading a description written for the character. Good epilogues tie up loose ends, they don't merely end a character's story by telling how they ended up. Chris Av likes to invert expectations, so inverting a priest that heals and helps into Durance, would fit his personality. The creator's personality. The Cipher was the same way, even after the cuts. As for good and evil, there are some examples and dilemmas. "They would rather have 4 to your zero, than 8 to your 10" Is that good, neutral, or evil? If a person had the chance to become great, at the cost of being overshadowed a bit by others, what kind of a person would choose to destroy that and instead pull everyone else around them to the ground, merely to have an advantage over them of 4? The classic "I would rather rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven". If I get a bonus of 5,000, and then I realize my co-workers get a bonus of 8000, I don't feel right. I have to get even, make it even, or else it doesn't feel right. Is another case example. There goes that office in flames. Now you don't get anything! But it is better to get less, so long as nobody overtakes you. That way, wealth can be redistributed to be fairer. Even if that means most people become poor and destitute. 4 and zeros. Now if a person just got a bonus of 5000 in the mail from their job, they might feel happy. So why do they feel different when they realize their peers got more? And why do some people not care, and just take the 5k to improve themselves? In another dilemma, let's say a child is starving so they have to steal food for their siblings and younger kids they look out for, at the cost of taking 2 points from people with 10 or 8 points of resources. It is hard to say what is necessary, at this point, without seeing far into the future at the consequences. If something was necessary right now, it might be gray. Not good, but gray. However, if it wasn't necessary, if everyone knew there was a better way, and people still chose the more destructive path, their motivations would be very interesting. Because it wouldn't be about survival. People killing and stealing to survive has a rationality behind it, even if it is self serving. What's the self serving rational behind destroying your own life in order to ensure nobody has it better than you?

No, it doesn't. You can't conserve your health resource. You can't heal health. Once you take health damage, the one and only way to restore it is by resting. It's kind of silly and ridiculous that everyone's just assuming that I'm some newbie who needs to get good. I play on PotD. I beat the game just fine. Really, the one and only way to "restore it is by resting". For someone with a shallow knowledge of the game mechanics that he never looked up the old or new versions of wound binding talents, what makes you think you actually understand the game enough to lobby someone else to change/mod it? Just because you beat someone at chess, doesn't mean you can design a better game nor even that you understand all of it.

Why don't people like manageri use the console? Is it really easier to lobby a developer to change a game option when you can already change the game option by typing two lines of text... not sure why people want to Change the World so much that they refuse to change themselves. Is it just easier to change the world...

While there are gameflow problems with the supply mechanic, notably it would have made slightly more gameplay sense to collect up a lot of supplies and create a "base camp" in the wilderness campsite for like say 10x uses of supplies for every 2-3 supply. Slightly more reusable. Still, the supply mechanic greatly encourages me to use non standard tactics such as switching my main tank to the rear and using druids or wizards to do spot tanking, and other tricks. It makes the difference between wizards/druids/priests very different from the hybrid classes, and those still different from the per encounter ability melee users. Personally, I thought the Mask of the Betrayer logistical constraint made more gameplay sense. It wasn't exactly more fun, per say, but it fit the context of the plot and game more consistently. Something that combined Watcher abilities with supply limits, might have did something similar. Since the Watcher cannot sleep... what happens when game time keeps passing because the party is resting? In Don't Starve, you become insane and shadows begin attacking you, and all your easy food sources become hair. As for having to go back, that's usually a break in pacing for when you have too much combat. For those that want to play it like a Diablo dungeon crawl, they just roll20s in console and hit rest. Simple. On another note, the reason why making a game easy to mod like CK2 is easy to mod (you can reload save games after modding it, and it still works, mostly), is the strain and load it takes off the developers. Because the developers have a hard time separating the noise from the signal. How many of these complaints are legitimate and how many can be fixed with a reasonable amount of resources? They don't have to deal with those questions, if the players can mod the systems themselves. Then the devs just sit back and look at who is willing to do the work. Some who complain a lot, will also do the work, then the devs can see if that system actually works or not. And they can easily separate out the complainers that do nothing about it, vs the ones most motivated to work on it. Wheat from chaff.

The Japanese are very good at helping voice actors in their industry visualize and obtain a context for the roles they play, using visual and story props. I wonder how the recording for the intro lines of Planescape Torment was done. When the player was introduced to the ghost, that became an important character later on. Her voice had an extremely broad range, from tsuntsun and yandere, to deredere soft depending on how the conversation went. At the time, it was kind of scary because I thought there was going to be a combat scenario at any time, like in Icewind dale or BG2. To translate, she went from mad with rage to a softer more feminine tone. Feeling wise, it's like the spooky voices near the Gwea spirit in Pillars. Except it was an NPC with its own motivations/backstory, that was crucial to your central story/backstory/plot as well. Setting the background music/SFX and mixing it properly with the voice volume is a big deal in Japan as well. I've often noticed that the sound effects are mixed better with voice audio over there. In the US, the soundfx and music is so loud, I can't even understand what the voices are saying unless I read subtitles in movies and what not. The mix is very different.

Hah, indeed. Braven, if you are interested enough, you can test out how the wounds tick down in a tavern, by constantly aggroing enemies. Then make sure only your own party can damage your monk. Sequence the attacks so you get 2 wounds, then 1 wound, and experiment. Ever since Josh's new class, Monk, got changed from wound doing damaging after tick down to no damage, it's gotten a lot easier to use and micro. But that means I don't have much playtime with them.

In addition to Eder and story companions meant for combat, I should probably clarify. The game is balanced on BG2 style parties, 1-6, and that really should be left alone for standard reasons. Having more relationships between players and npcs, npcs and companions, would help to flesh out some things, that can't be easily done if you just dialogue everyone from the player's viewpoint. Whether in game that's done by creating 3d assets or using the adventure skit engine box, doesn't matter all that much. Invisible squires in game will make as much sense as invisible infinite stashes. For the player, they only really care about the quality of interaction and whether it is fun or not. If it is fun, people can suspend a lot of disbelief. If the content is right. If the content isn't right, people will find all kinds of reasons to say it is unrealistic or wrong or badly designed. Eder's relationship to the player is stable, as equals or slightly less than equals because Eder is an NPC vs the player who is an (admin) user. In feudalism, there's a big deal to how people deal with people above them and below them in station. Crusader Kings 2 provides a good simulation of that, movies and Hollywood tends to fall over themselves ape ing the trappings of feudalism and nobility without actually providing critical information about how it worked back then. Which is ironic, given how much social status affected people back then and even now, plus how fantasy settings like Pillars tend to use nobility titles a lot in the world building as rulers, politicians, etc. To give one example, Durance may have an acolyte with him, that only obeys Durance, because Durance is in his chain of command. You, however, are not in his chain of command. You have to give Durance an order, and then Durance gives his acolyte an order. You cannot skip it by ordering the acolyte around directly. That is a key thing in feudalism and even in some military hierarchies now a days. It provides a world context slightly different than the player going around meeting people and asking them for quests and lore. Of course, usually what happens is that they need to render these extra people as NPCs or followers, with 3d assets, and then the designers wonder where they are going to place them. So they place them back in the stronghold as extra companions, party members, or NPCs for the stronghold, such as what Neverwinter Nights 2 did. Then of course, the player doesn't see or interact with them as much as the party companions get a chance to be interacted with, and they're mostly forgotten in time. Because there's no active human GM in CRPGs, making a deeper world context, like Fallout New Vegas, might make it easier to absorb the lore of the world itself in everyday gameflow interactions. That may require that the designers focus entirely on text content or alternative game content, and stay away from "3d assets" that take up too many resources. People seem to complain about the stash feature mostly because they are bored. The people who like it, like having the other boredom removed, but it is not a "new content" added on top. Just an unfun content removed. Witcher 1-2 seemed to me, to try to add in new and different ways to enjoy game content. With the cards, mini games, and potion alchemy system. It takes additional effort, but people may prefer deeper and newer ways to enjoy content, rather than merely streamlining a boring gameplay method. The problem with designing new gameplay systems is that it often times doesn't work the way it is intended to. Xcom 1/2 main designer lead, had a prototype for an Xcom game to Firaxis, and it failed to pass the check for fun. So they scrapped it and decided to work on something else. Until the main lead had gained some experience, then they went back to another prototype for Xcom, which became the new Xcom. And then the sequel to the new Xcom, that began utilizing new gameplay features like guerilla warfare and concealment. That kind of resource commitment is dangerous for a new game, though. So it makes sense that Pillars is "conservative" to the old CRPG models. Later on, though, the gameplay can become as stale as 4x games, if something doesn't get deeper as a result. While I wouldn't get rid of Edér, I wouldn't mind having a squire or a merchant with a donkey following the party, fleeing from monsters while carrying our stuff and being snarky about it all. Probably the easiest implementation would be to use the text adventure skit engine, and do a text skit with drawings of All Your Loot. It'll keep track of your scavenging party, their stats, your squires, their stats, and allow you to, merely by choosing options in a text adventure, to get all the trash loot, some bonuses, and coppers. Perhaps if you are in a rush, you only get 50% of the loot value, plus uniques and enchanted stuff. The other stuff is picked up by the Dozens or some scavengers. If you want it "all", then when you transition the Area, the adventure text allows you to pick an additional combat encounter to protect your scavengers or kill off the competition. That'll probably get old over time, but it makes the adventure text game more interesting, and provides some RPG value micro for people interested in the mini game. Since it would have to be a mini game. The executive summary here might be: Gameplay in CRPGs doesn't need to be infinite bag of stash vs encumbrance, just introduce new gameplay flows and methods. Think outside the box. Even if there is a chance for failure.

They should have highlighted all the emotional lines and had the Voice actors do those. Instead of what Pillars did, which was to make all the important intro lines, quest intro and content lines, voiced instead. It was more about the Plot Arc and its significance then about using voice actors in the right place. For example, GM had a reaction qip to something important to the main line plot and her own background. It wasn't voiced. Even though to her, that was the most important event up to then. That's partially because Chris Av wrote a lot for her and it probably capped out the voice actor budget allowance for GM.

It's not about the length, but the content. When playing Torment Tides of Numenera, there's a lot of reading there and no trash mobs to kill. So sometimes I would go check out a new area and think to myself, "I don't want to read about any of these npcs, I'm just going to talk to that guy over there for a moment and then quit". Then after awhile, I realized that I get sucked in by these NPC interactions and I've been dropped into an immersion experience, I stop thinking of them as NPCs and more like puzzles and goals. That's Torment, not the number of words in the original game or IWD or PoE or item descriptions. Mechanically, the npcs in these various different games are no different. They may even be in the same Engine for that matter. Yet how they are treated and how the interaction with the player is morphed, does change the experience. In Pillars, Josh Sawyer made it so that you can play the "psycho" build, where you can kill everyone, and the main critical plat would still work for you. That kind of design philosophy has secondary and tertiary consequences on how each NPC feels though. In an open world like Fallout 3 New Vegas, much of it is mitigated by factions and by the game environment. In a CRPG like BG2 or IWD, putting that kind of emphasis makes it easier for me to pattern recognize that these are NPCs written by other humans. Designed to be non essential, because they are non essential gameplay wise. A puzzle isn't a puzzle if the "reactivity" of it means that no matter what random combination you use, you still finish the primary goal. That's not a puzzle any more. It's more like a maze for rats or a hamster wheel. By allowing that much freedom in the initial conditions, the obverse effect may happen, when the player realizes that they are in an artificial track designed to make that impression. Sometimes a tighter narrative, with more limitations on initial conditions and freedom for the PC, produces a more cohesive experience. Giving people freedom, merely makes them question whether they are living in a Matrix, if everything doesn't line up just right in the simulation. And in a CRPG like Pillars, a lot of things often times don't "line up" according to expectations. If PST was more than 50% or 75% text gameplay, then Japanese visual novels are 99% text, 1% gameplay, 100% emotional impact. Since everything is in text, besides the simple engine code and images, it is easier to create alternative plot content for endings and characters. Pillars has something similar in the adventure skit mode, but they don't use it to that level, because there's no tradition of doing so in the West, other than the old adventure and text games. Pillars used that technology conservatively. Whereas using it to simulate a world where you really did "kill everyone" would make a lot more sense. The often quoted classical academic authority is the line "brevity is the soul of wit". By some playwright who wrote more than 2 Pillars combined that is. I transmogrified it to my own style "apathy is the soul of brevity".

I liked Jagged Alliance 2's inventory, especially the modded backpacks and tactical kits. For Pillars, I probably would have added in a squire, since even the Spartans and medieval knights had squires to carry all their weapons. Which often took a horse, let alone a mule, to carry per noble. Instead of a companion, an equal like Eder, I would probably add in a game mechanic like the squire as NPC, following the Lord of Caed Nua. If they get weighed down, teleport items to the keep using some version of dimensional shift. Then put the low value items on a market and sell them. That's difficult to do in an RPG that lacks simulation, a market, and a human GM to bend the rules. When game mechanics become too rigid, people make it smoother, which also makes it shallower or less deep. Sort of like Mass Effect 3 vs ME 1 with the cinematic and more simplified browser game explorations. There are games that focus much on simulations, such as Crusader Kings 2, Eve Online, Crow fall even. The ability of a CRPG like Pillars to simulate things to a high fidelity has issues with it. If they wanted to simulate the reality of a world behind the RPG rules, they would have looters, scavengers, squires, and all these other NPCs who have agendas and jobs, not just "quests" and "reactivity". Systems that run independent of the player. Not to the extent of a Morrowind or Skyrim, but still a mechanical gameplay system. Could just be a card collection game like Witcher has, except here you rank up your looters/squires vs the rest of the world trying to take your loot. That way, instead of "degenerative gameplay", there's just more gameplay. But that requires thinking outside and even breaking the CRPG box so to speak. Genre mashing. The adventure text box can also be a game within a game, if they get good enough at it. The detonate grenades on corpses power in Xcom 2 was also a good way to use physics in a world without providing loot all the time. In the first sequence of the adventure text in Pillars, you threw your weapon to save a companion. What happened to that kind of gameflow later on? There's plenty of weapons sitting around on the ground later on. Find someway to use it. Survival games love that kind of crafting tree and junk material they use to make good stuff from. Planescape Torment and Torment Tides of N, does a better job of creating NPCs and characters with different social status. Different topic now. This changes how I view the gameworld, even if the interaction is the same as clicking on dialogue. Each character is different when interacting with them, because they do different things to you or with you, and your reason to talk to them isn't always about getting quests and xp. I remember seeing the first zombie in game, and fresh from my Baldur's Gate II campaigns, I was like "okay, first enemy to kill, I'll click on em and start bashing em in". Boy, was I surprised when a dialogue opened up instead. Then there was this Lich I wanted something from, and the Lich told me to get out, so I attacked the Lich after pre buffing, thinking there would be a boss fight. I got teleported to location Z, every time I tried to attack the Lich. After a few loading screens to get back, and trying again, I stopped. A difference in power scale that wasn't based on stats. The camping supplies were designed by Josh Sawyer so that people would use all their abilities and treasure them more, instead of just rest spamming every time they want to fight. I think they said something about how they realized later on that nobody had decided where on each map the reusable or so camping grounds were. In some maps, you can actually see camping grounds. But they would have render them in for all of them, and rendering was already taking them quite a bit of time in the beginning. 12-24 hours I think per map, until they optimized it down. The stash was initially limited access, but people kept microing it so the option was to make it unlimited.

You should have heard the boots back when they didn't have per encounter limits on when it procs. It was like water metal.

Early on, Eder would benefit the most from plate, full plate, some kind of heavy armor. Durance, Sagani, Aloth should all be in light armor -20 recovery or those berathian robes from Raedric area. Hide armor is pretty good if you find unique ones laying around, as the recovery penalty is about 20%. GM can go light or robes/clothing if she is ranged, heavier armor if she is going melee/alpha pistol build. Eder's unique armor is pretty unique, and I sometimes found it useful to put squishies in them. The ones that get primaried a lot. As I play the game though, usually things happen which doesn't fit the ideal. So sometimes you'll get hit on the character that is wearing light armor. If that is the case, just change the armor and get some hatch/shield combos for that character. Until you can figure out how to prevent that from happening or just make use of it by dual tanking or spreading aggro around. Usually I go with medium ish armor, about 8-10 DR, as they provide some extra time to recover from mistakes. Armor is something I change around the most on my party. There's just no ideal setup for me. Almost like weapons. I switch stuff around depending on what I fight.

Companion armors are good up until you get full plate. Then they become less applicable when you get sanguine or scars or exceptional plate. I mostly struggle with which armor goes with whom and how much DR people need for their roles.

There's some kind of bug with Emery. Her AI and some of the other enemies, attack each other, as if they were on my side. But they are all red circle.

Wormageddon.

Wizards can do it with high resolve, per, and int. Mostly because of the int and per, as most of a wizard's dps per spell is from summoned weapons. Resolve doesn't add to the dps of any class, but per does provide the acc. So the big difference is for classes that use INT to power their dps powers. The chanter is also a good choice.