[Update #74: Wizard & Druid Reflections]

They probably put some similar spells in there to assuage fears that Wizards would be oh-so-shockingly-different from IE casters. Which then bothered some people anyway.

 

Obsidian can't win with some of you folks, I swear.

 

Wizards are easily among the most popular character classes for IE fans.  When we went through our spell lists, we identified spell concepts/mechanics that seemed too integral to the feeling of a traditional class for us to ignore.  We have invented a bunch of off-the-wall stuff for them to use, but I think it would be a mistake for us to conspicuously not have a fireball-ish spell at 3rd level or not have a magic missile-ish spell at 1st level.  If we omitted those from our lists, the classes would still have big lists of fun spells, but I think they would lose a good chunk of the *~ classic feels ~*.  From a balance perspective, I do want to avoid the "quadratic wizard" (and druid), but I think we can do that and still keep the spirit of the classes alive.

[Update #74: Wizard & Druid Reflections]

If Druids are modeled on Priests, what are the Priests modeled on?

 

Currently, wizards, druids, and priests are all heavily casting-oriented classes.  None of them are particularly great at weapon-based combat on their own and they aren't too durable, either.  The major differences between them in terms of spellcasting come down to what their spells emphasize.  Druids and wizards both have good AoE attacks, with druids having more affliction-based effects and wizards emphasizing damage more.  Wizards have quite a few personal buffs and oddball spells (like Minor Grimoire Imprint, Arcane Reflection, etc.), druids have "HoTs" (heal over time) and some support.  Priests heavily emphasize support and fast healing with a small number of personal buffs and select AoEs.

[Update #74: Wizard & Druid Reflections]

I don't like the idea of the druid getting some cleric spells. I love classes to be unique in their playstile, and when they overlap, it feels cheap or it outdates the other class.

 

Druids don't get priest spells.  They do get some healing and support spells, but they are not the same ones that priests get.

[Update #74: Wizard & Druid Reflections]

EDIT: Im also slightly concerned that since spells don't scale with level that if you miss finding whatever the next spell upgrade is that the mage will fall behind but hopefully the new spells aren't too hidden.

 

Our current design for wizards allows them to learn a new spell every time they gain a level, so if there's one that you REALLY want, the system allows you to take it when you advance.

 

E: This doesn't apply to unique spells, but there will probably be very few of them.

[Update #74: The Mob Rulers: Wizards and Druids and our Partnership with Paradox]

Josh: Will there be specific magic items for shifted forms, like collars for a druid in wolf form, etc?

 

That is not currently planned.  Sorry.

[Update #74: The Mob Rulers: Wizards and Druids and our Partnership with Paradox]

I am so pleased that shape shifting made it into the game! Even more that the idea of hybrid shape shifting also made it in the game! A few questions from someone who loves to play shape shifters…

 

1. Will we be allowed to cast spells when shifted?

2. How long will we be allowed to be shifted?

3. Will buff spells and abilities remain when changing shapes or when shifted for the first time?

4. If items will not merge when shifted what will make shape shifting unique? The abilities+ buffs or will it just be for role playing?

5. Will there be any shapes that are ranged in nature, for example like medusa with bow and arrow?

 

1. Yes.

2. Shifting lasts for the duration of combat or until you choose to shift back.

3. Yes.

4. All spiritshift forms have unique passive abilities that complement some aspect of fighting in melee.

5. Currently, they are all melee-oriented.  In the future, we are more likely to branch out into "weirder" spiritshift forms.

[Update #74: The Mob Rulers: Wizards and Druids and our Partnership with Paradox]

 

 

Listening to Josh in the video, I got the impression that you could sling spells in shifted form. What you could not do in shifted form was using weapons. You had to rely on the claws/hoofs/whatever of the animal you shifted to.

 

 

This is correct.

 

Now in the video Sawyer said that they will give the mage several personal buffs so that they can be played as a fighter/mage hybrid.

Now how is this going to work?

Because the reason fighter/mage multiclass worked in IE games was because of pre-buffing and we don't have that in Eternity.

Does that mean that the hybrid mage will basically need to stand there buffing for a while at the start of each combat?

I don't think that's really going to work.

 

If you want your wizard to be able to hop into the front lines and hang with fighters, barbarians, rogues, etc., there should be some cost to doing so.  In our design, the trade-off is the opportunity cost of casting in combat.  Individually, the wizard's personal buffs are pretty powerful.  Casting one or two should really ramp the character's capabilities up.  If you sit out half the battle loading up on buffs while other characters hold the line, you can become really deadly -- but you're sitting out half the combat.  If you want to give yourself more time, use something to slow down or paralyze enemies first, then capitalize on that delay to layer buffs.  Alternately, coordinate with a paladin or priest who can buff the wizard along with the rest of the party.

[Font Scaling]

Ligature support usually requires OpenType, but our fonts are looking a lot better these days.  I don't want to promise any specific features, but we've made scaling, smoothing, and kerning a priority.  I think you will like the results.

[Adam at Work]

Other question.

Can we get firearm/melee weapons? The obvious implementation of this is bayonets, but several Renaissance gunsmiths thought nailing guns onto maces or whatever would be cool, and thus created things that neither worked as guns nor as maces.

 

I like the cinematic idea of Sharpe's Eagle-style smacking or stabbing folks with rifles but there are a lot of interface/implementation problems with it.  Sorry.

[Adam at Work]

Do spells scale in power with level? I assume no since, afaik, spells eventually go from per day, to per encounter, to at will. Also increasing in power would seem a bit OP.

 

They do not.

[Adam at Work]

Pistols can be primary weapons.  They are the fastest-reloading but least damaging firearms.

[Adam at Work]

I'm a bit concerned with how much work there is still do and only about 8 months to do it in. Pre-Alpha > Alpha > Beta > Full game shipped. Novella, Almanac, Physical Tier rewards, printing Books, etc. It seems like a short time to do all this. Have you been sourcing suppliers for the physical tier rewards as well? eg. looking into what InXile is doing?

 

Fulfillment/distribution of physical goods has been on our radar from the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign.  As game developers, we'd rather not be a fulfillment house.  We've seen other companies nobly struggle with order fulfillment and practically drown in their own success, so we've been talking to other companies about that for a while.  Even if we could technically handle it ourselves, it would be an inefficient use of money.  We assume our backers want us fixing bugs and polishing content instead of packing boxes and printing out shipping labels.

[Adam at Work]

From what information I can gather, the PoE Paladin is a warrior with several abilities that boost the defenses and general prowess of the party and has a few smite-ish abilities, similar to the 3.Xe/PF Paladin. Is this accurate?

 

Fairly accurate.  They have modal close-range buff auras and a targeted commands to give powerful short-term boosts to individual targets.

[Adam at Work]

Interesting. I don't think you guys have ever discussed the weapon specialization system for PoE before.

So.... I've got a ton of questions. What do you mean by themed category? Does each one of those categories contain a list of weapon types and then when the fighter chooses a category he becomes specialized in all the weapons in that group? Or is it something else entirely?

 

And what kind of bonuses are we looking at?

 

I'm sure I have but it's been a while.  Themed categories contain groups of weapons, like Cowboy in Fallout: New Vegas.  E.g. specializing in Soldier weapons gives a % damage bonus with great swords, pikes, war hammers, arbalests, and arquebuses.

 

Most of the weapons in each category are exclusive to that category, but some (like the war bow and crossbow) appear in multiple lists.

[What flavors of voice do you guys want to see in dialogue options?]

We don't make reputation checks to see what personality options are available to you.  Personality options are what give you your disposition reputations.  NPCs react to those reputations after you build them.  If there's an option to be a jerk in a node of dialogue, your previous disposition options don't gate that at all.  If you spend half of the game being really benevolent and the second half stomping on kids' toys, you'll develop reputations for being sort of benevolent and sort of cruel.  The former doesn't limit your ability to select choices that influence the latter.

 

Choosing to remain silent is always blank-slate conscious lack of response unless we specifically state you're doing something else as part of the selection.  If you're glaring or folding your arms we wouldn't roll that in with a [Remain silent] option.  When attached to a personality type, it's usually Stoic (when being directly addressed and you choose to not respond) or Diplomatic (when two people are arguing and you choose to not interject).

[Shapeshifting Request]

Something I disliked about shapeshifting in most D&D videogames is that it would remove any bonus spell slots gained from equiping items.

 

Will this be an issue in PoE?

 

It shouldn't be as big of an issue in PoE because you don't pre-assign spell slots.  Druids effectively cast like sorcerers in PoE.  So you might temporarily lose a per-rest casting when you transform but you would regain it when you switch back (the items remembers if it's been used already).  Nothing's "assigned" to that slot so there's nothing to lose.

[Adam at Work]

We're doing some RP-related bonuses for paladins and priests but I'd rather wait to go into detail with them.  They're not as in-depth as custom abilities for each order/deity.  That's just too much work for us along with all of the other classes/races.

 

Weapon specializations are grouped together by themed category: e.g. Knight, Noble, Soldier, Ruffian, etc.  Only fighters gain access to WS.

[Adam at Work]

do they lower it for all the attackers bashing on the target, or just the bloke stabbing with steletto?

 

Just for the attacker.

[Adam at Work]

The weapon balancing is still very rough.  In general, fast weapons do a small amount of damage per hit but the most damage over time (though this can be heavily blunted by armor).  Slower weapons do much more damage per hit and the least damage over time, but are much less affected by armor.  Each type of weapon has its own special (though not necessarily unique) bonus as well.  E.g. sabres inflict a short-duration damage over time effect, estocs and stilettos lower the target's armor by a flat amount, morning stars do either pierce of crush damage depending on what the target is more susceptible to (automatically), etc.

 

Magical implements are the fastest of the ranged weapons, but also do pretty mild damage.  The rest of the ranged weapons tend to scale in this order of decreasing speed and increasing damage: hunting bow, war bow, crossbow, arbalest, pistol, blunderbuss/arquebus.

[Adam at Work]

How badass are priests? How do they compare to fighters and paladins in combat efficacy?

 

Paladins occupy the middle space between fighters and priests in terms of raw combat power and support.  Fighters have more consistent damage output and long-term survivability, but paladins can spike their damage with abilities like Flames of Devotion and Sworn Enemy.  Those are limited-use abilities but they are nice for giving someone an extra smacking.  Priests do not have an inherent talent in melee combat but they have the best AoE support abilities in the game (and can benefit from them on their own).  They don't have a huge array of offensive spells, but the ones they have are potent, if small in overall area.

[Adam at Work]

Quick, let's flood Adam with questions so he doesn't get to do any bug fixing! Wait a minute...

 

Anyway, question for Adam: how many weapon types (roughly) will there be in the game with actually useful magical equivalents?

 

Including firearms and magical implements, there are 28 base weapon types with two unique (mid power and high power) versions for each base type.  Additionally there are "ordinary" Fine and Exceptional quality variants for each base type.  The uniques and base types have all been designed and (mostly) implemented, though we've only placed a few of them in the world so far.

[Upload character portraits?]

I should have said before that there's a separate asset for the HUD portrait.  I don't remember the dimensions/aspect but they are not the same as the character sheet portrait.  We do manually crop them in to make the faces as prominent as possible.

[What flavors of voice do you guys want to see in dialogue options?]

Would you say the spreading of reputation would be dependent not only on the location but also on the position/rank of the individual you do a task for?

 

For example, if I had a character that saved a king from being assassinated, naturally you would get into his good graces and word about your deed would spread far wide.

 

Now lets say I helped out a man who lives outside of society from getting eaten by a group of wild animals, I wouldn't expect to have my reputation rise too much or even at all. 

 

When we increment reputations, we use a weighting based on how big of a deal that specific interaction/action is.  If you save the king from being assassinated, that would count as the highest weighting of rep bump.  If you save Joe Dirtfarmer from the wolves in the middle of nowhere, it will a) probably be small and b) if it's a regional rep, will likely be only for that region.

[Issues with NPC/Item Surveys]

After much consideration, I think I'm going to go with another idea, the daughter of an Aedyran servant and a Vaillian aristocrat who escaped slavery at an early age. I'm still giving this new character the last name Gullspark, though, just because I like it.

 

Which begs a few questions that only an Obsidian employee may be able to answer, unless I've missed the reveal of this information:

 

1. What are the conditions for being a "Vaillian aristocrat?"

 

2. Who do the Vaillians enslave? Is it another culture I'm thinking of that enslaves people?

 

3. How does slavery work in the Republics? Is it like ancient Greece's system? Rome's? Egypt's? Wholly original?

 

EDIT: Also, are sabres in PoE?

 

1. Being rich and successful.  Vailian Republics place a high value on success and don't care much about what your family did two generations+ ago.

 

2. They don't really discriminate whom they enslave, but they are more involved in trafficking than actually running slaving operations.

 

3. Can you narrow your question?  What specific aspect are you interested in?

 

4.  Yes, there are sabres in PoE.

[Combat demonstration]

Interrupts don't queue and an Interrupt always has a fixed (tiny) duration.  If someone actually gets hit by six attacks concurrently, they probably have to worry more about their Stamina than being interrupted.