J.E. Sawyer

We do have such a system, but the prefabs still need to be marked to do it. Creatures like beetles and wolves don't get marked that way because they aren't going to drop their critter weapons, just pelts, shells, etc.

It's always tricky to figure out what abilities should be available at a given level. In our ability progression, previous unselected options are not locked out for the player, which does ameliorate some of the problems with forcing a selection between two modals or two passives. I'll take another look at the low levels for classes, but it may mean that at levels 9/11 some classes are getting 1 new option instead of 2 (since some abilities may have been moved down to be offered alongside the existing pairs).

Pretty much all critters that are wielding weapons and wearing armor that could be of use to the players should be dropping those items. I know there are enemies in the BB and the game in general that don't drop their gear right now, but they are supposed to and our area designers are making a pass to ensure that.

I don't think it's something that's inherently difficult, but it would be time consuming. Anytime we change a model and the underlying skeleton, it can be tricky to get working properly. We currently try to adjust the sizes of player-controlled models (and their selection circles) to prevent pathing issues in different environments. That's why the ranger's bear is relatively small. A smaller spiritshifted orlan would be less of an issue than a larger spiritshifted aumaua, but it's still out of scope. Sorry.

It's my fault the strings don't appear for some of the new abilities. Here are the appropriate descriptions in case you want to use them: Nature's Vigor (1st level druid spell) Draws on the invigorating power of nature, creating a mild regeneration effect and raising Max Endurance on party members. Disciplined Barrage (3rd level fighter ability) The fighter intensely focuses on his or her training, significantly raising Accuracy for a short amount of time. Deprive the Unworthy (7th level paladin ability) The paladin temporarily snuffs out all active beneficial effects on a single foe. The effects resume once Deprive the Unworthy ends.

Using per rest abilities (spells or otherwise) is both a tactical and a strategic choice. That's one of the things that makes the choice more interesting. However, I've found throughout my career that people who minimize resource consumption are not extreme and they're not small in overall number. It's a very common behavior exhibited by a lot of players, both RPG veterans and new players.* I still think it's important to have those per rest (or simply limited overall, like potions/scrolls) resources to consume, but I also think it's important for players to feel that they have something core to their class that they can fall back on if all of their per rest resources have been exhausted. * Not me, honestly. I use per rests/dailies/consumables all the time.

Every spell does not have a uniform casting time. Spells have one of three casting times: instant, short, and long. Instant and short are both used a lot. Long is currently used less frequently. We could subdivide casting times even more, but I think past a certain point, differentiating your choices becomes difficult. Classes don't have the ability to do everything. Yes, any class has the ability to access any skill. A single character cannot excel at all skills. Any class can equip a great sword. If you want to rush a barbarian, a rogue, and a wizard into a mob swinging that sword, it's going to proceed differently for those three characters. PoE's fighters don't have class abilities to chuck fireballs. Rogues don't have class abilities to revive people. Paladins can't transform into animalistic forms. If you do a comparison of class abilities, wizards have the most by a good margin (a little below 70). Druids and priests also have a lot of spells (about 45 each), but still fewer than wizards. Chanters and ciphers have the smallest list. I don't disagree that it would be cool to have more diverse options like polymorphs, spell doublers, sequencers, contingencies, time stop, etc. We designed a list of more diverse, complex, niche spells and most of them didn't wind up being implemented because of the enormous amount of time (and often specialized UI) that they demand. I would like to implement more of these in the future, but it wasn't realistic for core PoE because we were building all of the game systems from scratch. No, the response is not surprising. Even so, I have always tried to be straightforward about why I make design decisions. None of these stated reasons have ever been because I have animosity toward caster classes (which would be pretty weird for any reason). Throughout the project I've tried to give casters the majority of the ability time, with wizards receiving the most even in that select group. I've tried to ensure that wizards have good access to personal protection magic, personal strengthening magic, and a mix of different offensive spells that do a variety of things: bounding from target to target, temporarily negating enemies' beneficial magic, sickening/terrifying anyone who comes near the wizard, swapping locations with an ally and hurting enemies caught between, temporarily stealing spells from enemy grimoires, etc. Is it enough? Clearly not for everyone, but this was honestly what we were able to do -- not because we decided to short-change spellcasters, but because even with 5 out of 11 classes (the casters) receiving about 3/4 of all abilities, we could only do so many special case scripts for them.

To put this in perspective, we are are talking in the beta forum for a game that has yet to be released. The beta process involves finding both functional bugs and making balance adjustments. Making balance adjustments prior to bugs being fixed in a system is often counterproductive. It can obfuscate functional errors and, once the functional errors are fixed, requires revision to the adjustments that had already been made. PoE's combat had a number of functional bugs connected to timing and recovery. There were problems with loops playing for incorrect time values, animation playback speed, inconsistent hit reactions, and a lot of errors with how Recovery time was being calculated, adjusted by armor and other factors, and depleted. Yes, three months ago I could have adjusted global Recovery. I would have been adjusting it in a system where Recovery wasn't calculated/played back properly to begin with. One of the small but significant benefits of leaving global Recovery at 1.0 was that it gave testers and programmers a very easy way to calculate the expected Recovery from an action with all appropriate modifiers. They could then use it directly with what they observed in game to see if things lined up. All of the known major errors with animation playback speed and Recovery have been fixed (there are still problems with reloading crossbows, arbalests, and firearms, though), so making adjustments to things like global Recovery, casting loop lengths, and even the Recovery values on armor types and creatures can be done with a lot more confidence. It doesn't mean we're done tuning them, but it does mean that what we enter in the editor has a more consistent effect on what's happening in-game. If we need combat to slow down even more, we can adjust that. If we need to slow down or speed up individual actions or characters, we can also adjust that. We're still in beta and that's why this process is ongoing.

Really a lot of this comes down to whether you would like the Talents to reinforce what the styles already do or if you would like them to grant a different type of benefit. The style Talents are currently a mix, but could be collectively or individually shifted. Passive Abilities and Talents are supposed to always stack, so Superior Deflection should stack with the benefit from Two-Handed Style. However, I have noticed that the character sheet is not displaying the same data that you see in the combat log. Specifically, the bonus from Two-Handed Style appears in the log but does not update on the sheet when you equip a qualifying weapon.

I agree with this generally, but I think there are exceptions. I think it's important for your main character (in a game like BG/BG2 and PoE) to feel solid from beginning to end. The games are built around parties, but people pretty much always want their MC to feel strong. In BG1, magic users were extremely weak at low levels -- especially before adding party members -- and it was frustrating for a lot of people. Before kits, I'd say that pure thieves and bards felt pretty bad most of the time in in BG, especially with another thief (albeit multiclassed) in the party very early on. I am not really concerned about things like a 20% power/efficiency difference between classes, more with players picking a class, getting 5 minutes in or 50 hours in and thinking, "This sucks." Perfect balance is not required to solve this problem, but we do have to pay attention to balance in broad strokes.

It would be a much more difficult solution, IMO. People are already reticent to use per rest resources and consumables. Combining them, plus linking components to spells and disseminating them throughout the game would be extremely time consuming and, again IMO, would likely cause people to be even more conservative about using them. I do consider your opinions, but we are also trying to final the game. In addition to the general balance/feel considerations, we have a lot of regular functionality bugs to fix. That's the main reason we haven't been as present on the boards lately.

Next kickstarter pls I was really disappointed that the Ars Magica Kickstarter didn't take off. I don't have anger toward anyone on these forums, but it does bother me that people think I'm trying to sabotage their favorite class, class feature, game feature, etc. It is not possible for us to make everyone's vision of this game come true. It's not even possible for us to make everyone's vision of an individual class, race, etc. come true. When I make decisions about how to balance parts of the game, it's based on the feedback that people give me and how I observe them playing the game (and previous games I've worked on). I don't place value judgments on how a person plays a game (at least I don't think I do!). If you want to play the game solo, or with all wizards, or murdering everyone, that's all fine. It's still my responsibility to make sure that all of these options maintain a good level of player engagement and enjoyment across the spectrum. Balancing and tuning is an ongoing process, but that's what I'm trying to do.

I don't have any hostility toward spellcasters/spellcasting. In A/D&D, I usually play clerics. For the past year and a half, I've been playing in one Ars Magica game and running another. Magic is a big part of most FRPGs. The difference between a game like Ars Magica, where magi are explicitly stated to be insanely powerful compared to mundanes, and a game like D&D or PoE, where wizards are ostensibly roughly on par with other classes, is the expectation of viability and relative difficulty. You should have fun playing a wizard, I should have fun playing a priest, Gfted should have fun playing paladin, Volourn should have fun playing a dwarf, etc. It's impossible to make everyone happy, but viability and relative balance are a big part of ensuring that the character you choose to play is going to feel good throughout the game, beginning to end. I believe there is a healthy place between "balance is irrelevant" and "perfect balance is necessary". I don't want wizards to receive the exact same number of powers as a fighter -- or even the same number of powers as a priest -- because having access to a boatload of spells is part of the fantasy of playing a wizard. Obviously having a lot of options that feel weak is bad, so we need to find the right level of power per spell, speed of casting spells, number of spells available, casts available per rest/per encounter, etc. But it's also important that when someone plays a rogue, a druid, a cipher, a fighter, etc., they shouldn't feel like they dead-end with the character or run out of steam while other classes easily sail by every challenge in the game. We want people to have different experiences when they play different classes, but we want all of those experiences to feature the same relative level of challenge and power growth (which are strongly connected). This is a difficult thing to do and it takes a lot of iteration, but that is the onoing goal. On a related note, if you want to play Wizards Are Cool: The Game, I do recommend Ars Magica 5E. It has a lot of cool things going for it, most obviously the magic system but also the general downtime system. Also, Pendragon seems to be Knights Are Actually Cooler and Wizards are Terrible: The Game, so check that out if you want to be a glory hound, manage a manor, and brutally destroy Saxons from horseback.

There's a lot of stuff to go through in your post, but I did want to make a few comments: * One of the problems with higher difficulty = more XP (and inversely, lower difficulty = less XP) is that the altered progression winds up shifting the actual difficulty. If harder difficulty gives more XP, you'll level faster, making things easier (even relative to the increased difficulty). If lower difficulty gives less XP, you'll level more slowly, making things more difficult. In a game like Diablo III, there's a large amount of relative scaling going on as you progress. We try to avoid doing any sort of dynamic scaling in PoE for a variety of reasons. * We do currently give you a small amount of bonus XP for having parties under 6 characters. It's not enormous, but if you play solo or with a small party, you will level a bit faster (not as fast as in BG/IWD). * As of the last Backer Beta update (I think?), the party gets small amounts of XP for entering a new area, for finding marked locations in an area, for disarming traps/picking locks, and for unlocking bestiary information (effectively a capped pool of combat XP for groups of monsters). In the later IE games, the majority of XP the party received was through quests. We're still adjusting the relative values of quest vs. "everything else" XP, but we do still want it to feel like quests make up the majority of the XP, with smaller rewards for everything else.

Hi, kloperius. We did early experiments with trees and grass and they were... okay. We believe it does really help areas feel more alive, but we weren't happy with how they looked given the amount of time we put into them. It's something we would like to revisit for future projects, but we didn't have time to keep experimenting once we entered full area production.

Casting times have been adjusted downward for all standard casts (from 3 seconds to 2 seconds). You should see this in the next Backer Beta update (I don't think it's in the version you have). I do think that the traditional caster classes (wizard, priest, druid) do need more casts per rest. I also certainly agree that we need to find a better balance between the number of per rest uses and the power of individual spells. Most spells take longer to cast and recover from than weapon-based attacks, and they're linked to a per rest resources, so they should have some kick to them. A big issue we found in our play week is that wizards do not find enough grimoires with additional spells. This is supposed to be a big part of playing a wizard, so we're trying to address it now. I do not think we need to move to a point based system for wizards and I don't think that wizards need to be able to do everything. What they do does need to be expansive IMO, with many potential good spells to choose from, and those spells should feel appropriately powerful for the limited per rest use the wizards get out of them (and the time they take to cast).

Although I do not believe it is currently in the Backer Beta, last week I increased global recovery times by 20% and added a recovery delay to all creature armor so they operate more at the pace of party members. Many creatures were also significantly reduced in overall speed*. Most notably, spiders, beetles, and various spirits (shadows, shades, etc.) but other creatures as well. I don't think there are many players in this thread who are new to this style of game, but there are many such players on our team. We did our play week last week and the new players picked up the mechanics pretty quickly. We definitely can do a better job of communicating what's happening through visual and audio language (and tutorializing mechanics overall), but the slower combat pace and Glossary helped a lot. * E: movement speed, specifically.

Hi gnoemli. I just added the descriptions for the spiritshift forms this morning. You should see them in the next Backer Beta update. We talked about doing Spell Sequencer type spells but it would have been too time-consuming for the initial release. I wouldn't rule it out for the expansion, though. We did set our personal buffs to be "Zero Recovery" and most of them to Instant cast, so you should be able to fire off several very quickly.

I don't think action recovery time is worth looking into yet (for classes), the problem is the percentile amount of endurance that per-hit damage represents. Slowing Recovery speed will make creatures drop a party member in 2 hits a tiny bit slower - aka not a big difference. The creatures that drop party members in 2 hits (e.g., forest/swamp lurkers) are outliers. When people (externally and internally) give examples of the typical situations where combat moves too fast, it usually isn't the party vs. one big dude, it's the party vs. a pack of creatures that are attacking and re-attacking en masse before the player's reactive commands can be of value (or simply enough value to outpace the damage output). Almost all party members wear armor, so they're all suffering penalties to recovery time. Adding a flat recovery penalty to creature armor makes them act more at the pace of party members (a good thing, IMO). It's also very easy because I can mass select all creature armors in the creature armor folder and set the Recovery Penalty to one value. Tuning up global recovery time is also incredibly easy. It's one variable in the editor. It is almost always better to turn the big dials (like global recovery) first and make broad changes if there seem to be broad problems. I put in most of these changes last night (in addition to lowering the standard cast time from 3 seconds to 2) and it felt better in the testing that I did.

Some of the spell effects will be reduced in intensity and duration. Kaz and the effects team will be going over the list to make sure they are suitably intense without being overpowering/confusing. We've discussed extending all Recovery Times by a bit but haven't tried it yet (we will likely be trying it in the next few days). That would make the self-buffs immediately more appealing not just because of the overall pace but because most of the self-buffs are now marked "Zero Recovery", so you can act immediately after they go off. Most creatures also don't have Recovery values set on their armor (it is built into all "human" armor). Bumping that up will help prevent them from gang stomping individual party members before allies can intercede. Certain creature movement speeds (wolves, some spiders, beetles, spirits in general) will also come down. A lot of players are also still overwhelmed by the available druid and priest spells. I don't want to reduce the number of available spells, but I do think having the player select from a subset of them at any given time would help prevent the action bar from looking like an icon orgy. We're also looking a lot at what abilities players get early on to make sure that the game is involved and fun with 1/2/3 party members but doesn't become a nightmare with 4/5/6 when the levels are doubled. It's difficult to balance especially if you have a bunch of casters vs. more melee-oriented characters. Our economy is also being tuned a bunch. Certain bonuses (in terms of monetary worth) are being devalued (specifically, Fine/Exceptional/Superb) and we'll be using a different value progression for bonus total on an item. Vendor sale prices will be reduced and gems will be set to full value instead of the fractional value you get for other items. Most bonuses from Attributes have been slightly increased. Derived defensive bonuses have gone from 1.5 and 1 (for Deflection on Int) to 2. Might gives +3% per point (from 2%) to damage and healing. Dexterity gives +3% Action Speed (well, -3%, but you know what I mean) per point, from 2%. Perception gives 2 Accuracy per point. Intellect modifies AoE size by 6% per point (vs. 3%). Max default damage for most weapons/attacks will likely be lowered (in part because of increased Might, but mostly to normalize out the range), min dam through DT will likely be set to 20% (like F:NV) to make it woefully inefficient but less hopeless (it should also mostly eliminate sub-1 damage Grazes). So yeah, lots of playing, bugfixing, and tuning.

Adam and several of the other programmers have been working on some memory optimizations, especially in the prefabs for summoning, which take up a huge amount of memory.

I know some people wonder why this was the specific time when we chose to announce our delay. After all, there were big problems in Gamescom/BB build, so why not announce a delay immediately? I think it's a reasonable thing to wonder about, so hopefully this explanation will answer some of your questions. When you, the individual developer, think there is a timeline problem on a project, it's usually not enough to simply rely on spidey-sense. There are exceptions to this, e.g. if you're working on a small team where everyone has high exposure to almost every aspect of the game. But with a team of 20+ people working on a project at a company of well over 100, gut feelings aren't substantive enough to make immediate course-corrections. What they are good enough to do is start investigating and start planning potential scenarios. When the Backer Beta went out, Adam, Brandon, and I all knew there were major problems, but we needed to quantify those problems in terms of time spent across our team. I.e., how many problems, how long do these problems take to fix, and who has time to fix these problems? We also had found work, which is a general way of bundling those valuable and worthwhile new features and options that backers and internal developers bring up that we think we really should take the time to pursue. We worked with the OEI owners to quantify all of this work and project it out over the next several months. There's really no point in us hooting and hollering that the sky is falling until we realistically understand how fast the sky is falling and what is required to prevent it from crashing. This took the time between the BB launch and several updates. That gave us burn down rates on bugs, a comprehensive listing and allocation of found work, and time for all of the leads to discuss a realistic timeline to complete the game at the necessary quality level. Of course, we also needed to discuss all of this with Paradox since they are the publisher for PoE and are handling a large number of logistical aspects of completing the game, including physical goods, localization, PR, marketing, and some QA. We also try to be as general as possible for as long as possible on dates for two reasons a) the closer we get to the end, the more accurate our estimates get and b) nobody likes seeing a ship date shift five times. If we could get all of our estimates right and all of the backed features in and polished exactly on time, that would be ideal. But if I'm forced to pick two of the following three: all promised features, high level of quality, on time -- "on time" is almost always going to be the thing I'd prefer to sacrifice. On many of the projects I've been a part of "level of quality" has been the thing sacrificed, and I've almost never had a say in it.

Major things we are working on right now: * Restructuring class advancement to allow more options, both within the selection of core class Abilities and through the (many) Talents that we implemented based on backer feedback. * Modifying some class features to be more transparent or just fundamentally work better. Monk wounds (and many of their abilities) were very confusing previously. We've revised them to make what's happening much clearer and easier to use. * Save/load and other persistence issues. This has been more troublesome than we initially expected and it has caused problems over a much longer period of time than we expected. Save/load issues can be infuriating, so we really need to spend the necessary time on it. * Memory overhead. Dan Spitzley has already made good progress on this by looking at audio memory issues and inefficient texture use/atlasing. * Adding in minor bestiary, exploration, lock, and trap XP rewards to increase the regularity of XP rewards across the game. * Revising how time/turns in the Stronghold work. The turn system (which elapses based on quest progress) solved some problems with time-based stronghold systems in other games (including ones we've made) but it causes some confusion. We're separating "turn"-based resource generation from the random event system, which will be based on the passage of world time. * Pathfinding. If we could have simply salvaged our previous system, we would have, but that did not appear possible, so we had to fundamentally rebuild it. There are still problems with log-jams between characters attempting to move through the same space. * Writing/narrative review. On most projects, it's rare to never that we get time to actually review our own writing and consider how major plot moments and information are conveyed in the story. This is also includes Karma Police reviews, where we ensure that the various choices players make have consistent feedback throughout the game. * Animation feedback and general aesthetics. We just added blended flinches for all hits (ones that don't Interrupt, that is -- Interrupts already have their own animation), which was something we weren't able to do at the beginning of the project. They can be played while a character is in the middle of a reload, attack, spellcast, or even while prone, which helps a lot with feedback. * Character model/texture quality. It's difficult to balance the needs of a distant camera with the camera views you have in character creation, level up, and inventory, but Dimitri is making his way through the more glaring issues.

You may also notice some odd loot drops (e.g. gems from wolves). We did change the loot tables, but that's a bug.

My goal isn't to discourage killing/combat overall, but to avoid the emphasis of combat solutions as the de facto best way to resolve quests (unless the quest is fundamentally about killing someone/thing, of course) and to avoid the player feeling compelled to kill everything they come across. I think it will be good for the game if a player can ask themselves, "Am I losing out by not completing this area with combat?" and sometimes answer, "Nah." Quest only XP accomplishes this, but obviously a lot of people want to gain XP from fighting. Short of having a separate mode where you get combat XP from everything and all of the quest XP is rebalanced around that, bestiary unlocking XP is the best solution I've come up with to accomplish both goals.