J.E. Sawyer

Ai, so the fact that stealth applies to the whole party at once is because you couldn't get per-character stealth to work properly? No, it isn't. Selective invisibility of characters as a general rule leads to more bugs with selection, perception, and GUI feedback.

Selective invisibility in combat usually leads to a huge number of bugs, but I'll talk to Tim about it. The more likely outcome would be an ability for rogues that allows them, specifically, to turn invisible once combat starts.

What your wizard learns and puts in his or her grimoires is completely up to you. It's pretty common in A/D&D to include minor variations on existing spells that have different targeting rules, different AoEs, different damage types, etc. Nothing forces a player into learning Magic Missile and Mordenkainen's Force Missiles, for example. And from a purely practical perspective, we can't have every spell in a wizard's arsenal contain unique mechanics. There's always going to be some overlap between various effects.

Making them NOT cost money would give a bigger advantage to people who don't use the OEI-written companions, since you could make a six-character party in the first town. You could also freely use them as fodder with no consequence. The adventurers aren't going to be outrageously expensive to hire, but we do want there to be some cost to them.

You'd prefer Bounding Missiles in a scenario where there are more than two beetles all spread out and Concussive Missiles in a scenario where the beetles are grouped together (the concussive shockwave also targets Reflexes instead of Deflection, so there's that to consider).

The Minoletta's spells are not improved versions of each other. Bounding Missiles and Concussive Missiles do different things than Minor Missiles. More importantly, you probably would not use them in the same circumstances. Sunlance (single-target, Deflection-based, Pierce and Burn damage) is not an improved version of Sunbeam (AoE, Reflexes-based, Burn damage and Fortitude-based Blind affliction). Yes, druids have three levels of blight summons. BG's druids had three levels of animal summons.

You will gain access to additional (player-made) adventurers shortly after the game's introduction. Depending on your play style, I would say within the first 2 hours. On a replay, probably in the first 45 minutes if you just made a beeline for it. There's a hard limit of 8 total player-made adventurers per game and new characters can be up to your main character's level-1. They also cost money to hire. I believe those are our only limitations.

There's Wizard's Double and Mirrored Images, the various Restore _____ Stamina spells, and Insect Swarm and Plague of Insects. I don't think there are that many "series" spells overall. The relative Deflection values of Arcane Veil, WD, and MI do need to be adjusted. MI is supposed to be the longest-lasting but provides the lowest bonus. Arcane Veil is supposed to be the fastest to cast with high DT and a relatively short duration.

Wizards have access to PoE equivalents of all those spells except Invisibility.

I have no clue. You use trap items from the character's quick items. You can acquire trap items from traps you disarm if your Mechanics is high enough, but you can also buy them. I think Matt may have overlooked putting traps for sale in the stores.

If the issue were simply that I needed to write a bunch of Talents or different Abilities, there wouldn't be much of an issue, really. This is the first game in what will (hopefully) be a series, and is intended to parallel Baldur's Gate I / Icewind Dale I in terms of overall character scope. I don't blame people for wanting stand-ins for every spell, ability, feat, talent, and item from every IE game to be present in PoE, but I hope people can all recognize that there are logistical problems with making that actually happen. What I would like to do (and always wanted to do) is allow all characters, not just rogues and fighters, to have more options via Talents -- and if that means characters should be allowed to select Talents at first level as well, that's fine. But we still need to actually implement them. The issue has never been that we don't have ideas for Talents (we have a doc full of them), but we have scope limitations. The classes that people feel are most in need of versatility will have priority for Talents, so if people would like to discuss the specific ways in which they would like to see fighters and rogues (for example) change, that would be helpful to know.

Gromnir, just to make sure, are you hovering on the combat log entries to expand out the calculations? If so, what additional information do you think is missing?

Just to make sure, was the rogue Sneak Attacking? That's where the majority of their damage potential comes from, though they can score it on targets with a wide variety of afflictions (Flanked, Stunned, Prone, etc.). E: Sorry, misread your post. They currently do +50% damage on a SA, IIRC.

Do people really believe that I disagree with everyone who has a critical view? I'm not going to change things that I don't think people have made a compelling argument for, but we've changed a lot of things based on backer feedback. Of note, one of the people who liked your post really had a problem with the lack of offensive abilities on paladins. That's why paladins now have Flames of Devotion and Sworn Enemy. I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about whether or not fighters and rogues are subjectively "boring", but we can productively talk about whether or not they have a varied list of abilities and, just as important, if they are tactically interesting to use in the context of PoE's combat. If people say things like BG's fighters and rogues felt more versatile, of course I'm going to argue against that because I don't think BG's fighters and rogues were very versatile. BG:EE and BG2's fighters and rogues (with kits) were much more versatile than BG's, but that's a different statement entirely.

In A/D&D people eventually got magical composite bows. Even if they didn't, 2nd Ed. grants bow specialists the Point Blank range category that explicitly allows them to add Strength bonuses to damage (and the +2 to hit on top of that). Until 4E, their bonus damage also tended to spiral out of control since you could combine weapon and ammo bonuses with everything else. Dave is implementing smarter targeting AI right now which should help with the feelings of overall immunity for the back ranks. That said, I've heard mixed things about ranged characters. Some posters state that bows are terrible (which presumably also means that implements are terrible) due to DT. Are crossbows/arbalests and guns the powerhouses?

The bug with hatchets has been fixed for the next build. They are Fast weapons.

Here's where BMac talks about zoom: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67436-zooming-in/?p=1502346

The 3D content should be rendered at the appropriate resolution. I'll ask Adam about it. I think we currently support increased levels of zoom through an .ini file. We may make this a menu option in-game. Positioning of elements being off are just bugs that need to be fixed. Thanks for giving us the specific examples. I think BMac is already looking at some of them.

That could work but there are some potential logic issues: e.g. fire bow, switch to melee weapon set, move until Recovery expires, switch to ranged set, fire.

Yes, it's supposed to be #3.

2nd and 3.X editions of A/D&D's standard rules are both more punitive to ranged characters than melee characters when it comes to moving and continuing to fight. Pausing Recovery while moving was implemented both to account for movement being something of value that you're trading off with other actions (as it is in A/D&D and a lot of other RPG systems) and to address what became a default easy mode tactic in most of the IE games: fire bows at melee opponent, kite backward until they all drop dead, repeat. Range gave the advantage of removing your characters entirely from harm at virtually no cost. Some creatures work best as melee only enemies, whether in a tabletop or CRPG environment. A/D&D tabletop rules generally give melee characters better options for moving and attacking because they lack the positional flexibility that ranged characters enjoy. It may well be that this implementation needs to be adjusted to allow for slower recovery instead of no recovery, but I don't think the basic premise that movement costs something is bizarre or unique to this game system.

The Accuracy bonus is only there when not using a shield. If you're using a shield, you get a Deflection bonus from the shield.

Yes, it shifts all results by that margin. If you're at a significant deficit, you'll be less likely to Miss and more likely to Hit.

A single 1H weapon gains an Accuracy bonus, so that means they are also much more likely to score a Crit.

Polina did those sketches as part of the creature concepting process. She did spend a bit of extra time making them look nice, but it was essentially the first part in creating the characters. With weapons, the artists started with historical reference and made modifications, so there wasn't a library of sketches at the end of it like there was with creature images.