J.E. Sawyer

The conversation UI could take up the entire screen and you wouldn't technically be losing any functionality since the game is paused. I can sort of understand having a more minimal dialogue UI in a game where conversations happen in real-time and you might want to do other things concurrently, but it doesn't apply for PoE.

The exception to the "not moving" rule is when the character is moving but currently targeting someone with a melee attack. In those cases, the pursuer will Engage as soon as they get within range of the target. A character will always stop moving when they are Engaged unless they are a barbarian with Wild Sprint activated. In those cases, the barbarian does not stop moving but will immediately take a Disengagement Attack from anyone they pass who tries to Engage them.

Everyone in QA and among the OEI devs fights most of the time in PoE. They love blasting critters in red circles with spells and bashing them with morning stars. They also use stealth quite a bit, but often to scout, less often to avoid fights (some more than others). So while the concern is a rational one, people are not entirely rational.

You can make a moon godlike wizard. How's that?

It would be an enormous amount of work to up-res all of the character models for a marginal gain in image quality on two screens in the game. At the beginning of the project, I did say that we were going to be keeping the view of the characters relatively limited on these screens because it would be prohibitively expensive to model and texture them all at a high level of detail. We have six races and two sexes that can equip dozens of different suits of armor/clothing with dozens of different weapons and shields. The only way we could author all of these models with our budget was to limit the mesh density and texture size. Sorry.

Every sex/race/class/culture combo has its own set of meshes for both the base character body and the equipment they are wearing (armor, shields, and weapons). Between all combinations, there are thousands of different meshes to make up those appearances. Those meshes have all been finished for a while, but they still often pop up with bugs. Sometimes an alpha channel isn't set up properly, or a tint-map isn't working, or the wrong appearance is mapped to the prefab, or it just plain looks ugly. We only clicked on the things that we had specifically tested for the demo to make sure they didn't have any problems.

Much like a standard elemental damage add in A/D&D, the torch's Burn damage is not rolled for separately, but applied automatically on a successful weapon attack. Secondary effect poisons (e.g. like those from a spider) not only require the initial attack to succeed, but need a separate attack of their own. Most commonly, the secondary attack is against Fortitude. Yes, mousing over an attack in the combat log expands to show the full breakdown of the mechanics. I'm not sure if we will have a "verbose by default" feature because it becomes pretty close to illegible very quickly.

Using 2D assets would mean that only a tiny subset of equipment types would ever be represented on that screen and would have little to no correlation to the 3D character.

You can't change non-weapon equipment at all in combat.

That's actually the way it works right now, though Roby is putting in a pop-up to warn people that they have unspent points.

Yes, sort of. Wizards do not have a recovery time/penalty, but their spells are locked out for a while after they switch. Tim is going to add a recovery time (2 seconds to start with) when any character switches weapons (PC or AI).

I don't remember that exact circumstance, but there is not currently a recovery time in place when weapons are switched.

No real rationale, actually. They've just been set to those values for a while. I'll ask Roby to set the minimums lower for the backer beta.

Yes.

Programming is currently hooking up all of the description displays in CC.

I'm pretty sure the flame effect is fire damage from the torch Calwhatsit is wielding. Yes, Calisca's torch does inflict a fire DoT when it hits and that's the effect.

You can disable the display of attribute/skill qualifiers as well as reputation increases.

What we showed at E3 did not include any character creation (it was not in good shape at that time) and there were a lot more visual bugs. A video of that build would have looked a lot worse.

Since those videos were recorded we've found and fixed two bugs related to attack/recovery rate. The first is that recovery rate was not properly accounting for armor. Heavier armor increases recovery time, slowing down the overall attack rate. Second, Interrupts were causing the recovery timers to go to 0, meaning characters could act immediately after an Interrupt even if they were in the middle of recovery. So combat will be a bit slower than what you see in the videos.

Companions can be pretty fun to make and play but they don't change a whole lot over the course of a campaign (I mean, other than getting old, weak, and dying). I think one of the weakest points of AM5 is that it does not have core mechanic for gaining Virtues post character creation. Ability advancement is painfully slow for non-magi and there are no real progress milestones for non-spellcasters to celebrate. The main thing I enjoy about it is the emphasis on the covenant as the campaign's central character, changing over the course of decades (possibly centuries in crazy campaigns). I appreciate the downtime mechanics. The enchantment rules are quite Byzantine, but they are also part of downtime tasks, so it's never been much of a concern for me. Overall I think the worst thing about AM5 as a whole is the organization of all of the books. As a first-time player, it's extremely difficult to find your way around.

Yeah, 2nd Ed. AD&D had racial minimums.

It's all enemies from all levels of difficulty and they have increased stats (don't remember the specifics off the top of my head).

No.

The standard cap for stats is 18, modified by racial bonuses, so no.

PoE's traps tend to be extremely damaging.