J.E. Sawyer

When creatures are placed in a level, they have checkboxes for each of the three base difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard. A creature marked as Easy, Normal will only appear when the difficulty is Easy or Normal and not at all when the difficulty is set to Hard. A creature marked as Hard will only appear on Hard. The exception is Path of the Damned. When this mode is enabled, all creatures are present, regardless of their level of difficulty settings. So using the previous example, both creatures would be present on PotD even though they would not be concurrently present on any other level of difficulty.

8 is currently the standard minimum, but they can go lower than 8 with racial penalties. Currently no race has -2, so the lowest possible is 7.

And in case anyone is wondering, yes, Grimoire Slam is still in for wizards and it's cool IMO.

All of the levels of difficulty (including Path of the Damned) will be present in the BB. Talents are things that are not core to classes but can be used to flesh them out in different ways. Some Talents are class-specific and some are more-or-less class-neutral. An example of a class-neutral Talent would be Weapon Focus, which increases Accuracy with a group of weapons, or Hold the Line, which increases the character's Engagement Limit by 1. Examples of class-specific Talents include Powerful Sprint, which increases the speed of a barbarian's Wild Sprint, Critical Focus, which grants allies affected by a paladin's Zealous Focus a 5% Hit to Crit conversion rate, and Penetrating Blast, which grants DT penetration to a wizard's Blast ability. The BB will feature about two class-specific Talents per class (~20+) and a small handful of class-neutral Talents.

As a forewarning, there will not be a lot of Talents in the Backer Beta, so class advancement will feel fairly static in that regard. Feedback on core class abilities will help us revise them, re-organize them, and flesh out Talents accordingly.

Those comments will eventually become voices howling in an empty wilderness because they won't be part of the final product SKU.

The two most salient are 1) separating the BB from the actual product means it's easier to separate the product platforms when the full game is released 2) the BB is a beta, so it will be full of bugs, possibly crashy, and generally not fully polished. It may also have wild balance issues, exploits, and GUI issues that will (one hopes) not be present in the final game. However, anecdotal data strongly suggests that people playing betas do not evaluate them as betas, but as final products. Accordingly, they trash the product's ratings and give scathing reviews. If the beta product is later "upgraded" to the final product, all of the hooting and hollering done about the beta remains part of the final game. So separating the beta product from the final product appropriately segregates comments and ratings for each one.

The likelihood is very small for the initial release, but we did do work on it and it could be supported in an expansion.

1. Wands/rods/sceptres do pierce/crush, slash/crush, and crush/slash damage, respectively. What this means is that when a wand (for example) hits a target, it will do either pierce or crush damage depending on which DT on the target is weaker. Spells do a wide variety of damage, occasionally physical, but usually "elemental". 2. Other than wands, rods, and sceptres, ranged weapons only do pierce damage (assuming they are not enchanted). We decided not to implement bodkin/broadhead arrow types. Cloth has, overall, the worst DT. It's not especially vulnerable to pierce damage, but it has the worst DT overall. 3. You can add an enchantment of any damage type to any weapon. This can be the traditional flaming sword or adding crush damage to a stiletto if you really wanted to. 4. Raw damage bypasses all armor. It is very infrequently used and usually has a low damage value. Poison effects often use the raw damage type -- though many poison effects are often a secondary attack that is only made if the initial attack lands. Ehh sorry but Spells do a wide variety of damage, occasionally physical, but usually "elemental" this sounds strange, dont get me wrong but I hope it will not end up like in skyrim eg. flame/froms/lightning hands, flame/frost/lighting ball, flame/frost/lightning storm. How are covered spells like finger of death, disintegrate, magic missile, weil of banshee, symbol of death.. etc which are not associated with exact element? Spells like Finger of Death, Disintegrate, Wail of the Banshee, and Symbol of Death would all do "Raw" damage in PoE. Our version of Magic Missile, Minoletta's Minor Missile, does Crush damage.

We do have movement speed-enhancing boots in the game. They don't affect attack speed and they just increase, rather than double, your movement rate.

Out of combat, all checks are threshold/flat, i.e. they are not random checks at all. In combat, all rolls are randomized. A creature's AI instruction set remains the same between reloads, but their selection of an individual instruction is still randomized within that list (and the list contains weights, making it more likely for them to perform certain actions at any given time that they are available).

Attributes in PoE are not quite so class-linked as ability scores in most editions of A/D&D. These aren't final lists (in fact, I haven't looked at them in a while and they will probably be adjusted soon), but these are the current attribute modifiers for the different base races: * Aumaua: +2 Might * Humans: +1 Might, +1 Resolve * Elves: +1 Dexterity, +1 Perception * Dwarves: +2 Might, +1 Constitution, -1 Dexterity * Godlike: +1 Dexterity, +1 Intellect * Orlans: +2 Perception, +1 Resolve, -1 Might Races and sub-races also all have a special bonus. Fighting Spirit was previously listed for humans. Coastal Aumaua have Towering Physique, which grants them defensive bonuses whenever Prone or Stun afflictions are used against them. Boreal Dwarves gain Hunter's Instincts, granting additional Accuracy against creatures of the Wilder and Beast types. Wild Orlans have Defiant Resolve, giving them a bonus to all defenses whenever their Will is targeted by an attack.

Yes, sorry I didn't respond to this earlier, but familiars are not a core feature for wizards any more. They seemed to have a mixed response initially and it seemed more important to make sure their spell roster was broad.

You will not be locked into Steam because of the Backer Beta. We're using a separate SKU/product for the Backer Beta for a number of reasons.

You will be able to go through character creation for your main character and any character you choose to make through the adventurer creator. They will all act as adventurers, not companions (meaning they don't have story content).

For people who are concerned about spoilers, the Backer Beta will feature a number of areas near the middle of the game that do not have strong connections (if any) to the critical path. In addition to the characters you create, we are also likely to feature a roster of pre-made characters who are not companions. We don't have any interest in using the Backer Beta to give out story info. We'd much rather have people play it and throttle the mechanics, UI, etc. so we can make fixes and adjustments.

We've focused in the past on how animancy has been used in the past to create undead, but I'm positive we've also discussed that a great deal of animancy research goes toward understanding and attempting to correct personality defects/mental illness and other beneficial things. Enough powerful people in Defiance Bay see the potential for good (at least, their own good) in animancy to keep the mobs at bay.

The common folk are imagining that the gods themselves will punish/annihilate entire nations for the activities of a few. Many also believe that animancers are inherently malicious and that their practices are intentionally undertaken to swindle/cause harm. They associate animancy with gods-forsaken evil instead of ethically-questionable but maybe well-intentioned haphazard experimentation.

The places most tolerant of animancy are the Dyrwood and Vailian Republics. Animancy was explicitly outlawed in Aedyr and Grand Vailia (the old world). The new colonial nations, once they gained independence, were slow to deal with issues related to animancy and research has flourished as a result (with some hiccups along the way). Aedyr and many of the "old world" cultures still think animancy is extremely dangerous for both immediate (you will get physically messed up) and global (the gods will get mad) reasons. Detailed (correct) knowledge of animancy is not particularly widespread. The research texts tend to be held by a small number of people in part because texts are all still copied by hand. Common folk have a lot of ideas and opinions about what animancy is, but it's not well-informed. Even within the Dyrwood, where a lot of animancy research occurs, there is a strong division between the opinions of rural Dyrwoodans/Glanfathans and people who live in Defiance Bay, much closer to where the research is actually happening.

A summer beta is still scheduled, yes. Character creation not being polished in mid-June doesn't endanger that. No journalists asked us about character creation that I can remember.

Ciphers do have some combat charm/dominate powers (in fact, one is actually called Puppet Master), but they are relatively short duration and do not change the fundamental nature/soul of the target. Some animancers do attempt to change the nature of souls/implant fragments of other souls/transplant souls, etc. -- usually with limited or no success.

Powerful ciphers can do a lot of things with souls, but I don't think what they do is, conceptually, tremendously out of line with what wizards and other powerful characters can do. What's stopping any powerful character from laying waste to things at will is other powerful characters who oppose them. Ciphers can't rip souls out of bodies, but they can manipulate and use them as power sources for other effects. Detonate and Disintegration are the high-level cipher powers most obviously associated with direct single-target damage.

The ultimate amount of customization will depend heavily on how many Talents we are able to implement. This is the last character-oriented gameplay content we are implementing and almost all of it will be developed in reaction to how the core classes wind up being used by QA and backers. If we wind up with a lot of good, solid Talents, there will be more flexibility in how core class abilities are received/selected/modified. The Talent system is fully implemented and we have a lot of flexibility in how the class structure allocates things as characters level, but we still need to finalize the content.

We didn't show character creation for two reasons: time and polish. Our demo slots were only 30 minutes long, 20 minutes of which were taken up by the demo itself, leaving 10 minutes for questions and general coming/going. I think Gromnir is right that character creation is very important in a game like this. At the time of E3, character creation was functional but it had a lot of bugs and the interface was really rough. Most of Roby's time recently has been spent polishing CC. It tends to be one of the most complicated and easily-busted interfaces in the RPGs I've worked on. The German market tends to be more detail-oriented overall. I don't think a details-light preview is necessarily bad (though I suspect most of the people posting on this forum would prefer as much detail as possible).

In short, it's due to a combination of ignorance and the current limitations of science (animancy, specifically). 1. Yes. Druids are animists and educated people have known for many generations that animals (and some plants, and some stones) have souls. Animancers believe those souls have many similarities to the souls of kith ("civilized" folk) but are not identical and not interchangeable. Some souls occasionally reincarnate in animals, plants, or living rocks, but it is uncommon and the process isn't understood. 2. No one knows exactly where souls go when the bodies associated with them die. Popular belief among Aedyran/Dyrwoodan cultures is that they go to Hel, a vaguely-defined underworld, where the gods hold them and later release them back into the living world. Short of reincarnation and Awakening, these are one-way trips. Even Awakened souls have no memory of their afterlife. 3. Animation of unliving material and re-animation of once-living material is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with complications. Centuries ago, the intentional creation of what could best be called corporeal undead (broadly termed "vessels" in Eora) was one of the events that heralded a backlash against animancy in most nations. Vessels can be killed by severely damaging their physical forms. Souls that are present in the physical world need something physical to anchor to. The exception are spirits, which never left the physical world and are anchored in it through the sheer will to be physically manifested. 4. Some animancers try to do these things. Ancient Engwithans did it in a limited fashion and created animats, multiple warrior souls bound into a suit of bronze armor. However, there are almost always side effects assuming the process works at all. Both the general public and many powerful people view animancy as reckless and likely to invoke the displeasure of the gods. It's seen as tampering with a natural or divine cycle. So while many animancers are interested in this research for a variety of reasons, it's not always easy to find patrons.