Luckmann

I think it would make sense; Dexterity helps you land those punches (or shots) where they are liable to cause the greatest disruption to your foe's stance or form. Adding Interrupt would certainly work, but I still think it'd be better to split the Accuracy with Perception, because Perception is just plain.. better. Best, I would even say. Might is feeling a bit overall meh to me, so Interrupt wouldn't be misplaced there either, but I could be wrong. Nothing makes less sense than gaining deflection from Intellect, so it would sadly fit in It's not that much of a stretch. You're deflecting intelligently.

Since we're on the topic of very minor UI issues relating to the Level Up/Creation screen, I noticed a highlighting issue when you select, for example, the Talents. The icons inside the textbars can be selected seperately, resulting in some highlighting wonkyness (if you select the icon inside the bar, the entire bar isn't highlighted). A minor issue to be sure, but I noticed it earlier and your post reminded me of it.

I agree that Perception is way too hard to pass on right now. The problem is that if you don't gain Accuracy, or too low Accurace, from Perception, it ends up being completely useless for anyone that isn't primarily ranged. CON appears to be the overall weakest, in my opinion, because it's one of the few that you can - for some builds - straight-out dump without much problem. RES can theoretically be quite powerful, though. The duration bonus, even if it doesn't feel very important, can make quite a big difference at higher levels. 20 RES (Human + Aedyr) results in a hefty +50% increase in duration. DEX doesn't have enough of an overall impact, imo, and while most would really like to not dump on it, there's also not that much mechanical incentive to take it high, either, except for certain characters. Some quck ideas that come to mind (milage may vary) is: Split Accuracy bonus between Dexterity and Perception in order to devalue one and strengthen the other, and incentivize mixing. Add a small Graze-to-Hit or Hit-to-Crit bonus with Melee weapons to Perception, revaluing it for melee, since it would become a bit of a bum stat for non-ranged characters with only +1 Accuracy and +Range%. Add a small (1-2%?) Concentration bonus to Constitution; while this would overlap with Resolve, Resolve/Constitution builds would conceivably sacrifice a lot for that potentially large boost. I had something in my head about Might, but it slipped out.

I.. I realize that Josh Sawyer is his own person and can post wherever the hell he please, but am I the only one somewhat annoyed by the fact that he seems to give more and better feedback and have a bigger (or continous) presence on SomethingAwful instead of here or other "official" channels (Dev blogs, whatever)? Especially SomethingAwful is.. something awful. I've got limited access to a friend's Backer Beta and I will only be playing on Hard, so hopefully I can throw some feedback on that at some point. I find it odd that so many of the devs themselves would have issues playing on Hard in order to test it. Them knowing the inns and outs of the system, I always assumed that devs were masters of their own games.

Whatever you do, do not get both Zealous Focus and Zealous Charge. The loop when your Paladin is trying to jump in and out of both Auras is practically impossible to get out of. Also, for reference, getting more than two Auras will allow you to trigger this bug at-will.

Went 10 pages back and couldn't see it mentioned, so I thought I might as well. Resizing fonts to smaller than the norm results in wonky-looking nameplates in that the text is not properly centered on the nameplates. Case in point, at 80% size: http://i.imgur.com/bM1qLXK.png Yes, minor issue, but given that the default font size in PoE is absolutely ginormous (almost feels made for tablets) I assume a lot of people would notice.

I thought about that, but then I remembered the massive conversion to 3e that IWD2 had to make for every spell. Plus an entire skill and feat system that wasn't present in earlier IE games. And...10. Months. In-engine, was the conversion really that massive, though? Honest question, I don't have any of the games installed to check. The skill and feats system was technically already in the game. It's pretty much built straight up around the Skills and Proficiencies, afaik.

Icewind Dale 2 is based on the Infinity Engine, and could pull on all the resources created previously. I don't think there's that many IWD 2 spells that weren't already in one of the earlier games, were there?

Actually, scratch that. It seems that AddTalent and AddAbility have extremely similar functionality, but you need to make sure to call upon the correct Ability or Talent as per the resources available in /objectbundle/. Talents are prefaced with tln_. So for example, for the Adventurer Weapon Focus, you use tln_weapon_focus_adventurer, not weaponfocusadventurer.

While I've tested the Backer Beta extremely little (on account of actually not being a Backer), it seems to me that Perception right now is incredibly powerful compared to most other Characteristics, and Accuracy very valuable from a combat perspective. So my knee-jerk reaction is yeah.

I'm not sure "make sure it beats out the rogue and fighter in ranged damage" is a good design goal. I think they are trying to (and I think they should be trying to) avoid the situation where X is always the best choice for Y in terms of general approach builds. This means that generally speaking, a ranger should be doing good in melee and at range, and a fighter should be comparable to a rogue be comparable to a ranger and so on, with key differences other than who does the best with what. I personally think that the Ranger should excel in mobility and skirmishing, being able to fairly easily move from target to target in melee, or stand at a long range and pick targets off, easily switching between targets (Generally high point-damage rather than extended single-target DPS), with the Pet acting as a support character to the group rather than a meatshield (which it currently seems to suck at, anyway) for the Ranger. The shared health-pool needs to die, though. At this point, I don't care overly much what that does to balance - it needs to die before any other balancing happens, because it just doesn't work, and the Ranger shouldn't be balanced (in any way) around a mechanic that just doesn't work.

I got the opportunity to play with the Backer Beta (v392) a bit today, and I decided to muck about a bit with the commands (since I didn't have the time to really play at this time, or at least not "get into it"). Funnily enough, I couldn't get the AddTalent command to work. It adds the Talents as Abilities, and if you use both AddTalent and AddAbility, you can even have two abilities of the same kind. It still allows you to take the Talent on Levelup, too. Also, the format for AddTalent and AddAbility is not the same. AddTalent seems to always affect the Player, and doesn't need to point to the player, simply AddTalent <Talent> is enough, whereas AddAbility wants AddAbility <Target> <Ability>.

On the topic of ranged rogues and fighters, I've been thinking about "non-archetypical" builds for classes lately, and how well they work in the game. Unless I've misunderstood something, a lot in the base system is very free - anyone can use any weapon, anyone can use any armour class, etc, etc. Even the core characteristics, the ability scores, attributes, is now meant to be usable and useful for all classes to some degree. But how well does it actually work? For example, the archetypical Paladin tend to be clad in heavy armour, with a sword and a shield, with relatively high Might and Constitution and low Dexterity. The archetypical ranger, as PrimeJunta himself said, is "the dedicated ranged class". The archetypical ranger runs around with bows or crossbows and have cat-like Dexterity and Perception. But how well does, for example, a melee ranger work? Built with high Might, running into combat with a spear, dressed in medium-or-higher armour? Or a duelist Paladin sporting medium armour at best, going for a nobleman idea rather than a steel-clad bulwark, rapier instead of greatsword or longsword'n'board? Low Constitution, medium Might at best, high Dexterity and a killer Resolve? Blackpowder Barbarian? Has anyone toyed around a bit with non-standard builds for classes? Because if the game leaves itself so very open, they should at least be functional in most regards with the options it offers up, or make it very clear how certain classes are meant to be played.

30% prebuffing? That's not nearly enough, if you're doing proper buffing in the IE games, you will steamroll everything, and pre-buffing could easily take longer than most actual fights.

Perhaps for the same reason as Bonus Frenzy might?

Then it might be working as intended, because you conceivably be in the situation where you haven't taken Frenzy yet, but intend to, and want to spend a Talent to get an extra Frenzy. If Bonus Frenzy doesn't show up until you have taken Frenzy, you may end up in the situation where you are forced to "waste" a Talent that could conceivably have been spent on something (Frenzy) that you consider worthwile to the build. At the very least, though, the Talent should explain that you need the Frenzy Ability in order for the Bonus Frenzy Talent to do anything (although it should be pretty self-explanatory, you never know...).

Frenzy is taken as an Ability, no? Is Bonus Frenzy taken as an Ability, or as a Class Talent?

My apologies to the OP for the off-topic banter, but that's just crazy. I can think of a lot of situations where I want to keep some companions out of the combat or hold off their introduction, or simply delay when I want to start smacking the hell out of whomever I'm planning to backstab. In both the IE and in DA:O, I remember situations where I would sneak my rogue into position behind an enemy mage, and then - with all other characters - engaging and pulling the rest of the opponents in the enemy group. My rogue waited until all the beefy enemies had started attacking my group, at which point my rogue leapt out of the shadows and started picking off the mage or archers or whatnot. With combat forcing the entire group out of Stealth, the game becomes robbed of tactics like this, making it virtually impossible to "tactically deploy" with Stealth.

You're automatically forced out of Stealth when combat starts? That's sounds terrible for any party with multiple good stealthers that wants to set up coordinated attacks.

Happy new yuears!

But now you're imposing a pretty significant list of restrictions that is in no way better than we currently have in it's rationale. If the goal is to have them behave realistically, then why wouldn't they be allowed to cross from level to level? Why don't they get to hear across elevation, when it's supposedly bad that they can't hear room-to-room? Aside from wilderness fights, I can't think of that many fights (or rather, scenarios) in any of the IE games that would have been reasonably winnable with realistically intelligent or behaving NPC:s.

I think the thread is already a bit far gone, because any attempt to actually discuss it will really just be met with the cognitive difficulties of the OP.

I must ask, are you a dad?

I was thinking the same thing. Because.. y'know.. "Normal" implies.. well. Normal. The default. I realize that it may very well be tuned for Hard and then scaled down, but if things are to work, they absolutely have to work as intended on Normal. And I say this as someone that will definitely be playing on Hard or harder, because.. well, I honestly don't expect Normal to cut it for me.

Make a party with nothing but rifles and pistols. Make a custom formation with everyone in a line. Laugh maniacally.