Luckmann

They have it, but it's not affected by Reputation/Dispositions. The same goes for CNPC priests. Only the main character is affected, for some asinine reason. The IEMod has fixed it but we haven't seen it patched yet, meaning that the developers doesn't consider it an issue.

Also, the pathfinding in the late IE games is actually much, much better than the pathfinding in PoE. So there's that. And also, a lot of the issues with pathfinding in PoE doesn't seem to stem from the pathfinding itself, but the world geography. It's not always clear where you can stand or walk at all, and sometimes there's places that are clearly bigger than the selection circle of the characters, but where you can't stand. I cannot count the number of times my characters have started to run the long way around something they could clearly just take a walk over to, because of some imaginary invisible barrier.

I'm sticking to my pet theory that Eothas have been split into the twin gods of Retribution and Mercy. Some assembly required indeed.

Don't be so melodramatic. None of us were talking about specifically this one issue, either, but the game as a whole, in which this contributes. It's not the end-all be-all. That has nothing to do with this particular issue, nor with the issue of overall reactivity or "C&C" (which I hate as a hard concept anyway). I really prefer having exactly what you describe, rather than having very clear cut "choose A, B, or C" with instant (or near-instant) effects, or knowledge of which exact effects there were. Which is exactly how this particular choice plays out, sadly. I'd rather have the effects of the choice play out much later, with unforeseen consequences. The problem is that a lot of players find that "unfair" and thus it is extremely rare to see in games, which is why we have things like Skyrim where people can't even lie to you unless it's an unavoidable part of the rigid questline.

Which really just brings me back to the pacing issue again. You get overleveled and then it's practically like having God Mode in 9 fights out of 10, even putting aside all other potential issues with combat that might warrant discussion.

Generally speaking, I agree with that. There are some consequences to some actions, but they never truly feel tangible, like as if they were afraid to make certain decisions matter. The options relating specifically to Maerwald feels very.. gameist, if you know the bonuses, and meaningless if you don't. They drive the point, but then nothing feels like it happens. If you tied Maerwald there, he should've stuck around, maybe even be intractable with to some degree. If you released him, something more tangible could've happened, like a weight having been lifted off the keep, and if you data-mined his noggin', the secret would obviously be granted to you. The heart of the matter is in the real place, but it fails in delivery.

I agree with what some previous posters have said; if anything, other racials should be brought up to the Wood Elf:s level. My only gripe with the woodie racial is that it's too pigeon-holed, benefiting ranged combatants far, far more than melee combatants. This is a minor gripe, but it has the psychological effect that if I'm doing a melee combatant (such as a dual-wielding Fighter!) I will be severely put off from actually taking wood elf, because I will feel like I'm being shafted. In particular, I'd like to see the human racial addressed, and diversified. Humans are the only ones that aren't getting unique racials based on subrace, and the racial that they do get is meh and bleh. If Perception increased accuracy then every character would max it first. Hitting, or not, is more important than more powerful or faster attacks. It would greatly diminish the amount of different viable character builds. The wood elf racial is fine, a small situational accuracy buff is not overpowered. The moon godlike ability, on the other hand, should be changed from an AoE to self only heal, possibly to per rest instead of per encounter. I'm not convinced that is true at all. Accuracy is good, but it's not the end-all be-all stat that some make it out to be. I could see +1 (absolutely not +2) be a part of Perception. Saying that, for example, that "hitting, or not, is more important than more powerful or faster attacks" is directly proportional to how much faster you hit, or how much more powerful your hits become when they do hit. Mind you, I'm not saying that you're absolutely wrong, just that it's a numbers game in the example you gave; if you can end up making twice as many attacks as before, it's better than hitting 2/3 instead of 1/3, simply because you make enough attacks to make up for it, and so on. There are other circumstances to gauge as well, which isn't as easy to translate or compare, depending on what you want to achieve - such as the healing bonus, or the deflection bonus, or interrupt. So it's not necessarily nearly as clear-cut as it may seem at first. Also, I think it's a bit unfair to count the Wood Elf Racial as a situational accuracy buff - after all, it's a situation that will be present 9 times out of 10. After all, if you're a ranged combatant, you really should have zero problems staying out of melee, especially if you pay attention (which you should, if you're a wood elf - especially as a wood elf!). And I would hate to see the Moonlike racial watered down to be caster-only; it is one of the few racials that actually hits the sweet spot (imo, it could even be a bit more powerful, by scaling!) for what godlike racials should be. If it was caster-only, it would only ever be useful for tanks and no-one else, dry, bland and boring, without any real reactive effects.

Really? Source.

Now we're even getting colour-coded for stupid? What does that have to do with 'stupid'? It's just convenience. Usually I had to mouse-over 3+ pages of items in my stash while selling after a big dungeon/longer time, because I didn't want to sell any unique items. Now this whole process is sped up a lot. But how is Draining Whip now working as intended? Doesn't it apply on Blunderbuss projectiles anymore? Or what happened? Great overall fixes/balance changes "It's just convenience" has been the argument for many of the baby-steps to mediocrity. Dividing things into sharp lines of "uniques" and "magicals" and "rares" is the tradition of immersionless games centred on lootwhoring, not RPG:s. PoE already suffers from itemization issues of gear not feeling special, and now the "uniques" gets lumped into a shared subgroup, that is colour-coded for stupid. What a load of hogwash. It's convenient and that's the end of it. If you really think being smart has anything to do with playing video games you're sorely mistaken. You honestly think that being "smart" doesn't have anything to do with playing video games, how you you play video games and what video games you play, you are sorely mistaken. Not to say unintelligent, which is a bigger issue than whether someone is smart or not. And saying that convenience is just convenience and that's the end of it is, if anything, hogwash. Convenience-based changes have a tendency to water down gameplay and interact degeneratively with other "convenience" features. A game is more than the sum of it's parts.

There should be very few (none?) "hard" bugs that will actually be gamestopping or considered "major". There are probably some strange things that could feel like bugs that you may or may not run into, but ultimately, those aren't really bugs and it's not clear whether they'll be addressed or not, since they're just.. odd content stuff. But as for major bugs, nope, most should be squashed.

If you haven't checked it out again, the patch is up on GOG now. @ Jojobob, yes I get this feeling with many games. I hate learning the mechanics and creating builds and characters with a certain goal in mind only to have that completely borked due to rebalancing patches. I wish games were released with much more attention to 'balance' in the first place, and patching involved minor tweaks and bug fixes instead. Of course, if wishes were horses... Sheesh, must've been minutes ago. I've been watching it like a hawk. HURRRR I'M A DURRRRR BLARGH BLARGH HURF HURF HURF. I don't detest balance, as you'd know if you weren't a poster-child for retroactive abortion. Sawyer's obsession with balance is a well-know joke. The kind of thing people that aren't mentally deficient do, without, get this, without getting offended. A revolutionary concept, I know! I may be annoyed by the way they're prioritizing and I may be frustrated by certain aspects of the patch notes, and I well and truly hate (and yes, this is actually the correct use of hate, as opposed to when people go on tirades claiming that I hate Sawyer) the fact that the very clear, very well-known, near-universally recognized issues with the Attribute Bonuses continues to go unaddressed while the CNPC:s get "fixed" by screwing with their Attributes instead, but the goal of balance itself and the fact that Obsidian actually cares enough about trying to build a balanced fundament to expand upon is actually great. Of that let there be no doubt. I do not share the obsession with trying to prevent "exploits" and trying to control the way which people play games, but if anything, my own obsession with balance itself rivals Sawyer's. - Sawyer-Sama! What is best in life? - To crush the exploits, to see badwrongfun driven before you, and hear the victory cries of muh balance. I agree with Josh on most mechanical point and find your constant complaints about him to be ridiculous, but that's a ****ing awesome portrait! I'd love to see the rest of the PoE team given a similar treatment. It's available in the custom portraits thread. I scaled it down to fit with a dialogue format for the joke. I would love to see an Avellone and Cain version, at least. A professional artist (I forget his name) at the RPGCodex made it. I echo the voices in the RPGCodex thread - it's almost bizarre that the man hasn't secured an industry job yet. I'm not sure it fits the style of PoE "just right", and I guess following a style is a big part of getting industry jobs, but damn he makes nice stuff. Edit: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/portraits-for-poe-thread.98127/page-3 http://www.jasonseow.com/poeportraits Check out his other work, too. Also, notice the scales on Sawyer's armour.

If you haven't checked it out again, the patch is up on GOG now. @ Jojobob, yes I get this feeling with many games. I hate learning the mechanics and creating builds and characters with a certain goal in mind only to have that completely borked due to rebalancing patches. I wish games were released with much more attention to 'balance' in the first place, and patching involved minor tweaks and bug fixes instead. Of course, if wishes were horses... Sheesh, must've been minutes ago. I've been watching it like a hawk.

Accuracy is directly tied into all damage-dealing in PoE, no matter how you go about it; ranged, melee, or spells. Accuracy determines whether you Miss, Graze, Hit, or Crit, and it's based on a 0-100 scale of Accuracy-Defence and a d100. What that means is that Accuracy is very important, and far from just determining whether you miss or hit, even though "not missing" is by itself incredibly powerful, simply because some damage is always infinitely better than no damage. That being said, I'm not sure I agree with the complete removal of Accuracy from Perception at all, but it should be clarified that it's far more than just whether you miss or not, and even if you see it as just an annoyance to miss, it is in fact deeply tied to difficulty.

A lot of it is for quests resolution- everything that other classes need GM or an outside Cipher for (Blood Legacy, Eder's quest, etc), a PC Cipher can do themselves. Have a very nice day. -fgalkin I know, which just makes it so much, much worse. Ideally, all classes should have a comparable amount of meaningful choices.

Barely 50% is typical internet hyperbole, yes, but it's probably 75-80%, which is actually a sizeable chunk of content. Honestly Act 3 could've been bigger. But.. yeah.

Life's about the journey, not the goal.

Great work. Do you know if this also includes scripted interactions? I would also like to know this. Also, does it include NPC:s reacting to you, or is it strictly the choices that the player has? I strongly suspect that it's both, but I'd like to have it confirmed, because there's a marked difference between people saying "Hey, you're a Coxfither" and you being able to do something because you're a coxfither. And with that in mind, the list looks even sadder.

Never. It's been confirmed as working as design. We can argue that it's bad design, and that they should make it into something that is a bit more consistent and makes a bit more sense, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

If we're talking Attributes in dialogues, the ones that are easily the worst off is Dexterity and Constitution. Might actually has quite a lot of options, especially if you're Aggressive (sadly), but Constitution and Dexterity? I can't even remember a single one for Constitution, and maaaybe one for Dexterity (but I might be confusing that with some other game). There's a few Perception checks, but not nearly as many as you'd expect. Most is probably Resolve, followed by Intellect. For Skills, there's a few Lore and Survival checks that I saw, but the rest is by and large useless. Like Zwiebelchen says above, most Athletics checks come in scripted events and can be replaced by a grappling hook. When it comes to backgrounds, classes and such, feast your eyes on this: I decided to do it properly, checking for everything I could think of. I crawled the "*.conversation" files with grep and removed redundant checks (like the 12 Fire Godlike checks for the braziers in the starter dungeon): Ponder the idea of a Female Cipher Wild Orlan Merchant from The White That Wends (69) compared to a Male Druid Mountain Dwarf Artist from Old Valia (16). Character reactivity in the game ranges from isolated events of "Hey, that's pretty awesome" to practically non-existent for the entirety of the game. For example, I started a playthrough as (spoilers!) a Priestess of Eothas and was.. let down, to say the least. Even when there's a degree of reactivity, it by no means feels appropriate or meaningful 100% of the time, and there's a fair degree of overlap (for example, Priest and Clergyman shares most reactivity, even though a lot of characters would probably want to grab too and be rewarded for that. So.. it's a bit hit/miss.

...hits rock-bottom. I can't even explain it, really. I enjoy much of the game, but once I've reached the cap, a lot of things just sorta feels useless to do, and I just want the game to end. It's really not the level cap itself that destroys it, but the pacing. You reach it far too early and there's some fundamental issues with how experience is doled out (in droves). With 1.05, it's supposed to be harder to reach level 12 before Act 3, but honestly none of the changes will have a dramatic effect - you'll probably still be overleveled for most of Act 2 and hit level 12 very early on in Act 3.

Seals shouldn't be affected by anything else aside from the attributes affecting all Priest spells. If they are spells, they should behave as such, and if they are traps, they shouldn't be in the spell list. It makes no sense to me on a conceptual level. Well Seals are affected by Skills. I would prefer them not to be, but since it has to be, I'd prefer them to be affected by Lore rather than Mechanics.

Do you really believe that with the current attribute system you can mechanically represent the characteristics of a companion? In a game where the best wizard is a world-class weightlifter and acrobat and the best tank is a wimpy oaf with a keen eyesight and unwavering determination. In every RPG system attributes are an abstraction, but in PoE it's an abstraction of an abstraction. It's beyond silly. In other games, even when the system offers me a totally useless dump stat, I don't go to very low range due to RP reasons. But the way PoE is setup... well, I have no qualms when I see those 3s. You're confusing the mechanical aspects with the foundations of what each attribute is meant to represent. The fact that what you describe is true is practically the entire issue. It is why the attributes needs to be fixed, rather than the CNPC:s compromised, because for good or ill, Aloth shouldn't have a Might of 18 just to be a good wizard, because it doesn't make sense for him to have that. The same goes for Grieving Mother switching her Perception 17 and Intellect 12 around. Why did they do that? Because Perception 17 is useless for a Cipher, and they don't want her to be useless. So no, the current attribute system cannot adequately represent the characteristics of a companion without the companion sucking dog buns. The sad thing is that this is also true for players. Forget about playing a perceptive or resolute wizard. But that's completely beside the point, my point being that under this current system, when the developers themselves have admitted defeat and have already broken the connection between mechanics and characterization, what possible argument could there reasonably be as to oppose the full respec of CNPC:s? If the Attributes do not matter for the characters after all, why do we stick to the notion that there's a necessary connection? Why shouldn't Aloth have a Might of 18, if the Attributes does not matter? What is the difference between switching the Perception and Intellect of Grieving Mother, and switching the (pre-1.03) Perception and Might of Aloth? None. There is no reasonable argument, on the foundation that we now stand, against full free respecs of the CNPC:s in the game.

On the note of skills, I wouldn't mind at all if trap effectiveness was moved to Survival, and Seals were affected by Lore.

I never realized this. That's hilariously broken and abusable for monks. Equip an off-hand weapon and enjoy dual-wielding with full duelist bonuses. If I understood you right.

I think that the issues are a bit more substantial than that, because it is about a lot more than the number of effects of individual Attribute Bonuses, and has a lot to do with how they all tie together - right now it all ties into a very clear dump/pump tank vs. DPS dichotomy, and I don't think that just fixing Constitution would be a solution, nor that interrupt getting a buff would fix things. Although I agree that both of those things absolutely should happen, but with interrupt it may be enough to actually fix the Talent. But you're unlikely to see an official message on the matter, since the current bonuses have been criticized since BB435 without a word. It is clear that Obsidian is aware of the matter, because they have been altering CNPC Attributes to buff CNPC:s, meaning that they know that the game favours min/maxing and that there's a clear dichotomy, or else they wouldn't consider the CNPC:s that much worse off with one set of attributes than another, to the point where they're actively disregarding the characterization-based attributes of CNPC:s in favour of "better" spreads (such as the 1.05 switch of Intellect and Perception for Grieving Mother). If they were interested in fixing the Attribute Bonuses or unhappy with the current state of things, there would've been no better patch than 1.05 so far to fix it, but instead they choose to actively muck with the CNPC Attributes. It's clear that they don't see a problem with the Attributes nor a problem with altering CNPC Attributes to better min/max values, no matter if it makes sense for that character or not, so why would they fix the Attribute bonuses? I held onto the same hope as you for the longest time, but I just don't see a reason for it any more. Edit: And oh god, yes, I just realized which spell Mental Binding is. I keep thinking the exact same thing: "Why on Earth is this a Rank 2 Spell?" I even constantly find myself looking at the wrong spell-rank when I'm picking spells in combat, because I keep expecting it to be higher.