Luckmann

not my experience. only times any of my characters got close to unconscious on hard mode, it was because of melee attackers. early on phantoms, ogres and the ocasional uber kith, later on high level fampyrs and things like... dragons. I can't recall any time my characters were getting a lot of damage from physical ranged attackers. oh, and traps. got knocked out by traps a couple of times. Wasn't talking about physical ranged attackers. Was talking about "distant enemies" that target deflection or reflex with spells and debuffs. I find that the best way to deal with those is to get them into melee range, though. Moreover, on characters for whom deflection matters, Reflex tends to be sky-high due to shields. Not saying Wood Elves are useless at melee range, but ... I dunno, if you're looking to go defensive, Pale Elf is probably better. I was only arguing that they're not useless. They're better tanks than humans and dwarves, for instance. They might be comparable to Pale Elf though because a graze at normal DR might be better than a hit at +10 DR, and a miss is a miss (considering most fire and ice attacks are from distant enemies and are usually fended by Reflex). Kind of disagree with you here, Dwarves have a innate bonus to poison and disease, which can be a bitch in a lot of instances. Those are a lot more situational than getting pelted from range by deflection or reflex fended attacks, though, IMO. Also, defensively, +1 Perception is better than +1 Con. While I do not disagree, it should be noted that +1 Perception is only better than +1 Constitution if you actually plan to fully max out Perception, otherwise it's just a free point to redistribute, same as any other Attribute. And you only want to max Perception if you're going to tank. So if you are going for melee DPS, it doesn't matter in the least.

That actually just makes it even dumber, if true. "I can't differentiate between green and blue, and can't tell the difference between allies and neutrals. Now neither can you because if I can't have it no-one can, play it my way or not at all stop playing with my toys you're doing it wrong this is badwrongfun!". Actually.. eh.. that's pretty much the vibes I've gotten from Sawyer for a long time so I guess it makes sense. Blue circles for everyone would've been terrible.

Afaik, nope. She also has no special Talents from her Paladin Order, Frermàs mes Canc Suolias, and like all C/NPC Paladins, gets no modifiers to Faith & Conviction.

BG1 CNPC:s had loads of personality, and it conveyed those personalities largely without talky talky talky talky talk talk, which is a feat in itself. I'd take Xan over Aloth or Edwin over Pallegina any day of the week. To be fair, Aloth and Pallegina are some of the least interesting companions in PoE. Eder, Sagani, and (of course) Durance are all pretty great. BG1 still had somewhat more flamboyantly interesting companions though to be sure. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is probably largely personal preference. I see merit in both styles, tbh - BG1's were more larger-than-life and ridiculous in an extremely entertaining way, whereas PoE's are a bit more focused on believability, which means that they're naturally a bit drier. Absolutely, I specifically chose Aloth and Pallegina because I agree with that sentiment (moreso for Pallegina than Aloth, honestly), and I specifically mentioned Xan and Edwin because they ooze personality. There are plenty of rather personality-less characters in BG1, too, and there are amazing characters in PoE (Durance, Edér). My point was that BG1 characters definitely had personality, and text is no guarantee that a character is deeper or more interesting. And while I do prefer more interjection- and conversation-heavy characters compared to the alternative, it ultimately has little bearing on how I feel for the character, and it depends on how that personality is conveyed unto me, as long as it is all consistent (inconsistency when it comes to things like this infuriates me, such as the ME2 DLC Companions, or the various companions in Arcanum; some had dialogue and interjections, some didn't have anything, some were voiced, others not). The only BG1 characters I remember that fits the "ridiculous" label are probably Minsc and Tiax, maybe Shar-teel (..not sure if I write that name right). But even Minsc is far less grating than in BG2. Virtually all characters in BG2 that was in BG1 went through flanderization. First of all, I don't think anyone has argued for combat to be more D&D-like. Second, saying "This is not D&D enough" is just as flawed of a fundamental argument as "This is not IE enough". It's nonsense. It ultimately doesn't matter how D&D did it at all, nor how IE did it. At best, they can serve as explaining examples or as a reference to preference (Such as Sensuki's "I like the IE games, ABC is how it worked there, and XYZ is why that is better"). What matters is why Å would be better than Ä and how it interacts with Ö, and the actual arguments around the issue. Thirdly, AoO is different to Engagement in an number of ways, but it is not worth going into, because ultimately, I don't think anyone that dislikes Engagement will want Attacks of Opportunity either. Either would serve a purpose in a turn-based environment (Divinity: Original Sin is an excellent example, without being D&D). In a real-time game, not so much. It's needless, exploitable, and restrictive.

Pretty much. Scout, tank and spank. Playing on hard, and auto-attacking. Quite often not using GM's spells which I could. Just letting them use their ranged weapons. It's also funny seeing mobs circle your tank, round and round ignoring your other characters as the mob tries to get in but can't because your tank already had a few mobs on him. So the mob goes ring around a rosey until an opening presents itself when another mob in melee dies. Perhaps a modder will mod in some enemy AI scripts. I've seen plenty of mobs do this even when there's an opening, just sorta stacking up in a bundle of 4-5 enemies, only 2 of which is attacking the tank. I think ties into the whole pathing and mapping issue, though, not just the AI being bad and the combat shallow. There's been so many places where I can see that my party members would fit, but can't actually walk at all. But in some cases, there's big open areas and the enemy just doesn't path around eachother to get to me. And as much as I enjoy murdering them with AoE:s when they make themselves such easy targets, you're still right, I most often actually do not even feel that I need to use the spells, AoE or otherwise.

Remove Engagement and nothing changes. The AI still acts like it's there. Engagement is not a very large part of how combat is designed in PoE, all it does is inhibit movement and forces everyone to cluster up and stay there, and saves the developers from having to make an AI that would move around and make decisions that would improve their position on the battlefield, for the same reason the player won't do it; it'll murder you with instant free invisible attacks if you even try to move *towards* the opponent that is engaging you. The biggest problem with Engagement has always been for it to excuse it's own existence. I play with it on simply because the game is made for it, and there are Abilities and Spells and Talents that deal specifically with it, and I don't want to break pre-existing interacting functionalities, but it doesn't really add anything by itself. I can't think of any RPG that ever had half-decent AI myself. Certainly not the IE games where enemies almost always just mobbed the first thing they saw. Difficulty in RPGs single-player game has never, ever come from the AI anyway in my experience, unless it's a very tightly scripted boss battle. It's always hard by making the enemy bigger and badder than the player so they have a challenge to overcome. Not really disagreeing with you, just pointing that out. Albeit I do think engagement is preferable to everyone running around willy-nilly like in Baldur's Gate, I love establishing a frontline. I love establishing a frontline too, I wish it was possible in PoE without everything becoming a huge cluster unless I block a passage.. which I could do in the IE games too. Establishing a frontline was not hard in the IE games. If you screwed up, yes, you had to run willy-nilly for a second, but I think that's infinitely preferable to everyone just standing still and the entire combat amounting to repeated tank and spank. And you're entirely right on the AI, really, but that's really not here nor there. The fact that AI:s have been terrible in the past is really no excuse for having a terrible on in PoE.

A Sword does 11-16. Fine adds *1.15 Damage (and +4 Accuracy, but that has no bearing in this). 16 Might adds *1.18 Damage. .15 + .18 = .33 11 * (1+.18+.15) = drumroll.... 14,63! Rounded to 15. Also, just for future reference, the game does take fractions into account, but only displays rounded numbers, which becomes all kinds of broken when you're trying to gauge actual damage and effects of armour (because DR also works in fractions and percentages).

Only recreationally.

You need to work on your formatting. I didn't read much more than the first few lines before I was tired of it. But I didn't need to, to get the gist. The "Combat Only" restriction on spells and abilities is rubbish. It is known.

Remove Engagement and nothing changes. The AI still acts like it's there. Engagement is not a very large part of how combat is designed in PoE, all it does is inhibit movement and forces everyone to cluster up and stay there, and saves the developers from having to make an AI that would move around and make decisions that would improve their position on the battlefield, for the same reason the player won't do it; it'll murder you with instant free invisible attacks if you even try to move *towards* the opponent that is engaging you. The biggest problem with Engagement has always been for it to excuse it's own existence. I play with it on simply because the game is made for it, and there are Abilities and Spells and Talents that deal specifically with it, and I don't want to break pre-existing interacting functionalities, but it doesn't really add anything by itself.

That hasnt been doable in most games for a darn good while though. It almost always requires some modder to make a tool to set stuff up in an editable and recompile-able framework. Since this is an RPG forum, anyone here play Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magic Obscure? Remember the item editor for that? There wasnt one originally. You used a hex editor. I originally learned hex solely to make firearms early-game not awful in Black Mountain Mines But then, some guy made a UI for it that automatically allowed you to change item stats very quickly without having to sort through a metric ****-ton of hex code and it'd spit out a file right there for you using Java, I think. And then on top of that, a totally different dude made a freaking web editor. You could enter the crap on a website, and it'd pop out your file right then and there. Both of these required alot of effort from the modders, presumably. They werent easily editable, until they wanted them to be. EDIT: @Luckmann, yeah I agree with you there. The nuts-and-bolts fundamental stuff isnt accessible, which is a god damn shame because thats what'd let people do some really cool stuff. Divinity: Original Sin I do the modding in Notepad++. Civilization: Beyond Earth, I do the modding in Notepad++. With the Infinity Engine, I could do much of the modding in Excel. The nuts and bolts stuff is the most important stuff, but it's also the stuff where I can't see anyone possibly making an editor of any kind. Talents / Items? Maybe, at some point, if there's interest (and with the game in this state and with this level of modding, I doubt there will be). Hell, I can think of games where I can edit the savegame files themselves in Notepad++, come to think of it. What game? Wasteland 2 of course.

Yeeaaah.. no. Have you tried modding PoE? Man I wish values could just be edited in a text editor like some games. Would be so awesome. Item stats can, many ability stats can, tons of stuff can be modded. It just requires an expensive program to do it Or maybe Disunity can somehow, idk. Need to actualy be able to modify .unity3d files to make changes which links to the other crap. It's not that easy; you can't just use a text editor and you can't do it straight-up just because you've got Unity. To edit most game files you need to extract .cs-files from a .dll, edit them, and recompile it. And even then, editing the .cs-files is ****ing crazy unless you learn the language. I've done some simple modding like this in my life, but most of it was easy. Here, I couldn't even figure out how to change the Attribute bonuses properly. And don't get me started on editing Talents or Items. Touching them seems to break them and you end up having to hex-edit the files by hand. **** that ****. Modding PoE is a horrorshow compared to most other games that I can think of that has even basic modding support of any kind, including games that were never intended to even be modded, like the Infinity Engine games.

As a Bleak Walker Paladin, I can't think of a single one so far.

This. Except one thing. No, Talents that increase Elemental damage does not increase Lash damage. Also, for all paladins out there, Flames of Devotion acts as a Lash, so.. don't take Scion of Flame, thinking it'll increase your Flame damage. The mechanics of lashes are very inconsistent and very unclear on how they are supposed to work, to the point where I'd judge them broken and bugged, but based on what we know, it all seems intentional. It's been a known issue for a long time and the developers know about it, but have never commented on it (as far as I know).

And here I was thinking I was standing completely alone in that opinion. And I found the PoE final battle much more fun than Sarevok. Sarevok: *wand of monster summoning* x 10... WON! As for the IEMod; * I really like a 'proper' solid UI. * Blue-circles?! YES! * Tooltip didn't bother me till the crowded with companions Twin Elms. That's about all I would include, the others just nerfing battle or overpowering the player too much. IMO. The movement recovery penalty is ****ing ridiculous though, it serves no purpose, and removing it doesn't nerf battles or overpower the player at all. BG1 CNPC:s had loads of personality, and it conveyed those personalities largely without talky talky talky talky talk talk, which is a feat in itself. I'd take Xan over Aloth or Edwin over Pallegina any day of the week.

Yeeaaah.. no. Have you tried modding PoE?

No it is not. I'm not challenging your position, but I am questioning it, because I want to hear your opinion on it. In what way is the Wood Elf bonus not useless for Melee DPS? Because even in melee you have the reflex and deflection bonuses against distant attackers. Well that's.. well.. if not useless, then useless enough to be rounded down to useless, compared to what you'd get if you stayed at range.

Haha, what? Why would it require Lay on Hands? That's absurd. What's the reasoning for this and how is anyone supposed to know?

Well it clearly shouldn't be stacking. I can see how the One-Handed Style Talent might be worth it for a heavy tank, with that terrible Accuracy of theirs. Unfortunately does not help the intended duelists much, though.

Most modifiers stack additively, not multiplicatively. I'm not following your example because your post is a mess, but that's probably the source of your confusion.

Actually, battle axes and such depended more on sheer weight and mass for their damage then anything else, with the sharp edge designed to concentrate this mass. This is especially true in the middle ages when large axe-type weapons were designed for a combination of crunching and slicing plate armor. This ^ Basically all middle-age heavy weapons were all about the crushing. Even large two-handed swords used from horseback was all about concentrating the blows and crush through armour than it was about slicing and dicing. The fact that Great Swords (...why not Greatswords?) in PoE even does Slashing/Piercing is really just in order to cater to fantasy tropes, rather than historical accuracy. I expect even Sawyer, who supposedly studies history, to know this. There's so many weapons that should actually be dealing crushing damage more than anything else, and really heavy armour should make you practically immune to slashing damage. ...that last part though.. I'd be perfectly fine with. Armours need to be tuned upwards in terms of specialization. That's actually not true. In middle ages heavy armour was expensive, and most foot soldiers wore no better protection that some leather, so sabres were extensively used even in the west, while straight sword itself, was also primarily used as a cutting weapon. You really could not use it in any other way while mounted anyway. But middle ages really aren't the proper era for the game. Game has arquebuses, estocs, rapiers, greatswords and pikes. That fairly accurately places it to the beginning of renaissance. A time when heavy armour became so elaborate that it brought with it whole new weaponry to battle it, when greatswords were introduced to battle pike walls, when gunpowder first entered the battlefield, and when rapier first showed itself as a duelling weapon. In fact, both armoury and weaponry in game can be almost precisely placed in real timeline. Offcouse, when used in a game system, that requires balance, but just seeing game use proper weaponry, instead of huge fantasy battleaxes that every other game has, is refreshing. I wasn't talking about most foot soldiers, I was talking about middle-age heavy weapons. The setting itself is anachronistic. The point was that the majority of those weapons were all about crushing. That's not to say that other weapons, such as sabres and rapiers and so on, were crushing weapons, or middle-age weapons, or even intended for use against heavy armour. The overall point was that despite this, the game is based in fantasy tropes, not historical accuracy, hence why Great Swords (...greatswords) still ends up with Slashing/Piercing, despite the fact that most of the historical ones probably couldn't slice through a cheese without making it explode like a melon.

Locks that are there for story reasons can´t be picked thats true, but i would assume that the devs thought it would be pretty obvious, which i think it is. Otherwise they could just slapped a "can´t be picked because of magic...reasons whaterver" text over it, and then people would criticise that. But.. that's pretty much what they've done. And I'm criticizing that. It's lazy quest design. I know I'm being unreasonable to a degree, but if you can't construct a quest to be in tune with the base mechanics of the game and what the game presents as a reasonable action, you shouldn't make the quest at all, and rather scrap it than to impose arbitrary restrictions. There are exceptions where the reason why you can't open something with a lockpick is integrated into the quest's story, but those are exceptions, not the rule, and it should be made pretty damn clear when it happens. Oh I know, but Hassat Hunter said this with locks that require keys that can be picked. No. There's quite a lot of locks in the game requiring keys that can't be picked. Fact. "Pretty much all of them" does not mean "Absolutely all of them". I would still say "Pretty much all of them" myself. And those that can't be picked without a reasonable explanation as to why.. that's just terrible quest design and should be criticised as such.

I thought the only difference between Hard and Path was the stat boost. No, PotD also puts the highest amount of possible opponents into all encounters, and the encounters will always be of the hardest type. It basically combines all of the difficulty levels, and then boost the stats of the opponents. At least that's how it's been explained to us. I'm the opposite. I hate it when the enemy has to cheat to make a game harder. Blanket increases in stats is a broken way to increase difficulty and plays with the assumptions of the game. Difficulty should be about encounter design, what kind of opponents you face, the amount, the placement, and their intelligence, not just whether you increase the difficulty by 10%, 20%, 30% and so on. Coincidentally, I'd like to have a difficulty between Hard and Path of the Damned, without the blanket increases the enemies get, but with the same encounter design (that is to say, maximum amount of enemies, and the hardest encounters, just without the cheating). Same here. Boosting all resistances and accuracy by 50% is a lazy way to balance difficulty. I'm not against it persay for the hardest of the hardest difficulty levels (as in Galactic Civilizations 2, where the AI does not cheat at all (an uncommon thing for that genre) unless you specifically tell the game to let it to make the game harder)... but since Hard isn't Hard, PotD has no business screwing with the balance. Just add more and more varied enemies. Mix up the resistances a bit so I can't just derpcast everything and expect to succeed. Maybe have an "extra hard" mode (checkbox, maybe) that adds stats to the enemies to add some difficulty (like the no-maim checkbox does), but let's have all the difficulty levels use the same (or similar) stats on enemies, just with more challenging encounter design. It's funny because I was specifically thinking of GalCiv 2 when posting about difficulty and AI cheating. Go Stardock & Brad Wardell.

Locks that explicitly say that they require keys can never be lockpicked. Unfortunately. It feels quite arbitrary. The quests should've been made so that the questlines don't break just because you open doors before certain points.

Actually, battle axes and such depended more on sheer weight and mass for their damage then anything else, with the sharp edge designed to concentrate this mass. This is especially true in the middle ages when large axe-type weapons were designed for a combination of crunching and slicing plate armor. This ^ Basically all middle-age heavy weapons were all about the crushing. Even large two-handed swords used from horseback was all about concentrating the blows and crush through armour than it was about slicing and dicing. The fact that Great Swords (...why not Greatswords?) in PoE even does Slashing/Piercing is really just in order to cater to fantasy tropes, rather than historical accuracy. I expect even Sawyer, who supposedly studies history, to know this. There's so many weapons that should actually be dealing crushing damage more than anything else, and really heavy armour should make you practically immune to slashing damage. ...that last part though.. I'd be perfectly fine with. Armours need to be tuned upwards in terms of specialization.