Luckmann

Yeah, I think they could have spent a bit more time on the "Tutorial tool-tips" - Perhaps some highlights / animations or even little videos built in to explain -- as long as they can be disabled by those that don't need them, I think it's better having them than not to help those that need it. It's hand-holding, but not a whole lot of people read manuals these days anymore. While that is certainly true too, I was also thinking about such things as Low-Resolve Paladins and hyperintelligent Barbarians, armoured, armed monks, unstealthy and unbackstabby rogues, etc. That's hard to do in an in-game tutorial. But they definitely, definitely should've worked a lot more with the game texts and explanations. The system is pretty forgiving for mistakes in a lot of ways, but if you want to get into it in any way, it's dense as a mother****er.

There are a lot of issues in PoE that aren't really addressed and sometimes it's understandable, and sometimes it's honestly a bit daunting that it turned out that way when it all tied together. But I think that they are aware of most of the major issues, but either couldn't find any solution that would be realistic to implement in time (or at all), or that they felt "just had to work". Some can probably be chalked up to pure stubbornness on some select people, though, or wilful ignorance. I know Sawyer specifically has had a hard time understanding issues plainly explained to him, and either misunderstanding the problems because he didn't read up on it, or just brushed them off without investigation. The idea of the armour system was actually pretty good, it just sorta grew into this, I think, and I hope that they keep working on it in the future. I think it was a mistake to remove DR in favour of DT alone (which is now called DR, I know, it's confusing, but DR was basically % while DT is what we have now, a flat mod), because it could've been an additional balancing factor to be used, but now it's going to be hard to re-introduce. It's not a lost cause, it's just going to take considerable effort to fix. I'm hoping that it'll be taken care of in an expansion, but invasive system operations like this tends to be beyond the scope of an expansion.

This is a bold-faced lie. Whether a stat has some effective value or not depends entirely on your build. While it is possible to succeed with any combination, not every Attribute contributes remotely equally in any way, and the Attributes are very far from balanced in that regard. This has nothing to do with min/maxing.

Also, unless they changed it some way, Arcane Veil is also not boosting Deflection enough to realistically matter for the Wizard.

Which is just another one of those really odd, counter-intuitive things in PoE. Monk with a (non-fist) weapon? Monk with a shield? Monk with... heavy armour?

Oh god, can you please quit trawling around threads looking to come with input on things you know nothing about? It's getting incredibly tiresome and you're just coming across as an edgy try-hard contrarian. Yes, if someone Engages the Tank and then tries to move away from him, he can score Disengagement hits on them. But as gkathellar clarified, even if you remove Engagement entirely, it doesn't change anything; they engage the Tank based on proximity and targeting, not based on Engagement or lack thereof. So it doesn't matter if the tank can Engage 2 or 3 opponents, because those opponents will target the tank anyway; they won't run past him. And if too much emphasis would be placed on Engagement, it wouldn't matter whether the tank can Engage 2 or 3 opponents in any situation that went above that number of opponents, because it would trivialize the tank's value as the opponents runs past him as soon as he's tied up with the maximum number of opponents he can Engage. I think that much like myself, you want to like Engagement based on the pitch, but it's not a very valuable mechanic in terms of tanking. It primarily an issue for the player, not the AI, because the AI is dumb as a brick and if it wasn't, the player would be in for a terrible, terrible time in terms of tanking because the enemy tends to outnumber any number of opponents the player could realistically tank.

I would personally assume that it would be best with a digital copy from that perspective, because there's so many different levels that cuts into the end price of a box (producer, shipping, retailer) but the price remains largely the same (-ish). Meanwhile, digital distributors take a clear ~20% (or something) cut. That said, if you're that dedicated, I'd invest in both, just to make sure. Boxed for Steam and then get a proper GOG copy for future-proofing. This is where I also repeat my annoyance over boxed copies being Steam. Absolutely ridiculous. Buy a boxed copy for a singleplayer offline game, requires Steam to install and use. What complete nonsense. I blame Paradox.

I went onto the boards just to mention this. I think it's hilarious when you're occupying 3 spots in the top 5. I would be surprised if they wouldn't doctor the lists so that The Witcher 3 wouldn't be at the very least #2 on the list; and only #2 because they know that people would ask questions if it was constantly #1. But I can't say I wasn't thinking the same thing. Occupying 1, 2, 3, with the different editions would be hilarious. The insane-price editions are selling better than I thought they would, considering that all of the extras are purely digital and there are no in-game bonuses (hallelujah).

Fair enough, Bob.

Bump, because this has apparently still not been fixed for the Review Version, and if it's still there by release, that's a pretty big ****ing issue for some of us.

The release version will not change considerably. The best we can hope for are minor adjustments. The entire current system favours heavy specialization and greatly awards min/maxing. While I share your wishes, I say curb your enthusiasm. Nothing will change considerably in 3 days. To say that the system isn't nice to hybrid builds or utility builds is probably the understatement of the century. That being said, it's also pretty hard to fail irrevocably. Even a really bad build should be able to finish the game. I disagree. I found several stat options that I could reach in conversation that weren't all 18+. Further, the skil checks for conversation and scripted events were reachable by a character that was split between 3 different skills. Combat, too, I am making hybrid, unoptimized characters and am taking out PotD difficulty with little struggle. The game encourages all types. There will be some instances where someone with superhuman might will be necessary to do something really cool, and that's great. That's what you get for being a specialist. But they will have had to drop a lot of stats to reach that high might, and would then miss out on dozens of different events. Generalist characters are absolutely viable. "Hurr durr dur duurr durf hurf hurr hurr durr hurr"

There are actually several different kinds of Accuracy in the game, but I think it only shows you one of them based on what you are holding in your hands, so it can end up very confusing. Any general bonus to Accuracy should affect Spell Accuracy too, but it's again hard to tell what constitutes a general bonus to Accuracy and what doesn't (for example, weapons with +Accuracy doesn't affect Spell Accuracy, but they're listed as just simple +Accuracy). A lot of things in PoE are a bit counter-intuitive, especially if you're coming from other CRPG:s, and the rules are sometimes.. obtuse to say the least (like fractional DR mods, but the game only shows you rounded numbers, like.. what?). But afaik let's say you have a hat that gives +Accuracy, I think that should affect Spell Accuracy too (but I can't say for sure, due to the aforementioned issues). The Wood Elf bonus to Accuracy should also count, but again, there's no way to know for sure without actually trying it. Yes, a lot of rules are very unclear.

The pro is to gain an adventageous position I *know* you agree with me that's a pro, otherwise you wouldn't have this discussion about making movement easier and less tactical demanding. You wouldn't do that if movement was something you see as a non-issue, would you now? If you want to get into an advantageous position, there must be clear disadvantageous positions, and unless you botched the initial positioning, that shouldn't happen. This was covered earlier in the thread. If you have a mechanic that only comes into play when you actively screw up repeatedly, it's not really that much of a mechanic. There is realistically no way you'd want to break Engagement and suffer movement recovery penalty just to get into a "better" position, currently. Had there not been such heavy penalties levied against movement, combat movement and re-evaluation of positioning could've been a real thing, but it's not.

This, this is something I would like to see coupled with my own suggestions earlier in the thread. Yes, it is still possible to min/max, but the way you min/max would be different, with several different styles and ways to min/max. Which will always be the goal, because min/maxing can't be avoided. Like. At all.

If any tombstones should be left untouched (honestly, a lot of them probably can be) that is definitely one of them.

If I were you, I'd probably just hold off a final version for this BB and prepare stuff for the final release. We're depending on you, Bester, don't go breakin' our hearts.

paladin tanks are a bit misleading. sure, they got great potential defenses, but tanking is as much about getting and holding aggro as it is about being a damage sink. fighters got superior engagement when in defender mode. fighter abilities is also more tank focused than is paladin abilities. am of the opinion that the deeper you get into the game, the paladin-as-tank builds will be decreasing in efficacy. that being said, particular on normal mode, we expect that the paladin will suffice in the tank role, even if it ultimately is not as impressive as a fighter tank.. or a monk tank. Engagement really isn't as important for tanking as it pretends to be. If you play with the mechanic turned off via mod, it becomes apparent that just having your tanks in front (and in the fight first) is the main determining factor. Between Faith and Conviction, Righteous Soul, and the various Exhortations, I think they'll work pretty well all the way through at the two things that matter - soaking up damage, and using occasional support abilities. Anyway, I hope you're wrong, because support-tank is really the only role in which paladins can excel. Pretty much what I was going to say, Engagement doesn't matter at all for tanking. For some reason, they want to make us believe that it does, but it doesn't. Either way, the Fighter would only have +1 Engagement over the Paladin, and if tanking depended too much on Engagement (such as the enemies flat-out ignoring tanks if they aren't Engaged) it would lead to the situation where the tanks would become so useless you could practically ignore them in any encounter featuring hostiles in excess of party members. As for the Paladin thing... true, absolutely true, but in defiance of reality, I intend to prove you wrong with my high-RES, high-PER, No-Armour, Rapier Duelist Bleak Walker Paladin! (whether he'll actually be human or deathlike is up in the air at present). I'm going to attempt to fix the Attributes, though, but that's somewhat beside the point.

It... *shouldn't* be that hard to mod, really, but the BBv480 had some issues with loading assets, so it could be a problem. It's hard to tell before the game has been released, I don't think the Companion files were included in the Backer Beta. I've actually been thinking about doing exactly what you propose, before I even start playing the game, changing Edér into a Rogue, although my intent is to actually keep him as a tanky kind of rogue with sword'n'board. It should be doable, but I can't until I have the game, the first patch, and the IE Mod by Bester, and there's no guarantee that'll happen right away on launch, and then on the 1st of April I'll be gone for a week, so don't depend on me doing it. But it should be doable.

I would expect that the listed 14 GB is the installation size, but I would not bet on the download size to be a lot smaller. It's hard to tell.

Alright, please excuse my hilarious colleagues. I would not get my hopes up for official Windows XP support. Windows XP is no longer supported even by Microsoft, so it is doubtful it's going to be recognized. Also, I know that there's been some issues with 32-bit Windows during the beta, I'm not sure how dependable it is right now, although I think they ironed most of the problems out. At the end of the day, I would be surprised if it didn't run on XP, if it can run dependably on say, Windows 7 32bit, but it is a bit of a leap of faith. Why are you still running XP, anyway? Honest question.

The thing is... I don't want other people playing with my toys. I do not see why this is unreasonable. If you want to name your character L337 H4xX0r and just play the game for the combat encounters, that's fine. That's one way to play the game. It's perfectly valid. But why would the fact that you play the game that way and the fact that breaking immersion does not affect you have any bearing on my wish to immerse myself in the game world? It wouldn't, of course. As has been said, we realize that people have paid for this, but it was a fundamentally terrible idea to hand this option out as a backer reward to begin with. A lot of us really hate the immersion-breaking NPC:s standing around everywhere with ridiculous names, and the silly tombstones. Hell, no, actually, I like silly tombstones. I'm fine with silly tombstones. Silly tombstones is a staple of the genre. What I hate is immesion-breakng tombstones. There's a pretty big difference between a tombstone that isn't utterly unreasonable in-universe, with a small quib about how someone died, or the fact that Sir Trout is now resting with the fishes or whatever. Because while silly, they're not unreasonable. It could be a thing in-universe that tombstones range from depressing to hilarious, or that there are deliciously ironic deaths all 'round. But some stuff in PoE, practically everything centred around backers, isn't just silly, it's flamboyantly breaking the 4th wall. And seriously, **** that ****, it ruins the integrity of the setting, breaks the suspension of disbelief, and comes across as incredibly jarring. Let the backers have their toys and let the ones that don't mind or doesn't care keep it, but the game and the experience should come first, which is why all of that should be optional.

I find it odd that OP reacted to the swearing in Dragonfall, because I played Dragonfall (Director's Cut is amazing and Shadowrun is really progressing well as an overall project, getting truly polished, I love it, I love the evolutionary approach to game development) and I tend to react to artificial amounts of swearing with gnashing teeths. I thought that some of it was oddly placed in for example Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but in Dragonfall? And to the point of wanting refunds? Eh. Different strokes, I guess. I wouldn't worry about it in PoE, though. Obsidian are usually extremely good writers and I would be surprised if they felt the need to be 3 edgy 5 u. I'm extremely happy that they went for the 'M' rating, simply because it allows them to do serious things when it's fitting, and write dialogue that feels real, with actual people that vary in their use of profanity, swearing when warranted, and so on, something a lot of games fail miserably at simply because they "can't" go for a higher rating (anyone remember Warhammer: Age of Reckoning? T-Rating. In Warhammer Fantasy. Hahahahaha, oh wow, all of my wats.)

Why would you want to? It's probably easy as all hell to mod, though.

The massive amount of sales Steam does is anti-consumerist? There's not much anti-consumerist about Steam beyond its terrible customer support. What does the number of sales have to do with whether something is anti-consumerist or not? There are a lot of things that makes Steam overall anti-consumerist. The fact that it's practically a monopoly at this point, monopolies arguably being anti-consumerist by default, is enough of a problem in itself. Sometimes I lay awake at night and just wish that the whole Steam infrastructure collapses as all their servers catch fire, just so the charade would end.

I think someone somewhere owes me a coin or two, I'm pretty sure I won a bet about noobs, reviewers (or "streamers") and Engagement. To be fair though, there's a lot of things in PoE that are very counter-intuitive especially compared to how things usually are in RPG:s. But yeah, this is pretty accurate.