Luckmann

Holy ****, I never knew that. :> Glory times when Bioware still cared for the community... To be fair though, the communities were much smaller, usually. Today Bioware's "community" is so enormous that you can't even get an overview of it, and the amount of whining if just one of them were mentioned would blot out the sun with the tears of the promancers.

Oh, god, I had forgotten about that. That was so.. terrible. Gnah. Suddenly, new character, woo, wait, what. He even changed deity, no, pantheon. From Clangeddin to Tyr, afaik. Never have a spiritual search and soul-seeking been covered better in gaming.

It should also be noted that with Torment: Tides of Numanuma, Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity, the market has been somewhat saturated in this field when it comes to Kickstarters. There just haven't been another major player capable of garnering this kind of wide support we saw in those. Once inXile or Obsidian puts up another Kickstarter in the same vein as either of their Kickstarter flagships, I have no doubt in my mind that we'll see enormous support, especially if they do good. Wasteland 2 was well received, although I think it was a bit underpolished. With some breathing room, I see absolutely no reason why a potential PoE2 (or similar) wouldn't do great on Kickstarter, especially with a major proof-of-concept published and a financial foundation to build on. Edit: Goddammit Osvir, I've been thinking about writing what I just wrote since yesterday, and you ninja me now?

Really? I find that doubtful, since it's fairly well-established in CRPG circles that respeccing is the devil.

All that'd do really, would be to re-create class restrictions on armour, albeit "soft" restrictions. If we want to "fix" the armour system, I think we need to incentivize (sp?) the use of the various armours, rather than to restrict their use. First, I'd like to see the various effects of armours "upped", so that there'd be meaningful and clear differentiation between them, instead of just No/Robe/Light/Medium/Heavy armour (as it is now, despite the obvious attempt to get away from it). This could be done by drastically upping the effects of the armours vs. different weapons. As an interesting side-effect, this would also mean that there'd be a meaningful differentiation between the various weapons used against humanoid opponents. Second, I'd like to see Talents to support the use of various armours, with interesting effects, to discourage the constant swapping of armours between encounters and promote specialization on a per-character basis. This would mean that it wouldn't be a bust to use Medium Armours, if, for example, Medium Armours filled that niche that was good against crushing weapons, and had a talent that made you move faster, Plate Mail would be good against Slashing, with a Talent that turns (%) incoming Hits into Grazes. Something along those lines. The added perk is that the game is already structured somewhat like this, it just needs to be upped to 11 to make it matter.

Clearly you haven't done military service in Sweden.

At least Deflection is a roll. Just that makes it marginally less boring. Note marginally, though, there's a whole slew of possible mentions, I just singled out the Two-Handed Weapon Wielder Talent as the worst offender I could think of.

While definitely a flaw, I find it funny that no-one uses Medium Armour, because no-one did in the IE games either. You stuck to whatever highest the characters could actually wear.

That a fact? It seemed like PoE was one of the biggest kickstarters ever at the time but now it is only the 10th largest. If the game is a success they might be able to do it again. Hopefully they will not need to. Well, considering that Torment's still the highest computer game pledge earner after 2 years (3rd in the kickstarter game category overall, with the other 2 in games that earned more being a card game and a console) and I had to go down to something like the 24th game in the 'most funded games' list before I found a video game kickstarter from 2014 or sooner, they may have a point. That's not to say a second kickstarter might not still do well, even if it doesn't do as well - the second Shadowrun kickstarter still got 1.2 million which is still great, even if it's not matching the original's 1.8 million. The Ultima Underworld successor didn't do as well recently, though, even if it did get funded so who knows? Our next chance to see what a kickstarter game can really make will probably be Bard's Tale. Yeah, I'm kinda sad the Ultima Underworld Kickstarter did so bad. It might still be good, but I'll always want to know how much better it could've been. That being said, as I've said before, the best thing would be if any potential PoE2 (although I hope it's not actually PoE2) was financed by the earnings of PoE2 and then had a Kickstarter for additional sales and funding for feature expansion and so on. Exactly like Shadowrun: Hong Kong did, except higher stakes and more money.

I think it's a cultural.. drift, for lack of a better word. I'm seeing this level of incompetence everywhere, these days. Back in "the good old days", it was downright uncommon that someone that was an executive hadn't worked his way up in some capacity. I usually use the now-privatized social sector (in Sweden) as an example, for example the railroads, where the higher officers and officials almost universally had worked at the lower levels and knew what was possible, what wasn't, and what could be expected. Today, you have someone coming out from business school or something equally nonsensical, a head full of statistical analysis, and with no idea what is viable and what can be done. This is how we got trains in Sweden that doesn't function during snow storms and no set of train fits any other set of trains.

Of course not.

Very true it's just that these talents are so freaking boring. This. This I can really agree with. A lot of Talents are good, but functionally boring. I think the worst offender is the flat +10% DMG you get from Two-Handed Weapon Wielder Talent. I can't think of anything more boring than "Here, have 10% extra damage. Done."

And it's already pretty damn terrible.

That'd be damn awful. I've heard the aztec empire had a political enclave within their territory where'd they grab people now and then from their enemy nation Tlaxcala. Which is awful too after all. there were a professor at Cal, we forget his name, who advanced the theory that aztec sacrifice were the single greatest limit to their expansion in the region. approximately 1% o' the population were killed by sacrifice each year, which at the height o' aztec civilization meant that hundreds o' thousands were being sacrificed. for a pre-industrial society, that were, according to the professor, an insurmountable hurdle. HA! Good Fun! I read an article where one professor (no idea where he was from, it was a long time ago) posited the theory that it became a form of population control because they were expanding too quick, not necessarily as a society or empire, but as a city (or cities), leading to widespread unrest and increasingly terrible sanitary conditions. Just for reference, it should be noted that Tenochtitlan had a population of anywhere just short of 200 000 up to over 300 000, and that the Aztec Empire came to encompass anywhere between 3 to 5 million people. So "hundreds of thousands" being sacrificed might be an overstatement, but it's still a crazy amount of people, especially if you compare it to the relative amount of people.

You're also going to have to centre the damn combat log!

A lot of games these days lock savegames to a major version to avoid rules changes messing up existing saves. In other words if you save was made on game version 1.01, you will keep playing the 1.01 version of the game if you load it, and only new games you start would actually have the changes in 1.1, or whatever. I'm not saying they'll do that, but it's not all that uncommon these days. I could see PoE version 1.0-1.09 or whatever being mostly bugfixes that don't invalidate savegames, and 1.1 introducing rules changes (attribute bonuses, combat rules, etc.) and requiring a new game. I can't really think of any games that do that (but I don't doubt that they exist, it depends on how they are structures and how simple they are) but I can't see it happening to Pillars of Eternity, because Pillars of Eternity pulls on a lot of assets as the game is being run. After a major patch, you'd basically have to have two installations of the game and the size would grow for every save/version.

I would say yes. The thing is, when you DO attempt this in the main game, you'll squeeze everything you can out of the game. The Backer Beta doesn't allow that, but drops you mid-game with average gear. You haven't been able to stack all the available resources meant for a party in your favour. You haven't been able to do that quest that gives you a macguffin of awesome +3, and you haven't been able to sneak through the dungeon of murderloot to steal the thunderous rapist +8 from the guarded chest. So I'd say that at least stripping your team-mates off their gear and having them walk the walk of shame back home is nothing short of fair.

You don't really need to spec in a specific weapon class with rogues. It only gives you +6 Acc. With Reckless Assault (modal)ability you get +8 acc and x1.2 dmg. Id put that point into something like two weapon fighting. The fact that you can get +Accuracy from something else doesn't invalidate bonus Accuracy from other sources. +6 Accuracy still isn't bad.

For these (truly excellent, excellent) graphs, could you get into the habit of marking down the version info? Because as things change (maybe due to the graphs, after all) this could really, really confuse new people that'll show up just around release or that isn't keeping up with the thread(s). I think that they felt that there'd been too many games these past decades that were clear on what was going on under the hood and said "Eh, **** it." Who needs transparency? Eh, 20%->30% won't really change that much, I imagine. Also, it doesn't even address the fact that duelist style (not the Talent specifically) is still majorly underperforming compared to the alternatives. Even if the change from 20% to 30% would make it viable compared to dual-wielding or two-handers once you get the talent, which I sincerely doubt, you'll be objectively better off not doing it at all until you get the talent. And I love that he says "I don't really want that [conversion of Miss-to-Hit/Graze-to-Hit/Hit-to-Crit] to be the entire basis of a viable weapon style [duelist]", just to confirm that he hasn't seen any of the suggestions on the forum discussing alternative buffs or changes to the duelist style or the concerned Talent.

While I agree completely, I do see how it'd be troublesome to do that for all the CNPC:s. Maybe one day... D:

That's the only thing I can think of too, yeah, chanters doesn't appear to be the musical instruments guy (at least not represented mechanically), so if one really wants to play a keytar, I guess you're SOL.

These graphs and such are amazing, Roguelike. Please don't stop.

The problem really isn't melee vs. ranged in the way you portray it. The problem is that ranged DPS is superior to melee DPS in virtually all contexts. You may still want a melee tank, but that's for tanking, to keep them away from the ranged damage-dealers.

No-one said they'd be removable. I think the tattoo idea is great, but they absolutely shouldn't be removable. Upgradable, maybe, additive, maybe, but absolutely not upgradeable. Anyone using them should consider them a permanent upgrade to the character, a build choice, like a Talent or Ability. permanent and non-removable tattoos is, in our opinion, a bad idea. is only one (or two) slots for weapons. sssssoooooo... our monk equips the Flaming Fist tattoo he finds at level 3 and which is balanced for level 3. he is now stuck with it? am s'posing you could make the tattoo increase in power as you level, but again, what if halfway through the game you decide that the Bite o' the Malefic Spider is much kewler? hell, if you knew the spider bite tattoo would be available later in the game, you would never have equipped the damn flamey fist tattoo. would you force a fighter or rogue to equip a weapon and be stuck with it for the duration o' the game? 'course not. as an aside, we always laugh when we see Flaming Fist. is a rather notorious gay bar by the same name. the etymology o' the term predates BG and is rather... colorful. HA! Good Fun! To me, that's like saying that Talents should be respeccable, too, because you may decide at one point that you'd want something else. The comparison to rogue or fighter being stuck with a weapon they equipped for the entire game doesn't hold water, because there'd be nothing preventing the monk from changing his weapons. And like I said, upgradable, or even additive, so.. yeah, there's, like, a whole sentence there that reads like you didn't even read my post, Gromnir.

No.