Grand_Commander13

You'd have to completely change up the hit system, because right now crit chance is based entirely on your accuracy roll: Dexterity is therefore the only stat that gives +chance to crit. I suppose Perception could widen the window that means that a hit would crit instead of deal regular damage, but that's not very intuitive.

What I'm saying is that Constitution and Might interact very similarly to Perception and Resolve: while Resolve allows you to shrug off interrupts entirely, Constitution raises your health pool so that the damage you take matters less.

I thought Might only influence healing you applied to other characters, not healing applied to that character from any source.

Constitution affects how much of your life you take in damage. If you have twice as much stamina, the percent of your life you take in damage is halved. If you ignore heals, it's mechanically the same as giving you a percent chance not to take damage, or a percent damage reduction.

The combat should be there for challenge or for pacing, not for dopamine injections. I should be like "yay, a fight; this doesn't feel like walking through a large, empty hall!" There should be something wherever the fights are gating me off from, or I should have been allowed to see that there's nothing there, but the kill XP is just a way to make cheap fights feel good without there having been any thought put into the pacing. I'm not an anti-kill XP fanatic, but it's far simpler to say "you get XP for completing objectives" rather than being forced to balance XP around the possibility that the player might do the peaceful outcome for the increased XP, then kill everyone anyway. And since games have been done just fine without kill XP before, I see no reason why having experience points for each kill is "best for Pillars of Eternity".

Yeah, I kind of guessed that's what you meant. It's just that by that logic, there are two attributes that have to do with damage too. If you don't think interruption should be a thing that's one thing, but it's not like the "this attribute is offensive, this attribute is defensive" paradigm is unique.

I'm confused by your use of the term "storyboarding". Is this related to life paths?

Or at the very least adjust cast range so it's the distance to the closest part of the perimeter and not to the center.

The really laughable part is how he says that Dragon Age: Origins deserves the "spiritual successor" mantle more than Pillars of Eternity. Based exclusively on kill XP and the attribute system, I'd imagine, because other than that it's mechanically nothing like Baldur's Gate. Oh, sure, it captures the feeling and fun of the old Infinity Engine games, but since Pillars of Eternity is no spiritual successor I guess that doesn't matter; it's all about the attributes and the experience drops. Never mind that PoE keeps the exploration and the deep dialogue trees, it changed things up on the attributes too much so it's automatically terrible.

The beta is lowercase "early access". Capitalized "Early Access" requires the game actually be up for sale.

... Which two stats? I thought only Perception made you more likely to stun lock someone.

Yeah, a system with a single attribute for damage is unintuitive. Let's go ahead and go back to D&D, because, hey, if you bought the right source book you can take an alternate class feature or a few feats that allow you to use your INT like STR, so it's completely flexible. It doesn't matter that it would be stupid to make a video game with so many character options: use it to prove the point anyway. These people obviously don't understand D&D, otherwise they'd see its inherent superiority. Please, don't stick around. There are plenty of people pouting and crying about an attribute system that most people on these boards are fine with. We need less vocal minority around here, so we can actually discuss how to balance the attributes without every thread becoming an argument about turning Pillars of Eternity into Baldur's Gate 3.

So basically... What is the advantage of the current system with the exception that it's better?

The problem is simple: you and your fellow whiners heard that they would be taking some very broad aspects of some old RPGs and in your heads decided that meant that Obsidian was making Baldur's Gate 3. If this imagined promise causes you to snap at Obsidian for Pillars of Eternity when it's finally released, you'll be savaging the only company willing to make old-style RPGs; you'll be complaining about the ten or twenty percent of peripheral content that's different when the core stuff – what they were selling the game on and what everyone got so excited – is all right there.

The difference between a pledge and a pre-order is that a pledge involves way more commitment: you pay up front, and it's not refundable if you change your mind or the game doesn't ship. With a pre-order, you don't pay until you have a product in your hand and you can cancel at any time.

I find the zealotry of the AD&D crowd to be admirable but misplaced. Every single thread about the attributes has to be about how "unintuitive" a system that says "You want damage? Increase this attribute" is. Never mind that this thread was originally supposed to be about whether the design goal of the game is being met: can you build each class with any mixture of attributes and still have a viable way to play them that really emphasizes the strength those attributes bring?

It's nice to know that the DRM-free crowd is being even-handed about things.

It would have to be intangible, because Arcanum was almost nothing like either.

... You know that Bioware, the people who made Baldur's Gate, called Dragon Age: Origins a spiritual successor, right? They changed the mechanics up, down, left, and right, and they were pretty upfront about it. Cry foul all you want, but they never said they would implement IWD's exact combat system any more than they promised a tearful mid-game reunion with "Blimoen" and an insightful examination of what can change the nature of a man.

I'd like to quote the Kickstarter page now: Doesn't sound to me like they're failing to live up to any promises. They promised to deliver on what made those games fun, not on exact copies of them or their mechanics. If they had promised to make Baldur's Gate 3 I never would have pledged.

Don't forget dexterity: effects don't last as long if they have a poor hit roll, and that damage is just as meaningless as the effects without accuracy. So max might, dexterity, and intelligence. Really only constitution and resolve are the odd men out: they only mean something if you get hit, and right now it's easy enough for your ranged characters to almost never get hit. Perception may be weak right now, but it can be balanced upwards so the increase in interrupts is very valuable for mitigating damage to your front line.

You got it right there: magic resistance. For them to be difficult, they need to be resistant to magic. If wizards weren't specifically nerfed against them, there would be no difficulty. Listen, I'm really surprised to find someone trying to say that fighters are just as powerful as wizards in AD&D. Usually people make the argument about wizards only being able to kill so many people per day, so they keep fighters around so the mooks don't tire them out, but trying to straight up say the system gives them equivalent power levels is new. This has been a settled issue for a long time.

Egads, the people the wizard keeps around to deal with the ones who aren't worth a spell ends up getting the most kills? Seriously, what a useless metric to track how powerful a character is. You want to kill people without using spells? Don't look to your mage. You want to kill someone who's a real threat? Wizard powers, activate!

Yeah, I think as soon as you have a stable release that has items not disappear on game load, push it out. It's making testing hard.

A fair point, Joker, a fair point.