Grand_Commander13

I think Obsidian is a little bit past the phase of work where they're getting their voiceovers done. With planning them, at the very least. In a long shot though, if there's still time, look up the lady who did and just have her do something like that. Best Shoulder Devil NA.

Well now your fighters get attacks of opportunity to really hurt people who leave melee combat with them, but that only counts for targets they have "engaged". The issue is that either BB Fighter can engage a lot of guys, or the AI just attacks the first enemy it sees. Either way, the result is that any stat without an offensive component (Constitution and Resolve) are never useful on back-line party members. You can either give them offensive components (I still like the idea of tying a combination of their activity and their not being hit giving them the ability to use a per-rest skill as per-encounter) or make the back line more likely to be attacked. Or maybe both. They'd have to rework the hit system for that to happen, so I doubt they can. Right now more accurate characters (i.e. ones with high Dexterity) will critically hit more often for their attacks and spells.

Nerfing the crap out of your mages is not a good way to make your fighters more useful; the fighters aren't being made cool to play, the mages are being made lame to play. If you're going to make your mage epically powerful, you need to make your fighter just as awesome.

Well you can't add crit chance to Perception, since crit chance is part of Dexterity's kit as part of accuracy (which itself plays in to both damage and duration). I think that interrupts can be important to everybody, so if Perception was simply improved to 5% increase in interrupt chance per level, I can see it being more worth points for most characters. Resolve's concentration boost could be buffed to match, but that still leaves people who don't plan on taking hits not needing it. Constitution and Resolve are kind of the odd stats out in that they're purely defensive. If the fights were made in such a way that the AI didn't always respect your front line it wouldn't even be a problem. You don't want the AI always rushing everyone past the fighter's engagement limit out to the back line, but there needs to be a lot less of this "just gonna pound on this heavily armored dude while the naked archer perforates my buddies." If you can't force them to sit still, they shouldn't happily oblige you anyway. Then, with interrupts and resistances to them more powerful, maybe we'll get a broader distribution of stats.

Meh, not the best example. Horrid class balance means combat difficulty on Normal is swingy as hell, depending on your party composition more than on your player skill. Using only one mage in the party.

Those lions are something else. I went to fight them for a lark, and everything was fine until they critted my main character twice in a row. There was some... Oddness with the monk's wound system, or something; I got taken down to 25% health from the first takedown.

Baldur's Gate was easy. If I can play through it on Normal without thinking it's too hard, then it's easy. As evidenced by me thinking Dragon Age: Origins on Normal is an appropriate challenge for fun.

To say nothing of Godlike.

I certainly hope that they take far more inspiration from Planescape: Torment than they do from Baldur's Gate 2. I'll admit I enjoyed BG2 right up until you got Imoen back (at which point it took a dive), but Torment was something else altogether. Lots of fond memories there. But then the complaints in the original post really have nothing to do with any particular game. I mean, you want a reason to play a race other than human? This isn't some war game where figuring out the optimal stats for your class is part of the fun. Why not ask for a mechanical inventive not to play a male, while you're at it? As for the attributes being dissimilar to the AD&D games, all I can say is thank goodness. You got your vancian magic, but don't go campaigning for them to take that horrible attribute system back too.

I don't think we're meant to do much reporting anyway. If they really wanted community feedback for bugs they'd use Mantis or something, not threads in a forum. Plus, it seems most of the bugs we've been finding are known already, so the beta is more for our benefit than Obsidian's.

You have no idea how happy I get every time I hear that the developers wondered "BG2 or PS:T?" and went with PS:T. Obsidian, I salute you.

I'm pretty sure PoE will be between BG2 and PS:T on the character spectrum, considering how few companions there are and how much work was put into them. And really, BG and BG2 shouldn't be placed in the same spot, because BG2 tried a lot harder to make your companions unique. I think of all the things we can trust Obsidian to do, trusting them to make a good story with good characters in it should be easy. They're not holding them back because they're not there, they're holding them because because they want more people to play the beta. Heck, even with all they're holding back, they still have tons of people saying "I have beta access, but I don't want to spoil myself." Imagine how bad it would be if you had some companions and part of the main quest in it.

We've known what the attributes do for a while now. How is it that only now when you're playing the game do you dislike it? They've been talking about the genius barbarian and "dumb muscle wizard" for at least a year now. Each attribute even has its effect listed right there when you're putting points into it. Might? "Damage and healing." About the only thing that you might need to do is clarify that yes, in this game it's not just magical damage, because some people might make that assumption. But that's a quick fix with the description, not a lengthy overhaul of the attribute system. The biggest problem I have with attributes is that my build seems to always be the same. "Well, gonna max out damage and accuracy; eh, better bring the others up a bit too so they're at least not shameful." I don't see how the system would be any better if I maxed out just Might for fighters, just Dexterity for rangers, and just Intelligence for mages.

Did you play a tabletop game where your character's soul was the measure of their power? Yeah, I didn't think so. One of the key design goals of Pillars of Eternity was every attribute being useful to every character. You can rail against that all you like, but you're not going to change anything.

Well, the godlike do get to select a body shape, while all of the other races are locked into one. So that should be something, at least.

Pretty hard, since the character needs to be constantly moving for it to work. It's one thing in a first-person game, where movement is very easy and you always have a very good idea of where you're headed, but in a top-down game like this where you need to click it would be super-tough to get mounted combat right without automating almost all of it.

I'd just like to +1 pretty much all of this. If you do combat "right" you won't have any trouble with the AI attacking your back line, and I didn't find myself doing a whole lot of spellcasting (though I did like to start fights off with a fireball since I knew they'd sit still until I finished). All in all the combat lacked much strategic depth being "just junk it", though I'm not buying the game for the combat so I can't say I find this to be a terrible thing. Still, if Obsidian wants the game to be about the combat and not just the story then they're going to have to think real hard and scramble to adjust the fights.

I think part of the challenge of the game is managing your health so that your fighter isn't the only one absorbing all of the blows. I've been getting BB Priest in on the action, and as a Ranger I really enjoyed having a free melee character for my front line as well. It's also a good reason to set BB Rogue to melee mode (in addition to the fact that melee characters seem to not donk out like ranged ones). I super-conserve spells too, so the fact that I can get pretty far on Normal shows that this problem can be overcome. It would still be nice to see Constitution increase Health at a higher rate than it increases Stamina though.

The whole idea is to avoid having stats a class doesn't care about in the first place. If mages could get damage, duration, and AoE on the same stat, they'd max it out every time. Since damage is on a whole different stat, they have to do a bit more thinking about their build. The problem is that back-liners are still probably going to dump Resolve and Constitution because they don't apply to most fights and probably won't help much in the fights where they do (having 50% more health doesn't mean much if you get shredded anyway). At least front-liners care about everything.

Use the stash Ben? All joking aside, I do think an "all to Stash" button would be great. I'm visualizing the loot window in my head, and I don't even know how to intentionally send something to the stash if I still have room.

What if a Concentration bar was added to the character? It increments upwards based directly on the amount of Resolve the character has, and if it fills up before they're successfully interrupted then their next per-rest spell is per-encounter instead. This way, Resolve is good for front-liners (they don't want their in-the-thick-of-things skills to be interrupted) and back-liners (they want to bring the hurt) alike.

I don't even know why there's a limit, since its only purpose is to force me to go back to town to sell my gear when I still have rests remaining, because if I carry on then I'm losing out on money I could be making.

Having dump stats for any individual character is one thing, but right now the issue is that there are characters who get no benefit from Resolve, and the bonus from Perception isn't all that big either. Resolve, I think, is easier to solve: it needs an offensive bonus of some sort. Since its current bonus is to allowing you to cast when you get hit, something related to skills wouldn't go amiss. Perhaps a percent chance to make a use of a per-rest skill count as a per-encounter instead? Or maybe give all skill users an instant-use activated ability to treat their next per-rest skill as per-encounter, and have Resolve affect the stamina cost to do it (it might cost 50 stamina per spell level, for instance, and Resolve drops the cost by 4%). Perception is tougher. I really like the theory of what it's trying to do. In fact, when I was making my Ranger I was like "Interruption? Sign me up!" I guess it's just not as useful as it sounds, though. Does it only interrupt spell casts, or can attacks be interrupted as well?

I'd think being able to lock it at thirty frames per second would help, but I'm sure that the beta will include some optimizations.

I've had this happen to me, but it's only happened once that I can think of. It was BB Mage for me, but from the screenshot it doesn't seem to be restricted to him.