Valorian

I largely ignored your concerns because I've noticed that often, as of late, your concerns are irrational fears (of losing the "IE feels", whatever that means to you). Like, the magic missile is not red, it is purple instead. The selection circle is too thick, the color is wrong. The woman plate isn't different enough. Make it like IE. In this vein, you think that an action queue will somehow disrupt.. something in combat. It will not.

An action queue is not necessary for this game. Action queues are generally for console games where you do heaps of repetitive actions over and over and generally know what actions you're going to do. If the game is interesting tactically at all, you should be reacting to the battle, making your decisions upon what is happening in the moment, not having a pre-determined idea of what you're going to do. That is, I believe, one of the design goals - to try and engage the player in the combat mechanics and have slightly more active micro management of units than what the IE games had. There should be no need to just go in and queue up the same spells and ****, or a chain of spells. I really do not want the feel of the game compromised by what I see as a "consolized" feature. Use the pause button and the slow function and micro manage your characters. All units have a recovery timer, and during their recovery period you can assign them their next action which will override their auto-attack. An action queue is perfect for this game. This is a game with 6 people you control, where everyone (not just casters) has lots of active abilities to use. Constant micromanaging can be fun, to a point. If I find that a particular combination of abilities and spells is very effective if executed in a particular order against certain enemies, I want to be able to queue these actions. You don't have to, if you're concerned it will feel like you're playing a console game.

An action queue would be neat, yes.

@Gfted1 Expert mode does come with a baggage, but I expect maim/kill will be a separate toggle too (that you can't use if Expert is enabled).

I don't think you'd want to reload. If your character is maimed, and therefore alive, you've just possibly defeated a tough encounter. You'd just need to rest... Alternatively, you could turn on expert mode and outright die when you reach 0 health to avoid the "inconvenience" of being maimed.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66100-death-dying/?p=1443390 "The Stamina/Health mechanics still work as they have previously. The one exception is how Maimed works on non-Expert settings. Maimed is now only a stop-gap before death. I.e., even on ordinary difficulty settings, any character can die if they are currently Maimed and lose their remaining Health. As before, Maimed characters have terrible penalties to their Accuracy and all defenses but move at full speed. Using a Maimed character in combat is asking for them to get killed. The reason for this change was to prevent the use of Maimed characters as immortal trap-sniffers or recipients of an enemy's hard first volley." The maimed character's remaining Health is 1, unless it's been changed so that people automatically regain more than 1 point of H. after getting reduced to 0 the first time.

I like the models. Perhaps the posture is a bit unconventional, but why not? It's the burden of a heavy soul. Also, his barbarian's outfit is delightful , it makes me want to play a rogue. Tough choices.

This is not about UI convenience. Weapon sets allow players to switch weapons during combat to get a valuable tactical advantage, too valuable to cover 4 scenarios by default. That's the entire point, yes.

Now all characters start with 4 weapon sets (it was 2 before) accessible in combat? What about the previously mentioned talents that increase the number of available weapon sets? I suppose it's possible it was just for the demo or the character had these talents.

... Maybe we could introduce some kind of iron contamination, so that most looted weapons were significantly less useful. Your iron shall forever be contaminated, for you have not defeated the Iron Throne!

Since it seems like there is a more FO style barter system for the merchants (i.e. merchants have finite currency, but value on items can be traded for other items) I don't see this as a huge problem. There is also the a level of diminishing returns on attempting to balance loot/currency economy because in the end players are going to break it if they want. If someone feels the need to drag every.single. dagger they find around with them, more power to them. Let them be ones that break the economy as opposed to the economy be balanced around and forcing me to skin every enemy down to their last follicles in order to afford camping supplies. I expect there will be a "take all" button, which is certainly going to help you with "forcing me to skin every enemy down to their last follicles" (sounds very time consuming, indeed). You cannot balance the economy around players that choose to ignore loot. Otherwise, I think we can agree that this is one of the reasons to not load enemies with additional weapon sets. I wouldn't like finding 2 or more weapons (+ shield) on every enemy capable of wielding them, on top of everything else.

Here's another observation. Enemies drop their possessions when they , so filling two or more of their weapon set slots results in much more loot. Much more loot could lead to a destabilized economy. I suppose it would be all right for archers to have a backup melee weapon. Melee combatants will do fine with a single weapon set.

[End Interaction], especially fitting for objects.

Yeah, the enemy A.I. does need work. I mentioned it in another thread about the ooze and other enemies. Although, if the enemy changes weapons, there will be a 2 second delay as per Josh's post. So while the enemy changes weapons, you'll have a 2 second window to exploit that. eg. Have a couple of ranged attackers shooting at the archers while a melee fighter runs in, enemy changes weapons and can't do anything for 2 seconds and dead enemy! Thankfully, the combat is not so fast. Two seconds is a rather short interval and such a tiny penalty compared to the benefit you're getting from swapping weapons. I'd like less focus on the weapon set switch so I'm in favor of enemies (and characters) being less reliant on weapon swapping - this can be achieved by increasing the penalty for swapping weapons in combat. It will no longer be a no-brainer choice and the AI wouldn't need to use it, and instead it would stick to the equipped weapon set. I do wonder if there's a penalty for fighting with a ranged weapon in melee range.

Two seconds is a tiny penalty for the benefit of hitting 40% harder or getting 25 deflection.

Nice. I'm a big fan of secondary effects that work like this (not just poisons, but also other debilitating effects). Adds so much to combat variety. Also! Maybe some enemies are less vulnerable to mind* affecting spells * *, or crits * * and sneak attacks * *. Not immune, just less susceptible; e.g. instead of suffering +50% damage it's just +25%. *Specifically due to their mind being different, and not because of a high Will defense.

I might've missed it, since the stuff scrolls so quickly, but this fire effect didn't seem to be logged in the combat log. I was just curious... is that because of an intentional setting (only show some things in combat log, or something to that effect)? Or is the combat log simply incomplete at the moment? Also, I believe you've said in the past that mousing-over an entry in the combat log will show all the parameters that led to the resulting graze/hit/miss/effect, etc.. Is that still true, and is there an option to show an expanded combat log by default? That would be interesting to know, such as knowing that fortitude checks are being made against the spider's poison (if it's poisonous) after each bite.

Complexity tends to be hard to understand (at first), or complicated, if you will. Complexity is good. Interesting tactical choices in games with brilliant combat systems tend to be complex. Pong is an example of a game that doesn't need to be complicated.

I'm surprised that there's no recovery time or another penalty for switching weapon sets in combat. It would be more interesting if more factors were involved in making the decision about swapping weapons apart from 'this weapon hits this armor harder'. Attribute minimums. Nothing wrong with that. Playable races are not the only living beings in Eora, other creatures also have attributes. OE will simply decide that a value of 8 or 7 or 5 is the minimum for a given player character to function properly (without having considerable trouble with moving or thinking). The average intellect of a kitty in Eora could be 3, for example. They don't need to provide you with the option to play a human with the mental capacity of a kitty. A higher guard could be okay. Although, I'd like to point out that when combat animations that simulate breathing and other 'being alive and emotional' stuff are also applied to certain other creatures that use a humanoid skeleton (e.g. skeleton warriors, zombies) it looks even more jarring.

I would like to be able to select a talent at level 1 to imprint a style from the get go, but yes, skills are also important. @Aslinng Josh Sawyer listed the racial bonuses a few days ago and noted that they're not final. Eora's dwarves are kind of strong! That's fine, though there's lots of +Might already so I'd prefer an accent on Constitution.

Borrowed.. meaning identical? Me no likey icons transplanted from other games. @Gfted1 Yes, but you could put a ranged weapon in the 4th slot, for example. I hope it's still 2 base weapon slots.

Really? I thought the base is 2. Maybe the character raised the number with talents.

It's nice and pretty. I watched the character creation process (not many attribute points to distribute, though I suppose you could garner some by lowering attributes from 10 to . Then I summoned my immense resolve and stopped watching in an attempt to preserve the surprise factor.

Is it possible to invest 20 points into a single attribute, increasing it to 28, instead of increasing 4 attributes to 13?

It sounds more like wizard pets could be a talent, eventually. Speaking of customization with optional stuff... fighting style talents pls.