erragal

I am having this bug and have posted a separate thread. I haven't checked in the game yet if it's a display bug or an intended change but I agree completely that it should be laid out as part of the penalty for the class (this one in particular seems way outside the bounds of any of the other melee subclass penalties and really everything except the wizard schools (which are there for flavor and clearly indicated))

Is it seriously intended that the Berserker sub-class of the barbarian has -3- less ability options and no capper for his signature ability? I'd like to know if this is intended or something that got screwed up at the last minute. It certainly makes the class as a whole lose most of its' luster (Especially considering I wanted to use the Spirit tornado side...) I could at least see him having a completely -unique- three passive tree with different abilities, but to actually remove a whole tier from a class that while very fun has a narrow pool of actives doesn't seem to match the design of the rest of the game. Is there a single other melee subclass they did this with? EDIT: I mean ghost heart still has heal companion which doesn't even make sense. Just seems really peculiar.

I'm going to stream my game from time to time this weekend. Very roleplay/in character where I'll try to have fun with the dialogue and even voice some of the characters. Analytical, immersive fun with a character rife for moral conundrums. Hope to test the immersion of the game. http://www.twitch.tv/postpigeon Here's a brief background to set the motivations for my playthrough. Outenne Death Godlike, Druid Old Vailian Dissident - The crispy carapace of decaying beetle shells weathered translucent after fortnights of rats gnawing for scraps of delicious insect innnards tastes of rotten lemon; physically bearable but conceptually revolting. So I try not to lick my lips often because then I get to thinking about it rather than enjoying the oddity of fragrant citrus breath. So it's not all bad, being me. Just mostly, especially at the start. Frankly I'm bloody ugly and the constant peeling chunks of exoskeleton flaking off my face doesn't give me very long to flash a winning personality. Everyone asks me, “Outenne, so how did you survive being a disgusting demon baby?”. Ok, so they don't actually say those words but the narrowed eyes and clenched jaws send the right signals. Mostly luck I would say, as everyone in my swampy backwards Old Vailian fishing village was covered in mud, filth, and a thick mucus-like oil the resident 'healer' made to keep the more dangerous predators away. No surprise a place like this has a grotesque cursed child. In a way I was an asset to a ****hole like that. Almost a symbol of their identity and what with all that magical potential accompanying my creepy affliction face it was only a few seasons before I was 'donated' to that village shaman figure. My actual parents were gone before daybreak the first night I was away but how can anyone blame them. How would you feel watching yourself birth a crusty bug faced monster? Beatings, queer almost sexual psychological tortures and an occasional dose of insightful simple life philosophical ramblings comprised my formative years. Eora is a hard place and I learned to read, concoct disgusting yet effective tinctures, and how to run a cult. That, of course, was the racket he had going. Yet he never treated it as a game to be played with the people, but a challenge to protect them from their own limitations. Never bend the world to your will, instead guide others through the maze. I don't think much of his name but on the ledger sheet of life I consider that crazy swamp rat and I even. All things must change and civilization won't ever let you forget it. My village, as many others in Old Vailian, was swallowed up in a rash of raiding from the Eastern Reaches Vailian Republics. Fancy representatives in their poofy clothes extend the arm of trade only to drag us down and stomp the entire place into the ground. Cannons, raping, enslavement...the standard operation. By this point my primal magic had come into its own and assuming the form of a boar I slipped away during the chaos. Still regrets that I couldn't be stronger, couldn't have predicted this would happen. Seeing the predatory drive of civilization as I began my journey to the Eastern Reaches; the effects of this colonial era leaves me cold. I sit here bells after the full moon watching a Revuan drifter attempt to catch crabs in the dark; the only time he can find a way to eat without being accosted. I sit here and know that this type of world, this 'society', is not the way I want things to be.

That's the first time I've heard ANYONE accuse Pillars of Eternity of being simulationist. Are you really sure you've played the game?Are you in love with hyperbole? Do you normally throw out other people's modifier words to twist their sentences into a narrative that allows you to try and attack their credibility?More. More. More. > And it is, factually, more of a simulation of fantasy combat scenarios than IE. As an rpg it is never actually a simulation. That makes no sense...the entire point is to represent complex minutiae with numbers. I'm really concerned that you still don't grasp abstraction layer yet. Please open your mind to new ideas, stop living in the past. It's almost frightening how neurotic your social interaction style is. Do you want to voice chat me? Do you need an irl friend to calm you down? Did you get bit by too many spiders as a kid? I can't fathom why you take something so innocuous, non confrontational, and factual and attempt to construct a conflict out of it. I'm really worried about you. What the difference between sensuki's "attempt to construct a conflict" and your passive-aggressive escaltion of the those conflicts? Your telling him to chill out and then giving him reason to react that way at the same time. Did I create the thread in all caps? I am definitely not escalating, I'm diverting. I want him to be a better human being and argue in good faith. I don't actually care at all about the design outcomes of the game;I gave obsidian money because I trusted the product they would create. Reason to react what way? He chose a comment I made to another person, and intentionally misappropriated what i said to construct a false narrative. That's deceptive, period. I am certainly confrontational but I am not misleading in what I take issue with. And considering how many people have repeatedly pointed out his predatory argument framing to no avail, you are just enabling him by claiming he has an ' excuse '. There is no excuse. Sadly these aren't the EJ forums or this wouldn't even be necessary.

That's the first time I've heard ANYONE accuse Pillars of Eternity of being simulationist. Are you really sure you've played the game? Are you in love with hyperbole? Do you normally throw out other people's modifier words to twist their sentences into a narrative that allows you to try and attack their credibility? More. More. More. > And it is, factually, more of a simulation of fantasy combat scenarios than IE. As an rpg it is never actually a simulation. That makes no sense...the entire point is to represent complex minutiae with numbers. I'm really concerned that you still don't grasp abstraction layer yet. Please open your mind to new ideas, stop living in the past. It's almost frightening how neurotic your social interaction style is. Do you want to voice chat me? Do you need an irl friend to calm you down? Did you get bit by too many spiders as a kid? I can't fathom why you take something so innocuous, non confrontational, and factual and attempt to construct a conflict out of it. I'm really worried about you.

Your last point is why there's endurance/health. Their abstraction layer is actually that most attacks aren't causing physical damage but exertion /weariness/fatigue. Taking raw health damage is actually really dangerous with perma death on. But perhaps that is the misconception overall: this game is aiming to be more simulationist than the original ie games actually were and it doesn't sit well with some people.

No it's a penalty that affects characters that move. Design a character that doesn't need to and you have no penalty. This is easy enough even you should understand. In fact I know you do because you just bragged about your awesome characters you designed in 3.X that bypassed moving so they wouldn't be stopped from full attacking! The imbalance is not AS severe that's true. But that is a bar so low to clear it's barely worth mentioning. It also does not logically follow that just because casters don't completely own non-casters that melee is "just fine." Why are you focused on casters anyways? I mentioned ranged weapons multiple times now. I also never said it had to be incentivized. I said there had to be a real reason to use melee weapons. What's the reason if devs keep penalizing it? No they objectively cannot. I DMed that stupid system for a long time (and I never had to handle casters with kid gloves) so you are seriously tempting me to go so very very off topic but I am going to resist. Why are implying that casters don't need to move? If anything melee characters should need less drastic repositioning once they achieve engagement in this game. Casters are significantly squish and really don't want to get engaged upon or directly attacked. It affects one type of melee build that shouldnt exist at all because it's an exploitative way to play. And as for your dm skills: you were soft, and lacking creativity. Unbalanced parties shouldnt work prior to level 8\9 spells and even then can be taken advantage of. All your bluster and system bitterness just tells me you let the rules play you.

You calling it a bad system doesn't make it bad. You know that right? Using extremist qualitative statements like that to further your narrative is the issue. That persuades no one. It's a system you don't agree with. Many people do agree with it. From that we can conclude it is likely neither inherently good nor inherently bad (like most systems). These talents aren't arbitrary, are they? You only use that word because they legitimize a system you disagree with. They then create more variance in playstyles between individual avatars, not less.

For me the absence of options punishing excessive running create an optimal way to play that doesn't represent any sort of a fantasy combat scenario. I love the idea of a hyper mobile character being enabled by a series of choices. This makes it a playstyle for those interested while properly representing how superheric it is to actually fight that way.

Yes you did indicate that because you said you could get aoos (s means plural). So if you want to have a meaningless semantic argument you should have said AN AoO.You aren't bringing some sort of incredible revelation to light about AoO's and Engagement. I already brought up it's purpose in my first post in this thread where I said the exact same thing. Inability to full attack after movement wasn't to create decisions it was a screw up by the designers. One of many. I am not bringing up 3.0/.5 etc. because it's a great system. Quite the opposite. I did not list every single way players came up with to circumvent the movement penalties. I already mentioned using reach weapons and yes charging is another way. Thanks for proving my point. The players response to penalizing movement is finding a way to circumvent those penalties. They didn't revel in the "tactical decision making this created" anymore than you yourself did. Please keep agreeing with me. Of course the absolute easiest way was to just use archery or spells. We see the same effect in PoE. I don't have time to explain how wrong you are. Melee people don't dominate the 3.X at any level. There are whole essays on this stuff but that's irrelevant. What's relevant are the similarities between the two systems vis a vis movement and melee and the player's responses to them. Why should movement penalize melee fighting? Because realizarm? Bad reason. This isn't a simulationist game. Players need real reasons to prefer a melee weapon. If we go by realism everyone would be using pirate style but they took that bug out of the game. EDIT: I am also aware you were not referring to 3.X exploits. This movement speed penalty does NOT stop kiting! You yourself have admitted this punishes MELEE more. It's not a movement speed penalty, it's a recovery penalty which applies to all characters equally. It's not targeted at anyone. Also PoE does not have the raw caster imbalance disparity of 3e so no incentive for melee needs to be given. I still can't parse your argument from the other stuff you said. Melee people could, at one point, output more raw damage with more safety at certain level breakpoints in 3e. Most people just had nice gms that were afraid to punish the casters fragile egos.

Yeah and I've repeatedly mentioned how this is represented statistically. Why don't you like numerical representation of combat factors? Do you still not understand what abstraction is?

I will reply this time but this is completely incorrect. You are simply against player input. Saying something is incorrect does not make it so. Holding your ears and yelling lalala will not make the other ideas dissappear. This goes back to the roots of pnp combat design. You aren't representing everything on a one to one basis. Why have reflex saves for damage spells if that isn't your characters natural ability to roll out of the way. Micro. Macro is you anticipate where the enemy caster is aiming for and you move prior to his spell animation completes. Scatter your party strategically (player input) you begin your abilities from your new position while his is wasted. This is macro movement. Player input is all over the place. Trying to reframe the argument doesn't make it go away. Microing a character so he never has to make any statistical combat rolls on defense while consistently making offensive combat rolls is using a macro movement systems to circumvent gameplay and create a rudimentary micro system. It would make sense if that was the way the game was designed. However the existence of engagement (A fact that exists in this game. Non negotiable at this stage) informs us what philosophy has been taken. Attempting to say it's an incorrect philosophy is too late....why not accept what this game is and try to work within the given framework to improve implementation. Railing against reality may help you feel better but it's wasted energy.

The issue is fundamentally what moving your character represents in a squad based tactical simulation versus what you want it to represent. It's not that you have to specialize in moving to be good at moving. It's that moving and doing something else at the same time is a skill in and of itself. Moving your character doesn't represent ' dodging an arrow ' or ' avoiding a fireball '. It represents your character repositioning wholesale several yards in order to have a new tactical position. If you are making that decision what it means is your original position is untenable. If you pick your original positions better then you shouldn't have to move as often. Introducing a penalty on your damage output when you move creates an incentive to pick your position carefully. The playstyles you want them to enable don't make logical sense. Think about what you want them to actually represent for a moment. Visualize what a guy with a two handed sword running backwards swinging it full speed whole never stopping to plant his feet or aim actually would look like. All the while somehow never actually getting in range to be hit himself. This is why kiting in games like this while you may enjoy it from a visceral playstyles perspective are things they're trying to excise. It's a wholly illogical conceptual idea.

Maybe if you spent more time fighting in virtual environments you'd know what you were talking about. PoE is not based on a pnp system though it certainly has a few DnD touchstones.For example engagement is just attacks of opportunity in 3rd edition DnD and it is also impossible to take a move action and full attack(usually) in 3rd edition. Sound familiar?It's certainly based on pnp combat abstraction principles.Well aoo threat is completely different in that you could take aoos against anyone in your threat range instead of being limited by your engagement number. I actually prefer the PoE system because it's ludicrous to assume you can just whack whoever walks by you if your attention is on existing combatants.I'm not sure the point you're trying to make about move + full attack. Please be more coherent?And as for my virtual combat time...I know what you guys are talking about its how I know you want to exploit systems, not have a balanced game experience. Impassioned cognitive dissonance is still, ultimately, dissonant. No actually youre limited in the amount of AoOs you can make. It's only once per turn without a feat that let's you do it equal to your dexterity modifier. Please know what you are talking about before you speak. So those are the engagement limits of 3e dnd and it's clones. But the designers were smart enough to realize that people wanted SOME movement to occur so they added the 5 foot step and the tumble skill. I was very coherent but my mistake was assuming you knew anything about DnD which I shouldn't have. In DnD you cannot move and make more than one attack on your turn. So if you are a class (like fighters) that starts getting multiple attacks per turn you do not want to move. Players start doing things like get themselves permanently enlarged and wield a reach weapon so they can use their full attacks. OR they use archery Because movement penalizes them. It's a serious flaw in the system. It's even worse for classes like monks who get a lot of movement oriented abilities so they can run around the battlefield... except they don't want to do that cuz then they can't full attack. You really couldn't be more wrong. This has nothing to do with exploitation. It's something that makes spells and ranged weapons even more powerful while making melee worse than it already is. What purpose do you think it is serving? What exploit is it closing?Nothing I said indicated you get infinite number of attacks without the combat reflexes feat, did it? I said whoever(or grammatically whomever). The issue I was bringing to light is that engagement and aoos are meant to represent that within a melee fight you cannot be occupied with everything around you and protect yourself. Full attack after full movement was designed to create a decision between tactical movement and offensive output;it's a decision that rewards properly planned position. What we call strategy. Your other points still don't make any sense. I wasn't referring to exploits in 3.0\3.5 I'm referring to exploits in IE games from constant kiting. Things that the limited full attack option restricts. As for the balance between casters and melee that has everything to do with the legacy of the dungeons and dragons system and an expectation for high level spells efficacy. Melee characters have power spikes in 3.5 from levels 8-14 where they can completely dominate the game. You're also crazy, crazy wrong about my 3e experience. I was creating one shotting shield charging paladins, and reach weapon ceiling walking psychic warriors to circumvent those limits. This just isn't a discussion about 3e mechanics (which are fun for rules lawyers but bad for storytelling flow). Edit: And movement should penalize melee fighting. That's because movement in a tactical simulation rpg is not micro, it's macro movement. Your micro is represented by your statistics.

I know you had a rough go of it and you're sensitive so let's differentiate. When a person is being aggressive, closed-minded, demeaning towards others and someone points it out...that is not an insult. You may feel insulted by my temerity...but your behavior led to the result. If you don't want people to highlight those behaviors than correct them. There is an enormous difference between calling out behaviors and trying to tell someone they have a developmental disorder. Specifically if he had said "Erragal you're very confrontational and preachy " that's 100% true. But he failed to address anything real and instead relied on trying to be "funny" while simultaneously disparaging real humans with development disorders (people I work with no less.) Also not irony. I'll let you hash that one out.