aeonsim

will sooner or later hit things pretty hard. Not necessarily during every 6-seconds round though. You problem is that you want instant gratification. Nope what I want is a combat system that doesn't have a "fantastical" armour/combat system that means that a good proportion of the time the armour actually does something realist like turn a blow so it slides off the character with minor effect, rather than a combat system where your armour effectively phases you out of reality or magically makes you really really good at avoiding blows so the enemy can never hit you. If your attacking a guy in a steel suit or a Dragon or some other creature you should be able to get your weapon to touch them, just most of the time it's going to do very little because you don't have the angle, force or surface area to cut against under your weapon... Yep, which is why I pay more attention to the combat log than the animations...

Misses are sometimes frustrating. Attrition is always boring. Take your pick. Yes. This is the crux of it. I'd prefer the former any day. While I find that completely immersion breaking, it pisses me off in BG2 when your highly trained fighters are swinging away like crazy and constantly missing, what are they Drunk? I can understand if there weapon connects but they do little damage because of the defence but when a trained fighter who's only job is to be good at hitting things with a weapon constantly completely misses, then there is a problem with the mechanic. It's especially obvious when you gang up on one enemy if they've got 6 chars attacking them there is no where to dodge all those attacks (unless the they're completely incompetent) so they should get hit, how if there defence is really good they won't take much damage from the blows, but they will get hit.

Also looking at that combat log, for the Rogue he had 12 attacks with 8 grazes (~66%), 2 hits (~16%) and 2 crits (~16%, one or more of these was converted from a hit I suspect, via Dirty fighting). While it's a little hard to tell as the sample size is small with those numbers it looks like the enemy may have had between 10-20 points better defence (makes me thing bug pos on your accuracy) than you had attack, and the rest of your party was even worse in BG you would have been looking at a lot of misses in a similar circumstance.

So part of your original complaint was that it spams the combat log, now if we replaced it with a 3 state system Crit, Hit, Miss like BG, then I think your combat log is going to look worse. You'll still have exactly the same number of lines except now depending on the exact Accuracy and defences involved in this case your log would be: Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, Crit ... Or maybe: Hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, Hit, miss, miss, miss, Crit ... That looks far worse to me than the grazes, with some if minimal damage. In this case (possibly due to a bug) you were simply trying to hit some one who's defence was too high rather than a problem with the mechanism, and in BG it's likely most of those grazes would have turned into a miss and been completely wasted.

I like the graze mechanic, it makes sense in that it provides a middle ground between a full hit and a miss. It also allows for finer adjustments to your deflection/defence, it allows finer shifts in defence to have a noticeable effect the whole -50% damage or -50% duration is reasonable.

This seems to be a nice way of separating things that all characters should know (how to use there weapon properly/better) from rarer cool tricks and abilities.

The camping mechanic seems fine, though admittedly not being able to carry all the camping gear you find does seem a little odd with an unlimited stash. Accuracy as a spell mechanic seems fine depending on what the spell is for things like magic missiles it makes sense, while for AOE spells with out a single vector for damage (ie cloud/gas spells) it makes less sense. As for effects triggering on a graze it makes a lot of sense, shock, fire, extreme cold and poison just for starters would all have an effect on the slightest touch. For fire and shock you don't even need to touch someone to cause problems in the RL just get close enough to something like a Van de Graaff generator and the charge will jump to you. Or if you just touch someone gently if you've touched the generator and are now carrying the charge they'll get a shock. The heat from a hot enough fire can set items a light and burn things even if the flames don't touch. Some poisons only require touching or breaking skin to be effective. As such abilities triggering on a graze seems like a perfectly valid mechanic to me, after all a graze could be anything from the weapon just brushing skin or armour to a superficial scratch they draws a little bit of blood (paper cut like) they're all more than close enough to do some damage.

It gives them a bonus when using ranged weapons. Just because ranged weapons are underpowered, it does not mean it is nothing. It's not about ranged weapons' power, it's about the inherent Accuracy boni and abilities Fighters get (or don't get in the case of ranged). The Fighter class is not designed to do well with ranged weapons - therefore counting "Range" as a good combat stat for Fighters is silly. Again though, the argument is moot because not every stat attached to every attribute has to be useful for every class - just every attribute as a whole. Range is bad for Fighters, but Accuracy makes up for it. Why are we still talking about this? Good point. Another thing to note is that the range bonus is useful if your fighter is hurt badly enough that you need to pull them from the front line while you finish the fight or push on through the last couple of fights before resting. It should allow you to move your fighter well away from the enemy while still attacking with ranged weapons, now it'll decrease your DPS from when the fighter was in the front line using it's fav weapon, but that doesn't make it useless it just is a case that you've spent so much of your fighters health that if you want to use them still your going to have to treat them as though they're a squishy little ranged person. Also the additional range may allow another ranged shot before an enemy reaches melee range, as such an additional free attack with out a chance of damage has some value especially if equipped with the right ranged weapon.

Some, but some are case sensitivity problems. More for the Linux build, but Mac can suffer from problems too. Ah so pretty much the classic bugs for people moving from a tradition of windows development to a Unix based OS. Still good to see progress is being made.

I prefer the look of the original UI at least when it has 16 slots. Not a fan of shared inventories and thought the group view with per party inventory slots was a nice way of doing it. I also like the separate stash because it allows you to move stuff out of sight, otherwise even with filters the group inventory can end up so crowded that it's a complete waste of time working with it. The multi-member view of the individual inventories would work well for me because I can organise gear by character and type ie the Wizard has the scrolls, the warrior the weapons and so on while allowing me to easily see what every one had and once they fixed a few of the selection bugs and made things easy to drag and drop out have allowed rapid sorting and moving of items around the inventory.

Hy Pillars of eternity Team So, well the same question again, as it has been almost a month and the newest Backer-Update has been out on 19.09: When will we be albe to get the FIRST linux and OSX Backer Beta? A Bit more information on development status on this behalf would realy be appreciated thanks in advance The original answer for at least the OSX version was the second update if there were no major problems. According to Adam they were still having issues with save and load on OSX at the beginning of last week and were actively working on it. Seeing they didn't release an update that week I'd suspect there a reasonable chance we'll see OSX support at least in the next build and if not that hopefully an update on when we will see it.

We were trying to balance what I saw as competing desires among backers for per-character inventories, reduced hassle in picking up items over the long haul, and some nod toward realism/strategic decision making in personal carrying capacity. The last element has always seemed like the least important to me, but that is what the Stash restrictions were meant to accomplish. If the overwhelming vibe from people is that they don't like the Stash access restrictions, I am a-ok with removing them entirely. E: Except for in combat, of course. I do like the concept for the stash, will have to see how it feels in play once the OSX beta is out. From what I've seen though it looks like the return to 16 slots pp in normal inventory will work wonders.

Yeah definitely, talking to someone creating a vision is a whole lot better than trying to talk to someone whining about how it doesn't match their vision. At least one is doing something the other is just bitching about entitlement issues, and should get off their rear and try doing something about it, be it a properly worked alternative system design or the beginnings of a mod to fix the issue.

An arc over the 5-20m's range the weapons are used at would look pretty odd.

I'd like a OSX build some time soonish though from tweeting Adam B (on monday), there are apparently a few big OSX specific save and load bugs so may be waiting a while.

I wonder if it's possible to push your companions XP & level higher than the main char. It'll depend on how exactly the Stronghold and companion tasks/quests work. If they're based on game time ie one is available every X game days then it may be possible to send them away on these and then just wander around the map until they complete it without doing any quests with your main char. So they gain XP while you gain none, if there are enough of them then like this you could probably push their level past your own, would be pretty boring but doable...

Wizard Cipher Chanter Priest (Maybe a Druid) Paladin or Barbarian Fighter

Its because it ends up having to do with how the game is built/designed. Theoretically, the game could just give everyone an omni-weapon at the start that kills everyone and people who want an enjoyable game could just not use it. Except that's dumb. Game design is about making choices for the player. Game design is about constraining what the player can do, and then letting the player have fun within those constraints. Just because something doesn't affect another player (the "it's SP" reasonibg) does not make it a good basis for doing it anyway, because "not negatively affecting another player" does not form the basis for making a good game system. I don't recall the ability to roll attributes in the BG series or ToEE being anything remotely akin to an "omni-weapon... that kills everyone." Just saying. It's called metaphor. I get the metaphor. My issue is that it's not a valid metaphor. A character with above average ability scores in Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale or Temple of Elemental Evil wasn't a "kill anything" overpowered character, like your "metaphor" suggests. They had some advantages that other more average characters didn't, sure, but they could still get their asses handed to them if the player wasn't playing smartly. True to a degree but at the same time a char with ~98 was a lot more versatile than one rolled in 70-80's being able to have 4 stats maxed one at ~16 and the last at ~10 (or all 5 if you were willing to dump one) gave you a lot more options and the MC or DC classes a pretty significant boost. A fighter/mage, thief/mage had top of the line spell casting + excellent physical stats allowing them to fight in the front line with few issues while laying waste with spells While there is nothing wrong with that it simply makes the game a bit easier.

Exactly all it effectively does is drive the time cost of generating the "perfect super elite build"/99.999999th%ile character up insanely high. Which i suspect is the reason many people like rolling the dice to get those "characters" that are so much better than every one elses, showing how lucky or obsessed they were. For the hardcore role players through such a system could be fun, creating a nearly completely random character that they have to play the game with and work out how to use...

If you really want the option to roll your stats lets do it the true hardcore way: The UI has one button you press it roles the dice for you and assigns them to each stat in order, you can keep it or reject it no changes then when you click next it encrypts it into your save file with a unique checksum stored on the cloud, each time you play it (GM) checks your save file and if your've changed the attribute it deletes your save . Or maybe we'll be a little more lenient, when you role your stats your allowed to choose which 2 dice total goes to check attribute and can add the result from the last dice to one column after which it encrypts your attributes...

A little practical experiment: Start a PoE game role your 13d6 dice, 2 per stat with 1 left over to spread around as you like, set the characters attributes to the values you rolled. Now can you click next without spending the remaining spare points and if you can do so, do you feel no annoyance or irritation that you didn't spend those extra points? If you can do that and happily play the resulting character with no regrets, congrats your a hard core RPG player. If your feelling any regret at all then it seems you like the idea more than the reality and your'd probably end up spending a long time clicking reroll... Or do you find it annoying because you didn't get to spend more points, and you feel your character should be more powerful? In which case I think it's more of a case you think your character should be more powerful than most other peoples because your "special".

That was just thinking out aloud, if they were undecided they could do that is what I meant, as this is a crowd-funding project after all. WL2 had votes for stuff and so did Torment, not sure about D:OS (can't remember). Oh there was already a vote on extra stretch goals, but they went against it anyway. Perhaps but that was likely a lot earlier in the process of making the game. With the time they have left now a "vote" would be costly and somewhat meaningless, the vast majority of backers are unlikely to care either way and the result would be pretty much random chance. The amount of time and detail that would go into helping everyone understand the differences would be better spent working on the game. Votes are great for getting a general direction and for broad questions for a game but the specifics need to be decided by smaller groups. The work you two have done has likely helped strengthen the devs view of where to go next and possibly given them a different look at what could be done. As such well done and I'm looking forward to seeing what ever the new abilities system looks like, and by the looks of it a large proportion of it will be similar to your suggestions.

While the second part may be a true in general in the BB it's a major assumption to make about the game, we don't know enough about the other weapons and abilities they can have to assume that holds for the wider game. There may well be builds you can make using some of the special weapons where speed is far more useful than might in a combat situation. I'd like speed to be added in as an attribute associated effect but one should be careful about general statements when basing them off only a fraction of the currently unbalanced game.

I do and don't understand that perspective. I understand wanting a justification, but it's always seemed fitting to me. Many AoE spells/effects originate at a point and spread outward. Fireball is probably the most obvious example, but I tend to think of most effects that way. You're a super smarty, so as you extend the AoE outward, you are able to selectively shape it at the margins, where it terminates. You can't do it on the interior because that's the origin of the effect, where it's emanating from. That's always been my view of it, anyway. That's a nice justification wrap it up in an in world description and add it to the game somewhere and I think it'd work fine!

While I can appreciate your point, I think if OE had taken the time to make a lot of their decisions more of a democratic process with the backers, we'd be looking at a winter 2015 release. The thing about democracy, it isn't speedy. So I kind of get why they hunkered down and quietly did their work. Also design by committee rarely generates good results, and a committee made up of fanatical fans in a forum would be crazy... A few more replies in the forums would be nice, but they have been replying across at least 3 different forums so it really is hard to tell overall how much they communicating and they're probably spending more time on it than we think.