aeonsim

Interesting though I'd argue that thematically Dexterity for Deflection and Resolve for speed would make more sense, as while Dex works for both, Resolve for deflection seems odd, mechanically it may be better but thematically odd. Dexterity for deflection implies high coordination for dodging or deflecting an attack. While Resolve for speed works along the lines of with great resolve/no hesitation they acted instantly, also while resolve is already linked to concentration and concentration makes sense when linked to speed if your concentrating solely on your actions you are likely to move an act faster than if distracted. Any way I'll be interested to see Obs thoughts on this and what alternatives they had been thinking about for improving Per & Res. Right I see that there thoughts were running along similar if not identical lines. I also agree with some of the others that this may require a rebalance of the Cipher class at least with regards to speed. As they get Focus from attacks attacking faster increases the rate of focus gain while the increased action speed also increases the number of abilities they can cast in a set time period. Thus your boosting both the rate of acquisition of abilities along with the rate of use of abilities.

No. The Fighter in the IE games were more flexible. They could dual or multi-class. They also had DPS. The Fighter in PoE is a straight up front line tank, inflexible and more to the MMO/4th edition type. They aren't the DPS of the party. Classes like the Rogue in MMO/4th ed are. While you do have some similarities, the classes play quite differently. Fighters are pretty bad with ranged weapons in PoE. So they usually stick with melee and they aren't the DPS of the party, so their damage output isn't that great compared to other classes, like the DPS classes. The Fighters in the IE games could be very good at ranged weapons and have the DPS, and can contribute to a barrage of ranged fire power with the rest of your party, and could take out enemies before they hit your front line. If your multi or dual classing a fighter they're hardly a fighter any more. What your doing is taking a more flexible class and adding damage and health to it in exchange for a few levels, it's an entirely different mechanism and system from PoE and does not prove at all they were more flexible in AD&D. If anything it would suggest they were less flexible as you had to change their entire class or add another to get them to do what you wanted (Kits are similar). The Ranged fighter build is a fair point though that does appear to be lacking in PoE. In PoE at least there are a couple of different ways to build a fighter just by playing around with the stats and equipment, fighters focused on Highish DPS (lighter-medium armour 2H weapons, mig, dex, con), high Interrupt (lighter armour, fast attack, dex, per, res) or high survivability (heaviest armour max con, res, mig, per). Though with the way the combat appears now it'd be pretty hard to tell how effective the high interrupt build is. They're all going to have a talent for holding the line and keeping enemies away but how they do it at least differs or should once things are properly balanced.

It depends on what they do to stamina though doesn't it, if all classes have the same amount of Stamina but different amounts of Health then the ratio of Stamina to Health effectively becomes the number of times they could be knock out before being killed in combat (at least before you take into account healing), which makes a fair bit of sense to me. A fighter thus can take being knocked out (0 stamina) more times than a mage before they die. Also if they share the same stamina to a certain degree they have the same level of hardiness in that they can take the same amount of instantaneous damage or damage over time (with out healing) before being knocked out of combat. Of course once you take into account healing for stamina then it does come back to the fact that if it's 30:180 (S:H) for a fighter vs say 30:120 for a mage then as long as there is constant healing the fighter can continue 50% longer before death. However the nice thing about this is that the Mage with the same DT as a fighter and spells to boost defence can stay in the front line with the fighter for 2/3rd of the time before they need to back up and use other abilities, and with the right spells they may be able to stay in the front line for as long or longer than a fighter. You could argue that for mage's, druids & chanter that part of there health is there summons, fight in the front line till the health gets low then drop a summon in your place and back up to provide ranged support while still having one of your abilities absorbing the damage. Also it offers some interesting choices you could kit out your fighter in light armour and a high damage weapon to maximise there DPS and a mage with heavy armour and use the cone aoe spells and they may survive a similar amount of time in the front line and possibly do a similar amount of Damage (the fighter to single targets the mage to multiple). Admittedly it does seem to mostly just change how easy it is to understand the system rather than to dramatically change the core mechanic.

I think they'll be easier, you'll be using a party of characters you shaped to the way you play, you'll have a full set of decent equipment with a range of options for each fighter, and you'll be more familiar with how to use your skills and abilities and how they all interact with the skills and abilities of the rest of your party. Those things combined will make the combat a lot easier I'd think.

I like the look of the current inventory but simply think it needs more slots (2x) per character like in the pcgamer video where JS showed the first 30min of play and possibly the ability to access during combat. I think the idea of the combined view of all the individual inventories and a stash (kind of like a bag of holding) is great, the ability to see what is in multiple peoples inventories and quickly transfer or arrange them is excellent, and the existence of the stash for throwing gear your not interested in and just want to sell seems ideal. In the IE games not being able to easily see what multiple people were carrying made it rather painful to juggle every thing around, especially seeing I'd have one person doing all the identifying then have different strength chars holding different types of gear to maximise stacking and give the heavy gear to the strong companions. The problem with this in the IE inventory is, as I'm a bit of a packrat chars would often be near there slot limit and I'd pick stuff up with a char who couldn't identify stuff. Then trying to transfer the items to the char with Lore I'd find they had a full inventory and have to spend the next 5mins playing an annoying version of the towers of hanoi to rearrange everything amongst the chars. Having the shared view of all the individual inventories solves this nicely. As for full merged group inventories the ones in NWN, KOTOR, KOTOR2 etc drove me crazy I could never find the items I was looking for even with the sort function. There was simply to much stuff in one place and I couldn't neatly parcel it out to the Mage had the scrolls, the fighter the armour & weapons, potions went to the healer and so forth. Now search can help with this but that assumes I remember what the item was called which is unlikely I tend to remember things like weapon that does lightning damage or strength item not the "Super Magic Sword of Elemental Air" thus having a char who carries all my magic weapons and another who carries all the armour and another who carries consumables makes it easy for me to find things. In short like the overall flow of the inventories just think it needs some improvements with the amount allocated to the different areas and how easy it is to drag and drop items between them. Note for those who liked D:OS inventory I loath it for numerous reasons including, the disconnect between selected char and inventory screen (clicking on the head doesn't jump to that inventory), the stupid buttons to switch from one party member to another while your actions remain those of the currently selected party member, the way certain items end up in different sub categories (is it magic, a weapon, or craft item?) than what your'd expect, the amount of material you end up carrying, that the stash/homestead inventory is split between the two chests depending on char and companion, that the homestead stash isn't available when with merchants, the floating windows and I could go on and on...

Four months seems reasonable, if you look at IWD2 that was 10months in total starting with the IE engine that they needed to heavily modify to support D&D3. Looking at the current state of the Beta it seems like they mainly need to do a lot of bug fixing, improve SFX, and coding to improve the UI & AI. After that most things seem to be tweaking or adjusting current game balance. While those things can take a bit of time I think four months is possible, there will still be a few new bugs in the game when they release and things they continue to alter in patches after release but that's normal. BG2 was hardly bug free at release & D:OS has had some major improvements to UI and plenty of bug fixes since it was released. The goal of the 4 months is to have a playable game with no game breaking bugs or completely unbalanced systems that people can play and enjoy, not a perfect game that never needs a patch...

More information about these things would certainly be good along with the calculations showing what and how they affect things...

I changed money without issues. Ah if that works then it should be fairly easy to create a party with 30K and make a visit to the Merchant and properly equip the party with decent quality standard weapons (rather than the named ones) and then see how the difficulty changes when every one has a couple of weapon sets with differing damage types. I suspect a party using a good set of crush damage weapons of the correct type for their Weapon focus should be able to flatten the beetles a fair bit quicker and take less damage doing so. Some one should have a go using the same party with the default loadout and with a customised one and see what the difference is, I'll have a go my self as soon as the OSX build is out.

You can't change the amount of money you've got either yet? 20-30K cp would allow a proper fit out at the merchant for the complete party. Will have to wait till the editor can handle those changes I guess.

Hey Sensuki have you considered using the save game editor to kit your party out in a manner that would be more realistic for level 5 characters? For example check each companions weapon affinities and then for the melee characters provide them with a ranged, crushing, slashing and piercing weapon set from those affinities based on what JS has said making sure they have a weapon they have weapon focus on is equivalent to a IE's +2 to hit. +10 Accuracy in PoE should give a pretty nice boost to the hit rate and the amount of damage you do by giving you more hit's and criticals. Secondly having a weapon of each damage type seems like something that would be logical to acquire early on to deal with different enemy types... I'd be very interested in seeing what the difference is in combat for a properly equiped party vs the BB-party with it's default spec. I'll certainly be having a go with it once the OX version of the beta turns up...

I don't think Josh's "degenerate rest spamming" complaint against the IE games is about having to rest too often due to low health. On the contrary, I think he just dislikes that fact that players could (and were in some ways encouraged to) game the system by resting arbitrarily often even when their health didn't require it, just to get back per-rest spells and abilities. His solution was to introduce camping supplies as a limited resource (which makes rest spamming less feasible), and make more abilities per-encounter (which makes rest spamming less tempting). At least that's how I understood it... In PoE, you can game the system by rest spamming. And when you're resting quite often, daily powers become nearly encounter powers due to so much resting. Especially when you're very close to the side of a map or even in the town. And due to the maps being small (maybe it's just the areas we're in and there will be larger maps in the final game), you can cross a map very quickly and get to town to rest. In the IE games, if I was in a town map and buying/selling items, I wouldn't necessarily trot off to the nearest inn and rest if I still had a large assortment of healing spells. PoE does encourage you to do so when you are in town. If only one of my characters has 80% or 90% health, I'll just rest to get it to 100%. PoE encourages me more to rest spam than the IE games ever did. And with 4th ed encounter powers, when you cherry pick stuff like encounter and daily powers from 4th ed but leave other stuff out like healing, the system will be flawed. Anyway, you quoted me with the obsidian devs and Q&A not bringing up their concerns with rest spamming that we've seen in the latest video with Rose's play which is the core part of my quote. Nice selective quoting and response. At least the rest system is logical here, you travel out to the crossing (4+ hours) fight for a few hours, if there is more stuff to do you and you bought camping supplies you rest using up some of your camping supplies (which would be bandages, food, fuel for a fire something on sleep on etc) and you fight some more then decide to head back to town, travel for 4+ hours get to town and sell your loot and then go to the Inn for a rest. That seems perfectly logical to me if I'd been fighting for part of a day then walked 4+ hours carrying a pile of loot plus my armour I'd bloody well want a drink and a chance to relax in a comfortable environment. This makes a lot of sense to me for a couple of reasons resting/healing has a cost associated with it, either in hiring a room or buying camping supplies, it's not completely free like in IE games. There is now a limit to how much "healing and resting" you can do outside of areas designed for it, especially on the harder difficulties. It never made sense to me how in the IE games you could rest after pretty much every fight when working your way through a dungeon or similar full of enemies (if there was a random chance of an attack people just saved and tried again till they were successful). Now this to me makes for a reasonable in game day, though possibly a little annoying from the point of view of a player and the amount of stuff you can do before you need to rest. It also strongly encourages you to fight tactically, in the full game by the time we got to backer beta it's likely we'd have better equipment and a range of equipment sets designed for exploiting different weakness, ie the front line would have a crushing, piercing, slashing and ranged weapon available and you would be able to select the correct equipment and weapon for the fight to maximise the damage you dealt and thus minimise the damage you take. I think once people have had a chance to properly equip their party with a range of tactical options the length of the adventuring day will substantially increase deceasing the tendency of people to play like it's an IE game and rest after every fight. The down side of this is that wizard's may have insufficient spells per day and you'll have to horde them and use them for maximal efficiency.

Quick Q, if you fall in combat with a DoT effect won't all the remaining damage go directly to health at a 1:1 rate rather than the 4:1 rate for when you still have stamina? Also once you come up against enemies with AOE attacks you could be down and still taking health damage at 1:1. Also what happens to your defenses do they remain providing some protect against AoE attacks or do they drop to 0 meaning you are also always taking critical hits and damage against your health? If it does shift to 1:1 with regards to health damage that's a really good reason to keep your party up and fighting...

Broad strokes, sure 3-4 months of bug fixing, balance passes and QA should fix the game. Which I'm pretty much sure is the obsidian plan... In more detail PrimeJunta's high priority list pretty much covers it...

I certainly think the beta was a good idea if only because it allow a lot of the die hard enthusiasts a chance to play the game before they start selling it and thus vent their rage that the game is different from their dream game before the vast hordes of new players and casual gamers hit the forums. Let the rage, anguish, vitriol, and silliness of the hard core vanish in to the mists of time and forums before the newbies arrive... In all seriousness there is value in getting input from a wider community it's easy to get so close to something you don't see all the flaws, at least letting us have a play and rant about the game allows a different view point and some people will undoubtedly spot a few things the developers hadn't noticed and provide a few useful suggestions, they'll unfortunately just have to wade through a lot of vitriol to get to them. Also it's a pretty good test on the stability of the Unity engine and the changes they've made to it, over a massive range of hardware and software configurations (that alone is valuable). I've actually been very impressed with the apparent lack of Crash to Desktop bug reports in the bug forum. Suggests there underlying code is excellent and stable and it's just minor issues, balance and interface they need to work on, which is worth knowing.

Yep pretty much as thought, wait till those stone beetles use their burrow to pop up in your back line and take a big bite of naked mage flesh. Proper targeting of that nature will make the encounters alot more interesting, would you leave your front line dealing with the wood beetles and poison while your back line takes some damage or will you pull them back to distract the stone beetles and thus allow the wood beetles to get closer and try attacking all the unpoisoned characters?

The problem I had with alignment in BG1/2 was that it was very hard to play a true chaotic good character (and probably some other types as well), far too often alignment choices seemed to combine lawful with good and chaotic with evil. And in many cases there was simply a lack of options, there were 9 possible combinations and you never seemed to get offered more than 2-3 possible choices for a quest which effectively means that for most quests you end up moving towards the 2 prime positions Chaotic evil or Lawful good sometimes with a neutral option. Reputations make sense to me far more than the alignment system did. In PoE it seems like your character is going to be an exception rather than the norm, they'll acquire a party of fighters, solve major problems and acquire a fortress. They're effectively nobility or equivalent, part of an upper tier of the society and there actions will be noticeable. For a culture that relies on messengers, travellers and bards to spread news that is exactly the sort of news and gossip that will spread rapidly out into the country side. When those that travel pass by and are asked for the latest news and gossip the traveller will certainly remember the name of a person who was the sole survivor of a caravan slaughter or who had claimed a fortress, pissed off a merchants guild, or was attacking random people. And they'll also pass on rumours like they seem a nice person, or they're associated with thieves, they're an easy touch etc. While those organisations you've wronged or helped will pass out that information to those that they are associated with along with instructions on if they should assist, hinder or ignore you. While I don't expect an isolated hermit in the middle of a forest will have heard your'd wiped out a group of slavers or had helped them any one with regular contact with civilisation on a trade route is likely to have and adjusted there opinion of you based on the gossip or instructions from their associates.

Remember the beta is part way through the game. In the videos showing the normal start for the full game you start with the same equipment (maybe lesser quality) and a bit of cash with merchant right next to you. So in the full game with the normal start you'll have a chance to buy different weapons straight away.

Love the style of the first three companions not such a fan of the style used for the Chanter. Any way if I dislike the default portraits there's plenty of nice ones available from deviantArt's fantasy section.

Looking forward to it here as well I asked Adam Brennecke for an ETA on Twitter and was told it should be released as part of the second beta patch, assuming no major problems occurred.

Hmm, what's the role of a tank is not to be the one to get ****ed up instead of others?I mean you might not agree with the need for a tank (which I have no problem with), but once you allow that path to be taken, then that's pretty much their role? I mean, fighters have nothing but talents dedicated to do just that, soaking up damage and get ****ed up constantly. The more you use resources to "CC" and "prevent damage", the more useless they become at their one and only role in the game... ...so it's not a failure or a fault if your tank gets ****ed up really, according to the game design, at least some of it, it's actually a success if the tank is getting hit constantly, because that's what everything in the class is designed for...except the Health system... So I see no reason to think the only way to build a fighter is a build that forces it to take all the parties damage, honestly it sounds like a lack of imagination and that you've spent to much time around MOMOs and other games where that is a fighters only role. I suspect the evidence of a good player will be one who can spread the damage around the entire party rather than just relying on one or two classes to take it all. There is a reason I suspect why the wizards have a number of abilities/spells that will allow them to survive in the front line, not to mention once they're out of spells switch them to heavy armour and light weapons and stick them in the front line and this is possible for all classes. Secondly with the interrupt system is should be quite possible to build a fighter who locks down enemies and doesn't take much damage. That combined with melee weapons that allow a stand off distance and ranged weapons means you should be able to cycle your entire party down to 20% health before you need to rest not just the fighters, while still allowing them to contribute damage. Finally tactical play should allow you to minimise damage to the fighter, play it smart rather than just run the fighter into a bunch of enemies and let them pound away him, chanters summons, ciphers controls, buffs and CC all these give you opportunities to control and destroy enemies in smarter ways. Use the fighter to attract attention but don't let them take any damage.

It is typical in software development that there is at least one new build every day, although Fridays there can be some reluctance to post any big changes in repository as typically nobody from programing team get to go home before latest build in repository is stable. Of course I don't have any real knowledge how they do these things in Obsidian, but I would guess that things aren't that different from companies that I have worked and work now. Yeah I'm well aware of that what I find encouraging is that they are confidant enough about the build to show it at PAX rather than stick with the older 257 build.

Good to know I see the PAX build is 271 (up from 257).

Assuming your pro combat XP which is likely considering the number of polls about it you've created your making two massive assumptions there, one you assume that combat XP has little cost, and two you assume that those opposed or Neutral to combat XP believe that there is little cost to this feature. The second assumption is wrong with out doubt and the first is provably wrong, simply by considering what you would need to do to implement a proper balanced sole Combat XP or combined Combat/Quest XP system. At a bare minimum a combat XP system would require at least a few days of software developer time, a few weeks of designer time and a minimum of a month of QA time (probably far more). Those are not minor costs for a project that has reached beta stage. Sure you could whip together a basic combat XP system in a couple of days but to balance and test it would take a huge amount of time. Software development is not magic it has costs and any fundamental feature/system change at this point in the game's development has a massive cost. Even if there was a magical way to add it with little cost those opposed or neutral to it will be being entirely rational to believe that there is a cost to this and to vote solely against it on their believe in the existence of that cost.

As I've said before if the lack of combat XP is the one thing ruining this game for you then why not make a mod? Ask the developers nicely for a bit of information and use the beta and you should be able to add it if it's not to much of a problem. If you do this I bet you will find that suddenly this "minor" requirement of yours is a whole lot of work to balance and a fair bit of work to properly implement. But then if the majority of the possible players for the game need combat xp to make it fun you should have no problem finding enough people to get it done. But by the looks of this thread most of you would rather rage against JS and obsidian, because a group of professionals designed a game that works differently from what you (not a professional in the field) wanted, rather than doing anything constructive. No matter what way you shape the argument based on the numbers from these polls and the number of people arguing for it in the forums there is no truth in claiming a majority want it. This "poll" is too close to call, some of the others had quest winning and the total number of backers arguing for combat XP is less than 30% of the people that I've seen logged into this forum at one time, a fraction of the total users of the forum and a fraction of a percentage of the total number of backers. In these threads you see all your like minded fellows who are obsessed with the idea of combat XP and you fail to realise there are just as many who don't like it and the vast majority of backers don't give a S****, they want a fun game and who cares about the exact mechanics of that as long as they understand enough of them to enjoy the game... Oh and Gromnirs dialect is awesome, easy enough to understand and level of consistency shows absolute mastery of it, something that is far beyond most people. Always amusing/interesting to read his posts, which is a lot more than I can say about a lot of the other posts in these threads

I agree, makes things far more interesting why not make it a talent? Pirate Style: Pistols can now be equipped one handed in the off hand slot. If the additional complexity could be afforded then when the pistol is in the off hand slot you get one ranged attack from it per encounter and afterwards it acts as a low damage crushing weapon, as you try to beat the enemy to death with the butt while stabbing them to death with your blade!