aeonsim

Probably the skill athletics with either Con or Might or both if it was a really heavy boulder.

Agreed the addition of a diverse range of more talents with the ability to select a reasonable number during character progression would work wonders.

Plenty of people would have still backed the game, and seriously it was obvious they were never going to do an exact replica of the BG games and systems. After all they don't have a D&D licensee and as such it would probably be risky to imitate the the BG games to closely. Thus they needed to create there own system which they have and it works the story style, the game play, the graphics and the feel of the game are similar to BG but the exact mechanics vary in what appears to be an improved way. If you are a D&D/AD&D fanatic who was expecting a reimplementation of those rule sets with a new story you should know the D&D/Wotc well enough to know that a licensee is needed for an exact copy of those rules and that Obsidian does not have that licensee. Note it's only in the last couple of months they have finally gotten a Pathfinder licensee...

A 30% increase in damage, or doubling the AoE of a spell, or increasing it's duration by 50% is not an insignificant difference. This is certainly not a binary choice it's far more complex than that.

Greater area and duration are desirable for buffs and allow you to be more mobile with out leaving the area of effect. While other classes barbs etc who have abilities that are effected by Int probably want the benefit of both. Large AoE for things like fireballs just means if your building that type of high Int wizard, your just going to have to position your wizard more carefully and move them around rather than just having them sit at the back and stand still. I can see this being a nightmare in combat as well, it will pretty much force you to pause every time you want to use the spell and results in there being no standard size for AoE meaning you can't just drop a spell based on memory of it's size you need to stop and check every time or never adjust it. In BG1/2 when I play for a bit I get to know the range and AoE of the various spells, and can easily position them as I know they'll be the same each time. So in summary with this suggestion people couldn't memorise the AoE and effective range because they could change at any time either deliberately or by accident from flicking the mouse wheel at the wrong time. Secondly this is an entire additional mechanic that you would be adding over the top of an already complex combat system. Thirdly for non-wizard characters who have AoE abilities may not realise this applies and screw up those abilities or can adjust them by accident and not realise they've done so. Additional complexity for small benefits does not = good.

I don't really see the problem with the way it is now, it just requires you to be a bit more careful with your AOE and positioning. Secondly this would increase the complexity and require a fair bit of work to implement, at this point in time I think there are far more important things for developers to be working on than an new mechanism that primarily benefits Wizards. For non wizards the current system works well for a lot of their abilities so this would provide minimal benefit for them or a negative. Adding an entire new mechanism into spell casting for no major benefit seems excessive to me.

It seems like a reasonable change if the premise was correct, I just don't think the premise is correct. At most it seems like there a maybe 100 players complaining about this in the forums while I've seen >300 logged in at one time so best base maybe 30% aren't happy assuming there are 100 people complaining (it's probably lower). In a more realistic case there are at least 7000 (based on kickstarter tiers) people who have access to the beta (I'd expect with the add ons it could be twice that), lets say only a 1/3rd of them have actually tried the beta so ~2000 people may have tested it. Now if we assume if they really don't like might they've probably complained in the forums and we come back to my rough estimate of less than 100 people who are complaining, in this case only 5% of the people are unhappy. Maybe I've underestimated the number of people complaining in the forums so say there are 300 people who are actively complaining that's still only 15%. While you may consider this to be many players, compared to the overall number of players it's pretty small. And this isn't even discussing the fact that there are something like 79,000 backers in total... It's a nice possible solution if this is a major problem, but when I look at the numbers of people who could be complaining it seems to me to be a very small very vocal minority or are upset. And changing the game so 15% will be happy doesn't seem like a smart move to me, especially seeing you will probably find a similar number of people who are opposed to the change.

Yeah it's work like doing anything else in the game, but it's not as complex as he is trying to make it seem. The thing is that this would turn into a complex system, sure it's not too complex to implement the basic bits/mechanisms, but to balance and tune it so it works well that is complex (or at least highly repetitive). With software and systems development things that sound simple often aren't because they're part of a network of systems all of which interact with each other in odd ways. It's kinda like some of the stuff I do for my job (biology, genetics & software) the principles are often simple and the basic implementation is easy, but to get it right and track down all the odd edge cases that can horribly break things in a complex system consisting of the interactions between many simple systems takes a lot of time. You can often get 90% of the way there in 10% of the time, the remaining 10% takes 90% of the overall time, and it'll be much the same here. Adding support for this will probably only take a few hours or days. Balancing it and propagating it through the game in a logically consistent manner which produces an enjoyable and balanced result (and testing this) will take up a lot of time. It's certainly doable but for obsidian to do it they would have to take resources away from there currently planned activities it would be much better for a separate group to do this by bringing additional resources into it.

Well why not do it then, announce a combat XP mod? Talk to the developers to get an idea of what needs to be done, there should be plenty of people willing to help if it's as important to them as they claim. Start work now and if it's only a going to take 1 person and a week or two then it should easily be doable by a small team of modders over 4 months, so you can have it ready the day it goes live. I suspect it'll be abit more work than you think as if it's done properly they need to add in code to toggle the XP system over, and then implement systems that allow XP to be attached and rewarded to each creature in the game. Then there's the balance aspect is the XP going to be solely for killing stuff or is it a mix of kill and quest? If it's only for killing stuff you now need to go through each route you can take in the game and make sure that there are enough enemies in the area with enough XP assigned to them that you can reach the same level at the same point. Also what happens if the player doesn't fully explore and area and misses some enemies are they now taking a permanent XP loss or do the system adjust XP to compensate for it? Secondly if difficulty is associated with different mob types and numbers how do you balance the XP between the different difficulty levels? Then there are questions like well should all enemies of the same type and level have the same XP? If so do you now need to adjust the mob compositions at some areas to get enough XP? Once you've solved all that then you need a QA team to run through the entire game and check all the different ways of playing to make sure the XP system works and players have the correct amount of XP at the correct point in time. Including for players who like combat XP but only do the critical path and can't be bothered chasing down and killing every last thing on every map. At this point it's into a standard development cycle they'll find problems, you fix problems, they run through the game again all possible ways repeat a few times and you've used up a lot of time for a lot of people.

So your suggesting rather than have the developer's designers and QA personal working on adding critical features, keeping kickstarter promises, fixing bugs and polishing the game instead they should dedicate at least 3 people (probably more) to trying to tack on a separate XP system that will only be used by a fraction of the people. Nope really bad idea, my suggestion is that the people who care so much about this use the beta to understand the game structure and then start work on a mod to develop a combat XP system, that should keep them quiet for the next 4-6 months and get rid of most of these annoying posts about how combat XP is the only thing making combat fun in the forums.

Yes it is. It is useless for any non spell casting class, and even then it doesn't make sense to put points in it because it hardly has an effect on the AoE. 3 int: 18 int: Not worth it. A real nice dump stat... unless you want a few more dialogue options. heh But if you did try it, then you would still have points leftover to spend on your attributes. Hmmmm.... What are you on about? That's a massive increase in area, it appears that Int effects the radius/diameter of the AOE and in the case above that's approximately a 40% increase, but as area = Pi*R^2 you've just DOUBLED the effective area of effect, combining that with a similar increase in duration and Int is amazingly effective. A stat that allows your AOE spells to double their effective area is not something to dump, unless your building a single target, or target chain based spellcaster.

Looking at the Wiki it seems like Perception/Interrupt can affect melee attacks as well, so if you make a light damage high Interrupt character (High Dex, Perception and Resolve) with a quick attacking weapon you could decrease the amount of damage your taking by intercepting attacks from slower weapons and disrupting them. So it's possible that Perception's interrupt acts as a damage reducing stat by interrupting enemy attacks as well as a ability interrupting stat. Sure it's a little complex but AD&D is hardly simple. Note with regards to AD&D it's nothing special and people who say how logical it is are clearly forgetting that BG2 was AD&D 2.x, with all the bizarre side effects of that, claiming THACO and the strength system 18/00 18/92 etc makes more logical sense to a new player than a simple Might stat with a clear % increase in damage is silly. Unless your highly familiar with AD&D these looks to be a much cleaner system, sure 3/3.5 clean this up a fair degree but I don't see people talking about NWN when comparing PoE to a previous game.

Has any one tried making a High Int, Dex & Perception mage with AOE spells and seeing what they do to enemies yet, (AOE long duration & Interrupt...)? Or an Archer/Ranged char with High Perception and Dex to see if they can be used to lock down enemy abilities with lots of Interrupts? Or a high Resolve, Dex & Con Monk, Wizard or Cipher focused on short range or touch based abilities, that rarely get interrupted (Concentration)? Can't wait till the beta is available for OSX to try out those sorts of builds.

I think Perception would be critical for anti-ability style characters, a high interrupt chance is going to screw over heavily ability focused classes and allows the creation of lock-down characters who aren't focused on doing damage but are instead interested in shutting down the enemies ability to use spells and special abilities. Think of fighting an enemy mage where you can use a high Perception ranged character to interrupt a decent percentage of their spells or doing the same to a Monk or Cipher trying to use their abilities. Or think about it vice versa how well would your party hold up if there were a couple of enemies maxed out on Perception using high interrupt weapons and interrupting your attempts to use your abilities. Say targeting your Priest so you couldn't get any heals or buffs off, or your mage or Cipher so they couldn't get there high damage abilities into play. Or consider an enemy Mage with maxed Int & Perception, the high Int gives them a massive AOE and spell duration so they hit your whole party at once and the high Perception could mean that as long as your taking damage from the spell there is a high chance you won't be able to use any of your abilities? While Perception and Resolve may be a bit weak at the moment I think they can be improved either by strengthening there current effect and making it more obvious when there effects kick in ie a clear notification when an Interrupt occurs blocking one of your abilities or an enemy one.

So the problem I see with your current build is that if Interrupts are working properly a High Perception, Int, Dex wizard could shut down/wipe your entire team. Perception boosts interrupt which if you combine with AOE spells could be disrupting nearly every attempt you make to use an ability. Or a Ranged character with High Dex, and Perception and a fast attacking weapon could completely lock down your spell caster (except for instant cast spells) or any other high ability class, if they're getting an interrupt every attack or two as they'll be continuously interrupting your abilities and spells. Now I'm not sure if Perception boosts interrupt enough to make this happen at the moment (what's the % boost per point to interrupt?) but if it works as described in the ability description and has a fairly high chance, then unless you put a fair bit into Resolve your party could be effectively neutralised. Now I'm not sure if any of the combat in the Beta has such enemies present but if there are some in the full game you may find your party has major issues. While perception needs a bit of a boost I think it would also be helpful if the game was more 'vocal' about when interrupts and concentration kicked in to show you what the effect was. Also having enemies that specialise in high perception and interrupt based tactics and high resolve (concentration) high damage attacks it would make things more obvious that these stats can be important. Also a Wizard/Cipher/Monk with high Con, Dex, Int and Resolve could make an excellent melee fighter with the touch based spells & abilities.

Kill them.

I think you may be under estimating perception/interrupt a bit. If you think back to IE games when you saw an enemy wizard you generally needed to target them early to stop there high level spells from decimating the party (control magic, dominate, AOE etc) you did this in two ways. One you killed them quickly by getting a high damage char to attack them as they had very low health, or if you couldn't reach them you made sure you regularly hit them for a decent amount of damage to disrupt their spell casting (unless they had really high Con, which was rare). Now how ever everyone has abilities and ability heavy classes are not as weak health wise, thus it seems like your going to want to put something into Perception so your character has a good chance at interrupting enemy abilities when they try to activate them. Otherwise you may find your Might, Con, Int maxed character get's in some good initial hits, then the enemy abilities stack up together and your now left trying to damage someone you can't hit, or has massively increased damage resistance or who has just dominated half your party and turned them against you. As such I think it's probably going to be worth having a high perception character to act in an Anti mage, priest, monk, chanter, cipher and druid manner focused on stopping them using their abilities. Who will also be useful against the other classes by reducing their chance to use their abilities as well. Resolve is kind of the opposite of this boosting concentration to counter interrupt I suspect this would be more useful for melee focused ability classes such as monks, ciphers, priests and battle-mages focused on touch spells. You really don't want your priest interrupted when they're trying to cast a group heal to keep your front line alive. Though for long range focused ability classes you may be able to dump the stat if you focus on microing them away from damage and keeping them in the back lines during combat. Biggest problem with the two stats may be that they're less obviously useful if you don't stop and think about it and that resolve can be partly micro'd out through careful tactical placing. They're also hard to see the impact of in combat, if some obvious notification was provided when they worked in combat that might help a bit but they probably also need a little bit of a tweak to make them more obviously useful.

Either way I'll be playing it in that mode just for the tactical challenge.

This would be nice.

I don't think it's such an issue, saw one person streaming last night who was solely down to per encounter abilities for the wizard and still managed to clear one of the major dungeons (on normal) with out having to rest. She just made excellent use of the characters abilities and took minimal damage on her fighters, the priest was doing alot of control, buff and debuff work.

So my hope they leave it as it is, now if they do decide to change it for some silly reason like a vocal minority complaining about it, then they can do the following: Compromise and give you your combat XP, with a levelling system like the one at the bottom, now they'll be really generous and will have 2,000,000 XP (summed) spread across all the creatures in the game. With Quest XP being 4,096,000 so combat XP ~1/3rd of the total xp (6 million) (that's a lot!). So if a levelling system like the one below is used what is the effect of this approximately 0. If you charge around the game killing everything you'll have a total of 6 million XP at the end of the game, but you'll still be at the same level as a person who only did quests (level 13) now maybe if they missed a few quests then you maybe a level or two in front of them, but I'd bet that you didn't actually manage to kill everything so it's unlikely you got the full 2 million. Secondly it's likely that the only effect this will have is through the game you may end up a level ahead of someone only doing quests by 10-15mins of play time, because the game doesn't scale enemies so you are most likely restricted to the same areas as players doing the quests. But this should solve your problems right? You now get a whole pile of XP for killing stuff :-D so the combat is now fun and you'll actually be bothered fighting /-). You've successfully gotten some poor developer to waste a month tracking down every possible enemy in the game and assigning them an XP value. Your game may be a little bit more buggy because hey that developer could have been working on something that ACTUALLY HAS AN IMPACT but not to worry he saved the game for you and made it fun, even though it had NO IMPACT ). Combat should be fun because it's a tactical challenge not because there is a magic number assigned to each enemy! At the end of the day this is a massive fuss over nothing, as long as you have character advancement who cares where it comes from? If combat isn't fun without XP then I think your playing the game in a very odd way (XP addiction ). 1 1,000 2 2,000 3 4,000 4 8,000 5 16,000 6 32,000 7 64,000 8 128,000 9 256,000 10 512,000 11 1,024,000 12 2,048,000 13 4,096,000 14 8,192,000

So the problem with these sorts of forum polls is selection bias. People who are happy with the way things work are unlikely to both reading the thread & or voting in the poll. While those who dislike the way things are will read and vote. Thus unless every one has to vote in the poll or you somehow manage to get a significant number of the registered 70K backers or the >10K backers with beta access to vote it's somewhat meaningless. Also polls by there nature offer only limited choices thus providing another sort of bias. The short of it is while polls are amusing they are generally meaningless and something developers should avoid paying attention to unless they can get most of the backers involved.

One thing to note about betas and cut down demos is that they can be buggier than the main game due to the changes needed to create them. And secondly they can be considerably behind the main game with regards to current code, we don't exactly know when the code freeze occurred for the beta it could have been last week or it could be a month ago. Secondly in modern software development systems often significant work gets done in a branch off the main code to allow for rapid experimentation and the development of new features or massive changes with out screwing up the primary build where people are testing other aspects of the software/game. The result of this is we could see small incremental updates fixes obvious bugs specific to the beta, we can see updates that port bug fixes over from the main code base, and we could see major updates which bring in new features and significant changes to many different functions when experimental/development branches are merged back into the beta branch or main branch. Until we've seen a number of updates over a reasonable period of time it's going to be hard to say how quickly things are moving.

Adding a small increase in critical chance to perception would seem to make sense. For Resolve several possibilities occur, any one of the following might work: Add a small amount of stamina recharge during combat Adjust the stamina to damage ratio slightly A chance to down grade a successful attack one level, ie Hit -> Graze Thematically they could work as those with great resolve will work above and beyond expectations, or are able to shrug off minor difficulties without being discouraged. I personally think adding a small amount of stamina recovery might work best. Thus characters of great resolve will be able to fight longer than those lacking resolve. It would stack fairly nicely with fighters as well allowing the creation of fighters who will continue to fight and with high enough resolve, they'll fight till they die. It would also allow back line fighters a chance to briefly join the front light or recover slowly from the odd hit or two.

Has this feature been abandoned or simply not fully implemented yet? It would make a nice improvement to the game world.