Sensuki

I don't really care too much about the odd style of level ups (the Druid is the same) as I'm more interested in how they actually play. I do agree that the Deity-specific Talents could use a bit of tweaking. For The Pallid Hand - Concelhaut's Corrosive Siphon isn't a very good spell to begin with. Inspired Flame is fine Hope Eternal is good Prey on the Weak is really good, but light weapons in general are pretty weak, and Clubs are *only* useful when dual wielded against enemies in Chainmail. Incomprehensible Revelation is okay, but Rods are just bad on anyone but a Wizard with the Blast talent. It does feel strange that none of them have bonus accuracy with a War Hammer.

Thought I'd start a new thread for this one, considering this exciting new feature that has been added. Forum member Bester, who was responsible for the Savegame editor for the early BB versions, and the work in this thread here has just added a new feature to his IE mod for the PE BB (of which I recently did a demonstration video on which can be found here). Bester's IE Mod can be downloaded from here: http://rien-ici.com/iemod/ That new feature is a draggable User Interface. He has created a series of custom buttons that you can use to drag around the portrait bar, menu bar, combat log and ability bar and save their positions. These changes also persist when you exit the game and there are convenience buttons to undo your previous move or reset the UI back to default. There were many of us that were unhappy with the UI layout that Obsidian have chosen for Pillars of Eternity, and for many the position of the combat log is a fairly serious issue that renders it completely impractical to read on the fly during combat. With this mod you can now remedy that and position the UI elements wherever you wish. There are a couple of catchesThis mod removes the ability to collapse UI elements as the flaps are impractical for horizontal re-positioning (they really should have used gems like in the IE games) The ability to have a vertical portrait bar is not available at this time. There is no method implemented that allows perfect swapping of UI elements around as of yet. This might be looked into in the future, so you'll have to rely on your hand eye coordination and maybe some mspaint measuring The mod also comes with a few non-optional features: ​- You can skip the Obsidian intro movie - Level cap changed from 8 to 12 - All selection circles are displayed when paused - TAB no longer displays all unit tooltips (only the unit you're mousing over) - Restored v364 Party Member tooltip functionality - Can remove ability tooltip delay with TAB - Cheat codes enabled (for testing convenience) And also the following optional features, which can be accessed from the in-game menu IE Mod Tab - "Disable Excessive Highlighting", which disables the the blue/green blinking shader unit highlighting (AoE spell highlighting still works) - "Disable Engagement", which turns off Melee Engagement - this feature is not fully supported yet, but it allows you to see how the game plays without it - "Blue selection circles", which changes the color of NPC selection circles to the colorblind blue color when colorblind mode is disabled - "IE-like blue", which requires a reset to the main menu if in game, and changes NPC selection circles to a cyan-like color - "Always show circles", shows the selection circles of everyone, all the time - "Unlock Combat/Inventory and Looting" - Allows use of Inventory and Looting in combat, all items except for armor can be equipped or unequipped. Here is an example orientation Installation instructions Go to X:\Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity - Public Beta\PillarsOfEternity_Data\Managed Backup your Assembly-CSharp.dll Copy and Paste the Assembly-CSharp.dll from the rar file into the folder and overwrite the default one. Run Pillars of Eternity If you forget to backup your .dll, you can "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" on Steam to restore the default one. Download it and try it out Make sure that your thanks go to Bester for the mod, I only help test for bugs and provide suggestions about what to mod.

That says something about the game, moreso than the class design itself. Ever watched a BG2 Solo Sorcerer run or something ?

Try using Code Mode. Normal mode appears to be broken on the forum (and has been for like 9 months, for me). More like, you can play Baldur's Gate 2.

I don't think there's anything wrong with immunities. They're also very easy to understand and a concept that most gamers are familiar with I think (contrary to popular belief) especially when conveyed properly to the player ... like in Diablo 2. They went a bit overboard in this game over what was essentially just a User Interface problem in the IE games.

Some of those need to be like that because of the nature of the status effects. This is a good way to handle Petrification (and while those specific mechanics (facing, magic immunity) would probably not suit PE, the delayed turn-to-stone with a beforehand complete slow sounds apt.) So far we've only been Petrified by Crystal Eaters and it was from a melee attack ... which doesn't make sense.

Mmm, yeah. TBH you should post about those in the beta forum, I would support inclusion or changing of some of those weapon groups. Rod for instance is not a very useful weapon if you're not a Wizard.

Yeah I think just having CNTRL-click is better. I have a cracked version of v257 installed for posterity, I will have to boot that up and see if this change was added in after the beta release, because I don't remember coming across it before. Yeah, nope definitely wasn't in v257, so it's been added in later.

Rest Anywhere is an easy one to do. I'm sure that can be included soon (for the likes of yourself, Gfted1 and others that want it) and I believe mutonizer modded that in himself back in v278. I was actually hoping for campsite rests in this game so that completing dungeon levels was actually a tense resource management game, unfortunately they went with camping supplies instead, which isn't quite the same thing.

Sometimes yeah, because you can't dismiss any of the BB party members as it crashes the game during transitions. If you create a PC wizard, you can pick some better spells. Which spells are better changes with each version. There's also a Grimoire on the ground in the Dyrford Crossing, just across the river above the wolves. So you get access to a few more.

Right, well I enjoy the playstyle of a Mage and facing enemy Mages in the IE games. I think the aim is to make it so that Wizard's spells are like "woah" but they're a limited resource, so they can only do that stuff sporadically. They haven't quite got the balance right yet in Pillars of Eternity - and having a fairly suboptimal BB Wizard with a poor spell selection probably skews many people's view of the Wizard class in the game. I also don't really read the Saving the Wizard class thread. Yes, Wizards aren't as good as in BG2. Yes, it sucks. Ain't gonna change for PE vanilla though, but they have promised to look into some more advanced spells for the expansion. One of the problems is actually to do with the general design of the game and the fact that they've basically removed 'counterspelling' from the game, which is something I really enjoyed in the Infinity Engine games, but a bunch of people from Something Awful and badgame.net did not. Their dislike of it is also probably a shallow at a glance type thing. In contrast after some forum discussion, some pointers and tips, PrimeJunta is enjoying counterspelling after seeing the cool things you can do with it, where he previously did not. I completely understand people's disappointment with PE Wizards, especially coming from BG2. Fact is that we're either going to have to mod the game to replicate some of that play, or campaign for it for PE:X1 / PE:2

Even if it does take a few patches, many things do eventually get fixed. Here is one silent fix I noticed a few builds ago. A while back I made a suggestion about Animations and Model Collision, pointing out that weapon swings clip through character models and that it looks bad. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68147-sensukis-suggestions-015-animations-model-collision/ Some time between then and I think v333 or v364, the issue was addressed

You can use CNTRL-Click to add and remove characters from selection, but yes it's annoying that you can't unselect all of them. Not sure if I like the RMB doubling up on that functionality tbh, will need to play around with it more. Bester said he'd probably make a video to demonstrate the issue as well

That was just a general statement, but I get pretty defensive when people post things like that. To your second line - I don't think you need to be concerned about Wizards. Even if the devs wanted to do something in that regard, it's simply too late in the dev cycle to do anything about it. Would you mind speaking a bit more about that concern about a potential change to Wizards though ?

Yeah I wasn't too big on the Idol room. The second time I played the game, I got stuck there because I just couldn't beat the respawning undead. There was like 8-9 year old kid at Athletics when I was younger who also played Icewind Dale because his dad did and he told me that I just had to rush straight to the idol and destroy it and ignore the undead. Worked like a charm. Have to be careful of the spell that paralyzes your entire party though And it's also much better to attempt from the side door, rather than the door from the Fire Giant entrance as it's a long run to the end, and more chance that you're going to get paralyzed by that spell. The first time I fought Malavon it was super hard, and I beat it by sitting in the doorway until all the AoE spells ran out. Last time I did it though it was easy, I didn't use any pre-buffs. I just used an in-combat Oil of Speed and a Cure Critical Wounds to heal my Fighter who solo'd most of the Iron Golems inside a Cloudkill spell. I've also never had trouble with that Elven chick, but YMMV. Lower Dorn's Deep is really well designed, and you can complete it by doing the various things in any order

A lot of the time the fact that something isn't like the Infinity Engine games isn't the main problem or the only problem with an aspect of the game. When I complain about something not being like the Infinity Engine games it's usually because something about it is worse or there is a downside to it. One example is controls. I have been playing the Infinity Engine games since Baldur's Gate came out and I replay them every year. I have over 10 years worth of muscle memory built up from doing this, and when a control is changed it often negatively impacts my experience because I can't use the natural muscle memory I have from playing the Infinity Engine games. Some of the changes are better - being able to shift-queue actions is good, I dont really use it but it doesn't negatively impact my experience, but not being able to use TAB to remove tooltip delay in the inventory, pressing it anyway because of muscle memory and having it switch selected characters is a bit annoying. Another recent thing I've been going on about is monster per-hit damage, which I think is too high (and Josh has responded to that complaint and has been tuning the values down for the next patch), I have mentioned that combat encounters do not feel like playing the Infinity Engine games (my experience is relative to Hard difficulty, which is supposed to feel the most like "Core Rules difficulty" in BG2/IWD2, as stated by the developers). The main reason why the damage being too high is bad is because it makes certain playstyles/strategies very inefficient and not viable and creates a combat pace that is not enjoyable. My natural reaction is to recommend to make it feel more like the Infinity Engine games because the lower per-hit damage of enemies felt much better there - I have that experience to relate to where I think something worked better. Obsidian have improved on the formula on the role-playing side/dialogue side in many ways and also in some ways on the character building side. But for the most part I still think the general gameplay has a ways to go before it'll start making me think "this is starting to feel right". This will differ for some people because they may have only played the IE games once or a handful of times, and maybe not for many years. That experience also tends to differ depending on the manner of which you deal with encounters and whether you use mods or not.

edit: appears to be because right clicking a character adds to the currently selected characters - which did not happen in the Infinity Engine games. If all characters are selected it unselects all characters except the one you right clicked on ? Behavior does tend to be a bit finnicky though.

Refer to this thread http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69952-the-ai-issues-thread/ Josh Sawyer stated that in v392, the AI would now re-evaluate targets when moving. This doesn't appear to be happening, as demonstrated in this video The thread has all of the associated information and issues.

Do you have a specific concern about something being changed?

It's fine to not care about game mechanics, but the purpose of the beta is to get feedback on game mechanics (among other things). Various people have made this post many times before whether it be in a new thread, or in another one but the fact remains that if people didn't complain about things, or take the time to investigate the inner workings of the game / how it played a little bit out of the box - then it's pretty likely that these exploits/bugs/issues would make it into the base game. There's a lot more to the 'complaining' that meets the eye. Just because you don't like the tone of some posts, doesn't mean that they aren't helpful. I 'complain' about absolutely everything I can, and many of the things I have whinged about have been fixed/changed/re-balanced/identified etc. As for complaining about damage, if you're just going to chuck the game on easy and go to town - then you aren't probably going to care about damage. But there's more people out there than you that play on harder difficulties, and want the game to still be fun and/or feel/play more like the pace of the Infinity Engine games.

Hmm, I wonder who he's referring to here.

Yeah, it's a pretty horrible spell.

I actually find it pretty inconvenient that no ability or spell stats are shown in the tooltips anymore. That was the most useful information to read at a glance.

Lots of PR speak.

Nah they don't. I guess it's because there's no penalty to shooting in melee.