Sensuki

They are bugs, but rather than post these ones in the bug forum, I thought I'd bring them to public attention.

Yes I can mod them to be used in combat. It's very easy to do. But not everyone is going to use mods. Regardless of that, the Enemy AI needs some more work.

RE: Paladin Talents - more coming in the next patch

There are quite a few problems with the enemy AI in Pillars of Eternity that are causing quite a few issues with combat, and I believe skewing the developer's view on what abilities are "too OP" to be able to cast to initiate combat, among other things. First and foremost, I will address some of the things that I brought up in my Engagement thread from last month. I highlighted a particular issue with AI targeting and movement that has been present throughout the entire beta. Josh Sawyer stated in one of the other Engagement threads that this issue was being addressed for build v392. Having now tested to see if things have actually improved, I am not seeing any difference in v392 with the AI for Medreth's party, or Beetles (have not really tested many of the other groups, but I assume it's the same). Here are some videos showcasing that the AI still does not update when moving / if there were any changes made, they are not working/were not tested properly. There is one thing that is different from the last version, and that is the Cowled Woman (Ranger) does in fact reacquire targets when moving more often. In v364 she very rarely did. I believe the reason she re-acquired targets in this instance is because I ran behind a tree and broke line of sight, which caused her to re-evaluate targeting. There are also many other bugs present in the video, I have reported all of them except the animation glitches, which is another topic I need to investigate. I created a bug thread with a video for the Beetles example here. For posterity here is my old video on AI Targeting issues from v364 One of the issues is that the enemy AI and/or the combat state have trouble dealing with scenarios where the party is split up. If you send a single character around a corner to attack a bunch of enemies, and your party was not in the enemy group's FOV at any point, and the enemies KO that character, eventually the combat state will end, and the KO'd character will get up, and be KO'd again by the enemies - rinse and repeat. Sometimes the same enemies won't detect that your party member has gotten up. Bester reported a similar issue here, where by closing a door he was able to make some of Nyfre's group return to their room, while two of the enemies opened the door to attack the rest of his party. Enemies in Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 had some issues with detecting the party through the fog of war, and it was very easy to just simply leave combat (which to be honest, is fair enough). Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter improved on this. Perhaps not with every enemy, but IIRC there is no way of escaping Yxunomei in Dragon's Eye unless you close a door (of which, the combat state still won't end), or exit the area. If you run all the way to the entrance of the map, she will find you (from memory anyway). I would actually like to be able to run away from combat and use area transitions in this game, but I'm not sure if that will happen, so it would probably be a good idea to give enemies some better detection of party members through the fog of war once combat has begun. One thing that the designers are unfortunately doing is limiting several of the offensive and status effect abilities to Combat only, meaning that you cannot initiate combat with them until the combat state has actually begun - which means that if you are attacking neutral NPCs or from the Stealth GameState, you can't use those abilities until at least one of your characters has made an offensive action, or an enemy has. I think this is an oversight of the actual problem with those abilities. An example is Whisper of Treason, which is a level 1 Cipher ability that charms an enemy. This spell was made combat only because you could cast it on an enemy in a group, the group would kill the enemy and then everything would go back to normal and you could rinse and repeat the process. This situation would be completely avoided if the ability actually turned NPCs of the same faction/group hostile if cast on them, and if enemies could actually detect the party properly in the fog of war. There are also a lot of other status effecting spells that are either combat only or do nothing on neutral NPCs that probably could be enabled if these issues were addressed, which is why I have created this thread. These are not the only issues with AI in Pillars of Eternity, and as I investigate various issues more, I will continue to add to this thread. If anyone else has any issues with anything AI related, including but not limited to enemy ability and spell casting routines, AI targeting, detection of party members and dealing with Engagement - feel free to post them here. Also a sidenote: Engagement is still exploitable the same way it was before. Not as bad due to the re-engagement delay and the Defender nerf, but still totally possible to do. Fixing the issue with enemy AI target re-acquisition should help to make it harder to achieve, but I don't actually think the exploit will be able to be removed from the game entirely.

Without this "rumbistious bickering", PrimeJunta wouldn't have been able to see the "grognard" point of view / understand our Infinity Engine playstyle

My example was just an example.

You mean Bester

... guys

Yeah, you can click and drag any of the elements and put them where you wish. Vertical portraits is not currently supported though as that ... would be very tricky given the way how things are done presently. Also the move to Unity 4.6 would potentially allow modders to create their own new UI with the Unity 4.6 UI which is much easier to work with than NGUI. Bester sent me a preliminary version before he went to bed as it's not ready for public release yet.

Ideally the menu would be able to be inversed as well, so the attack/cancel etc buttons are close to the portraits. Might be tricky though.

Btw for the area transitions in combat, I was just having a look back at what some of the earlier modders did and mutonizer modded it in himself and said it worked fine (area would be the same as you left it, I think). Obviously that was prob just quick testing but we'll look into it soonish I guess.

One of the reasons I much prefer the Infinity Engine games to other D&D RPGs is because I came from Warcraft 2 and Age of Empires 2 before I played Baldur's Gate, and the transition was pretty much perfect. I honestly couldn't envision games looking any other way at that point in time.

Only happens the very first time you select them after they start their reload. I have managed to produce it on other animations/units, and one time just plain selecting any character would interrupt any combat action they were doing and cancel everything, including recovery - but I was not recording when I managed to do that. This could possibly be related to this - which I understand has already been fixed internally.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69776-392-cant-disarm-chests/

On my first playthrough of IWD I got stuck in the Severed Hand because I didn't find the staircase to the other side of the bottom floor which contained a piece of the Astrolabe ... lol. In Icewind Dale 2 I got stuck in the Fell Wood. Didn't have a Ranger or a Druid and couldn't find the way out.

I'm pretty sure you'd be free to express that view. Not really anyone there is going to agree with you though. The difference between the Codex and another forum is that on another forum you'll be moderated out of the forum in no time. I can't say 'storyfan' on this forum, if I do, I'll be warned and then banned. You can say Anita Sarkeesian (whoever that is, but I can take a pretty good guess that it's something related to feminism) is right about a lot of things on the codex all you like, without impediment by a moderator.

Hard? It's not hard. Remember that many classes don't even use most of the attributes. If you look up the D&D attribute tables, some of the minimums before you start getting negatives are pretty low, in the single digits. It's "harder" building for some classes that require more good attributes, some of those are made easier by their class attribute minimums. I've actually saved myself a fair bit of time over the years by exporting characters that I get amazing rolls on, so I can use them again.

^

Main priority for me is fixing the animation glitches When characters get hit and play a non-interrupt hit reaction, they slide across the ground. Also characters often glitch out after Engagement ends if they are chasing a moving character and they are in recovery time because the combat stance and run animation don't blend properly with eachother. Other than that there are BUCKETLOADS of general functionality issues with the game that make it frustrating to interact with Change the Inventory controls for double-click equip (very annoying, needs to be shift or control click or something) and splitting items - which needs to function the same as it did in the IE games (which was double clicking an item stack). Fix Action Cancel - you can't cancel actions before the hit frame anymore which is really annoying, so if you start casting a spell and you misclicked the spell you want to cast or you changed your mind based on a change in combat, you can't cancel your action anymore, as of v392. Build an action cancel into RMB please, so that RMB functionality is exactly like the Infinity Engine games Remove the TAB switching between characters in the inventory and replace it with TAB removing tooltip delay of items, which is how it functions in the Main HUD. The code handling how that works is also really strange, and makes it difficult to mod in. Improve Weapon Set switching (probably needs to be hotkeyable, like an ARPG or something - I consonantly go to press W to swap weapons from playing Diablo 2 and Titan Quest hahah). Weapon Sets also work sub-optimally in the inventory. Visual Clutter - still quite a problem in combat (VFX, Occlusion especially) Pathfinding - while improved a bit in v364, still pretty shocking. Units have severe trouble pathing around other units. One of the problems is actually caused by the size of the movement indicators being smaller than the size of unit selection circles, but there's also some calculation issues in there too. Characters take strange vectors to locations / don't take the shortest path around other units. Auto-attack really needs to be cleaned up, it's cancelling character actions and auto-attacking when it shouldn't Tooltip delay really needs separate sliders for unit and ability tooltips, among other things VO needs Always, Seldom and Never options like the IE games for selection and commands Sound slider really needs to be split into multiple ones, because it's super annoying having one slider for music and one for EVERYTHING else Performance and Hitching is becoming a major problem for me. Every patch it's getting worse. That's just off the top of my head at the moment but I have several text documents of issues that I'll go through and paste in later. Back to bug reporting.

Yeah a little bit. I think that Heart of Winter does a bit better with providing some more challenge purely based on monster stats. Actually hitting things really isn't a problem in the Infinity Engine games provided you optimally build your party.

Probably wasn't aware that it is actually a viable or fun tactic I guess. Jarmo ? Rushing in and 'knocking down' the Mage, is exactly how I beat Mages in most of the IE games. The only game it doesn't really work very often in is BG2, because Mage's have lots of protection spells to get through. Check this out man start at 4:35

Or you could save $10, and ask your question here and I could copy paste it for you. He also answers questions on tumblr and twitter ... Personally if I was a dev, I'd hate it if the company required me to only post/post the most on the company forum. Most of Josh's posts on this board focus on correcting misinformation and responding to big issues (delay of the game, engagement exploits, problems with combat legibility and pace, etc). At present, what misinformation or 'big issues' is there? As the person who probably complains about the game the most, since they don't agree with / probably don't care about most of my largest concerns - other than that there's lots of moderate and minor issues. FTR, Engagement is still exploitable. Not quite as much as before, but you can absolutely still do it. Pull melee enemies into your party and run around behind a melee character or two equipped with two-handed weapons and you'll get 2-4+ nice big 2H hits, free of recovery time without having to make a single move. Do it with some Barbarians for extra laughs (Carnage hits on everything from each hit).

With the Stag Carnage, why not just make it a passive instead?

Inclusive without being INKLUSIVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEE