Sensuki

Yeah I use haste there, and I think a handful of times in the late game. I do play with some mods that increase the difficulty though.

Do you actually read the spell descriptions though? There are many ways to beat the encounters in the IE games. Casting haste on your party is one (as eventually the enemy protection spells will wear off) but you become fatigued after casting it. I don't rest spam, so I don't cast haste very often. One example of a counter-spell is something PJ mentioned in his other thread, let's say an enemy Wizard Dire Charm's your main Fighter. That's an oh crap moment because your main Fighter will mince your party. You can counterspell it by casting Dominate on the charmed party member so that you regain control of him/her. You can cast Resist Fear on your party so that you're immune to the spell Horror. You can also let your party be effected by the spell and then dispell it with Remove Fear. There is literally hundreds of examples.

I flat out disagree with this one. The idea behind PE's attack resolution system is good, but the way it is tuned/the way it actually works in the game is not very good at all IMO, when compared directly to how the THAC0 implementation works in BG1, BG2 and IWD1 or the To Hit Roll implementation works in IWD2. This totally depends on the encounter, and the terrain - see here. I also think the encounter and terrain dictating the available movement and positioning strategies is completely natural - Engagement makes it artificial. However I totally agree about magic battles being pretty banal in Pillars of Eternity. There's a subset of backers (mostly located on Something Awful and Badgame.net) that really don't like mage duels. Since Josh is tight with the people on those forums, they got their wish - at the expense of pretty much everyone who really loved them in BG2.

Yes it's missing. I've repeatedly asked for attack speed to be calculated in seconds and milliseconds, but Obsidian haven't acknowledged it/haven't gotten around to implementing it yet.

I don't really use those spells in the IE games, anyway. In ToB I sometimes use Wail of the Banshee to kill summons, but by that time your Fighters are so baws that they can kill them in a round or two anyway.

Not true. I like The Witcher, Mass Effect 2, Titan Quest, Path of Exile, Knights of the Chalice, Shadowrun Returns, Expeditions: Conquistador among others (in the RPG category) but there is a general overtone of tragic romanticism about the state of gaming in general on the Codex, and it's something that I think is true as well. Because games are big business now, everything is made for money / for the lowest common denominator and actual quality of gameplay suffers across the board in pretty much all genres. There's also the fact that AAA games are geared towards consoles, and diehard PC users are often frustrated having to settle for console-geared controls, interfaces and no PC optimization. The codex actually doesn't have a prejudice - doesn't matter who you are or where you come from, everyone gets a kick in the balls

All healing was incredibly strong in v278. They nerfed all healing abilities quite heavily.

Now it's a question of whether Resolve actually works on the lingering effect I'm sure GordonHalfMan will do the honors.

I paid the $9.95 USD to access Something Awful just so I could have a direct line in. Worth the money. Usually if I have a question it gets answered within a day or so on there (moreso since the beta began). If you want to be 'in the know', I also recommend following the RPGCodex thread, because I and others post everything PE related there: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/pillars-of-eternity-beta-release-thread.93694/page-285

Counterspelling was deliberately removed from the game. You can suppress afflictions temporarily but you can't dispell anything. You can cast a few protection spells and they give a small-moderate bonus against a certain type of attack (for instance against the Terrified status effect, which isn't really a big deal anyway). I've found Protection spells to be a waste of a per-day spell, and much of the time suppressing afflictions isn't worth doing either, except in some instances (ie. when you're surrounded by like 12 spiders).

It was actually Shieldbearers of St. Elcga and it's been fixed in the next build.

If I can reproduce it in combat, I'll record it

It's about time someone created a discrete thread about this because it needs addressing. Druids are a cool class, their spell list is effective and they have pretty good stats ... but their signature ability - Spiritshift, is just downright terrible. Some problems I see with the ability: Suffers the same issues with accuracy as many other class abilities, in that there it merely uses the class+level+stat+bonuses to accuracy. Wielding a weapon is superior because weapons can have accuracy bonuses (such as a Fine Weapon giving +4 Accuracy) and you can improve your accuracy with weapons via talents. If I want to deal melee damage as a Druid, I am much, much better off using a Fine Quarterstaff, than Spiritshifting because I have a higher accuracy and will do pretty strong per-hit damage. Every Spiritshift mode has a really long recovery time Spiritshifting doesn't improve your defenses. It gives you a certain DR based on the creature type, but I don't believe that's anywhere near as helpful as bonuses to defenses would be (like where the Ranger Animal Companion has higher defense than the Ranger) The creature abilities are a bit underwhelming. The Bear's roar AoE could stand to be bigger - it's far outclassed by the Barbarian's Barbaric Yell, for instance. The Boar's DoT for 2 damage per tick doesn't seem to be particularly great. The Cat flurry attack has a long cast time, long recovery time and the attack speed length seems to be short/inconsistent - it lasted like two attacks for me/stopped working after I got interrupted once. The Stag Carnage active ability didn't seem to even work Casting spells in Spiritshift form is terrible, because your recovery time is slower thanks to the recovery time slow from the spiritshift form The bonus damage from Wildstrike doesn't *seem* like it's working, even though Sking assured us that it is back in August. I selected Wildstrike and Greater Wildstrike and tested with and without Wildstrike at all and didn't notice any difference in per-hit damage - although that doesn't mean much because damage is random. What I think needs to be improved: I think that the first step is to fix the broken animal abilities and make the underwhelming ones better. The recovery time of spiritshift form also needs another look. It's too slow IMO. Non-weapon based class abilities needs an inherent accuracy bonus based on level or something, because currently I'd rather just not use spiritshift and equip a Fine Quarterstaff or something if I want to melee as a Druid. The form could probably give the Druid some defense bonuses, particularly Deflection. Wildstrike bonus damage needs to actually work if it isn't already and be shown in the combat log

I can't speak to that but he's been a member of SA since 2001 and he plays Ars Magicka with a bunch of dudes from badgame.net - those are his recreational forums. We don't really know how often Obsidian devs read these forums, but Matt Sheets, NCarver and BMac seem to read the forums pretty often. Most opinions probably get filtered through QA, if anything. The devs seem pretty busy working on the game and they don't really have anyone hired specifically to deal with feedback like inXile and Larian do. But sure, their communication could be a bit better.

Okay, the bug is because you clicked the Spiritshift button outside of combat, but it's marked Combat only and isn't greyed out (which is a bug). What happens then is that if you click it before combat and then enter combat, the ability expends until the end of the encounter. If you actually initiate combat with another character, THEN click Spiritshift, it will work.

I actually haven't been using Spiritshift because it just plain sucks/is gimmicky, but I'll try and record the issue for yas.

I think the fact that Wizards can only have four spells in their Grimoire per level and we haven't really had full access to the spell list makes them not seem as cool. While certainly not anywhere near as good as in BG2, they are useful. We can hope that the expansion can improve on their spell list. Learning new spells is also *very* expensive, which is a bit nyeh.

Bug with Iconic Projection targeting, Fog of War, and Walls Issue & Bug with Ability Hotkey changes in v392

In v392 you can't seem to unassign ability hotkeys after you've assigned them (or the function has been changed, but not documented). I also find that I'm accidentally assigning hotkeys pretty regularly so I might suggest that you make it so that something like ALT-clicking or SHIFT-clicking hotkeys assigns & unassigns the key or something, to prevent accidental assigning and unassigning of hotkeys.

Expected Result: Not sure. In the Infinity Engine games if you tried to path to an inaccessible area, the character would try and find a path to the area and then just stop when the condition for no path available was satisfied. But either way, the character shouldn't slide towards the door and the Fog of War shouldn't be revealed when trying to cast a ray spell at an angle through a wall.

I'm pretty sure they're supposed to benefit from Intellect, but I don't know about Resolve. I can ask Josh on Something Awful for you about the Resolve bit.

I actually hate the added Range on Perception. It was totally unnecessary. What they did was nerf the range of a lot of spells so that the added range from Perception actually had an effect on the gameplay. In most cases it is actually quite bad being distant from the party because you miss out on Paladin Auras, Chanter chants, being in range of Priest AoE spells and stuff like that. Pointless addition IMO. You're absolutely right that an Amulet that gives an integer bonus to Endurance is pretty much worth 10 points in CON at certain levels. IMO CON should give integer bonuses to Endurance, then it might actually be somewhat okay, but it still doesn't change the fact that it does absolutely nothing to help you kill things faster, which in this game is very important on Hard difficulty, so investing in CON is not worth it on pretty much any character.

The absolute BEST thing about this patch for me is changing the Formation Rotate Function to behave exactly the same as the Infinity Engine games, I can now naturally path around areas exactly the same as my muscle memory is used to