Sensuki

In my video, the Yuan-Ti Mage didn't get his Cloudkill off, I interrupted the spell If not, just walk out of the cloudkill AoE, most of them will follow you out of the room. There's probably a few Wizard spells you could use to aid you vs the trolls. Slow would be a good one. I didn't have a problem, I kept my characters moving around and didn't let them surround me. Towards the end when I started focusing on them, they started hitting a bit. As you can see I drew aggro with my highest AC character, if all of them attack him, that means they will do less damage to the party overall because more of their attacks will be misses. I'm sure that PE will have it's fair share of party composition problems as well. edit: I'm sure some people beat it on the first try, but it took me a few gos back in 2001 or whatever when I first played it. I like die-to-learn stuff - usually you have to make mistakes to improve. Apparently that's what Dark Souls is like too. It's like when you're learning anything I guess, you have to lose to win. I also don't think it's masochistic. If you ever played Super Mario, how many times did you die in that before you finished it? Was it still fun? I'll bet.

That's the idea, and that's why it's terrible.

The Talonite Priest fight is very easy if you cast Haste, completely ignore the trolls and kill the Talonites as fast as possible. One of them is probably going to get Hold Person off on you, so just sit the Cleric out of the AoE, and have her/him come in and drop a Remove Paralysis straight away. Try and interrupt their spells with archers and Magic Missiles. I think I sent you a video via PM. The trolls aren't very difficult and to kill them you're given plenty of bombs that you find on Lizardmen if you don't have any fire/acid arrows or spells. Yxunomei is one of the best fights in the game. Here is my video, fast forward to near the end. This is with the Harder Yxunomei mod, which makes her immune to +3 weapons (instead of +2) and high magic resistance. You can see that I completely ignored Yxunomei and killed all of the Yuan-Ti first, that I have found is the best tactic to deal with that encounter. In the Harder Yxunomei mod, I only had one weapon in the party that could hurt her, and I actually had to give that weapon to my best melee character (who wasn't proficient with it) and constantly switch aggro back and forth until I could take her down with my melee character and any spells I could muster that would actually work. Great fun for me, but you'd probably pull your hair out at that one. Looking at your party comp, you're lacking a character that has amazing THAC0. A straight Fighter that can go all the way down the proficiency line makes a big difference. I haven't played Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition (I was given it by Beamdog, but I prefer the original), but I imagine that the AI targeting in that game may follow the BG2 system, and it's possible that the AI is kind of derp and doesn't change targets very often, that's one of the reasons I prefer playing IWD:HoW vanilla. There are also mods for the original IWD that fix those weapon proficiency issues. Pathfinding is fine with Path Search Nodes 40,000 on, but in tight spaces you have to micro your characters because they can't handle calculating pathing in tight spaces around other characters. I find the IE pathfinding more manageable than PE's horrible pathfinding around units, but the PE overland pathfinding is better. I really enjoy the trap finding in the IE games, and I really enjoy the setpiece encounters that force you to think about new ways of playing to beat them / get better at the game to beat. And yeah the blitzing movement is one of the reasons why I love the IE combat more than any RPG, it's super exciting for me. I also reload when I lose a character. Faster repeating the fight than trecking back to town.

Yeah they have, I've tested it against Medreth's group - they now change targets. Beetles do not however.

That's BG2 AI. Icewind Dale:HoW is very different. Good, because that's how it should be (and how it was in the Infinity Engine games). Since I will be attempting to do a full re-balance of the game for no engagement, I will likely re-tune all of the encounters for it. When encounters are designed well (eg. The Guarded Compound in the Temple District in BG2), there is a decision to be made about whether you beeline your Fighter for the backline enemies or stay to defend the frontline from the enemy melee opponents. In that encounter I find all of the melee enemies to be larger threats than the Wizard at the back. Koshi with his katanas, Ketta with her backstab and the Orog guys with their axes. In the encounter in the Sewers, the archer Gallachobhair is the biggest threat IMO and I usually go straight for him first.

The only reason I am using War Bows and disables is because melee is not very viable in this build. Previously it wasn't too bad. I didn't abuse web/entangle and fireball/cloudkill combos, or mass archers in the IE games. I usually rolled with 4 melee and 2 ranged.

No one wants stupid AI targeting, but AI is not some magic thing that you can design and it thinks like a human. Good AI is deterministic and has a robust set of conditions. In IWD:HoW, enemies will re-acquire targets if you try and kite them around. Many enemies in Pillars of Eternity just follow the original unit they targeted (eg. Beetles) so you can just run around in circles and kite that enemy around. Engagement gives the player an easy means of overriding AI targeting and forcing the AI to perform a certain action. It makes it easier for newer players, but for people who moved around in the IE games it really restricts what you can do in an encounter, and takes a lot of the fun out of it.

Confirmed with video. (In the combat log you can see that the Halt I cast before the one I recorded was a graze for 12.5 sec) Also the VFX for Halt lingers for a few seconds after the spell ends. It should disappear immediately (also the FX is way too over the top, should just be something around the unit's legs or something).

And when it works like that and you block the pathing space, the AI glitches out and runs on the spot in an Infinite Loop (this happens currently in the BB sometimes, you can force beetles in the Dyrford Crossing to do it). Enemies in IWD:HoW have very robust AI targeting, especially compared to this game. That's a 14 year old game, too.

If anyone here even mentions changing how the mouse controls work again I'll come after ya kent

Apparently that is the new colorblind blue from the new patch, not a color Bester chose. Since I never play with colorblind mode on I wasn't aware that Obsidian changed it.

Medreth attacking way too fast, Enemy Animal Companion seldom spawns

In this video Medreth attacks way too fast (probably the same bug or a similar bug as to why Korgrak was attacking too quickly) and the Animal Companion of the Cowled Woman only seldom spawns, which I think might be a save/load issue. When you load a saved game or start a new game after you've already been playing the game without actually quitting the game is what causes the Animal Companion to sometimes not spawn, it always spawns if you exit the game and then start a new game.

In this image I have circled a problem area where I think the UI could be a bit more polished. It looks untidy for the ribbon to end suddenly at that part of the screen where the wood pattern continues across the entire length of the screen. It would look better if there was a border on the right side of the ribbon separating the whole of the two pages of the screen. In the new talent screen, the buttons are not centered/do not match the background pattern of the element they are contained in.

The War Bow +4 Accuracy not working could also be related to this, I have seen this happen in v364 as well http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69492-364-possible-bug-with-accuracy-and-new-stacking-rules/

Multiple bugs with Accuracy Suppression and Suppression display - fixed internally Two minor UI art issues

In this video, the Accuracy bonus for the Rogue ability Reckless Assault does not appear to stack with the Weapon Focus talent and the damage bonuses for Reckless Assault are also suppressed along with the Accuracy for some reason, is this intended? :/ Also the Accuracy bonus for the War Bow being Fine also appears to not be working in this instance / is suppressed by Weapon Focus. The Accuracy values are shown as 54 and 64 respectively. 25 (Class) + 9 (Level) + 20 (Perception) = 54, and +10 from Weapon Focus Adventurer. In this video, you can see that after the suppression of Reckless Assault appears in the Character Sheet and Tooltip after having a weapon of the Weapon Focus group equipped, it persists no matter what weapon is equipped (in this case, unarmed - which is from a different group) and makes the Accuracy display inaccurate among other things.

I don't think the armor change is as bad as you think it is, it's just that creatures need to be tuned for it. They were already dealing very high per-hit damage before the armor change anyway.

The issue is that because it's the best way to deal with encounters and take the least damage that it trivializes combat in general. Why on ****ing earth would I send my units into melee to take massive damage when I can just sit back with ranged weapons and pepper them to death. In the Infinity Engine games I favored melee over ranged. Wade straight in with my high AC Warriors and wreck everything. Instead what happens here is that high Deflection Fighter (if you built for max defense) deals no damage, and still takes a lot of damage himself anyway because creatures deal a crap tonne of it per hit.

Make CON give a set amount of integer Endurance instead of a percentage

Well as you can see, I can take no damage from encounters by using spells that Hobble enemies and using bows. That's not exactly fun though. BTW what were your thoughts on the Core Rules difficulty of BG2 and IWD2 ? While that may encompass a wide range of difficulty itself, I'd say the harder encounters of BG2 and the general attention level of IWD2 is the aim for Hard difficulty here. That's what they've stated they are aiming for anyway. I still think that despite being able to topple the encounters easily with AoE disables, nukes and ranged weapons that several creatures deal too much per-hit damage. My 5th level characters there have between 70-90 Endurance and the Adra Beetle can one shot KO several of them if it crits on it's Shocking Blast attack, and two hit several of the characters with normal melee attacks. That doesn't feel very Infinity Engine to me.

edit: and in making that video, watch that spell get nerfed through the roof in the next patch, soz guys.

Not even one hit, usually. I'm starting to dump CON down to 5 on my characters, it's only -10% Endurance and Health, and you get more from the offensive attributes anyway.

Adra Beetle Shocking Blast ability doesn't need the smoke after effects

That's the kind of stuff I will be looking into yep, I would like to move to an integer bonus system over percentages as then what you get from things are very easy to understand and calculate.