Sensuki

It was changed in v364 Most classes have 35 or 25 now. Priests and Wizards have 15 ?

All classes. I also agree that criticals contribute to the burstiness of encounters. The unified attack resolution system is pretty hilarious on high damage and AoE spells in particular, but the most hilarious on Rogues with their damage multiplier stacking. They have like 3-4 things that can increase damage by x1.2 or whatever that can make even a Stiletto attack ridiculously damaging at fast intervals. A while ago I requested that crits be changed back to the roll of the dice, as I don't like how they affect the gameplay now. That's not going to happen, but I'm interested in trying it in a mod anyway. I think the Rogue 400 damage crit is a bug.

Yeah ideally it would be a complete redesign of the mechanics and encounters to feel a lot more like playing IWD1:HoW, BG2, IWD2 etc. Use of integers instead of percentages will be another thing.

First the devs have to actually recognize that the Ranger sucks. But the chance of actual changes to the class are slim to none at best.

It's the game mechanics that make Lone Druid interesting, not the abilities itself. You can use the Bear to block the pull camp, split push, scout, wittle the enemy down with radiance as they push and cheekily recall it etc etc

and an Orb of Venom and an Armlet of Mordiggan (or did they fix that exploit?)

It's been in since about v333

This is also something you definitely do not see in Pillars of Eternity, due to the size of areas, encounter design style and the general game design geared more towards 4E style play Splitting the party up like that ends very badly in PE. Most encounters are contained within the same screen.

I am not giving up on the BB. The more things that I can get into the game that make it so that I don't have to mod it in the better. Bester has already been able to implement many of my UI change requests with ease. I also need to do some research into the animation glitches that occur where melee characters in recovery are trying to attack moving targets. Those glitches should be more noticeable now that re-engagement has a delay, so it may be possible to get Obsidian to fix them so that a No Engagement mod won't look retarded (it plays fine, it just looks silly). For the past 1.5 months or so I've mostly been focusing on bug hunting anyway.

Wear a helmet. What encounters? I'd like to hear which specific ones you don't like, and what you do in them. I don't play encounters that have casters (or archers) that way. In the Infinity Engine games, casters are usually the primary target of the encounter and NEED to be taken down as quickly as possible. This is the case in BG1 and IWD1 more often than BG2 and IWD2 I think. The fastest way to down a caster is usually take them down with your best melee character. I use a ranged character to try and interrupt their first spell, then send my best melee character ahead to quickly make short work of the caster. I also find that I often spread aggro around. Ranged units are scripted to change weapons when attacked in melee, and usually have a higher hit chance with their bow than their sword, so bum rushing them with melee characters is more effective than holding a choke point, as that forces them to change weapons, and thus they deal less damage. This doesn't happen if they do not have a secondary melee weapon and in rare instances, some ranged characters, and many monster archers will continue to use their ranged weapon. Yes. Setpiece encounters in the Infinity Engine games are the best encounters in the game. Myself, Hiro Protagonist II, Stun, Malekith, Raszius and many of the other people that are big fans of the Infinity Engine game combat all love the setpiece encounters the most. Pretty much. This game seems to be designed for the people that did not like the key things that are quite unique to the Infinity Engine combat among combat in other RPGs, and one of those is definitely the setpiece encounters after cutscenes or dialogue and the way that you deal with those encounters, and I am pretty disappointed how the overall design of the game has turned out. At least you seem to understand my point of view. I am pretty frustrated bordering on angry about how combat in this game has turned out, and I can only hope that we can get full access to the game prefabs so I can try and mod the game into more of an Infinity Engine experience for myself and those that are disgruntled with the design of this game. A lot of it stems from the fact that this game has been designed like a turn-based game in many ways, and Obsidian's general unfamiliarity with designing for an isometric game.

That didn't happen for me.

Damage outcomes themselves were not swingy. People sometimes complain about missing a lot, but that basically boils down to poorly building characters, which has nothing to do with the actual combat itself, but the character system. When I play a Fighter in BG1, I build 18/XX STR, put 2 points into the weapon style i want to use (usually Large Sword) and that gives 15-14 THAC0 at level 1. Low level monsters have AC higher than 0, so hitting them is not difficult for the PC, nor for Imoen. I'm sure that in Pillars of Eternity if you dumped Perception, attack resolutions would be very swingy too, but no one does that because we know it's the absolute worst character creation choice you can make. I've always had as high STR on my warriors and as high DEX on my archers in the IE games as I could, and the NPCs, while not 100% optimal are not terrible either (although there were some in BG1 that had bad stats). The combat here certainly isn't swingy either

It does not matter what you consider a successful attack resolution or whether graze is or isn't one. The fact is that damage outcomes are extremely swingy compared to the Infinity Engine games (The armor system also contributes to this). More damage more often also contributes to the issues with combat pacing. While it may be less of an issue playing on lower difficulties, it has always been a problem on Hard, since the very first beta. Also for a system that is supposed to be simple in concept and easy for new players to understand, it's actually more complicated than how D&D works, and more difficult to determine the efficacy of options or actions.

Josh Sawyer doesn't play and probably hasn't played DotA 2, so I wouldn't expect anything remotely DotA-ish to show up in the game unfortunately. I agree that the way that Barbarians play doesn't necessarily co-incide with their paper design. I do recently recall saying that I think Barbarians aren't fantastic. Josh replied on Something Awful saying that QA and Bobby Null really like the Barbarian as is.

It is a more than fair comparison. On a successful attack resolution for a weapon attack in the IE games, you get a fairly normalized outcome because of the small damage range combined with integer bonuses. The pacing of combat with optimally built characters in the IE games is fantastic.

I meant Karkarov's 70/30 split is just a made up stat. 1-40 while still a guesstimation, is a relatively accurate one. The actual damage range might be 18-28, 1 damage would be minimum damage on a graze, where 40 would be maximum damage on a crit

They have indeed changed their minds about tuning for harder difficulties Which is probably why normal feels the most sensible these days. A bit about Monk wounds.

Barbarians now have 25 Deflection or something, but that's still low compared to other classes, and they also can't tank so them getting hit at all is not great.

I have an FPS overlay on most of the time, reported many FPS issues.

The FPS drop is from getting knocked out.

Zealous Focus was actually nerfed this build from +10 Accuracy to +6. Even still, it's by far and away the best aura to have on, as every offensive action requires accuracy.

Guns used to be amazing, they're not very good anymore though other than for an opening volley. Hunting Bows are still terrible, lol.

I believe the IE games were made for D&D players, so when they were released, it wasn't a problem - and they sold very well for their time. I actually had never played D&D when I first played Baldur's Gate, and I did fine. Sure I died a fair bit, but I learned as I went. I don't believe being able to steamroll a game without dying much is very fun. Some games require you to improve your skill in the game, others require you to improve your knowledge of the rules. RPGs often have the latter rather than the former. Pillars of Eternity isn't much different, other than the fact that people need to realize the emphasis on strategy and planning over tactics (which seems to be a problem for some new players). I did mean RPGs rather than all games, my bad. I think Pillars of Eternity's mechanics require a lot of learning of the rules, just like the Infinity Engine games. There's also a very steep roadblock for newcomers. I remember when I first played the game I was perplexed at how fast I got TPK'd just by a beetle encounter. Everyone at Gamescom seemed to have the same reaction. Jesse Cox got himself into trouble a few times during his PE stream and generally had no idea what was going on, they had to cheat him through the prologue multiple times just so he could progress.

Because you rest-spammed and faced every encounter at 100% strength? Yeah I'll bet. The gameplay is actually fun if you don't do that and also accept strategical errors such as forgetting to buy arrows, haha. There appears to be lots of people who rest-spammed and didn't use potions ... In a lot of places in the vanilla games you actually can't rest spam, but the Rest Anywhere mod exists (I use it too, but I mostly only rest when fatigue kicks in and mostly only backtrack when my inventory is full) so I suppose that's mostly where it comes from, otherwise there'd be lots of backtracking to inns. A lot of the best fun I've had with the IE games is figuring out ways to beat encounters when you're not at full capacity. Out of spells, out of arrows, didn't bring the right scrolls or whatever, and see how many ways you can make something out of nothing.

Most of those spells are per day. In BG1, BG2 and IWD2 in particular you don't have too many spell slots. You can only use them often if you rest spam.