Sensuki

Wouldn't be as terrible as it is now, but they're not going to change it. With engagement disabled, movement affecting status effects like Hobbled actually matter quite a bit. CC abilities are really all that's necessary, I will try my hand at modding and see how I go.

You've repeatedly stated that you regularly cheese encounters and rest spam in the IE games. Your position seems to be that because exploits exist in the IE games and you use them, Pillars of Eternity is automatically better. Sedrifilos has stated that he only plays games once and doesn't like having to learn complex rules, which doesn't really have anything to do with the gameplay itself. Two more examples of people who don't really like the combat gameplay in the Infinity Engine games that prefer Pillars of Eternity. No change to that trend here.

Come on man. Not everyone is terrible at building characters. PE's character system is a bit more forgiving and is designed more for role players than power gamers, but it's just ludicrous if you think that makes gameplay in the Infinity Engine games not matter. I don't really have a massive affinity for the actual system itself, but I do enjoy the gameplay it produced in the Infinity Engine games, it required reaction/multiple reactions from the player. Combined with other gameplay elements there were often multiple ways of dealing with a combat problem. A simple example is an enemy that casts Horror. You can cast Resist Fear on the party before the encounter, you can sit the Priest back and cast Remove Fear on the party after it has taken effect, you can interrupt the enemy caster with an archer, or a magic missile. Josh Sawyer and others here don't like Hard counters. Okay, fair enough. I'm not saying that absolutes is the best way to go (nor am I saying it's a bad way to go) but removing them has removed these reactionary elements from the gameplay. There's a few reasons for this. The first is that you can't flat out remove effects, you can only suspend them, and the number of ways you can do that is very limited and some of the spells themselves aren't very good. Then there's the fact that in PE, if your party members are Frightened, or Sickened, or Blinded or something - so what? It's very difficult to even notice the effect of a spell compared to the Infinity Engine games. When I am blinded by a Mist Mephit in BG2 at the start of the game, geez I notice the difference, it becomes really difficult to hit anything. If you're blinded in PE, you don't even really notice it. Status effects are also cheap to come by, and you're usually affected by more than one of them in combat. Figuring out the exact efficacy of something in this game is very difficult, and requires external mathematical equations, like the stuff Matt516 does. There are some "Protection from" type spells, but they only give a meagre increase against afflictions. Most afflictions don't cause damage or last for very long either, so using one of those to get like 3 seconds less of an affliction over a heal or a debuff is just a waste of a spell slot on a Priest IMO. There's no reason such reactionary gameplay couldn't exist in this game without having the hard counters, but I believe it was deliberately excluded from the design, and there are ramifications for doing that. I don't believe that is true. I think you may be overlooking some of the things you did without thinking in the IE games. It does depend a bit on which game you're talking about. There wasn't too much to the combat in Baldur's Gate 1, but the other games required more reactionary elements from the player. In my Let's Play (modded) Icewind Dale, I did a tonne of reactionary movement in encounters, switching of aggro, micromanaging wounded characters to the backline, moving melee units around mid combat. Tactical repositioning to take advantage of terrain. Swapping items between characters mid combat. Swapping between melee and ranged on some characters. I think a lot of people do this stuff almost subconsciously in the IE games. The Melee Engagement system alone removes or actively discourages most of the movement-based tactics that you could apply in the Infinity Engine games. If your character is engaged, it's almost always a very bad idea to disengage and risk the disengagement attack, particularly on characters with low Deflection. You can build a character that is hard to hit with disengagement attacks at the cost of character advancement points and ability use that could otherwise be used on something useful like actually making the character better at doing damage, and instead just standing still and doing damage. Even with investing in making a character better at disengaging, you're still going to lose Health because of it and make your adventuring day shorter. The Monk ability that you love so much was not available in any of the previous builds, it is new to this build. It is a good ability and it's likely the only one worth actually using because it knocks targets away AND inflicts the prone status, which is a really good disable. Regardless, 99% of the time it's always better to stay engaged and just stand still and deal damage, which is boring gameplay. For me it's the opposite. Combat in Pillars of Eternity is usually decided based on the combat opening and initial movements. In this particular build combat goes for a bit longer against creatures because character weapons and class abilities have been nerfed, but creatures have not, so they take longer to take down. If you make a positional error at the start of combat and one of your squishies is engaged by multiple melee units (which is more an issue on Hard due to the increased number of enemies in encounters that your front line cannot deal with - due to the engagement limits) and your opening set of abilities wasn't particularly effective, that's probably going to end up in some KOs. For me that's a reload. Excluding save or die effects, you can clutch yourself out of most situations in the Infinity Engine games. I've saved characters through tactical retreating, tactical blocking, swapping potions mid combat, casting clutch spells such as Invisibility, Free Action, shuffling items between inventories mid-combat so a character can use a Potion of Invisibility or Exilir of Health. Sometimes you can't do it - for instance if you're out of spells and your main Fighter gets charmed and kills your party or something silly like that. Lies (or ignorance maybe). Kinda sounds like you didn't like the combat in the Infinity Engine games that much. There seems to be a trend here. The people that didn't really like/didn't really care for the IE combat gameplay seem to enjoy Pillars of Eternity more. The people that played the IE games for the combat gameplay (myself, Stun, HP2, Malekith, Sif, Raszius etc) don't find it very fun.

You have to manually cancel the arquebus reload. However in v392 there is a bug or a change to action cancel that prevents you from doing it. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69793-392-action-cancel-no-longer-works/?hl=%2Baction+%2Bcancel

That's just a made up stat, but in general it's true. Eternity is more about strategic planning and less about per-encounter tactics. I don't like that. I do like the fact that planning and strategy are required, I don't like the fact that the actual gameplay in the encounter isn't very fun, or very tactical.

will reply properly after my dota 2 game

Other classes can apply debuffs. Wizards have a couple of good ones, but you don't cast more than one in an encounter. Best practice appears to be to use one AoE debuff, followed by AoE damage. Arcane Assault and even auto-attacks with Blast are AoE damage, so it's not strictly related to Fireball.

They haven't really done too much to the Fighter and Rogue, all they did was change the progression from set to open, which I think most people would have preferred all along. By level 12, the classes will have less abilities and less choice during an encounter than they would have if they kept the standard progression, but due to having a limited ability choice, it plays better at lower levels and makes more lower level builds possible. Personally I don't think too much has changed with the Fighter or the Rogue. You can build them different ways, but they still play the same. You definitely don't use Fighters as a ranged class, and Rogues are still a glass cannon.

That's more a strategical depth, than a tactical depth IMO. Most of the same depth existed in 3E D&D (and thus Icewind Dale 2) and it existed in the IE games too if you cast spells such as Greater Malison and stuff that reduced the saving throws of enemies. The difference with the 2E games is that there were spells that reduced all saving throws, or spells that reduced armor class. Tactical depth is in the moment decision making / the way that you responding to immediate problems. There's not much of that in Pillars of Eternity, it's usually a series of non-choices, and pretty much all of the movement based tactics that existed in the Infinity Engine games is removed by the Engagement system and replaced with binary choices - initial positioning plus a do I / do I not disengage question, which most of the time is, no. A lot of the ability based tactical decision making that the IE games has been deliberately removed or made redundant as a side effect of design decisions. In the IE games you were required to pay attention to what spells enemies were casting and react to them, either by trying to protect your party members from the spell they were casting, trying to interrupt the spell, or making sure the appropriate party member (usually Priest, Mage or sometimes Paladin) were tactically positioned away from the party so that they were not caught by the enemy spell, and could dispell it. You don't really need to deliberately position casters away from the party in Pillars of Eternity because the AoE size of spells is small, and when an enemy targets an AoE spell, usually the AoE is only big enough to get the party member they are targeting and one other party member (usually the melee party members). You can't remove debuffs or status effects, you can only suspend them, and at the moment there is only one spell worth casting to remove status effects and that is the Paladin's one which suspends for 15 seconds. It's good but it costs an advancement point. The Priest one is only 6 seconds, and usually not worth it because casting a heal is 99% of the time the better choice (for the purposes of the spell slot, and the action itself). The monk one is a self-cast, and it also costs an advancement point, and as I've never seen it as a good choice among the other options available for Monks - particularly when weighed against disable abilities. Interrupts are now random+weapon based, and ranged weapons have standard-low interrupt, so trying to interrupt an enemy caster with a ranged weapon is folly. So far enemy Wizards don't seem to be a huge threat in PE, they're easy to beat because they don't protect themselves against anything, (except maybe cast Arcane Veil) and they go down very quickly. Enemy Priests are annoying, but they don't seem to deal much damage, so they're usually my last priority as their buffs/debuffs are useless with no allies to take advantage of them. Beyond the opening set of actions and movements in PE combat, there's not much tactical depth. You're required to react to initial movements, targeting, positioning and your ability choice (which there is more of, due to the class design), but after that it simply boils down to who you target and what abilities you use. A lot of that is rote because for many classes you just spam your per encounters, if you picked them. I have not faced a single encounter where something an enemy did after the opening required responding to other having to heal damage dealt with the Priest. I have lost encounters (well, I tend to reload if a party member falls unconscious) because I made a mistake in my opening positioning/ability choice, but that's about it. Encounters in all the IE games (except maybe Baldur's Gate 1) often went for a lot longer duration than Pillars of Eternity due to the to hit system, lower per-hit damage across the board and the required responding to enemy actions, particularly casters. Combat could end catastrophically quick if you didn't prepare properly against a "save or die effect", or you cheesed the crap out of the game with broken combos, but the standard play against Pillars of Eternity standard play is a lot different, has much better pace, is more tactical and more fun. PE has a bit more strategy involved, and more emphasis on the opening set of actions, other than that I find it pretty banal - it's trying to be tactical, but failing at it.

Well there you go not much has changed unfortunately And yeah it's sad about the Ranger. Once again it ends up being a bad class

I think they've already stated they won't be giving Wizards summoning spells or Invisibility, at least not in the vanilla game. Josh said something about this being the problem with so many backer funded classes or something. Kind of their own fault for a) having so many as a stretch goal and b) designing them the way they have but what can you do. Contingency / Spell Sequencers etc etc is something they've said they couldn't realistically do for vanilla as well, but they would like to have it for the expansion. I'm definitely not saying don't give feedback, it's good feedback, but it would have been more useful feedback about 2-3 months ago unfortunately Many of us said the same things you did back then, and I think there are some responses to those specific things, you'd have to check the dev tracker / Josh's post history though.

Minor Grimoire Imprint is simply not good. It costs a per day spell, and then you get a random one from their spell book - that's a per day spell slot used for one encounter that only has a chance of being useful for that encounter, and an action you made that didn't do any damage. I'd rather just pick another AoE damage spell myself than use it.

I agree that it's not the biggest problem with the class. As they are now I wouldn't use one simply because they are terrible. I'd prefer they actually be more useful in combat than anything.

There needs to be more offensive talents so you can actually make an offensive Fighter, right now the offensive talent pool dries up between level 4-6 depending on your weapon type. Druids are just a flat out better class than Wizards. Rangers are terrible. Yes, a lot of the Chanter invocations are not great, and fights are usually over before you can use them sometimes. You might get to cast one, but rarely two. Summoning that Spectre always seems to be the best invocation to use. Better not repeat that though because then it will get nerfed. The design philosophy seems to be nerf the stuff people are using rather than bump the stuff they aren't Your input might be a bit too late. There's not much Obsidian is going to do about classes now, because they're trying to limit themselves to bug fixing, only adding new things where absolutely necessary. There'll be balance changes, but we'll be hard pressed to actually get anything new in. That's one of the reasons why I've stopped doing Suggestion videos.

Animal Companions have higher defenses than the Ranger does. Some have higher DT (Bear/Boar?). The issue is that you can focus fire the Ranger because he's way easier to hit, and ignore the animal companion. Josh Sawyer already stated on Something Awful that they've been considering applying a debuff to the Ranger or Animal Companion if one falls in combat, rather than having both get knocked out, but they haven't looked at it yet because there are still many bugs to fix with Rangers.

That's only because there's no Save or Die effects. As I previously stated a few days ago. That's the only difference here. The actual resolutions of attacks have more states in this game, the to hit "die roll" is 100 not 20 and the damage ranges can be pretty wild as well. This creates a system where you can score 1 damage or 40 damage on the same attack. That IS more random and more swingy than the Infinity Engine games, and it's just downright awful.

No you can't. That's how we would like it it work, and I have no idea why they didn't code it like that in the first place .... Instead, Stealth is a Game State. Combat is also a Game State. and Stealth and Combat game states cannot both be active at the same time. Very strange implementation.

The only reason this is badly placed is because the encounter is not facing the camera, it's facing away from it. Combined with the unfortunate lower camera angle outside, you often lose your units if a Forest Lurker attacks them in melee, and you can't see them behind the Forest Lurkers. I would possibly recommend just not using Forest Lurkers up there, as it's just not practical. Wouldn't be as big of a deal if unit occlusion through other units was actually good, but it's not and I'm not sure if they will have time to improve it before release.

I agree with PrimeJunta, it shouldn't be visible until you've taken Frenzy. This actually happens with quite a few talents for other classes too.

Good post. I second the status effect suggestions. Status effects in this game appear to have been an afterthought, or only there because "the IE games had them". Instead of making them strong like they were in the IE games, they were just mostly all turned into debuffs and assigned semi-random combat stats to debuff. The endurance draining spells are useless. I agree. I also do not use Wizard self-buffs because it just seems like a waste of a daily spell slot, when you could cast another Fireball instead and actually contribute something to the encounter. If an enemy attacks you, regardless of whether you've pre-buffed yourself, you're going to take damage anyway, and also if they are attacking you, it's likely that your other party members are down, so it's better to just reload. DoTs are insanely overpowered/bugged and always have been. They aren't quite as nasty as v278, but still very, very strong. I disagree about Arcane Assault. It's a great Talent. It's 2 per encounter (very useful), it's Foe-only AoE (very useful) and it does moderate damage. You'll always be able to cast them, and it's still better than making an auto attack with a Wand. But I do agree about the others. I don't pick them when I make my own Wizard. Jolting Touch used to be the best level 1 Wizard spell in v333, but the cast range was nerfed to hell and changed to be more like Shocking Grasp. I no longer use it. I think it should be changed back to being a ranged spell. I try to stay away from cone spells because you can't cast them on the ground like in other games, you have to cast them directly from the Wizard's feet which is really annoying. Noxious Burst used to be better than Fireball, but it was nerfed in v392, and has now been relegated to "probably wouldn't cast unless I knew the enemy was weak to corrode". A lot of the Wizard spells suffer from pre-nerfing, where a good D&D spell has been taken and then had something about it severely hampered before even being tested in the game. Whether it be cast range, AoE size or whatever. I would never choose 90% of the Wizard spells just because of that. In Pillars of Eternity, the role of the Wizard in combat appears to be dishing out AoE damage as fast as possible, maybe with an AoE debuff or two in between. I pretty much ignore everything else as it just reduces your combat efficacy. Any action spent not dealing AoE damage to the enemy in combat is wasted actions IMO (unless you're being charged head on by a bunch of beetles or whatever). I also think implements need a faster hit frame on their animation, it's like way too long.

Pretty much. A while ago I had to open most of the talent prefabs in Unity just to find out what values they gave. Although the "Active Effects" section in the character record usually tells you the raw values of them as well.

And you attack slow and do no damage either.

Lol? No. In Icewind Dale 2 you can lose because of saves or whatever but in the 2E games, this doesn't happen. Most of the time in BG1 or BG2, you die because you failed to do something (such as counterspell), not because of RNG. > inb4 qq about wizard battles

Uhhh, PE is worse regarding the randomness of outcomes, especially when using a daily spell and getting a graze or a miss. I have to say after playing with this system, I much prefer the standard way things are done - automatic magic and rules with exceptions.

In the original Baldur's Gate, I have never reloaded the game because I cast a spell and it didn't work. There are no encounters in the game where it is that big of a deal. There's plenty of times where I've mucked up and been killed by Tarnesh or Nimbul because I failed to interrupt their Mirror Image, and then proceeded to have my PC killed by an onset of Magic Missles, but not actually cast something to no effect (Magic Resistance / Save vs Spell) and reloaded. It's not that drastic in BG1.