Sensuki

The Stuck Affliction FX is too over the top, obscures too much of the unit. Rolling Flame could be toned down a bit as well.

Throughout the entire beta, there has been absolutely zero communication about balance changes. Obsidian does a passable job at communicating the implementation of new features and bug fixes, but there has almost never been anything stated in the new BB posts "Backer Beta XXX is now live!" about balance changes. Every other beta, and released game that I have participated in the ongoing development of, has done a better job at communicating balance changes to the community. In my opinion, balance changes are the most important thing to communicate to the fanbase, after implementation of new features or fixes of critical bugs. It may be slightly more important in other game genres - for instance I am a DotA 2 player, and it would be completely unacceptable to change anything without informing the community. I likely have the most logged hours of testing out of all of the beta backers, and even I find it difficult to thoroughly test lots of different encounters with different classes and abilities. So sometimes even I am unaware of various changes to abilities, and do not get the chance to give feedback on them. Whereas if I knew what was changed, I could actually go and test the change against my memory of the last version. It must be doubly difficult for others. I was able to get this information from Josh Sawyer about the armor changes in the latest patch on his tumblr Let's have a look at what was posted in the official backer beta release post Yes, I am aware this was a rushed patch and rushed patch notes due to being near the end of the year, but every build update post has been like this. Now if you had not read about the DR changes on the official boards (because I posted them there), the RPGCodex or another forum that reports PE news, you mightn't have noticed it. You also might not be aware that various abilities have been changed to per-encounter from per-rest and had their recovery time removed. You might not be aware that Priest and Wizard buffs are now much more viable. The game does not convey this information to the player very well in the first place, how is the average backer going to know about such changes, without paying keen attention to the details like I do ? Obsidian might be taking the view that this creates 'innocent' feedback, where someone is reporting their 'feel' about something they do not truly understand. In my opinion this is a very bad way to go. An analogy - I was once talking to a sound engineer who said that he regularly gets asked to turn the volume up at gigs, and instead he tricks the crowd by increasing the clipping and slightly decreasing the volume and everyone is tricked into thinking it's louder. However the most probable answer is simply because compiling a list of changes takes time, and they likely do not have a process that makes it easy to do. Wouldn't it be easier to get people to keep a list of changes they make/bugs they fixed in between BB builds, and then when you go to release a new patch, everyone sends in their list of changes and Brandon Adler can just copy/pasta them? Only takes a few seconds to write a single line about a change you made into a text document, not like it would be that difficult. When I go to play a new version of DotA 2, I read the patch notes before I play and look at the changes, and then I can go hmm, I want to try this, and then play one of the heroes (or use one of the items) that has had changes to see how it is. Whereas in PE I have no idea what's been changed until I actually jump in the game and start going through characters. It would be much more efficient for me and others to give specific feedback on things if I knew beforehand what the changes were, and the easiet way to communicate that would be for team members to keep a record of changes they made. As an example here is a patch update for Age of Decadence - this is a small team, and they list changes and combat balance changes. Easy to do, and very helpful for testers. Thanks in advance if anything is done about this.

I'm not concerned about modding area art, but modding the scenes themselves (scripts, monsters, npcs etc) would be cool. Currently we can't do it.

Yeah I already reported that, and they've already added it to the fix list

They're not removed, but they're not available for every class or culture.

I've spoken about this many times in my version reviews, but I'm finding that stuff I say in those doesn't seem to get noticed as much as things I report here, so I'm gonna start posting all of my issue related stuff in here. The first of those being that Interrupt and Concentration values really need to be shown on the stat sheet along with defenses and weapon damage. There are things that modify Interrupt and Concentration, and the player needs to know what their interrupt and concentration scores are. Currently the only way to do that is to read the combat log. I think that Interrupt should be shown in the stat sheet on the left hand side here

The performance in this build is disgusting, and the game balance is warped as after the armor changes among other things. Probably the worst build for actually playing the game since v257. There's a few people saying v392 is good - there's definitely some good things about it, but other than that - seriously wtf @ that. Area Design on Hard seems really slap dash. IIRC the game was supposed to be designed on Hard and then toned down for other difficulties, but I'm guessing since that most of the devs themselves probably play on Normal, that's the difficulty that gets the best testing/balance. Also the complete lack of documentation on balance changes is really annoying.

I agree, this is a problem. It stems from the fact that most of the leads prefer turn-based combat to real-time combat, and really want to make a TB game. This is reflected through several of the designs, and basically ignoring any of the RT-isms that the Infinity Engine games had from being built off an RTS engine.

Somehow it seems to work against allies, even when no party member is targeting or attacking that ally.

Josh just posted on Something Awful that it's not a bug, but it needs to be toned down a bit.

I'd also state that the FX for this spell is too strong, and needs to be toned down.

In this image I cast the spell Rolling Flame, you can see that it hits multiple people, but does not use the new 'combat log brevity' where it should show one line of "3 grazes, 2 hits" instead of the spam of lines that it pastes out. I suppose it's because it doesn' hit every target at the same time, but there's probably a way to make it follow suit.

Not inside the portrait please. Below it, if you must. You can disable Combat HUDs, but you have no idea if your units have a queued action because Obsidian has ignored requests to move the combat idle to a recovery time idle.

Edit: Actually it does work, but it only works during recovery. This is not helpful because a lot of the time when you make the wrong action by mistake, you want to cancel it before the hit frame (such as casting the wrong spell, or misaiming the spell). In v257 (and maybe v278) this is how it worked, action cancel only worked during recovery and before the hit frame of an attack. This is also how it was deemed to work by Josh Sawyer when questioned about it on the forums. Sometime after this ... v301 maybe? It was changed so it also cancelled animation backswing and recovery. Can it please be reverted to how it worked in v257/v278 ?

After fighting Medreth's group testing some Cipher stuff, my BB Fighter's engagement selection circle persisted after the fight. Not sure what caused it, but he did drink a beer before battle. Will do some more testing to see if I can reproduce it.

Mostly 2H, it's the best at the moment. Only use 1H when my Accuracy is lower than enemy defense.

32-bit OS ?

The only thing that really needs to be done to better facilitate modding is Obsidian need to externalize more of the files. I did some of the earlier modding, but Bester is a waaaay better and waaaay faster programmer than I am. He's been powering through several of my UI requests recently. It's been cool.

Yeah, but I don't think it had been reported yet. The armor changes highlight how ridiculous monster damage is.

Last build I reported a bug with action cancel ignoring recovery time. The bug was reported as fixed internally ... except Action Cancel no longer works at all. That's not what I would call fixed.

Yeah but when there's like 10 of them on the screen, combat becomes a nightmare - pathfinding wise. If they were IE size, wouldn't be a problem.

For pathfinding purposes they are too big. They should tone down their size a bit. Wood Beetles actually used to be smaller, and they increased their size :/

The creature size in the IE games is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more practical than the creature size in Pillars of Eternity.

Fireball definitely, it does not need a persistent after effect, after the hit frame. There's like a mushroom cloud that rises in the middle, followed by smoke. The new Web FX is strange, it doesn't look like a web and you can barely see it, and now the Hobbled FX is more obtrusive than the actual spell itself. TBH all the Hobbled FX needs to be is some stuff stuck around the units legs or something, not a glowing chain around their body. Chill Fog and Grease are also too much. Every Chanter Invocation needs the screen darkening removed. Will do some more testing some other time and add to the list

Nope