Sensuki

When you change characters in the Character Record, the text bounces up and down for a moment during the change.

This issue is still happening, this is the first time I've encountered it in v333. I have the Rogue equipped with an Arbalest, and after combat she started playing a repeating loop of the Arquebus reload animation. She's never been equipped with an Arquebus, and never had it in her weapon sets or inventory. As you can see my Priest is equipped with an Arquebus. The Rogue can move, but she repeatedly keeps playing the Arquebus reload animation while idle.

Went to the Stormwall Gorge for the first time today, what damage do Elder Lions do on other difficulties? They're hitting my BB Fighter for 75 damage a hit (normal hit, not a crit) and he's in Plate Armor. WAT.

The pathable area with water here should have VFX, Audio like the river in the Dyrford Crossing for when the player walks in the water.

These Feral Druids are wearing various types of clothing and carrying weapons, among other things. The only WYSIWYG loot I got off them was a Flail, which I'm not sure was even equipped. There were four guys all equipped with weapons, clothing and possibly lighter armor too. I have been finding this is a common issue with many of the scrub/unnamed humanoid enemies in the beta.

In this image you can see that the very edge of the Area Map in Stormwall Gorge is visible on the map Looks ok when you clear it

The gold is added to the party and the obtained gold sound plays one dialogue node before Nyfre says "here's some gold" asking you to look around town for Medreth.

and 99% of the time it's better to just deal raw damage instead, because combat is over very quickly all the time.

Yepppp. I know that feeling.

Hard isn't hard though, it's just boring and has no tactical depth. The only difference is it requires more pausing - that's it.

@Indira, Shevek just posted how he plays it: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69294-newb-guide/ He gets Medreth's gear first, hires another companion and when he goes into the Dyrford Crossing he pulls single beetles at a time (which you can't really pull off as easily on Hard). Obviously when you do that, it's going to be much easier and he can just stand there auto attacking without much consequence. All of my videos are done with the stock party and gear against a group on Hard and I try and take on the whole group at once and see how well I can do, so it's obvious why he has a different experience to me. But yeah when I played Icewind Dale recently I used the pull a few at a time tactic in Kresselack's Tomb against the skeleton warriors to prolong my adventuring day.

Is there no Monk in Medreth's group on normal? That Barbarian build is fine. Like I said in my guide I'd probably put at least 15 into PER on every character which you did. INT will be better when they boost the AoE. And yeah if you just pull single beetles like that rather than try and take on the whole group at once then obviously it's way easier than fighting them all at once. On Hard the spacing is a bit different and there's Adra beetles, so often if you try and pull one, the others will pretty much always aggro as well. You should try picking Barbaric Blow on your Barbarian - it's pretty awesome (even though it's a 1/encounter active).

I think it's a bit superfluous really because there's a Talent called Superior Deflection, and I don't think they stack.

1H single, no shield

Yeah it's not a difficult game it's literally just a bit of a steep hill at the beginning. Once you learn some of the basics it'll be comfortable for you. If it helps, when I first faced the beetles I got KO'd just like Adam Brennecke

Currently AoE only is 3% per point though, the Carnage AoE is pretty small, and 18 Int would make it like only a few pixels bigger, you'll rarely ever hit anyone extra with the increase because enemies are larger sized than the IE games and have large selection circles and can't clump up closely. They are going to be increasing AoE to 6% though, it will be better then. Looking up the AoE size in Unity I think it's 1.5m, a 24% increase in size from 18 INT makes it 1.86m Not sure how big that is in game off the top of my head, but I don't think it's very big You should try using the Barbaric Blow talent Shevek, it's pretty insane.

And that it's free of recovery time, there's technically no limit on how many targets or how often it can proc. Removing it and making stickiness ability based would require less work to get right as well, and the programmers could focus on more important things.

I wouldn't focus on INT and MIG I'd make sure you max Perception first, tbh CON also gives more survival than INT does for Barbarians, because they have a low deflection anyway. Deflection is only better for survival than CON if Deflection is already quite a bit better than enemy ACC, which is pretty much never in v333.

Yeah I've never actually lost to Medreth, but I just reload when one of my characters gets KO'd because to me that's a loss. Because v333 was so different from v301 and I was so used to just auto attacking stuff doing nothing it was a bit of a cold shower like "oh I actually have to try now". Eventually I worked out how to easily beat it, just had to read that the Monk was dealing 120 damage per hit if I so much as hit him once with anything. Here's my idea anyway: I don't like either of the components of Melee Engagement - targeting clauses that make your units attack enemies when engaged or vice versa, and I don't like the disengagement attack system. It's a poor attempt at implementing a turn-based system in real-time combat. So I just don't think Engagement should be a concept. The AI targeting clauses should be sensible and classes that 'should' have stickiness should be given passive/modal/active abilities to be sticky. Enemies probably aren't going to run away/move around much but they could stuff to give the player a harder time. When Melee Engagement is removed (tried it by modding it) it feels way more like playing an IE game because you can freely maneuver around. However there's a couple of things that need to be done in order to make it feel better. Currently the interaction between attacks and moving targets is not very good, and there are basically no AI targeting clauses outside of 'first enemy sighted' or 'enemy that attacked me first'. IE style targeting (from HoW or IWD2 or BG2) combined with some abilities for players to control melee should be fine, and those abilities while also being used to make units sticky also have other uses, such as being able to safely get away and will also likely create interesting chain combos and stuff like that. Have you seen my videos showing how broken Engagement is? I think we can make a case personally because for me it's like the #1 thing making it not play like an Infinity Engine game. I know heaps of people that don't like it as well. There's a couple of vocal forumites here that do though. Most people seem to be more concerned about being able to make the enemy attack them, and that's easy to do with targeting clauses. Right now it's actively working against the player though.

Oh I think there's no Adra beetles on Normal (if that's the difficulty you're playing on). Adra Beetles hit like a truck, 40-80 damage or somewhere around there per hit.

Yeah I meant the outdoor bit. The reason why I pause when Fighting the beetles and stuff is because Fighters, Rogues etc have per-encounter abilities that you can use every encounter. Playing 'well' I guess is using those per-encounters as much as possible to reduce the incoming damage. I *always* cast the Priest interdiction, I *always* open with Crippling Strike (later the Rogue gets some other cool per-encounters) and I usually use Knockdown at least once.

What's your party health afterwards though? The reason people put effort into the combat is to reduce the total amount of Health damage they take. Sure I could go through auto-attacking as well, but if I put more effort in I lose less health. That's why I play like a spaz in my IWD playthrough, because I was trying to go as far as possible in the game before having to rest. I also recall Josh saying that the content in the beta is underwhelming (as in not great encounters / pretty easy compared to other parts of the game I guess).

Beetles are pretty easy but they do high per-hit damage, and the poison can rack up if you don't suppress it or kill the Wood Beetle causing it quickly. The spider groups are a bit more problematic. They bypass 10DT (bug) and the ones that have Petrify are f'kd up. Also the one that casts the freezing pillar repeatedly over and over again is pretty funny. Last time it did it four times in a row and because of the bug where when FX is cast in v333 it creates a duplicate of it for every character hit by it I couldn't find the spider among the multiple persistent pillars Managed to kill it with my rogue at the end, but had 4 chars KO'd by the consecutive pillars. The Rain Blights and Forest Lurkers are pretty gnarly too.

I will be the first to admit my earliest beetle videos are horrible, I said that in the thread I posted them in too. Those were produced in my first few combat scenarios in the game. I didn't play much v257 combat because it was pointless with the broken selection and commanding. I assume by the rolleyes you were being antagonistic though? Seen my latest ones? I have 90 in game hours logged now, come a long way since then. What are your broad ideas because I am quite literally doing the same thing. I will not accept anything that takes over my characters like what happens in the current system though because I find that annoying as hell (MMO Aggro mechanics). Currently the melee engagement system requires you to use actives (if you have them) to have a chance at dodging those bs attacks, pretty much like it was a turn based game. I reckon it should be the other way around, if you want to control combat you've got to use abilities to do it - that's more tactically interesting. And I was going to present a bunch of actives/modals/passives that could potentially fit the bill. However first I have to write the "why Melee Engagement sucks" bit, got plenty of notes but I need some more videos of it, and my mod without it.

They're adding more every patch with the talent system. It would simply be a matter of reworking some of the class abilities. Class abilities are optional now too They don't have to be active either, they can be done passively or modally too, like I said - random example is to give Paladins an aura that slows enemy movement speed, want to stop a guy running away? toggle that on. Fighters could have a modal that does less damage but adds a secondary attack roll to slow or something like that. You don't get a free invisible attack from a broken system, but you can control melee.