Sensuki

I'll try that in my next video. I've been taking virtually no damage from most encounters with the tactics I've been using. It's only the OP enemies such as Menpwgra/Forest Lurkers/the Crystal Pillar spider etc that wreck me sometimes. There's a whole bunch of exploits you can use. Casting Withdraw on the Fighter makes him invincible as well, so you can just get him to open up with a right click, cast Withdraw on him - everyone attacks him while you smash them with ranged, and the Fighter takes no damage.

Here's the Dagger/Stiletto version

Yeah if the AI was designed for no engagement it would feel pretty much exactly like the Infinity Engine game combat - literally one of the only things holding it back. That's why I think they should use other methods of unit stickiness, because it just feels better.

Just did like 4-5 of them in a row HAHA, would have been easier with two Island Aumaua Fighters. Daggers and Stilettos have the same engagement range.

I'll make a new video. The attacks are coming from outside of weapon reach and they are FREE, instant and independent of recovery time. I don't give a fig for simulationist arguments. Let me record a video with a dagger.

I just told you, enemies have higher Deflection so that ACC-DEF falls in the +5 or lower range on the graph. That's why there has been a shift away from Might to Perception. Also in v301 when Attributes changed to the 10 is 0 system, all classes lost 10 Accuracy, whereas Deflection stayed the same, which pushed things further to the left side of the graph.

I was talking about the spell Noxious Burst (that's the spell I open with), it is not persistent and sickens enemies for 15 seconds by default. Every encounter I have played in the game is usually over before 10-12 seconds of in game time, so +Durations to that spell don't do anything. The combat being too fast has a negative effect on +Durations and +Speed at the moment because you don't get to utilize their benefits properly over time.

No, DT is not the issue. DT makes attack speed flat out worse than pure damage though. It's just that enemies now have higher defenses than they did in previous versions of the beta. Stone Beetles were given +50 to Defelection (yep) and they now have 63 Deflection instead of 13. So you can see how where you previously might have been at ACC-DEF +30 where Might was better, you're now in the range where Perception is better.

What? Are you sure you understand the rules correctly? In order for an AoE to even hit (even if it 'hit's the units in it) the Attack Roll has to score a hit. More Perception means more Critical Hits from AoE spells. Rolls verses each target in the AoE are independent of one another, it's not one attack roll like in D&D. You can miss, crit, hit and graze four different targets with one AoE. For non-damaging spells, Durations are more important - yes.

You're kidding right? The large spike in the center of the graph represents the portions of ACC-DEF where +1 to ACC removes a miss and adds a crit. The sharp incline of Might on the right side of the graph is because you're critting more often, the might 2% bonus is more effective. Feel free to check the math yourself, his spreadsheet is readily available.

I disagree. The Wizard is quite an effective nuker because they can hit multiple enemies with a single spell. It's just that the Druid is often better at both AoE nuking and controlling. In v278 I was opening with Web spells because enemies didn't react to targeting from it, but now that they do it seems faster to kill them by dropping Malignant Cloud or whatever it is - the AoE Corrode spell, which is better than Fireball and positioning the Fighter at the edge of the AoE so they're stuck inside it when targeting him <aka abusing the AI lolol>

Here is the actual math if anyone cares: Courtesy of Matt516. Accuracy is better all the time when ACC-DEF is between +5 and -5 and below -20. It might be better than Might between -5 and -20 depending on what you have in each score. In BB v333 most of the time, enemy defenses are between the -20 and +5 range by default (without buffs).

I've already removed it from the game in a mod - I have no problem with doing that for release either, but the AI Targeting and probably the way melee attacks interact with moving targets need a lot of work for it to be remotely fun to play, with or without Melee Engagement.

So would I, but I think he's more referring to the casting of self-buffs in combat. Pretty much pointless. Kind of like your Rogue/DA:O example from before.

Bull****. Give me an example? The only thing I can think of is AI 'teams' getting faster resource accumulation on harder difficulties and that has absolutely nothing to do with combat mechanics Citation for what Theoretical situations are not going to help you here. The situation you described here would only occur if you are dumb enough to position your ranged units in targeting range in the first place. I don't think it was a good example because I was able to see how broken it would be in a further two seconds. I do, because then you can leverage combat situations with ENCOUNTER AND ABILITY/SPELL DESIGN which makes the game far more fun when you face interesting and challenging encounters rather than banal encounters in combination with a mechanic that serves to handicap the player. That's what I thought, there seems to be a horde of people out there that get butthurt about the existence of kiting gameplay and are fully willing to remove any corresponding tactical movement in combat to try and remove it. In v257 Obsidian had also paused recovery time while moving because heaven forbid someone move around in combat in the attempt of actually doing something tactical. You can still kite enemies around with Melee Engagement and with proper enemy AI targeting clauses - all you need is a bit of micro. There are a lot of people out there who do not find micromanagement fun and seem to want to remove as much of it as possible from games. I actually like moving my units around. I enjoy making tactical decisions in combat and changing my positioning and targeting based on new situations. There seems to be a crowd here who thinks combat is all about preparation and execution, as if it's this binary thing where you you make a choice and then execute that choice and then live with the consequences of that choice, with little to no room for error correction or adapting to unforseen circumstances. Only games with ****ty combat have that, and as primarily a competitive FPS and casual RTS/MOBA player, which are all about moment-to-moment decisions rather than strategy I have to vehemently oppose this notion. The primary reason why I want Melee Engagement removed is because I want to be able to tactically retreat in combat. In turn I want encounters on Hard to be designed around the need for tactical retreating in combat. Josh said last year during the Vertical Slice that there was an encounter in the VS that only a handful of the developers could beat, and it required a bunch of tactical retreating (which I think is the Menpwgra encounter in the Dyrford Crossing). I understood that to mean that you had to switch aggro of your units, micro wounded ones back to heal and rinse and repeat and that sounded fantastic to me because that's what I enjoy doing. However now I see that since enemies have never done anything but target the first unit they see, he probably meant that all you had to do was send one guy in ... and lure them around while ranged units peppered them with spells and arbalests. Melee Engagement does not and will not prevent kiting, all it does is hamstring melee units into binary standstill combat once they have reached engagement range. Every decision they have made regarding moving in combat has been in an effort to try and remove or penalize it, some of which are the most banal gameplay decisions I have ever seen. Combat in Pillars of Eternity is currently not very fun and all it requires to beat is trial-and-error wombo combos. I found the Infinity Engine games to be more reactionary and more freeform. Sure there were exploits, sure there was imbalance, sure you could kite - but if you actually played fair, combat was really fun and it was enjoyable to control and move units around in combat. Pillars of Eternity feels more like Neverwinter Nights 2 combat at double speed to me, it might look like an Infinity Engine game, the control scheme might resemble it, but the combat still has a ways to go to feel anything like it. HAHAHAHAH YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING - the attacks are free of recovery time and rinse-repeat abusable, but I am not really surprised you think that based on the way you assign attributes to characters. Sorry but I think you'll be in the minority there. By the way the use of a Pike and a Quarterstaff are not related to the range that those free attacks occured. I could have had a Dagger equipped and that would have been the range that the attacks triggered. Engagement is independent of weapon reach.

Screw turn based mechanics. It's not a turn-based game.

You shouldn't implement mechanics to make up for the targeting deficiencies of your AI - that is just dumb, and no game I know does that, well okay - Dragon Age: Origins / Aggro mechanics kind of do that. Engagement should be just dropped in favor of mechanics that actually work in real time - slows, disables and stuns are the bread and butter of RTS stickiness and that's the direction PE should go in. None of this trying to convert a turn-based mechanic into a real-time game horsedung. Because it will not work. You would still abuse disengagement attacks with your suggestion, just not as badly as that one by drawing aggro with one character and then running them into the range of a Fighter with Defender on (or even better, multiple Fighters). They were abusable in Neverwinter Nights 2, they will be even more abusable in Pillars of Eternity because you have more finite control over your units. Any change they make, I will be able to break it. Oh not to mention that all you have to do to enemy Fighters is just micro your units around his Engagement AoE and he won't be able to catch you because he'll be too slow with your suggestion Random examples of "RTS style stickiness": The Fighter could have an active 1/encounter that does an AoE attack with a melee weapon and sacrifices damage in order to afflict a slow or hobbled. Hobbled units are ****ing **** slow when they run away and have worse defenses. Paladin could have an MS decrease aura that slows units movement speed down. Fighter could have a mode that reduces his damage but increases his interrupt. Interrupts are basically an 0.5s ministun. There's a bunch of ways you could do it, but you should not give free attacks with no animation just for moving one pixel outside of an engagement range. The concept is just retarded. If you have more units than the enemies do, you will be able to kite them. It happens in every RTS game. Unfortunately Pillars of Eternity usually has small encounters, whereas most of the IE games usually had more enemies than the party.

The Resolution at 720p was actually fine in v301, but they changed their scaling system and now it's bad. I believe it was a direct result of supporting 4:3, they decided to just scale the assets they had rather than modify them for 4:3

Just attacked this guy down quite low doing some testing with a Monk, didn't kill him - but it says he's knocked out on his tooltip.

Look how much of a joke this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NA6nVsjh30

I'll do another round tonight. Busy recording Melee Engagement bugs.

Pretty much, and the extra Fighter engagement range is completely exploitable, I have a video uploading now that I scored four disengagement attacks in a row with two characters against one guy. Pretty funny.

None of them were that bad and Icewind Dale: HoW had pretty good targeting clauses, so did BG2. It won't work. I will continue making videos that prove that it abusable/broken and buggy. I support sticky mechanics, just not this one.

In the same fashion as the previous video

How's this? (same size as before, but one less zero)