Sensuki

I have not completed all the content because the performance in the Dyrford Ruins and Lle A Rhemen puts me off entering those areas (I'm very sensitive to poor performance / low FPS). The developers said about 4 hours, although I could imagine that some backers can do all of the content in 2-3 hours.

Intellect and Dexterity are currently the worst stats, and is thus dumpable on many classes. Intellect grants Deflection and Area of Effect. Deflection isn't really necessary for ranged characters (or Monks) and grants less survivability than Constitution does in most cases, such as when enemy defenses are around about the same as or higher than yours, and it only protects you from one type of attack. The bonus to AoE is pretty small, and most of the time does not end up granting you extra DPS/seconds of durations from spells because it's rare that you'll hit any extra units because of it. Players can also make up the lack of increased AoE through smart play, such as forcing the enemy to clump together and/or pausing and positioning the AoE in the 100% most correct position to hit as many units as possible. Many people have been leaving Intellect at 10 (base) or dropping it to 3. Many Hard and Path of the Damned players dump it to 3 on Wizards in particular, because it's terrible on them (irony) . Dexterity grants less DPS per point than Might and Perception do in the latest build, so you can dump that below 10 and still get a DPS benefit as long as you pump those extra points into Might or Perception as a result. Constitution is dumpable on ranged characters, but that's a problem with the game and not the stat itself. Resolve is also dumpable on classes that do not have active abilities, and in the latest build it's possible to build more passive characters which makes Resolve even more useless, as if characters have no actives, then they do not benefit at all from the extra durations from effects. I think the old Intellect (v278) of AoE and Durations together was a bit better, but that's just me. In the previous system, you could pretty much completely ignore Perception and Resolve. The new arrays combined with the 10 is 0 system aren't much better. The only difference I guess is that instead of every character investing points into Might, Dexterity and Intellect primarily, now it depends what class you are a little bit more. I have some ideas about how to make this better, so sometime in the future I'll probably post them somewhere.

While I don't prefer the new system and it does need a looking into, I'm not sure that Josh Sawyer would want to do that. Having recently done a full IWD playthrough, the IE Combat Round actually does feel very good and I know there was a big kerfluffle at the start of the Project "HAH WE DON'T NEED ROUNDS WHERE WE'RE GOING!" and "Thank fark they're getting rid of that horrible IE combat system" etc However there is one (huge) advantage that the IE system has. Players tend to issue their party commands all at once at the start of combat, usually while paused. Due to the time division, characters that require new action-based inputs do so at around about the same time (due to per-unit timers ending at the same time). In Pillars of Eternity this is not the case, and different characters have different actions that have different speeds, which is modified by Armor, Dexterity, Items, Abilities, Spells, Feats etc. Due to this factor, characters often require new actions at disjointed times, and since many people pause to issue characters a new command, and most classes have a more active nature than the Infinity Engine games, the amount of pausing required increases dramatically. This is magnified by the lethality of combat, as well. It also 'feels good' when characters perform a string of uninterrupted attacks in a row in the Infinity Engine games, before a cooldown between those three attacks, rather than a longer cooldown between every single one. A character performing 3 attacks per round feels very satisfying. So while I have always found, and more particularly - recently found that the IE style implementation of rounds actually feels really good, and makes it very easy for players to control multiple characters, I am not sure that is a direction the developers are interested in going in, primarily because they said they were not going to I suppose. It is possible that the issue with combat speed, pace and lethality can be solved by using the current or a slightly modified current system, I think that is worth attempting first.

working now

30 FPS looks too laggy to me, I can't stand it. 40 FPS is much more visually fluid. Second video re-up is 95% processing, hopefully will be done soon. Yeah I failed his Knighthood in one game, although that would have been the only game I used him in. Didn't like him ;D

I turned the combat music off in v278, I currently have 70 hours or something in-game time ? I probably disabled the music after about 20-30 hours. Hiro Protagonist II has 80 I still think that the main theme and the inn guitar theme are pretty good but the others are meh, especially the combat track - although it does have an okay beginning.

In this video I showcase the Baldur's Gate combat idle and how it differs from the standard idle animation and highlight the instances when it was used in the game, for perspective. In this video I propose that the current combat idle that units enter when the combat state begins (also used for Stealth) should be changed into a recovery time animation and stance with longer and more prominent breathing, fidgets and higher, more sensible and recognizable weapon guards for characters. I think that units should use the default out of combat idle animation when they have no target / not doing anything in combat, because then you will be able to tell that they are IDLE in combat. Morphing the combat idle into a Recovery time animation will likely be less expensive for Obsidian than creating a new separate animation for recovery time itself. I don't really care whether this suggestion is used or a new animation is created, but I strongly believe that one of them needs to happen to lessen confusion in combat and make disabling Combat HUDs actually viable. Melee weapons could also use an extra attack animation or two, but that's a topic for another day. Let me know if you agree with this suggestion so that the developers see this as a priority or have any ideas or improvements to it. I know Karkarov thinks it's a minor quibble and thinks it's easy for animators to do this right at the end of development however I am not blessed with the same assurance. There are probably a few other things the animators could do regarding combat animations in Pillars of Eternity, but I think these are the main two, if you have any other ideas, please post them. Previous Suggestions: XP Rewards Version Review v301 bb Recovery time should not pause while moving Revamped Character Creation Show Derived Stats during CC Talents and Feats Inventory Mockup v2 Desynchronized Character Movement Version Review v278 bb Cultural Gear Selection Navmesh for AoE Targeting Animations & Model Collision Inventory Mockup Dyrford Crossing Area Design Main HUD Mockup Beta Version Review v257 bb Fog of War Inventory & Item Tooltips Combat Feedback Comparison Re-wrote CC Class Ability Descriptions Item Descriptions and Contextual UI Rant Area Map Functions Main UI Tooltip Stuff Selection Circles and Targeting

This may have been mentioned before, but it looks like the environment artist who created this area accidentally put a rock over the top of some blades of tall grass, and the grass is now clipping through the rock. I thought stuff like this went through an art review during the Alpha phase, but I suppose it's an easy one to miss if you're not actually play-testing the level itself. Probably too late to fix since the area has most likely received it's paint over pass, but I thought I may as well mention it anyway juuuust in case it can be fixed.

I think if the attributes gave more / took more away per point then dumping them wouldn't be as good, but yeah the two defensive stats (in this version - Int and Con) will most likely always be dumpable on ranged units.

I've been turning it off because I'm sick of hearing it. That may be because there's only a few tracks or it may be for other reasons, either way there it is.

Oh I know, but the green NPC selection circles are pissing me off so I thought I'd do something about it. At best we will have saved them a little bit of time by doing some of the work (99% thanks to Bester, too).

Btw Gonna see if we can change the blue to the IE light blue though because tbh I don't think it looks very good. I understand that it's required for colorblind users though, so we'll see if we can keep both.

Oh that spell actually lasts longer than a single attack does it? Going to have to try And yeah the change to Intellect has made it a trashbag Attribute. Durations and AoE / Deflection and Concentration would be better combos tbh, which I believe there is good evidence of.

Yeah I found that ironic as well. NCarver said it's a known issue and they know when/why it happens.

HAHAHAH. Nearly spat out my drink when I read this, serial powergamer - amazing. Kudos Bester is working on some changes to selection circles and stuff to make them more like the IE games at my request, when they're done I'll post the mod in the forums. Currently he has been able to give NPCs blue selection circles when Colorblind mode is off so that they are a different color to the party (Phew!).

There are some fights in the Infinity Engine games where you pause a fair bit and that's mostly in Baldur's Gate 2. But even in those fights, you still pause less often than you pause in a moderate encounter such as this in Pillars of Eternity. I don't play with auto-pause, or slow modes and I am trying to help test the game to get the default speed of combat with manual pausing correct. Currently the game requires you to manually pause too much. If I played that fight with the Chanter multiple times in a row, I would need to pause a bit less, yep. If I tried some different tactics (such as you suggested), I may not need to pause as much - yep. BUT the amount of pause is still ridiculously high. It's a combination of things - units pretty much always scoring hits, units doing very high percentage of character endurance per hit, action speed formula being janked - very disjointed feeling compared to IE style rounds. Can't see wtf is going on in combat due to various visual and graphical issues ... etc

Yeah I haven't practiced that fight. If you want to win when you're playing a class you're not super familiar with against an encounter you're not super familiar with on Hard, you have to pause a lot. Some of those pauses were me just needing to pause the game to read the combat because the Spell FX, Combat HUD clusterfûck, lower camera angle, tall grass with character blending etc etc make it difficult to be able to properly understand everything that's going on. Long story short : This game has problems.

I'ts not just damage it updates you about everything, and the log also produces a damage line for non-damaging stuff like "Priest Affected Beetle for 0.0 Points of Damage Beetle is dazed" etc

Unfortunately modding assets (items, spells, abilities, creatures etc) is really difficult/almost impossible. It requires Unity Pro to do and some extra programming to make it work. Bester has managed to modify a spell, but he said it was fairly hard/annoying ... however he thinks he could make a tool to make it easier.

I actually think the IE rounds work really well. It's not that they are 'rounds', it's the fact that they are a discrete time division easily understandable by the player. It also 'feels good' when you can perform 2-3 attacks in a row and then have a short pause before you can do it again. Feels really fluid. I'm not saying PE should do that, I'm just saying that after playing PE for a month and then going back and playing IWD, the IE round implementation feels really good in comparison.

Nah, all the physical rewards have been removed. You can buy them a digital copy though.

I agree that action & recovery times for spells are warped - partially due to the 'simplistic' system whereby there are only a few different set times for spells "short, medium, long" although I think they are breaking away from that mould after the recent patch. I was more referring to the act of spellcasting. I agree that the classes have issues as well (Wizards lol).

I have lots of PE vids on my youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLDoful0qkygJxzwo7UC-gQ

You can kite and exploit the AI anyway Uomoz, regardless of whether melee engagement is in or not. Combat is horrible when all units just stand still and though there are some abilities that break engagement such as Rogue escape, the situation I have described is still a valid one I think. Real time games that give enemies free attacks independent of real-time feel so goddamn retarded. You can kite the crap out of anything if it's slower than you or you have multiple units against a single unit. That will not and does not change whether or not Melee Engagement exists. I also don't agree with rules that handicap the player against the AI.

Yeah pretty much. I still need to have a think about Action Speed as well. I think Engagement should be removed and class 'stickiness' should be handled through abilities. One example - The Paladin could have an aura that slowed enemy movement speed in a small AoE by a certain percentage (let's say 30%), this would allow you to chase any character if they were running away and perform hits on them while they are moving, etc. Fighters could cause the hobbled effect for short duration (2-3 secs) on Interrupts or something. Those are just really rough off the top of my head examples, but you shouldn't get a "free" attack against units that decided to move away from you in real-time games.