Sensuki

Stash access is now an option in the game options menu.

Bestiary XP does nothing for me, but I'm not against it. I play exactly the same as I did before, because I don't need a reward to engage in combat as an activity. I'm more against Lock and Trap XP and I think the implementation of Exploration XP is silly as well. Will look into those further during testing.

I absolutely hate the new double click camera center, holy christ that's annoying. I always accidentally do it. Make option plz.

Item comparisons are in

Figured out one of the reasons why the Medreth fight is harder - THE MONK GUY Dat Turning Wheel damage y0

Precisely - it was the RTS style combat that made the IE games fun. PE combat is closer to Neverwinter Nights 2 at the moment, except with an isometric camera and faster paced combat.

I figured out why this happens - it's because a change was made to center the camera to location on double click. THIS IS INFURIATING - can this please be an option it is pissing me off something shocking.

There's not more Beetles on Hard. Can't say about the other difficulties. Beetle placement on Hard is now fairly optimal actually. Kudos to whoever changed it.

A loading bar and a touch up of the screens would make them perfect though, although I'm not sure they can afford the art time for it.

Cubiq just sent me some videos of the Medreth fight with my mod installed that removes engagement. It plays the same due to the AI targeting clauses. If you pre-position the BB Fighter out in front, the same enemies that dogpile him in the unmodified BB will still do so, the Boar never targets the Fighter, it always runs to attack the BB Rogue or the Wizard (I think it's whichever character opens combat) and there's that Dwarf guy that either casts spells or attacks another backline character that isn't the Fighter. It's the AI targeting clauses that matter most - not Engagement. I liked the bit where when his PC was about to die he ran him around in circles until the Priest heal went off - exactly how you do it in the IE games. That would not have been possible in PE because he would die from Disengagement attacks. Removing Engagement also stops your characters from cancelling their actions too ^_^. As Namutree said - that type of gameplay was in the IE games. I have a whole Let's Play of Icewind Dale where I regularly showcast tactical unit movement in combat https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIRfCmyR7ijJU11xQVn2SXIwmeuajTkom

In this video, the Dwarf character is moving to attack a character in the backline, when Cubiq presses pause for the third time, the character teleports to it's target. Stone Beetles also still teleport, their Burrow animation is cancelled and they appear next to their target instantly on Pause (although they have to Burrow back up). Kudos to Cubiq for the video.

Fully disagree. You can completely manipulate the melee enemy AI in the IE games, in any game - BG1, BG2, IWD, IWD2 - they all have the same or very similar enemy targeting clauses. Even in open enough spaces, you can force most enemies to stop targeting their current target through micromanagement. Not all enemies, but most enemies, and the ones that you can't, you can still run the character they are targeting around in circles while the rest of your party hammers on them. WHAAAT? It actually requires tactical unit movement and isn't a snooze stand still fest. Automation of such things is lousy, in my opinion. Like in Warcraft 3, if you wanted to stop a Huntress from kiting your hero, you had to use a unit to block it - it's basic freaking RTS gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIT4jxAh32c Tactical Unit Movement. **** automation.

No they aren't. They're a leftover from turn-based brought across into realtime, when you can react to enemies moving up to you in real time. In the IE games, frontlines were perfectly effective for player characters because you can control the units. Enemy AI was designed so that you could ~90% of the time, force enemies to attack your front line. If an enemy was targeting your backline, all you had to do was move a melee character to incercept, and block the path of the enemy, and by that I do not mean issue an auto attack and let them walk past you, but actually physically block the path of the enemy. This would cause them to change their AI targeting to attack you. And for the other 10% you can micro. However, Enemy AI is not sophisticated enough in the IE games to do this. I have played some RTS games where enemies do block you to protect units (usually games with hero units) - but that is unavoidable and unrealistic for Pillars of Eternity. I do not enjoy MMO Aggro mechanics, and every single implementation of an Attack of Opportunity system, including the Pillars of Eternity one, is horrible. I believe this could be improved by ramping up the crowd control AI for enemies, have enemies dump CC spells on top of player units and whatnot. Interesting encounters with tactical challenges can be created through encounter design and creature placement. It's not my fault that the encounter design in PE is very simplistic, and I don't want to have to suffer a horrible aggro mechanic system or an AoO system because of it. Here is the final episode of my Let's Play Icewind Dale. You will notice how I use tactical retreating, unit blocking and micromanagement to control Belhifet so that he does not kill any of my characters - that is textbook Infinity Engine gameplay.

You use crowd control spells and disables just like every other game that doesn't have some horrible incarnation of an AoO system (aka everything that isn't based off D&D 3-3.5E). Are you complaining about enemies in the IE games getting past your frontline, or the opposite? Besides if you're fighting in a wide open space, there shouldn't be anything to restrict your movement.

One thing they could do to make attack resolutions less extreme is normalize miss and crits to natural roll 96-100 = crit natural roll 01-05 = miss Everything else is either hits or grazes. And then have spells, abilities, items and such that alter the natural ranges - like the "Keen" property. A blur spell could raise the miss % etc Because critting on every second hit is extremely f'ed up - as we found in v301.

That won't work on Hard difficulty, there's way more spiders - but the Queen still gets stuck at the back.

They aren't. Think Infinity Engine games.

I have to admit I do sorely miss pre-buffing haha, combat is over before I've had the chance to cast 3 Priest spells usually.

I think you guys are just happy not to have to spam mouse clicks 20 times to level up skills.

Lots of tweaking, and the removal of Melee Engagement. I have some broad ideas, and some concentrated ideas - but I'd rather take the time to investigate them first. Unfortunately Matt516 has been pretty busy and hasn't had time to update his DPSCalc Spreadsheet with the new info. Here are some of the general problems: Party members still have AI that cancels your actions - I think it's related to engagement Player controlled units do not have IE style auto-attack clauses All monsters have a faster movement speed than the party. Movement speed in combat is too fast Pathfinding is a nightmare Action speed *might* be too fast in some cases, too slow in others Per-hit damage is ridiculously high - party members can die in a single hit. Spell FX is way too over the top, what do I have to do to get RTS style spell FX design ? Enemy AI Targeting needs more development Melee Engagement flat out sucks donkey balls and restricts tactical movement in combat There's a HUGE emphasis on the combat opening in v333, the fight is usually decided in the first few seconds Did you miss or graze with your opening AoE Attack or disable? Did the Rogue score a miss or graze with his opening Crippling Strike? Did the enemy score a 150 damage critical on your Fighter on the first hit? Did your issued commands to your party members get cancelled due to Engagement? In the current build, if any of these things happen, you're probably going to lose the the fight against Medreth's group, a larger group of beetles, or one of the harder spider groups on Hard. You can abuse chokepointing to win both of the party fights by using the Dyrford Bridge, and the badly outlined navmesh at the Dyrford Crossing Ridge, or if you made a certain PC (Fighter, Druid, Cipher?) that has a bit of crowd control, it is more manageable with just the stock BB party. I think the DT system (well, the Armor system in general) is causing some of the issues with the numbers. Due to the fact that starting armor alone scales DT to 12, per-hit damage has to be very high to compensate and takes the designers outside their familiar design territory (D&D numbers). The balancing appears to be random, and by trial and error, rather than some pre-defined mathematics. I would like to work with Matt516 further on the numbers when he has time, and I would also like to do some combat comparisons to some of the Infinity Engine fights and explore what the differences are. One issue I can see is that higher active ability use is required in PE at the moment, and Priests and Wizards still have D&D style spell numbers per day - currently this doesn't scale very well for the Adventuring Day, you'll be out of spells after a few encounters just like Baldur's Gate 1. edit: I also think that the Attack Resolution system in Pillars of Eternity is more extreme than the IE games system when you hit often. In the IE games (assuming you optimally built characters), it was common for your warrior classes to have a good THAC0 (or BAB) and be able to hit fairly often, and when you didn't you just missed a bit more often. In the IE games, you score critical hits very occasionally, an optimized THAC0 has you dealing regular damage numbers pretty consistently. In Pillars of Eternity, when your accuracy is higher than the enemy defense, your damage becomes insane due to scoring Critical Hits more often. I find the Pillars of Eternity system to be waaaaaaaaaay more swingy than the IE games. It wasn't as big of a deal in the previous patches, but now that it's harder - grazes and misses are a BIG DEAL, if you miss or graze on anything you are royally screwed. In PE if your Fireball attack rolls are bad, you just wasted your spell, essentially. It was impossible to waste a Fireball in BG1, IWD or IWD2. In BG2 you could waste it on Mages with protection or enemies that were immune to fire, but it worked on everything else.

In v301 you were given an extra Morningstar, some potions, a bunch of traps ...etc - all of those are gone in v333 On Hard I don't think there are any less beetles, they are all now in groups of 3-5 rather than spread thinly across the map. There are now four larger groups of beetles - much better. The beetles are now also off the footpath, so you can avoid them if you want. However on Hard there's now a group around the statue in the middle.

In Icewind Dale I believe they painted over them. Right now they do look a bit too much like a screenshot of a 3D level. I'm not sure if Kaz will have time to paint them over before release as there's lots of other stuff to do. WTB more art time for Polina or another 2D artist pls.

A loading bar would be good, yep. I'd prefer if the tips were optional. I'd rather not see them.

http://forums.obsidian.net/blog/3/entry-121-tunin-tips-and-tricks/ Josh prefers the "doubling and halving" method to balancing. I'm not a game designer and this method seems a bit inexact to me, but that's how he does it. So expect a waveform curve of balancing until it gets a bit closer to correct.

It's because monsters got increased Deflection. Character Accuracy is now in the range where Perception grants more DPS per point than Might does. So yep, in this build Perception is more important.