Sensuki

Renaming Intellect would create problems with the dialogue and scripted interactions too.

What I thought you were implying there is that splitting damage, accuracy and attack speed over 3 different stats would make it harder for DPSers to focus on a DPS build in reply to my "splitting AoE/Duration" will make it harder to casters to make a good build. Not as neat as it is now Yes, and remember this depends because Constitution will protect you better against attacks with a low accuracy, that is, because you're only getting hit and grazed most of the time. When your Deflection outclasses the attacker's Accuracy, Deflection is always better for increased survival time as it adds more misses with every point. Casters have spells that can protect them in this manner too. This is why we paired Deflection with Concentration though, as technically it's not better than Constitution on it's own. Also not forgetting that Deflection reduces enemy interrupt chance in a multiplicative sense - which is much better for not getting interrupted from Deflection-based attacks than Concentration is on it's own. That's the reason why we think that Deflection and Concentration should be kept together so that the attribute mirrors Perception and cancels out both the Accuracy bonus AND the Interrupt bonus. When they are not paired in opposition, a character with the same points in Perception will have a distinct advantage against a character with the same points in Resolve. edit: and this relationship between Accuracy and Interrupt and Concentration with the defenses was THE very reason why I asked Matt about helping me with this proposal. I thought that this pairing would solve the problem with the attribute system, because of the dependencies.

Cheers mate. The spreadsheet link is included in the paper if you'd like to check anything yourself We encourage people to check the math to see if it looks correct. I'm more of a logic guy myself but Matt says it's right. I like the foe only AoE thing as well.

Well I imagine without drugs to stop pain/exhaustion you'll be pretty stuffed after getting hit with a warhammer a few times right ?

Attack speed is not in the attribute system currently so your first statement is not correct, and attack speed is never better than Might anyway as demonstrated in our paper. Caster interrupts are much more serious than melee interrupts because if their casts (which can be 3 or 6 seconds long) get interrupted, they have to start casting again and that's anywhere from 0.01 to 5.99s of DPS lost on top of the 0.5s interrupt, which is much more serious than interrupting a melee attack, which is at worst 0.99s lost + 0.5 s interrupt time. Just a question though, does interrupting an arbalest reload or a gun reload reset the reload ? I don't think Concentration + AoE will be a good attribute. As stated in the paper, Concentration prevents DPS loss, which can be more than made up for by an extra point in Might, old Dexterity, Intellect (and probably new Dexterity) depending on the class. As a Fighter, why would I take that attribute? I would just bump Might to max to make up for the DPS loss, and I don't need the AoEs at all really. I have dumped Resolve on every single character I've made in the beta so far (which have mostly been melee characters) because the Concentration bonus is pretty much "lol who carez". What's your reply to my bit about Constitution and Resolve together? Instead of just singling out our proposed Resolve. Also remember that you acted rather narkily to me in another thread recently after I disagreed with you on something. I am not disagreeing that our proposed Resolve wouldn't be the best immediate choice for casters/ranged characters, but it would be a lot better for melee characters than it is now, instead of a laughably bad choice as it is currently, and it wouldn't reduce the efficacy of any of the already pretty much perfect attributes. Thing is though, if you took Resolve - you'd be able to use Wizards, Priests and whatnot in melee better right ? That would be great extra flexibility IMO.

That's a good point, I would just say that the damage that they don't receive immediately to Health would not be immediately received to their Stamina Pool instead. That's actually how I thought it already worked though, but I may be wrong.

Oh, then yeah. But I hope they don't do that for reasons stated in my previous posts. I don't care what the attributes are called - just what combat stats are paired together.

Agility would work, yep. I don't like Cunning though I think Intellect is good.

Durations and AoEs are best together. Intellect is most beneficial for caster classes. Priests and Druids (perhaps Ciphers too?) moreso than anyone as they have lots of duration based spells, and lots of AoE (duration based) spells. If you separate Duration from AoE, this makes it much, much harder for these casters to get the most out of their build, as they will be wanting to ideally pump the attributes that give these things, but because the bonuses are now split over these two attributes they have to sacrifice a lot more of their attribute points just to get the bonuses. They would be getting other bonuses as well (the other bonuses that would paired with them on this proposed system) however I think this actually creates less flexibility. Constitution and Resolve are defensive stats, so you could technically say "Your Resolve" and Constitution are cardinal for melee characters but practically useless for ranged characters in comparison, instead of just singling out our proposed Resolve attribute - and this is a problem that stems from the AI at the moment, and not the attributes themselves. Our system would allow casters to go all out - Priest and Druid? try Intellect and Dexterity/Agility for buffest of all buffers. Due to their lack of defensive capability (not pumping CON or RES) you'd have to be smart about their positioning and stuff, and protect them and when they got hit they'd likely get interrupted (not much Res) and take a large proportion of DPS to their total Health. If you split up Durations and AoEs, this creates an inflexibility where such classes would struggle to get the most benefit out of the attributes, as ideally they want extra durations, larger AoE and increased cast speed, so now you'd have to pump three attributes to do this instead of two, and you would never be able to get as much of an effective build. All attibutes are going to be better for some classes than others, too - there's no way around that.

We didn't want to suggest that because we know that the developers and others like the Interrupt and Concentration mechanics. If they were to remove Interrupt and Concentration mechanics, that is something that we could calculate, sure. We wanted to try and come up with something that required the least change to the current system, that would not be much work for the dev team. Refer to my description of the attribute on page 1 of the thread: "Resolve is like your determination and stuff right? You have so much guts and determination that you are a boss at defending your body and your mind ... however this does not mean that your body can defend you from Fortitude and Reflex attacks that are beyond it's capability."

Not necessarily, that's only against Deflection-based attacks. If you neglect your CON as a Fighter you'll get d1cked hard by Reflex, Fortitude (and possibly Will) attacks. You could pump both for this effect: I think there could be a way to make the Barbarian work with a high Deflection build, you'd also need to compensate with some other items though, which is fine. Like, use two Hatchets or something. It also depends on the enemy accuracy, it would be great against lower accuracy enemies but not quite as good as higher accuracy enemies that target Deflection. Makes thematic sense, but it makes both attributes weaker, which is not a good thing. We tried to achieve as much mechanical balance across attributes as we could as well as trying to best achieve the stated design goals in our solution. Josh (and others) are suggesting making changes to the best three attributes that the system has at the moment (Might, Con, Int) and I just don't think that will work at all, based on the math and logical findings of our paper. YMMV.

HP (healing points)

I'll wait for his reply on the topic before talking to Matt - we're happy to check more design theories on the subject if they arise.

Probably won't either the direction their company is going, jeez. It absolutely baffles me why you would EVER want to remove the start bar OR change the design. Good way to alienate the majority of your customers.

I've managed to get 7 to feel more like XP, but far out it takes a lot of tuning. The difference between the Clock Resolution timers is really annoying. HPET is a piece of ****, I bought a new motherboard just so I could turn it off (as you can't on various ASUS models). The mouse lag is mostly gone now, headshot flicks in CSS gungame are so easy now.

If I could still run XP SP2 I would Best OS! damn you for not supporting more RAM!

Well it is your Health as it's your Health over the day. Endurance/Stamina is more like you just run out of steam during a highly intensive activity (combat). I did see your proposal, and I did see another user post a very similar thing as well.

Also Josh is the reason you want to split Stamina and Health and Deflection and Concentration because you don't think they'll be useful enough on Ranged characters? Or just because you don't like their 'passive' nature? I don't think the math supports doing either, but I can see the point of view in either case.

I think because we used math/statistics to investigate how the attributes are related, it makes it pretty clear to see that changing the 'good' attributes such as Might, Constitution and Intellect would not be a good thing. Might is very strong on it's own. The flat percentile damage is great, scales well with everything. Constitution is really good, but it's also better for high HP characters, technically. However you can see that if you split Health and Stamina, Constitution becomes not as good as pure Deflection on it's own (theoretically). If you take away Durations from Intellect, this gimps casters a little bit because they now *have* to invest in two different attributes just to get the benefits that are most relevant to them. I think AoE and Durations together was a great idea to begin with and should not be changed. Not all casters need Deflection/Concentration, Concentration is good for them sure, because it hurts them more if one of their 3 sec spells is interrupted more than it hurts melee characters or something, but the DPS loss from that is probably made up by just being more Mighty, or more Intelligent - or FASTER (as one thing we didn't check is how IAS affects chance to be interrupted) and they can technically get more benefit out of bonus Might on an AoE or Duration. Then there's also the problem of the attribute balance. We proposed putting Interrupt with Accuracy because Accuracy on it's own at +1 per point is weaker than Might is, and likely not as strong as Intellect either for caster classes. Accuracy at +2 per point would outclass Might (we checked) so you can't do that. Accuracy and Interrupt really fits. However if you don't also put Deflection and Concentration together - then Concentration as a combat stat is just plain weaker than the Acc/Int combo, because now you are forced to pump two attributes to protect yourself from interuption from physical attacks as Deflection grants an indirect bonus to Concentration by reducing effective interrupt against these attacks, whereas Accuracy increases them because Interrupt is reliant on the roll, and that makes pure Concentration on it's own weak, even when combined with durations because then the attribute wouldn't be great for every class. I think Josh said they were going to change the interrupt mechanics, but they have to be careful because folding Interrupt directly into Accuracy may not solve the problem of Accuracy not being as strong as Might or Intellect on it's own. I also think the elegant solution of two offensive, two defensive and two universal attributes is a good mix.

Yeah as I said - we will not find this any different. It's the same thing displayed differently in the UI.

Icewind Dale 2 changed the color of the number as more HP damage was taken, it went from green, orange, yellow, to red. It's a fair point but I think if explained properly in the Character creation, UI and perhaps even kinda/sorta in the dialogue in the prologue between Calisca and Heodan - where they talk about resting, it should get the message across. I don't think there's any way to avoid "why aren't they just the same thing?", as that's an issue with the current system as well. If they can explain that there's no true healing magic or whatever, then the player should understand. It personally doesn't matter to me if it's left as is or changed.

That was my interview that you read that in. You get what I mean though

This is an idea I've mentioned before but I thought I'd make my own thread for it. Here is the text from the KS BB Update I think that this is being caused by the combination of the Health bar, and the Stamina red fill together, and the fact that both resources take 'damage' at once. My idea makes a slight change the mechanics of how they work (no ratios or values are changed) but just WHEN Health is reduced and how it is displayed. Here is a terrible mspaint mockup I made Your health would be displayed as a NUMBER (number > bar in intuitiveness, always). This number would represent your character's health which in the upcoming system will likely be a high number, probably in the several hundreds or something. How is your suggestion any different, you may ask? Since all I have done at the moment is changed the health bar to a number. What I propose is to change the way damage is dealt, and make all damage deal Stamina damage only. Health cannot be reduced by damage, so when you take damage, you take stamina damage only and your portrait fills up with blood. However when you heal, ALL healing converts HEALTH into STAMINA, so as you heal, your Health pool is drained and it refills your stamina. Once you run out of Health, you cannot heal yourself any more - as in the lore there is no 'true' healing magic that can heal health, and you must work with your remaining Stamina only. No healing in Pillars of Eternity is free, and this is why I think that the suggestion to split Stamina and Health over different attributes is a bad idea because Stamina can be healed, Health cannot. This idea is more in line with D&D 4E's healing surge mechanic, and less in line with Darkland's split health system. I think stamina is now called endurance too, but anyway. I think this would make the Health system MUCH more intuitive for new players especially. I don't think it would improve our (the beta backers) understanding of it any further, but I think this is a more intuitive way to get across how Health works in Eora/The Eternity world. So yeah sorry Josh I know you like the Darklands way, but I think that this is probably a better way of doing it. I will say though that I do not care if this suggestion is not considered as I understand the system as it works currently, this suggestion is more for the benefit of others.

I have a very similar PC iy-870 HD7970 3GB Windows 7 SP1 1920x1080 Same issues. The 2D and 3D animations in levels are not optimized - they cause HUGE slowdowns, and I'm expecting to see a performance pass later on that gives ~ the same performance increase that Wasteland 2 got in late August (I got +60FPS on all maps raising my average from 30 to 90-110).

Finally! I've been saying that all along Could this also be done for dialogue please? This was one of the questions I sent in my Codex interview that didn't get answered (understandably too I guess)