Sensuki

This is actually already a thing, the values are just not shown in the UI. Plate armor has -50% DT vs Shock damage for instance. Chain does basically nothing against Crush damage. However, the 2H weapons of these types - the Estoc and the Morningstar most notably, outshine any other weapons of their damage type due to the DT system at the moment. Maces and Stilettos are also very good because of their -DT property, which is hugely valuable. Better than any other special property any other weapon has.

The HP number system I would say is more 4E inspired than anything else. The fortunate thing is we can catch these flaws in the design and request improvements/alterations - which is what we're doing currently. But yeah armor seems borked atm. The accuracy penalties for Heavier shields actually reduce your overall DPS something shocking as well. I think my revised attribute system poses a better solution to what they have currently. If you care to read the thread when it goes up it will include a lot of charts / comparisons and such that will also help everyone understand attributes better

Humanoid enemies have a bug atm where their defenses skyrocket, not sure why. Also happens to party members too

I wouldn't say it's the newness. I play the IE games, Dota 2 and old school RTS games (AoE2, wc3, c&c generals, battle realms, sc1 etc) fairly often and I wouldn't say that PE offers much 'newness' other than some of the system design. Right now it plays like it's struggling to get out of NWN2 horrible RTWP mode.

Not really. Miss and Hit was not normalized in the IE games so it was perfectly safe to have High AC non-tanks at the front. In the 2E games, Thieves, Wizards and straight Druids were armor restricted, so obviously you had to be careful with them.

It will be verbose, probably several thousand words, with DPS graphs and everything.

I personally think it's workable with the right tuning. I think the Health system can be made to function semi-properly with some ratio / number tweaking. I think that Weapon viability can be improved with the right tweaking. I think that combat feel can be improved by making it feel more fluid. Right now it feels disjointed. Very soon I will have a massive thread coming with all of my combat suggestions. I've been working on them for days and days and I want to make sure I have mathematical and logical backups and explanations to go with my suggestions. That should make it very easy to see their merits. Matt516, the guy who did the DPS spreadsheets is helping me out with this. It will cover the attribute system, attack & recovery and movement in combat primarily, and raise a lot more issues that I think are preventing enjoyment of combat. What I don't have a solution for is how to make armor viable for Ranged characters, or how to make the Attribute bonuses from Race or Culture more meaningful - I have ambiguous ideas only, nothing solid.

Large numbers (of Health and Damage) are actually *required* because of the DT system. There's like 10-12 types of armor or something and Josh has staggered them in 1 DT intervals. D&D numbers wouldn't work because something like 5-8 damage for instance (one of his earliest examples of a Longsword damage) would do nothing against 8 DT. I don't think so. I actually don't mind the higher amount of micromanagement, but some people - such as the majority of the RPGCodex think it's horrible and that the system would be way better if it was turn-based because it seems you pause very often. What I'm not enjoying is that there seems to be little flexibility in how combat plays out. There's one optimal way and the rest are not as good. The IE games wasn't really like that at all. You could cheese stuff, sure but if you played normally there were a variety of different playstyles you could use for party setups.

Right well I haven't actually played all of the Beta content yet, but on Hard I'm usually down to 50% Health on my Fighter and 25-50% health on another character after all of the beetle encounters. This is also with not using a 6th party member, not using any consumables and just using the gear that you start with.

Didn't check the wiki those were the ones I knew off by heart

You can hear off screen footsteps in the IE games.

Yeah footstep sounds are too soft

Moonwell - level 4 spell Garden of Life - higher level spell not available in the beta

I would also like to point out that there's an issue with combat at the moment in regards to exactly when combat has started. Right now, due to a number of factors including the party being able to see too far into the fog of war, certain non-damaging debuffs not triggering AI targeting and the music not being immediately apparent it's very difficult to tell when combat has started - for the purpose of casting your own buffs if anything else since Josh has disabled buffs until the combat state begins. In the Infinity Engine games if you weren't paying attention and combat started, you'd know EXACTLY when combat started because the combat track would play as soon as the combat state began, usually triggered by either you targeting an enemy or vice versa (can't remember exactly). I don't know if it's the music specifically, but it's not very obvious when combat has started if you're not paying 100% attention to the action. I've had a beetle walk up on me and get the first hit off before I noticed combat started while I was looking around on a different section of the map before the music started. The Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 soundtracks probably did this the best out of all of them, the combat music was obvious from the moment it began - which is important.

No it's just the pathfinding code. The code is not checking for the shortest unobstructed path taking into account units, and it's also not checking it often enough.

The solution is simple: There should be an Actual Damage and Actual BAT (Base Attack Time) displayed in the inventory screen preferably one for each weapon slot. The item should display the base attack time in seconds on the item tooltip and item description (which includes the length of the animation frames and recovery time frames). When you equip the item, the actual damage (including bonuses/penalties) and actual base attack time (including bonuses/penalties) are calculated and displayed under/next to the weapon set. You should then be able to mouse over them and see the formula that makes them up

Yeah percentages make you actually do the math before understanding how much they give. One of the benefits of integers is you know how much they give: +1 damage gives you +1 damage. +1 second duration gives you +1 second duration. Percentages make it harder to follow. For instance -50% Recovery time from Plate mail. What does that mean? Well it means that you have to do the math of (Action Animation Speed + Recovery Time) + ([Action Animation Speed + Recovery Time] * %Style Penalty) + ([Action Animation Speed + Recovery Time] * .5 {Armor Penalty for Plate Mail}) For a 2H weapon that gives you (in seconds) (2) + (1) + (1). Or you could just use logic if you already knew the numbers. You wouldn't have to do this if the Base Attack Time was calculated for you on the UI, but you'd still have to work out your DPS efficacy vs DT with damage and attack speed though.

If Armor was a percentage reduction rather than flat, that would fix the issue with slower weapons being more powerful, and attack speed would then be equal to raw percentile damage increase for the purpose of DPS. Attack speed numbers could also be tweaked so there was a power curve where there were certain points where 1H fast & 2H fell off in terms of efficacy, which might be more interesting/tactical. However it would not fix the issue with ranged nudism.

In the IE games, right click has a special movement/cancel function. Pillars of Eternity had the same thing, as well as an individual cancel mapped to the X button. You could cancel animations before the hit frame and casting before the cast point. This is not working in v278 To be honest it's kind of sh1tty that the game pidgeonholes you into playing how it does currently, definitely needs tuning.

I think this is a bug, cancel was working in v257 bb

I like those too, but I don't know who the 8th companion is

Don't forget Attributes and Weapon balance (due to integer DT), and Inventory system too I guess. I don't hate the design philosophy but atm a lot of the ideas are not working as intended. Some could be fixed with some tweaking, some might need a bit of an alteration.

Current BG2 portrait:

Upscaling

Yeah well I deliberately haven't played all the content in the beta as I want to wait until issues with combat and bugs are fixed, but I haven't fought one encounter with an archer yet, but I know there are some encounters with only one or two. I think one issue with this atm is there's not much incentive to have many melee characters for a number of reasons - bad pathfinding, slow attack speed in armor, movement pausing recovery, smaller areas with larger enemies, heavy ranged weapons doing really good damage and class outfits - Priests, Wizards and Druids are all very caster-y, so is the Cipher. Ranger's animal companion tanks for him.