Sensuki

Wizards hitting enemies with a spell seems to make every enemy dogpile the wizard.

The level up sound is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too loud

Stone Beetles also teleport if you pause during their Burrow, and sometimes they get stuck in their burrow animation (ie. they disappear) but can still be targeted.

I've got a 10 minute recording of me playing the Beetles on hard coming up

Heaviest armor possible for Fighter, Medium armor for Barbarians / Priests etc No armor for every single ranged character (as it's pointless).

Smashed the encounter this time - with video - going to upload now

Mine is 300GB, so it's fine.

I would but I live in Australia, 1mbit upload = no streaming sorry.

Kaz has done some new portraits - quality = *Hi5* Kaz captures the IWD art style.

Formations still aren't working properly after area transitions though. My BB Wizard moved to the first slot when I entered a building

Oi man, we should make this the official First beetle encounter thread - and then do a thread for every other 'major' encounter for tuning purposes Everybody please remember to post the DIFFICULTY you're playing on when you post your feedback on the encounter

Here's my posts from the other thread:

Here's some proof that they're listening to feedback: I have made the following suggestions that have all been added Vertical Sync Area Map smoother scrolling and double click set and close Combat Tooltip decoupling from character and portrait Health AND Stamina shown on tooltips Female armor model breast sizes (all changed to exactly how I requested, although haven't tested from iso view whether they look more distinguishable) Tooltip delay slider - although there needs to be two of these, because it also delays the tooltips for the abilities, which is kind of annoying. I'd prefer to have a 1.5 second tooltip delay on combat HUD stuff and 1 sec delay for abilities in the action bar. Haven't had a chance to check any other stuff out yet

This happened in v257 as well.

It's not just the fact that enemies are fast, there's also the issue of the space in the area. So far, most enemies I have encountered have a very large selection circle. Characters are sorta larger than they were relative to the IE games AND areas themselves appear to have a much smaller scale than at least the BG games had - BG games had lots of openness in areas, whereas the IWD areas were more like tunnels. Stormwall Gorge is pretty open, but the Dyrford Crossing is very tunnel like (at least as far as navmesh is concerned) and there are lots of bits of geometry with no navmesh that makes available space for encounters with enemies that have a large selection circle not very large. Currently you can abuse the fact that you can see farther than you are meant to due to the fog of war not being correct and you can pre-position your party members to kinda block the beetles from getting through. Stone Beetles can teleport behind your lines however and if you're fighting in a space that's blocked by some rocks on one side, and a tree on the other, it makes moving through combat an issue which is HUUUUUGELY magnified by the fact that movement pauses recovery time - which I think is an absolutely terrible design decision, rooted from a turn based mindset. Movement should reset/pause gun and crossbow reloads only, IMO. TBH I reckon if they could possibly scale down the beetle size to be smaller - that would be good. Bombardier and Boring beetle size for the Wood Beetles, slightly bigger again for Stone and Adra - they're just too big.

There is a 3 pixel gap between the portrait and the left and right side of the portrait HUD that is see through on the first, second and third portrait slot

I think this is related to loading a save. [Description of the issue] BB Rogue and BB Wizard have more total Health than expected [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] Start a new game Create a character Level up your PC Go to the Dyrford Crossing Defeat the first Beetle encounter Loot their gear Save the game Quit Pillars of Eternity Load the game [Expected behaviour] BB Wizard and BB Rogue should have the same Health / Health numbers at full HP [Other remarks / Comments] The first value (eg 102/87) is being used for the total health rather than the second, when you go into combat, the health number on the left side is reduced from that total)

Also the position isn't the best for on the fly reading, but that may not change.

Possibly. Beetles still charge at you at 100 miles an hour in combat though, whereas character move speed is slower. Also when you pause during a Stone Beetle's burrow, they will instantly teleport to their destination upon unpause, therefore making their burrow instant.

I don't think so. That's really only an issue for Bow users - guns, crossbows and stuff need a full reload. There's probably a way to make it fair.

I think recovery times are too slow. It's better than before, but to me it feels like playing the IE games at half speed - unless of course you mean Icewind Dale 2, which had less overall actions per character and (IMO) was way less fun. They said they were aiming for the sweet spot at mid-level IE game pace, which IMO is good - but they should aim for AD&D 2E Pace, not IWD2 Pace. Archers had ~ 3 attacks per round at around that level. Melee Fighters were the same. You could cast more than one Wizard spell per round ... etc The Stock Wizard with Plate is absolutely terrible, he's so much better wearing no armor at all. One thing that is probably confounding the issue is the weapon style speed penalties. -50% Speed for using 1H no shield, 1H Shield or 2H I think it should be no speed penalty, +15 Acc for 1H single and half recovery for TWF ... prob also means recovery time would need to be reduced after ability use as well.

Yeah slowly improving. I found out that Binding Web doesn't trigger enemy AI targeting so that allows you to get a whole ranged volley in. Also swapped some party gear around - gave the BB Fighter the Morningstar, gave the Priest the War Hammer / Shield and removed the armor from the BB Wizard (screw plate mail) and the Rogue. Still had two party members drop to poison, but an improvement anyway. Also had some issues where Stone Beetles are permanently stuck in burrow mode, and never reappear at all. You can still target them, but since I was playing with Combat HUDs off, I didn't know the beetle was still there until I pressed tab.

Yeah I got destroyed on Hard by that first spider group in the last patch, my PC went down to Petrify almost instantly, and game over.

BB Fighter down to 8 Health after 2 encounters, and only one Heal cast on him xD dat adventuring day (ftr, that's with 3 characters front line)

What difficulty though? There's 6 Beetles in the first encounter on Hard (which I think is actually MORE than v257 bb) and once a Wood Beetle applies poison to a character, they're done for for the encounter unless you immediately dump a cleric healing spell on them - which you can't if you've already assigned the Priest an action, because you have to wait 3-4 seconds for them to have another action due to the long recovery time. edit: There we go, beat them. Still lost three party members due to poison though. Also Stone Beetles teleport if you pause during their burrow ... lol! They instantly appear at their location.