Sensuki

The problem here is the point buy system is not staggered, so the bonuses from Race and Culture are worth exactly the same amount as a point in the point buy system, making them irrelevant apart from the higher/lower minimums and maximums.

I am against the decoupling of Health and Endurance, I think this would diminish Constitution as an attribute, because Stamina can be recovered by spells and whatnot, whereas Health cannot. There are other ways to fix RES and PER, I've made a few suggestions in other threads. Josh may have to make one concession from the design constraints he has put on the attribute system if he wants to make all attributes a compelling choice for each class.

IE games didn't have a minimap. The maps aren't *that* big, and the M button serves just fine. It's not like an RTS where you need to pay attention to map control, it's an RPG.

Okay sorry, I think I've been trying to explain this from the wrong angle. You are correct that the percentile benefit increase from Might is better on the lower weapons, a 60% increase in per hit damage is higher than a 40% increase in per hit damage. However due to the fact that the weapon has less damage anyway, the fact that you are getting 60% from the lower weapon and only 40% from the higher weapon is cancelled out by the actual amounts of damage that they do, regardless of the percentage increase. You are getting more flat real damage from the weapons that do higher damage, even though the 60% is higher than the 40%, taking into account the actual weapon damage, the benefit (IMO) of Might on lower damage and higher damage weapons is actually the same. The 60% increase in your example and the 40% increase example give the same amount of DPS increase in relation to the weapon damage (30% increase) Does that make any sense?

Don't make the combat slower, the recovery times for characters wearing armor (and shields) is already long enough to slow down character actions in the game. Wizard spell cast times and recovery times are also pretty slow. People keep saying the combat is too fast, when the action speeds in combat are not too fast, it's a whole bunch of other factors. Movement speed and amount of damage dealt by creatures and large ranged weapons are a couple of them. I would refrain from making too many judgements about combat until some of the critical bugs are fixed - such as auto attack, the retarded pathfinding and selection issues.

It's not as simple as that man, it's a lot more complicated. Do the math with the actual weapon damage ranges - on grazes, on hits and on crits and take into account the actual DPS (I provided you the times in a post above) - and tell me that. You also can't get a 50% Might bonus. Calculate it with realistic Might values such as 10 (20%), 15 (30%) and 20 (40%).

Yeah I think they could use being a bit bigger.

You guys are forgetting recovery time when talking about weapon speed. A Stiletto does 12-20 damage, and makes an attack every 50 frames, at 30 frames a second (animation speed is 30FPS) so it attacks every 1.666667 seconds A War Hammer does 16-26 damage, and makes an attack every 60 frames, so it attacks every 2 seconds. This is of course, assuming you are not wearing armor or a shield. Two Weapon Fighting I believe, reduces the overall damage you do with both weapons, but I am not sure about the exact mechanics. The math works out so that the 1H Normal weapon has a higher flat DPS, but the special properties of the 1H Fast weapons should make them an interesting choice if they are done right. I don't think that's actually true.

Won't work because ranged characters don't need to opt into the Interrupt/Concentration system

1H fast weapons are already inferior to all other weapons in DPS, but the special properties can probably bring them back into par. Haven't checked the flat values of the special properties yet.

I made a video showcasing character shadows jittering left and right while inside the Blacksmith shop I created a new character and walked into the shop, and noticed the jittering. Here is my unity log: http://www.upload.ee/files/4219715/21-8_536AM_AEST.txt.html

After doing some proper DPS calculations, I've changed my mind. Percentile damage bonus is fine, it is in fact the weapon balance that is off. the Might damage increase is not more effective for daggers than it is for larger weapons against DT though.

I am not sure about the ranged weapons but the speeds for the melee weapons are as follows: The animation speed is 30 FPS. 1H Fast - 20 frames (0.6667 second animation) 1H Normal - 30 frames / second (1 second animation) 2H - 40 frames (1.3333 second animation) Recovery time is, I *think* a flat one second across the board without armor/shield etc modifiers.

Grazes and Hits are the most common at the moment. Hunting Bows do absolutely nothing once the DTs start to even get into the medium numbers, whereas Arbalests do a hefty amount of damage even on a graze. For a Hunting Bow to catch up to an Arbalest graze against the same DT they need to hit twice or three times.

Currently though I believe we have the opposite situation, due to the huge scaling of damage bonuses with larger slower weapons, it appears that you are crazy if you pick the smaller, faster weapons over the slower ones. You are however correct that the flat bonus is more beneficial for faster weapons than slower weapons using a flat bonus which is something I forgot to take into account. In that instance to reign that in, you'd need another rule such as a cap on the Might bonus such as faster weapons only getting 0.8x the Might bonus or something. Such edge case rules I *think* are against the design goals of the system. Regardless I think the straight percentile bonuses could be troublesome, intuitive but I'm not sure if it's balanced for weapon use. This is one of the reasons why in games like Starcraft, damage bonuses from weapon upgrades and stuff like that are set at tested, balanced discrete values, because I don't think there's a unified system for this that works.

Might is a good attribute in Pillars of Eternity, it affects Damage and Healing which is useful for all classes, some more than others. Might currently grants percentile increases to damage and healing. This works ... until you take the weapon system into account. For characters that primarily make weapon attacks, the benefits of investing in Might are highly dependent on the types of weapons you are planning to use. Pillars of Eternity has a few different "styles" of weapons 1H Fast 1H Normal 2H Ranged Two Weapons Ignoring that the Perception and Resolve attributes can pretty much completely be dumped to oblivion at the moment, allowing you to max the crap out of the other attributes, let's say you are torn between investing Might and Dexterity, or perhaps putting a few extra points into Constitution as a primarily weapon based character. 15 Might gives you a +30% damage increase I've been talking about this on the RPGCodex, but let's say you're a Paladin and you're planning to play a ranged Paladin. What weapon do you choose if you have 15 Might? Should you use a Hunting Bow, or should you use an Arbalest? Hunting Bows deal 11-19 damage (or close enough to that) and Arbalests deal 43-79 damage (or close enough to that) Your 15 Might turns your Hunting Bow damage from 11-19 into 14.3 - 24.7 damage However 15 Might makes the Arbalest damage a whopping 55.9 - 102.7 damage Now I currently think that Arbalests and Arquebuses may not be properly balanced against the other ranged weapons, but that's a very early observation. So ignore this fact for the moment and focus on the numbers. Why would you even bother using a low damage weapon if you invest in Might? To get the most out of your attribute investment you may as well go with the higher damage weapons, as you'll be getting a larger DPS increase from having a high Might than you would using a lower damage weapon. I think that using a percentile modifier for Might based damage bonus will pidgeon hole weapon based characters who invest in Might into only using high damage weapons, because the extra damage granted from them is super awesome, even if they attack slower. Percentile modifiers are generally used in ARPG games for damage increases in their skill/talent systems and on items, but they are never used for attributes themselves, likely because of the same issue. RTS games also do not use percentile modifiers for damage increases. Games like Warcraft 3 give a flat bonus per point of the primary damage attribute of heroes. In light of this issue I think that the Might bonus should be changed to a flat number like Accuracy is, that way the bonus damage you get is the same across all weapons. Lower damage weapons will get more of a percentage increase to total damage by investing in Might, but the bonus damage is useful across all weapons (and spells and abilities). I am not insanely strong at mathematics though, so if someone can do some calculations against DT and debunk my argument, go right ahead.

Ahhh, there you go. Cheers Brian.

If you're skeptical I'd skip playing for now, especially considering the state combat is in. A lot of people I know don't want to play the beta, they want the release version, rather than experiencing the unpolished mess.

can you upload your output_log.txt file after you quit the game? http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67421-how-to-save-output-logtxt-and-find-saved-games/

You can delete the lost D3D device lines from the log manually I guess

I think balanced attributes can be achieved with six of them, I also don't think the amount of attributes will be changed because of all of the dialogue design that's already been put into options based on the six attributes. They're here to stay I think.

Just to go on your change of the UI pane, I can understand the reasoning for Obsidian's change here. The PE UI is flipped around from what the early IE games had. Portraits on the left instead of the right, and menu on the right instead of the left. The combat relative buttons need to be closer to the portraits on the UI, so thats why the attack, cancel, select all buttons and whatnot are on the left side. There will also be a solid UI bar coming soon hopefully. I think the reason a lot of the panes are small is they made the assets to be semi-full screen at 1280x720, rather than a higher source art resolution and downscaling. They're also 2D, whereas games that use 3D can scale them with resolution, like Age of Wonders 2.

Yeah you shouldn't be able to zoom in the game when you have a UI panel open IMO.

UI consistency is a big issue in Pillars of Eternity. I made some points about this in one of my suggestion threads, but you're absolutely right. I think all panels should follow a uniform design.

Yep, done. The PE Logfile path is \Steam\steamapps\common\Pillars of Eternity - Public Beta\PillarsOfEternity_Data\output_log.txt Save everything, particularly when something happens that it shouldn't (such as inventory items disappearing).