Sensuki

Prepare to be pissed off (for the record, I don't like it either but it's waaaay past debating).

Yes but in 2E/3E they were not the highest DPS melee damage dealer. Some of us prefer the idea that the Fighter is better at fighting than the Rogue is.

Not really. The AoE of the Barbarian's Cleave will probably be small, whereas a Wizard will have a lot of larger radius AoE spells. Wizards have their Blast passive ability that they can use when equipped with an implement (wands etc) to dish out regular low damage AoEs kind of similar to a Barbarian's cleave but I assume with the risk of friendly fire. I don't think the Barbarian's ability has friendly fire. Invisibility is out as a wizard spell afaik, but there might be a short-range teleport. If there is, the teleport will always be safer, but it will probably be a per-rest use ability; whereas the Barbarian's Wild Sprint can be risky if they get targetted by a melee opponent mid sprint.

I think in close to all cases where I've written "spike damage", I've used it as a verb. A rogue can spike his or her damage output, i.e. dramatically increase it for a short duration. Rogues have a few Abilities for doing this, the most notable of which does increasingly more damage based on how low the target's current Stamina is.

The Rogue is a Rogue. It's just the 4E/MMO style Rogue, not the 2E/3E 'Utility' Rogue.

Yeah I was a bit surprised about this distinction as well. The Barbarian still seems like a good tanky class, but will require a moderate amount of micro-management. They'll want to avoid getting hit by the high damage classes like Rogues and Rangers or creatures as much as possible. If you aim or angle your attacks correctly (I'm not exactly sure how Carnage works, whether it is a cone or arc or whatever) you can apply a moderate damage hit to one creature and several lower damage hits to nearby creatures. Theoretically, using the Barbarian's burstiness and fast weapon(s) you could provide 6 full hits to one character and the equivalent of 1 or 2 full hits to nearby characters. So you are still providing a strong total damage output, just not to the same unit. Another possible use I can see for Barbarians is to drop casters. You'd have to be careful of Fighters and Traps (don't want to get snagged by a Disengagement attack) but you could use a Barbarian's wild sprint to rush through the frey to a caster at the back, turn on their Frenzy ability and start whacking away. Here is some older Barbarian info from Sawyer April 27 2013 July 2 2013 The Barbarian concept in January 2013: By May 2013 this had changed:

It's possible your soul might be special in that you'll be able to interact with lost souls as a 'Watcher' (but they won't spoil that part of the story).

OTOH I really like a lot of the D&D 2E and 3E archetypes of classes.

I'm sure you'll be able to do that, you'll just have to buy talents to augment it probably.

You want your Monk to be out the front taking hits. As they take hits, they only take a portion of damage immediately while the rest is converted to the Wounds resource. This enables them to use their class abilities - Trancendent Suffering is automatically turned on when Wounds is active and applies fire damage to the Monk's fists. That's what makes a Monk tanky - in that they can shrug off a portion of incoming damage to power their abilities, but if Wounds are not spent then it will turn into damage. If you aren't taking damage as a Monk you won't have any Wounds to use your special abilitites. According to Josh Sawyer they are. Most of the anecdotes are over at Something Awful though, but Gamebanshee's Project Eternity social round-ups catches some of the quotes usually. Rogues and Rangers were higher DPS classes than the Fighter in 4th edition as well. Sure. This guide here only displays the 'optimal' way they are played based on textual information. Players will uncover new ways to usefully play classes through playing the game, and as Josh Sawyer has said, you can play classes out of their 'role' but with an efficacy loss of between 10-25%. On lower difficulties, this will not matter too much but on higher difficulties (Hard, Hardest, Path of the Damned) you may need to play your party 'optimally' to beat encounters. What is your favourite class?

I originally posted this over at the RPGCodex for a few of the newcomers to the P:E mega-thread over there, but I've noticed a lot of class related questions around the place, so here's a quick primer based on the current information: (Some of this may be wrong/out of date, but I'm sure if it is, I will be corrected) Every class will be good in combat. Josh Sawyer wants to remove as many traps in character creation as he can because he hates it when players stop playing games because they made a bad choice. He also wants as many builds and party combinations to be viable as possible. The classes are being designed as role-ready, which appears a little bit pigeonholed on paper compared to D&D 3E, but we'll have to see how we go. If you play characters out of role, they will be more inefficient filling a role that another class is best at (75% - 90% efficacy roughly) and depending on the game difficulty level you may run into trouble, but it should be viable to do it at least some of the time. From the way Josh Sawyer has been describing it, classes have natural counter-classes as well. Rogues and Rangers are the damage dealing classes. Rogues have the best single target single-hit damage of all of the classes, Rangers have very high DPS (particularly against their per-encounter favored enemy). These characters will probably not hold up well to being beat on though, a Fighter's sticky abilities counter a Rogue. The Ranger shares health pool with it's animal companion. We do not know if you get bonus health/stamina from this link, but a Ranger also has to be careful that their animal companion doesn't get trapped ... kind of like Lone Druid in DotA 2 except a lot more terminal. Barbarians will be good at dealing with trash mobs and squishies. Barbarians will be tough as well and can take a lot of hits from average enemies, but they will probably suffer if targeted by high DPS characters because their deflection sucks and they are 'peaky' characters. Fighters and Monks are the characters you want out in the front being the tanks, soaking up the DPS. Fighters have high Deflection and can hold people to them with their class abilities, Monks want to take damage to power their status effects which you can use to hold people back from your squishies. The original Fighter description in the very first class update read that "And while fighters are often thought of as being primarily melee-based, they can specialize in a variety of weapons, including bows, crossbows, and even firearms.". In a recent statement Sawyer said that using a Fighter as a ranged character is playing against type because most of their abilities are melee based. You could still probably specialize in a Ranged weapon but you'd never get the chance to use half the class abilities. You can probably build a Fighter as a non-tank and play one like a Ranger or a Rogue, but you'll be doing it at 70-80% efficiency compared to the class that fills that role. Wizards are designed to be versatile spell casters. Their spells will probably let them do everything, but their Grimoire limits the array of spells they have access to per encounter, so rather than having a spell for everything available in an encounter you have to pick your spells correctly. Sawyer has also said that while Wizards are versatile their spells will never be as effective as another classes ability if they are similar. Paladins are good when positioned near allies. They will never be able to 1v1 a high DPS class and win, but if you stick them in melee near your Fighters/Monks etc their short range auras will benefit them, and likewise if you set them up with a Bow or an Arquebus and stick them near the Rangers and Wizards, and use the short range auras to buff their attack speed or accuracy etc. Chanters are supposed to be pretty versatile, they can be melee or ranged, have good accuracy and average defenses and they chant while fighting to give status effects to the party and/or themselves. The Chants have a large aura range compared to the Paladin. After a certain amount of ticks, the Chanter can unleash a (usually offensive) roar, which probably has to be close range to either damage/stun/slow etc a group of enemies. Chanters look like they'll be one of those classes that can 'fill' any role with a varying degree of efficacy loss. For example: You could tank with a Chanter, it would be less efficient than using a Fighter or a Monk, but better than using a Rogue, Ranger, Cipher or Wizard. They might have an aura that makes them more 'tanky' and they might have a Roar that does an AoE cone stun, but they will never be as good as a Fighter or a Monk and if you use a Chanter as the tank they will run out of Health over an adventuring day faster than a Fighter or a Monk would and they wouldn't be able to last as long in an Encounter if being beat on by tough guys. You know about Ciphers from the latest update. Priests and Druids are primarily spell caster classes and have access to all of their spells rather than relying on a Grimoire, but their spell list is not as extensive as the Wizard. One could assume that you can build a melee or ranged Cleric or Druid but according to recent information they might be most optimally played as a ranged/reserve melee character. Druids have the limited ability shapechange into "anthropomorphic animal forms, more like lycanthropes in appearance". You can cast spells while in your animorph form but you can't hold weapons. You could have a Longbow Druid, shapechange into a Man-Bear and then wade into melee with Claws. Priests have the only non-self Stamina regen spell(s) so far that we know. Priests also benefit from being in close proximity to allies to give them their Sacred Circle passive accuracy bonus, but if they aren't they get it themselves. Josh Sawyer stated today that "(PE) priests have shifted away from the original concept of them being melee/caster hybrids. They are closer-range casters than wizards, but they aren't particularly strong in melee (paladins take on the role of close-combat support). Their spells are designed to be on par with wizards' in overall power, but they have a different flavor and trend differently. E.g., wizards have some nice personal buffs but virtually no area buffs. Priests have a few personal buffs, but have a lot of huge AoE buffs." The class 'role' design overall sounds pretty robust, it just plays against a few of the traditional archetypes that some of us are used to. For me the Paladin and the Barbarian are in the frey, toe to toe with the biggest monsters just as much as the Fighter is. Wizards are also nerfed quite a bit. Ciphers are more "Soulblade" oriented than the well known "Psion" class.

If you zoom right in you can see the jpeg distortion. The original screenshot grass looks much worse, although I think it was done way before they optimized their rendering method. But sure I'll also agree that it's not "the most organic" that it could look, but it's still a step up on Icewind Dale I guess. If we're going to be real nitpicky, there's only three tree models used in that screenshot Baldur's Gate grass in comparison is a bit 'grainy'. I definitely have Baby Duck syndrome though when it comes to original IE. The area most thinly populated by trees that is a Forest tile in BG1 is probably Peldvale, and here they have some patches with a tree here or there like the Adra screenshot, but the clumping is IMO a bit more realistic. Who knows, the Glanfathans may have 'procured' the Forest that way, or a lot of the trees were cut down by Dyrwoodans ?

It's probably a Wilderness area from the Prototype.

Hopefully it's possible to lose control of your entire party when facing a bunch of Vithrack

I don't really care about that as long as the game defaults to desktop resolution to begin with and there is a Graphics section in the options menu. Suppose it can't hurt though. Please make it extensive though rather than the recent trend of allowing you to change bugger all.

I think he was being sarcastic. It's very possible that was the inspiration for the design.

This way please. Don't necessarily need the book, just Kaz's artwork.

They'll have a fair bit of dialogue to do though, so my hope is they bring him back for some of that.

Only if it's PC only. If it's a console game, no.

Happy Birthday

A few people have asked George about his work on Project Eternity on his formspring and he has stated that he has not worked on the game since the Prototype stage. Obsidian is keeping most of the work done in Project Eternity in-house and due to the limited budget of the game it makes sense to use George (Narrative Designer) where it counted the most - in pre-production. We also know that George probably won't be doing any CNPC writing as he doesn't really enjoy doing it, it would be nice to know if George be contributing again though. It doesn't seem like he'll get to do any Area Design, but hopefully he gets to do a bit of non-CNPC dialogue.

+1, bleak as a mofo, plz

No. Piss off with the statistic bull****

They're making Kaz suffer first so his portraits are better.

How are the environment art paintovers going? Having fun doing 16K pixel wide maps ???