Sensuki

Yeah, De'Arnise Keep is what I was referring to. Candlekeep, The Friendly Arm Inn and the Baldur's Gate walls had sensible battlements and towers though, there's two spots at least on Raedric's Hold where it looks very odd. The part directly above the main gate, and one of the towers on the left side or something.

AI targeting does need work, I've made some videos on it but perhaps I need to make more.

The X-Factor for this problem is DR. If there was no DR, Josh could have used D&D style lower numbers for things. Because DR exists, everything requires much higher numbers and it makes it very hard to balance. Another thing that throws it off is the Endurance and Health system and how Constitution works. The attack resolution system was designed so that unit actions had a positive outcome most of the time. The original design didn't even include a chance to miss. They have not really accounted for the fact that things pretty much always deal damage with their numbers properly IMO, or, if they are - they're looking at it from the wrong angle or something. It's a fair experiment for a system, but it's got a long way to go before they get it right IMO.

They should be able to fix those glass panes easily enough unless they were painted on (doubt it?) There's a larger issue with the towers/walls in the exterior which are very poorly designed. I'm surprised they didn't pick up on that. In the IE games if a Castle had a wall, there was a door that led to the wall, and you could walk on it ... and there was often content on them.

We know that there unfortunately isn't much percussion used.

This is a problem with the game design, not how defenses works. This is the very thing I've been complaining about throughout the beta. In the Infinity Engine games - good encounters elicited reactions from the player and the player had many tools that they could use at their disposal in a reactive fashion. The game also included counter spelling, which is my favourite thing about spell casting in the IE games. Counter spelling has been intentionally mostly eradicated from the game - at the preference of the SA and badgame goons I believe - and most of the fun along with it. In Pillars of Eternity basically the only two things that you have to react to are moving out of a persistent hazard such as the AoE of Ninagauth's Freezing Pillar, or casting Suppress Affliction. The high per hit damage in conjunction with this leads to combat that is stacked very hard on the encounter strategy and alpha striking phase, with virtually no reactive tactics required unless you make a mistake of some sort. I think the devs have unfortunately been looking at D&D rather than the Infinity Engine games for their combat influences, so the RTS feel and reactionary tactics that made the IE games fun have been eschewed from the combat. It really sucks. There are people here (Infinitron might be one of those people) that do not care for reactive tactics and make the case that because "the majority" of IE players simply cheesed the game, that people do not expect to have to use reactive tactics. I think the developers also think that the game is more tactical than it actually is.

I have been reporting bugs that I find to Bester. The mod has been in development for months now, and so far I've only found a few minor bugs. Every bug I've reported Bester has been able to fix very easily. There is one bug with the Custom UI menu where sometimes when you enable it you can't click any of the buttons, you have to quit to the main menu and reload your game to fix it. That's the only issue we are aware of at the moment. There was a bug where enable looting in combat would be enabled regardless of whether you had the checkbox checked or not, that's been fixed as well. Other than that, I've been using it every day and I have not had a single problem. Personally I think it's far more likely that any serious bugs you find will be caused by the main game itself. First, the IE mod has to be adapted when the game is updated to release version, so the mod will not be available until that happens. You can't use a previous version of the mod with a newer version of the game.

He's obviously not doing it properly.

Adam Brennecke on twitter

Also while still not quite finished, here's an alpha version of those custom bottom bars. Bester coded a system that can make collider boxes for any 2D background element automatically (as long as it's rectangular/square), so many kinds of UI are possible - although it requires adjusting of how tooltips work so that they automatically position correctly, rather than clipping off screen or being shown from the wrong corner. This one needs revisions based on its implementation (sent them to the artist this morning), and currently a collider can't be made for the triangular "adra" decoration, at least not automatically. So if you want to make your own UI bar, you can replace one of the files in the IE mod UI folder, and the mod should make a collider for you, to eat clicks. Hopefully they change the combat log texture though. No idea why transparency is implemented on the texture side, rather than it being coded transparent by the game.

Thankyou, this is what I've been saying the whole time. While not totally related to how defenses works, it is a problem. I don't have time to reply properly atm, but give me 5-8 hours or so and I'll be back.

COME ON GUISE

Because the combat log is not in the middle of the screen (and no, I will not forgive them for making that decision), you're right that it's basically impossible to look at it during unpaused combat. However I look at it when paused, and I have it open larger than the default size so I can see a larger sequence of actions. There are soooo many useless lines that cramp it.

Yes, they are - if you don't mind being active. Blinding Strike and two Crippling Strikes give you a fair damage boost in encounters and you can use them every encounter. Not only do they give x1.25 damage and a status effect - they allow you to qualify for sneak attack against the target. Confident Aim is a _TERRIBLE_ ability tbh - it gives you like 7% chance to do 50% more damage, and increases your minimum damage from 20% to 24% ... big whoop. Just checked the files, Confident Aim actually increases the minimum weapon damage number, rather than your minimum damage percent through DR. That's not bad, especially with 2Hers. EG if your minimum base damage is 20, it will become 24.

Do you really want to find the correct textures, shaders and sounds for thousands of files? I know I don't.

Bug #1: Horrible VFX associated with the spell (Stuck-FX) - remove that Bug #2: Duration on tooltip does not match actual duration Bug #3: Dominated party members *ALWAYS* change weapon sets as soon as they are dominated.

Those are the incorrect specs I was talking about. The minimum RAM and Hard Drive space will be lower. the CPU might be higher though.

Rogue, lol. Just make sure you have a couple characters to take aggro.

Got a crash when loading a previous save. I was in combat in Lle A Rhemen, loading a save in the area. The crash was caused by Null Object Reference - something about UIMapTooltip, UIManager and GameState.Update - uploaded my log to go with the report. output_log.zip

Gonna do a few of these until a new patch comes out Gonna use the same party and apply a different strategy each time and see which is the best one.

Yeah it will slow your cast speed down by 20% If you have a cast animation of 3 seconds and a recovery time of 3 seconds, your recovery will now be 4.2 seconds. It takes the total time of animation+recovery and penalizes you for the total, rather than just recovery time itself.

Really I thought there were a few good female voice sets. Some of the lines were a bit over the top but the voices were nice to listen to at least. Can't say I find the voices of the player voice sets very compelling.

The acid traps in the stream use the 'sinking ship' sound from Warcraft 2 lmao

Yeah there's nothing wrong with crickets, but yeah they shouldn't have been used for EVERY night time scene.

The blur is when the player is fatigued. It looks bad, but apparently it was done for a reason. I would simply prefer no blur.