Infinitron

(written by Something Awful, how appropriate)

Josh Sawyer acknowledges your opinions: http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113517551741/k-take-it-up-with-these-guys-on-your-companys http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113519146896/i-wasnt-actually-expecting-you-to-publicly

https://www.facebook.com/obsidian/posts/10152755383786593 Little is known about the long-lost Engwithan empire or its culture. Called the "Builders" by the tribes of Eir Glanfath, the Engwithans are believed to have created strange, elaborate structures over decades using shaped pillars of living adra to support the stone. Their language is barely understood by even the most well-read scholars, leaving many details of their society lost to the ages and hopelessly mired in rumor, folklore, and blatant lies.‪#‎PoELaunchMarch26‬

tons of fun!

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what's going on in this thread to be honest. You have Josh Sawyer saying the game plays fine on Hard with the unoptimized, non-min-maxed default companions, and in here, a bunch of people saying it's punishingly difficult if you don't use a party consisting of "one tank and five naked spellslinging mages", and that you can't make a defensive character without sacrificing literally every offensive ability. Can we get some clarity here?

Well, casting a counter-spell isn't exactly "difficult". It's just something you need to have. That sort of thing has always seemed to me more like a "this feels cool" thing than a "difficulty" thing. The universally available mundane counters would have to be less efficient, of course. Something that takes more of a time investment than casting a counterspell.

That would be a hard counter too unfortunately, because it requires the party to have access to that range of suitable spells in order to avoid being "defeated" by the Death spell. I've been trying to think of ways to implement BG2-like "hard countery" abilities that aren't actually hard counters, by virtue of being counterable through standard means that are always available to all characters (though those means may be sub-optimal). See for instance: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/mage-duels-without-hard-counters.97027/ Maybe I should start a thread on that topic over here as well.

You can roll for stats in PoE. That functionality would be trivial to implement, and I'm surprised Obsidian haven't done it, just for kicks. What you can't do is roll for how many total stat points you have at your disposal altogether. It's always the same amount.

Well, Domination/Charm IS a hard counter because it utterly "defeats" a character, removing it from play in one blow unless that character's allies have a proper counter. Although according to Josh this may be acceptable if the duration of the effect is short enough: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67946-josh-sawyer-on-immunities-and-hard-counters/ Here's an idea for implementing more powerful Domination/Charm effects in PoE: Give other characters in the party the option of telling the charmed character to "snap out of it". Like, go up to him and slap him or something. Not a specific counter-spell or set of counter-spells, but a universal ability available to everybody. So Domination/Charm would be most helpful in situations where the rest of the party is too occupied by fighting other enemies to take the time to slap their ally out of it, but fairly weak if they're around to help each other.

Gotcha. Keep in mind that some of these changes would make the hard counters not hard anymore. Resistances instead of immunities means soft counters, because you can overwhelm them with enough effort (50% resistance, so just cast twice as many spells). And some of the things you're talking about were probably never hard counters to begin with. A slow spell that can be countered by a haste spell isn't usually a hard counter, because being inflicted with slowness in an RPG generally isn't a tactic that outright "defeats" you. You can keep on fighting and inflicting damage, and the duration is usually not incredibly long. Although that can depend on the implementation and circumstances, of course.

Tell us more about these "specifics about how they're set up" that you would change.

It's like how some people thought Glory in Dragonfall was junk because they wanted to use her as another ranged shooty character instead of activating her implant and going into melee. That's okay, those people are just dumb. Anyway, I'm sure the people who thought the attributes in Pillars of Eternity have extremely minor effects will be thrilled to hear this. :smug:

I like how by namedropping all the companions, it seems like he's sort of making the argument that "I don't care about these guys' crazy Adventurer's Hall theorycrafting - the combat is fun and flexible with the companions that we're going to give you, and that's all that really matters". (that's fine by me btw, "balanced for your available companions" made Shadowrun: Dragonfall a lot of fun even though the system as a whole was anything but balanced)

sup bros http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113466098696/how-do-you-respond-to-the-claim-that-pillars-of http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113466978636/the-damage-is-too-damn-high-in-pillars-of-eternity

Well, you're still clicking on the corpse, just not on all the corpses if there a whole bunch of them near it (3m radius)

They quietly changed it into a simple shared inventory extension. Nobody noticed or cared, lol

Seems pretty clear to me.

lol grognards

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/576122829113970689

That said... Yeah, I don't see why just tuning down the damage would necessarily make things more "on-the-fly". Couldn't it just as easily end up making the combat the same, only slower? I get what Odd Hermit is saying - making the combat more forgiving in terms of damage would let you use a wider variety of builds, which would in turn be able to do a wider variety of stuff in combat. But I don't think "on-the-fly tactics" is a good description of that. It'd mean you'd be doing different stuff in combat, but it doesn't imply some kind of new layer of tactical complexity that would be unlocked.

Well, I think these guys definitely need more help than SCL does. Nobody knows about this game. It's a crying shame.

But it's what your complaint ultimately comes down to. The sum of all those things means that the game rewards class purism. Those who have complained since the beginning of this Kickstarter that mean old Josh Sawyer is watering down their archetypes in favor of 4E-like homogenizing design can relax. Or maybe it'll all be rebalanced, we'll see!

From what I've read of it, including the KS, it does sound very much like a "Far East" setting somewhat like Kara-Tur. Or at least a mix. It's a Western RPG setting, but with some Chinese trappings. So not at the level of say, Jade Empire, but with some oriental flair.

What Odd Hermit and Sensuki are complaining about here is basically that traditionally non-melee classes such as mages don't perform well in melee combat if you build them as such. At least, not as well as they'd like them to. Infinity Engine purists shouldn't have a problem with this, since in those games it wasn't really possible to build a pure mage that performs well in melee anyway. Not until you got cheesy spells at the high levels, anyway.

Well then, like I said, seems like a fairly trivial balance issue. Unless the beta area is actually designed for the player to have way better armor than what's available in the beta, or something.