Infinitron

Matt516: I agree that the current system can lead to a concept of "kamikaze tanks", willing to abandon all self-preservation tactics and commit their entire stamina pool/25% of their health to finish off a tough encounter, if it's guaranteed that their sacrifice will allow the other party members to get out without a scratch. But I'm unsure whether this should be considered a tactic that's "against the spirit of the game" and therefore degenerate. And it does have a cost, after all - you can only do it 4 times.

I agree that there's a bit of a strange/perverse incentive here, but it's not always the optimal decision if, you know, you still need that fighter to prevent your other characters from losing health. You're not operating in a vacuum.

Ways to prevent damage in Pillars of Eternity: 1) Find a chokepoint, so only a few enemies can get to you at a time. Disadvantage: You might only have room for one or two of your own characters in the chokepoint, which means they'll take a disproportionate amount of health damage. 2) Use more ranged characters. Disadvantage: Melee characters take a disproportionate amount of health damage. 3) Be aggressive - focus fire, so that enemies are taken down as quickly as possible. Disadvantage: Melee can be come a cluster****, leaving your characters more vulnerable to the attacks of other enemies. 4) Cast buffs on your party and debuffs on the enemy, so that the enemy is more likely to graze/miss you. Disadvantage: You could be using that time to cast a damage spell instead and end the fight sooner. 5) Wear heavier armor. Disadvantage: You'll attack slower, losing attacks you could have used to to end the fight sooner. 6) Find and equip items that boost Deflection. No obvious disadvantage here, although you might be giving up on items that let you attack better instead. All in all, it's a pretty complex set of decisions! There is no must-have risk-free damage avoidance stat like Dexterity/AC in D&D. Although I suspect Deflection boosting items will be very valuable indeed...

I've been doing videos of the same encounters with different classes, I have improved since my first video but the amount of Health lost after the first few beetle encounters on Hard doesn't vary all that much, due to the normalized damage output of the game. I can kill the beetles a little bit faster, but they're still dishing out roughly the same amount of damage every time. The only big difference appears to be when I get a Critical Hit with the Arbalest (which is the equivalent of two hits from the Morningstar, which is worth ~8 seconds of BB Fighter's time). I think I can get a little bit better once I become more familiar with the spells. I'm not denying that the system might need tuning, but no health ratio will help if players don't respond to incentives correctly. (And by the way, this is also a criticism of the game, not just of the players. It's the game's responsibility to make sure these things are understood.)

Re: frequent resting A problem here, I think, is that some people are responding in an unexpected way to the efficiency incentive that Pillars of Eternity is trying to introduce. By forcing you to use up a limited rest supply or return to town for resting, Pillars of Eternity is trying to say: "Hey, you! Play better, be more efficient! Don't get hurt so much, you are NOT supposed to rest so frequently! If you use your party's abilities more efficiently, you can do better!" But I think some people may not realize that. Instead, they'll assume that they're supposed to get hurt that badly. After all, they did survive those battles, didn't they? A win is a win, and screw efficiency. And then they'll get mad at having to go back to town to rest all the time. This is part of a more general problem in that the human mind isn't as good as evaluating things "continuously". A fight that took off 50% of your health is a harsh outcome in PoE, theoretically equivalent to two deaths and resurrections in the Infinity Engine games. But it doesn't seem that way. The upside here is that it also prevents savescumming. There might be an inevitable trade-off in having this sort of design.

Yep. It's all about the AI baby And when those ranged characters start getting hit, your tanks soaking up all the damage and shortening your adventuring day will become less of a problem as well.

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/96794297651/currently-in-the-pe-beta-backers-like-myself-are

Well, this isn't BSN after all.

They can "encourage" them with some free money.

Maybe there is no reason. Is that a problem? Armor isn't a permanent character building choice, after all. (I realize that it might be cool to more fully support some sort of "armored mage" archetype, but according to many this game has already strayed too far from classical archetypes as it is. Besides, there's also a serious danger of them becoming too overpowered.)

Angry backers tend to have an outsized opinion of their numbers. The truth is that it'll be very hard for these Kickstarter RPGs to fail. Even Alpha Protocol-level sales would be enough for them to be a resounding success.

Wait, ranged? I thought we were talking about wizards in close range/melee.

I hope you're not preaching a return to AD&D as a solution to the problem of overly strict party composition! I'd say that's one strategy you might need to pursue if you aren't able to keep the heat off of a smaller number of melee characters. Like, if you aren't effective enough at using crowd control spells and such.

So heavily armored mages should have high Might so that each cast they get off counts. Makes sense. You might argue that the exact numbers are too punitive (personally I'm not sure) but the principle is solid.

Why do you insist that ranged builds need to go into melee and tank and spread the damage? I don't. I'm telling you to use your Barbarians, Paladins and Priests. Just like in the IE games. (As an side, there's nothing inherently wrong about trying to develop a character from a ranged class in a more melee direction. It'll be an interesting challenge for a gimmick playthrough to play with a party of them. Who says Eternity doesn't support those?)

Why do you insist on acting like Fighters are the only melee-capable class in this game

*shrug* Sounds like typical low-level Infinity Engine gameplay to me. One of my fighters would get hit with a crit or something while I was crawling a dungeon and I'd have to be more careful with him and let my other melee guys pick up the slack for the rest of the journey. And yes, at the end of the day, you might have 3 or 4 busted up melee characters while your ranged characters are still at full health. Not a tragedy. It's simply a matter of how long that day is.

Says who Some classes like the ranger are designed at the moment to not be front liners, and classes like the fighter are only useful in the front. I realize that. I just think there's a distance between "designed to be on the front line" and "can be relied upon to single-handedly hold the front line indefinitely with no regard to preservation of health".

I don't see an inherent problem with the concept of swapping armor for different tactical roles. What, because it doesn't look cool? What's the big deal about wearing armor if you don't really need it anyway? I guess some RPG players are stuck in this mental box, where swapping weapons is okay/normal, but armor is more ingrained into their conception of who their character actually is. Running around naked just needs to be riskier. Also, having some DT 0 clothes with no speed penalty would help make it look less silly. Says who

I like how evil characters in D&D know that they're evil. "Be it known to all those of evil intent, that a bounty has been placed upon the head of CHARNAME, the foster child of Gorion." It's pretty funny.

It's not a question of finding the bugs. It's a question of Obsidian getting around to fixing them. You think they didn't know about most of the problems in the initial beta release already?

This is true. However, there are two mitigating factors: 1) Wizards do decent damage anyway, even without a high Might score. The spells are just inherently tough. 2) D&D didn't actually have any stat that increased spell damage, so you could say its attributes didn't exactly support that archetype either. Between Might as the stat that increases spell damage and no stat at all, it's probably better to have an option.

That's correct. The issue addressed by Josh Sawyer here:

I don't know where you guys are getting the idea that Might doesn't represent physical strength. It absolutely does. Yes, in the world of Eora, strong young wizards generate more intense spells that do more damage.

wat Only plate armors, and both had meaninglessly low thresholds considering the type of characters that usually wore them. It's absurd to suggest that AD&D armor was more complex than PoE's system.