Stun

Bethesda did not invent quest markers. Blizzard gets that credit. They've been using Quest markers in WoW since the Bush Administration.

Yeah, the real disappointment will come after you finally get that blade forged, and it hits you that you just utterly wasted your time...because you could have crafted an identical blade out of any Esoc you found way back in act 1. :::: shakes head :::

The example Luckman gave was NOT about unforeseeable immunities or defences. Was it, Gromnir. It was about Trolls. Specifically, trolls in the IE games...who won't die unless you use the fire and acid equipment that those games flood you with in the beginning of the very same dungeon/area where you encounter them.. BG2 even takes it a step further, throwing NPCs and load screens in your face who's only in-game purpose is to bark out instructions, like: "Make sure you use fire or acid on those trolls, or they'll get up again, Player!"

Correct. But that's the thing. The vast majority of that reviewer's gripes with the game are things that are neither broken nor fixable. They are specific designs that are working precisely as the devs intended them. But the problem is that they're simply not fun, or to be more objective, they don't fit the reviewer's definition of fun. For example, he complains about The engagement mechanic. But the engagement mechanic isn't broken. It's working as designed. So what is there to fix? Nothing. There's nothing to fix. It can only be changed or removed.... And that would go counter to the intended design. If you go down the list of this reviewer's talking points you'll find that they're almost all about developer design decisions, and not really about "broken mechanics" or "things that need number tweaking".

This is the only unique part of that review, and I utterly agree with it: He's right. The mega dungeon was the thing I was most looking forward to in this game and PoE totally let me down with it. I actually didn't mind the repetitiveness of the encounters that the reviewer whines about (Durlag's tower is just as guilty on that front). No. What got me was how 'shallow' and unemmersive that entire dungeon experience felt. There was hardly any story. There were hardly any puzzles. There were no Od-Nua-unique loot to be found (and no, that Bore-snore Esoc you can assemble isn't Unique) Also, We were promised gradual, level by level difficulty progression but we got nothing of the sort. We got 8 straight levels of same-same and then we got a spike in difficulty at about level 9 or 10 that remained until the end. And the End... <gag> a Super DULL end boss. Durlag's tower gave us the Demon Knight, and then Aec'le'tec. Watcher's keep gave us friggin Demogorgon. What did Od Nua Give us? A dragon without a name. A generic and completely faceless foe.

^This. When you look at BG1's story you really have no choice but to see it for what it is: Bluh. But BG1 does such a good job in delivery. It's that slow drip of information - that feeling that you're moving up the enemy's ranks. That detective-like situation when you take out a member of the grand conspiracy and learn about his boss.....then you take out his boss and learn that he's just a puppet for someone greater, etc. And then there's the way that Bg1 presented its world. You don't just learn via some letter or journal, or conversation with someone that there's an iron shortage. You witness this shortage first hand. You see its effects all around you. Your weapons break. Named bandit groups ambush you for your iron. Iron mines are taken over by the enemy. You discover ransacked caravans on the road. And it isn't until you're neck deep trying to solve that problem that you discover that the Iron shortage isn't what the plot is about at all. That slow drip, learn-by-discovery thing is something PoE lacks. PoE's plot suffers from mis-delivery. Events occur too fast. Plot-essential characters and their storylines are dumped upon you, rapid fire. Consequently the game denies you that essential thrill of discovery - that cat-and-mouse chase -- that climb up the enemy ranks.

Where are you getting your math from? This is not World of Warcraft. In PoE, a +24% action speed increase is NOT an increase in weapon swing speed (per second or otherwise). It's a decrease in recovery time between weapon swings. And that timer is paused when you make any movement (like moving from one opponent to the next). And by the way, Dexterity + The weapon is not the only factor here. The type of armor you're wearing also determines your action speed (in fact it's a bigger factor than dexterity) But the bottom line is that you can't brush away the nature of the encounters in this game just because your math demands it (like you're doing here). Things simply cease being a matter of DPS when most fights see your rogue only needing to hit with his pike 2 or 3 times.

I would take issue with someone who equates PoE's Wichts with D&D's Wights. Their only similarities are their names and the fact that they're undead. But in PoE, wichts are undead Children. And that's NOT what Wights are in D&D. On the other hand, Xariups are indeed PoE's version of the Kobold. They're little critters? Check. They're semi-reptilian? Check; They're Tribal? Check. They worship Dragons? Check. But I, for one, don't mind the "copy-cat" thing. I welcome it. I backed an IE spiritual successor. I *wanted* similarities. If anything, they didn't give us enough of them.

Not really. Do you know what the difference between 18 Dex and 10 dex is? Yeah. +24% action speed. This means that a pike-wielding rogue with 18 Dex will be able to hit something with his pike 4 times in the time it takes a pike-wielding rogue with 10 Dex to hit it 3 times. Sounds positively game changing, right? Except that it isn't. Because fights don't last that long in PoE, unless you're a really Sh*tty player, Or you're soloing. And we're also dealing with Pikes. They're slow weapons. And no amount of Dex will make them fast weapons. Maybe if we were talking about Stiletto dual-wielding it'd be a different matter, but again...we aren't.

It's generally a good idea to max out Might and Intelligence first. In fact, I'd pump intelligence all the way to 18 even if it means you have to drop Dex a few points, actually. As much as it may seem that the added few % points to action speed will make a difference, it doesn't. Although it's probably a good idea to at least keep your dex in the teens. But after that, none of the other attributes matter and you can drop them to single digits without taking a combat performance hit. The game recommends perception on Rogues, but I still haven't figured out why that would be. For the Interrupt? Well, you're using a pike. You'll get interrupts all the time with it anyway (it's a high interrupt weapon). And eventually you'll find a Pike that inflicts Prone (knockdown - a forced interrupt. Can't beat that)

^Faulty English. Assumes present tense. And misses the point. Edit: And ends with a lie (I seriously doubt you're curious, since your first post on this thread was a blanket dismissal of all the critics, and their viewpoints, and their experiences)

Oh, I wouldn't be too worried about that. First, it doesn't work that way. If it did, then Bioware wouldn't have changed the DA:O formula, because IT was the Biggest selling Bioware game when it came out. But we know what did happen, don't we. DA:O sold so unexpectedly well that they decided to.....reboot the franchise and give us something utterly different. (a 180, to quote Mike Laidlaw). Second, DA:I is NOT Bioware's biggest selling game. Not Yet at least. The only information EA has released was that DA:I was Bioware's most successful LAUNCH. This is double-speak, designed for stockholder consumption. Translated to English, what EA is saying here that DA:I had the most pre-orders of any Bioware game, and it had the biggest week 1 sales of any Bioware game. But most gamers know what that really means: Nothing. DA2 had a much better launch than DA:O, but ended up only selling half as many copies in the end. In order to be Bioware's biggest selling game, DA:I would have to break 6 million. Because that's what Mass Effect 2 did. And I'm pretty sure it's not there yet.

Yes. That's one of the main ones. Another gripe is that it's simply implemented wrong. During the kickstarter, when the devs first described the engagement mechanic, they made it sound really cool. The example they gave was that of a FIGHTER being able to stabilize/control the front line so that no one can get past him and make a b-line through the ranks to get to your party's squishies. Had they just left it at that, engagement would have been an excellent mechanic (who wouldn't want their fighter to have such meaningful front line power?). But no. Instead, they decided to give every class and every enemy in the game the engagement power, thus bringing the fighter class right back down to what it was before (Generic), AND THEN they put creatures in the game that can teleport, thus rendering the mechanic tactically useless, AND THEN, they didn't bother giving enemies proper AI, thus nullifying the purpose of Engagement in the first place. It's just a garbage system overall, the way it's been implemented. And when given a choice between a badly implemented engagement mechanic and no engagement mechanic at all, I'll take the latter.

What a coincidence. The people you've categorized and lumped together as "the complainers".... yeah, their stance ALSO isn't "It's not BG, therefore it sucks" either. So perhaps instead of just waving everyone's arguments away with overly simplistic labels we can, instead, address the various specific gripes that people are voicing about the game. Just a suggestion.

In other words, we go from "It's not Baldurs Gate, therefore it sucks" to.... "It's not D&D, therefore it's awesome." Ok, is there supposed to be some sort of profound difference between your stance and that of the "complainers"? Because I don't see any. Both positions are equally shallow and they're both tainted by the exact same type of worthless, meaningless bias that leads nowhere in a debate. On the other hand, some of the criticism I'm seeing does not actually fall into either stance. For example, complaints about the Engagement mechanic. I can describe the ways it goes against the spirit of true tactical combat.... can't you?

A few years ago I got into a massive debate with a few other people at BSN about that. I'm not seeing the sexism people say is inherent in the Witcher series. Is the claim being make simply because of all the sex and titties? It must be that, and that alone, because there's nothing else there. Unlike most other RPGs, Women in the Witcher games tend to be excessively powerful. They're world shakers. They're leaders like Saskia. They're King-manipulators like Philippa Eilhart. They're premiere swordsmen like Ciri.

Ok, you guys lost me, here. So is Skyrim supposed to represent the Corvette or the Fiesta? And does the shopping mall symbolize RPG fans, or Console peasants, or Sales numbers? Or what?

Well, not since Daggerfall, anyway. But it does give me a chuckle to learn that, now, in order for a game to be an RPG, it has to be 3rd person and party based. Got it. lol Goodbye Wizardry series; Goodbye Ultima Underworld; Goodbye Eye of the Beholder Series; Goodbye Fallout New Vegas; Goodbye Betrayal at Krondor; Goodbye Ravenloft; Goodbye Might & Magic series.

You mean easier to exploit. Easier to exploit because of the engagement mechanic (and the group stealth mechanic). Have you....played PoE?

If we check back with PoE in 4 years we will probably discover that it hasn't yet approached half of Skyrim's day 1 sales. Thankfully, Sales are not the sole measurement of a game's identity.

This is not a matter of "degeneration". The Elder Scrolls Series as been a financial overachiever for the RPG genre since about 1993. Daggerfall outsold the all the Goldbox games. Morrowind came out during the Heyday era of Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale, and outsold all 4 of those titles combined. Skyrim is just the latest.

But it doesn't. It's not useful. It wouldn't help us learn anything. And In the case of a PoE vs. BG2 comparison, it wouldn't even be conducive to healthy debate. Again, Objectively speaking, comparing PoE's combat with BG2's would be unfair....to PoE. PoE's Combat system is in its first stage of infancy (it was literally created less than 3 years ago). It hasn't had time to mature, to be built upon, to be refined, tweaked, and reiterated. They haven't even invented the rules for Level 13+ yet. It's like taking a toddler and matching him up with Floyd Mayweather and then saying "Well, Ok, lets do the Tale of the Tape and see who's the better fighter!"

You're not really trying to compare PoE's combat with Bg2's in any way, are you. Because that would be Absurd. Edit: And, objectively speaking, it would also be unfair for both titles, since in BG2's case, developers had the benefit of being able to refine and build upon both a previous title, and an already existing Ruleset, while PoE doesn't have the luxury of either one. And of course there's the Obvious unfairness: PoE was SPCIFICALLY designed to have one, straight-forward, uniform combat system, while BG2's is based on 2nd Edition AD&D, which is about as convoluted and NON-uniform as a combat system can be and still be called a system. Add to this the extreme ADDED mutations and arbitrary alterations bioware took with BG2, which was, by itself, designed from the ground up to have dozens upon dozens of additional individual systems dumped upon the AD&D rule set, which all came together to produce a conceptual combat system soup with near limitless combinations of combat strategies, rules, rules breakages, methods, counter methods, approaches and anti-approaches. ("Breach and Teach" for example, will not work on some mindflayers, or Golems, or Liches, or some Beholders, or Kangaxx, or some fire giants, or some Vampires, or some dragons, or on some creatures within the species family of any of the above)

The game is a success, therefore no criticism allowed. I beg your pardon? If the IE games are "much simpler" than PoE, then the developers have failed to achieve their own stated goals.

Yeah, nothing is immune to anything in this game. Nor is there any way for anything to *make* itself immune to anything via buffs. The problem with trying to stun-lock the Adra Dragon, though, is that it has monstrously high saves. You can occasionally get lucky and knock it prone with Tall Grass or Stunning Shot or a Fighter's Knockdown or whatever, but you won't consistently succeed in doing so, and the chances of actually hitting or critting with such procs is even lower. In my last attempt against the Adra Dragon, I was running a Barbarian with Tall Grass. I managed to Prone her, I think, twice, but not in a row, and both were Grazes...which is kinda meh. Really, when a prone lasts all of 2 seconds you have to wonder: "what was the point?"