Stun

I'm both expecting, and looking forward to quests like that. In the Stronghold update it was hinted that there will be such quests. Or at least that's how I interpreted the following: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64350-update-63-stronghold/ ^ I can totally see a 'stealth mission' job posting at your stronghold, and you being able to send your Rogue on it. Of course it would be really cool to also have full blown stealth quests that you can actually take part in as well. The IE games sorely lacked quests like that (BG1 tried it, but the 2 or 3 it had were so short and meaningless that they really don't count)

Well, no major schedule slippage, but they have, on two occasions, canceled a scheduled update because they 'weren't ready' to show what they had planned to show. Can anything be read/interpreted from that?

Good God, the UI for the Enhanced Edition BG2 makes me want to vomit.

I agree. And lets please note that BG2 only did it in, like, 2 instances: Hold, and Confusion. Both of them happen to be mind-effecting spells, so at least it made sense that something would visually appear over the victim's head. But it's not needed. And Bg1 didn't do it. If someone is frozen in place, perhaps with a slightly shimmering outline surrounding his body, it won't take a genius to figure out that they are magically held/stunned. A spell like confusion or chaos will be more tricky to graphically project, but we won't have to worry about spells like that, since they're luck/random based, which means Josh doesn't like them, which means they won't be in PoE.

I agree. I'll also add that when Developers focus too much on the concept of "Boss Encounters" they inevitably fall into the trap of making that narrative flow too predictable. In a linear game it's like this: Chapter 1: Trash mob + trash mob + trash mob + BOSS! Chapter 2: rinse and repeat In an open world game it's like this: Discover dungeon/area.....Explore area....Trash mobs along the way.... then BOSS at the end! Discover next area/dungeon. Rinse and repeat. It'd be nice if they mixed things up a bit. There's nothing wrong with putting that unique, named encounter at the entrance to that dungeon instead of at the end. There's nothing wrong with making that hidden optional encounter be tougher than that chapter's end battle. There's nothing wrong with that dungeon having unrelated 2 "bosses" instead of just the one. Or having a tough, boss-like enemy be a random encounter/ambush that you may or may not ever see. Or here's a crazy thought.... making a dungeon be uniformly tough from start to finish, without placing any bosses in it for the "spike" effect.

The Irenicus battle in spellhold. He casts Spawn Clones, and suddenly there's a duplicate of everyone in your party, as well as a duplicate of all the crazy prisoners you've freed.

Except that Fighting a clone of yourself isn't 'adjusting' the enemy. It is "duplicating the protagonist", which is a completely different concept with a completely different purpose. And it is a cliché. It was used in Bg2; it was used in Nwn: HoTU; it was used in Planescape Torment: and it was used in Witcher 2.

Well, I think fighters already have a "disengage" ability. I believe it's called "knockdown". Obviously it's not the fancy-schmancy "switch-places" thing that rogues and rangers get, but I can't see a fighter being unable to safely disengage from someone who's lying on the ground.

I suppose. That is, if a game HAS to have Boss fights in the first place. It doesn't though, except for maybe the obligatory Big-Bad-Guy(s) at the end. And a good RPG doesn't even need that. I'd argue that the best way do things is sorta like how BG1 handled it. It had "bosses", but only because they were the last thing you faced in any given dungeon and the plotline named them as such. But that's it. The most memorable fights (and often times the toughest) in Bg1 were the enemy party battles. I'm hoping PoE goes that route instead of how Dragon Age 1 does it.... where a boss is a BOSS, with a big cinematic introduction and a giant orange health bar to advertise the fact this this enemy is a super-special-BOSS and therefore, get ready for a specifically designed 10 minute battle of attrition.

Oh, I wouldn't go that far. Taken to the absolute extreme, Kiting can probably succeed in rendering one lone PoE game play mechanic irrelevant: Forced engagement. And nothing more. But as anyone who's ever played a class based RPG will tell you, forced engagement is Hardly the sole function of a melee class, is it? Or at least it better not be, because if it is then playing a fighter in PoE will be brain-numbingly DULL. melee-oriented classes should be designed to.... Fight. And that means dealing with the entire spectrum of enemy tactics, including stalking mobile targets, as well as BEING mobile attackers themselves if they have to. But I understand. There are developer-defined Class roles that can't be deviated from. Thus your Tank can't be a fighter jet. If anything, you should be complaining about the overpowered nature of the engagement mechanic, and how it seems to be designed to make ranged Fighter builds worthless. I wouldn't be too worried about that either. Simple, unimaginative encounter design solves that issue. If the Devs want a specific encounter to be really tough, they'll simply give the enemy an innate disengage mechanic, like the one Rogues, rangers and mages get. If they want an encounter to be simple, they'll just put your party up against a bunch of lumbering fighter-types who can do nothing but stand in one place and wail away at whatever is in front of them

That's not very accurate either. Rape was more than just a hint in Icewind Dale 2. It was the main plot. It was how the Legion of the Chimera came to be in the first place. Including its 2 leaders.

I also don't put a whole lot of value in community engagement. Specifically, I don't subscribe to the notion that just because we're members of the Obsidian forums then that means we're some elite society entitled to receive automatic briefings on every developer action, announcement, reveal, interview etc. that ever occurs about this game. That said, If the Obsidian Devs don't feel the need to make their own forums be the Go-To source for all PoE related material, we could always take matters into our own hands. I personally don't have the time, nor the motivation, nor the personality for it, but maybe someone else here can better manage the "known information" sticky at the top of this page and turn it into a Reveal-source thread. And update it every time they find something noteworthy from the Codex, or SA, or Twitter or whatever that the devs didn't bother to point our attention to in their bi-weekly updates.

He also sees things that aren't there. Here's what Sawyer REALLY said about summons: ^He's wary of the fact that players often use summons as the de facto tactic. ERGO, he has designed (and is still designing) POE to have LESS summoning so as to make it impossible for them to be used so frequently, and to incur a risk when they are used. In other words, we'll still be able to use summons, and we'll still be able to use summons as "tanks". It just won't be the universal cheese it was in the IE games. Sawyer also said exactly nothing about the nature of Figurines. We have no idea if they're even going to be monsters.

Fair enough. let me respond to that then. Profound! thank you for your input. It's also fair to say that you probably won't be able to Solo as a mage unless you.... use spells against Bosses. And you probably won't be able to solo a Chanter unless you.... employ chants and invocations against bosses. I never once brought up using a figurine as a tank. Edit: and neither did anyone else. You literally brought it up yourself, then shot it down with your own speculation.

This entire discussion about Kiting is a huge red herring. From you. Why the hell would a solo fighter want to Kite in the first place when engagement is a Fighter's *strength*? Nope. Did the developers say that you can't use figurines to engage the enemy?

hehe. Wolf limps into a tavern. Bartender: This is a tavern for people! What the hell are you doing here? Wolf: (in a southern drawl) I'm lookin' for the man who shot my Paw.

Who's they? Should all enemy-types have the exact same Biological functions as your party? I don't want that. It won't be the least bit believable. Undead, for example, should never "rest when you do". Ditto with automations (if they're part of the Bestiary) Although I am open to the idea, if you're playing on normal, for enemies to suffer from the same "maimed" status that your party members receive when they fall in battle. Because at least *that* opens up believable retreat/pacifist role-play options beyond simply being a ham-fisted tool to maintain "Balance!"

Or here's a crazy thought. Solo fighter sees an enemy.... activates Figurine. Figurine engages enemy in melee. Fighter launches attacks with his bow. Solo Fighter wins battle. Wait. What? You lost me here. That's not how it works. The monster must first get within melee range, then he must stop moving, then he gets to attack. Of course, while this is happening the fighter is free to do a bunch of things, like activate stealth mode and.... walk away to load and fire in safety, effectively starting the entire process over from step 1. Welcome to Kiting 101. 'fraid so. But unlike other degenerate behaviors, this one won't be cured. The best that can be done is to make it "less appealing" as a game play option.

When you get nailed the fleeing opponent staggers with a hit animation which allows the pursuer to immediately reengage the target, hitting him again and again with the disengagement attack, until he either misses (the attacks have a bonus on accuracy) or you use a fleeing ability. http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Melee_Engagement Sure. And this is where we get to speculate on what defenses/counters a Frontliner (warrior) will be getting, which we don't know yet, since there hasn't been a warrior class update. How does recovery matter anyway in a Kiting situation where the pursuer will also be moving? Sawyer can say whatever he wants, but the only ways to prevent player kiting is to either a) design a totally unnatural system where everyone on the battle field is rooted in place once combat starts unless they've got spells or talents that let them move or b) incorporate copious amounts of developer cheese and make all enemies move twice as fast as the player, or c) punish kiting by making all attacks against the kiter be insta-kills. As your link above indicates, however, all Sawyer has succeeded in doing (and even then only in theory) is to make Kiting a little more difficult to carry out than it was in the IE games. The problem with this all-encompassing mindset is that not all battlefield movement = Kiting. So the question arises. How will the mechanics differenciate between someone who's trying to kite, and someone who's attempting a tactical battle field repositioning? Answer: it can't, And the latter is something that cannot be removed or overly punished if the devs wish to maintain any semblance of believable tactical combat in the game. If my character is happily engaging that Warrior, and I notice that the enemy mage in the back is pot-shotting me to death with his spells, I'm going to disengage an make a b-line for that mage, and the game is going to let me. The same will be true if I decide to kite.

Ok. Just to clear up something here before we get too carried away. The engage mechanic that Josh describes for PoE is not inherently different than how 3e D&D's attack of opportunity mechanic works. Someone engaged in melee has a threat range. Anyone who tries to enter or leave that threat range gets nailed. And....so what? This doesn't necessarily eliminate Kiting or render it unviable, since one can always just stay out of that threat range in the first place when attacking or retreating. Range weapons come readily to mind as one way to do that. Polearms are another way (IF they decide to incorporate decent weapon reach mechanics in PoE) And so what...to that too. Nailing a retreater is not some indefensible insta-kill. Especially when the Kiter happens to be a *fighter* himself... a class who's very strength is resiliency.

Well we haven't yet gotten the Fighter class-update, so none of us knows all the fighter abilities. But we do know that just as there's an engage mechanic, there's a disengage mechanic and many classes have it. Besides, what insurmountable benefit will an enemy's engage serve him, if you've built your fighter to excel in violent engagement?

Actually, I imagine Soloing a fighter might be easier in PoE than it is in the IE games due to the versatility of the classes. For example, In PoE you will be able to build a mobile fighter with stealth and trap disarming skills. Add to this the mechanics they designed for talent interrupts, and soloing a fighter suddenly looks quite doable. Plus of course the encounters themselves will have more than one solution to them (see: Tim Cain's example of enemies guarding a bridge and how you'll have the option to either fight them, or slip past them, or talk your way past them etc.) Regardless, Gamers will always find a way. First time I played BG2 I wouldn't, in a hundred years, imagined that it could ever be soloed with any class. But how wrong did that turn out to be!?

It is a small positive that gets buried under all the negatives associated with a larger party, such as 1) slower leveling 2) stricter Loot sharing 3) heavier micro-management 4) The battlefield clusterf*ck/path finding mess Keep in mind that (for me at least), when I say a game is easier with a smaller party, I'm not just talking about combat difficulty. I'm talking about everything. In the IE games, even walking down dungeon corridors is easier with a smaller party. Lephys, I have already agreed with you that it doesn't make a lick of sense at all. All logic dictates that an army of 6 can do more, and do more quicker, than a party of 4. But I'm just going by experience. Somewhere within all these mechanics we're discussing, a bunch of immeasurable intangibles get created and the logic fails to translate into the application.

Yes. in fact, I often find myself doing precisely that when I have a 6 person party, since it's usually pretty early on when you discover that a battle-field clusterf*ck doesn't make fights easier. There is very much an element of diminishing returns/dead weight once you have that many people involved. And in a game where XP rewards are shared, you realize really quick that if you really need meat-shields/cannon fodder, summons will do the trick far more efficiently, since UNLIKE party members, it doesn't matter if they die, and you don't have to share XP with them. Nothing in Bg2 scales to party numbers, only party level. But as since a smaller party levels up more quickly, then you will eventually be facing tougher encounters if you're adventuring with a smaller party, yes. But that kinda puts a wrinkle in the comparison/measurement, since we're no longer dealing with the same encounters.

That is only true if you reduce combat down to being nothing more that a simple, one dimensional thing where 6 people fire shots in unison at 1 enemy or whatever. But again, in the IE games combat usually ended up being far more complex. A 6 member party also means you have 6 liabilities. Because if the enemy casts as spell like Confusion, or mass charm, and it manages to succeed against half of your party, then you're screwed, Because then you've got a situation where 3 party members are working with the enemy to kill off the 3 party members that you still control. Where as, if your party only consists of 3 characters, and that confusion or charm spell gets 1 or 2 of them....you have less headaches on the battle field to deal with. Same goes with Healing. Enemy casts a giant fireball spell. And then another. With a full party, You'll have 6 very health-drained party members by the time that fight is over. That's 6 party members that need to get healed up. Question: does your cleric have that many spells? Well, if we're dealing with a low level campaign like BG1, chances are he won't. But if a 3 person party is in that same situation, your cleric probably WILL have enough healing spells to bring everyone back up to 100%.