Karkarov

I have to admire your dogged determination Bruce. However it is more likely I will win the 12 million dollar lottery than Sawyer and Co put romance in Eternity. I don't even think they will do it in Eternity 2 to be honest, no one involved in the project likes romance in RPG's

As an actual Physical Backer.... seriously #1 Mr. Adler. You guys know it is the right choice. Like the update says, we all get digital keys too. There is no reason to delay all the other physical goods for a disc we don't even necessarily need.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70188-physical-goods/ I didn't an official response either so hopefully we will hear something soon one way or the other.

Well that's the catch 22. The gameplay is all about mechanics. You don't actually need full access to the game to test them and give opinions on gameplay elements etc.

Still too big, still too much dead space, still totally clunky. That said I can't imagine an "old school IE" UI looking any better. Nice job! The UI's deficiencies aren't your fault, it is a side effect of the U design to begin with.

The level of deflection this thread is talking about can't be achieved by most classes... The guy is using a paladin in his pics for a reason.

There is only one problem Osvir. You are assuming the devs don't want you to be forced to fight the beetles. Yes tons of combat in the game is avoidable, yes tons of it can be talked around (like the ogre), but no one should have any illusions that there won't be forced battles. There will be encounters Obsidian has designed around the idea that you will have to resolve them through combat, maybe they felt like forcing some beetle encounters was a good "party" check in case someone wanders in too low level.

In his build you are screwed the second you fight anything with 60 accuracy or better.

There is a reason it can't be used out of combat. You want to stealth around outside combat we have a perfectly functional stealth skill in the game. The fact that you can exploit it once combat triggers is well... an exploit. Hopefully the devs will do something to fix it, or just take the ability away since no one wants to use it for it's actual purpose. Which is to break aggro and score a free sneak attack.

Well the devs want a stat system that is not a no brainer and want people to have to think about it. The 301 and on systems were fairly obvious on what stats were good and which weren't and I bet testing by the QA team showed the same stats consistently got ignored over and over and over and with the new system the stat use spread is much closer and less "I always put points in this and never put points in that".

Half the time I never look at it. Once you know all the dangerous enemies and stand out abilities there is not a ton of need to analyze exactly what happened in a fight. I am not interested in the maths, I care about the general gameplay and basics of the mechanics. There is also the other thing. It isn't one combat log for solid UI and one combat log for non solid UI. They are the same log. The transparent log looks better when you don't have a solid backing, so I would rather not lose that purely for the players who want a solid one. Like I said... opinions.

Here is the thing.... that's what the stealth skill is for. I just don't see them letting a one off ability invalidate the need for using the stealth system just saying. You do realize accusing someone of a "strawman arguement" is in fact the ultimate "strawman arguement" to begin with. Meanwhile when I said months I was being nice, it is more like.... two years ago. Personally I get my jollies coming to this forum to see the every so often new wave of "BG3" posters who are shocked and complain about stuff communicated months or years ago cause it isn't a copy paste of BG2. Pre buffing sucks. It is isn't fun, it doesn't add anything to the game, and only grognard num nuts think it is anything resembling gameplay. Are there a couple abilities here and there I think could benefit from being used out of combat, like say Paladin aura's, yes. Do most of them need to be changed or is it some horrible offensive thing they aren't out of combat. No. Nor does the ability specifically in this thread need changing.

Like I said elsewhere the solid part needs to be darker and with a defined edge on the top. The pattern in the wood could also use a sharpness/contrast pass to make it stand out more. Also make the hide/show "gems" could look a little less gamey and fit the UI better? Other than that I think it is fine. The combat log being transparent is fine for me, it is all about opinions!!! I do agree it should be against the hard edge on the right though, I can understand why it isn't however as it may become a scaling/spacing issue for different resolutions and a buffer zone never hurts.

Meh. I like it just fine how it is. Accuracy and interrupt on the same stat would just be OP land again for perception.

There are many strange issues like that. I do agree though, stacking deflection past a certain point is not a great investment in characters. You only need to have enough to be unlikely to crit, once you hit that base threshold going further is big time diminishing returns to say the least.

It is an ability that blatantly has effects that are only pertinent in combat. It makes you untargettable... well if you aren't in combat no one is targeting you to begin with. It makes perfect sense that it is combat only if you think about it, why would you need a skill to make people stop attacking you when.... no one is actually attacking you? You guys need to get over wanting to prebuff. The state of "out of combat" abilities has been known for months.

I just kind of assume any really good tank is going to have horrible damage. Which makes me think something with a lot of base abilities would be a "better" tank in the long run as opposed to a fighter. Pallys would be little better off cause they do something in fights other than miss with a hatchet. Bear in mind Fighters can get an extremely high deflection and benefit for those paly aura's too. They can also engage more than one enemy, unlike the paladin, and have tons of abilities they can proc that give them damage resistance. Not to mention the fact that they constantly regen endurance... even in combat. As for the hachet No, seriously, 5 is not a lot. Any decently built tank will be fine with or without a hatchet.

Your party in the backer beta is intentionally weaker than a normal party would be upon reaching Dyrford. Of course you also level up crazy faster than a normal party too in the backer beta.

Approximately 12 backer portraits are in the game (according the $3k and $10k tiers). It's been a while since playing the beta, but I believe they are all in there so far. It is possible. I honestly hope many of the "lets make the same portrait with 3 different hair style" portraits get toss and they just make unique ones. The portrait styles currently in game are not consistent to say the least.

Yeah I am curious what they will do with it too. They should have planned around it and thought ahead. As in "Well for this quest I need a npc that has this sort of personality and is a rogue.... lets look at the backer npcs.... yeah this guy works we will just use him there." I suspect what happened was more like.... "Ok let's make the game.... oh yeah we have over 100 backer NPC's... what are we going to do with them? Oh lets just toss em in somewhere."

More than likely this. If he ordered the top version he probably got the preorder bonuses, and the Expansion included.

To further clarify the devs at one point said you should probably arrive at Dyrford around level 5-6. But it is possible to get there as low as 3 if you really take a weird route.

1: No pre-buffing. You have misunderstood why they don't like pre-buffing. They removed it not because it was "OP" or the effects lasted a long time. They removed it because it was a non choice. "Should I pre-buff for this fight, or just go in without?" Non choice. Of course I should pre-buff. They fact that it only lasts 10 seconds is a non issue, it is still 10 seconds of buff versus 0 seconds of buff. 10 beats 0. So there is no choice, you do it. They want buffing to be a choice, they want you to decide that having your wizard cast party buff X is more important than throwing another fireball. That is why there is no prebuffing. They want to eliminate all "no brainers" and they want every choice to matter. 2: Programming reasons. I am not a programmer, I don't know what kind of crazy programming issues they are running into with abilities outside of combat. I know they changed paladin aura's because of something relating to the programming. We don't know what the issues they are having are exactly so it is impossible to counter them with any argument. Meanwhile I don't think adding yet another type of ability that requires even more programming is a good idea this late in the game. We are less than 2 months from launch, there is unlikely to be enough time to code it, test it, add it, and test it some more.

This is definitely one of the things that makes it difficult to design a Pillars of Eternity UI is because of the differences between all the classes and their abilities - more abilities means more action bar slots and spells and other menus also make it a bit more complicated. That's why my original oft despised UI's did what the actual Pillar's UI does. Has the bars pop out the top of the party bar. That way there is always room. You guys better be careful. You guys keep posting this UI's you make me do another mock up again .

Of all the old school mock ups I have seen it is probably the best. So it has that going for it. I won't reiterate all the reasons I don't like the old school IE UI's though.