Karkarov

Yes it is. It is mechanically different and they are working out the bugs. We all knew it would be mechanically different though, and the bugs will get fixed one way or the other. It looks like the IE games, controls very similarly to the IE games, I am sure if I had a install CD it would even smell like an IE game.

From what I could see, any creature with a poison effect landing any graze hit or above, will automatically trigger "additional effects", which makes a ACC vs FORT check, and from there, calculates hit quality (graze, etc), applying a varying DOT depending on that hit quality. Actually I am not even sure the graze etc matters. Once you get hit through whatever means "additional effect" happens and you get the challenge of Acc vs Fort (or whatever relevant resistance) and if you fail that check then boom you get the full "effect".

I feel pretty conflicted here. I don't disagree, but I feel like we have a couple issues in the BB that sort of block us from seeing it. Most of the encounters, lets be honest, are what we in the MMO world would call Trash Pulls. Mobs that exist for no other reason than being in our way and don't really pose a big strategic challenge. There is nothing wrong with this kind of encounter either, not every fight should be a knock down drag out death struggle that requires perfect execution. The second problem is many of the fights that could provide a more strategic bent might be getting hampered by bugs or over tuned abilities. Deep Wounds? Crystal Spiders? Teleporting Enemies? Once these types of issues get smoothed over those fights could become far more satisfying. However I don't ever see those three wolves by the ruins ever being an exciting fight. You get where I am coming from here?

I do agree with Kjaamor, I would much rather they just round up to the next number and call it a 1. If that leads to needing adjustment for the health system then just adjust stam health values slightly to compensate.

Well one of the core design concepts behind the stats is that there are no stats that are useless outside of combat and there there are no stats that are useless for combat. So yeah, expect some shifting about. That being said I don't think any front liner should ignore Resolve, that interrupt resistance is very nice for a tank.

I hope it was because you had failed to pick something as there was a bug that let you create characters with no subrace or stats not distributed and so on. I posted about it the first day of beta .

There is actually only one guy who does the Deep Wounds bleed. It is the dude behind and to the right of the boss. Other than him and the boss none of them are any special threat. So probably what happened is your mage and paly managed to take out the boss and that one guy then just mop up the rest of them since the others are actually not that strong.

Can't say I agree with this. I have had plenty of posts where Sawyer actually direct responded to something I wrote and basically said "I see what you are saying but..." and "told me I was wrong". He did it by explaining their design, giving reasons, and making a coherent argument for why it is how it is. Where I am from that is called a reasonable response. He is the lead designer of the game. He has the right to say "I feel really strongly about this thing, this is why, so we are going to do it". However I have never seen a post where he just shows up and says "Nope you are wrong and we aren't going to do it that way, suck it." with no explanation. Additionally it isn't like Obsidian has a community manager or anything. I would hope Josh Sawyer has something better to do than read every post on the beta forums every day, as it would take 2-4 hours to do so and constant checking for new posts. Not to mention most of them are just rehashes of older posts or "static" as some have said in other threads. I am sure our posts are being read long term though and our feedback is being taken seriously. I don't think people should need a response from the games Lead Designer to feel like their posts were read however.

Just a bump to make sure this stays on main page. A tool like this is critical for good beta testing as it allows us to get away with more than the normal game would allow and experiment a bit more. Maybe it will even let me give BB Fighter that Fighter skill he is somehow missing that he should have got at level 3 ;p.

Mechanical improvements to the combat, mostly lots of small light touch ups. Runner up: Far more detailed and accurate character panels/item descriptions. Honorable Mention: Seriously tone back the poison/dot effects. Either make dots only effect stamina not health (preferred change), halve their damage, or halve their duration.

You clearly don't get it. You don't have to argue for the system that is in place. When you want to replace it you have to argue for why what you want to replace it with is better than what currently exists. Problems with quest only exp are unimportant, because you aren't trying to sell Obsidian on quest EXP. You don't sell someone something by convincing them what they have is bad, you do it by convincing them that what you are offering is better. That is something none of you have done, not in this thread, not in the original thread, not in any of the god knows how many threads this has come up in.

Actually I could easily solo most encounters in the beta with BB Fighter. Most of the enemies deal physical only damage, the only enemies he has real trouble with are the ones who do dots or cast spells. Two things no amount of DT will do anything to assist with. Don't get me wrong, he will need a rest pretty fast doing it all alone, but he can still do it.

I understand what he is saying fine, I am just saying DT is not clear enough yet and it has a definite diminishing return. Example. I had my fight MC solo the wolves, what I never told you is that in his breastplate he never took more than 2 damage the whole fight. If I had been wearing full plate I would likely have never taken more than 1 damage per hit, but it would have taken me at least 10-20 seconds longer to end the fight and in actuality I likely would have taken slightly more damage from plate because it would have taken longer to kill them. When the enemies are already doing minimum damage to you there is no reason to pack on more DT. It isn't like damage, there is definitely a point where stacking more is pointless. Trust me if anyone on this forum understands tanking... it is me.

That's cause 4th edition is heavily based on MMO mechanics. PS: This was already done, it is called Neverwinter. Even funnier info? It uses the exact same mechanics the company that makes Neverwinter already used.... in two other mmo's. Funny enough one was Champions Online, which is based on Champions, a different pen and paper RPG system.

He is just trying to explain it in terms people might be more familiar with. No one outside of Obsidian REALLY knows all the details about Eternity's combat and mechanics yet, anyone with 20 bucks and the desire can learn everything about the 4th Ed D&D rules, and I don't think it is unfair to assume most backers on the the forums would be passably familiar with them.

Eh not exactly. DT is just like Accuracy except eventually you get to a point where it really is useless. Let's say an enemy can hit for 12-15 damage normally on average. Do you know that the DT difference between full plate and a breastplate is 4? Okay, so Fighters for example get +3 DT outright just cause they are fighters. Breastplate gives another 8, thats 11 DT (actually it is more than that apparently get to that in a minute). So that enemy doing 12-15 damage is actually only doing 4 to the Fighter in a breastplate at best on a normal hit. The fighter in the Breastplate also gets to act 10% faster than the guy in full plate so at 3s with a normal sword + shield speed you get 4.5s per action with Full plate and 4.2 with the breastplate. Over the short term it seems obvious the full plate wins... but over an hour of combat the guy with the breastplate gets at least 60 more actions than the guy in full plate. But the damage? You are right, the breastplate guy does take 3 more damage on the 15 hits... but on the 12 hits they both take 1 damage, assuming of course the enemy always does at least 1 damage no matter what if they hit. So over the long term you lose a ton of damage potential but don't take a massive amount more damage. You could argue the "multiple targets" angle, but again, say three guys hit a fighter, all three guys get to act once every 3 seconds, and on average all three combined (after DT) 5 damage to breast plate guy but only 3 to plate guy... well... breastplate guy is still a fighter, still regenning 1 hp a second, meaning by the time they get to act again he is only down 2 stam. So the health damage would pile up faster, but again, it wouldn't be heinously fast. I am glad I did look into this though cause there is a lot more to it apparently. For one BB Rogue has 6 DT naked, why? None of their skills imply they get a DT bonus. Is perception giving bonus DT and it just isn't documented? In the same line BB Fighter gets no DT when no armor is on, not even 1, but somehow BB Mage has 4 DT with no armor??? Maybe dex is involved also? Or is it somehow a hidden racial bonus? In fact every character I had except BB Fighter had at least 4 DT naked, including my human fighter MC. Also the DT calculation is wrong... or at least not giving the whole truth. Like I said in addition the to "hidden" bonus some characters appear to be getting for some reason armor also apparently has different DT values VS different attacks. Here is some combat log pics where I took my MC Fighter, gave him a fine breastplate, and let him Solo the wolf encounter. I do admit I let BBRogue die just to test if they really did have 6 DT, and yes, they did. As the screenshots will show you versus the crushing attack they do I have 17 DT (4 for naked based+3 for fighter wearing armor+8 for breastplate+2 for being fine quality armor). However against the piercing attacks I suddenly have 22.5 DT??? Again nothing in the character screen or item descriptions to explain this. We need much more detail in the item listings and character panes I would say. Here are the pics:

Yeah many things don't show correctly on the character sheet. Thank god they at least fixed the open/close inventory thing to get armor to show the correct DT.

While I wont say some stats don't need adjustment I don't really think we need to do anything as drastic as what is listed here. I think if we simply raise the formula on stam to health from 4 to 1 to 6 to 1 and to 8 to 1 for barbs we should be good to go. That will literally reduce health damage by 50%. That and of course fix the blatantly bugged/over tuned skills like wood beetle poison. If you say made it so poison or deep wounds only did stam not health damage it would pretty much resolve them completely without having to lower their actual damage.

Lul. Thank god I am not showing on the list.

Yeah I should have posted the video where I soloed the four beetles with my Cipher after I gave him Justice. His lash would cause crits and literally one shot the wood beetles and he could two hit the stone beetles even without a crit.

I like this post and sure AI will make a huge difference. Like Indira though I still think the armor needs some retooling. The plate speed penalty is what 50% for example? An attack action that normally takes 2 seconds now takes 3. Not huge? Really? Over the course of one minute AKA 60 seconds that is a difference of 10 actions. Over the course of an hour? 600 actions. The 4 more DT on plate is not worth the 20% more speed loss over say a breastplate even if you are a tank. That's just my opinion though. So while AI definitely needs work the armor system needs adjustment as well, as does the damage ratios cause guys with 10-15 DT taking like 1-2 damage from a hit is pretty crappy. Also as for dissing the devs... drop it guys. Seriously they were in germany, probably still adjusting to the time shift, adam looked like he hadn't slept in 48 hours, and there was all the con stuff going on and distractions. Plus there is the ever present back of your mind issue "I am being filmed, hundreds or thousands of people might see this, don't screw up...." which of course only makes it easier to mess up.

That's fair but like I said elsewhere there is no point in fine tuning gameplay and mechanics when there is a big ass bug sitting on it that will crap out both regardless of how well tuned they are. You have to fix what is broken before you start trying to improve what isn't.

No it is fine. The only thing to be concerned about is if negative beta tester impression will have an impact on sales. But I think it will be fairly minimal in this case. Like Sensuki I want the game to be the best it can be, so I have played the beta and given feedback on my observations. I have no fear at all of spoiling myself on the game as a whole, after all, this is literally only one tiny area and three quests. One of the quests doesn't even take but 10 minutes or so tops to complete. If I am that burned out on the others by launch time I can always just skip them.

That's because it isn't. Eternity uses two systems. 1: A Personality system where your character is known to behave in a certain way. You seem to hate this system for some reason I can only assume because your grognard levels are vastly superior to your role player levels and you see everything as numbers game instead of just playing your character how you think they would behave in a given situation. 2: A literal reputation system where faction X gives you a quest and how you handle it effects your reputation with that faction and the factions associated with it. Basically it is your "perceived" attitude and your "real" attitude at work. One is based on what people see and how you act, the other is based on what you actually do.

You guys are assuming Caroc is a companion.... Not enough evidence to prove it at this point.