teknoman2

i thought id get a transfer from surgical to psychiatrical because i felt i was going to lose it due to boredom and i had no idea how long they planned to keep me in. i did a minor surgery this friday (the type: you get opened, you get patched you go home in about 30 minutes), but they kept me in to feed me antibiotics due to an infection. i felt like a prisoner being releashed this morning when they said i can go home

I had a lot of time to think these 3 days i was in the hospital and came up with an idea-suggestion for the mega update they promissed. Each of us votes for 6 classes. The 6 classes with the most votes, are used to make a party and Josh plays a story irrelevant small dungeon with it and shows us the video to see how the game works in its current state What do you think?

i dont think you will find many people who would disagree on this. it's always better to look at a number and know what it means, instead of having an instructions manual and a scientific calculator and try to make sense of complicated equasions to see how much the 42 defense you have actually protects you

it's a bit like playing phantom assassin in dota 2. you go in hoping that your hit will be in that 15% critical range and will kill any enemy in one hit, but most of the time it is not and you should be prepared to survive the fight until the critical goes off. the thing i dont like about randomness, and especially if the difference between min and max is big, is that im generally unlucky and always get min or close to it on the rolls

no, i did the math at the time and it was actually 35 the minimum possible damage i could do with a critical x5 backstab.

Have you considered adjusting the critical damage bonus? I know 50% is a nice bland number, but what about 60, 66, or even 75%? Those are simple fractions too, and arent too much of a jump from 50% but are more likely to ensure that crits hit higher than highest base dmg. Sword with 5-8 damage. Crit of 5 rolled is 7.5 in original percent. 8, 8.3, 8.75 with the new numbers respectively. as long as it is not like in dnd (icewind dale to be precise) where i did a backstab 5x with a roll of 20 and i did 35 damage, when max potential was over 100.

I guess this story and especially this final paragraph concerns me for a couple reasons. 1: It reminds of World of Warcraft or "Insert Trinity Based MMO Here"... I don't have a problem with that type of game, the appeal (especially for multiplayer) is painfully clear, it is easy to design encounters for, encourages team play, gives everyone a unique and defined role in the party. Many MMO's use it because it really is one of the easiest and best ways to get a group of people to work together to overcome a wide variety of encounter types. I even love to play tanks in MMO's, but while my primary job is "get punched in face and not fall down" there is some level of threat management, ability dodging, different cooldowns you may need to time, specific mechanics you have to counter.... PE on the other hand is a single player game, the cooldowns won't be that intense, the mechanics won't be as demanding (such as move 15 yards in 5 seconds or die), there is no threat I just use an ability with the fighter character to force "engagement" on those in melee.... or I don't. 2: If grazes are basically sub optimal and not desirable outside of "graze or miss" situations, which can't be that common and could surely be fought with a better approach, what does that say about the fighter class if one of the top end skills is being able to graze more often? It tells me they are a low damage class first off. Per your own words even the worst hit you can get will do better damage than the best graze you can score. Most of their use seems to be heavily reliant on positioning and use of engagement. Based on your story a fighter can clearly take a hit... but unless someone tries to break out of engagement it doesn't look like they can deal one. They sound like the very definition of the "get hit in face but don't fall down" character. It sounds like the Baldur's Gate 1 fighter, except now he can force you to hit him but consequently does no damage. Handy, but not really more fun for the player or all that interesting mechanics wise. Why not just bring a barbarian and deal better damage and counter higher damage intake with higher hp? Why not bring a paladin whose damage is still probably weak but has better utility overall? I am sure caster classes have some form of mob controlling abilities that might paralyze or even prevent someone from moving and likely a far better offensive complement. Sure there is all kinds of tactical synergy with the engagement system, but it sounds a little too much like MMO combat to me and it only works and is fun there because of all the things going on around it, very little of which will be going on in PE. A lineman on a football team does a lot of work to help his team win... but unless he is on defense and sacks the QB no one ever talks about him. He does a key important job but he just isn't exciting or interesting. I guess I am saying I would like the fighter to be more exciting and fun to have in my party, not just a meat shield who gets beat down so the rogue can score an easy backstab. Hopefully I am just over reacting, but then that is what happens when you speculate based on limited info. Normally I wouldn't do that but it has been a long day that's not what i understood 1 it is fairly obvious that certain classes have certain advantages over other classes, otherwise it would be meaningless to have classes in the first place. a fighter may act as a meat shield that keeps fighters off your wizard by doing and receiving mostly grazes, but that is just one of the things he can do. he can also go engage an enemy wizard in melee and do huge damage because the wizard has low deflection. it is situational 2 the skill you mention seems to be for fighter vs fighter situations where both deflections outclass each other's accuracy, making the numbers something like 30%miss - 45%graze - 25% hit - 0 critical. as i understand it, this skill will cut let's say 20% from the miss and add it to the graze. the one who has it, will do damage more often, even if small, while the other will be mising a lot

usually the AI is made of scripts that predict every possible action of the player, and indicate to the npc to perform an appropriate reaction. if there is little time or money to spend on making the AI, usually they go for a level design that restricts the player options or/and cheats for the npc, like having unlimited spells, being able to always hit the player, no matter his defenses, being imune too friendly fire(balls) and so on

i see, so an advantage in defense takes away hit and critical and add them to miss, while an advantage in attack does the same to miss and graze. makes more sense than how i thought it was. must be the fever.

i think that for every point in stat difference the % changes by one. so a melee attack 15 vs melee defense 15 is 5% critical - 45% hit - 45% graze - 5% miss a melee attack 20 vs melee defense 15 is 10% - 55% - 35% - 0 a melee attack 15 vs melee defense 20 is 0 - 35% - 55% - 10%

indeed. it was pretty annoying in IE games that the character did like 5 or 6 melee attacks in a round when it came to animation, but of these, only 2 had an attack roll attached so it seemed like the character was missing all the time when he actually didnt even attack

you only need to think of BG2 where npc mages had like 3 or 4 contingency spells active, so if you dispelled and hit them, they would recast their defences over and over, forcing you to have a full page of dispells every time you went against a mage. meanwhile the rules said "only one contingency at a time"

with lots of "if" commands in the code i guess

you do, you just dont know it yet

i have a bad connection, but i still went for the digital version. it's more convinient because i do not have to worry about it coming intact or even at all (post office "accidents" are common) and i dont have to wait for it. another reason is that i dont have to deal with my parents about what i bought, i just get it and nobody knows about it. since steam came out, i havent bought a boxed game except BF3 (because i found a really good offer for the limited edition in a retail store)

it's called choice and consequence. you chose to make certain enemies easy to deal with, at the expence of making others harder. in your example you can make high deflection characters that pass the first encounter easily, then have anti magic buffs or items for the second encounter, or make high reflex group and spam aoe spells disregarding the friendly fire (that will mostly miss) for the 1st, then be able to avoid most damage in the 2nd or keep a balanced defense and have both encounters at equal difficulty

and that is what i say too. every player will influence the system differently, so all aspects of the system should be equaly viable for all possible choices.

I'm not sure that you grasp it but you are arguing in favor of a useless stat. If it's easy enough to bypass traps that you never need a defense for it then, by all means, that stat is useless. If traps are absolutely trivial either because they can easily be avoided or because the damage is negligible anyway, then there might as well be no traps in the game to begin with. because you believe that if it costs the player equally much to raise A as it costs to raise B, both should be equally useful. If you haven't noticed any signs of this mentality in the P:E design process you probably haven't followed Sawyer's statements. And if you focus your fire on an enemy with physical damage (assuming, like you did, that there is only one per encounter) then you don't need much deflection. Your point? are you by any chance a reporter or a politician? if not you should consider becoming one, you have a skill for twisting what others say 1. im not arguing in favor of anything, i just said that i do not mind the presence of a defense stat if it has a valid reason to exist. that i may or may not have need of it, depending on the way i play, is something entirelly different. 2. i dont follow much any coments that i dont find in this forum or in updates, that's true. however i do not see the reason why the various stats should not be equaly useful. you may play in a way that renders a stat useless to you, but if it provides a solid alternative to the way the game plays, someone else will use it. 3. the point is that everyone will play it their way, so the skills and stats they will need to accomodate their style, will be different for each player. you may have a group of only thieves and not trigger a single trap, someone else may not have a thief and will need an alternative to survive a dungeon full of traps. so the defense vs traps that is useless to you, becomes priceless for him. there are no inherently useless stats, just ways to play that may not require them

if i have a defense that determines if i get hit or not from traps and i make sure that i spring no traps i dont see why it should bother me. it would bother me to have a defense against traps in a game that has no traps. on the balance topic, i dont see why anyone would balance the game to make sure each defese type gets the same amount of use, but even if they did, the result would greatly vary from player to player. if i focus all fire on the cipher and kill him before he can use his skills on me, then i dont need to worry about having high psyche, however someone else may decide to focus on the wizard first so he will take attacks from the cipher and will need psyche. so no matter how much they may balance it, it all comes down to how the player will act

it's not a misunderstaning, i just oversimplified it sacred i dont see your point. why is it a bad thing if you have different defenses for different types of attacks? and why should it matter how many times you may or may not have to rely on a particular defense type? or what you are afraid of, is that for every sword swing that you deflect there will be a fireball to make sure your reflexes wont be used less in the battle

this makes no sense. each does a different thing and what it does, depends on the kind of enemies you fight. if you manage to fight against fighters only during the entire course of the game and you never fight a magic user, the stat that defends from magic becomes useless. besides not all characters have the same defense stats: a fighter has high physical defense, but next to no magical defense, a wizard has high magic defense but almost no physical You don't seem to get it. I made a hypothetical example of two stats that might well exist in the game and support certain defenses. I think deflection and reflexes are the two terms in P:E. What does it have to do with the fact that fighters will have high deflection and rogues will have high reflexes? Nothing. My concern was that both stats could be interchangeable if they are used to the same extent in the game, i.e. the difference between fighters and rogues would be non-existant, defense wise. Which I would find derpy and uninspiring. P.S. I doubt that Obs would put both deflection and reflexes in the game if only one was ever tested by the game. So no, the "only fighters" and "only mages" scenarios won't happen. you should read the skill descriptions better. deflection is a defense vs direct physical attacks. reflexes is a defense vs attacks of opportunity, traps and aoe damage. psyche is a defense against mental attacks and i dont remember the last one so a rogue will easily avoid most of the aoe damage of a fireball and a fighter wont, however if a barbarian is pounding on the fighter's shield with an axe he will barely put any hits in, while he will easily cut the thief in 2. that is the difference between the 2 stats. they do not provide the same defense in a different way, they provide defense against different things

this makes no sense. each does a different thing and what it does, depends on the kind of enemies you fight. if you manage to fight against fighters only during the entire course of the game and you never fight a magic user, the stat that defends from magic becomes useless. besides not all characters have the same defense stats: a fighter has high physical defense, but next to no magical defense, a wizard has high magic defense but almost no physical

Wait, what? Is there a story behind this? Or is he simply finished doing what he was assigned to do? he finished his job and went home

Wut? If "kevlar vest" was a stat, or a defense boosted by a stat, you could almost be sure that the damage you have received (i.e. the knife damage) would have also been blocked if you had invested your points in another stat that would have protected you from the fire damage. that my friend is sophistry. first you accuse the game of being silly because the statement: "if the X stat is responsible for 2 different types of attacks then the same defence stat should counter both (even if one is magical and the other physical)", is not true, and now you accuse the game of having this statement as true. make up your mind or go troll somewhere else

Are you suggesting that somehow the survivability of high DEX and the survivability of high CON will be identical in effect? Like, if you have 18 of either one, you'll just stand there and survive hits in all the exact same situations? No, and I don't believe that you're stupid enough to misunderstand my post. Why would you have two attributes in a game that accomplish the exact same thing? If for example the output of magical and physical damage by enemies is about the same, and two attributes reduce their respective damage type by the same amount, that would seem silly, no? That seems to be their design philsophy though. so you are saying that if i throw a knife that does piercing damage (i need strength and dexterity to hit accuratelly) and a molotov that does fire damage (takes strength and dexterity to hit accuratelly), a kevlar vest that would completelly nullify the damage of the knife, should do the same to the fire, because both attacks require the same stats to use?