general_azure

Hm, I always assumed their actual combat prowess would somehow correspond to their security value, but when thinking about it again this is probably not the case. Would be useful to get this information when hiring them... not that I trust those guys to fight off the enemy without me in any case. I think they are, actually... and the time the enemies need to find the right way is what we get as early warning for incoming attacks. It all makes sense suddenly

Something else I noticed is that the hirelings I got unlocked from certain quests/reputations were almost all strictly worse than the bunch you always have (eg -2/+2 instead of 0/+2). The Doemenel guy was the only exception to this, being actually pretty good. Any idea whats up with that?

I have the same issue, I cannot disable auto attack reliably. Most of the time my guys charge whoever they want and get torn to pieces.

I got this skill only after patching and it's still stacking. As far as I can tell, there is no fix at all.

If I remember correctly, there is a passage in the eastern wall that can be opened with a hidden switch and leads into the throne room. Might be able to use this one until they fix the key... no idea how much mechanic skill is required to find the hidden switch though.

I somehow summoned enough multitasking power to read the silent description parts while listening to the spoken lines at the same time... but it's not exactly comfortable. I agree that some short pauses at appropriate places would be helpful.

The only one I really missed so far was switching weapon groups (in order to draw swords after the opening salvo).

https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/7/entry-179-patch-notes-103/

Good job, this is one of the best game I've played in years and I'm glad I backed it. Encountered only 2 obvious bugs on my first playthough (none of them major), which is pretty rare these days... might have been lucky though, judging from the talk on the tech support subforum here.

Had this twice in my playthrough as well, somehow I had managed to only pull part of a group and combat would not end until I had found and killed the rest. Feels kinda weird being "in combat" when neither side is even aware of the enemy... EDIT: The large and spread out group of stelgaer on top of that waterfall is probably one of the easier places for reproducing this.

Indeed, it was the group in front of the cave on the road to twin elms. Brutally hard fight with the permanent stacked dot (at least for me), when I saw there was another group like that inside the cave, I just ran out screaming and never came back.

Had the same issue, when fighting a group with 2 ogre druids I got the spell stacked twice and with infinite duration. The timer counted down and vanished but the effect persisted until saving and reloading. Even stayed through resting. Avoided ogre druids for the rest of my playthrough... EDIT: I'm refering to the "plague of insects" druid spell.

There you go, fancy colorful lines (the x-axis is accuracy-deflection, in case you're wondering)... but I think we're still something missing about that calculation. Those plateaus where hit chance becomes constant (because miss chance can't go any lower and the probabilites from grace already go to crit) look pretty weird to me. This would mean that your chance for a regular hit can never be above 50% and critting becomes the most likely outcome from accuracy-deflection=50 onwards. Other than that, the offensive part of the system actually looks rather good to me. Sure, you might end up getting a lot more crits than in other games, but the rather small multiplier should make up for that. On the very defensive end the effective HP rise pretty sharply until the cutoff, so stacking bonuses is way more effective there (result of the 1/dam in the calculation, happens in almost all games).

Ah, there's the good old "1 in 20 no matter your stats" I was missing. Sounds better this way ^^ I'll crunch some numbers and see how much raw damage each point of accuracy is worth in various ranges, should make the comparison more solid.

If I've gotten that right, this means every 5 points advantage in att vs def lets you shift a d20 roll by 1. So the 35 def listed for the large shield above would be the equivalent of 7ac in good old BG (actually even better, since it also reduces the enemy crit range by a whopping 7 points which was impossible back then). The idea that you can completely shut down some of the outcomes (because there is no guaranteed minimum 5% chance) is just icing on the cake. And yeah, same thing goes the other way around for offensive stacking as well. Somehow, I don't think this scaling will stay

If I understand you guys correctly, the actual problem here is not the deflection value but how hit chance is calculated from that. Slap some gaussian pdf on it and most of your problems should vanish (hit chance always greater than zero, rather flat in the region of characters who didn't invest in this stat, noticeable slope for those who did, flattens off near the end for diminishing returns)... Out of curiosity, what calculation is used right now?

The holy trinity for greatness is plot/atmosphere/consequences, imho. The rest are just "covering the basics" for me, it's stuff I expect any decent game to provide and if I remember it for those it's usually not fondly.

I don't really care myself which color those things have... but then, it's just 3 integers per circle type and a dropdown list in some menu, so I can't see any harm either. Hell, if they're really feeling lazy they can skip the menu and read it from the ini. Guess I'll vote yes just for the simplicity and because it might make someone happy after all =P

I don't think you could quite reach those 10k gold in BG1 from selling generic gnoll halberds anyways... the only non-magic stuff I looted with the express purpose of selling were heavy suits of plate armor. My actual income in that game was neither junk loot nor gold rewards, but all those magic baubles I picked up along the way. Think we had a decent thread about the value of gold way back before they split the PE discussion up into subforums, I'll see if I can dig it up and link it here.

Not that much of a fan on gold limits, usually they are either set so low they make no sense or you can pretty much ignore them. Logically you can assume every vendor to at least be able to buy any goods equivalent in price to those he is selling himself. If he can't afford to buy a few well crafted longwords, there is just no way he can run a weapon shop. Especially since my stuff is second hand and probably cheaper than his regular supply. If you want to sell/buy something so rare it is not usually traded in gold bartering is fine, but everything I can buy in some sort of regular shop I should be able to sell for coin somewhere. Regardless of how much it is worth. Otherwise you end up with those shifty Morrowind traders, selling multiple items in the 10k+ range but only having 200 septims available to restock. Where did they get this stuff from then? Probably stole it all....

Yay for patrols ^^ Respawns... not so much. Sure, as mentioned some critters can move into the cleared space... but that should take quite some time, I don't want to run into a bear in a cave I cleared of bandits only minutes before. For intelligent enemies, some might get back from patrol if I hang around too long in their evil lair, so a group might spawn at the entrance and check out where all those corpses come from. But that's pretty much it. Respawning the old monsters while I'm away is usually weird and/or annoying. Remember that elven tower in icewind dale, which you had to climb multiple times? Now imagine repopulating the area between every visit.. just no. And for the love of god, no enemies spawning out of thin air around my party if I trigger an alarm or something. If you want guards appearing have them already be physically present somewhere in the area, so I get the option of eliminating them preemptively.

And 20 pesants attacking you all at once and you not being able ot parry all? How is that unfair? You only got two hands and two eyes. Your sword/shield can't cover every part of your body from every angle at the same time. The difference between every peasant having a 1 in 20 chance of ignoring parries and being attacked by 20 peasants all at once is vast and in between there lie broken games. Just try mount&blade and you'll see what I mean =p

True, it works with mount&blade... I guess that's because the player in that game has direct control over combat, which gives you the ability of not being hit at all. If every peasant had a 1 in 20 chance to ignore your parry, it would just feel unfair. HP inflation is a rather important point imho, since it also leads to things like disarming traps barbarian style and tends to devalue purely damage based magic. Maybe we should split this off into another, more specific thread? This one is totally fubared after all those pages discussing aragorn or dragons, nobody will find it here =P

If I may ask, what things have you modified in the mod? How high was the base HP? And is the mod available somewhere? I'd be interested in that as well, in case I ever do yet another playthrough. Probably won't be able to fix my problems with high lvl d&d balancing by itself, but it can never hurt to try.

I'd actually prefer to limit diseases to quest and story elements instead of the random combat debuffs you usually get. Instantly developing some affliction that sounds rather deadly (yet never kills) and is gone just as fast when the next best priest looks your way is rather silly imho. And I don't think cutting out the priest and instead healing on rest makes it much better really, what pansy disease just vanishes when I lie down for 8h in some tent in the wilderness? Hangover is the only thing that comes to mind. Might be better to leave the debuffing role to curses/spells or maybe poisons (if you need some use for that herbal stuff). On the other hand, a disease that is not just a debuff but tied into some quest can be neat to have in the game. Think of morrowind style vampirism: It's pretty rare, requires some time to fully develop, alters your gameplay experience dramatically (can even kill you, actually) and takes quite some effort to get rid of. Guess you can count me as option 4 only, with an added emphasis on diseases being rare and powerful quest devices.