Caerdon

It's also FACTUALLY true that you don't have to run to the inn when you use your brain a bit and manage your resources properly.

If your health is at 90% after a fight, then you literally couldn't have had any trouble keeping your endurance up. On the other hand, if you're taking lots of damage in a tough fight and use healing to keep your endurance up, it's not uncommon to burn over 50% of your health in a single encounter. EDIT: In other words: it's working just fine.

Nonononono. Using console to rest is c̩̭̳̦̦̺̼̥̺h̬͕̻͉̺̗̖̫e̩͙̮͈̤̥̳̰a̗̳̣̺ͅt̼͈͙ị̙̜̝͔̥n͈͔͖͓̭̙̼g̞̳. Using a mod for the exact same thing is perfectly fine.

I think this thread would have made a lot more sense if instead of focusing on Fan of Flames (which is actually a reasonable spell given that it's cone like and does nothing but damage), the question was framed as "Why are the single target, pure damage spells so weak?" They don't really have much of a benefit beyond being single target and occasionally having a decent range. For example, consider the Magic Missile wannabe at level 1: it has 3 missiles each doing 14-26 Crush damage (base), but it attacks Deflection (good luck with that) and DR is applied separately to each of the three instances. You can try to use it to interrupt a spellcaster (realistically, that's the only enemy type that will take any serious damage from it anyway), but honestly, it's way too specific a usage to be worth the grimoire slot. True, Minoletta's isn't so great. I'd say it's still good against spellcasters (good for a level 1 spell, that is), because it has long range, it attacks their poor deflection, wizards have little DR, and it potentially hits three times, which helps with Ironskin, Wizard's Double and stuff like that. It's crap at interrupting though: 0.05 s. Interestingly the more you like to spam Fan - or any other spell - the more likely you are to have room in your grimoire. Also, Penetrating Shot apparently works with Minoletta's, and it doesn't even slow down spellcasting.

Hunting bow is better than war bow against most targets with low DR, though not necessarily by much. What this "low" is really depends on a huge number of factors. 10 might be in the right ballpark.

It's enough of an inconvenience that most players learn to manage their resources instead of running to the inn and back. If the game locked you to a dungeon with limited resources we'd have a serious issue with lots of players hitting a brick wall they can't hope to overcome, and the only way would be to load an earlier save and do the entire dungeon again from the beginning.

It is easy to manage. It appears it's simply a design choice that you reach the cap so soon if you go for all the side quests. If I were to create an XP-based RPG like this, I would simply automate the task of XP balancing. The game could easily keep track of all the XP that could potentially be awarded to the players (even accounting for any major mutually exclusive XP) and scale it accordingly. Then I'd just have two variables to control it: one to indicate the level players would reach following the minimum path, one to indicate the level they'd reach if they did absolutely everything. The game would take care of the rest automatically.

Double stilettos has been shown to be perfectly competitive choice compared to estoc. There are so many ways to increase your per-hit damage that DR isn't as much of an issue as one might think. Penetrating shot is good for bows (and, surprisingly, some spells), but with the heavier-hitting ranged weapons it's likely to be counterproductive.

Of course, while some D&D editions suck more than others, D&D and it's offshoots suck regardless of the edition.

But you can't look at damage only. They have other properties. Speed, range, accuracy, target defense etc. I agree with you whem it comes to Fan of Flames, it's usually the best level 1-2 wizard spell if you just want to deal some damage quickly to a bunch of targets. Maybe it should even be toned down a bit. But still, the other damage spells serve their purpose, and often they don't deal as much damage as the Fan because they offer other benefits, and this is the point you don't seem to get. I agree. Personally I think INT should increase AOE area they way it says, not the way it does.

While THAC0 is unintuitive, it's trivially easy to write things differently if using any kind of house rules. For example: ACnew = 10 - ACold Accuracy = 20 - THAC0 (both start from zero and go up) Now you just roll d20, add Accuracy, subtract AC, and if it's 10 or more, it's a hit.

Wow! That's just like... in Eternity! Now imagine if everything else in POE was as logical. That's not true in any game. Skeleton is a simplistic example, and it's really obvious why it has the resistances and weaknesses that it does. But how about something like a skuldr? Who are we to say it's defenses are or are not logical? It doesn't have any DR, which seems logical, as it doesn't appear to have any armor... but then again, if it did have DR against, say, Freezing, how could we possible say that's not logical? We just don't know enough about them. Yeah, it true that the complete lack of actual immunities is a problem in this regard, but even then I find that many of those problems can be explained away with just the smallest amount of hand-waving (oozed getting knocked down and flying things being vulnerable to slicken aren't nearly as unexplainable as people claim them to be). Usually the bigger issue is that people mistake those creatures for their D&D analogues. As it happens, oozes aren't slimes, blights aren't elementals and undead aren't just animated corpses.

It was actually quite irritating that the most powerful weapons in vanilla BG1 (aside from Drizzt's stuff) were all cursed - three +3 weapons, if I remember correctly. Not that such powerful items would've even been appropriate, of course.

There should be a threat system of some sort - built in as part of the enemy AI (and, in fact, I'm pretty sure there already is). I absolutely hate manual threat management. I want the kind of game mechanics where the opponent could in principle be another human player.

I have nothing against such items in principle, but you have to be really careful when designing them. Often there are ways to just ignore the drawback, and that can lead to huge balance issues.

I haven't felt the slightest urge to roll a moon godlike. Munchkins will munchkin, I guess. Not that balance issues shouldn't be fixed in a patch.

Honestly, I still don't understand your point. You can't just look at damage in isolation. Spells have multiple properties, damage is just one of them. One spell does more damage than others? Cool. Other spells do other stuff. Besides, wizard's spell vs. spell balance is one of the least important categories of balance in this game. Why? Because A) different spells are still better for different purpose, and B) spells of different levels use different resources. In other words: even if level 1 spell X is "better" than level 2 spell Y, that's not a huge problem, it's just a matter of managing your resources. What other spells do you want to be using? How many level 1 spells can you cast? Do you want to cast this now so you can cast that later? And so on.

Wow! That's just like... in Eternity!

I agree that the game should have immunities, but those should be used sparingly, when there's a really good reason for it, not simply to spice things up. Specific defences, on the other hand, could be bumped up quite a lot in many, many cases. That'd force players to pay a bit more attention to which defence they're attacking, and it'd make it more exciting facing new enemy types and discovering information on them. That said, I don't think we're quite on the level of "everything works on everything so don't worry about your combat options". That's true to a degree, but paying attention to defences is still worthwhile and beneficial. "The dose makes the poison." Assuming there are not special immunities in play, an ogre should definitely be more resistant to poison than a dwarf. Just like a rhinoceros is more resistant than a sheep.

You can't argue that there's something wrong with wizard by comparing it to cipher, that just destroys the whole foundation of the argument. It's cipher that's broken, not wizard.

You're late: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/74769-normal-mode-is-too-normal/

The game needs to have three* XP modifiers that can be used to adjust (by simple multiplication) the amount of XP you get. Main_guest_XP affects XP you gain from the critical path main quest, nothing else Other_XP affects everything else: side quests, bestiary, exploring etc. Global_XP affects all XP Now, you simply adjust Main_guest_XP and Other_XP so that roughly 60%-70% of all XP comes from the main quest. Then you adjust Global_XP so that you need to complete 95%-100% of the game to reach level cap. Voilà! (*: Two is technically enough, but with three you'll make it simpler and end up with nicer values.)

Sorta, yeah. Str/Might/Fitness should improve the damage of war bows, but not crossbows or firearms (and not really Hunting Bows either, since a hunting bow is gonna have pretty low max poundage - you'd just snap it if you tried drawing it too far). A hunting bow made for a stronger person would still have comparatively higher draw weight - i.e. higher damage - than one made for a weaker person. The difference to a war bow is that it doesn't go for the maximum draw weight the user can handle. Of course, if we're really getting technical, every single bow should have their own draw weight and draw length which the archer must be able to match to be able to use them without hefty penalties (or at all), any extra strength wouldn't be of any use. A smaller person with small draw length could use a bow with higher draw length with less strength, but would also get less damage out of it. But I guess that's a bit too simulationist. I prefer a system where a bow functions as if it was made for its user - just like things are right now with armors.

I'd like the wilderness areas in general to have slightly more complex topology. Too often it's just one open area with a few obstacles in it.

A little pet peeve of mine, but.. Strenght (or Might or Fitness or whatever you want to call it) should affect bow damage just as much as it affects melee damage. Other ranged damage can depend on Perception or Coordination or Prescience or something like that. As you were.