Caerdon

How would you do that? The safe zone is determined by the caster's INT.

I considered 3 missiles in my dmg calculation. I don't know about other difficulties but on path of the damned -10 accuracy is usless, shade on your wizard will still kill him in a few seconds. Sometimes you have to walk a little bit, but still you can cast fan of flames in majority of the situations without any troubles. The biggest question I have is why the aoe spells have the same damage as single target ones... I meant that striking three times has certain amount of value in itself. Think Ironskin. The game is not balanced with PotD in mind, nor should it be. -10 ACC is significant on Hard.

Minoletta's has 15 m range, it's Fast and it attacks three times. Kalakoth's -10 Accuracy is great for when your wizard is under attack. Fan can be extremely powerful but's it's often situational precisely because of it's huge area. And they all deal different types of damage. Seriously, I don't see a problem here. Even if some of them are better than others, they all serve a purpose.

How, exactly, does XP get awared in this game? Isn't it just divided among party members like in BG? I haven't paid much attention to XP, but when my party gets awarded 600 XP, it looks like each individual party member receives around 100 XP.

Yeah I have no idea what people think they can accomplish by throwing personal insults at Josh instead of providing constructive criticism And seems to me that people think that Josh designed every single part of this game. Like everything. That's a good soundtrack Josh, didn't know you were so musically inclined You're being silly. Obviously he only designed all the bad parts!

Tough.

It'd be nice to have coloured circles like in BG:EE. Possibly with a third custom colour for this purpose alone.

You can eat food straight from the inventory, just not during battle. Makes sense, really.

Yes it does. But it's funny to watch them rage about nothing. Oh. Okay. Sorry. I went looking for "trap" in the auto-pause options, and was greatly disappointed. Thank you for informing me that I was simply scanning for the wrong word. Apology accepted. Now, don't let it happen again, or I'll have to inform your parents!

I might even throw a "perkele".

It'd be fun if the world of Eora was full of magic sensitive people and creatures, so that when you start casting buffs, you'd just invite every nearby enemy to your location...

You wont be. That Grimoire would still get bonuses just not as high as a specialized grimoire. You're not looking at the big picture. Classes are balanced based on their overall power level, and your system would raise that power level. Next time the dev consider whether the class should be buffed, they might think that "nah, specialist mages already get +X% damage bonus, that makes wizards more than good enough" and skip buffing the class. Or they might nerf the class because specialist mages are too powerful. In both cases my Grimoire of Five Elements - any grimoire that doesn't make full use of your bonuses - ends up being weaker than it would have.

How does this matter if they don't balance any of the fights and encounters ? No matter how much you think the encounters haven't been balanced, they could be balanced much, much worse.

Precisely the reason why Obsidian didn't take those forms of prebuffing away as well. But even if they're too tedious to use often, don't forget that you still have them as an option if you're having difficulties with a particularly tough battle.

Every time there's a bonus for playing in a certain way, it's the equivalent of a penalty for playing in any other way. No thanks, I don't want to be penalized for having a Grimoire of Five Elements.

The buffs that really matter (not counting chants here) have limited uses per rest (and once the lower-level buffs become per-encounter, they are not as strong anymore). Therefore, clearly not "every fight" would need to be designed to depend on buffing. But larger encounters ('boss fights') definitely *should* give the player the opportunity to prepare everything they have at their disposal. It just doesn't *feel* right from a player / storytelling perspective otherwise, no matter how balanced it might seem. There are still many ways to prepare for a particular tough battle: resting bonuses, scrolls, consumables, equipment selection, traps... Eliminating prebuffing altogether is not a pretty solution, but honestly, I think it's good for the gameplay.

Not necessarily, but neither does it have to be in a 3D engine, especially in one with fixed camera angle with limited perspective.

How's that, exactly? Every area in Eternity has been modeled in 3D, in sufficiently high detail.

The main issue is because a lot of people think it's bad for game balance. In short: if you allow prebuffing, then you either A) balance everything with that in mind, punishing all those who don't want to go trought the tedious (and rather brainless) routine of prebuffing before every fight, or B) balance everything as if it didn't exist, which would make fights trivially easy when you do prebuff.

Yes, naming weapons should be a Thing™.

Those both look pretty, but honestly, the one above looks better. And if you take gameplay into account, it's not even a contest. In the first picture you can see at a glance the difference between passable and impassable terrain, in the lower picture you can't.

Min-maxing is about recognizing what gives you the most bang for the buck and maximizing that at the expense of everything else. The idea is not to create characters that are good at everything, but characters that are the absolute best at the most important thing. TV Tropes actually puts it quite nicely: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MinMaxing

Uh... just about everything you see in-game, including tables and objects on them, have been modeled and pre-rendered. Same is true for PS:T. These games haven't been "painted by hand" like some people seem to think.

To play the devil's advocate for a bit, even though I've always loved the graphics both in the original IE games and Eternity, I don't really care much whether the game uses 2D or 3D backgrounds, as long as the camera has fixed angle and the perspective distortion is kept modest (unlike in most RTS games for example where everything on the lower part of your screen is huge compared to the stuff above). 3D has its benefits, notably it would be easier for modders to deal with. I'd still prefer the Eternity approach to cutscenes - the scripted interactions. Luckily a 3D engine doesn't necessitate in-engine cutscenes, a lot of developers just seem to forget that.

Thanks for the link, kmbogd! So, I read through the whole thing, and to summarize: so far no one knows for sure how exactly DEX affects attack speed, except that it doesn't seem to affect it quite as much as it should, and bows need a buff.