Hiro Protagonist II

Well it seems one person who loves and plays 4th ed and thinks it's amazing as well as thinking the current system in PoE is great thinks the ritual is gamey. LMAO. Seriously. Of all the things I could come up with, gamey is not one of them.

Ah, so you agree then that intelligent enemies should go after your half dead bloodied Fighter on 50% health and 100% stamina than your full health/stamina ranged companions, due to being an easy kill? That's not what is being proposed. What's being proposed is you may have encounters where the enemy A.I. sees your full health/stamina ranged character having marginally less stamina (say 145hps) than your front line fighter who's bloodied on 50% health but also on full stamina (say 150hps), then the A.I. will go after the ranged character.

You even said 4th ed combat system is amazing. It's not just simple hit and spell, it's everything else including healing your health. And the stamina/health mechanic is a very poor substitute for what's in 4th ed. In fact it has nothing to do with 4th ed. And LOL at the ritual being gamey. You praise PoE because it takes stuff from 4th ed and when someone else who plays 4th ed says it would be better with other things like a ritual and goes against the current design of PoE, you call it gamey. Yeah Uomoz. We get you like the current system in PoE and we get you like 4th ed. But please don't make up BS like taking 'core' stuff from 4th ed when it doesn't.

There's already a thread in the Computer and Console forum. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68112-icewind-dale-enhanced-edition-announced/

I'd have to agree Immortalis. There's been some decisions throughout these two years that seem like fly by the seat of your pants stuff and leaving things right at the last minute. I was really looking forward to PoE and WL2 was going to be something I would play later. I haven't followed the development of WL2 as much as PoE but it feels it was handled better and now I'm looking forward to WL2 more. I find WL2 fun to play and really enjoying it. It shows betas are good ideas and the way they're handled are also important.

No. I'm not a big fan of ESP-based AI. The enemy shouldn't know how much stamina a character has. Good point Stun. How does the enemy know who has low stamina? Because someone with low stamina would be panting, sweating, exhaling heavily, bleeding etc. Exhaustion and fear leave signs that are detectable for virtually every sense. Okay you edited your post. I liked your 4th ed spiel but this I have an issue with. So when you take a nice leisurely relaxed stroll to Medreths group in the town, the enemy knows by panting, sweating, exhaling heavily, bleeding etc? Nope, you are NOT panting, sweating, exhaling heavily, bleeding etc. when you take that nice relaxed stroll to Medreth's group or any other enemies when I'm on full health and not exhausted in any way. Also, my ranged characters are on full health and look healthy while my front line fighter looks bloodied. And you want me to believe the enemy won't go after the bloodied half dead character for an easy kill?

Considering we have two big cities and presumably quests in those cities and inns in those cities. Why wouldn't you rest spam in those cities? Even in the Beta, if you attack the Orlan in the inn and kill her, you can go down stairs and rest before you leave the inn. So not only killing her is a viable option, you can immediately rest afterwards with no camping supplies. LOL.

No. I'm not a big fan of ESP-based AI. The enemy shouldn't know how much stamina a character has. Good point Stun. How does the enemy know who has low stamina?

LOL. Josh talking about healing surges and 4th ed. This is a huge WTF to me. For instance, Josh says this "For defense-oriented characters — both in PoE and 4E — their defensive abilities and their HP/surges/Health are their resources." Bold emphasis with 'both' and 'surges'. There are no surges in PoE. In fact, there is no healing at all in PoE other than an extended rest. So while he's going on about healing surges, it means nothing unless there is some equivalent in PoE which there isn't. And your adventuring day is short in PoE and why in 4th ed you can continue with encounters because you have healing. His whole post just comes across as some marketing spiel. And this is coming from a 4th ed pnp player who's played for years. It seems when Josh speaks, people feel warm and fuzzy and everything is right with the world.

You mean like the 4th ed ritual Comrade's Sucor that I've been bleating about in so many threads and that I asked Josh about and he didn't respond to a while back? Gosh, who would have thought that would be one idea? No, nobody has never come up with such an idea before!

I don't think Josh's "degenerate rest spamming" complaint against the IE games is about having to rest too often due to low health. On the contrary, I think he just dislikes that fact that players could (and were in some ways encouraged to) game the system by resting arbitrarily often even when their health didn't require it, just to get back per-rest spells and abilities. His solution was to introduce camping supplies as a limited resource (which makes rest spamming less feasible), and make more abilities per-encounter (which makes rest spamming less tempting). At least that's how I understood it... In PoE, you can game the system by rest spamming. And when you're resting quite often, daily powers become nearly encounter powers due to so much resting. Especially when you're very close to the side of a map or even in the town. And due to the maps being small (maybe it's just the areas we're in and there will be larger maps in the final game), you can cross a map very quickly and get to town to rest. In the IE games, if I was in a town map and buying/selling items, I wouldn't necessarily trot off to the nearest inn and rest if I still had a large assortment of healing spells. PoE does encourage you to do so when you are in town. If only one of my characters has 80% or 90% health, I'll just rest to get it to 100%. PoE encourages me more to rest spam than the IE games ever did. And with 4th ed encounter powers, when you cherry pick stuff like encounter and daily powers from 4th ed but leave other stuff out like healing, the system will be flawed. Anyway, you quoted me with the obsidian devs and Q&A not bringing up their concerns with rest spamming that we've seen in the latest video with Rose's play which is the core part of my quote. Nice selective quoting and response.

I think it's wishful thinking to think the A.I will be so good in the final game that naked ranged characters will now become unviable in a lot of encounters. I'm quite sceptical that the A.I. can be fixed to such a degree when Josh also confirmed the A.I. won't be as tactical as IWD2.

Have you actually played the beta Infinitron? I'll just leave this with you. Teleporting Spiders

Rose appears to be playing it and she was playing on easy. Rested twice. And nobody is saying they feel compelled to rest 20 times. There was very little scripted scenes and dialogue (quest giver), and just getting on playing the game and getting to the ogre when Rose played it and she played it on easy. She just played the Dyrfrord Crossing map and the ogre cave. First encounter 2 beetles, second encounter 2 beetles. Rested after 4 enemies. Third encounter encounter 1 Spider, fourth encounter 1 spider at ogre cave entrance. Fifth encounter 2 spiders. Rested again after 4 enemies. And then went to the ogre. I thought Rose did pretty good. The fact is she had to rest twice because her fighter was on half health after 4 enemies both times. No doubt she's played it a few times since she knew where to go and avoid all the trash mobs and get on with getting to the ogre. What surprised me is resting so much. But obviously according to some people, she's just like us noobs and needs to l2p and work out more efficient ways of combat.

There may have been many concerns and reservations about some of the design choices and not just combat xp from the other developers. I could see Josh putting his case forward and convincing them that his design would be good. What I'm wondering is if the dev's have been testing this for months, why hasn't any of them including Q&A mentioned their concerns with things like rest spamming. This was one of the degenerate things Josh criticised in the IE games. Even in the latest video, Rose rests twice before she gets to the Ogre and she took the optimal path avoiding a lot of trash mobs. This never happened in the IE games with a simple FedEx quest. Surely some of the dev's would be thinking, 'geez, I'm resting a lot before I even try and finish a simple quest'. These sort of things should have been picked up and something done about it.

I very much doubt there was a vote.

Why would I be preaching a return to AD&D? I didn't realise healing spells and potions were the domain of AD&D and no other non-AD&D crpg used them. LOL. So it's my gameplay that's at fault, not the bad design of PoE. Nice one Infinitron.

But hey, you're spreading the damage around. That's the solution for now.

And if you built a party that has two melee and four ranged, you're going to be in a world of hurt and will have to rest quite a bit for those two melee characters. So now you're advocating more melee type parties? Say 4 melee, 2 ranged to spread the damage over your melee characters? That's not a solution to the healing problem. Poor design shouldn't dictate what party you make.

Why do you insist that ranged builds need to go into melee and tank and spread the damage?

No, Ranger and Animal Companion share Health, so Ranger is tanking whenever the animal companion gets hit. Okay. Well if you build a ranged character like an AoE Wizard instead of a melee Wizard, you then have to send him in to tank. So really we need melee builds to help tank to spread the damage with the Fighter. Again, bad design.

Says who Josh? You now have to move your Ranger into melee to soak up damage even though your fighter is doing okay, because if you don't you're going to have to rest after the encounter for your half dead fighter? So you move your ranger into melee to soak up damage, encounter has ended and now you have your Ranger at half health but that's okay, you can now continue instead of resting. Bad design is bad design and moving ranged characters in to tank is not solving the problem.

As long as there are penalties for wearing armour, it won't solve the issue for naked ranged characters or even melee characters who aren't being hit by enemies. They need to get rid of penalties altogether for characters to wear armour. It's too exploitable with penalties at the moment. Also, I've found the enemy AI will attack the party member that aggroed it and will usually not change to other party members. So if a wizard fireballed a couple of enemies, they'll usually ignore your front line members, run past them and dogpile on your wizard. So the best way I found is to time it so my Fighter will aggro an enemy a half second before throwing a fireball or other spells from your ranged characters so the enemy goes to your Fighter first. Also, I don't see the point in redistributing damage to your other characters as a solution by moving your ranged characters into melee just so your Fighter can take a breather. It goes against the design of those characters. That's not the solution. We know what the solution is, healing spells and potions.

Well I can understand why Josh didn't want to put an 'hour' figure on how long the game is. This will probably take longer to finish than BG2 due to all the resting and trekking back to inns.

I try and think how this system would play in the IE games. The thought scares me. Indira, you're playing BG:EE right now. How would you feel if you didn't have healing potions and spells and the only way to heal your party members were limited camping supplies or trekking back to inns? Having a couple or few encounters and resting all the time. And PoE is supposedly in the size of BG1. The thought of entering a new map and knowing I'll likely have to rest or trek back to an inn before I even complete the map isn't encouraging. Another problem I realised with this system, looking at Indira's other thread, is that in the IE games your characters and enemies could miss and not do any damage. In PoE, the enemies always hit even if it's grazes. I've never seen an enemy miss although it's supposedly rare. This just exacerbates the problem of having your characters take damage and not being able to heal your characters health. Yep, we need healing potions or spells. Something, anything, that can heal your health instead of resting.