PrimeJunta
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Everything posted by PrimeJunta
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Oh, forgot one thing: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Status_Effects @BlueLion ... the bestiary, eventually? What's annoying me about that specific thing is that it is not transparent at all. The way it works is logical enough, but it's plumb near impossible to see the numbers: Each weapon deals one or more damage type Each armor (including, presumably, natural armor like beetle shell) has a damage threshold (DT) A part of your base damage always goes through the DT Different armors have DT bonuses or penalties against different damage types, e.g. Chain has a penalty against Crushing and--I think--a bonus against Slashing So to figure out which can opener to use against which can, you would need to know what the DT of the can is against each damage type. That information is not easily available. There absolutely has to be real-time combat feedback that includes this information, e.g. in the floaty numbers: raw damage and applied damage. So if you see something like 23/8 you know that most of your damage is getting soaked and you ought to try something else, but if you see 23/18 you know you're doing pretty well. -
The druid, by the way, is kewl. Finally got around to playing one. I would not recommend it as baby's first class because a lot of the spells rely on status effects or attacking specific defenses, which makes them either extremely effective or not effective at all, and if you don't know which is which it'll just feel wrong. But if you play it right, it packs some serious punch, and also synergises really nicely with some other classes, especially the wizard. There are some really neat one-two punches there, like using the druid for an AoE hobble, then the wizard for an AoE attack against Reflex, or the wizard for an AoE Weaken, then the druid for a multi-target attack against Fortitude. I didn't care for the concept at first, but after experimenting a bit it's clearly one of the most interesting classes in the game, and among the thematically most coherent too.
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Combat.
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Seriously? You'd be happy with wonky broken un-fun combat, if you get more portraits? Don't know about "people," but that would certainly not make me happy.
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Nope. That's when things get interesting. If their ranged units target your back row, then you should try to take them out of the fight first. If their melee units target your back row, you should interpose your melee units so they don't reach them. Tactics, y'know.
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The trick to playing P:E is knowing which defense(s) to attack. Hammering away at a critter with high Deflection isn't going to get you anywhere. Spell and special ability descriptions helpfully state which defense each of them attacks. The real clincher however are status effects. The most important effect of most of these is that they debuff specific defenses. So, for example, your standard Fireball becomes a great deal more effective if cast on Hobbled enemies, because Fireball attacks Reflex and Hobbled applies a -20 penalty to it. Here's the problem: I didn't find information on what the various status effects actually mean anywhere in the beta. I had to look them up from the wiki and write them down on a piece of paper. Ever since I did that and started using combinations of spells and specials somewhat intelligently, the fights got way easier. I believe something ought to be done about this. Because these combos are so central to the gameplay, the game should communicate explicitly what the status effects mean.
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My advice would be somewhat different from the OP's. If you want to enjoy the beta, take it as what it is: a possibility to get in early to see the systems shape up, and to have a small say in how that happens. If you're looking for an enjoyable game experience, then don't participate in the beta. That's not what it is.
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It shouldn't be hard to add this. Just have an arrowhead pointing out from each selection circle at each enemy the combatant is engaging. If two combatants are engaging each other, have the arrowheads change shape, into a diamond or a link or whatever looks clearest.
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Uh... some of the city fights in BG2 were plenty tough. The beholders. The vampires. Kangaxx for cryin' out loud.
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Wel-l.ll... I don't entirely agree with that, Indira. There are some decision they've made that do feel "different for the sake of different," but for the most part... I don't think making a straight clone of DnD would've really helped. For one thing, it would've been an enormous job to get the implementation to the level of richness and refinement you had in BG2 or, say, SoZ, and the closer it is to DnD the more it invites precisely these kinds of comparisons. It would've felt like a cut-rate knock-off, with all of the flaws but missing the main benefit (=the richness and variety in classes, kits, spells, etc.). Whereas building a materially different system still invites comparison, but at least it's not a one-to-one direct comparison. I have a feeling it was actually safer to go this way, and it's likely the rage would have been even fiercer had they steered closer to DnD, simply because the omissions and deviations would have stood out even more.
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There's no reason 25% health has to be the functional equivalent of 25% healing spells. It can't be, plainly, because healing spells can be applied where needed whereas health is what it is, even allowing for tactical adjustments like rotating your badly beat-up tank to the back while a less beat-up character equips heavy armor and goes on temporary tanking duty. To work, however, the mechanic has to provide 'adventuring days' of comparable length. I.e. that, on average, you'd get about as far with the health/stamina system as you would with one cleric on medic duty. This is currently not the case and it is plainly a problem. But that is a numbers issue, not an issue with the fundamental mechanic.
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No, damnit. Rogues and fighters are boring. Both are one-trick ponies. Rogue is a sneak-attacker, with talents supporting that trick. Fighter is a sticky melee defender, with talents supporting that trick. The fact that AD&D thieves and fighters at comparable level are equally or even more boring does not excuse it. At the very least equalize the melee/ranged base accuracy for the rogue, so ranged rogue builds won't feel gimped.
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Yeah, just like we always do here on the forums.
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Brute Force targets Fortitude only if it's lower than Deflection. I.e. barbs always hit the lower of the two. It's very much a net advantage.
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I don't think the AI algorithm itself ought to be particularly hard. I think the tricky bit would come from its interactions with the other systems. Pathfinding for example. Ranged attacks are simple to target, but a melee unit would have to determine if it's able to reach the unit it's targeting, and revise its decisions as the situation changes. If this doesn't work well you'd get some really weird behavior. And of course you don't have unlimited CPU to play with.
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No, but there bloody well ought to be. (It does show up in the combat log, but that's generally useless ATM so it doesn't help much.)
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Good thing in P:E there's no reason you'd want to do that, unless you thought they carried really good loot of course.
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Healing potions/items were, for me at least, always a supplementing feature. The only game I used them regularly was IWD2 where I knew enemies would drop them regularly so there was no point to hoard them. In all the others they were emergency-use only, i.e. when I screwed up somehow, or in rare instances I wanted to push through further than my cleric's healing would allow. The purpose of stam/health is still the same: you have a tactical health resource (stamina in P:E, hit points in DnD), and a strategic health resource (health in P:E, cleric heals+potions in DnD). The former is relevan in an individual fight, the latter determines how far you can go before resting. The purpose of the mechanical change is to broaden the cleric's role from a heal-o-mat. The idea is sound. The implementation is currently flawed; for one thing priest gameplay is less varied in P:E than it is in DnD. The priest is my favorite DnD3 class by far, because it can be built in so many diverse ways and it remains true to the concept. The P:E priest is a buff-o-mat.
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Just had one idea about the stamina/health mechanic. How about if there was a spell--perhaps a wizard or druid spell--which distributed vital force between linked individuals? Or, in game terms, equalized health in the party? This way you'd be able to keep truckin' if one of your dudes got beat on rather badly, without having to treat him like a Ming vase, but health would still be a strategic resource that would deplete as you got roughed up. This would make it behave more like DnD divine healing; there you could after all decide who to heal.
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Århus has been treating me well so far, that's for sure. I might just take you up on that offer of a beer one of these days, @TheChris92.
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To stay standing in combat for longer in case it's necessary? You do realize, Razsius, that the problem isn't that your stamina regenerates? The problem is getting hit. Getting hit is bad, m'kay? Things get iffy if you're standing in a position where you're taking a pounding while regenerating stamina fairly quickly, and you have no options to get to a safer spot, what with disengagement attacks and all. You can solve that by providing the player with options to use for just such a contingency. Mages have short-distance teleports, rogues have Escape, barbs have their better stam/health ratio so they can eat a disengagement attack with less strategic cost, priests have that badass group buff to Deflection, and so on. I.e., you would always want to wear a trollhide belt, because it keeps your stamina topped up. However, trollhide belt or no trollhide belt, you would generally want to avoid getting beat on, because even if you had the trollhide belt, you'd still drain your Health.
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I just don't see it. I know what it is supposed to do, but it just seems bad to me. I don't think it's a balancing issue either. Health is the functional replacement of the D&D cleric's healing spells, no more, no less. Run out of heals, rest. Run out of health, rest. It just needs to be tuned so that it 'feels' that you have about as much health as you would have had cleric heals.
