PrimeJunta

Jeebus, guys. Do you really have to turn every thread into a whine about no combat XP?

They've talked about it. My impression of what's open to change, in rough order of priority -- Talents. I believe this is the main focus of the beta from their POV actually. They want to hear how we think the classes play, how we want to play them, and add as many talents as they can to support as many styles of play as they're able. (I'm lobbying for ranged talents for fighters and/or rogues, and gish talents for wizards as a matter of fact.) Balancing. They want to put all the classes in the same ballpark in terms of overall power. If there are OP or underwhelming spells, talents, or attributes, they will be tuned up. This includes adjusting attribute bonuses, combat timing, weapon, spell, and talent accuracy, damage, AoE, duration, and so on and so forth. General tweaking. If the UI's turn out to be unclear or clunky, they will be adjusted. Naming of things. I think Josh already mentioned that Stamina is going to be renamed Endurance. If there's a strong consensus about renaming one of the abilities, that might happen too. Same thing for talent names and so on. Some stuff that's not on the table -- Basic design decisions, like the number of companions, number of abilities and roughly what they mean, RTwP combat, the classes, the XP system, the level-up system, the art style, the music style, the lore, firearms being in the game, romance. As to the specifics you listed, I'll have to go with hunches: I find it unlikely that Josh would agree to divide damage bonuses for different damage types between different abilities, which would make renaming Might to Strength even less intuitive. The XP system is highly unlikely to change. There is a general butthurt thread here about it though if you need to vent. While technically it would be easy to add rolling for stats, I very much doubt that's going to be there either, as Josh doesn't like to encourage degenerate tactics like clicking on "Reroll" until you get a Yahtzee.

Status effects tend to be fairly long-lasting as it is, and there are tons of ways to confer them. The simple Crippling Strike leaves an enemy hobbled for the duration of the battle already (well, most of the time). I don't think it'd make a huge difference if that was applied automatically... except to make the talent redundant, which would be a little annoying.

The recovery time isn't the cause for the combat becoming an indecipherable dogpile though. Let's get those sorted first, then we can comment on the timing. The only timing-related thing I'm fairly convinced about is that movement speed is too fast.

Distributing stacks of arrows between inventories was, without question, my favorite thing in the entire IE experience.

At least it's in. For the ogre quest there's XP at least for entering the cave, then for dealing with the ogre. AFAICT you don't actually get any more XP for reporting back to the farmer, you just get the money and the gun, and Piglet of course. We're just bored of the ... "discussion." @TrueMenace @Ink Blot The problem with your proposed system is that (a) it ends up in the same place as quest XP, but (b) it's a lot more complicated. You'll have to keep track of which monster "belongs" to which quest(s), account for situations when someone kills them before any of the quest(s) have triggered, and so on. In addition, it'll make the reward system feel inconsistent: you'll get an XP reward for killing these beetles now, but if you kill the other identical beetles on the way back after you've filled your XP meter by persuading the ogre to become a vegetarian, you won't get any XP. I.e., it would be significantly more work to implement and especially test (how do you test for all possible orders in which players could take on quests and kill monsters?) and it would lead to a system that will feel erratic an unpredictable even if it works perfectly since sometimes you would get XP for killing things, and sometimes not.

You could do that in DnD too. I've had campaigns with big stretches of no combat at all, with XP gained for all kinds of other neat stuff. Once they brokered an alliance between some warring nomad barbarian clans so they could attack the kingdom attacking their kingdom. Involved a lot of sneaking across enemy lines with means magical and mundane, seduction, bribery, some Charm spells, some Wilderness Lore, a great deal of diplomacy, calling in favors, and what have you. Took several months of calendar time, and yes, the barbarian and rogue leveled up too.

FWIW I wouldn't object to a "story mode" one step below Easy, for the folks who don't care about combat and are just in it for the story. Not to mention the really nifty-looking armor. It'd be dead simple to add and wouldn't harm anybody's enjoyment who's playing it at the regular difficulties.

Barren? Jeez, the signal to noise ration ITT is incredible. It also has some of the best and most constructive suggestions on the beta that have been posted here too. Except now we're adding noise. Mods, pin this maybe? Or find some other way to make sure the devs see it?

@war:head Ah, the Dan Vavra school of game design. Nothing wrong with it as such, but it's a whole different game.

AFAIK there isn't any info on this at this time. Tim Cain said he'd like to do it, but there's been nothing since. Perhaps it's been dropped; perhaps it's not done yet. (I'm guessing it's been dropped, but your guess is as good as mine.)

Uh... no?

You and BruceVC need to get together to discuss romance and combat XP.

Tell that to our controller. What could possibly be more readable than the numbers she's working with? It sounds to me like you want to obscure the mechanics altogether, and make it all about, say, visual and auditory feedback. That is all very awesome and entirely well-suited for a game like, say, The Witcher 3. It is also completely not what a game like P:E is about. We want to see the numbers. ALL the numbers. You may feel that this numbers-based gameplay is all very last millennium, but a lot of us disagree -- and that's a different matter altogether.

I think the engagement mechanic is actually most helpful for writing the AI. Engaging/disengaging are nice, simple states to script; pathfinding around possible AOO's has got to be a lot harder. From that POV it works pretty well already IMO; the main issue is the pathing-related dogpile and general lack of transparency about who's engaging whom.

"Disease-ridden pariahs?" Riiight...

(1) Combat information in this type of game is complex. That's part of the appeal. Which defense am I attacking? What are my numbers? What did I roll? What was the result? How much damage did I do? How much of that was soaked by DT? And so on. To play optimally, I need to get at this information. I'll only not care about it once I've already drawn the conclusions and made my choices and am playing efficiently. (2) Therefore, we are dealing with a problem of presenting complex information in a manner that is as clear and understandable as possible. (3) A tried-and-true way of accomplishing this is the combat log. This one is a mess, but that's not because it's a combat log; it's because it displays unimportant information ("BB Fighter regenerated 1 Stamina due to blaa-blaa-blaa") and doesn't display the important information (the numbers). Therefore, if you proudly proclaim it to be obsolete, it is IMO incumbent on you to suggest a better alternative. What you're doing sounds almost like you were proudly proclaiming the spreadsheet to be an obsolete way of managing numbers and formulae, and when asked what you'd replace it with, go "I don't know, it's Microsoft's job to figure it out." I.e., not very... helpful, from where I'm at. (FWIW I have also designed user interfaces for longer than I care to think about.)

Nice cop-out. "Combat log is bad because 1999 and the info should be availabel otherwise." "How?" "Damned if I know, it's their job to figure out."

@Sensuki I'm intrigued. How would you have done it? @Cubiq The AI needs work, yes, but it is noticeably harder for enemies to just move past your defenders. They get stopped and slapped hard if they disengage. It works. We'll see how it shapes up when the AI gets better.

Another thought on making the fighter and rogue classes more flexible and interesting. Blow them wide open. Let the player distribute the melee/ranged accuracy points. Add ranged talents. Allow the player to pick from among them starting from level 1. So we could build the current tanky fighter by picking knockdown, stamina regeneration, extra engagement target, and Defender mode, and dump all the points in melee accuracy; or we could dump all the points in Ranged, picking Fast Aim (modal), Crippling Shot (2/encounter), Knockdown Shot (2/encounter), and what have you. Or we could go half and half and get a nice musketeer-type who switches between ranged and melee flexibly.

I like the engagement mechanic. It actually lets you hold a line. In the IE games you couldn't do that, at best you could block a choke point with a couple of characters shoulder to shoulder. It's nothing to do with the fighter's limited flexibility. The more I think about this, the more I think the fighter design should be blown wide open. Add more talents, some ranged, some melee, and let the player pick from them from level 1. That would include what are currently the fighter's 'base' talents--the extra engagement target, stamina regen, Defender mode. Keep those, sure, but don't force them on the player. You could build a tank, an archer/gunner, or a combination (musketeer). Hell, while you're at it, let us assign those 35 accuracy points between melee and ranged as we like! Fighters would still be low-maintenance and tied to a combat role, but we would get to build it into the kind of role we want.

Not the kind of specifics I had in mind. I was thinking more, how specifically would you provide the info that we would like to see in the combat log?

"Trygil the currier would like 10 wolf pelts?" I'll pass.

Specifics would be nice.