PrimeJunta

I think if it's 2/encounter, that'll limit the effectiveness quite enough.

Okay, I must've missed the "in order to better translate what was happening on screen into feedback for the player," and focused on the "graphical polish." I still think the game's graphics are polished enough. By "feedback" I mean things like -- Character icon border brightening when mousing over the character in the scene, and vice versa Icons representing status effects and the character's current action on the portrait Character's selection circle+portrait border flashing in a different color when something important happens (Monk gains Wound, cipher gains Focus, chanter completes phrase and make an Incantation, character is Interrupted, etc.) Sound effect associated with gaining a Wound, being Interrupted, Interrupting, etc. Character model turning grey when Petrified Some of these are arguably graphical, but not what I usually think of in terms of "graphical polish." "Graphical polish" for me means stuff like more and better animations, more and better textures, more and better visual FX and so on. These are IMO already fine as they are. Sorry about the misunderstanding (if that's what it really was).

it's not a rifle; it's a muzzle-loading primitive firearm. You have to lower them to reload them between shots. That's one animation that's IMO quite crucial.

Re Interrupt, I honestly can't tell how much of a practical difference it makes. I did make a melee interrupt build (max PER, max DEX, fast weapons), and there was a visible difference in the way he hampered his melee opponent; however I felt it was a fairly inefficient way of doing that compared to the other things we have available. A high-Interrupt barb might be interesing though, what with Carnage. We haven't really seen too many spellcaster in the BB, so I don't know how good a high-Interrupt archer would be at ruining their day, either.

I did? I do not recall even thinking that let alone saying it. Are you sure it was me and we were talking about the same thing? Edit: I hazily remember something about fidget animations or more animations in general. Could that have been it? 'Cuz those I still file under "nice to have but not essential."

I did. On the other hand I didn't try a dumb barbarian so I can't tell if there was any difference. Rage certainly lasted long enough to make an impact. Couldn't tell if the Carnage AoE was big or small due to the general impenetrability of the combat.

I've been musing over my experiences with the ranged weapons in the BB. I think they could use some work. I found myself gravitating to the biggest ones available, meaning arbalests, arquebuses, blunderbusses, and pistols. The bows felt anemic in comparison. I think something needs to be done about this. A part of it I think has to do with the general balance issues between fast/light and slow/heavy. The DT system favors heavy weapons, and lots of if not most enemies had moderate to high DT. That pushes me into a situation where I have to pick between a weapon that's great some of the time and ineffective a lot of the time, and one that's OK some of the time and great a lot of the time. I'll pick the latter every time, rather than switch. IMO it would be very important to make fast/light weapons at least OK most of the time. Here's one possible thing that might be worth trying -- Increase the heavy ranged weapon load times even further, and make the punch even harder. Turn firearms and arbalests into "opening move" weapons, powerful enough to take out squishier foes with a single volley, but so slow you'll really not want to be reloading while combat is on. The impact of a volley could be something along the same level as, say, a fireball. (Note: by "volley" I mean all or most of the party firing at once. Obviously having an arquebus fire fireballs would be way OP.) Improve the DT penetration of light ranged weapons somewhat, and improve their base interrupt a lot. They wouldn't become absolutely much more powerful, but they would be more all-around useful rather than useless baggage against armored targets; they would also beef up the currently IMO problematic interrupt/PER mechanic. Assuming I only have room for one ranged weapon per character in my weapon slots, this will force me into a tactical choice: I can either go with a powerful opening punch, potentially taking out the most dangerous enemies before the action even starts, but effectively foregoing use of missile weapons during the rest of the encounter, or I can take something that won't make all that much of an impact in the opening, but I can use tactically over the course of the encounter, to interrupt enemy casters (hence the raised interrupt) and generally direct damage at a chosen target. Thoughts?

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.)