PrimeJunta

I can't match Sensuki's dedication, but I thought it might be useful to summarize my thoughts on the BB so far. I think I'll leave this build alone for now, despite having skipped some classes, notably the Druid. I'll follow the list of high-priority feedback requested in the announcement. Classes Fighter: With the rogue, probably the most restrictive and role-limited of the classes. I would very much like adjustments and talents to make ranged fighter builds viable. I don't think they'd displace the Ranger, because that class's gameplay revolves around the animal companion. Suggested talents (lifted from other threads): Swords to Crossbows (swaps melee and ranged base accuracy), Knockdown Shot, reuse of some Ranger ranged talents. It would also make possible a highly lore-appropriate "musketeer" build who opens up with a musket, then goes into melee when the mobs close up. Knockdown made it extremely useful to quickly put high-priority targets out of commission for the time it took to disable them with something stronger. Basis is good but needs fleshing out. Feels weak overall compared to most other classes. Rogue: Underwhelming. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the only tactic I discovered was hobble+stab-stab-stab. Just a point damage machine, and not all that great at point damage. Sneak Attack needs to be beefed up to make using it worthwhile. Adding Talents that inflict a larger variety of status effects could help too. Feels weak. Wizard: Predictable. I really liked the possibility to make an armored caster, and thought the increase in casting time balanced out the added protection nicely. I could finally use all those nice cone-shaped spells that were mostly doing nothing for me in the DnD games because it was usually just simpler to use something else. Spell selection is currently a bit lacking in variety though, like someone went through a checklist and put them in. In particular, I would like more spells/talents supporting gish tactics, for example something that gives a medium-duration Accuracy boost (rather than the ultra-short one from the L1 spell). It's solid enough but somewhat lacking in 'flair' as Sensuki puts it. Power level feels about right. Priest: Supremely useful set of buffs, debuffs, and heals making it one of the most strategically useful classes to have around. I thought it suffered a bit from the same as the wizard--it's more "fundamentally useful" than "fun." I also couldn't figure out many alternative ways to play it--it's basically a support machine hanging back casting support spells, occasionally plinking with a ranged weapon. Feels a little overpowered; some of those buffs seem to confer near-invulnerability for fairly long durations. Unfortunately I can't think of any simple ways to remedy this. I like playing frontline support characters, but that's already covered by... Paladin: Liked it a lot. The auras and per-encounter abilities plus decent melee skills strike a really nice balance between high-maintenance and low-maintenance. One of my favorite things in DnD based cRPG's was to build a melee-oriented cleric, throw Battletide, and wade into melee. The paladin feels very similar. Power level feels about right. Barbarian: Liked it even more. Lots of tactical variety here; armor up and take Hold the Line and you've got an excellent, strategically durable tank with serious damage output, or Wild Sprint to take out backrow squishies, then Defiant Resolve when you're about to go down. Everything could use more talents, but all in all IMO the best melee class by far. Power level feels about right, maybe a little underpowered. Cipher: One of my favorite classes although needs nerfing, especially durations and obviously Soul Ignition which lets you cheese through the whole thing. Cool take on the gish. I played this as a disabler/melee combatant: took spells like Puppet Master, that multi-target paralysis thing, and so on, and had a ball. Good job on this one; don't change anything (much) other than dial down the power a bit. Chanter: Another of my favorite classes although the summons are obviously way OP at the moment. Feels genuinely different: a low-maintenance caster is something new and cool. Again, don't change everything other than fixing the obviously broken bits. Power level is over 9000. Ranger: Not my thing, I think, but that's probably just personal preference. Gameplay is unique what with the shared health pool, but frankly it felt a little bit gimmicky, different for the sake of being different. Other than that, the implementation works well enough. Power level is too dependent on the animal companion; with the lion he felt too fragile, with the bear definitely overpowered. Needs tuning. Edit: forgot about this one -- Monk: I liked this more than I'd have expected. Main obstacle to enjoyment was the lack of feedback; you have to watch that Wounds counter like a hawk or risk taking unnecessary damage. Needs very noticeable visual/auditory feedback when the monk gains a Wound. Consequently I didn't play with it all that much. I'll file this under "promising," once the combat is more sorted I'll be able to explore it more. Seemed to have rather few talents to choose from; similar issue as the rogue, only with the monk it was ow-ow-ow-Stunning Blow, ow-ow-ow-Stunning Blow. Power level was about right. Druid: Did not play enough to be able to comment. Maybe in the next build. Overall: There were two concepts I wanted to build, but couldn't: the archer/musketeer (with no animal meat shield), and the wizard-based gish who self-buffs, rushes into melee for great burst damage, and then buggers off magically when the buffs run out. (The rogue's Escape ability would be rad for that, as a spell or otherwise.) Races Due tot he limited impact of ability scores on anything, the racial bonuses felt fairly insignificant; if this isn't changed I'll probably pick a race for aesthetic and role-playing rather than mechanical reasons. The aumaua are cool, as are the fire, moon, and nature godlikes; the death godlike doesn't really appeal to me. Never cared for furries so pass on the orlan. Elves and dwarves are what you'd expect them to be. I do like the ability to pick your culture and your background, and that they're not bound to your race. Again, mechanically no big deal but I hope there's some roleplay mileage to be had from them. Attributes Yeesh, almost said "won't go here again" but hey, once more into the breach. I have a few quibbles with them, PER in particular is too easy to dump, but my main beef is that they don't matter all that much. I've kind of gotten used to this already, but yes, I would like it to bite if I dumped something to 3 and feel the punch if I pumped it to 18. I also think that it would be aesthetically better to represent below-average adjustments as penalties and above-average as bonuses, rather than just add everything to a base, even if the numbers ended up in the same place. Equipment Overall, I liked the gear selection, especially the armor. I'd say the design objective of not having one objectively 'best' choice is close to being met here, although I suspect that if I wanted to minmax I'd just go with robes or clothes for the back row, with more variety in the front row. Edit: I have to add, I really like the way the armor looks, and the way they take on the color. Brigandine, padded, leather, and breastplate were especially nice. I even made BB Wizard wear padded armor just because I liked the looks. If you've managed to make armor look so neat I'll take a 20% casting time penalty for it, you've got to be doing something right. Firearms and arbalests felt overpowered, hunting bows underpowered, and I couldn't get a good handle on damage type vs. enemy. I figured out that you're supposed to crush bugs, but that was more by trial and error than by something I could more or less easily understand by looking at the system. So that part could use more transparency. Also if damage type/defense matters as much as it appears, I think it would be important to have more weapon slots from the start. The ability to switch between ranged and melee isn't enough if you also have to switch between crushing and slashing, for example. Some of the hidden powerful weapons felt appropriately punchy; I really dug the way it changed things when I found and started using them. Crafting and Enchanting Glanced at it, did not try due to all the inventory bugs. Maybe next build. Conversations and Quests Oh yes baby: The best part of the beta by far. Won't rhapsodize about the specifics here, just keep doing what you're doing. A+ Combat Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? Actually it's not bad. There is a good combat system underneath the bugs and overall lack of feedback, but it desperately needs digging out. Please, please, please take Sensuki's suggestion #008 to heart and add the combat feedback it deserves. As it is, it's desperately difficult to figure out what's going on, even apart from the bugs. Movement speed is too fast. Basic mechanics are, as far as I can tell, fun, varied, and interesting. Nothing wrong with miss/graze/hit/crit. Relationship between damage and DT was too murky; it really needs clarification e.g. in the weapon descriptions and combat feedback -- I need to be able to clearly see that my attacks aren't doing damage due to DT; as it is it's quite unclear why I'm doing little to n odamage. Relationship between stamina and health is crystal, except for the petrifying spiders thing. I thought that was bugged. If there's an effect that makes damage go straight from health, that needs to be made extremely clear. User Interface Character creation was fine. The main game HUD was... not perfect; again Sensuki has that part covered, although I kind of liked it that the character abilities popped up above the portrait. The combat log is a mess and in the wrong place; it needs filtering and more info displayed directly to be useful at all. Inventory, character sheet, and journal were fine except for the bugs. One consistent issue I noticed was a general dearth of "Accept/Cancel" buttons in dialogs; it's counterintuitive to accept choices by closing the dialog from the [x] and then going through a dialog. I'll probably return to this when going through builds with the most egregious bugs removed.

As an aside, I'm digging Skaen. A nasty god with understandable reasons for the nastiness, and cultists with similarly understandable reasons for following him. As a good Communist I had to side with them in the end too, of course; couldn't side with the parasitic class under any circumstances. Not your usual Ancient Evil.

It's funny, the Watcher's Keep never made much of an impression on me. I did go through it but I honestly can't even remember much of it. Wasn't there the Machine of Lum the Mad somewhere in there?

What do you guys consider 'accomplishment?' On a bit of a tangent, this whole debate reminds me of one of my pet peeves at work. There are two types of people: process-oriented and goal-oriented. Process-oriented people think that activities should be rewarded; goal-oriented people think that accomplishing things should be rewarded. I can't, in general, stand to work with process-oriented people. They're the ones who are concerned that you clock in at the right hours, make sure that everything is properly written down, call endless meetings to properly assign responsibilities, and so on. Goal-oriented people are concerned about what needs to be done in order to get that thing we're working on finished and out the door, what it has to be like, and so on. Of course some process and, in teamwork, a great deal of discipline is needed to actually do that, but I find it extremely important that goals go first, adherence to process second. I think this is behind my dislike of systemic XP. It's process-oriented, the game equivalent of making sure the T-45 form is properly filled and the hours are properly clocked. It rewards activity rather than directed activity. In a game which has goals other than "retrieve the amulet of Yendor from somewhere below level 20 of the dungeon" this just feels wrong. I.e. systemic XP only really works for me if the activity is the goal. This also reveals that I think of XP as primarily an incentive system, not, say, a 'simulation of learning things.'

One more reason to wish boss fights begone, yes.

Can't see how it could be related to drivers. Earlier you said you hardly ever loot anything: since this is an inventory bug related to pointers, and looting things puts pointers in your inventory, it sounds likely that putting things in your inventory could cause the bug to manifest. It certainly seems to happen less if I loot less.

I wish they'll lose the whole 'boss fight' concept. Have tough plot- and environment-appropriate enemies for sure, but not that "this is not even my final form" nonsense, hitpoint mountains you have to whittle down, collapse-the-temple-to-win, or complete immunities to bloody near everything. I hope Obsidian has grown beyond that. That said, I don't mind immunities or near-immunities to some or even many abilities. It would be a bit underwhelming maybe if you could just knockdown Darth Vader and then proceed to kick him to death.

Really?! Wow. I could've sworn item durability was removed. You still have to replenish your weapons and armor? Or, are you saying that illusionary equipment will be dropped by foes? Or both? *blink blink* o_o Helm's talking nonsense. Enemies do drop loot, sometimes very good loot. The two fights in Dyrford itself drop excellent armor and weapons including probably the best ranged weapon in the demo, so much so that if you go the pacifist route you're actively handicapping yourself for the rest of the beta, or at least until you get through to some rather nice found loot. Some other drops are more disappointing though; wildlife usually just drops monster bits which may or may not come in handy in crafting, and some of the other human enemies had fairly underwhelming drops. I hope they fix the latter; don't mind wolfs dropping wolf hides and spiders dropping venom sacs and spider legs.

AFAICT yes. The wiz would benefit from gishy talents and/or spells.

Hum, I disagree. I like extremely deadly enemies, things you have to take out really fast before they get to you, or find ways of defending specifically against their attacks. If they had additionally given them insane DT and/or crazy HP and immunities to many or most of your serious debuffs, then yeah, but it's not like we're lacking in ways to deal with them. If there's nothing there that can really, seriously kick you in the nuts then combat just becomes slow and grindy and always the same.

@Stun that is EXACTLY how I met my wife.

You're on fire, @Mayama. Those rule. Thematically appropriate and extremely cool ideas. Chorus made me LOL though. Fear the Vailian Republics!

Yes, let's. I made a general suggestion to this effect in the Classes thread, but specifics would be nice. Bumping base ranged accuracy is a start, though. Some ideas that have been floated, apologies for not remembering who exactly floated them, with all these ideas flying around -- Knockdown Shot (tactically interesting but would make the simulationists howl probably) Reuse some of the Ranger ranged talents

Uh, I've certainly had no trouble getting my monks beat up. Just put them in front.

No, the Wizzards. I'm sure the wizards are busy enough on their own to not worry about to much as long as they don't notice you. I'm drawing a blank on my obscure reference lore here. I am defeated. As are the wizzards. Usually.

@Ganrich I like those ideas a lot. Really nice ways of adding cross-class features to existing classes. Arcane Steel though might as well be a set of spells (Minor, Major etc.) which would make it easy to drop into the existing framework. I would want something exactly like that to make wizard gish builds more feasible. @Mayama I especially like the first two. Empathy is also so thematically appropriate it's surprising they didn't think of it themselves. Add a second tier, Universal Empathy, that'll bump up your Wounds when anyone gets hurt, including enemies. Shaped Discharge would be cool but it would add complication to the UI--either they'd show up as spell variants which would make the list a lot bigger, or there would have to be an additional step where you select the AoE shape. Not so sure about Soulstrike. Ciphers already have Focus-powered abilities that do more or less this; making it connected to the melee attack goes against the "punch to charge up, magic to cause effects" rhythm.

I think the barb is pretty good as it is actually--between Wild Sprint, Rage, Defiant Resolve, and the better stam/health damage ratio there are a lot of tactical options there. You can make a very good tanky barbarian, or a very good hurty barbarian. I do agree about the fighter and especially the rogue. At least the fighter has Knockdown which is per-encounter, near-instantaneous, and pretty reliable; I've found it enormously useful as a way to take out high-threat targets for the time it takes to slap on something more effective. Whereas the rogue's hobble+stab thing is just, well, damage, and a somewhat high-risk way of delivering that damage too.

@matt516 By "aggro mechanics" I mean that there is a number directly associated with the likelihood a character is to be picked as a target by the AI, and the player has some ways of manipulating that number. I.e., that there are mechanics in place specifically so that you can get the AI to attack the target you want. Taunt is the most basic example; items that make a character more or less likely to be aggro'ed is another. I think the AI should choose which character to attack based on tactical considerations only. E.g. that the AI categorizes your party as "crushies" and "squishies" based on their class, armor, and how you've positioned them, and prefers to attack squishies, and then perhaps adjusts this list depending on what your characters do. Of course this behavior will also be open to manipulation by the player, but that's part of the fun of the game. What I would not like to see is stuff like you got in DA:O -- where heavy armor made it more likely for a character to be targeted (any reasonable tactician would do the opposite, attack the high-damage squishies first), there were items like boots and whatever that would bump the aggro number up or down, and where fighters had "taunt" abilities allowing them to pull enemies away from your squishies. That made it too easy to pull attackers away from the squishies. There must be more interesting and genuinely more tactical ways to accomplish that.a

A ranged fighter would not be using any of his abilities. He'd just be plinking away at Low base accuracy. Any class can do that, and some (cipher, ranger) can do it better. Abilities are the core of the combat gameplay, so...

I think having a different attribute system is vital. Perhaps one problem with it now is that it's not different enough. STR-DEX-CON-INT-WIS-CHA is absolutely central to DnD as an identity. For anyone who's grown up with DnD, it immediately evokes the entire system. Put them in a system with different mechanics, and massive cognitive dissonance follows. It becomes impossible to change anything without causing howls. "Butbutbut, everyone knows STR affects melee accuracy!" OE made it clear from the very start that P:E isn't DnD. Perhaps a lot of this drama would have been avoided if they had gone with a genuinely different list of attributes, perhaps with a different number, and certainly one where so many of them map so neatly to the DnD equivalents. MIG-STR, DEX-DEX, CON-CON, INT-INT, RES-WIS, PER....Cha? All that is kinda hindsight now. They're not going to change the number of attributes, and probably not what they're called. Pity, that.

FWIW I stopped awarding combat XP very early in my DM'ing career. Lately I've gotten really lazy; I just decide roughly how quickly I want my players to advance per session, and award about that much every time, adjusted up or down depending on how creative they got, how big the challenges were, and how much they accomplished, with individual bonuses for players who did especially well. I have a homebrew system that takes this one step further -- XP has other uses besides character development; I playe it into a pool during play, which also has in-play uses (e.g. some extra-powerful special abilities). Anyone can play XP from that pool during a session. At the end of the session I throw in a lump reward and the group decides how much to spend on party resources and how to divvy up the remainder. They then get to spend that on individual character development, and anything they don't spend goes back into the pool and can be used next time. Saves me a lot of bother trying to remember who did what and be fair about the rewards. Probably wouldn't work for many groups though.

Epic.

I hope they use their conlangs, after all the effort they've put into them. Real languages in games can be fun though. I got a big laugh from the village full of Finns in IWD2. LOL @ Kurttu...

Good point. I haven't tried using the keys to select characters. Gotta keep that in mind.

BTW Sensuki, I found one of the badass hidden weapons and that suddenly made melee a lot more viable. I have a hunch that the current heavy ranged dominance may have something to do with out-of-whack gear.