PrimeJunta

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.

The environments are fairly static in the beta. I won't venture a guess about how much they'll be prettied up for the final product. They have show a fair few dynamic effects though so it would be a disappointment if they don't make it in.

@Gfted1 It does get more tactical if you use tactics. Turn up the difficulty and you'll have to. Some ideas -- Priest buffs/debuffs are really powerful, especially the L3 one that bumps all your defenses by +15. The cipher has various dominate and group debuff effects which are extremely powerful, and per-encounter (plus SI which must be nerfed as you can cheese through the whole thing with it ATM). There's Puppet Master and that one thing that'll freeze a whole group of nearby targets for a very long (too long IMO) duration. Try playing a "muscle wizard" wearing heavy armor, and use the cone- and line-shaped spells directly from the front line. Augment with Arcane Veil as necessary. There's also a boss L4 spell that lets the wizard magically escape if things get too tense. Instead of opening up with your mage, move your fighter forward to pull the enemies. If necessary, accompany with another tanky character. Then use magic to burn down the dogpile. For particularly dangerous/nasty creatures, use Knockdown. It's short-duration but reliable; it'll put the poison beetles out of action for long enough that you can either kill them or disable them with something longer-duration. Use the priest 1 spell Halt to break up the enemy formation, or slow down particularly dangerous critters so you can kill them from range. That's for starters. There's plenty of tactics there, and a lot of the abilities are fun and can be combined in interesting ways. The only class I've played that's felt seriously underwhelming is the rogue; with that I haven't managed to come up with anything more exciting than hobble+stabstabstab.

Very good work. I agree with most of it, too. You clearly have sharper eyes than I do though -- for example I never noticed the bit about the doors, or that the inventory pane is rendered at 720p, or the frame rate issues. I like the action bar on top of the portraits, though. It makes for small and precise mouse movements since I usually first select a character, then the ability. I've thought of it as almost a pop-up menu. My experience with the wizard is quite different from yours, thanks to Gluteus Maximus the Muscle Wizard. A lot of the AoE's were highly useful, especially the cone-shaped ones; the self-buffs became relevant, and the "standards" -- Minoletta's contributions, Fireball -- stopped being all that cool. Agree about the loot drops. The two fights in the village proper did have them like you'd expect; perhaps the Skaen cultist stuff was just unfinished.

The engagement mechanic is itself pretty damn effective. The AI also doesn't like to disengage ATM. I haven't had any trouble maintaining a defensive line -- certainly less than in the IE games where you had to pretty much go shoulder-to-shoulder at a chokepoint to do it at all.

Because the 2D artists were fully booked making in-game resources and those took higher priority?

This has been discussed here in multiple threads; rather than go over the objections again, I'll just direct you at them.

In the "not exactly critical" file -- I found a Footpad's Hood at some point of the beta, and equipped it. I was a bit surprised to see it look like a very nice helmet. Might want to check the model. It also didn't seem to do anything much.