PrimeJunta

If anything is yesterday's design, it's 4e. 5e is already out. Perhaps MC was insinuating that Josh's design philosophy == 4e. Which is untrue, obviously, but it's one of the favorite things his un-fans like to say.

What's the current generation of RPG design dogmas? (Not a rhetorical quesiton, genuinely curious.)

:whispers: I houseruled that. Eventually. For me at least, when I started RPG's D&D was the only game in town. Literally. I branched out to others, mostly for radically different settings--Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Judge Dredd, Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0, Star Wars (two different editions), a stab at Warhammer but that didn't take for whatever reason, a stab at Rulemonster... ahem, Rulemaster, but that didn't take for obvious reasons. But I always kept coming back to D&D. It was because of that wonderful, magnificent multiverse system. My Al-Qadim campaign had forays into the Inner Planes; we met some old friends from there when we went Planescape; again with a completely different-flavored thing set in a fantasy version of Warring States China on this Prime Material plane or one very like it. There was a feel of "anything is possible" that nothing before or since could quite capture. But those systems, man. AD&D was godawful in every way. :stops self before embarking on long rant:

I would have backed it if the concept was good, but that would have been despite the D&D, not because of it. I'm an enormous fan of the worlds of D&D--many of them, anyway--but not a fan of the systems and mechanics.

Fortunately the spleen is one of those organs nobody seems to know what it's for, and people do just fine without it.

The point of a beta is to help development of the final product. That means we are here to help them. Their responsibility is the final product and its users. It is up to them to decide when a new build best helps the project. They do not owe us an "emergency patch" because a beta with critical bugs is not an emergency. At the moment it's obvious that they've got their hands full without our helpful advice. We can wait. Yes, even you, Marceror.

I think that what Namutree is saying is that you can then double the absolute values of the adjustments without affecting the average, making the builds more extreme. If all the adjustments are positive numbers, doubling the range will also raise the average, making everybody more powerful. Edit: oh, he wasn't. Sorry...

Dump CON and MIG, pump PER and INT, equip him with a pike, jab from behind somebody else, and make sure to use priests or paladins to buff defenses. Then take extra Knockdowns and make sure to use them a lot. Voilà, interrupter/disabler build.

Fighters currently don't have great ranged Accuracy, and all of their feats are melee-oriented. So no, not really. The go-to ranged classes are the ranger (obviously), and the cipher. I posted a suggestion in the General Classes Thread to bump the fighter's base ranged accuracy and add some ranged talents to the mix, to allow that kind of build which currently none of the classes support.

You smacked people with your stiletto? Why? Your base melee Accuracy is terrible, all you'll do is graze anyway, so nothing's going to make more than a decimal-point difference. Look at spell damage. IMO the real difference is in RES. Your muscle wizard who dumps RES will get interrupted, like, a LOT, if standing in the front line. This is because casting time is up to 12 seconds and your opponents will have time to get in a lot of hits, any of which can cause an Interrupt.

Have you tried playing one in P:E? I have. He's not overpowered. He casts half as slow as a "glass cannon" and despite pumping RES, occasionally gets Interrupted. Overall difficulty was not affected much at all.

Have you tried it or are you just talking out of your khyber? I dare you. Create two wizards. Pump CON and RES on one, and dump CON and RES on the other. Kit both up in brigandine and put them on the front line. Play on Normal or Hard. Then come back and tell us, hand on heart, that there was no difference between the two.

So you're against the idea, then?

Same here. Clearly a quest bug.

IMO the need to rely on auto-pause a lot is symptomatic of something else wrong with the combat UI. Autopausing after every action is cleared could get extremely stuttery, with six characters performing actions with different times/recoveries. Not sure it'd be workable in practice. I'd rather they drastically improved the feedback as per Sensuki's suggestion #008. Then if it still feels unmanageable, add more auto-pause options.

I kind of like that idea, Longknife. On the other hand I'm not sure there's a problem here, other than that of magnitude. The effect especially of dumping Int is not all that dramatic. I'd prefer to see durations and AoE's that really are short enough/small enough that you'd wish they were longer/bigger.

Suit yourself. My muscle wizard casts with his muscles.

@Gromnir Resolve is not at all useless. Try building a front-line spellcaster, or a melee type who uses slow weapons. If you dump RES, he'll get Interrupted all the freakin' time and won't be able to get any spells cast/attacks made. I got bit in the behind by this when I thought RES was easily dumpable. You won't notice it much on back-row/ranged types, and IMO PER is dumpable as interrupts against melee fighters only really work against slow-hitting types, and only against one target at a time, and there are better/stronger ways of debuffing them. I suspect it will be useful against spellcasters, but then casters have spells specially for that, and I believe some items as well.

I'm 100% certain there will be Ocean Folk portraits in the final game. It would be ridiculous not to. It seems fairly clear to me that Old Vailia is a good deal more than just tokenism. I also agree that it was a foolish oversight to omit them from the beta, and one that sends the wrong message about the game, and I hope they correct it ASAP.

Moar on my muscle wizard. I think I almost finished the beta with it; "almost" possibly because of a choice I made in the spiderdungeon quest, or a bug, don't know which. I am now quite convinced that at least the INT AoE adjustment needs to be much more dramatic. I dumped INT, but my fireballs and cone effects still cover enough ground to be as effective in practice as BB Wizard's bigger areas. I would not find it objectionable if an INT 3 wizard's fireball was only a little bigger than a point effect, say big enough to hit one target plus anyone engaged in melee with him, while an INT 18 wiz's fireball about as big as it is now, or perhaps just a little bigger.

I believe different people are using "cannot" in different ways. Some people use it to mean "should not be able to," others (who are usually mistaken) mean that you actually cannot, that it's not possible, or if it's possible, it will be unviable. Thinking of the stats as bonuses is a pretty good way of looking at it actually. Your class defines the basic profile, you get to adjust that with your stat distribution. (And, I reiterate, I think the bonuses/maluses should bite more than they currently do, to make the stats feel more meaningful. The principle itself is sound though.)

I get that you think that -- but it's just your opinion, not some objective, cosmic truth. (It can be in your RPG campaign of course, and will be if it's a D&D campaign. But P:E isn't D&D.) You can pout and stamp your foot about it though, if it makes you feel better. I find it unlikely that P:E wizards will be required to have high intelligence.

Sensuki had an excellent thread on this in the beta forums. Rotating camera is impossible (obviously), but combat does desperately need more feedback. Check out the thread, there's a lot of good stuff there (and I hope the devs take notice).

Possibly not a bug. Check that you still have the quests in your journal, and do more stuff. There is another way in.

The stat governing meditation is WIS, martial arts DEX/STR, and musical instruments, CHA. :checks back: No, you didn't. You made an assertion and then appealed to common sense. That's not an argument. Seriously, the "pasty bookish hunchbacked antisocial nerd flinging fireballs" archetype comes from D&D, presumably because its authors were pasty bookish hunchbacked antisocial nerds getting pushed around by the high-STR, high-CHA jocks and wanted a power trip. There's no cosmic truth to it. It's also one of the most boring wizard archetypes out there. Azar Javed from The Witcher was way cooler, as was Anomander Rake from the Malazan Book of the Fallen, or many others.