PrimeJunta

Back-row characters do have two stats they can relatively safely dump (RES and CON), but they have four they actually need. After playing with it for a while, I'm disliking the unintuitive aspects of the character system more than I'm liking the universally useful aspects. I don't think it'd be a big loss to drop the Healing bonus from Might as it doesn't really make sense and doing more damage is universally useful anyway. Maybe move that to CON so it'd be more useful for back-row priests at least, and let back-row wizards dump it if they want. As to RES, you could make it more useful for back-row types by having it affect special ability recovery time. That wouldn't be completely unintuitive. Eh, since everybody's doing this, here's my latest suggestion for revising the stats. MIG - damage DEX - accuracy CON - healing, health and stamina INT - AoE and duration PER - interrupts and crit chance RES - recovery time and concentration This would mean that a "pure" support cleric for example could dump MIG and DEX since they wouldn't be interested in scoring hits or doing damage. I don't think that'd necessarily be a bad thing though; it could be an interesting role to play.

Absolutely. It's just even less obvious due to the lack of feedback.

Just for your information, this is exactly how my muscle wizard spends his downtime.

Are we playing the same game? I'm seeing stone beetles burrow under my front line to attack the second one all the time.

Unless you've built a frontline mage. Try building one and then blasting your foes with that Burning Hands clone or the other spells that originate from the caster and do annoying friendly-fire damage if cast safely from the back.

It's not really a problem IMO. It's a choice. Most classes allows enough flexibility to decide whether you want a toon to be frontline or back-row, and the abilities let you implement that. That's good as far as I'm concerned. (And the classes that don't really have that flexibility—fighter, monk, barbarian—are front-liners and so will find all stats useful.)

I've done a bit more checking out with the Interrupt mechanic, and contrary to what I thought it actually is significant. Very significant even. Try completely dumping RES on a front-line fighter, equip a slow weapon, wade into melee, and watch him not being able to get any hits in. Then do the same but pump RES. Then dump/pump PER and watch him stunlock/not stunlock enemies. Big difference in viability. Like CON, RES is less important for back-row glass cannons of course. I think the main problem is the lack of feedback. Especially with melee and moreso for fast weapons, it's hard to tell when a character interrupts/is interrupted; it just looks like he's standing there doing nothing getting pounded. If they added a sound and flash effect that also appeared on the portrait, it'd be a lot clearer. I.e. I'm warming up to RES and PER. Not so dumpy after all.

@cliantroll Look on the bright side: if you hadn't backed, you wouldn't be trying out the beta and you wouldn't know what the combat is like at this point. It will get better. I promise.

Kiting is only a problem if it becomes the best (i.e., lowest-cost, lowest-skill, lowest-resource) way to win fights. FWIW you can kite some enemies in the P:E beta. Just run away from it with the character it's targeting and shoot with the others. Works great. Although you can also slap it with a hobbling attack, a slow spell, or something similar. I don't think the intent is to eliminate kiting altogether; rather, it's to stop it from being the silver-bullet tactic that lets level 1 characters beat level 10 enemies without taking a scratch. 'Cuz that shouldn't be possible except under really exceptional circumstances.

Hey cool, this will actually make it possible to progress. Just duplicate everything to get around the disappearing item bug.

@Fluffle but the developers always decide that! They're the one who build the playing field, set up the rules, provide you with the ball, jerseys, shorts, and shoes. How can they not have opinions on what's enjoyable and what's not? How could they not set up the incentive systems and mechanics to be as enjoyable as they can, based on their understanding of what's enjoyable? If they think grinding isn't enjoyable, why on Earth should they make a game that rewards grinding? Should they make it so that tapping the spacebar once every second gives you 1 XP, and leave it up to the players to decide whether they want to keep tapping the spacebar or not on the off-chance that they find tapping the spacebar enjoyable?

Consider setting up a public bug tracker for bugs reported by us. Wouldn't have to be connected to your internal systems. It'd be interesting to be able to follow how the bugs we've reported fare. It would also help us report better bugs, and I'm sure it'd make your QA folks' life easier too; I'm sure I'd prefer to work with that rather than trawl through forums. A Jira license for up to 10 users costs all of ten bucks. You can allow anonymous access so everybody can log issues. I'm sure you won't need ten QA engineers to triage them and zap the important ones to your internal systems.

If that happens then the quest/XP system is broken. For quest/objective XP to work, it has to be robust; if it doesn't allow for doing things in the 'wrong' order then it's broken. I'm not too worried about this either; FO:NV had something similar and the quests triggered and completed just fine. The only way you'd lose them is if you did something that changed the landscape so much that they'd become redundant, like killing someone important to the quest or completing another quest that depopulated an area.

@Matt516 That's probably due to one of the many AI bugs. I have definitely been able to disengage and paid the penalty; BB Wizard lost half his health in one hit this way once.

A game consists of rules and systems. It's up to the designer to create rules and systems which he thinks would be fun to engage with. It's up to the player to engage with them however he wishes. The designer's and the player's ideas about it may not completely converge and that's entirely OK. If the designer thinks that kiting, rest-spamming, or grinding isn't fun, it's up to him to design a system that doesn't reward kiting, rest-spamming, or grinding. It's then up to the player to decide how to engage with the systems that end up being there. Consider football. (The real kind, not the one with the guys with the silly pauldrons and a non-spherical "ball.") At some point someone clever discovered that an easy way to score goals was to leave one of your guys hanging around the opposing team's goal, and then make a reeeallly long pass to him while the opposing team was busy at the other end of the field. However then they figured that this hurt the game, because the tactic doesn't require much skill and doesn't reward either personal ability or team tactcis. So they came up with the offside rule that stops this. Degenerate tactics are a bit like offsides. They don't reward skill, creativity, or cleverness and aren't in and of themselves fun for most people. (Few people would grind very long if all the reward they got was some pieces of beetle.) While there's nothing inherently wrong with two teams agreeing to play football without the offside rule in place, such a game isn't all that much fun. Same for single-player games with systems that allow offsides.

There are spells that broaden the crit window. I'm sure it'd be easy to bind it to a stat. I like the idea actually. Everybody loves crits!

There's one character concept that I'd like to play that isn't really well supported in P:E -- the ranged fighter. In D&D this would be one of the high base attack classes with ranged feats and specializations. I realize we have the ranger, but his gameplay is totally focused around the animal companion which is cool but changes the way it feels. It would be easy to address simply by making the Rogue's, Paladin's or Fighter's ranged attack bonus High or at least Average, and/or adding a few Talents to support it. The Fighter would still be playing a bit against type, but it might still be fun.

@Darvon don't give up on it at this point. The combat is broken because of a relatively small number of high-impact bugs. The underlying design is sound and very IE-esque. Fix the bugs and it'll be a lot better. Add the polish like in Sensuki's suggestions and it'll be awesome.

Only since 1984 or so. Seen 'em. Tried 'em. Observed 'em being less effective than high-STR fighters just piling on the armor. AD&D didn't have Combat Expertise. That was added to D&D3 specifically in an attempt to mitigate the "just pump STR" problem. It (also the Dodge/Mobility/Spring Attack/Whirlwhind Attack chain) are useful, and if you have a DM that's liberal enough with stat points that you can get DEX 15 and INT 13 as well as STR 18 (which isn't too hard sometimes since you can safely dump WIS and CHA) it's worth taking. But that's about the amount of wiggle room for a fighter. (Of course they later piled on the prestige classes so after slogging gimped through a few levels you could have another pre-crafted mold that would suddenly make you Deathlord to fit the concept you're playing. Which is a really clunky solution to a problem that could have been avoided with better systems in the first place.) As to why you're talking to me... that, Mrak, only you can answer. Fighters aren't even the worst offenders though. You cannot make a low-INT wizard, or a low-WIS cleric. They won't be able to wiz or cler. (Which is one reason they added yet another class, the sorcerer, which had the additional "benefit" of breaking the lore -- D&D had lore reasons for the absolute necessity to prepare spells, to which the sorc says "Oh, never mind.") Yet low-INT wizards and low-WIS clerics are perfectly interesting character concepts: the wizard could be a savant, say -- someone with a hyper-narrow talent for magic but nearly unable to function in normal life; the cleric could be a charismatic, weak-willed fool blessed or cursed with great powers by an evil god using him for its own purposes. D&D just doesn't allow these kinds of characters. Nuh-uh. As a DM, if a player came to me with one of these concepts, I would find ways to make them work, but it would require pretty serious breaking of the rules. Oh? STR 18 CON 18 DEX 14 INT 3 WIS 3 CHA 3. Power Attack, Cleave, Great Cleave, Weapon Focus: Greatsword, Weapon Specialization: Greatsword, Improved Critical: Greatsword. STR 18 CON 18 DEX 14 INT 3 WIS 3 CHA 3. Ambidextrity, Two-Weapon Fighting, Improved Two-Weapon Fighting, Weapon Focus: Scimitar, Weapon Specialization: Scimitar, Improved Critical: Scimitar. Yes, he is! In fact I would like P:E to support the archer-fighter, with no animal companion. Note to self: write a note in the Classes thread. STR 18 CON 14 DEX 18 INT 3 WIS 3 CHA 3. Point-blank shot, Rapid shot, Multi-shot. Weapon Focus: Longbow. Weapon Specialization: Longbow. Improved Critical: Longbow. STR 18 CON 16 DEX 16 INT 3 WIS 3 CHA 3. Dodge, Mobility, Spring Attack, Weapon Focus: Greatsword, Weapon Specialization: Greatsword, Improved Critical: Greatsword. Yeah, this one's fun. STR 7 CON 18 DEX 15 INT 13 WIS 3 CHA 3. Combat Expertise, Improved Combat Expertise, Dodge, Mobility, Spring Attack, Weapon Finesse. He'll never do much damage, but boy is he hard to hit. (Of course this fighter will be fun if your DM is generous enough with stat points or magic items to bring STR to where it belongs, i.e. 18. And you can maybe compromise on the CON a little.) Can't think of how this would be different from mage-killer or maybe tank. (This was all from memory BTW so it's possible I got the feat thresholds wrong, but they're not far wrong. If you want to embarrass me you can go "The INT threshold for Combat Expertise was 15 not 13 you fool, haven't you ever played D&D?") Let's see: all but one of those builds had INT, WIS, CHA 3 with everything else in STR, CON, DEX, with STR always maxed, and that one had pumped INT to a moderate value to get Combat Expertise. Am I seeing a pattern here? Yes, I am. Which is the point I'm making: if all your fighter builds (except one) have you pump STR, CON, DEX with trivial differences, and dump INT, WIS, CHA, then why even bother having attributes? Why not just roll those bonuses right into the fighter's class description, giving him attack, damage, AC, and hit point bonuses from the get-go? Attributes are only meaningful if they permit variety. It would be interesting to role-play, say, a wise, charismatic old warrior who's lost someof the raw speed and strength he had as a youth... and still be mechanically effective. D&D won't let you which makes the whole attribute system borderline pointless. Haha, we do agree about something then. The attribute system is confusing and non-intuitive, and does need to be overhauled.

I kinda agree in theory. In practice I don't think it'd be the same if, say, Strength or Dexterity had no mechanical effects at all. Twiddling attributes for combat effectiveness is very near the core of the D&D character building experience; moreso for AD&D because class + attributes were pretty much it for most of 'em. So I think stats ought to have mechanical effects, if only for the feelz. The hard part is making all or most of the compelling for all or most classes. Perhaps "no dump stats" is too ambitious; relaxing it to "at most one dump stat per class, and different dump stats for different classes" might make it possible to get more role-play-ey stats without forcing everybody into cookie-cutter builds. (I'm still taken by the muscle wizard idea though. I'd really like to see that work!)

Sure I have. To make a good melee character, pump AGI for the action points and INT so you can max out your Melee Weapons (or Unarmed if you prefer) ASAP. Average STR will do just fine. Then just punch/slash them in the eyes. I did play a dumb character once. It was an amusing novelty, but mechanically pretty hopeless. I'm saying that a system that has such a thing as a prime requisite (or role attribute as you put it) is dumb. If fighters have to have high STR or wizards have to have high INT, why even bother asking the player to allocate the points? There's no choice involved. "Please specify if you want pie or a kick in the nuts" is a false choice.

@Mrakvampire: If stats are unbalanced, it means that you'll always allocate them the same way (for any given class). This is very much the case in D&D. If you end up with the same stats for each class every time, then why even have stats? Where's the meaningful choice in them? Why not just get rid of them and roll those bonuses directly into the classes? If you're always going to pump STR for your fighter because of to-hit and damage bonuses, why not just get rid of STR and give the fighter those bonuses outright? From where I'm at, stats are only really meaningful for role-play purposes. The D&D ones are fine for PnP. They define what kind of character you're playing. Effectively forcing classes into particular stat distributions detracts from that, rather than improving it. Mechanically they're an unnecessary complication.

Apparently that only happens if you hit continue instead of load then manually picking your save from the title screen. Unfortunately not. It's happened to me a lot, and I never Continue.

I'm pretty sure the "chants" are going to be in. They've only started voice work recently, so it's not surprising they didn't make it into the beta. The animations are likely final though.

To reproduce: 1. Go to the Options pane and untick the Show unqualified and Show qualifiers boxes in dialog options. 2. Have yourself a dialog. => Expected/Observed: the unqualified options are removed, and qualifiers are hidden. 3. Go to another map (exit a building, enter a building or similar). 4. Have yourself another dialog. => Expected: the unqualified options are removed, and qualifiers are hidden. => Observed: the unqualified options are displayed (in red, with content hidden), as are the qualifiers. 5. Open the Options pane. => Observed: the boxes that I unticked in 1 are ticked again.