PrimeJunta

A high-Might wizard sucks at melee. Look at the base melee accuracy. He just sucks a little less than a low-Might wizard.

@Sensuki YMM does not V. This is a no-brainer. Individual stealth please. I think some kind of highlight effect would be better for stealth. 1. Select character(s). 2. Click on stealth. => Screen darkens. => Two concentric lighter areas appear around characters. => Stealthed characters switch into stealth animation, and an icon appears on their portrait. (Inspiration: Arcanum. Prowling FTW!) 3. Select non-stealthed character. => Screen returns to normal, but stealthed characters remain in prowl animation, with the stealth icon on their portrait. 4. Select a stealthed character. => Screen returns to state from step 2. Just my 10¢.

Ye gods I hope not. World of Warcraft would be a terrible precedent.

I bathe in your tears, Helm.

Huh, I disagree. I played a couple of paladin builds and thought they rocked. Pallys are better front-liners than priests because they don't cast and so don't suffer from the armor recovery penalties so much, and the auras were highly useful while interfering with combat less. I thought it's a great take on a melee front-liner.

Another thought -- I think one thing that appears to offend a lot of people is what @Namutree pointed out: that stats just aren't as important in P:E as in D&D. In D&D your stats made the difference between an unplayable character and Deathlord. Missing one point of INT meant that you couldn't take Combat Expertise, which blocked entire feat trees and prestige classes from you. I.e., something you chose at chargen determined the course of your entire career. Personally I didn't like this aspect of the game. I planned my builds beforehand on a spreadsheet sometimes, to make sure I met the requirements for the prestige class I wanted... after ragequitting halfway through because I hadn't noticed that Whirlwind Attack depends on Combat Expertise which has a 15 INT requirement, and I need Whirlwind Attack for the Deathlord prestige class. (Or something, that was just an example that probably didn't happen.) There was a certain satisfaction to getting the power builds just-so, but it wasn't worth the downside IMO. Put another way, a blind choice you make at chargen shouldn't really bite you in the arse ten levels later.

Not necessarily so. Avoiding dump stats is in theory easy: just connect all of them to some combat system which has a tangible effect in combat. Dump something, and you'll notice. Pump something, and you'll notice. The slightly trickier bit is to make it so that there are viable tactics to play with any or most stat combinations. If, say, RES becomes so important that you can't effectively play a front-line character in any way at all because he won't be able to do anything due to constantly getting interrupted, then that's kind of bad. But if you make it so that a low-RES frontliner still works if you use fast weapons, then that's perfectly fine -- dumping RES just directs you to play in a certain way, and of course the effectiveness of that way of playing depends on the situation. The character will shine when facing enemies that are effectively fought with fast weapons, and will be handicapped when facing enemies that are resistant to them. Which is as it should be.

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.