PrimeJunta

@Hatred Mature.

It is always nice when something restores a little faith in humanity.

Well, it gets the job done for me. I'm careful with my strategic resources because I don't want to trudge back to the inn to resupply. YMMV if you have a high tolerance for boredom.

No. It. Wouldn't. Because most of the time pre-buffing isn't even the optimal strategy. It would be useful in some specific cases, where it would permit alternative approaches to the fight. That said, getting overleveled for the endgame clearly is a problem. I was a proponent of encounter scaling in the crit path à la Baldur's Gate 2 Chapter 2 quests, but that got shouted down. Perhaps XP does need a nerf, even if it would make players who only pursue the crit path underleveled. But that's nothing to do with the question under discussion here.

You're mistaken. -10 ACC debuff is not "minor," it's a very big deal indeed. Fan of Flames is indeed great, but so is Chill Fog (can be cast from behind your front line), that Ice Blades thing which also Hobbles, Slicken even after the nerf, Thrust of Tattered Veils if you're facing a caster, and Eldritch Aim if you're targeting a (hard-to-hit) boss. (It's the level 2 spells I'm having trouble with. Curse of Blackened Sight is awesome, Fetid Caress sometimes useful, but I haven't had much luck with Rolling Flame, Binding Web is obviously worse than Slicken or that Ice Blades thing that also hobbles, and the gishy self-buffs/self-defense spells are a waste of a cast and a spell slot.)

Jeez, manageri, you're starting to annoy me. You just keep repeating what you already said without, y'know, addressing the counter-argument. Such as: if you cast three priest buffs one after the other, the first one will likely have run out by the time the third one takes effect -- or, at best, will run out a couple of seconds into the encounter. The buffs are bleeping short. This makes timing absolutely crucial. If you cast that excellent level 2 regeneration effect too early, you're wasting half of its potential. If you cast that fantastic level 3 buff to all defenses too early, same thing. With these durations + limited resting, it only makes sense to pre-cast them in very specific circumstances. It's not at all like "Prot from Evil 10' radius" after every rest in BG2. If any of you have an actual counter-counterargument to this, I'd like to hear it. Having you parrot Josh's argument over and over again is getting tiresome, and I say this as someone who actually likes most of Josh's design on P:E.

No they are not. Rests are unlimited because the game does not punish or ban you from going back to a village or city and buy more of them. Having to trudge back in shame to the inn is punishment enough for me. Losing progression due to sloppy play would be a punishment. I would cry from joy if the hardest mode actually enforced the difficulty it is supposed to have! Fair enough. I'm not that hardcore.

There are better reasons to play it than that. It's horribly broken but still awesome. I found playing as a technomancer/gunslinger most rewarding -- hunting for schematics and crafting all kinds of contraptions from junk, while trying to stay solvent when every bullet cost serious money was great fun. Magic is utterly broken and the game loses all challenge extremely quickly. Throwing weapons are similarly broken. And if you make a "talky" character you can get through the whole thing without getting your hands dirty, but you'll barely gain any XP. I really wish they'd do a spiritual successor with at least halfway sane mechanics. Eora in about 200 years, after someone invents the steam engine, printing press, and railroad would be just about perfect.

Arcanum.

No they are not. Rests are unlimited because the game does not punish or ban you from going back to a village or city and buy more of them. Having to trudge back in shame to the inn is punishment enough for me.

Uh... rests are a limited resource. You get two camping supplies on Hard, plus whatever you pick up on the way. If you're careless with your spells, you'll find yourself backtracking a lot (just see the whaaing about it in several threads here). (OTOH if you're not careless with your spells, 2 supplies + whatever you find is plenty.)

There's a lot of words ITT but not that much beef. The whole thing could be summarized in about three paragraphs. Also @glenn3e I do get the impression that your side isn't actually addressing the counterarguments our side is making. Namely, that the combination of short durations and limited resting in and of themselves eliminate rote pre-buffing as an efficient strategy, making the combat-only limitation unnecessary.

I would upvote everyone with a Polish accent. Just because.

You are assuming a system in which everyone's abilities use spell slots, which isn't the case in this game. Which buffs are you thinking of? Besides spells, I can only think of paladin auras (no strategic or tactical cost to start with) and Divine Radiance. Thing is, Divine Radiance isn't just a buff: it also applies Burn damage to enemies within range. Especially when fighting Vessels the timing makes a lot of difference: it's by no means automatically the best strategy to hit it first thing rather than waiting for as many of the nasties to be in range as possible. The duration is also short enough that you're wasting a lot of its potential if you apply it before everybody is actually attacking.

Pre-buffing is too a negative. It costs a spell slot, maybe more. It's a strategic decision. I don't pre-buff all that much in BG2 precisely for this reason, except for the utterly no-brainer super-long-duration ones which really should have been nerfed from hours to rounds (Stoneskin, Iron Skins, Circle of Protection against Evil, maybe a few more). Again: nerfing the durations (=increasing the strategic cost of using the spell) and limiting resting (=making the strategic cost count) would have been quite enough to eliminate rote pre-buffing. If pre-buffing was allowed, my spell use pattern would not change all that much; only the order in which I use them.

First off, (2), yeah, non-combat is not viable. Some combat is avoidable, but most of it is not, and if you don't enjoy combat, then you will have a VERY hard time enjoying the game. In re (1), yeah, the game does require both micromanagement and an understanding of the mechanics to be enjoyable. Select all + auto-attack = party wipe. I've found it immensely rewarding though to have a fight go from a TPW to barely getting my armor scuffed simply by changing my tactics. If you're willing to put in some work, I'd be happy to give you a few pointers.

Not necessarily. I played through a good stretch of the first part of the game with PC Wiz + Edér + Aloth. It was among my easier runs. With Edér tanking (keeping the nasties off the wizards), and Aloth + PC tag-teaming the opposition with debuff + DD combos, fights were over pretty quickly. I did not use an unreasonable number of spells: for the easier fights one debuff plus the four Arcane Assaults plus Edér did the job, for the medium ones, maybe add one or even two DD spells, and then open up for the hard ones. I did not have to backtrack for supplies, and I think I may have hit 0 camping supplies once in the Eothas temple which I did pretty early. I also had Edér equipped with two weapon sets, one for tanking, one for hurting, and switched to the hurty weapon when the thaumaturgic duo had softened them up. You do burn up the wizard spells fast if you spam DD and don't use the Arcane Assaults. But that's just a wasteful way to play.

@Shdy314 Actually they had nerfed the arquebus for the release version. It used to be even more powerful than the arbalest. It needed a nerf but I guess they just forgot about the arbalest when applying it. (They might have over-nerfed it though; currently the blunderbuss is all-round better, and it kinda doesn't make sense to me that ruffians get better firearms than soldiers, and two of them to boot. I've been hoping they'd give it a mild buff. But then I'm partial to musketeers... :sigh:)

Yeh trap/lock XP is dumb.

If I had known how this would turn out, I would've backed at the silver tier, easily. Maybe even gold. I only backed at the level I did because I wasn't all that keen on what appeared to be another Western traditional fantasy game, and I had a preference for turn-based over RTwP. At the time I wasn't even a huge IE games fan. I was a huge Planescape: Torment fan but I loved that for the story, not for the mechanics; I had thought IWD was OK, BG1 was dull as dishwater, and BG2 about as much fun as being repeatedly punched in the kidneys. Over the course of these two years I've discovered the joy of IWD and BG2 at least, which counts as another huge side benefit. So yeah, I've gotten way more than my money's worth, and I will make up for my mistake with Obsidian's next Kickstarter, should they choose to do one.

@NathanH Josh changed a lot of stuff based on BB feedback. He's nowhere near as dogmatic as many people make him out to be. He stuck to his guns on a couple of points, but for most of those there was at least a large minority opinion backing his view. Like this question on this thread for example. There is a tendency for people to throw hissy fits when they don't get their way, including calling Josh names. I imagine he's grown an extremely thick skin by now.

They're still not so long you can stack them so much it becomes tedious. Plus, with the limited resting, the opportunity cost of spending one or more spells on them is still pretty hefty. I've said it before, but here it is again: I agree with Josh's diagnosis -- that the way you could stack prebuffs to absurd levels, then steamroll fights, then rest in the IE games did not incentivize fun or smart or engaging gameplay. However I do think he threw the baby out with the bath water here: nerfing the durations to be measured in seconds rather than hours plus limiting resting was sufficient to fix that problem. Adding combat-only limitations to buffs on top of that is just irritating. Not a huge irritation by any means, but still an irritation.

Buff durations are so short I don't think there are no-brainer pre-buffs.

Having no rest limitations promotes lazy strategies. You find one high-level spell that works most of the time, you end up playing by spamming it every battle and resting every time after it. If you have to ration your more powerful abilities, it forces you to think about how to use what you have more efficiently and intelligently, which ends up being more fun. Wizards have two Arcane Assaults. You can take Grimoire Slam or Blast and then develop it. Most non-boss-fights barely last long enough that a wizard has time to use those two Arcane Assaults and maybe fire off one spell. If in addition you're auto-attacking once or twice, that's a long way from "all the time." And, if your fights last much longer than that, then you're not playing very well. The solution isn't to remove rest limitations and rest-spam yourself to oblivion: the solution is to play better.

Yes I've played a wizard.