PrimeJunta

@MC: Are you actually trying to understand the systems? Or are you just throwing your hands in the air and going "too complicated! too complicated!" 'Cuz I'm finding the combat enjoyable, varied, and challenging, and not at all like how you describe it. I think it's at least possible that if you did make the effort to read up on the systems, experiment with how they interact, and then attempt to apply them effectively, you too could find this fun. Basically it sounds to me like you're doing your best not to make this fun for you, despite claiming that you're trying to enjoy it. Start here: (1) How is an attack resolved? What determines damage and duration? (2) What are the defenses? (3) What are the status effects, and what are their effects on the defenses? (4) How do I apply the above knowledge to murder my enemies with verve and aplomb?

They fixed two broken spells, Slicken and Chill Fog. That's causing a lot of butthurt. They also bumped up damage on a bunch of others and made Curse of Blackened Sight foe-only, which for some reason the butthurt ones fail to notice.

@Kveldulf and others: I don't like hard restrictions on gear. That kind of "gamist nonsense" irritates me far more than, say, the recovery speed penalty in P:E. If I wanted to design something more realistic with a mechanical trade-off for armor, I'd add a strong in-combat fatigue mechanic. Moving or meleeing in heavier armor runs up your fatigue meter faster, which puts penalties on your actions. This can be offset by training (talents) or innate ability (stats), and fatigue can be suppressed or restored by spells and potions. Note that this would be different from the "strategic fatigue" in P:E which forces periodic rests.

@MC You're not very consistent with your criticisms, you know that? Like here, you fault P:E for "gamist nonsense" but at the same time you give AD&D a pass when it dictates that rogues can't shoot longbows, wizards can't shoot crossbows, clerics can't use swords, lets you rest every thirty seconds, and lets thieves hide in shadows in bright daylight. All of that is "gamist nonsense" as well. There's no reason for it except gamist reasons. I.e. a lot of what you say doesn't look like legitimate, actual critique at all; it's instead just knee-jerk conservatism and an unwillingness to understand how this system works. I'd have a lot more respect for your opinions if you applied your standards consistently and made a genuine effort to figure out how and why things are like they are. As to the ToB endgame, well, the endgame's always the endgame, isn't it? That's when the general rules go out the window and the games throws something at you that you have to pull out all the stops to beat. And of course there are lots of fights in BG2 which don't need a tank or can't be tanked, e.g. the caster-, beholder-, illithid-, and lich-fights. That does not mean that tanking isn't crucial to success in the fights where you're facing hard-hitting melee enemies.

:shrug: You don't have to like it, but it's just not true that there's no reason to wear plate armor. Edit: Also, it's not like there weren't tanks in the IE games. Maxing out AC on one of your characters and getting enemies to aggro him is pretty crucial to IE game tactics as well. Whether that tank also does damage or not is optional; fighters do damage but a cleric or druid will make a perfectly good tank as well, and they won't be all that good a that.

Tanks. They don't need to do any damage, they just need to sit there, hold enemies down, and get pummelled as you use your DPS characters to scrape them off him.

Hehe, yeah, a Path of the Not Quite Damned would be good, with the massive monster groups of PotD but without the stat adjustments.

Hard. The way PotD screws with the enemy stats is off-putting to me for some reason. I have a hunch the increased enemy ACC may throw a bunch of systems out of whack, especially the armor: if hard-hitting enemies are critting a lot more, no armor's gonna stop that.

@Odd Hermit I've mostly been playing a DPS rogue and have found that highly rewarding. Sneak Attack synergises really well with the other classes -- slap a Curse of Blackened Sight or Eyestrike on a group, and the rogue will chew through it like a hot knife through butter. It's also not that hard to keep him out of trouble. Also agree about armor scaling. I didn't want to bring that up here because it's not relevant for the basic issue. In the early BB's, armor was a combination of DR + DT, where DR was a percentage reduction of damage and DT was what DR is now. It was mechanically much better IMO but apparently people found it too hard to understand so they changed it. That was a mistake IMO. From where I'm at, there are two kinds of players -- intuitive/empiricists and theorycrafters. The intuitive/empiricists experiment with a bunch of stuff and go with how well it works in practice; the theorycrafters crunch through the numbers to find the optimal solution. I believe the theorycrafters would've crunched through the somewhat more complex armor mechanic just as well, and the intuitives would've figured it out from experience. I kinda wish they'd change it back, but it's too late now.

Yeah I was actually wondering about that a little. It'd be a nice addition and another hat-tip to the IE games which inspired this.

@Emperor Pen Good points. I haven't played with the barb or monk much; just a couple run-throughs in the BB. They probably will have a use for medium armor. Count them as special cases mitigating the basic problem with the armor system.

FWIW I haven't encountered any serious bugs. The ones I've personally noticed are occasionally inappropriate combat barks, invisible cloaks (OS X), and some UI visual glitches related to Kana's extra weapon slot. And yes I did check everybody's stats and no they were not inflated. Although when I read about those bugs I did start taking extra care not to double-click to equip or save in an area where I recruited someone.

I think the counter-arguments are all technical. It's easier to track as a game state. From a gameplay POV I don't think there is an argument, as per-character stealth becomes party stealth if you select all and stealth them.

What, per-character stealth is in this patch already??? Where did you get that?

Over the course of the development and then the beta, there was a lot of bellyaching about Josh's stated intent to eliminate "trap choices" in the game, to make light and medium armor viable, and to make all or most weapons attractive for at least some characters, without having hard restrictions à la AD&D armor and weapon restrictions. Many feared this would make every class, weapon, spell, and ability play effectively the same. I thought I'd jot down some of my thoughts on how the game is doing relative to this design intent in a few specific areas. (Usual disclaimers apply: I'm having a huuuuuuuuge amount of fun with this, I think Obsidian hit it out of the park, it is the best cRPG of the decade hands down etc etc, so do not construe this as hating on the game because that I'm not doing. And yeah the bugs need fixing, and perhaps Obsidian's coding practices need some improvement so they don't make so many in the first place before it gets to QA.) Classes Success. Yay for the classes. There's a good deal of griping about how wizards have been nerfed and whatever, but at least I'm finding all the classes useful and fun to play. I hated the Ranger during the BB, but am quite liking it now, to the point that I'm thinking of rolling one at some point. We can argue all day about which one makes a better tank, the fighter or the paladin, or if druids are OP relative to wizards, if chanter Invocations come too late (yes they do, especially if you're using the higher-level chants), and so on, but all in all I'm really, really happy about the classes. They're as varied as they can be with 11(!) of them, they're all effective, and they're all fun. (Okay, some I don't personally find as much fun as others, e.g. the barbarian, but that's due to personal preference.) Stats Fail. The intent was to reduce the incentive to minmax and make every ability useful for every class. The outcome is that now there are pretty much two optimal stat distributions -- one for DPS characters, another for tanks. DPS takes MIG, INT, DEX, tanks take CON, PER, RES. Support characters and some gimmick hybrid builds can tweak these a little, but that's about it. I.e. it ended up in the same minmaxing place AD&D started from, except that now there's no optimal stat distribution for each class, but for each build. With all the iterations the stats have gone through, by now I'm kinda convinced that a six-stat system is just plain bad. There's no way to make one that's at the same time intuitive, non-minmaxy, and genuinely impactful. As it is it doesn't really bother me but considering all the angst the discussion caused, they might as well have gone with STR-CON-DEX-INT-WIS-CHA and left it at that. Armor Qualified fail. I'm honestly finding no use for light or medium armor, once I get to the point I have the resources to genuinely choose what to wear. I mean of course wearing it isn't unviable, but mechanically it's really simple -- Edér and Kana (my off-tank) get the heaviest armor available, everybody else wears one of those snazzy outfits you can get by murdering backer NPC's. However, since the armor restrictions have been removed, there is slightly more scope for tactical variation; I have been in a situation where Edér's been so badly beat up I've temporarily switched Sagani to the front line in heavy armor. Also, because of the speed penalty, at least it's not "always wear the heaviest armor," but "tanks wears heaviest armor, everybody else wears nothing." However: I think this may be a learning curve thing. If you're unfamiliar with the mechanics and haven't yet figured out how to keep your squishies out of trouble, light/medium armor does give a bit more margin for error. I do not find the trade-off worthwhile. This is a bit of a shame as the armor models look really cool. The only way I can think of to mitigate this would be to sprinkle in more unique armors with attractive side effects so your off-tanks might want to wear them despite the speed penalty, or put in higher-tier lighter armors first, so they'd become the best choices. The expanded AoE Aloth's armor gives is so useful I've kept him wearing it, for example. Weapons Success. This is largely thanks to the Weapon Focus groupings. Each of the groups has one or more really, genuinely attractive choices, and after you've picked one, all the other weapons in that group become interesting. After that, it's all up to the unique item properties and finding the right character to use them. It's not perfect but it's really very good. Also the special properties in different weapons are highly interesting when combined with different character roles. In the early game, having Edér wield two hatchets for the extra DEFL and the benefits of dual-wielding is interesting for example. Needs a bit of tuning of course, but it really has worked. I've experimented with most of the weapon groups and have found all of them satisfying and varied. Talents and Abilities Partial success. On the plus side, there are enough talents and abilities and they're varied enough that you really can skew builds in different ways. Rogues can become straight-up damage dealers, or focused backstabbers, or gunners, or ranged death-dealers. Wizards can focus on spellcasting or improve their pew-pew-pew. Durance can become a competent gunner or a pure dedicated supporter. However, many of the talents are just... not very good. Bear's Fortitude? Also some of them combine in uncomfortable ways, Backstab for example is next to useless before you get Shadowing Beyond, which really isn't that great for a 2/rest talent. (Should be 1/encounter IMO; there would still be a reason to pick Escape also as that'd let you duck out of trouble twice per encounter.) And, conversely, some of the talents are fairly obviously much more useful than the alternatives -- Flames of Devotion as opposed to Lay On Hands, for example. This could be fixed by tuning: turning some of the weaker per-rests into per-encounters or increasing the number of uses (turning Lay On Hands into a small-radius area heal would make it attractive, for example).

@Daemonjax As others have pointed out before: solo notwithstanding, if you're constantly trekking back for supplies, you should adjust your tactics (or turn down the difficulty). At least on Hard I barely ever need to buy supplies, and I haven't had to trek back for them once. Resource management is a big part of the fun in this type of game, and effectively eliminating it makes the game a great deal shallower. Being at full power whenever you want makes all battles play the same. Having to ration your resources makes them different. I.e., I wouldn't really care if camping supplies cost 1000 copper on Hard, both because 1000 copper is pocket change pretty quickly and because I don't actually need to buy them.

@Stun: How are you playing your wizard? 'Cuz I'm finding Aloth (plus one Chapter 1 trial run with a PC wizard) more than competent, and I haven't been abusing Slicken or Chill Fog (didn't even notice the latter is foe-only). Fan of Flames, Curse of Blackened Sight, Reveal Vulnerabilities, and Wall of Fire have saved my bacon more than once. And at least Curse of Blackened Sight is now way more powerful.

Yeah, there is an action queue. Also ranged characters do (usually) auto-attack.

There's plenty of scrolls in P:E as well. And you can make more.

1. Either use AoE spells in the opening from stealth, or move someone forward you figure they'll attack and target pre-emptively based on that, or wait until your front line has engaged and the battlefield has stabilized before using them. 2. Take control of your friendlies and keep them out of the AoE. Pause if they start to move between the time you've started casting and the spell's gone off, and issue new orders. Also make use of the "no FF" fringes. 3. This is a special ability which makes fights with them different from other fights. You have to use different tactics to beat them. It's the kind of thing that makes encounters more varied and interesting. It would be dull if a single tactic beat every encounter. 4. Oh? Mine usually engage and auto-attack. 5. Yep, they do. Pathing in combat is easily blocked. This is annoying and I hope it'll be improved in future patches. Solution is the same as to 2: if they start doing that, take control and issue new orders. 6. Only if you're casting from too far. Pay attention to the cursor. If it turns into the walk icon, it means you're out of range and they'll move. This may take them into melee. If this happens, take control and issue a different order. 7. Take control and issue them different pathing orders. Avoiding hostile AoE's was not a feature in the IE games, and it's not a feature here. The reason is that this would eliminate a whole range of tactics based on intentional FF: e.g. buff your tank to near-immunity to fire, have him pin down the enemies, and then firebomb the bejeezus out if the area.

Eyestrike, Mental Binding, that one level 1 ability that does Raw damage and inflicts knockdown behind the first victim. Soul Shock isn't bad either. Eyestrike + Soul Shock combo is powerful.

Ah, you rest-spammed through them. Well, if that's your idea of fun...

Haven't played much BG1 I take it?

Oh? I like having characters that sit out the easier fights to be brought out when you need the big guns. Makes for variety.

No. In general, poking your nose somewhere without being invited is a bad idea. On the other hand, if you only follow the breadcrumb trail you will hit a serious difficulty spike fairly early on as well. Do the sidequests you're invited to do first and don't go out of your way to look for trouble unless you, well, want to look for trouble.