PrimeJunta

I'm fairly confident I'll enjoy P:E a lot more than BG2 at least.

How would you design an encounter that doesn't allow you to do that?

Content density has nothing to do with the number of peasants wandering around y'know.

Not fixed in BB392 at least. Inventory paperdolls and character creation models are still upscaled rather than rendered at native rez. Default max zoom on the Mac build is past native rez; on the Windows build it is at native rez (i.e. pulled out further).

I wasn't making an argument; I was expressing a preference -- that mages be more of a potent threat than they are in BB392. Since you appear to agree, what exactly do your have your panties in a wad about again?

Currently armor is useless because of the out-of-whack damage that (some of) the enemies do. Stone Beetles have 10 DT bypass, which gives plate mail or fine brigandine a whopping 2 points DR. And they graze for, like, 15-20 points. That can be fixed by tuning and/or relatively minor mechanical adjustments (e.g. switch to percentage-based DR or DR bypass).

Do you prefer that they have no defenses against such things at all, like in P:E now?

In BG1 it is. In BG2 with spell triggers and contigencies it's not, if you don't get those down first. I bet my dad can beat up your dad though.

In BB392 Deflection really isn't worth all that much. I just tried making a fighter with maxed-out Deflection. Pumped INT, took all the feats that pump Defl. Got it well past 100. Then I had him and BB Fighter with much lower Defl engage a bunch of beetles. Both went down PDQ, and PC did not even last much longer than BB Fighter. The main problem is that the damn things bite so hard that even Grazes through heavy armor do a significant amount of hurt. The way the attack resolution works, there's no way to get your Defl so much higher than beetle Acc that they won't be scoring a lot of Grazes at least, which means you might as well have put the points into stats and talents that give more DPS. This is obviously not the design intention and I'm quite sure they'll adjust the numbers so there's more utility from Defl. The stat system will look a good deal different after that as well.

I can only judge by what's in the BB, and what I know about the mechanics. Based on that, mages have no defense against a ranged firearms volley. Whether mage encounters in BG2 were a joke or not is entirely immaterial. Or do you think P:E should replicate BG2's flaws as well as its strengths?

And therefore, it is perfectly fine that in P:E all you need is vanilla ranged weapons. Is that what you're saying?

It has 8 projectiles though. If it also has the same accuracy as a single-projectile weapon then it's seriously badass.

Josh owns a mace though.

@Sensuki You know, you're right. Before we had one attribute that's too strong, now we have two attributes that are two weak. That is a step backwards.

If you say so. I just think it's a good idea that Accuracy is gone since it's so absolutely crucial to everything making PER such a must-have stat. I don't think there really is any way around that, other than re-engineering the graze/hit/crit system which I'm pretty sure would cause all kinds of balancing problems across the board as it's a much deeper mechanical change. You're right that it does make Talents that buff Accuracy more valuable, but the solution to that is to make the alternative Talents that much more appealing. That's easy to do by tweaking durations and such. It's a lot harder to balance other attributes against Accuracy without either nerfing PER completely or throwing the others similarly out of whack.

This is an improvement IMO. MIG, CON, DEX, and INT are all good. PER and RES seem a little weak though.

Different stream. Yours was the BB, this is the real deal.

There was some pretty funny party banter too.

http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive Companions Josh is playing with: Edér, Kana Rua, Aloth, and Jesus. He almost got pwned by xaurips a while back there. They be nasty.

That sounds like a really cool battle.

Oh, BB Mage is fine. But that's just because we haven't seen too many enemies with ranged weapons, and the ones we have don't tend to target him particularly often. I was talking about enemy mages. They're ridiculously easy to kill.

@Enoch Yeh. Again: the coolest moments in a spell battle I had were in IWD when someone charmed a party member and I Dominated him right back, then someone did it again to someone else, and I used Hold Person to get him to stay put until it wore off. That was genuine back-and-forth, in-the-moment stuff which wouldn't have happened if I had just quick-loaded and pre-buffed with Freedom of Movement and Chaotic Commands (or something). I haven't had any moments like that in the BG2 spell battles. No back and forth. It's either quick victory or equally quick defeat. If it starts to go bad, I can only very very rarely turn it back around. Those high-level spells are just so immediately lethal or debilitating if they bite, on both sides. I would prefer a magic system that had more of that back-and-forth, rather than immunities that are either up or not. So no, I'm not really digging the mage battles, even if I've figured out how to beat them in a reasonable number of reloads.

We can both speculate on what "the community" wants and what the reaction will be once it's released. You however are stating that "the community demanded," past tense. It did no such thing. Your karma is about 500 for about 1000 posts. Mine is about 4000 for about 3000 posts. I'd say that if one of us wanted to claim that he speaks for "the community," my claim would be a good deal stronger than yours. And I'm not. I recognize that "the community" has a ton of divergent, often entirely incompatible preferences. Even your grognard sub-community differs on a number of points. Sensuki f.ex. doesn't care what the attributes mean, he just wants them to work mechanically, whereas Stun is really annoyed that Might means both magical and physical might. (Sorry if I got this particular point wrong, but you get my drift.)

Archangel, here's where you're wrong. "The community" did not demand they put in combat XP, make the attribute system more DnD-like and minmaxable, drop engagement, or put back hard counters. A number of individuals did so, all of whom don't even agree on these specifics. If you're wondering about the occasional acrimony here, at least I get a little ticked off when, for example, you make like you're speaking for "the community" and what it demanded.