PrimeJunta

Too bad about the change to Wounds. I like they way they work now, a lot. But we'll see how it plays out in practice. It does seem to mean that monk specials are now a limited resource as they're directly coupled to Health loss. :/

It wouldn't be hard to fix. Just buff Frenzy and some of the other per-encounter abilities. Wouldn't require any drastic re-engineering.

I choose Lassie!

So you want fireballs to be more or less equally effective, regardless of the defenses of the foes targeting. And that's the opposite of dumbing down. Oh-kay. Well, that's... kind of what pause is for. You won't be able to do it, even with pause. Because of differences in action and recovery times, you won't be able to get your desired shoves to fire at the same time. It would work in a turn-based game, or one that's turn-based under the hood so all turns run in the same rhythm, but not true real-time. Not even in the IE games where each toon has its own turn timer. (Or, if you want to get technical about it, to coordinate your pushes you'd have to get your pushers in position, wait for all of their recovery timers to run out, pause, and issue commands. Only, by then the foes will have moved or done something different which means the situation won't be the same anymore. Can't be done in a RT game, with or without pause.)

That is unfair. The chanter and cipher are both cool new takes on arcane casting, and their coolness has nothing to do with their DPS potential. The wizard is duller than it should be, but the reason isn't some "value system" you're attributing to J.E. Sawyer.

I don't know, but I very much doubt Hoppy the antelope contributed much. Also: BB Rogue was gimped with a weaker weapon and talents not optimized for ranged combat, so she wasn't really playing to her strengths. Anyway, what of it? The ranger's only distinguishing characteristic is that it's supposed to excel at doing damage at range. That's what it's for. If a rogue or fighter equipped with a bow beats it at its own game, then the ranger is a squib.

Yes, powers. I always get those two mixed up. Sorry.

Any debuff of Reflex or buff of Accuracy will have the same effect. Immobilization was just one example. You can also build a wizard with high Perception to start with. I.e., it's hard not to read what you said here as a straight-out demand for dumbing down, i.e., making intelligent use of your abilities less important. Good luck coordinating that in real time. There are spells and abilities that push enemies around by the way, and they're highly useful. (The ones that work as intended anyway.) Have you checked out the spells/abilities in the BB that do exactly that? If they're not working for you, why not?

Kiiinda. My main problem is that Slicken is such a win button. If they nerfed that, and made some foes less susceptible to it than others, it'd shake things up a quite a bit. I've played through the BB a couple of times resolved not to use Slicken, and it forced me to use more variety with tactics, making the encounters more fun generally. The encounters themselves are actually pretty varied for such a small slice of the game; there are those damn beetles and spiders, of course, but there's also an adventuring party, a mini-boss plus minions, temple guards with priestly magic, spirits with some rather scary specials, and so on. Still, compared to BG1 where the encounters were almost exclusively "aggro them with armored priest, then shoot them to death" or "neutralize enemy spellcasters and get your 'win this encounter' spell out first;" this is actually pretty damn varied. More IWD than BG1. BG2 and its dance of spells and counters isn't a fair comparison since it's higher level.

I'm sure it can be modded in. I'm also fairly sure that if you gave the game a fair shot at Easy, trying to understand how it actually works, you'd end up finding it more fun than cheesing fights by spamming AoE's into melee.

@nipsen, a quite a few of your imaginative abilities are already in. There is teleportation in a number of forms, there is a soul channel to a tank, there are stun-type spells/abilities that change the entire encounter, there are buffs that cause power-balance changes, there are spells that damage foes and help friends (not sure if they're freeze/fire though), several types of seals although nothing as drastic as some of the high-level DnD ones (maybe at higher spell levels, though?), there are at least some teleport abilities that work on enemies, and there is damage reflection. No cover or barriers though (those could be difficult to do because of pathfinding issues, I believe).

Another note on the barbarian. I tried to make an archetypical carnage barb and play him like the tooltips recommend: if there's a group, wade in and carnage away. Gave him Medreth's old greatsword since he didn't need it anymore. Uh, no. He got roflstomped both by beetles and, later, by spiders. If the intent is that you Wild Sprint into the middle of a group and Carnage away while Frenzying... well, that's not working right now. Not even with a relatively squishy swarm.

I like the idea of a falcon-equipped ranger. You could assign it a target which would qualify for the companion-related ranger talents. Its attacks would do no damage but apply a mild debuff (it's bound to be harder to fight if you've got a falcon swooping at you), and it could have some stronger single-target per-encounter debuffs. You could even name him Boo and tell him to go for the eyes. How's that for an IE games homage?

True, but there's still such a thing as "really not good enough." I compared a ranger with ranged rogue and ranged fighter builds. Both of the latter had significantly higher damage output, and since damage is the only thing the ranger does, that's... not good. At the very least the dedicated ranged class should be more lethal with a bow than melee classes rebuilt for range. It was also much higher-maintenance because I had to baby the animal companion. Comparison protocol: Medreth to get the war bow, ranged build pumping Mig, Per, Dex and dumping Con, taking Weapon Focus: Adventurer and the best ranged talents available AFAICT, then dragon egg quest, then fight through drakes to get back to Dyrford. Then look at statistics. Rogue and fighter are on par with each other, more or less, ranger is a ways behind both. Then, to confirm, I did another ranger, named him Park, equipped BB Rogue with a war bow (Ranger still got Medreth's superior one) and gave her Penetrating Shot on levelup. BB Rogue beat Ranger Park in damage output by a significant margin, and she wasn't even built ground-up for it.

A few more notes on the cipher. I tried another one, and the problem really is that some of the invocations don't appear to work. I ended up using the few that I knew did and were effective: the one that paralyzes one target and gets others Stuck, Treasonous Whispers, and Puppet Master. And I think Eyestrike once or twice just to try it. I.e. the invocations need balancing so that they're more or less equally attractive. There's nothing wrong with them in principle though.

1.8 GB is the backer beta, which apparently represents about 5% of the content. The full game at this resolution is going to be about 25GB. That's not even the bottleneck, though, the problem is that rendering the damn things for 4K would take too long for their content production pipeline. Anyway, you're wasting your time arguing this with me, I'm just relaying what Josh said. If you don't like it, take it up with him.

BB Wizard's spell selection is suboptimal, and the ones he has in his grimoire are even... more suboptimal. My playthrough with two wizards in the party firing combos was fairly devastating. Stop them with Slicken or Web, then nuke them with AoE's. A wizard+druid combo works really well too, as they have debuffs which complement each other's attack spells. It's not as interesting as it could be, but it's certainly not weak, slow, or useless.

I haven't noticed it elsewhere when getting knocked out. I don't have FPS displayed on-screen though; it's quite possible it drops, just not so much it bothers me.

And you can make one that looks just like Darth Maul.

BTW I finally saw that framerate slowdown. Happened in Korgrak's cave. I was fighting the spiders. I had been careless and was getting swarmed by both groups of spiders near the entrance. I had cast the L3 priest spell that buffs defenses in a wide area, then someone got knocked out. Boom, framerate dropped through the floor. As bad as PS:T with some of its spell FX. I eventually recovered and beat them and the framerate picked up too, but yeah, that was ugly. I think it must be triggered by a combination of things -- lots of sprites, FX, and getting knocked out -- as I haven't noticed it with any of these things in isolation.

Haha, suicide paladin. Cool. I somehow got mine out of the loop when I tried a paladin again just now too.

There's random and there's random, though. I think some randomness within categories is fun and adds interest especially to replays, but if it's completely random and it's not a roguelike, not so much. Legendary items should be hand-placed, but having cool stuff turn up semi-randomly can be fun too.

Annnd, the final class. Paladin - 1 I liked this "specialist" fighter more than the barbarian. The Exhortations are actually tactically useful, especially to get yourself out of trouble, and the Auras are nice. I made a slightly-against-type paladin, with Noble weapon focus, wielding a mace with no shield (because there wasn't a Fine or better rapier available) and Excellent Leather armor. Zealous Focus and Flames of Devotion. Flames of Devotion didn't appear to work quite as they should. Zealous Focus clearly made fights easier overall although it's hard to pinpoint the exact effect. Picking between a fighter and a paladin is a bit hard actually. Both have a quite a lot of versatility within the class (damage, durability, how good they are at range etc), and both have distinct advantages -- the fighter's all-around good at fighting, whereas the paladin is a subtle "force amplifier" for the entire party. I like exploring the options I have for both. Damage output with this build was very good although it's slightly hard to tell because I goofed up and got knocked out in the dragon egg fight, so I didn't rack up any damage from that one and fell behind BB Rogue. The paladin perhaps suffers from the same problem as the barbarian -- too many melee classes which makes playing any of them rather similar. The rogue is the best differentiated among fighter-rogue-barbarian-paladin; being more fragile and having those special stealth/evasion abilities, they do play materially differently. The others you basically park in the front line and let them do their thing. Perhaps having all those classes as stretch goals was something of a mistake: it would have been possible to build everything the barbarian, rogue, and paladin do into a single fighter class as optional talents, never even mind the ranger. Edit: Zealous Focus seems like a bit of a no-brainer as auras go. To be honest I didn't try the others, but they didn't look all that attractive. Partly this is because armor is kind of broken right now, with enemies that have >10 DR bypass and doing 40-50 damage, having +3 DR feels pretty wimpy. Will revisit once that's sorted out.

A melee ranger would be ghastly, since it's bad even playing to its strengths. I built a ranged fighter and rogue, and both were highly effective. A pure blackpowder build isn't really viable, since guns have such slow reload times. They're mighty effective as starting volleys though. So a barbarian who opens up with a pistol, arquebus, or blunderbuss and then switches to melee would work perfectly well. Your duelist paladin should work fine. In fact I think I'll try one next.