PrimeJunta

On another note... where's the base Accuracy for each class listed? I can't find it in character creation anywhere at least.

Gotta mention SoZ at this point. Rangers really came into their own in that.

OK. Must have been my misreading it then. Let's hope it's saner in the next build.

Yeah, I remember that. I read it differently than you though: I didn't see it as a reference to the difficulty settings, but the overall difficulty. I.e., I assumed that they'd start by making Normal relatively hard, and then adjusting that down near the end. It could be I read it wrong though. It could also be that they've changed their mind somewhere along the line. Be as it may, after trying Hard, I get the very strong impression that nobody's been tuning that. If they have, I worry for their sanity. I usually play these things on Hard or, lately, Very Hard or the equivalent, and Normal on 392 feels more or less like that.

This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that in 392, Hard is out of whack. If you're regularly meeting beasties that entirely ignore armor thereby making it more advantagous to fight them naked, well, that's a problem. TBH I'm a little suprised it's this hard to get armor right. It's not like it's being done the first time. From where I'm at, the problem is that now we're dealing entirely with flat numbers. If armor gives DR 10, any attack which has DR bypass 10 or more will make it 100% useless. If we were combining a flat number + percentage this problem would not arise. You could have armor DR as a flat number (because easy to understand) and DR bypass as a percentage. If those hard-punching beetles had DR bypass 50%, it would reduce the effectiveness of armor by that much but never make it completely pointless.

:can't tell if sarcastic: I'm all for more classes at least... if you have classes at all, that is. All of the ones in P:E are between "competent" and "excellent" so far IMO, except the ranger. Thing is, IMO classes should be clearly differentiated. They should have unique strengths, or unique ways of doing things, or both. This is clearly exactly what Josh has attempted here. The problem is that in attempting to make the ranger clearly different from the monk, fighter, barbarian, paladin, and rogue, he's ended up with a gimmick that doesn't really work all that well. I.e. I think @Nakia has a point. P:E has six "combat" classes and five "caster" classes. It's clearly easier to differentiate five classes than six, all the more so because magic inherently leaves more room to do things imaginatively than finding yet new ways to hit things, shoot things, and stay standing while others are attempting to do it to you. Maybe the Ranger really is redundant. If that's the case, then I think it'd be better to make like DnD and embrace it. Remove the gimmicks and just make it a slightly different type of fighter/rogue that people will pick for the flavor rather than the mechanics. As an aside, I can think of one way of making a differentiated ranger that at least pays lip service to some editions of DnD. Make it a light ranged/fast fighter with limited priest-style spellcasting, but single-target rather than area-effect. And a summonable animal companion, if you insist.

@Sensuki Why do you think the game should be tuned for Hard rather than Normal? Naively I'd expect it to be tuned for Normal, since being the default that's what most players will use.

@Nakia Something like that. In this context though the morality and social function are kind of irrelevant; the problem is that the class doesn't really work mechanically. When I think "ranger" I think of a solitary or small-unit warrior trained for forward scouting or special operations deep in enemy territory. He knows how to survive in the wild, how to blend into the local population, how to stay out of sight, and how to kill quickly and discreetly when necessary. Trouble is, there isn't much call for those "survival in the wild" skills since food, cold, water, and orienteering aren't gameplay elements in this type of thing. Take that out and what's left is, mechanically speaking, a rogue, perhaps with a little less aptitude for lockpicking and pickpocketing than you'd usually expect. You can build just this with the P:E rogue, and in most editions of DnD the ranger is, basically, a rogue who can fight but can't pick locks or pockets. So what's left for the actual ranger class? A pet, which is ATM mostly an annoyance -- I'd rather not have it at all and just be a seriously badass archer.

Yes, it has. That's one reason I brought it up; I was hoping they had addressed it by now. It feels like such a waste with all those Exceptional sabers... Will try a rogue rocking stilettos with Vulnerable Attack next.

Mm... no. Not for this type of game. It would work great for a stealth game. You could even make a stealth RPG. But not for an IE-esque game. Dungeon crawling in an IE-esque game is all about clearing the thing room by room. Making "raising the alarm" an effective lose condition would totally change the feelz. I'd rather continue to suspend my disbelief on this score.

If you cancel the action before the spell is cast, it doesn't count. -- I was thinking of Canceling the rush-forward though, not the casting; most of the time the problem is that they want to rush into an existing spell effect anyway.

My experience is the exact opposite. Sure, the rogue gets lots of shots off with her hunting bow but they're all graze for 0.5 damage. Whereas when you get a shot off with the blunderbuss, it's murderous. Firearms and the arbalest dominate to the point of making bows almost useless except against the squishiest of enemies. If they were as fast as bows, there would be no point using anything else at all; you could just mow down anything with a couple of concerted volleys.

Hard. That explains it. Hard is... unreasonable in this build. I tried it, and while it's not overwhelming it's not much fun; you can't get anywhere much without constant pausing. I've been playing the "harder" builds on Normal, and on Normal, IMO this one feels very good.

@Falkon Swiftblade I like those ideas. They would all be better than the current system. If they just had a more or less "ordinary" companion perhaps with some special features mostly for flavor, all they'd need to do to balance it is adjust its damage output and hit points/DR. This system is just annoyingly gimmicky.

Tried rolling my own. It was... promising but not conclusive. I think a party with two priests + two fighters + one rogue + one druid would be a bit of a steamroller. Druid for area debuffs, the two priests layering buffs, and the buffed fighters + rogue making mincemeat of the debuffed enemies. With the BB party composition, two priests is too much though. I'll try a second time later, hiring another Adventurer's Hall fighter to get close to that composition. The wizard isn't as good at area debuffs as the druid, but he does have Slicken, so...

By UI issue I was thinking about the divider bar in the portrait. I honestly thought it was a rendering/graphics glitch; it looks like a band of "static" in it. Now that I know what it is it's no problem of course, but I think they ought to change the appearance somewhat.

FWIW I made a somewhat stealthy party in my latest round with the BB, and it does make the Skaen temple at least a lot easier. You can get everyone in position, then open up with a volley + backstab from the rogue. Took several groups of Skaenites down virtually without a scratch and without expending spells.

:skims through thread: Serious business.

Heh, immobilizing them makes fireballs way more effective here too. That's because immobilizing them debuffs their Reflex, and fireballs attack Reflex...

OTOH chanters have fairly huge summoning abilties. Can't see why you couldn't give one to wizards. If you want to add a cost to it, make it drain Endurance when active... or, hell, make it share the caster's health pool, like the Ranger's animal companion. I think they're a bit bugged though. My skeletons either didn't appear, or just stood around doing nothing much other than following the party. They also usually appeared rather too late to make much of a difference. At least in a previous build, the cipher's Charm ability was a fairly massive game-changer though.

I think the rationale is that inventory management is a drag, and more people want to be rid of it than enjoy it. I certainly fall into that camp. The quick items plus weapon sets are enough inventory planning for my blood. I really don't enjoy shunting things back and forth between the inventory and the stash. I know there are people who consider that sort of thing an important part of the old-skool RPG experience, but I ain't one of them. I hate inventory Tetris in all of its forms and always did. Either give me unlimited, self-sorting inventory, or limit it to only items I could realistically carry.

There is a little devil of a roleplayer and a GM inside of me that thinks that this would be an excellent idea, but in actual play, it would probably be pretty horrible. Yeh, I'm pretty sure it would. Realistically, unless you somehow managed really quick stealth kills, the entire Skaen temple should get alerted to your presence pretty early on. You would have a lot of those Deep Wounds archers sticking pins into you...

@Luridis good point. The fighter's effectiveness is modified a lot by equipment since he gets those specialization/mastery feats. I just had one with the right specializations and an Exceptional estoc, which did turn him into a bit of a deathlord -- I suspect the monk would be lagging. Consider that objection withdrawn, for now.

It's not an IE game, obviously. It doesn't run on the Infinity Engine, and it's not D&D. It is, however, closer to the IE games than anything since then that I've played, by a wide margin. The visuals, the dialog, the overall "feel" of most classes, the "feel" of selecting characters, issuing commands, and seeing how they respond, the breadth of spells, talents, and abilities, the "feel" of the PC races... they are all very IE-ey to me. The game has a "crispness" to it that, for example, the NWN's and their successors lack, and it's nothing like the DA mechanics involving cooldowns, aggro, and ability spamming. Many of the innovations are also material improvements as far as I'm concerned. The cipher and the chanter are way-cool classes with no D&D equivalent, making the spellcasting classes much more clearly differentiated. I know opinion is divided on it, but I like the way engagement works now: it effectively stabilizes the battlefield, making it possible to think of things in terms of flanking movements and whatnot; also AoE spell effects are much less chaotic in such an environment.

Just noticed they made the Stash available everywhere. Joy! @KaineParker Which difficulty are you playing on?