PrimeJunta

I think the spider teleport may be a bug (heh). If it's not, it needs a better animation, like them dropping from the ceiling on a thread or something. I like the burrowing beetles, it makes them more interesting. Edit: Thanks for the beetle-swatting tricks. I get the message, I clearly suck at swatting them. Will try again with the benefit of your wisdom.

I like a good sandbox game as much as the next guy, but that's a subgenre, not a measure of excellence.

Blunt weapons, mostly. With the beetles I mostly use spells etc for CC rather than direct damage (except Minoletta's Minor Missiles -- crush damage -- on the wood beetles to take them out fast). That may be a mistake in this case. I don't find the difficult to kill, only tedious. One issue probably is, though, that I generally play with only one melee character forward, and if I go straight to the beetles, I don't have any ranged blunt weapons. So it's poor BB Fighter with his hammer or morningstar dealing all the damage. BB Rogue is fairly useless, and the casters keep them immobilized and debuffed, or the party buffed. Haven't tried the corrode spells. I expect they would help.

The beetles will be a walk in the park when Poison DoT is fixed. The stone beetles still take too long to clobber IMO. Too high DT or too many hitpoints. (There are ways of course but IMO a wandering monster like that shouldn't take special tactics to defeat. Brute force should work decently.)

I'd say it's somewhat tedious some of the time. In addition to Sensuki's excellent suggestions above, I'll point out two things -- * Some of the enemies clearly have too high HP. Even if you're doing most things right, it takes a quite a while to whittle them down. This needs fixing. * There are bugs related to DT which make this much, much worse. They can give enemies (or you) ridiculous DT, which means that combat turns into graze, graze, graze. Like trying to dig a well with a toothpick. None of the reasons for the tedium are fundamental; they're a matter of fixing bugs and tuning values. But right now combat in the beta isn't all that much fun, except sometimes. (So sue me but I've enjoyed finding different ways of making spider pudding.)

I honestly don't have a problem with encounter/monster variety in the BB. Quite the contrary really. Fighting the same beetles over and over does get old fast, for sure, even if you mix in the occasional wolf, but there's really a lot of different things here and they do feel quite different. The wolves, lions, and drakes are kind of vanilla, but a game needs vanilla monsters too, otherwise the wack ones wouldn't stand out. Not everything has to have a badass mofo special attack. Not even the wolves. The big swarm of different-sized spiders in the ogre cave are cool. The ogre is cool, although needs more powah badly; kind of anticlimactic as it is. The totes-not-shambling-mounds are cool, with pretty neat specials of their own. The cultists are cool and varied too. The cult boss makes for a nice climactic fight, if you decide to fight him. Medreth and Syfre are both interesting-enough encounters, as are the adventurers next to the egg. (Need better AI of course.) The syllable-soup things in the syllable-soup dungeon are also different and cool. So is the totally-not-mindflayer. Short version is, I quite like the monsters and encounters, although the difficulty does need tuning -- the beetles and perhaps spiders down a notch, the ogre and a few others up a notch. No complaints there, honest.

I would add: go back to the way the fighter was originally envisioned. Quoting from memory: "When you see a fighter, the only thing you'll really know is that he can take a lot of punishment. You can make a ranged fighter, or a tanky fighter, or a damager fighter." Right now we only really have the tanky one. Fighters are no better than other classes at ranged or damager, and worse than many. That's just not right.

For me the main appeal of fantasy has always been the way it holds a mirror to our world. My favorite fantasy books and films capture something crucial about us, while putting it in a wild and weirdly different context that makes some salient features stand out, or shows them in a new light. Same for sci-fi.

I'm glad you asked. I have posted these elsewhere, but here goes again. I would like the option to build a ranged fighter, minus Mr. Bear. Ranger gameplay is cool, but it's not like a "pure" sniper. It's qualitatively different. I would also like the option to build a "musketeer" -- someone who opens up with a volley, then switches to melee. Currently this does not work very well, because the fighter's talents are so very melee-centric, while the rogue's are about mobility and sneak attack. My proposal would be to open up the fighter class altogether. The current tanky fighter is fine, but I would like to be able to make a damager build, a disabler build, or a ranged build also. Even more specifically -- (1) Equalize ranged and melee accuracy, and add talents that let us bump one or the other. Apply this to all classes. I honestly don't see any reason you'd want to railroad any class into specifically melee or specifically ranged. We the players should be making that choice. (2) Make all the currently built-in fighter talents optional, and let us pick the ones we want from a broader palette. (3) Add ranged talents. Reuse some from the ranger, add some especially martial ones -- Armor Piercing Shot (2/encounter, ignores DT), Knockdown Shot, Stunning Shot etc. (for ranged build) (4) Add a Power Attack - Cleave - Great Cleave style sequence (for damager build). (5) Add a modal talent that reduces Damage but boosts Interrupt. Separate one for melee and ranged if you like. (6) At higher levels, allow taking the rogue's Escape ability. Basically, I want to feel like I'm building a character, not taking a ready-made template and running with it. While this was more or less how AD&D fighters worked, there was a lot more scope for variation in DnD3, even with vanilla rules. I would really like something like that. I would also like to see the wizard and priest classes similarly broadened in scope. I'm missing enchantment and conjuration spells from the wizard. Perhaps they're not there because you felt it would overlap too much with the cipher (enchantment) and chanter (conjuration); I think that even so it would be worth it to have them. The cipher and chanter could still be the go-to enchanters and summoners, but the wizard should be able to do some of it. The beauty of the wizard in DnD always was the enormous variety of spells; the current selection of blasts and self-buffs with the occasional area debuff just feels one-dimensional. Finally... I think P:E is showing a tremendous amount of promise. Please take it to the finish. I've made a bet that you won't let release slip until 2015, but I will happily lose that wager if it means that sufficient variety and polish can get added. And... thank you for making this. (Edit: as an aside, I just started a BG1 playthrough. I'm still finding it a little dull, but I assure you, the fighter is more versatile in terms of combat role, even on level 1. Specifically in the way he can switch between ranged and melee, damager and tank.)

As an aside, if you're not going to read the descriptions (of the abilities, spells, attacks etc.), you're going to have a bad time. Even on Easy.

How you respond to the "all stats are valuable to all classes" incentive is up to you. One way is to spread everything evenly. Another way is to pump some and dump some, and then adjust your tactics to make maximum use of the pumped ones and mitigate the weaknesses from the dumped ones. As long as both approaches are viable, I'm a happy panda. I would certainly try several different stat distributions and strategies for different experiences.

I'm with MC and Indira on this one. Spiking challenge rules. Uniform challenge gets dull fast, regardless of whether it's uniformly easy or uniformly hard.

I've had this happen too. My theory is that it happens when an ability use is interrupted for whatever reason. E.g. you activate Crippling Strike, click on a target, and the target or rogue go down before the attack is made. Perhaps a plain ol' combat interrupt will even do this. In any case I have seen this on multiple occasions, also in the earlier build.

What's wrong with that? Both will work fine.

I've found a pretty good ex post facto rationalization for this. It keeps me from losing sleep, anyway. Might is a property of your soul. How it manifests depends on what you do with it. So you could have a mighty wizard who is not physically all that powerful, because he's channeled that might into spell power, whereas a mighty barbarian would have channeled it into bulging muscles. Gluteus Maximus the muscle wizard still casts with muscles. Just sayin'.

They should rename Petrified to Constipated. I would find that amusing.

Edit: @Sensuki you're absolutely right. Over and out.

"It would be better if it was worse?" Sorry, Indira, but that argument never made a lick of sense to me.

No point, as long as your discussion is proceeding from a faulty premise.

@Indira: Interestingly, he doesn't mention degenerate strategies there even once. Comment, Hiro? That's a valid objection. Suggest a broader sample. So far you've been going purely with assertions, backed up by nothing. Let's see your evidence. I do think it's valuable to correct misconceptions, even, perhaps especially widely-held ones. I believe your assertion that Josh is obsessed with degenerate gameplay is a misconception, and a harmful one at that -- for Josh personally of course, but also for the discussion here. I could point to several examples from this very thread where people assume as a matter of course that Josh decided on some particular feature because of this alleged obsession, for example, although there are other perfectly reasonable reasons he might have made those decisions. The whole discussion gets thrown on an unproductive track because of that. So yeah, I do think it would be valuable to debunk the myth of the degeneracy-obsessed Josh... always assuming that it is a myth, of course. Anyway, it's your turn. Let's see your evidence. Cherry-picking only the posts/articles/whatever over 15 years where he discusses the topic doesn't count; you can make almost anyone look obsessed by almost anything that way. Other than that, I'll be willing to look at any sample of what he's written. In other words, "put up or shut up."

Of course I have confirmation bias. Everybody does. However, I try to actively fight it, e.g. by looking at the actual data whenever possible. Of course I'm blind to it too; that's the nature of it, which is why I invited you to find an alternative way of settling the matter. You're more likely to catch my biases, just as I'm more likely to catch yours. Therefore we can help each other see more clearly. Edit: but I do believe the only reliable way of fighting biases is to look at the facts as far as they are known. In this case it's easy, sine we have Josh's full posting record that we can browse at our leisure. If he really is obsessed about the topic, it ought to show up there pretty damn frequently, don't you think?

Okay, I checked. The term itself was mentioned zero times, and there was one discussion of a particular degenerate strategy (kiting). I stand by my assertion: Josh is not obsessed with degenerate strategies. The contingent claiming he is, however, is.

I know he's discussed the topic. I disagree that he's 'obsessed' about it. What I have seen is that a contingent of players for some reason get extremely upset about the term, and amplify what he's said out of all proportion. So, with all due respect Hiro, I do think it's a combination of echo chamber + confirmation bias, rather than any real obsession of Josh's. There's a pretty easy way to settle this, though. Let's look at a random sampling of 10 posts by Josh on these forums. Let's take items 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and 89, counting from the top, in what comes up from his profile. I picked the Fibonacci sequence to prove that I'm not cherry-picking the results. Now, how many of those items do you think refer to degenerate strategies or degenerate gameplay? I'm guessing 0 to 1, probably 0. An 'obsession' ought to count for more than that. If you have an alternative way to settle this by looking at Josh's actual record -- the whole record, mind, not cherry-picking individual items from his whole history -- let's hear it. (The concept itself is game design 101. Literally. You'll find it in introductory textbooks. Every game designer knows about it and watches out for it. The only difference is that Josh has actually brought up the term in public, and engaged in discussion about it. Which, I suspect, he now regrets.)

@Hiro Are you sure that's not confirmation bias at work? I've read and watched a quite a bit of stuff by Josh, and degenerate strategies do not seem to figure particularly centrally. He has talked about them on a couple of occasions, including engaging in discussion about it a couple of times, but compared to many of the people on this very thread, for example, his 'obsession' barely even registers.

@Indira yes, your OP is what got me using google-fu on the case. It appears they really didn't. I suspect the association may have come from the T:ToN KS. That was explicitly pitched as a spiritual successor, so P:E got lumped in with it.