soulmata

I finished my pre-2.0 POTD run as a Cipher with 8 con and it wasn't very difficult at all. I think I got KO'ed maybe 6 times through the whole game on my first run. I've started a post-2.0 game as a very similar Cipher, but with 3 con (I've traded the CON for PER, because of the accuracy changes). Definitely a different game, but so far, up to Defiance Bay, I've yet to be knocked out one time. Haven't tried as a Wizard yet, but as a 3-con Cipher wearing rags, I'm pretty damn squishy. The primary tactic I use is to try and disable or suppress everything immediately so there is no chance for them to get in range. We'll see if it pans out.

Latest patch, using Steam. To reproduce, I'm guessing: * Talk to the Stone Watcher, tell him about the Leaden Key * Leave and go do other things (In my case, I completed Heritage Hill first) * Come back. Stone Watcher acts as if you've already cleared out down below * Can't enter Sanitarium because the door is quest locked. Can't seem to fix. Main quest can no longer progress and it's a Trial of Iron game so I can't reload.

What would that accomplish? The effect sticks no matter how far you run. And it looks like the consensus is so far to deal with it out of range, i.e. confusion. Thanks.

I'm patched. It wears off after combat or after the timer expires. I'm just talking about the plain damage it does. My level 9 (now 10) party gets massacred by it due to how fast it drains health and that it stacks.

Very plentiful. Twin Elms on Hard/Expert and I have 70k, along with about a page's worth of unsold blues. I generally do not buy or use potions much, but I do buy all crafting ingredients from all vendors, I buy whatever armor/weapons/items I want and I have taught Aloth every spell we've come across. I've also fully upgraded and fully staff the Stronghold (but, oddly enough, even though all upgrades are in, Steam hasn't given me the achievement). I turn down all monetary rewards (My Benevolent score is like... 4? 5?), and I paid for the amulet in Defiance Bay (4k). I was able to fully upgrade the Stronghold before "Turn 5" by not turning in quests but selling loot. That probably had a lot to do with it, since I'm getting around 700-1000 from taxes (which is kind of odd - even with 51+ security, I'm still losing a few hundred to "bandits"). I also completely obliterated everyone at Raedric's Keep and sold their nonsense. I can't see myself spending all this unless I suddenly got the urge to start buying up every single item I see.

Note to date I've been using Suppress Affliction to try and get through the fight fast enough, but that's quite often not enough.

Scenario is: Party level 9, main character Cipher, Hard/Expert. To this point, not much has been super challenging. There have been some tough spots, but nothing that wasn't manageable by thinking up some tactics. But what the crap is the deal with Plague of Insects? This spell seems absurdly imbalanced, to the point where I have to wonder if I'm seeing what I'm supposed to be seeing. The description of the spell implies it does a huge amount of raw damage over time. Raw damage, as I believe, bypasses DR and affects you directly. That part I'm behind. What I'm not behind is just how insanely high that damage is, to where often encounters with Ogre Druids are leaving my party dying (red health) before they lose EN. When I look at the tooltip and the damage output, here's what I see: "89 damage over 29.75 seconds...", which would be something like 3 damage/s Then, I watch the health of my party - health plummets at 3-4x the rate of Endurance. On all my characters except the tanks, their health drops *faster* than Endurance. It's not even possible to heal through that - if I try to keep them awake, they will die, even from Green health at the start of the fight. Additionally, multiple plagues seem to stack - which makes sense for some damage types, but this seems out of control. OK, so that said, exactly how am I supposed to deal with Plague of Insects without resorting to fog-of-war nuke tactics like charming from just outside engagement range? Given the relative difficulty of an Ogre/Ogre Matron/Ogre Druid, I feel that one single spell should not be the difference between "a relatively easy fight" to "this fight is luck based". I must be missing something! Can it be dispelled?

Intelligent interaction / looting: It's nice that with the party selected, if I click an object, the nearest character will try to interact with it rather than the party "leader" running from a billion miles away to be the first to get it Indiscriminate murder: It was nice that the game didn't artificially restrict my impulse to completely slaughter the town, except, of course, with a group of adventurers at the inn that butchered me. Exceptionally well done art. The backgrounds in particular are fantastic. Very nicely done. Intuitive character creation: It's plainly obvious what you're making and what you're getting (mechanics aside)

You're trivializing an important mechanic because you don't see the value in it. Not everyone wants to play puppet master, and would reasonably expect that "intelligent" agents, such as NPCs you have recruited, can act in an intelligent manner if required. No one here asserted they want the game to "play" fights for them. If you like monotonous grind, more power to you. That doesn't mean everyone shares your viewpoint.

Having a player-controlled list of conditions and actions is a far cry from "having the AI do everything." The point is to reduce the amount of monotony when you are fighting dozens of trivial fights, where the individual actions don't matter so much. If I have a working strategy for fighting a pack of goblins, and I encounter goblins six thousand times, I don't want to tell my party to do the exact same thing six thousand times. That's not immersion, that's your PCs being so stupid they can't recall "Oh, right, goblins don't need heavy nukes, just switch to a nice melee weapon and close the distance." It also lets you keep some fights going rather than having to pause constantly. If you can be reasonably assured your PCs will drink a health potion if they get low on health, you can focus more on taking the fight to the enemy rather than babysitting your entire party.

BG's AI scripts were absolutely terrible. If you gave a mage an actual "Mage" AI script, they would do things like use Horrid Wilted on goblins and gibberlings, hurl magic missiles at magic-immune creatures and more or less try to burn all of their magic in a single fight. Additionally, AI scripts didn't make use of items as well. Even with 3rd-party improvements like SCS, leaving combat decisions up to the AI was almost universally bad. I generally defaulted to telling everyone "engage enemies from a distance with equipped ranged weapon", and anything beyond that I had to intervene. It was universally bad in BG, BG2, P:T, IWD and IWD2. It was not quite as bad, but still pretty bad, in NWN and NWN2. DA:O's party AI was superior. Hands down. The conditional system meant the player had a much higher level of control over their party members - it was a bad design decision on BioWare's part to artificially limit that by requiring you to spend skill points on tactics. There should have been dozens of tactics slots open from minute 1.

You're still approaching the problem from the standpoint of MMO development, which has no place in a single-player role playing gaming. "Class Balance" is meaningless in a single player game. You don't need to control it. Make your mechanics, make your plot, and then let emergent gameplay do the rest.

P:T I feel is a bad example - that game wasn't designed for balance, it was designed almost entirely to give you an interactive story. Combat and even class mechanics were non-important for the majority of the game. I get what you're saying, though - and you do have a good example with the assassin. Kit comparison is actually a great example in general - look at other kits, like the Beastmaster or the Jester. Some kits were ridiculously powerful, while others gave up good class mechanics for mechanics that didn't scale past the first game.

This argument is illogical because it is based on the premise that all skills in the game are applied equally to all environments. What about a character who has absurdly high DPS based on a high rate of attack with a low damage weapon, but is unable to overcome the damage threshold or damage resistance of his or her target? What about a character who relies solely on magic and can out-damage everyone else in many cases, but is rendered helpless when up against a creature or creatures who are resistant or immune to his attacks? What about a character who is solely focused on combat and nothing else, then finds themselves at a crippling disadvantage because an entire quest-line is focused around diplomacy or subterfuge? The 'dps' argument is contrite and pointless. It also reeks of someone who is accustomed to playing MMOs, where DPS optimisation actually matters. In single player story-based RPGs, most players are in it for the experience, the story, the depth of lore, the immersion - not optimising DPS.

It depends entirely on how it's handled. Bethesda had the start of something good with the Radiant system in Skyrim. It was definitely unrefined and lacking polish, but it found a way to procedurally generate quests based on templates that made the quests give you at least some immersion. For instance, each Jarl had a handful of quest templates. The templates were unique to each Jarl, but the locations and individual targets were pseudo-random. This meant while I know I'd get the same quest from each Jarl on a given playthrough, the area's I'd be exploring and NPCs I'd be targeting were different. They prevented this from breaking the storyline by having a handful of areas marked off-limits for randomly generated quests. That sort of system can work well, and reduces the amount of development time needed to provide 1000 quests. If you can instead make a templating system that only defines requirements for a given quest to trigger, you can then generate a large number of quests with less effort. Finesse is needed to make it truly shine, though - that's where Skyrim falls short, as you see through the veil and break your suspension of disbelief when someone hands you a quest and you know, immediately, it was a Radiant quest. None of that, however, compares to quests which have impact. I want my decisions to matter. If I'm given a sidequest to help deliver medicine to some remote village in the middle of nowhere suffering from a plague, and I opt to instead sell the medicine to a shady black market dealer, I want that to matter. I want that village to suffer and die out, I want to reap a huge chunk of change and I want people to know about it happening. If there are half the number of quests but twice the amount of impact from doing them, I'd be happy.