IndiraLightfoot

I did the same. It took a bit of time, but I can now tell you that in six saves, three from two different "games" with different characters, without this bug being present for me in any form. I just assumed I had it, but I didn't. More people need to check this out. EDIT: I never installed any mods (although Sensuki's ones were tempting). And obviously, I didn't use any old saves. I had them deleted.

PcWorld interview with Adam and Josh, Nov 2013: "Adam Brennecke (AB): And it’s really easy to make a bad character [in the IE games]. JS: In the old games, yes. So we would like—a good way of saying this is if you want to make a character that totally fits the archetype of the character you conceive, like let’s say you say, “I want to make a character who’s a wizard and that character has a high intellect”—in our game it’s intellect, not intelligence. Or if you say “I want to make a rogue,” and the rogue has a high dexterity. Those are great characters! They work great. They might not work exactly how you think they’re going to work, but they’re good characters. You make a fighter with a high strength—also a good character. Doesn’t exactly work the way you think it might, but it’s a good character. If you play against type. If you’re like, “I want to make a muscle-wizard. It has a high strength and a high con”—that’s also a very good character. If you want to make a fighter with a high intelligence and a high resolve, that’s also a good character. Might not be the most optimal character, but it’s not a bad character. It’s not impossible JS: No, it’s not impossible. You get something. Every class gets something out of the ability scores. Every class can work with given arrays. There aren’t weird, like, “FYI: after ten levels this character’s not going to be viable.” So it’s just about doing stuff like that to make people feel like, “Go into it, there’s no hidden gotchas, make the character you want to make, and if you find it’s not quite playing the way you thought you’ll be able to adjust and you’ll be okay. It won’t always be optimal, and we’re not trying to make everything perfectly balanced. The goal is to say, “Don’t not consider it.” We have to consider, what if someone wants to make the foxing idiot wizard or the weakling fighter? They’re going to have some problems, but whatever you dumped—if you dumped this and jacked something else, you’re going to get something else neat out of it. And hopefully what that turns into is not just a worse play experience, but a different play experience. Because I jacked these stats, my character veers into this other play style, so I have to play him a different way."

Yeah, that catch phrase's brilliant. And Summer 2015 would be failure. It must, at the latest, sneak in before W3, and that with a margin.

Complaining? I'd say most of us wanted to help Josh reach his goal of no dump stats, but at the same time, we were safe in the knowledge that he would do well without us. I still don't get why you're so upset about it all, Nipsen. I read your cool piece on the General forum, like a month ago. You're a really talented guy. http://thedigitalfragment.com/ And your music taste is impeccable. You know that two and two always makes a five. Don't throw your hands or lose your temper over these banalities. You are meant for greater things. Ha det, min venn!

Nipsen: Your wish shall be fulfilled. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68526-how-to-fix-the-attribute-design-in-pillars-of-eternity/?p=1508219 Plus Josh's other replies in that thread and then of course, as evident by this recent patch, the changes he did make. It's one of the most popular posts of all time, you cannot have missed it. P.S. I hope you won't charge a fee for each bridge you burn now, like a good troll would do.

Thx, Sensuki! Yeah, that's quite some leaning going on, and even more interesting: Yet again, the party and the NPCs aren't leaning exactly the same way. Even weirder, in your pic, it's like a mirror image of mine. In mine, NPCs lean a bit too much to the left, and my party is near-perfect. In yours, the party is leaning to the right, and those NPCs by the fireplace is near-perfect.

Sometimes a bug is great and turn into a feature. Now we got to test it like this, and it seems most people like it. It would perhaps be easier to keep it more or less like this, and even do one or two bold changes, like Mut suggested.

If anyone got the time, I'd love to see a pic of that laterz. EDIT: As for my pic above, it actually feels like the NPCs are leaning on one plane and my party on the other. Overall, the NPCs lean a tad more to the left. Is that even possible?

Would you be fine with them appearing somewhere else craggy and wet, or do you want to keep them right were they were as a homage to the beta testing etc?

I just noticed this - some cool, but not necessarily minimalist UI corner elements are blotted out by the portraits and the combat log. When you lad a game, you get a brief nanosec to see them, at which I managed to snap this shot of the left one of them still "uncovered": Great skellie. It seems sad that nobody will get to see it. Then a sec later, it looks like this:

I'll add a pic just to demonstrate the leaning effect: Those two in the bottom right corner seem to be adepts of Michael Jackson himself.

I miss the beetles battle, but I approve of it being moved in the final product. I'd love to see a wilderness with fewer, but more challenging encounters (a bit like BG1). Hopefully, there is a place for those cool beetles, and I'd be darned if not one of them stone beetles will drop: Suki-Sen A golden magical amulet with three gold stars engraved +1 to Resolve

More or less, yes. I won't spoil anything for anyone, but thanks to Josh knack for language and me knowing quite a bit about place names, you can deduct the location just by having the PoE map in front of you. Also, I know where it is in relation to the beta.

Heh! I'm getting there, one year at a time.

Me too! That's like half the fun of the IE games and CRPGs overall. I can't wait!

Josh published an image of his ideas and calculations for changing the attributes right after S&M released their report. He clearly stated that he had more or less meant to change them in the same way, with one exception, really. That you still go on and on and on about this, well aware of this readily available fact, speaks volumes. Lay your frustrations to rest and cease with this monkey business, or else you will deserve that troll label that people are sticking on you now. Contribute constructively, and don't be so condescending.

Another interesting read in that long and lovely interview that PCWorld did with Adam and Josh in NOv 2013: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2071423/deep-dive-with-pillars-of-eternity-project-lead-josh-sawyer-the-full-interview.html?page=3 They discuss the reward system and the quest system, amongst other things, and here is a noteworthy excerpt: "So there’s an optimal path—like Fallout: New Vegas, don’t head North right away. JS: Yeah, to make things clear we are going to have stuff, like, “Hey, this looks like a really horrible cave.” Maybe you don’t go in there, or you’re super cool, you’re a really cool dude, and you go in there and you win and you get a special prize. We’re not going to scale that stuff, and we’re specifically going to put stuff near the crit-path that is potentially enticing and really dangerous with some warning so that you as a player will poke your head in and go, “Maaaaaybe.” We want people to see that stuff and be tempted by it and play the risk-reward game and feel proud if they make their way through it. Or feel wise for waiting. Do the rewards for those areas scale to level? JS: No. So if you go in early, you’ll get great loot. But if you go in later and slaughter everything, you’ll get a dumb reward you don’t need anyway? JS: Yeah. AB: For example, Od Nua—the Endless Paths of Od Nua is a fifteen level dungeon, it’s enormous. What we’re doing with that is as you go down into the dungeon, each dungeon level outpaces how fast you could level by going through it, so you basically have to be really good to get through it all in one run or you have to exit the dungeon, go do some other things, and then come back. Is there a way to teleport out? JS: There’s ways." This is interesting, so if you challenge yourself and pick those horrible non-optimal path caves pretty early on, you'll get useful loot, but if you are level 8 or 10 or 12 doing them, not so much.

I just found a very informative interview with Josh and Adam that PcWorld did in Nov 2013. Amongst other things, Josh explains why he has introduced grazes: "To kind of ameliorate the swinging craziness of old D&D, below a standard hit which is normal damage and normal effect, we have something called a “graze,” and a graze is, “Eh, you kind of hit him.” And that does half duration or half damage. And then below that we have miss, but that’s not very common unless you’re completely out-of-bounds, like, “I attack the dragon with my toothbrush.” Well, you miss! Congratulations, you’re going to miss a lot. Try to hit that defense and what you roll, based on the difference between them determines hit, crit, graze, or miss. So the graze effect ameliorates the problem with the original Baldur’s Gate with that super-hard fight right in the beginning of the game, where you’d just go miss-miss-miss-miss-miss... JS: Yeah, we don’t like the sense of it’s all or nothing. Miss-miss-miss, big hit, foxing murder. So the grazes tend to do, because of our armor system, they tend to do less than half damage typically because the armor absorbs a lot of it, but you’re still making progress. It normalizes the output and makes it a little more regular as opposed to sitting there watching and it’s like, “Yahtzee! A character explodes!” So that’s kind of the goal." Hmm, the good thing is: Crits are still in, so we still get those Yahtzee-moments, but so far in the BB, the grazes are for to meek. I'd say make them scarcer, but have that damage increased. It doesn't sound like Josh envisioned a death by a thousand papercuts that can take minutes upon minutes (the last BB, it took 20+ minutes in one case for me - and I gave up, and that vs a normal group of enemies).

Heh, I meant "left out", not "sorted out".

I'm guessing this: -They are sincerely set on trying to make it before X-mas -Josh still recalls how rushed IWD2 was. They can do wonders in very little time, but I have a feeling that they want to achieve more polish, meat and bug-squashing if they can -They are 100% ready for a delay into early 2015, but there has to be very good reasons for it (on the level of "a game not worthy to be released yet")

If grazes remain, I do like your suggestions, Caladian. At least no health loss from them (it doesn't make sense), and make them scarcer - and then divvy them up in graze message and blocked message (I'd love to see "blocked" at times). Misses, however, are scarce enough as it is - if graze is kept. Lastly. like I've said before, please no 3.7 in damage. Turn those numbers into units, please.

D&D CRPGs always had that problem of showing some, but not all, Matt. I actually like more info, and even select info, an assorted collection, where stuff like AoE etc are sorted out. I don't mind that.

It's a must and a given. This is indeed needed, and I won't rest till we get it.

cRichards: Sure. In fact, I'll even throw in some bonus bugs in the UI while I'm at it! I wasn't clear enough in my description. The off-centre (slightly right aligned) skill points only occur on the level up screen for skills, the one where Sensuki wisely suggested that the skill points that you get to raise to the left be bigger and more elaborated upon. The bug is still there. It's just not slanting. It goes for #7 and, like below, for #4: And now for the bonus bugs! On the character sheet, you have numbers listed and they form columns involving units and tens (for attributes in the left column and the percentages in the right column). And when numbers do form columns like that, units should be stacked under other units and be right-aligned, but as you can see, here the units are left aligned, faultily stacked under the tens. This goes for both the attribute column and the percentages column to the right. Last bonus bug: The texts describing the percentage bonuses I got here for Int and Res are clipped, so I can't read it all.

I see, I figured it was something like that. It must be hard to calibrate that angle, so our eyes easily pick up on even the slightest leaning effect. Keep up the great work, you too. OE, chamone!