IndiraLightfoot

I found this Blizzard dev post: "Greetings, nephalem! We're pleased to announce that our first Diablo III Season is scheduled to begin this Friday, August 29th. To ensure the roll-out process goes as smoothly as possible for all players, we're planning both a delayed and staggered release, with different gameplay regions launching the season at different times after patch 2.1.0 ships. For reference, below are the current launch times for Season 1: Asia: 9:00 a.m. PDT (1:00 a.m. KST, UTC +9) Europe: 12:00 p.m. PDT (9:00 p.m. CEST, UTC +2) Americas: 6:00 p.m. PDT (UTC -10) For time zone assistance, visit: http://everytimezone.com/ To learn more about Seasons, visit: http://bit.ly/1rBFf9D Please note that these times are tentative and subject to change. If they do, we will be sure to update this thread. Thanks!" Perhaps I will take part in one of them seasons. That would be a first for me. I didn't do that in D2, and neither did I do it in Path of Exile. Anybody here tried it? What worries me is that it's a huge time sink. How much is needed to get any real fun out of it? Whatever that "fun" is?

I guess you mean encounters as in quests? Well you can solve all 4 quests in the beta without killing anyone. Heh! You got me there. I pressed stealth and it turned all party to stealth mode, and I gave up on it, and tried sneaking without game-mechanic: sneaking. And all I got was hostile reactions. You are probably right about that - but it would be bizarre sneaking through those maps, crammed with beetles and prides, though - they are there for the taking, my combat-xp fingers are twitching at the sight of them.

Agreed. Personally, anything that at least makes it possible to vary fighters to be specialized in ranged weapons, rangers in close combat, druids in dual wielding sickles, or war priests focussed on a single weapon, like a flail or a morning star, would be so very welcome. That would increase builds, and expand on the build freedom that could be argued being part of the IE games sprit.

Wow, i never even knew that. And i'm still playing BG2 from time to time, too, but i'd never even think of doing something like that. Mostly because, you know, there's a whole Icewind Dale franchise created exactly for this + there's ToEE, it's spiritual successor, + there's a million other games when you can just walk around in a fantasy world killing monsters. This is not what made BG2 so memorable to me. Now i know that apparently there are some people that are willing to turn a game with great story, great set of characters and great atmosphere into a hack'n'slash fest just because they love battle encounters and/or how AD&D combat system is represented there. Are these guys Obsidian's target audience now? If they are, then i wish i'd known that before backing PoE, because i had in my head that a game representing the "legacy of the Golden Age of computer role-playing" should be oriented towards, well, the whole role-playing part, instead of butt-kicking for goodness. You gotta love late awakenings...

Or move damage for fire arms to Perception.

Yeah, even the Asian RPG concept of Might and so-called "muscle wizards" makes that one stretch too far.

Even when I was defending the objective xp (before the beta), I reckon this scrap-combat-xp-since-stealth-options-are-in argument didn't hold water. Just think about it - many encounters in the beta, and truckloads of them in the full game, will require that you do fight. Since no xp is given for other non-combat actions: traps, locks, puzzles, dialogue smooth-talking, etc, this stealth can't be the stumble block for decent design, methinks.

Mayama: Like I've said elsewhere, I am one of the few that actually like the fast pace in the PoE beta. In NWN2, for instance, I rarely pressed pause. All the issues have to do with lack of control, wonky or non-existent feedback, and overlapping dog-piling of your party and your opponents. Hence, my suggestions.

Josh has built a pretty complex system, great for building lots of classes, and for some reason, I reckon, it would work quite well as a PnP RPG, but like he said himself: J.E. Sawyer, on 25 Aug 2014 - 9:27 PM, said: Before we start tuning a lot of values, we need to get the basic bugs fixed. The next update to the BB should clear out the most frustrating aspects of simply selecting, moving, and executing commands reliably. Then we can look at overall combat speed tuning, among other things. It seems it still remains to turn it into computer RPG combat, and as long as I see "Real Time" in their declared RTwP-system, I'll suggest stealing a lot of working solutions from the RTS scene, and specifically, from those games where you control several units at once.

Yeah, a small amount of select passives was implied in my drastic suggestions for combat improvement. Whatever it takes, since I think they will stick with real time with pause.

Amentep: Yeah, and for me at least, that's for the better. Monte: Cool! I'd love to try it out on PS4, just so see what it feels like. Right now, I'm looking forward to entering those goblin portals and fight the Queen of Greed.

I suspect this is one of the keys to making the combat much more enjoyable, yes. As long as PoE is Real Time (sic!) with Pause, I'll gp out on a limb and propose the following changes to PoE, inspired by the RTS game COH2: -Reduce the abilities for Fighters and Barbarians (well, perhaps most classes) heavily. Let them have one or two active in-combat one-per-ecounter abilities, but let them earn them by fighting for a few seconds, perhaps landing successful hits is required, or filling up some "muni-like meter" that will only make it to one use tops in low levels and perhaps two in PoE2, at level 18. -Using combined arms with six different infantry teams in a battle vs a number of enemy teams in COH2 (obviously in real time), is really tough - I often even forget to use one of those muni-cost abilities in the heat of battle So, for PoE, with endless class/race/talent combo builds, we need some automated basic fighting for that - using ranged when required, and close-combat weapons when that's required, and we need attack on the move (I know this is controversial, but such AI would be very interesting to see, even if you get to pause). Every character could have two weapon sets: one for ranged and one for close quarters fighting. -Let us issue basic combat commands action cue style, like in COH2, by using SHIFT + a series of immediate orders (move there, use that rare abilty, retreat to there), I can point+click fast onto the field of battle. In short, PoE needs to acknowledge and use the field of battle more, literally, the surface of it all, needs to behave, clear and sound, intuitively. EDIT: Lots of bonus stuff from this: - Speed will matter a lot (could be a great combat/class balancer) - Range, literally, can balance stuff up too - damage-wise, percentages, etc -Strategy, without the need to resort to turn-based grids, like D:OS, for instance.

This doesn't bode well for my plan to play a ranged fighter using a bow in my first playthrough. :/

Well, I've played this a lot this summer, almost exclusively. We're talking hundred and hundreds of hours (each and every spare time I've got). It's now my 2nd most played game on Steam after my beloved Civilization V. It's very hard to fault this game - so much is perfect. I like all factions, but the US gets to hard for me to micro-manage, the Ostheer is a bit underwhelming (or rather nothing new has come out for it). The Soviets and the OKW are those factions I reckon are almost impeccable. I still mostly play the AI - comp-stomping - like practice, and I have done lots and lots of idling too while working (farming war spoils while not really playing for real - I'm a get-all-content-sucker, so I use that as my lottery instead of wasting money a real one). To top it off, this autumn, Relic will release more theatre of war scenarios that'll deal with the Battle of the Bulge and other exciting stuff: http://www.incgamers.com/2014/08/company-of-heroes-2-ardennes-assault-announced

Yeah, I just re-installed D3. My body is ready for a huge kill xp fix right now, for some reason.

I forgot this one, and I kept Stun's and Zeckul's posts as well for easier reference: Before we start tuning a lot of values, we need to get the basic bugs fixed. The next update to the BB should clear out the most frustrating aspects of simply selecting, moving, and executing commands reliably. Then we can look at overall combat speed tuning, among other things. Yup, this is why after playing 30 minutes with this I thought "I'm reserving judgement on all the systems until it gets minimally playable". Lots of interesting discussions going on, but even with a combat system designed by God himself people would still not be having much fun and try to blame it on the combat system.

InkBlot: That's right about where I stand on this issue too. The same goes for attributes. I'd much rather see them have a stronger impact on your build - and if you for some bizarre reason, gimp all of them hard - then you really ought to be suffering from it - getting a really challenging playthrough even on Easy.

Gromnir: That would be a cool side quest in PoE. You get to search out and destroy the no-kill-xp zombie lord Hollow Holgar and his brothers-in-arms: Killjoy, Desiré and Digger.

As long as no aspects are avoided, but yeah, for the most part, Josh giving info ==happier forum crowd.

Oh, one of my all-time favourite game devs is giving his feedback... And I love all of it, I must... *swoon*

Combat is like phase beasts dog-piling at the moment, with ranged casters dumping all horrors on Eora on them - half of which don't even affect the beasts in the pile, regardless of it being fire or status effects - it's as if the game itself has a hard time keeping track of the messy melee.

Thank you for that chill pill, PrimeJunta! Wise words. Or should I call you PrimeHunta (see post below) - given your avatar, this would almost be as fitting and cool as the name you have. PrimeHydra: I agree. Combat is the big issue - and turn-based would of course have made everything so much more clear and lucid. When PrimeJunta delivers, he beats the heck out of FedEx! You can say that again, and may I add more frank info on which aspects of the game design are open for debate and even change, and which are locked down as a must for their vision of the game.

How about this? Sensuki had a good point when he said it ought to be automatic. Imagine, if all this stuff just happened, and no individual action bars were ticking in the open either. All that would be hidden in the engine. Instead, what we get to see is just our fellows in our party + your enemies during combat taking turns to hit. It would all feel a bit like initiative in PnP D&D, which I think in this case would be more intuitive. In short, let a hidden system calculate who gets to attack first all the way down to the last attacker, and then repeat - almost like hidden rounds without time-set turns.

Personally, I don't believe that Might is overpowered, but I do think Dexterity could be improved a bit more. The difference between 10 and 20 Dex is 10 points of Accuracy, which is only equivalent (sort of -- not exactly due to how Grazes/Crits work) to +2 in D&D terms. This is also feedback that is relevant to some of our questions here.

More sweet Josh-feedback on itemization!