Captain Shrek

Ok. With a cursory look, I think the accuracy bonuses are the most important ones. At equal Def/Attack the chance of a critical is 5% (like in D&D). The chance doubles (which is a large change) if the accuracy is only increased by 5. This is UNLIKE D&D where the crit chance is independent of the AB - AC difference. This is probably broken. By pumping accuracy the player should be able to reap ridiculous benefits, as DT is irrelevent I assume on crits. Now Per seems to yield only +1 to accuracy per point. But the closer the def/Attack ratio is, the larger the benefit is there from PER. So I assume that Mutonizer is actually correct, when such a case holds: He practically doubles the crit chance with his per bonuses. EDIT: Addionally even when the ratio of attack/def is awawy from 1, Might adds almost nothing compared to what accuracy bonuses potentiall give you in terms of increasing the crit chance. The crit bonus is 50% which requires an equivalent of 25 Might to give you similar damage effect for that attack. The winner is pretty clear here.

So how much accuracy does one gain by one point in perception? Help me here since I haven't played the recent patch.

Now the only question is what values of Might and accuracy are allowed by the game. May be that ought to be reflected in your graph?

That definitely makes it real. You convinced me mate.

Aren't you over justifying this attribute system a bit?

Really? Then PhDs in physics must be terribly good swordfighters.

Forgottenior. WHy would you play with non-OP builds is probably beyond my comprehension, as long as all those builds give you the same story and allow you to experience all the abilities. If every class has a OP build then I would totally choose to play it like that. Doing anything else is punishing yourself. There isn't even a component of "Role playing" in playing suboptimal builds as the attributes are not really related to character traits. They are just stat modifiers.

Matt, if you are at all into python, then try out either the ipython notebook or spyder. But admittedly Python is not best suited for high performance analysis. That would be C/Frotran. But for most engineering problem you will never reach that threshold.

I think you are conflicted here. It was not a fun encoutner at all. It was just the hardest one of them (I think). Replacing that with a non trash hard encounter should still be 'fun'. Or even better, turn the beetles encounter into a non trash encounter with a story to them. That would satisfy your yearn for the elder days and removal of trash.

Dude, you put so much effort into this game critique. How can you so easily dismiss the encounter design with "who cares."?. I agree that mechanics is one essential aspect of gameplay, but the other more important one is Encounter design. They both need attention. I can guarantee you that even with as broken a combat an NWN2/NWN you can actually have a good game as long as you design the encounters right. The BG mage battles are a proof of the idea. If anything, OE should try to reproduce those instances than concentrating on balancing trash mob encoutners.

I would rather have it gone. I want meanignful encounters, not trash mobs. Personalyl I have nothing against difficulty. I just hate wasting time fighting crap. This is one of the reasons that I can not just replay IWDs and NWN OC. Hmm. In what way is it better? The beetles are practically teleporting and bloated. There is no story. There is only a "historical" reason that they gave BBs a reason to complain about how hard the combat was.

Hmm. So which of the two things is right? Can someone who has the context make an argument? 1) The encounters earlier were meant by devs to be easy but made hard due to underbalanced stats. SOmething that has been corrected in the new build. 2) The encounters earlier were meant to remain hard and are now easy due to underbalanced stats.

Both are log spamming and the first has attrition. You are right that besides the unnecessary attrition there are no arguments against Graze. But at the same time there are no arguments for it either.

May be some musing on what the attributes OUGHT to represent will help the issue along. Attributes are basically defining aspects of the character. At least in most RPGs I played PnP and cRPGs had this in common. This is in no way to say that this is all attributes do. But still a good game will have BOTH a meaningful (as in an understandable) and a unbroken implementation of attributes. The first one is to mean that if there is an attribute called Intelligence, it should be effing tied to traits / abilities that one associates with being intelligent. The second one means that no single attribute should overwhelmingly be good / bad for ALL classes. As long as these two conditions are met I believe the implementation is reasonably good. The rest is up to what you allow players to do with the mechanics. One can argue that within the "gamism" paradigm the attributes need not really define anything concrete and they just need to be some excle sheet modifiers. This a valid design, sure. But a lazy and incompetent one. Taking this argument to the extreme why even play as humaniform creatures or even have meaningful graphical representations? Just play excel sheets! A good designer is always trying to TIE in the utility and the realism (in the sense being used here in the post) together to create a game. *** Something I posted in another thread, but makes equal sense here.

May be some musing on what the attributes OUGHT to represent will help the issue along. Attributes are basically defining aspects of the character. At least in most RPGs I played PnP and cRPGs had this in common. This is in no way to say that this is all attributes do. But still a good game will have BOTH a meaningful (as in an understandable) and a unbroken implementation of attributes. The first one is to mean that if there is an attribute called Intelligence, it should be effing tied to traits / abilities that one associates with being intelligent. The second one means that no single attribute should overwhelmingly be good / bad for ALL classes. As long as these two conditions are met I believe the implementation is reasonably good. The rest is up to what you allow players to do with the mechanics. One can argue that within the "gamism" paradigm the attributes need not really define anything concrete and they just need to be some excle sheet modifiers. This a valid design, sure. But a lazy and incompetent one. Taking this argument to the extreme why even play as humaniform creatures or even have meaningful graphical representations? Just play excel sheets! A good designer is always trying to TIE in the utility and the realism (in the sense being used here in the post) together to create a game.

I can suggest an in game lore reason: The fighter's guild. Wizard: Knock him down! Knock hi down! He's casting Arcane gas!! Fighter: Sorry, I can't do it bud. Wizard: Why not? Fighter: The guild thinks its too competitive to use more than twice a day. Wouldn't want a disqualification, would I?

Just one query: Why are knockdowns per-anything? Shouldn't these be independent of how often you rest/encounter? Another balance overriding common sense issue?

Funny, I was under the impression that if they gave, oh, like a +2 benefit to certain skills for a class those benefits would not matter at all. Percentage wise these would not even make a dent. I never realized that OE would skew the mechanics by giving inherent bonuses to classes for ATTRIBUTES. No wonder those builds are broken. Add to that the Stamina bar being tied to classes and you have perfect pigeonholing. Was it not a chief goal to avoid that kind of a thing?

Mutonizer. Is DT the real culprit here?

MC, a tank is a popular term with MMOs which means a character that can hold the line. It has nothing whatsoever to do with doing damage.

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of the people that thing D&D is the best evaaar! In fact I have quite a few gripes with it. All I believe is that D&D is tested enough to still allow a good game as long an experienced DM is around to design it. Just calling it terrible and making an untested mechanics is not helping this game. If you think about it, this game has had so many changes since its inception in terms of the mechanics that I wonder if there really ever was a core design. 1) The local cooldowns are gone replaced with global ones 2) The regenerating stamina thing is gone for all classes 3) Resting is now possible everywhere and limited by supplies instead of earlier resting only in inns 4) Attributes renamed / their functions radically changed (perception : from stunlock to accuracy) etc I have been around enough to realize that a lot of these changes are occurring a bit too slow. A slightly more critical approach from the player base might look discouraging, but it is what will finally help repair these problems since this is a completely untested mechanics for the game.

3kg+ are solely two-handers(also known as longswords or greatswords). That aside, yes, they aren't terribly useful against armor. Which is why they usually weren't used against it. Also, Might still isn't strength. It's simply assumed that any fighter is strong enough to wield her weapon in battle effectively. MIght * is * strength in the sense that it affects melee damage. I know that in this system things are ridiculous to a point in terms of name. But still, strength affects damage in real life and that is what might does.

Slightly off topic, but Isn't SRD open licence?

Exactly. In fact in BG/BG2 if you have to constantly save/reload to win, it means that you have severly handicapped your build. I believe that this was one of the motivations for the "balance" ideology behind PoE. It has a severe issue of trying to regulate how players play the game instead of letting us invent and improvise.

That is practically what is MMO thinking. Bringing all gameplay down to banal but "balanced" level. You can have consistent gameplay there, true. But it is also assured to be boring and repetitive.