Mr. Magniloquent

It's logically inconsistent. It doesn't *feel* "right". If a Wizard has the capability to totally shield friendlies on margin, why can't they do that with the whole spell? I would make more sense to have a series of talents..Spell Shaping I-V to be able to avoid friendly fire throughout the entire radius of certain levels of spells. Even talents which mitigated by percentage would be welcome over nothing. Right now friendly fire is such a concern, that it is almost more practical to avoid Intellect than to utilize it.

I was delving through the PoE Wiki, and a thought occurred to me. In past games, weapons dealt a range of damage to approximate the quality of the hit. Since PoE determines both whether the attack hits as well as the quality of the hit within the same roll, why do weapons have a range? What does that range simulate? Would PoE be better if weapons possessed a raw integer, rather than a range? It certainly might make determining damage and chance to bypass DT more simple. What do you guys think?

I am very fond of this. INT and RES would have to be balanced so that casting spells on oneself would not "double dip". Otherwise, I very much like this suggestion.

Your may also be experiencing problems simply because you are using a Linux distro. WINE is great, but it is still a layer of inefficiency. Considering Beta is only configured for Windows, and not yet optimized for the only OS intended for the beta--that could be your problem.

Well yes, doing things faster is always better than doing them slower. Even for characters with limited spells, getting those spells off faster rather than slower is a definite advantage. The point we try to make is that doing things faster is rarely if ever better than simply doing things better - whether "things" is casting buffs, hitting dudes, etc. IAS, if implemented, would improve everything - but not beat any attribute at its own game. Hence the "Jack of all Trades, Master of None" nature of the attribute. I understand what you're saying. That's why I opened my comment with stating exactly that. My whole point is that there are two notable exceptions of IAS being a worthy compromise. These are in the cases of limited resources (Druid, Priest, Wizard) and infinite (Chanters, Ciphers). For the former, they do not spend most of their time using their name-sake abilities. The utility of being able to cast the infrequent spell 30% faster is marginal. Yes, it can enhance tactics, but not quite the same way as for a character which is expressed primarily through attacking. Chanters and Ciphers make the opposite end of the spectrum. Chanters chant continually, and must chant to project invocations. Doing this comes at no cost, and is done continuously. Chanting and invocations are the prime actions of the class; therefore, chanting faster is always better than alternatives. The same holds true for a Cipher, but on a greater scale. They generate resources through standard attacks. They will always need to attack and always need resources. Time spent casting spells is time not spent generating focus. Faster casting times = more focus. Gathering focus more quickly = more spells. This is the primary feature of the class, so it will always be best to do these things faster. I'm not trying to knock the idea. I'm generally in agreement with it. I've said this multiple times. I makes sense that while all attributes will be good, some classes will still favor some over others because of the inherit class design. It just immediately became poignant to me about the ramifications IAS changes would have for resource (in)dependent classes. I actually don't think that would be the case, I think you have to activate the chant but it's like an aura, or a passive. The speed would not be affected by IAS I don't think. And if it is, they can always change it so it isn't. That is an unknown. So much in that Chants have a duration, it is safer to assume that they function more like regular spells than a static aura.

You two have certainly outlined why attacking more is always good, but not necessarily better than alternatives--no doubt. I made sure to read the paper thoroughly before commenting. Chants are still an ability, so if Dex were to improve ability/spell speed, then Chants would be no exception. This would cause their chants to progress X% faster, compounding to output far more invocations than otherwise. The effect would be similar to your spellcasting example on page 16. For Ciphers, this is all the more true. Faster attack speeds would mean more resources generated over a shorter period of time. They spend less time generating and less time casting--allowing them to do far more of both. Because of their resource type, doing things faster is always the best thing to do--particularly in the case of the Cipher.

Priests, Druids, and Wizards would only be able to burst more efficiently. They might even be able to interrupt something with a spell, but still unlikely. The overall benefit is marginal because of their resource limitations. They would burn more brightly, but briefly. With the frequency of combat, it is difficult to appreciate that distinction. With respect to Chanters, they would be tossing out invocations much more quickly at no real cost. Ciphers would be the greatest beneficiaries, as it would allow them to both gain and expend resources more quickly.

I've read through it, top to bottom. In general, I am supportive of the proposed changes. It is good that you spent much of the paper discussing Increased Attack Speed, because the changes it could present are monumental. One significant thing about those changes, is that they will not be uniform among all classes because of the divergent resource mechanics that they use. IAS would only be marginally beneficial to a Wizard, Druid, or Sorcerer as they have very rationed resources. Ciphers and Chanters would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from increased IAS. While Resolve, in name, sounds ackward, the overall changes as explained seem well and good. I still think that abilities and spells would need critical rework in their activation/cooldown, but this is a step in the correct direction.

Right now, Health:Stamina is 1:1. For every Health, you have one point of Stamina. The loss ratio is 1:4, so that every every 4 points of Stamina damage, you lose 1 health. That's ideally how the system should function. You get knocked out more easily than you are killed. The change sounds like a semantic difference. Both are Health and Stamina/Endurance are lost at the same rate, but your Health will be multiplied by a class Hit-Die; logically making your health value greater than your stamina. That must be how its going to work. If they move the ratio to 1:1 without increasing health & stamina/endurance values four-fold or greater, characters will both get knocked-out less and die more quickly. That can't be right. I imagine that this change will be semantic only then.

I think cooldowns for all actions can work. I think it's good to see them try and evolve beyond the legacy of PnP where uniform & synchronous turns were necessary. It is going to require extremely delicate balancing--a monumental task. Every weapon, ability, and spell will need to be meticulously mapped to a "Grande Chart of Power" so that their relations can be understood and given proper activation/cooldown times. If they do anything less than that, I believe that this concept will fail. Yikes. That's very interesting. Where did you read that?

The idea is that classes with higher ratio can take more punishment on their health which will make them require less frequent resting to replenish it. The system remain unchanged beside this. For example, a Barbarian might have a 100 endurance and 500 health (5 * Endurance). In the first encounter, the Fighter is hit for a total 80 points of damage. His health is now down at 420. In the second encounter, the Fighter is hit for 120 points of damage. His Health is now 300. In the third encounter, he gets hit for 50 points of damage. Health is now 250. In the final boss fight, he gets hit for 200 points of damage (this was boss). Health is now 50 and resting should be envisaged. That just reads like code for Not Hit-Dice. This indicates a base HP value with a class-dependent modifier to create a single resource pool. That does not sound like what Mr. Sawyer describes in this quote: For this system to increase the longevity of melee classes, the resource which governs their mortality must be higher when applying damage at a 1:1 between them. Otherwise the character will die before they get knocked out. Mortality Statistic: Knockout Statistic 50:150 - Character takes 50 damage, distributed at a 1:1 ratio. Character's statistics are now 0:100. They are dead, but still fighting? 150:50 - Character takes 50 damage, distributed at a 1:1 ratio. Character's statistics are now 100:0. They are alive, but incapacitated. From the quote, it sounds like Mr. Sawyer is using Endurance as the mortality stat, while Health is the knockout stat. Whatever they call them, let's just hope that it works out like supposition #2.

Well, so long as the statistic that determines if you "die the final death" is higher than the "knockout" statistic, it should work. Having it the other way around when damage is applied evenly across both Health & Endurance will neither change or solve anything. To phrase differently, your knockout resource has to be lower than your death resource; otherwise, with a 1:1 distribution of damage, you'll be dead with plenty of fight left in you.

Thank you for the link. So with this system, the Health:Endurance ratio will be something like X:YX, so that they would be knocked out when XY <= 0. Am I understanding that correctly?

Where did you read that? That's very new to me. Does that mean "Health" is now one consolidated pool, or does it function the same but with a different ratio loss? I'd love a link.

They are supposed to function as providing moderate (Not the most!) AoE damage and AoE debuffs. Right now the only part of that design goal being met is the part where they don't do too much damage. Doing too-much-damage is part of the Rogue and Ranger class design. The Wizard's moderate damage capability, coupled with DT and a whole lot of grazing makes for very lowly damage though. You might occasionally eek out mid 70s damage with a critically hit Fireball or Fan of Flames, but that's about it. It would be easier to stomach if their spells were as plentiful as the Cipher's. Whereas Vancian casting in D&D was the trade-off to reality manipulating power, Wizards in PoE just get their hamstring cut. That's true, but it would have been equally true if PoE used a carbon copy implementation of the D&D mirror image, all other things being equal. They should have departed further then. Right now, many things in PoE are Not D&D, *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*. The classes epitomize this. Whereas Pathfinder was a kind of enhanced D&D, PoE is functioning as Not D&D--with some very questionable results. This conflict is very evident in the Priest, Druid, and especially Wizard classes. Conversely, melee oriented classes and combat function very well, and in many ways superior to "the old ways". I think they need to exhale and take the plunge to depart further from D&D standards and conventions. I'm thinking in the direction of spell points/mana systems.

Understood and agreed. I imagine that they felt that slope to be less precarious whilst emphasizing the old convention of inns being the hub for adventuring.

PoE has no restorative magic. Having your characters die forever once defeated with no chance of revival is considered punitive and enjoyable by most standards--particularly modern ones. They needed some mechanic to plausibly allow a character to "die" yet "not die". There's your health & stamina system. It's like riding a bike with training wheels. Anyone determined to cause the bike to fall over can do so, but it's not even half as easy to flip your bicycle as without them.

I am sorry but this is a pretty retarded way of doing it then. The easiest way would have been to simply make it damned hard to get: Well, it's not just the player's hands. That's actually secondary. They want restorative magic out of the setting. The ability to heal solves a great deal of problems in the world--imagine that! Adventuring becomes an extremely dangerous line of work, and the mysteries of life and death remain obscure. Healing bodies verges on and temps power over life and death both conceptually and functionally. If you can close a wound with magic, why not regenerate a limb. If you can regenerate whole limbs, why can't you restore a body to life? It's the slippery slope argument which risks demystifying PoE's magic, deities, and cosmos. They would like to avoid that for the time, I believe.

Frankly, I'd like to see most of classes eliminated and stratified by talents at every level. Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians would be the same base selecting 2 or 3 talents at creation, then one every level thereafter. Other very similar classes, like Priest & Druids would distinguish themselves the same way, but perhaps broaden their gulf by having spell selection related to domains. Even Monks & Ciphers for to that point, as those classes are both Gish with a converse resource mechanic. Between the "make any build" attribute system and people naturally falling into whichever role they desire through custom builds...it all seems very sensible to do things that way.

That gave me pause, and I took some time to more diligently test many abilities. It's difficult to determine precisely, but certain abilities do appear to have different activation times. The Priest per encounter abilities appear to be the quickest; casting very close to or at an instantaneous speed. Knockdown is also quicker than previously thought, but again it's difficult to time the exact activation. I have had less success timing the druid shape-shift to say one way or the other. The rogue ability, Crippling Strike, appears to go off instantaneously if invoked as the first action of combat, but has otherwise taken time once combat is engaged (even if idle). I'll have to test these out some more. Despite that, a spell, is a spell, is a spell--and I neither agree with nor enjoy that convention. I feel like my observations and criticisms still stand for those.

I extensively test and examine the Wizard (my favorite class in most games), and yes, you are correct in just about all of your grievances. To answer you... Defensively, Spirit Shield is your goto spell, and works well. I recommend keeping your Wizard in at least DT 6 or greater. The expensive leathers from the town smithy work well. Anything less and Spirit Shield won't do you much good. Many debuffs are pointless atm. To get better utilization out of them, it's every bit as important to have Dexterity maximized as it is Intelligence--if not more so. Some spells, like Ryngrim's Repulsive Visage just flat-out do not work. Many other debuffs will be effectively usless, because they will often graze, causing only a few seconds detriment. If you attain high-teens or greater durations, you're doing well. That's just very difficult to take advantage of them given the targeting issues of wide AoEs. More than you might suspect. They are mostly single target offensive and defensive spells, but there are few friendly AoEs. Spells like Jolting Touch, Arduous Delay in Motion (Slow), and Arcane Dampener to name a few. Your assumptions are correct. When the bar reaches "zero", you may take another action. This is often problematic though, because auto-attack will often kick in, forcing you to wait before you can choose another action. Sometimes I will even queue a spell, only to have the Wizard attack, or the bar run several times through (bug) without it taking any action at all. Bugs definitely exist. Help us squash them by reporting them. Right now, the Wizard is definitely...problematic. From reading many of his remarks about them, I imagine Mr. Sawyer has a vendetta against wizards, so I'm skeptical about how much they will improve. Giving them higher DT armor and using a non-wand ranged weapon will help. I'd also recommend using cone and single target damage spells while everything else gets fixed.

Obsidian wants to keep restorative magic out of the player's hand. With D&D and Forgotten Realms, no hero should ever really expire but from old age or an irretrievable corpse. I understand their reasons to use a health/stamina system as a way to have things both ways, but there are some issues that arise from it. I think the most problematic ingredient within the mixture, is that attacks will almost always do a small amount of damage. Having one or two defenders is not very adequate, as they either require heavy support from expendable abilities to mitigate damage--lest those same defenders burn out quickly. Rotating characters is not even very effective at keeping your warriors from being the limiting reagent to your adventure, as many of those classes are not designed to handle sustained damage efficiently. I don't think that it is correct to totally eliminate genuine healing though. You may have to let the genie out, but you can still keep it tethered. Just have healing magic be of a higher level to keep it scarce with a real opportunity cost. Furthermore, just concoct some in-game reason about the difficulty of binding souls, and how only the gods yet know the secret to successfully binding souls to produce genuine life. I really think that would go a long way to mitigate the aforementioned problems with health/stamina loss.

I'm very confident that the one-size-fits-all approach is why spells and abilities;ergo, combat is/are so unwieldy. It's confusing as to distinguish between a Hatchet and a Battle Axe whilst considering every single ability and spell in the game equivalent. No person would genuinely contend that a stilleto and a arquebus should have the same attack speeds and recovery, so why abilities? Something as mundane and classic as Knockdown cannot even function as an effective tool to interrupt or control movement. How on earth are you supposed to sabotage ANY action when it is going to take 3 seconds (likely several seconds greater) just to invoke it? Also, with a base duration of 5 seconds, good luck having your heavily armored tank actually capitalized on the prone opponent. Consider the spell Thrust of Tattered Veils. It's a "quick spell" meant to interrupt something. What that something is, I have no idea, because it's the slowest activating ability in the game. It cannot even plausibly interrupt another ability, because you would first have to recognize an ability is being used, hope that your wizard was standing completely idle, and then hope that your spell finishes quickly enough before your target to reach them before they execute their spell. That literally cannot happen. Even if every contrived and improbable setup existed, you would still have to cast your "interruption spell" before they attempted to use their ability because they have identical activation times plus travel time. How successful has anyone actually been with negating wood-beetle poison? Or Deep Wounds for that matter? If you manage to prevent a K.O., what percentage of their character portrait isn't red? Etcetera, etcetera. This is a major problem. Treating all spells and abilities as though they identical in form and function with respect to usage is ridiculous. Given the speed of combat and that all classes have abilities--many of which are highly situational and time-sensitive, I would consider this one of the most paramount things to address given the universally perceived chaos of combat.

The values are not important. The key is that they synergize and interact with the base mechanics of attacking/recovering better. Having all weapons swing and recover at the same speed is a poor idea. Having all abilities and spells, some of which (conceptually) should be very divergent (lvl 1 vs lvl 10 spells), is both horrible in concept and practice. Any abilities/spells at either end of the spectrum will be gimped with a one-size-fits-all. Here is a simplified chart more akin to Mr. Sawyer's Attack & Recovery illustration. It shows activation time as well as activation plus recovery times in naked, lightly armored, and heavily armored states. The general framework is kept more closely to the current weapons pictorial so that equivalencies can be better understood. I used the current cast time to approximate the upper limit. The using a casting speed of 0.2 and recovery rate equivalent to the cast speed, this general formula is: (1 + (Cast Speed * Spell Level) * 2) + Armor Penalty This leaves abilities and spells to be comparable to being naked with two light weapons when naked and using low level abilities, while using the most powerful abilities and spells (lvl 10 equivalent) would operate identically to the current cast speed and recovery. Again, the point is the convey that spells and abilities need scaling activation and recovery times--not get caught up in minutiae that are subject to change on their own right.

I made a quick attempt at organizing spells & abilities by rank. Essentially what you're looking at here is: (1 + Ability Level) * 0.5 * ( Cast Speed + Recovery Speed) + Armor Penalty I used a base casting speed of 0.66 and base recovery speed of 0.66. This is almost arbitrary, but I began on the assumption that casting the lowliest of spells/abilities would be equivalent if not on par with the speed and recovery of the fastest weapon. I then multiplied this value by the spell/ability level and added the armor penalty (if any). I made a linear assumption about the degree of time to activate and recover from increasingly powerful spells/abilities. This linear scale was also used for simplicity of illustration--particularly in observing the effect of armor. Since spells are defined by levels one through ten, I used this as my frame-work. I realize that abilities would have to be categorized to their equivalent level. Here is the chart. I included a table, just so the values would be clear. To me, I feel that it all is very tidy. Simple spells cast quickly--particularly when wearing clothing, whilst other armors add proportionate encumbrance. This is particularly evident in the higher tiers of spells and abilities. What is significant about this data set, is that it would significantly improve the incongruity and discord between timing spells. This way, casting time is proportionate the power of the ability being used. Weak, frequently used abilities--and even intermediate abilities have more permissive activation and recovery speeds to be utilized more tactically. Likewise, earth-shattering spells and profound abilities would take time and require advanced planned and defense to execute. Looking at the impact of armor, the heavier armors significantly impact the recovery over clothing (naked), effectively trading-off flexibility, readiness, and output in favor of defensive bonuses. To me, the penalty feels worthy without precluding the use of armor. Being linear, the amount of exertion (recovery) scales with the degree/potency of the ability. I am strongly in favor of allowing simultaneous movement and recovery, but I feel that this could work even if not. The addition of talents to improve the efficiency/recovery time with armor or specific abilities could also allow a degree of nuance and customization. Example: Knockdown. Currently, for a fighter in plate armor, it takes 3 seconds to activate and 6 seconds to recover. Using this chart, that would place it between a tier 6 and 7 ability. Selecting the talent "Improved Knockdown" could lower its equivalent Tier by 3 steps (arbitrary). This would lower the activation and recovery to between tiers 3 and 4--a significant improvement in efficiency! This would improve its tactical timing use, as well as rewarding specialization with improved recovery times. Obviously, this would have to be balanced out. Since everything requires significant balancing already, I don't see that as a detriment. The argument for scaling the activation and recovery speed of spells and abilities is identical to why utilizing a dagger should be different than utilizing a great sword. This chart is just a stepping stone to illustrate the strength of this model and how it could drastically improve the egregious problem of tactically utilizing spells and abilities. *Edit: To Clarify this chart, Brigandine & Plate Armor currently have the same penalty, so their plot overlaps. This can be seen in the data set below the cart.