Mr. Magniloquent

While I believe there is plenty of latitude to broaden classes through talents, I am not optimistic that PoE will go that way. The inherent class designs of PoE enforces specific class roles. At this point of development, that pigeon-holing is already entrenched. I'll be holding my breath over this one I think.

During the Kickstarter I found myself hoping that they would fall short of certain funding goals so that only the "core four" would be developed first, leaving kits/prestige/sub-classes for expansions or second games. I wanted this to happen because I wanted the essentials to function beautifully first, then allow the more focused and distinctive classes to develop uniquely to the setting. I've focused critically on spellcasting classes throughout the Beta, and I'm pretty disappointed with them. Particularly in light of their attribute system goals, they should have gone with a classless system. Furthermore, as they were taking advantage that calculations did not need to be table-top friendly and could utilize the complexity of computers alone, developing a broad, dynamic, and customizable feat based progression like D&D 3.0 would have been VERY viable. While I am far from giving up, and believe that all of this is quite fixable...I've lost quite a bit of faith due to lots of the combat & class design choices. I am likely to mod this game extensively when released.

I find the melee classes to be just fine in PoE. The game appears to have been designed around melee combat first and foremost. I think it would be nice if fighters were less defensively oriented, but with the way classes were fractured into MMO roles.. that's not likely going to change much.

The system was clearly designed around and emphasizes standard attack melee combat, which is why abilities come across awkwardly. I believe Obsidian is going to need to retool the activation speed and recovery times of abilities/spells to be based on [Ability Tier] + [Armor Modifier] + [Talent]. Abilities would be tiered according to their power/frequency of use/etc. to have them resemble the current staggering of weapon action/recovery speeds. Significant balancing would be required, but that's already in dire need anyway. I think it would be an elegant solution to a severe problem with combat.

I'm content with the level of difficulty on normal. I only FPW'ed once at this difficulty, and I suspect that was due to the DT bug. One of my problems with combat, is that I do not feel it is decisive enough. I would like encounters to be more chess like, rather than melees of attrition. Abilities and spells feel impotent while (Stamina) HP values tend to be quite high. With DT shaving off a large portion of damage every time, these influences only compound on each other.

The major The problem with this scenario, is that it is contrived. Your barbarian is likely to already be engaged in battle. Your countering wizard is also likely to be performing an action. They both have cooldowns of their own which must complete before they can form new ones--especially for your own wizard. Furthermore, your Wizard still has the same casting speed as the enemy wizard. For his interrupting spell to work, it needs to not only cast more quickly than the enemy spell, but so much more quickly that is has enough time to strike the opponent before they complete their own. I think that departing from absolute rounds can work, and could potentially be great. However, it presently makes ability usage severely problematic. The native/inherent use and recovery times, let alone the abilities themselves are going to require significant rework.

Lack of mechanic optimization is certainly a problem. I guess that's the entire issue I'm having. I do not feel that a masked turn based system need be the answer either. At the moment, a major problem is that ability usage (which all classes have in some form), are extremely inefficient. Disregarding poor balance of duration/damage/effectiveness, they cannot reasonably be applied in an appropriate manner because of the combat calculus. High resolve alone does not fix this, as even when not suffering risk of interruption, the character's own actions conspire against them to act in a timely fashion. In the time it takes to invoke 1 spell/ability (just successfully use, not recover), there is the potential to have had up to 3 attacks and movement for EACH actor fielded. The variability further increases if engagement is being involved. This is problematic for timing something as straight-forward as Knockdown. It is a real conundrum for spells with radius, and a nightmare for spells which are aimed on margin due to friendly fire. That's just a three second span of time with assumptions made that all actions began simultaneously--which they very rarely are. Factor in the minimum three second recovery for ability use, any recovery imposed by armor, compounded by the probability that your character was not idle and already engaged in an action with its own speed factor and recovery rates, and you have a fine mess. Responding to change in conditions through abilities is very complicated. This is the chaos that people are talking about with PoE combat. Edited for grammar.

I'm having a bit of trouble with the asynchronous nature of combat. This is not a problem for standard attacks, but certainly makes spells and abilities unwieldy. Even with a cleric and wizard standing idle naked in reserve, they often do not have enough time to appropriately respond or apply spells both offensively and defensively. Add the necessity of armor with their own standard attacks, and it's almost as if they are acting independently of the battle conditions. The shifting melee contributes to a high degree of misses, since spells need to be cast at the edge of their periphery to avoid friendly fire. Action and equipment delays regularly necessitate a healing spell to be cast at the first sign of damage or risk it being cast on a corpse. Having each actor on their own unique time-sequence with the added potential for each to be altered by interruption and movement, the exact nature of the problem is difficult to discern. The experience is reminiscent of solving multivariable calculus. If I were to guess, I would wager that the problem is with the standardized cool-down and use speed of spells/abilities. I think that they too will need some variation--likely based on spell level and attribute scores rather than weapon type. To reiterate, I'm not sure. I'm just wondering if this is a problem for others, and what their thoughts might be.

Might is an abstraction of direct force and potency. It is concerned with innate power. It is not the sole governing statistic of spell casting. Dexterity influences the degree to which your spell will overcome defenses, reducing the chances and/or degree of which your spell will be resisted. In this regard, it functions similarly to Spell Penetration of D&D 3.0 , but towards all defensive statistics. Furthermore, it increases the chance as which the spell will critically hit (increased damage/duration). Intellect increases the scope/radius of the spell, allowing priests and other casters to make more broad use of their limited use spells. More importantly, very many spells, particularly for the Priest have duration. Intellect governs duration, and confers a significant advantage over Might for many spells because of this. It's not the statistics themselves which verge on precluding modalities, but the availability of point on creation to maximize nearly four attributes. If you're concerned about a certain spell caster being overly potent and dynamic though, fear not. Priests (and other spell casters) will be hampered by their imitation of MMO class design to prevent this. In this way, Priests are at low risk to be both "DPS/Healing machines", or even a "DPS machine" for that matter.

Yup, Ciphers have some devastating abilities and have enough focus at the start of combat to use 1 or 2. Soul Ignition is just broken, and basically is basically a finger of death on whoever you target. That is exacerbated by the fact that you can cast it continuously with the speed at which Focus is gained. They gain focus way too fast IMHO, but that is based on the power of their spells. They have a nice variety of spells, but are limited by selected specific ones as they level (Like a Bard or Sorc in the 3rd edition DnD).... I've been experimenting with Ciphers, and I'm enjoying them a great deal. They are working well as the Gish the were obviously intended to be. I do not feel like they are overpowered though. Ciphers spells actually work. Imagine that. Damage spells do effective damage. Spells which blind, paralyze, charm, or otherwise disable actually are effective and incur a duration that is worthwhile. The rate at which they can acquire focus may need tweaking, but I don't think it unbalanced or crazy to actually play a spellcaster who spends a major percentage of their time actually casting spells. After my long foray into figuring out all the nuances of the Wizard class, the Cipher is a breath of fresh air. I imagine this is what the Wizard would have played like had it not had all of its qualities diluted and gifted to other classes.

Understandable that you would suspect that. I assure you though, that's far from the case. My context is far beyond BG2, though I loved it. The lvl 7 D&D Wizard has very few spells per day, but they can matter intensely. A level 7 3E Wizard was a force to be reckoned with. They couldn't cast often, but when they did it had significant value. That trade-off is entirely absent with PoE Wizards. I digress. The point is, that the Wizard is currently not even capable of moderately fulling its design intention as an AoE damage and crowd controller. This is entirely fixable, and largely rests on spells needing severe reconsideration. Introduction of talents will likely improve this lot as well. At the moment, I have two impressions. First, Mr. Sawyer does not like D&D Wizards. Secondly, the Wizard class for PoE has been so severely diluted in the attempt to give other classes more distinctive identity, that Wizards are currently impotent. I regard it as an "inverse bard syndrome". Whereas Bards are typically troubled by having too little of everything, PoE Wizards are currently besieged by the attempt to keep them from being the "omni-class". When I experiment with classes like the Cipher and Druid, this becomes all too obvious.

I doubt any re-spawning is featured in the Beta portion of the game. It doesn't mesh with the design goals, or lack of combat XP for that matter. It's likely a bug. If you kill off your entire party, they will periodically re-spawn and automatically rejoin your party when you enter friendly zones like Town, the inn, and the blacksmith shop. I've been experimenting with it to trying and figure out what exactly provokes it, because it is inconsistent, though not infrequent.

I have successfully been able to flee combat. It's extremely difficult to do without leaving a sacrifice, but I have done it once by using a Wizard spell to paralyze everyone for long enough. Escaping combat is very easy to do if you don't have any problems killing off your party members. In order to test certain things, and explore levels higher than 5 expediently, I've been literally throwing the BB character naked and defenseless to the lions. So long as you're slightly out of LOS either due to incapacitating the enemy or sating them with blood of the fallen, you can break combat and leave the area. *I need to edit and clarify something. You cannot escape combat by breaking LOS with obstacles like walls for example. You need to be a distance where LOS would not be met were there no obstructions. Breaking combat indoors is a challenge, and I can't say I've accomplished it yet. Outside though, it's as above.

I've been going through each class, focusing on the "core four" and intend on reviewing each of them. I'll be starting with my favorite RPG class, the Wizard, of which I have extensively play-tested. General Impression The class feel familiar, with the nice addition of being able to use armor and all weapons should I feel so inclined. The spell list is adequate for the level and is strongly reminiscent of classic D&D spells. Most of the attributes feel worthwhile (after much testing), with some being far more notable than others. The ability to engage in melee if determined to, along with the open skill selection gives the class a more dynamic feeling than is traditionally possible. However, it is the core of the class that is weak and in need of serious revision. I believe these reasons are fixable, but fundamental, and would exist even if talents were implemented. As is, the Wizard fails most at what it was intended to do. Spells & Spellcasting The potency of damaging spells are entirely inadequate. Even with maximized Might and Dexterity, whilst casting spells with a "high" threat range, the most damage I have ever done in a single casting is 78 damage. Spell damage is most consistently confined the high 20s to low 30s range and below. Considering Wizard spells are a very scarce expendable resource and enemies have Stamina well into the hundreds and above, this is not useful. Even with a level 7 wizard, it often takes nearly every single spell with its repertoire to defeat even one single foe--and just barely at that, if at all. The duration of spells which disable and paralyze are woefully short. Even with Intellect maximized, there is little use in casting these spells. Without Intellect maximized, duration is negligible. With Intellect maximized, durations are often only long enough to close into melee and enact a single attack. Even within melee, these durations are too brief to be of use for more than one or two attacks and are extremely difficult to use with large radii often disabling your own party--the offending wizard included. Again, for a scarce expendable resource, these effects are inadequate. Furthermore, spells would also benefit from having greater standardization of area of effect. Being that they are all more or less equal in effects and potency, the dramatic disparity between their radii is pointless. This may be an AI bug, but often when commanding my wizard to cast a spell, the character instead reverts to auto-attacking. Sometimes the action will show the spell icon but have it use the Blast ability instead, but more often than not it will simply fail to trigger. Customization & Play Style While there is a discernible difference between min/max attributes like Might, Intellect, and Constitution, others feel marginal. While Dexterity increase are noticeable for a "muscle wizard" build engaged in melee, usefulness spell accuracy appear negligible. This may be due to how infrequently they are cast though. Perception has no strategic value what-so-ever. There could be some potential, but even at level 7, my Wizard cannot per-encounter use level 1 spells. Furthermore, with all wizard spells taking equally long to cast with a set "recovery time", using spells to interrupt any action is not feasible. Resolve is of some use, but even whilst maximized, using DT 6 armor, and Spirit Shield, spell interruption is still common. Currently, the "muscle wizards" are the best approach, purely because spell casting itself is woefully ineffective for the Wizard. It's currently better to be briefly adequate at melee, rather than next to useless as anything else. The Blast ability is of little comfort. While it can produce damage on par with spells, that is only because spell damage is so low. Misses are common with maximized Dexterity. Damage to peripheral foes is unreliable, often not possible, and not compensatory for the pittance done to the actual target. I considered the Blast ability to be conceptually awful, and I feel that opinion has been vindicated in its implementation. The ability to choose any skill and item does shine though. I have had fair success with a stealthy and mechanically inclined Wizard. Being able to wear armor and weild weapons does not much in compensate for its fundamentally weak at its intended class role, but does provide options. I look forward to seeing their impact once the class is further developed. End Point If wizards were to have their entire spell book be brought to a per-encounter basis, the class would still be underpowered. Major balancing, spell, and class revision is required. They fail at the role they've been designed for, and are probably my only major disappointment with PoE thus far.

Not a fan of this at all. It only exacerbates the current problems. Character portraits need to be on the side, so that status effect indicators may be larger and more clearly readable. This also permits character action indicators and action bars which currently clutter up combat to be placed by their portrait on the side as well. The same applies to the menu selection box. This gives ample room for the text and feedback window at the bottom.

That's just a matter of changing a few numbers. This is a beta. During the beta, balancing takes place. The current figures are not release candidate numbers. This is not an argument that substantiates your claim, it is simply evidence that you cannot do basic maths. Thank you for indirectly agreeing with me. You are correct. It is partly a matter of changing numbers. I never said it wasn't. I never said any of this wasn't fixable. My point is, and has always been, that its current implementation is problematic. This thread is about its current problems, and how we might improve it. If you were less concerned with being antagonistically pompous and quipping insults, you might have figured that out sooner as well. I very politely request that you try to be civil in a threat created to be constructive. If a minimum standard is enforced, the only way to increase variance is to adjust upward. In effect, you have only two kinds of attributes. "Good enough", and "better than good enough". If the degree of variation is small like the current implementation, the choice presented to customize is hollow and indistinct. If the degree of variation is large, whilst enforcing a "good enough" minimum standard, then the maximum ranges will be highly likely to be broken and unbalanced. This is the conceptual and system problem with "no bad builds".

This is just nonsense. How do you get from "no bad builds" to "less variation"? The PoE attribute system as it is designed(Ignoring balancing right now) is meant to add variation by allowing you to create classes that focus on various sub-types. It sounds more like you're trying to squeeze as many clever-sounding words into your comment to distract from the fact that you actually don't have an argument. See this thread. For a choice to matter, something has to be forgone (see: opportunity cost). A character with maximized stats can only perform class functions marginally better than one with minimized attributes. This is what all the fuss over attributes are right now. In many cases, they are distinctions will little difference. This is exacerbated by several attributes having demonstrably poorer values for all classes, and that the usefulness of certain attributes are directly limited by the explicit role intended for certain classes. This sums up to a false choice. It's the illusion of choice. If you been less threatened by vocabulary, you might have gleaned that from my prior comment.

Not at all. Here's a made up one attribute system for fighters. You get a knob that trades offense with defense. You can have a dynamic range that makes it essentially do nothing. If the default is good then there are no bad builds, true. You can also give it a dynamic range where all the way to the left means hits almost everything but gets hit by almost everything (rogue++) or all the way to right means hits almost nothing but gets hit by almost nothing (tank++). Both of those extremes and everything in between can be good builds especially in a party based system. It requires that you play the more extreme characters according to their abilities. Interestingly, the Dark Eye game Blackguards does something similar to this. All the way to offense ended up being almost unilaterally the favored choice though, partly due to the small party size that pretty much required everyone to be capable of doing damage. I immediately thought of Blackguards as well with his comment. At least with Blackguards, there is opportunity cost. Even if other circumstance (small party) favors offense, the choice is meaningful. With the current implementation within Beta, attributes only have two values--adequate, and more than adequate (at least within combat). This distinction is mediocre. This mediocrity is only magnified by the absence of talents (which may more heavily rely on and distinguish roles), and that some attributes have narrowly defined and marginal use. The only places where these distinction are felt are where they are such a given that they don't matter. The wizard for example. Their class is designed as primarily focusing on AoE damage and crowd-control effects. More than half of their abilities have a duration, and more than half of those have an area of effect. Being that Intellect increases both AoE and effect duration, there is almost no reason (mechanically) to avoid maximizing Intellect. The choice presented to increase it or not is almost false. This is not satisfying. The class structure plays against the attribute design. They need to increase the significance of each attribute to how each class is deliberately focused, while limiting the attribute distribution in such a way as to where opportunity cost demonstrates meaningful distinctions in play.

Philosophically, the problem with preventing "bad builds" is that in doing so one will inherently diminish, if not outright sabotage, variation. Variation is one of the principle enjoyments of any game, let alone a game with character customization. Lack of variation implicitly removes player agency. Without opportunity cost, choices don't matter. No bad builds ensures lack of opportunity cost; therefore, lack of variation/player agency. People are really getting lost in the minutia though, and are failing to understand what Obsidian was trying to do with this attribute system. I personally feel like there would be much less fuss if Obsidian had chosen abstracts such as "Minor, Lesser, Standard, Greater, Major", etc. while keeping mechanical the values hidden. As Obsidian does not have intentions of allowing attributes to be increased with level, the player doesn't necessarily need to understand the degree of abstraction--only that it exists and what trend that the distinction implies.

I'm a bit surprised by all of the attention the attribute system is receiving with regards to whether it is significant or not. It's entirely besides the point. The current design objective of "no bad builds" is implicit that builds will have little meaningful variation. This is first and foremost, a low-level campaign. Attribute bonuses are percentage based. This will cause their influences to be less distinctive. Character classes, abilities, talents, etc. are not yet fully implemented. We do not know how they will compound against attribute bonuses. Just by those three points alone, we already know that attributes within the current state of Beta will not have much influence. The question is not about whether attributes are meaningful. The question is about whether players should be "allowed" to fail, or at the very least--perform poorly. If the answer is that they shouldn't, then classes should have been designed on rails like Diablo 3. If the answer is that they should, then the magnitudes of difference within build values will become self-evident in pursuit of "allowing" players to fail. Beyond my belief that players should be allowed to fail, I truly do not think the answer to "fixing" the attribute system has much to do with changing magnitudes as per reasons #2 and #3 above. The problem is that some attributes, like Perception and Resolve, have very narrowly defined circumstantial purposes that lack the intrinsic and more broadly applicable benefits of other attributes. Then again, this very well may change. When talents are fully implemented, they may rely significantly on attributes values in ways that we currently cannot know.

Thus far, from the Wizard's implementation, I feel that the spell selection is adequate for beta. Many of the spells are low level D&D facsimiles at the moment. If you visit the Wizard wikipedia page you can read a list of spells which appear sufficient. The short-comings will be with defensive spells, as Mr. Sawyer does not wish for Wizard to be "complete". Summoning also appears to be totally absent, and I doubt it will be implemented in any significant way due to Mr. Sawyer's preferences as well. I have a strong suspicion that the more exotic spells (like the Illusion & Wish spells), will not make it to Pillars of Eternity wizards either. As it stands, both in current beta implementation and design objectives, Wizards shall have AoE crowd control and damage spells, with a small complement of limited-time self-protection spells. The current protection spells focus on raising defensive statistics like Defense, rather than absolute damage evasion like Stoneskin or Displacement. I anticipate that trend to continue for the stated design goals. That being said, Arcane Veil is useful, functions well, and serve its purpose as designed. This is not to say that Wizards are currently dissatisfying within Beta. Despite some issues, playing a control wizard (my preferred style) can be very satisfying when employed expertly, particularly with maximized Intellect and Dexterity. The Wizard class in PoE is deliberately not being designed as they were in Baldur's Gate 2. While this is a shame, modding in spells is relatively very easy. I have great expectations for when they are.

The side would be a much better option. I don't know why they are trying to duplicate the IWD2/TOEE UI. The additional space on the size also provides greater room for displaying things like....status effects, and character action bars. Whereas status effects are currently far too small and ambiguous with their tiny little tags affixed to the top of a portrait, action bars and indicators are quite obstructive. Both could be placed by their portrait and appropriately sized if they were on the side of your screen, rather than lost in combat or crammed into the bottom.

My issue isn't exactly with the speed per say. The very first thing I did when loading the game was go to the options and tweak my auto-pause conditions. They are your friends. My problem with combat being chaotic, is that I don't feel like I can effectively protect characters, or have a meaningful formation/strategy once melee is engaged. While engagement is noticeable, it doesn't have quite the stopping power I was hoping for. The constant combat coupled with the brief duration and limited availability of protection spells leaves my squishy casters vulnerable to the more durable and nimble monsters that readily shove through. While I feel that engagement will ultimately prove successful, it's the asynchronous "combat rounds" that's really hurting me. I feel like strategies I try to implement fall apart because my characters are queuing their actions at very sporadic times. It may be due to different armors equipped, or subtle mechanics that I may not have yet grasped, but many actions feel unresponsive. There are many a time when I've issued a command to cast a spell, only to watch the action bar deplete, reset, and run down again without ever having cast. Mind you, these characters are not experiencing an interrupt. I don't feel like any of these problems are insurmountable, but they are going to require a great deal of tweaking. Their difficult to articulate aspects certainly doesn't help either.

Dis. Seconded. That's why I'm not very interested in a queue at the moment. It's not about people having the choice to use it. It's about the root of the problem. Combat is too chaotic for reasons other than lack of a queue to be able to benefit from one. It's a misapplication of a solution to a tangential problem.

There needs to be a component which mitigates friendly fire for Wizard spells. The usefulness of Intellect is severely diminished because it effectively forces friendly fire in order to use spells. The fray of melee is too chaotic, and I am frequently left with the choice of damaging/disabling my entire party with the enemies, or not using spells at all. With a Wizard that has an Intellect of 3, I can at least target in between friendlies and get some use out of my spells. While I was a proponent of friendly-fire, enemies move too quickly, engagement is not yet effective, and PC initiative is too unresponsive to effectively time spells before melee is met. Please either introduce talents to screen friendly fire, or include a sort of tiered friendly-fire reduction within the Intellect stat itself.