Ninjamestari

If that is what you mean by intuitive, then a thousand times no. I'd rather have expanded "help" features that have detailed explanations on how the math works. My problem with PoE is mostly that there's so many important details that are never mentioned anywhere. For example, how am I supposed to judge the importance of say perception vs another stat if I don't even know how accuracy affects attack rolls? I do now ofcourse, but coming from a D&D background I thought that 1% + hit per point in perception is an awful return, but turns out that due to the way it affects criticals, perception quickly becomes the most important stat in the game for any hostile action. Another even greater offender is the Keep you get, I still haven't found anywhere exactly how turns are calculated, which leads to serious problems considering the expenses from hirelings are tied to the simulated in-game time isntead of these turns while your revenue is directly tied to these turns. Two things should be done for this; firstly, both expenses and revenue should be tied to same time units, either both operate around turns or both operate around the simulated game-time. I strongly dislike band-aid solutions like the experience gain + time mechanism in Tyranny, which is also incredibly unintuitive and never properly explained anywhere. Secondly, the game should tell the player exactly how things are calculated; how prestige is turned into revenue, how does security affect banditry and the general idea on how it influences events, including the detailed math ofc.

Yes, I might like having a black isle, for chuckles if for nothing else. No, I wouldn't put money towards it.

The summoner class should have its own unique mechanics; I don't think the spell casting system in PoE lends itself well to a proper summoner. I'd take notes from how Druids and Necromancers functioned in Diablo 2. Call the class "Invoker" or "Conjurer" or "Warlock" or something, give it a talent-like system where you can choose to invest in the power of your summons, how many summons you can have up at any one time, what kind of abilities your summoned monsters have etc. Have some buffing and direct damage spells as well. The Summoner could have some sort of spellpoint resource system, let's say 5 points per second regeneration, 100 point maximum and spells that cost anywhere between 20 and 100 points to cast, and the spellpoints could degenerate to 0 out of combat. The lore could be that their soul manifests energy that binds semi-sentient entities from ether to the caster or something like that.

1) The first KotOR 2) The first two Gothic games 3) The second Mass Effect I'd put the first Deus Ex on top, but I don't consider it a pure RPG. Besides, it wouldn't be fair for the other games to include it anyway. Bioware games tend to be better than Obsidian games, but Obsidian games allways have so much more potential than Bioware games. The problem Obsidian seems to have with most games it makes is the homogenous mood, where as Bioware has diversity of emotions to draw from in their narratives. Take the second KotOR; it's an inferior game to the first one by any measure, but it could've been so much better with the deeper philosophical aspects, but it falls flat with everything feeling the exact same doomy gloomy mystery. Even PoE suffers from this, and I think the folk at Obsidian have recognized the issue. They're brilliant when it comes to creating that mystical feeling, but that's the only thing they ever truly deliver in terms of mood. I know though that the other thing that has held them back have been unfinished games, Tyranny for example feels extremely unfinished, especially the third act which just falls flat and is over in less than an hour. I don't know if this is due to Paradox being difficult or Obsidian running out of inspiration, but it seems to be a recurring theme throughout their history. I'm glad PoE doesn't suffer from that as badly though.

You've heard about something called rounding? Just do that in your head, and round down. If getting 0.2 seconds of overlap is going to screw up your game, you're doing something very, very, very wrong. Getting rid of decimals would just mess up the stat system that works on %bonuses, so hell no.

I think the Chanter doesn't really represent the Summoner fantasy people want to go for, and that is the core of the issue. To me, chanter is not a 'summoner', a chanter is PoE version of a Bard. I think what people want is a Warlock/Necromancer type summoner, because hell, that's what I want too, not a friggin Singing summoner.

I don't think anyone is saying that it has to be Vancian magic, people are just sceptical on the proposed alternative. I've said it before and I say it again, I think mana based systems would work best in a crpg environment. It's no longer feasible for PoE due to the lore choices, but other types of Spellpoints could work just as well.

No, I seriously have to join the chorus of "Micromanagement sucks" I'd rather have the carry capacity only affect your equipment and quick items, otherwise it's just added unnecessary hassle. Definitely, shouldn't be hard to add and adds a lot of convenience. I forget locations all the time. Could be interesting, but I wouldn't waste too much effort trying to see this done. If it's doable without too much of a hassle, by all means. Split party missions where you'd for example have to use one party to lower a drawbridge and then another part of the party to defeat the evil knight that attacks you afterwards could be interesting, the other party could even assist with ranged fire from the battlements. I don't really see a reason for that. Maybe a passive trap detection that is always on? The Assmaster 5000 Arquebus, finally! A thousand times yes! :D The non-full-second times are the result of % bonuses and can't really be helped without messing up the stat system. Hmmm, why not. EDIT: oh and a wish of my own: Livelier characters. PoE NPCs are incredibly dull and joyless. I like the mood of the game, but it is way too homogenous.

Chanters talk too much :D

Ye it does feel the those last abilities are going to be very important to make sure its a real choice to go straight 18 level class or multi You can't really put that on the last abilities; let's say the options are pure fighter and a fighter /cipher that gets that +20% damage. Why would anyone choose not to take that +20% damage that will help you all the way through your game and instead wait until you get something cool when the game is essentially over?

This changes my somewhat defensive oriented priest with 10 Might into a speed-focused unarmored caster which you wanted to avoid… Buffing her Might is out of the question since her primary role is buffing. That would depend on the math of it. There's this gray area between being able to wear the heaviest armor and wearing no armor at all you know, and 10 Might should fall within that gray area. The character with 5 or less Might would be the one that is unable to wear any armor due to being so weak. The idea is not to force you to invest in Might, the idea is to punish you for dumping it and rewarding you for investing in it. Also, pulling one or two points away from somewhere isn't going to kill your ability to buff, you don't need to maximize any attribute to be viable.

There could be more consequences for just skipping 8 hours. I liked the beginning of Tyranny, where you had to really think on when to rest in order to complete the conquest before the Day of Swords. Another solution could be a mana system where mana doesn't regenerate naturally at all, and you'll have to invest in mana potions. Or if you have wandering monsters and slowly regenerating mana, you'll have to be careful and avoid contact with hostiles when you're low on mana and health. The point is, no system can be built perfect, it's the game content that needs to be created in a way that discourages rest spamming and the like. When the game content is really well made, Mana systems are superior to cooldowns and Vancian magic due to the added fantasy value; mana system is so easy to forge into a part of the fantasy world, where as vancian and cooldowns are kinda silly no matter how you explain them.

The problem with the proposed multiclass system is the 17/1 build. If the 17/1 build is worth doing, it'll be leagues better than a pure 18 always. If the 17/1 build is not worth it, then it'll be just worse and no one will make 'em, and people will end up making more balanced multiclass builds, in which case why bother with 3rd edition style free levelups at all, just have a 2nd edition style dual-classing. And seriously, no dropping to 5 party members. That road leads to casualization, which will lead to Obsidian becoming faceless men with suitcases, which in turn will lead to the very same problems they were trying to escape by crowdfunding a game instead of relying on a producer whose agenda is to make money instead of a great game.

Dragon age didn't have resting at all, and a system that can be countered simply by carrying certain items with you isn't very meaningful. I'm not opposed to having injuries, far from it, I think injuries, medical kits and perhaps even a first aid skill could enrich the game a ton; I just don't think that injuries are the proper way to facilitate the need for resting, and both the resting mechanic and the nature of the injuries suffer from that approach I think. Either way, I think in order to recover from injuries you should both treat them AND rest.

Well, you definitely do not change your game concept if your UI sucks or your Pathfinding isn't coded properly. That is not a valid reason by any stretch, fix the damn UI and Pathfinding if they cause problems. I'm not saying 6 is the best number of characters that there can be, I'm just saying that 6 is the traditional number and there are no valid reasons to change that. I liked having 6 party members in infinity games, and I liked having 6 party members in PoE, and I definitely want to have 6 party members in Deadfire. The amount of Trash isn't dictated by party size, it's dictated by encounter design. Besides, sometimes battle can become chaos, and there are spells and abilities to help you take back control when that happens, be it due to powerful hostile spells, incredibly strong individual foes or large numbers of 'trash'. Also, the redundancy thing, I really don't think that people should be forced to multiclass their characters due to reduced party size. Single class should be the core option, multi-classing the advanced option. If everyone is some sort of multiclass character, then the classes lose their meaning, and it's better to go the completely classless route instead.

The crafting thing is completely in the hands of the developers. If you force the player to invest in crafting, you can have those more worthwhile crafted items, which in some extreme cases could be slightly more powerful than the ones found in the map. The point is that it has to be worth the investment, but not so good as to make the investment mandatory. If you require no investment in crafting, then you're either in situation a) where the stuff you find is superior and crafting is useless or b) the stuff you find is inferior and loot is useless. I know I've overly simplified the issue, but this is at the core of the issue I think. EDIT: oh, and I actually like creating characters that stack up passive abilities occasionally, but I see what you mean with the Paladins ^^.

The problem with that approach is that it encourages you to rest every time you suffer an injury, which leads to rest-spamming, which kinda breaks the whole immersion thing.

If a game encourages you to always use the same spells, it is the encounters and the stats of the spells that are encouraging this, not how frequently your spells replenish. I agree with this 100% If the only reason you change from spell a) to spell b) is that you ran out of spell a), then the encounter never needed spell b) to begin with. That's why a simple system with simple spells is better; it puts the focus on planning the encounters. A Simple strategy will always outperform a complicated strategy in a simple situation. The problem with games today is that the encounters are simple and the tools you have are clumsy and complicated. A good game has simple tools and complicated encounters.

1. Improve the UI 2. Improve the pathfinding 3. Only if you use melee classes. Spellcasters had a ton of spells in AD&D and infinity games. You don't change aspects of the game because another aspect requires more work.

I'd definitely prefer a 2nd edition style multiclassing, where you pick 2 classes at the beginning of the game and not all combinations are valid. Simple and eloquent and avoids all that hassle that comes when you can freely mix and match class levels. A needlessly complicated systems will only add problems and those problems will then add band-aid-solutions that negatively affect the rest of the game.

I don't like this system. It's needlessly complicated and lacks eloquence. I feel like the boys at obsidian need a couple nights worth of good sleep; I only design stuff this complicated when I'm on psychosis induced by sleep deprivation and too much caffeine.

I vastly prefer the concept of 2nd edition multiclassing to 3rd edition. 3rd edition always felt a little cheap and gimmicky, too many builds just took one level of the other class to get that one ability that the build needed or that utilized the strengths of the original class. I prefer the simple approach, which is also infinitely easier to balance. The other effect of being able to determine your multiclassing from the very beginning of the game is that you already are both of the classes you picked and don't have to deal with the whole hassle of when to multiclass and when to pick levels in which class, and you'll go through the entire experience as a multiclass character instead of dipping that 1 level after first getting 5 levels of something else. EDIT: remember K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid - a piece of wisdom everyone with any programming background should remember and apply to everything in life.

PoE is the real spiritual successor for the Infinity games. 6 party members is an honored tradition and should definitely be kept. There are so many problems that arise today from people wanting to change stuff just for the sake of change; reducing party size from 6 to 5 doesn't accomplish anything, dropping it to 4 would make the game completely different. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Seriously, change for the sake of change is just chaos. It never leads to anything good. Only make changes that are backed by strong reasoning and not just "We thought we'd do things a little bit differently for no reason".

I don't really like the idea of power charges. The concept feels half baked and divorced from the fantasy world it is supposed to represent. Vancian magic isn't perfect, but I think it worked well enough in the first PoE that it shouldn't be replaced unless the system that replaces it is truly thought through and not just something gamey aimed at fixing a problem that isn't really there. To me, the character mechanics of the game should all represent aspects of the fantasy world the game is trying to portray; this is why I like mana systems. Mana is so easy to tie into the game world as a natural energy with mana potions, spells that drain or burn mana, or transfer mana from one caster to another or maybe even to a device that needs this mana to be powered up. Mana systems are also more easy to balance than most people think, the problems modern mana systems have is that in newer games mana has ceased to be a real resource as it regenerates so rapidly that it no longer serves as the limiting factor in spellcasting. If there is mana regeneration in a game, it should come from something really special and not just be handed to anyone. I'm not saying that Mana is the way to go for PoE2 (although it could be), but my point is that what ever mechanics you come up with should have strong ties to the fantasy 'reality' of the game world and not just be game-mechanics. Good game mechanics reinforce the fantasy, bad game mechanics do not.

To me, the character creation and progression in Pillars of Eternity always felt a little bland. The choices seem numerous and expansive but in the end become quite binary on the other hand and quite pointless in the other. The progress could be spiced up by adding more effects to existing attributes and expanding the list of skills. Blatant min-maxing also isn't punished properly I think, making any decent character power-wise really implausible and ridiculous with those dump stats. The choice in armor in PoE is a prime example of the binary nature of the game; you either focus on protection and take the heaviest armor available, or you focus on speed and have no armor at all. Any compromise in between is more a hindrance than anything else. Therefore there could be an aspect of character creation that would allow you to build for certain types of armor. My suggestion is that to tie Might into the equipment management by having a base item weight for every piece of equipment and quick item. Might would then determine the maximum weight of the gear you can equip. This would have the effect that stronger characters can wear heavier armor and carry bigger weapons, while the same time punishing overly specialized characters who completely sacrifice Might. To expand the usefulness of Dexterity, it could also have an effect on the Movement speed of the character. This would allow you to create builds designed around mobility, adding a new layer to character desig Constitution is pretty much fine as is now that its effects were increased to 5% per point, although I would still prefer a modifier per level increase in hitpoints rather than a percentage multiplier. This would make constitution a more attractive pick even for classes that don't naturally have high HP, where as in now low HP classes rarely want to invest in Constitution due to the low returns because of their low base value. Perception as a stat is also functional as is, but it's not that important to a character that doesn't rely on crits that much. To expand the utility of Perception, I'd make it affect the range of special abilities and spells, perhaps 5% per point. Some spells and abilities are limited by range and having perception affect that range could allow players to make builds that rely on overcoming those limitations. Intelligence obviously could affect the amount of skill-points you gain every levelup, just like in 3rd edition D&D. Together with an expanded skill list this would allow you to invest in the versatility of your character and also punish characters that sacrifice intelligence completely. I always felt that the game lacked some way to strengthen the passive class abilities players have, and here I think Resolve might be perfect. From Cipher's Whip to Paladin's auras, Resolve could directly affect the strength of the passive ability, let's say by 5% per rank. A Cipher with 20 Resolve would do 30% extra damage with an unmodified whip rather than 20%, and Zealous Focus would increase accuracy by 9 instead of 6 and convert 22.5% of grazes into hits. I think tying crafting to characters that have actually invested in it is paramount for good itemization. This guarantees that the items found in the world as monster loot, hidden treasures, quest rewards or merchant's wares will always be useful regardless of the power of crafted gear while still making sure that one can safely have powerful craftables. I always liked Crafting being an investment, both in cases where I did invest and gained access to it and in cases where I didn't and had to rely on world items. This makes crafting feel more rewarding and significant, and every item has more value by restricting crafting behind skills that require investing. Besides Crafting skills (Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Traps, Jewelry etc), the skill list could be expanded with stuff like first aid and bartering for better vendor prices. Lore could also be divided into several knowledge fields, dividing Wizard, Priest and Druid spells and scrolls into their own categories, so that if you truly wish to cast any spell from a scroll you'd have to invest to more than just a single skill. Just what I think. Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas.