Ninjamestari

No, I fully believe in 1) and don't consider it extreme, and wish it were simply common sense. 100% this.

But the problem with the soulbound weapons is that they didn't really feel unique, they felt like generic super-items that try too hard not to be generic and end up being a generic representation of a category of their own. IE, soulbound weapons. I'm all for making unique weapons and other equipment, but making a special category for all of them and have them all behave in the same manner just defeats the whole point. I'd rather just have all the honestly generic stuff. I know that the way crafting worked kinda killed all the non-soulbound items in the game as far as personality goes, but that's not a problem in how the items were made, it's a problem with the crafting.

Intelligent people like blowing stuff up, as it is usually the most efficient method of dealing with a problem. I mean, intelligent people have been coming up with more powerful ways to blow **** up for all of human history, and we've come up with some pretty powerful stuff. The simple solution is usually the intelligent solution. Only an idiot would begin to waste time doing an elaborate plan if they have the capacity to just blow **** up; cunning is the last resort of an intelligent mind, and the first resort of a dishonest one.

Generic hasn't been a derogatory term until these new pretentious hipster generations of people began using it as such, it used to be a completely neutral term, and it still is, unless you're a hipster.

What's so wrong with generic?

I really don't understand this "ordinary stuff is dull" - thinking, I think over-inflated 'special' stuff is the very epitome of dull. Special isn't special anymore if there's too much special everywhere. Kinda the same reason I don't like the god-like races; they're simply too far out there to be so common. Same with the soulbound items, none of them were anything more than stat-boosts with an annoying grindy-extra-mechanic. You didn't get them under any special circumstances, you didn't work for them, you didn't even look for them, you just got them while doing the same stuff you would've done anyway. You don't create interesting weapons by having a 'weapon system', that stuff needs to be hand-crafted, the legendary items need to be mentioned in-game by NPCs and books, and they definitely don't need extra mechanics that put them into a category instead of making them unique. The soulbound items feel more like merchandising-crap than actual important objects in a fantasy world.

By calculating the available experience up to that point and balancing the encounter accordingly, like I've suggested a few times already. Balancing isn't some form of arcane magic that can only be learned from the devil of programmer's hell, it's pretty straightforward logic and math. Again, you gain nothing by scaling him up if you've already balanced the encounter so that it is sufficiently challenging to the level your character can be at that point, and significantly more difficult if you've been skipping side content a lot, obviously. The whole point of scouring through the entire game to make your character just as powerful as he can possible be is to see just how easy you can make that one tough fight, that's the standard by which you then measure that build of yours. Even better if there are several incredibly tough encounters scattered throughout the game so you'll anticipate them, form strategies on how you're going to approach that particular fight with this particular character and wondering how is this build going to fare. If the encounter is just scaled to your level, it takes away your effort and input into the situation, it's no longer the player playing the game, it's the game playing the player. The thing is, why stop at level scaling? Why not scale them according to your equipment as well? What if a player has done tons of side content but didn't equip all the best gear in the game, now he's paying a price for it. What if a player didn't go through all those side missions but did end up with a nutcase-gear? What's the point of advancing and building your character if the game is just going to adapt to it so that you'll never experience any different results even by accident? EDIT: No, I really can't think of a single situation where level-scaling would be beneficial to a game, a well designed game doesn't run into those issues. There are always people who will find the game difficult and people who will find the game easy, but a uniform difficulty will provide you something to measure your success as a player against.

what's wrong with muscle-bound mages? Everything

You're not powergaming then, when you powergame, you go for the most powerful build, not for 'pretty powerful'.

Like I've said, simply listing every single xp source in the game up to a point X is ridiculously easy, you can then calculate the level at which the player would be at that point and adjust the encounters accordingly, or adjust the XP rewards, or both. The fact that obsidian had the tools but didn't bother to use them sounds kinda shameful to say the least. Level scaling is a lazy solution, which is why big-money companies love it as they seek to automate the design process and rid the world of the evil of handcrafted masterpieces that make their mass-produced pieces of junk shrink in shame.

I have a confession to make: I never liked the soul-bound weapons. They always felt kinda out of place and silly, with no real story to them and they just had this feature that was apparently a thing in the world but no one never talked about any of them and they didn't have any value what so ever outside combat. If it was up to me, I'd simply remove the feature from deadfire, they're dead weight that add zero value to the game due to being just another powerful item no one cares about.

STR vs MIGHT *is* a separate issue, there's nothing subjective "i see it this way" about it. The problem arose when they changed the concept of one stat but didn't touch the others and only slightly tweaked the others. The STR and MIGHT issue is purely about the concepts involved, but if you think you can change the concepts and just slightly tweak the math, then you're dead wrong. That's why I've always said that they need to rethink the whole package, not just change one thing here and one thing there. Start by deciding with the concepts, separate physical and mental stats and THEN figure out what to do with the mechanical implementation. The point is that the whole process they're going through is wrong and absolutely cannot produce satisfying results. The concepts for the stats are the very cornerstones upon which the mechanical implementation is built upon, that's why you need to begin with them and not worry about "this stat affects this" until your concepts are balanced properly. There is a larger picture here and no one will get anywhere by stubbornly staring at these two particular details. The conflict between the concepts has to be resolved before the math can be built properly. Oh yeah, and in PoE, a min-max character is always more powerful than a non-min-max character, especially on higher difficulties. If you really want to powergame in PoE, which is to make the most powerful party you can, then you will min-max every single character based on their roles in the party.

I didn't raise it as a point in the Strength versus Might context, min-maxing is a separate issue that has to do with the mathematics of the game, not with the concepts of the stats. You know, concepts as in "Strength means physical muscle-power" and "Might is the power of your soul" - stuff. All the "this stat increases this effect by x-amount" is mathematical implementation of those concepts, which is a completely separate issue, and the source of any min-maxing headaches one might have. And the min-maxing has been a standard argument of the pro-might crowd, so it naturally becomes part of the rhetoric here, even though it is a silly argument considering that PoE1 stat system is every bit as much min-max BS as the IE games with their AD&D stats ever were, saying that the change to STR is bad because it causes min-maxing is simply false. Grow a thicker skin, you'll go further in life. If I catch someone weaseling in their arguments with me, you better expect me to call them out on that every single time, and I fully advice you and everyone else to do the same. **** the tone of the conversation, honesty and intellectual integrity are far more important and preserving them in the long run is well worth 'lowering the tone' of the conversation. Respect and politeness have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and the first one is important, the second one is not. People are polite when they're either trying to sell you something or trying to feed you their bull****.

Why would you ever want your player to be able to kill a level 25 dragon at level 13? Having a situation where a player has access to an encounter he cannot yet defeat is an incredibly powerful way to convey growth, it's not a flaw as you suggest. Take a look at how Gothic I and II work, and the first Risen. The mobs are all static, although new ones spawn as the game progresses, and if you encounter something you can't yet defeat the game lets you find it out for yourself, it doesn't hand-hold you like a nanny by telling not to go there, or even worse, scale that encounter down so that little timmy can beat the dragon at level 13. Having the dragon be level 25 gives you something to measure yourself against, you can see the difference between facing it at level 13 and dying instantly, facing it at level 22 and being barely able to defeat it, facing it at level 25 when the encounter is challenging but not overwhelming, or even at level 30 when it becomes pretty easy if your game lets the player progress that far. Having the player be able to do anything at any point in the game is a supremely bad idea, and a big part of the reason TES games suck so much rat-ass; they offer absolutely nothing of interest, nothing to achieve, nothing to work towards and nothing to struggle against. The only way your game can 'need' scaling is if it suffers from really bad design. And having enemy get increased levels and learn new abilities is even worse than simple statistical increases. Having an enemy wizard learn to cast fireballs just because I helped one kitty too many down a tree is just plain retarded, it creates wonks and cranks in the difficulty so that certain encounters might be easy up to level 6 at which the enemy wizard gets spell x and then up to level 8 the encounter is incredibly difficult, after which your party gains spell y to counter the spell x and the spell z the enemy wizard gains isn't game-changing and it becomes easy again. Level-scaling monsters have never caused anything but one hell of a mess that is impossible to balance properly so that it remains both challenging AND intersting via facilitating the player growth and acting as a proper measure for your party. None of the stuff that level-scaling allows you to do makes the game better, it makes the game worse.

And being forced to make ludicrous builds with 3 in the low stats and 18 in the high ones in order to power-game properly isn't my idea of fun. There's nothing wrong with powergaming, powergaming is a fundamental aspect of any RPG, but there definitely is loads and loads wrong with a system that actively encourages blatant min-maxing. The point is, going for the super high stats should carry with it the opportunity cost for doing so, if it doesn't, it isn't a relevant choice, and you might just remove the numbers completely and simply have the player choose an x-number of "max" stats and the rest will remain "min" stats. And truly, I love powergaming, I always do it in RPGS, min-maxing simply is such a cheap and dirty way of doing it, it's more an exploit of a broken system than true powergaming.

This here, ladies and gentlemen, is called weaseling. Don't do it As far as the min-max stuff, you've got to understand that the concept of the stats and their mathematical implementation to the game are two completely separate issues; it's not the design of the concept that causes min-maxing, it is bad mathematical implementation. There are ways to combat min-maxing, such as diminishing returns point-buy systems and fundamental attributes tied to each stat in a way that any low stat actually does limit your game-play as much as a high stat opens possibilities. Those ways simply got ignored in the stat design causing the current situation. In other words, the Might versus Strength debate has absolutely nothing to do with min-maxing and vice versa.

But if mobs scale on 1:2 ratio, you'll end up with a system that is exactly the same as a system where mobs don't scale at all but the power progression is 50% slower, so again, there's no point in the scaling what-so-ever. The point is, level scaling is a completely worthless tool that doesn't really do anything, you're just tweaking two variables to achieve the same result you could've gotten by simply adjusting a single variable. In essence, completely pointless.

So we're in a 100% agreement here, looks like I just misinterpreted your comment a little bit. The dungeon really suffered from being a strap-on feature instead of a core feature, but I think it speaks volumes about the concept itself that the Endless Paths still managed to be one of the most interesting parts of the entire game, at least in my book.

Bear in mind that you're still playing beta, there may be limited content in order to have a more focused testing experience.

I have to disagree on the mega dungeon; even knowing it's there brings a ton of atmosphere to the game, and it was one of the things in PoE1 that I really liked. I think the only mistake about it was that the mega-dungeon was completely separate from everything else; they could've scattered all sorts of quest items around the world that would've had functionality in the Mega-Dungeon, and more dialogue and actual NPCs instead of just straight up combat in order to have it be more of it's own character rather than just an incredibly long dungeon, but overall I really liked it.

And yet, by design, the entire campaign of the game has your opponents scaled such that the path you walk in the first 30 minutes of the game, when you're level 1, isn't populated by level 73 dragons, but instead by lower-level things that are feasible for you to face. The creators of the game world and campaign have literally forced the world to be reasonable to your starting party. For the sake of clarity, when I use the word 'scaling' in this context, I mean automatic scaling relative to the player level, not static monsters that are just designed to be on the approximately right level for the individual encounters. An encounter shouldn't change based on the player's stats, it should be static so that it can be used as a measure for the character's strength and the player's ability. Homogenous challenge isn't a good thing anyway, you need contrast, otherwise you kill stories of those certain monsters that are more dangerous than others at that particular point in the game. You know, the kinds of horror stories nerds tell around a campfire at night in an attempt to induce nightmares upon others.

I don't think it's honestly that much work. A couple of talented coders and a designer to go over the in-game items, a weekend an a steady stream of coffee should be enough, and then a couple days off for a little hard partying to recover from the coding-induced brain damage. Josh for example obviously has enough vision to come up with with the details, someone just needs to repeatedly kick him in the nads until he has the confidence, focus and the will to trust his own vision, so even the overall design changes that impact the whole game shouldn't be that much of an issue. I'm 100% certain that if they begin to focus more on mining the gray matter of their own talented people rather than the opinions of forum/social media users, they will in the end begin to deliver far superior games for it. Oh, and the fact that it's more difficult to make ridiculous min-max-builds doesn't mean RIP Ciphers, and a multiclass and/or hybrid character isn't supposed to be as focused as more 'pure' characters. For a 3rd ED D&D example, take a Bard versus a Fighter.

Sure, but if the first 50% of the sidequests are "wow, I can really feel the significance of these extra levels I'm gaining!," and the last 50% are "Anything I gain at this point is entirely pointless," is that really the ideal situation? The situation you describe would be a problem caused by poor implementation IE way too much xp for side content or way too high power curve, so this isn't really a point for scaling monsters but rather a point for better content/class-mechanic design. EDIT: What I'm saying is, scaling monsters is a cheap duct-tape-attempt at fixing bad game design, and is never a good thing.

While I'm 100% behind this statement, I find it somewhat of a struggle to apply it to attribute mechanic design. Yeah, I kinda edited my post to elaborate on that a little more, but the main point of that was A) there seem to be two competing designs working at cross-purposes in the stats right now and B) Jojobobo kinda suggested reverting back to Might because that 'seems to be popular'.

If an artist decides to change a feature of his work based on what 'seems to be popular', he ceases to be an artist and becomes just another craftsman marketing just another product. I wish Obsidian trusted their own visions more and took less feedback from the people. Chasing popularity just to end up delivering an incomplete vision is never worth it. That being said, I absolutely hate the Might stat, and I'm really glad to see it gone and replaced with Strength. The problem seems to be that since the other stats have been left unchanged, there seems to be two competing visions when it comes to the stats. I think all the stats should be somewhat re-designed to reflect the new approach that separates mental and physical attributes in the more traditional sense. What I'd go is something along the lines of STR - Simple Physical prowess and Muscle Mass: increase melee accuracy and melee damage, requirement for heavy equipment such as hammers, large bows and armor. DEX - Agility and Coordination: increase both melee and ranged accuracy, deflection and action speed (Ranged weapons should have static damage, no modifiers from stats beyond accuracy) CON - Health and Toughness: Hitpoints and Fortitude Defense WITS - Alertness and Quick thinking: Spellcasting/Ability bonus accuracy, Reflex Defense, Power Source Cost Discount for abilities/spells. INT - Learning and Reasoning: More skill-points during level-ups, Increased Damage and Increased Healing for activated spells/abilities. RES - Willpower and determination: Increased effect for passive abilities, Increased Duration and AoE for all abilities/spells, Will Defence