Doppelschwert

I wonder why bruce did not already chime in to celebrate? Apart from the fact that correlation is in fact not the same as causation regarding this violence debate, you probably shouldn't let your kids play a game where they can bang a prostitute anyway if bad words are a big deal in the first place...

That would be kind of punitive, wouldn't it? Apart from that, good job on doing the rational thing with the translation, although it's a pity for the portuguese speaking people.

You missed that one could imagine that there is an universe with a book with an orc riding an unicorn on the cover. You're welcome ... Whoever can proof me that this universe is ours gets 1000 points btw. On topic: Realism to me is having a consistent setting, as others already pointed out.

Lets do as he says, but only for gold and above. That would be fine with the op, right?

I would like to see some humans that don't look like spell casters or rogues. The only male portrait that legit has on armor is for a dwarf. Really we need more of everything. I would say at least 2-3 more of every race male and female. That includes the subraces and godlikes. Although you are right I guess that isn't very helpful when they try to priorize what can be done in the little time left. I guess the most helpful would be if they concentrated on portraits which you won't be able to find elsewhere in order to import them, so it would probably be best if they focused on doing more portraits for orlans, aumaua and godlikes first of all. You can easily find countless fantasy portraits of humans, dwarfes and elves in the internet after all (even though it would obviously be better if they were already included in a similiar art style in the game, I guess thats more efficient for having a broad variety of portraits).

Huh, I didn't know that. So then that character is irretrievably gone since there's no resurrection? Apparently it works like this although I didn't bother to check ingame: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Maimed

I gotta admit, I've got a fetish for humans. There's just something sexy about them that makes me wanna roleplay, if you know what I mean. In all seriousness though, I'm not imaginative enough to identify with something that I'm not, so it's humans - humans everywhere for me.

Cool. I think that it is possible in German to have a single word for "know it all on the topic of crowd funded independently developed computer role playing games" - so how about it? Well, formally you can construct something like that. The only rule in doing this is basically that any word describes the next word to the right further, so the order matters. For example, 'SchulFerien' means vacation from school while 'FerienSchule' means a school that you attend during vacation. So I guess it would be "crowdfundet-indie-rollenspiel-besserwisser", although nobody would say something like that. I actually think that it doesn't fit here because know-it-all itself is not context specific, so it feels kinda strange. Self-claimed expert on crowd funded independently developed computer role playing games however seems more natural, which would maybe read 'selbsternannter crowdgefundete-indie-rollenspiele-experte'. Still, no-one would use that. You would say "selbsternannter experte für crowdgefundete indie rollenspiele" which is basically the same as in english. Note that words like crowdfunded, indie and rpg are common words used in germany because nowadays no-one seems to care to use the translations of the words as english sounds 'cooler' or something like that. This word-stacking is more common when all the words are actual nouns. The more I think about it, the more I think you wouldn't use adjectives or the likes in these constructions. I guess there is a reason I studied maths instead of literature, after all...

'Besserwisser' is the german word for 'know-it-all' or, to less extent, smartass.

I don't see what the problem would be if there were optional scripts. Everybody could have their cake and eat it, too.

In the interest of consistency and quality, that is really the only acceptable option, IMHO. I perfectly understand that someone might not want everyone in the party to be high-maintenance, but to have high-/low-maintenance be a core concept of a class is inherently flawed; if you can build it both ways, that's perfectly alright, and is frankly what would be most in line with the approach to character building that Pillars of Eternity seems to take. In a roleplaying game, there is really no excuse as to why one character concept (class) should be inherently less engaging than any other, unless you as a player chooses to play the concept (class) in such a way. Then you shouldn't complain about the existence of passive class abilities in the first place because that is exactly why they are there. If you look at the numbers, then you'll see that there are actually more command abilities than passives and auras combined, so it's already implemented with this 'acceptable option' (in theory). I'm counting 6 passive abilities and 8 active abilities in the wiki (don't have much time to extract that info from your post just now). I agree that the active abilities are too restricted in their use and /or applicability, but it's not as if there are only passive abilities. Besides, the paladin gets to enjoy way more talents because of the orders, which gives you way more character building than building a monk for example. It may not be properly balanced as of now but there really is enough choice as it is. Personally I think one design goal was to have all the auras equally useful in different situations such that there would be an incentive to switch them around all the time during combat for optimal play, making the class way more active although it's just passive boni. I think with proper numbers there may be merit in switching between Zealous Focus and Zealous Endurance, but Zealous Charge seems kind of pointless as already pointed out by the others.

Great writeup and a lot of good criticism / suggestions! However, I agree with aeonism that passive abilities should be available for people that wish to play low maintance characters. As long as there is enough active alternatives, there is absolutely no harm in having them. If there aren't, then there should be more instead of removing the passive ones.

I think ducks are the greatest animals there are. :sadface:

I actually think it's more important to have a dps formula that is mathematically robust against scaling. It's nicer if you can have all values small and still contribute meaningful compared to some JRPG scaling where you start with 83 HP at lvl 1 and end up with 12507 HP at lvl 50. As long as every factor is concerned in your formula, you can still tweak the individual values to give an incentive (although of course less than tuning the formula). If, however, the formula scales badly toward extreme allocation of points because the mathematical growth of the function is hardly contained, then not only keeping values small but also balancing becomes rather difficult or not possible at all. When you set up your system in a way that the highest DR you can get from armor is 12 and the enemies have DR in way higher ranges just to make them feasible encounters in the first place, you screwed up in my book. Besides, as sensuki pointed out, we know what the design intention is anyway. It's mathematical clear that the system is more robust if there are less multiplications and more summations, especially when you can limit the input of any factor.

Thanks for digging this up! I think pointing out the code is already enough to show that there are errors in the way the game handles the formulas, but I guess some further testing can't hurt as well. It also explains a great part of the 400 damage rogue.

Thanks for digging this up. Looking at the code, I agree that the multipliers are not applied in the right order (as I expected all along as well). What you can see from the code is that the formula is something like [(BaseDamage * (1+Might_Mult) *(1+ Crit/Miss_Mult) + Disengagement_Bonus + Melee/Unarmed/Ranged_Bonus )*(1+Melee/Unarmed/Ranged_Mult) - DT] * (1+Racial_Mult) It's unclear whether the damage bonus from enhancements or support spells goes into the base damage or anywhere else.

One good point raised in this thread was what i mentioned as well a week ago: I can't look into the game so my proposed formula is only a guess, but I think it holds. Maybe someone who can look into the code can confirm this, as it would explains a lot of the game behaviour and swinginess. Using the formula Total_Damage = [ Damage+Bonus_Damage - DR]*Critmultiplier as proposed in this thread as well is a good balanced way to do this from a mathematical point of view, as it turns critical hits into a linear increase in damage, compared to some nonlinear extreme value when damage reduction starts to grow. In particular, this smoothes the usefulness of critical hits over all weapon types: A fast low damage weapon will not benefit any more from critical hits than a high damage slow weapon. Assuming that this spectrum of speed/damage is properly balanced against the armor system at some point, this is IMO preferable: Given my formula holds true, that means that fast weapons with low damage are relatively more useful against high DR values when they crit, so increasing your crit chance basically undermindes the question of which weapon to use against which which range of DR values (which was the design goal of that system in the first place). It's a bland solution because crits basically become only free attacks, but its mathematical soundest in order to prevent gaps big gaps between crits and normal hits. If you insist on having some nonlinearity, which is probably more fun, then go for the other formula Total_Damage = [Damage*Multipliers+Bonus_Damage- DR] When I played the game it seemed to me that when I critical sneak attacked someone, the damage was calculated as Total_Damage= (Weapon_Damage+Sneak_Damage+Chanter_Buff)*(Might_Multiplier (+/* not sure) Critical_Multiplier) - DR Just by having all percentile calculations only apply to the base damage would help the damage range a lot at making the game way more mathematicaly robust towards big gaps between hits and crits. I wouldn't even apply the multipliers on the weapon modifications like the 'fine' damage bonus. Still, some actual ingame code would be nice to see how these formulas work.

I totally agree with you, that's basically what I was saying in the other thread today. However, with the aim of having easily understandable rules, I don't think an asymptotic function is up for debate, although I see the mathematical advantages. A more macho way to break down the chance would be to use the square root of the crit range as it is now, although that is also too mathematical. I think linearly downscaling the crit chance would be a sufficient change, for example just divide the crit range by 5 for every point over 5. The problem is not only in the crit chance but also how I assume crits are computed: I guess its Total_Damage = [(Damage+Bonus_Damage)*Critmultiplier - DR], where Damage is the base damage of an action modified by might and Bonus_Damage comes from buffs, although it would be nice if someone could confirm that. A better way would be either Total_Damage = [Damage*Critmultiplier+Bonus_Damage- DR] or Total_Damage = [ Damage+Bonus_Damage - DR]*Critmultiplier, the difference between the two being (Critmultiplier-1)*[bonus_Damage-DR]. I don't want to be able to have rogue with 400 dmg crits in the final game.

Yeah, I agree with you. What they did in 3.0 was a little silly, although you still can build powerful crit dependent characters with the weapon master in D&D 3.5. A weapon master with kukris still has a crit chance of 40% in that system. However, it's balanced by the prerequisites of the weapon master and the low initial damage of the kukris, and a lot of enemies are immune to critical hits as well, so a crit system in itself is not automatically bad in my eyes. With the design philosophy of pillars, you can't have these things, so crits have to be restricted in some other way. I feel like diminishing returns in increasing crit probability is a possibility. The way the game seemed to play out yesterday I guess that cirtical multipliers are used on total damage after adding bonus damage - I think first adding critical multiplier on basic weapon damage and adding bonus damage afterwards would go a long way too balance this as well, so that you can't one shot every enemy with 400 damage just be flanking them and hitting them with a buffed sneack missile critical attack anymore.

It's been in since about v333 Thanks, that explains a lot. It felt like something was off when playing the monk, but I was never sure if they changed something or not. Given that you don't need to spend the wounds anymore, I guess thats a small buff to lesser wounds and turning wheel then.

I think the crit range is the only problem in PoE regarding the combat swinginess - if you remove crits, then PoE has a slightly more predictable damage output pattern compared to IE - conceptually, it's not really changing a lot whether you miss or do little to none damage. What became obvious to me when I built my 400 crit damage rogue yesterday was that the individual talents are fine, but the stacking is not. I don't think the solution would be to nerf the individual talents or that there is stacking - either the individual talents become to weak or there are situations like in DnD where your buff ability is useless because you have already equipped an item that has a superior bonus. I think the solution would be to have the accuracy bonus give diminishing returns for the crit range. Compute the crit range as it is in the game now and then either divide it by 5 or take the square root and multiply it by a constant. That way you don't end up with a guarenteed crit on every hit no matter how hard you try. I think that is more elegant than having a hard cap on crit range . A bit about Monk wounds. So, is that already in or will that be introduced in the next patch? I honestly couldn't tell from playing through the beta yesterday. That's also kind of ****ty because that somehow defeats the whole purpose and the most interesting synergies of the class. If there is no incentive to use up wounds immediately and given that some of the more interesting class features are per encounter now anyway, I might as well ignore spending wounds completely and build a monk around all the passive abilities and use the wounds to fuel the turning wheel flame damage.

I made a ranged rogue today that was able to dish out 400 damage with a fine hunting bow on a critical sneak attack every single round, given how the rest of my party was set up around him. It was total carnage, so I feel that you might be onto something there when you compare him to the ranged fighter.

I finally figured out how to make a custom party and played through the beta the first time. Was on normal. Encounters with humanoids were kind of fair, but animals were kind of OP, so I guess this goes back to the armor change. I built a party without any spellcasters. Fighter/Paladin/Monk/Barbarian/Rogue/Chanter. I mostly invested in passive and modal abilities to see whether its feasible to have health as the only ressource and no priest. I still don't really have a feeling for combat; after some levels, my rogue acquired the ability to crit every enemy in the game for 400 damage, killing them instantly. Which is kind of ironic - I killed the ogre boss in the first shot and then his bears one-shoted every party member they got a hold of as well. I was able to dish out 900+ damage with a crossbow and some debuffs, but switched to a hunting bow of 400 damage for faster killing. Don't know if this is a bug or just because of my heavy stacking of passive abilities on accuracy and damage and crit range. I saw a lot of content and talents for the first time and they really seemed nice for the most part. I often found myself not able to choose which ability to get, which is good design in my book. However, the general feats seemed kind of lackluster. For the most part I just choose to take the class related ones and then a weapon focus, weapon style and interrupting blows.

I have a small chance to deactivate it by clicking on the modal button corresponding to the aura. Basically, I order something different like a move command and then repeat to click on the modal icon and after a while the paladin will abort the casting loop, doing the order i gave them. Somehow I even got him to attack himself the first time I encountered this.