Doppelschwert

I think that's intended. Isn't the reloading considered part of the recovery?

You also can't save anymore when you satisfy the conditions for this bug, e.g. if you dismiss a member of the BB party.

Feelings are subjective. To me POE feels very IE in regards to art. Obviously updated and higher fidelity. Bit different angle but the feel is there. Combat still needs work but I entirely disagree on the feel of art. That's actually what he said as well. He disagrees on combat and agrees on camera/controls/art.

Thanks, but I found that thread as well. However, the thread doesn't mention how to actually open the console, which makes the commands kind of useless to me... It's also not stickied and contains some spoilers, so I still think a spoiler free thread would be nice.

I'm trying to make a custom party for testing, however, I have no idea how to open the console and add gold to my party. I can't seem to find anything with the forum search and the internet is vague at best. So far I've found that I'm supposed to open the console with the ~ key, however, that does nothing and I guess that's either because I have to enable the console in some ini file first or because I have an european keyboard. Anyway, wouldn't it be useful to have a proper thread with the console and the known commands be a sticky here in this forum so people can do some proper testing? If you want your custom party, you basically only have to go to the inn, dismiss the current party with the menu accessible by pressing 'P' and then buy new party members with the gold you get from entering a command code. If you transfer the items of the BB Party to your main char, you don't need to buy new equipment, but apart from that apparently there are some codes out there to spawn items as well.

Thanks! I hope you are still reading this, because I want to wish you guys happy holidays and a good start into the release year of PoE! Pat yourselves on the back, you did great work this year again.

Hey Brandon, I'm wondering about the classification of the talents a bit - class, offensive, defensive and generalist is an odd way to sort them IMO. For example, all the talents involving weapons are in the offensive category, except two-handed because it gives a deflection bonus. When I want to build a character, I generally think about it not in terms of the categories presented in the game, but the following ones: - Equipment (Styles, Proficiencies, maybe armor at some point?; basically my configuration) - Passive, Situational (Stuff like the elemental DR, Damage Bonus against enemy types; basically the enemies configuration) - Passive, general (Stuff like bonus to the various Defenses, engagement; basically influencing core mechanics to my favour) - Modal (I'll probably just want to pick one or two from these and otherwise not look at the list again) - Daily (I think there is some psychological aversion to invest into this stuff by some people/some people want more active characters; it basically helps to filter) - Class It's two categories more, but I think it's way easier to find stuff you're looking for when building a character, especially if you expect each of these categories to grow over more installments of PoE. I don't expect you to use my proposed categories, but I think it would be easier to navigate if there were more categories / they were sorted differently. Maybe you'd like to discuss that with the team.

I think we're looking at it from the wrong angle as well. Enemy NPCs of the player races are probably almost always built within the same framework as the PC, so some situational talents can be used on these enemies to counter certain strategies of the player party. In this line of thinking, if you implement them with enemies in mind anyway, you might as well make them accessible for the PC. As for the claim of many useless talents, I guess a good part of it boils down to a lot of talents being situational and a psychological aversion to take something like that over a general bonus. It's probably a similiar effect as the hoarding of items for a later time when you need to use them instead of actually using them. I'm wondering about the classification of the talents a bit - class, offensive, defensive and generalist is an odd way to sort them imo. For example, all the talents involving weapons are in the offensive category, except two-handed because it gives a deflection bonus. I think it'd make more sense to have more categories: - Equipment (Styles, Proficiencies) - Passive, Situational (Stuff like the elemental DR, Damage Bonus against enemy types aso.) - Passive, general (Stuff like bonus to Defenses - Modal - Daily - Class It's two categories more, but I think it's way easier to find stuff you're looking for when building a character, especially if you expect each of these categories to grow over more installments of PoE.

You already answered your own question in a way. You get 6 points to spend, no class has 6 class talents, so you have spare points. Apart from that, as sensuki already said, some class talents are not very good or situational or only benefit one way to build the class. Consider the monk, for example. There are two class talents: Getting wounds faster and self inflicting damage to generate wounds. When I played the monk today, I often had the problem that wounds would pile up faster than I was able to use them because I had low DR and only invested in abilities that don't cost much wounds or passive abilities. The way I played, there was absolutely no incentive to get the class talents.

You see a screenshot of someone maxing those two attributes and conclude everyone does. Nice logic you have going on there. Does the screenshot also imply that no one plays any classes beside the monk anymore?

Modding is either done via code injection at runtime, or editing the code in an IL (which is fine for small changes, nasty for big ones) and recompiling the dll (which is basically instant). Doesn't have anything to do with making a build in Unity. Thats good to know, thanks a bunch!

I'm confused a bit. Do you have to recompile everything each time you want to test stuff yourselves or is it only necessary for the builds you want to push out for public? Given how I go about the little programming I have to do at work, there is a lot of recompiling going on for a lot of small changes when I test stuff, so I guess it's not feasible to work with compiling times of 5 hours when you can't be sure that everything is already working perfectly. I also don't get how this relates to the process of making mods - I doubt that the people making small changes of lines for their mods have to somehow recompile the entire game, do they? So I guess the long compiling is only necessary for some core parts while the details can be changed quickly without compiling or something? Someone care to elaborate?

It's just binary search with a first step to set the extremes. May not be the most efficient choice mathematically, but makes sense because it's fast enough and a manual process is needed here. Thus the method of choice should be easy to grasp and apply for humans. As opposed to an automated approach to an optimization problem. Yeah, you're right. It's been some years since I took my last course in computer science, thats embarassing. I know that its just binary search but was trying to come up with a connection to heaps, although there actually is none when I reread the definition of binary heaps. Totally agree with what you said - it's fast enough since you're basically halving the error with every iteration if you do stuff right, so it shouldn't take long to get into the right ballpark.

Josh also said on the SA-forums that no matter how high DT is, 20% of the original damage will always get through. Which means you can have damage values much closer to DT or smaller than max DT and balance around that, avoiding the issue with crits that are way overpowered for a good part.

Are you sure the link you posted is the one you meant? Somehow I don't have the feeling that people working on category theory and abstract algebra care much for a technique you learn in the first year of studying math. I may be wrong though, so feel free to write me an elaborate pm with some references if you want, i'm interested. No, I wasn't sure actually. I also wasn't sure if it was the right method to liken it to, hence my question in the post itself. I'm neither a mathematician, nor a computer scientist. A friend of mine who is both explained heaps to me once, in terms broad enough that I would understand. How about this link: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Heap.html Is it about the same thing? All I remembered was the practical application of heaps for quckly ordering elements by size, if I'm using the correct language. I see, so I was right. Your wikipedia article is about something that probably has no effect on any application of mathematics in our context, so feel free to disregard it. The wolfram article is closer, the corresponding wikipedia article is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_%28data_structure%29 Note that heaps are mainly used to efficiently store and access sorted data, but the process of retrieving data is similiar to how josh searches for balanced values, if you see it from a specific angle. That sounds pretty sweet. Looks like I'll finally be able to participate in the beta meaningful.

Are you sure the link you posted is the one you meant? Somehow I don't have the feeling that people working on category theory and abstract algebra care much for a technique you learn in the first year of studying math. I may be wrong though, so feel free to write me an elaborate pm with some references if you want, i'm interested. I don't think it makes a lot of difference conceptionally. I don't know whether DR or DT is applied first at the moment, but it hardly matters as the result on the damage function is the same - it stays constant at 0 up to a point and then rises with the (1-DR) being the slope. With the change, it stays constant at 0 up to a point and then rises with a slope of 1. Changing the point of view, they remove the ability of armor to buff your stamina by a certain factor. The most likely balance change is that damage for characters without armor will be a bit lower while damage for characters with armor will be a bit greater after the patch. The decision on which weapons to use against a certain type of armor for the most DPS remains an actual meaningful decision. I think it would've been worse if they kept DR and removed DT.

Awesome! Tomorrow is not even friday, so the chances are good that even in the worst case we may see an update before the weekend.

the content of patches seem to get better and better. so the main question now is probably when the next patch is going to arrive.

I don't want to get into a lenghty discussion about whether the wizard actually is versatile as there is another thread dedicated to that, but the way his spellcasting is setup with changeable grimoires, the versatility comes from having access to theoretically every spell in his spell list (you can decide yourself whether thats actually versatile in your eyes or not). With this line of thinking, a wizard should not be able to just get his melee grimoire and put the melee classes to shame, because he can decide to use another grimoire (with cc or debuffs or stuff) which the melee classes can't. I just wanted to say that the wizard in this game is supposed to be a generalist with the associated disadvantages and not a general specialist as in the IE games on high level. You can go into melee, but it's still advisable to actually use your magic spells for fighting instead of hitting guys with a weapon for the reasons Mr. Magniloquent pointed out - you can do it, but it's not very effective/fun to use the short duration buffs all the time at this point.

I don't know how much you know about the attributes, but I think high Str/Con/Dex is part of the problem. Dex increases your attack speed, but what you'd actually want is Per which increases your chance to hit and maybe also some Int instead of Con as Int increases your Deflection and area of effect. You'll also need armor of course, in case you didn't wear any. You can somehow have a melee wizard, but it should revolve more around using close combat area of effect spells like Fan of Flames or the like instead of weapons. The wizard is built around versatility, so you definitely won't be able to put him on the same level as standard fighting classes just by using buffs on himself. For the rest, see sheveks post - the cipher basically is designed around being the battlemage of the game.

My engagement limit section is indeed proposed in order to allow the player a little more freedom of movement to do things but it does not completely nullify the engagement system entirely. Both you the player and enemies mobs do not necessarily have to have an engagement limit of only 1. It might be a limit of 2 or 3 hell it might even be 4 but it does allow you to "tie up" and interact with a set of mobs. The neat thing is it gave would give the engagement limit system a little more "meat" to it. Things like Hold the Line might actually be a viable talent for your off tank (pardon the mmo expression) to pick up. Being able to hold off 5 units in melee between a fighter in defender mode and an off tank with Hold the line between the pair might be a good example to providing a safe or safer melee environment for otherwise squishy characters. Sometimes it might only hold off a total of 2 enemies it really depends. It does however, give the player more options. I might be alone here but talents being more useful and more player options is something I will always consider a good thing. If you notice the 2 examples I gave involving null-engage were both hobble abilities. Currently, hobble abilities function as a relatively minor defense debuff, something that can proc a sneak attack and a movement penalty that doesn't matter after engagement. Null-engage would make hobble abilities movement penalty actually matter. If there was a big nasty spider all over your wizard eating his face off hitting it with a Crippling Strike would do the equivalent of almost nothing. I mean sure yea now it moves slower but the minute your wizard moved it would basically be over for him due to the incoming disengagement attack. So what then is the functional purpose of a hobble? Is it a debuff only useful during the alpha strike phase of combat? Even I consider that a little unforgiving and i'm certainly no casual player. As above, it would change some of the landscape of abilities and spells. For example, it would make the Wizard movement speed spell much better without adding a disengagement break on the spell itself. I neither see why cycling through wouldn't be an easy manner in fights with less enemies than party members nor which part of the idea I misunderstood. Care to elaborate whats preventing me from doing this when I go all out with a party of 4 melee characters on a single enemy like the ogre? Does the ogre have an engagement limit of 1? Does he have other abilities he can kill you with? Does he have friends? Is it bad that you can use 4 melee characters to do a damn good job of "holding a line"? I thought people wanted more reasons to use melee characters . Regarding the first quote, I agree that it wouldn't be pointless to add the denial of engagement to already existing abilities. Making new abilities that can only deny engagement still seems kind of pointless to me, however. Regarding the second quote, I was assuming that the ogre has an engagement limit of 3 or 4 and that he is alone, so I think what I have proposed is viable. Especially if there is an additional chanter with summons, which should have their own nonzero engagement limit as well. I wasn't judging whether it's a good thing or not that you are able to hold the line in this context, but I am remarking that this plays totally different from the way it works now, and that it may work contrary to what is intended. The way it is now, if the near death guy retreats, the ogre attacks him with an disengagement attack and he probably dies, like he should because every human player would play this way if given the chance. The way your proposal goes, the ogre just spreads the damage around, never killing anyone, and eventually dies, which makes for rather bad AI in my opinion. Even without the change to engagement limit, you could just hobble the ogre with your other suggestion or make some crowd control spells or just heal up your guy and so on and so on. However, I think it is intended that there are not many abilities to ignore the mechanic, so I'm arguing that your proposal is contrary to how the game is supposed to work. I'm all for player agency and stuff, but if you have so many abilities and ways to ignore the disengagement mechanic, that you basically never have to suffer it if you don't want to, then IMO you might as well just remove it alltogether.

I neither see why cycling through wouldn't be an easy manner in fights with less enemies than party members nor which part of the idea I misunderstood. Care to elaborate whats preventing me from doing this when I go all out with a party of 4 melee characters on a single enemy like the ogre?

I agree with your criticism of #3, Doppelschwert. However, I reckon, Raz is right in his ambition of including some player agency into it all. On #2, I disagree. Raz's solution there wouldn't make Disengagement pointless in any manner or form. In fact, it would work beautifully and would vary baddies in interesting ways, including "bosses" and strategic ambushes etc. Ok, look at the following paragraph: How would I ever get any disengagement attack when I can simply cycle through my party to occupy a boss monster? Eveytime someone is short of dying, send another guy in and retreat the wounded guy. Heal the wounded guy and repeat. Either you have enough engagement limit to occupy the boss making you immune to disengagement attacks or you don't which means the mechanic is only available for trash where tactics should be less involved anyway. You would never get a disengagement attack if you wanted to while the enemy would get several because AI either wouldn't be able to plan around it or could easily be forced to never disengage. If you want to weaken it so considerably then you might as well remove it altogether in order to make it intutive at least. If you want them in the game, then you shouldn't be able to evade them with such ease.

If you call this a dissertation you're probably not a real doctor. Now that I made the bad joke I came here for, I guess I have to answer to the topic in order not to get off topic. I'll probably come off as harsh, but I appreciate the effort you put into it. - I agree on the visual stuff for the most part. - What you describe in 2) with your disengagement limit is basically a form of aggro mechanic and for the most part completely nullifies the whole mechanic, making it rather pointless to begin with. - What you describe in 3) seems rather pointless as well. Why is there a distinction between an ability that disengages and one that nullifies engagement at all? The only reason you want to nullify engagement is in order to disengage, so the ability may make you disengage as well. If it allows you to nullify engagement, its just a break free of jail card you can occasionally play in specific situations. The abilities that allow you to disengage at the moment have way more uses and it's not trivial to decide what to use them for as they can also be used for different tactics. In conclusion, I think the changes you propose make the disengagement system not trigger for the most part while being heavily penalized even if it ocassionally does. If you want to go with this kind of setup, you're probably better off removing it alltogether.

Yeah, that's how it is supposed to work. Note however that the number of spells you can cast per day is independent from grimoires, that is, only spell selection is tied to grimoures, in case that's not clear. If you gather enough grimoires, you could basically write down every spell in the game into them where the only thing preventing you from accessing spells is the time spent switching to the grimoire that actually has them. So in short: - The wizard knows a selection of spells which can be expanded by finding grimoires with unknown spells or leveling up. - Grimoires have limited space and can hold a selection of the spells the wizard knows. - You can have multiple grimoires but only one equipped. You can customize your grimoire by writing down spells you know. - Wizards cast a spell by selecting a spell from the currently equipped grimoire and using one of their appropiate spell slots. Basically, the wizard combines the spell availability of the DnD wizard with the spontaneous casting of the sorcerer with an opportunity cost (the time it takes to switch grimoires). Theoretically, you can prepare grimoires for different jobs and then switch them at the beginning of a fight according to the situation (one for elemental damage, one for gishing, one for crowd control or any combination).