Doppelschwert

That's not what I wanted to imply. Good arguments can be short and concise. I also think that being right and witty saves the day. I never get what you want to envoke with these kind of oneliners. Care to elaborate?

I'm indirect because I don't believe in direct confrontation. I was too direct for a long time in RL and decided that that is not beneficial for anyone. I'm also indirect because I'm not even sure if direct criticism makes sense at all, as I'm not really against anyone in particular here. I think if you consider where each individual poster in this forum is coming from, everyone has understandable reasons why they act like they do, and I don't want to act like my reasons are any better. For this reason, I don't really dislike any poster here, although I may come off as antagonistic at times. At the same time, I'd like to hear all kinds of opinions in these forums, and that seems kind of hard lately that fronts are hardening on any matter. That's where I'm coming from and I think people should decide for themselves whether what I criticed in my post is applicable or not. That being said, lately I feel like a lot of people want to shut discussion down by dismissing the other side or claiming that their opinion is fact, which is what I'm criticizing. It's understandable, because now is the time to speak up before stuff is finalized, but that doesn't mean I agree with the sentiment. I don't think its unfair if I say you are dogmatic at times, so this includes you, but I don't feel like that's limited to you, so don't take this as directed to you only. Mind that I think this happens to both sides of a lot of discussions lately and that if I feel like I'm not in the mood for this stuff, I will simply stay away from the forum till things have cooled down a bit. I just feel like we could express the same stuff we currently say while being more open minded about each other. The devs will surely be able to filter the good advice from the bad advice, at least I have that much faith in them. I know thats probably an forum utopy, but one may dream.

I agree. I think the inpolitness scales exponentially with every patch or so, because people feel like their time to force changes is running out. Discussion was always heated, but I think it started to get to a point where it is really annoying that the basic approach to any conversation is being hostile and personal feuds are interrupting the topics more often than necessary. I know that I care less and less about the forums recently because even the content its really just the same stuff that has been discussed for a long time now for the most part. Basically, people prefer to rage and whine instead of being constructive. I guess this needs rationalization: In any argument, the loudest and the passionate have the highest chance of making an impact. People writjng essays are read, yeah, but People writng one liners? they are heard. Not that it applies for this game. For PoE, Devs only care about the mythical min maxer who is apparently the average player. I'm not so sure about this. If I was to make a game, I would consider the people that made the most reasonable and realistic argument, given how the game is shaping up. I always feel like people that are loud and crave for attention should be disregarded in favour of actual arguments and in my line of work, that is usually the case. I'm sure that in PoE, devs care for the QA team because they are probably a more reasonable audience than the mythical IE games average player that most people claim to be.

He read their thoughts, explained what he fought about it for the whole time and did not change a thing because there are proper reasons why he decided that way in the first place. Thats a great example how people crapped their pants and it changed absolutely nothing, which was a good call in my opinion. I think his time is better spent on working on the game and that people could be so polite as to leave constructive threads alone with their whining. There is enough threads in the forums to vent your anger.

I agree. I think the inpolitness scales exponentially with every patch or so, because people feel like their time to force changes is running out. Discussion was always heated, but I think it started to get to a point where it is really annoying that the basic approach to any conversation is being hostile and personal feuds are interrupting the topics more often than necessary. I know that I care less and less about the forums recently because even the content its really just the same stuff that has been discussed for a long time now for the most part. Basically, people prefer to rage and whine instead of being constructive.

If you make a monk from Ixamitl Plains the stuff he is wearing could be considered normal (but exotic) clothes.

If you're living in europe, go to bed instead of waiting for the update. If there is nothing stopping you from staying up until this early in the morning, then there is probably nothing stopping you from sleeping through the night and playing the game all morning anway. Bonus points for being less dissapointed in the morning because you're still sleepy.

Nice sum up, I wholeheartly agree. I think the way the character system is set up multiclassing doesn't really make much sense, because if you allowed multiclassing, you might as well get rid of the classes all together and make a classless system in the first place. Multiclassing was in ADnD because the classes were to rigid in order to represent a lot of archetypes, and in DnD 3.X it mostly served to let the inner munchkin come out. Personally, I think its better to have a lot of talents that give minor versions of another classes abilities because that can be balanced easier. Apart from that, I think most archetypes can be represented in PoE already.

It takes a certain amount of rationality to break ressource hoarding, although I don't want to imply that I think that people who hoard ressources in video games are irrational. I tried to find some scientific data on this subject but unfortunatly wasn't able to (in contrast to compulsive hoarding in real life). I think its about trying to be better prepared for the next encounter, so if you are able to save some ressources now you will be able to turn the next fight around if it goes too badly. The main point here is probably that you can almost never know whats around the next corner, reinforcing the need to stay alert and prepared. You dont want to waste your precious ressources on trash if another adventuring party waits around the corner. At least I think its a psychological thing which is hard to break, I don't think people do this on purpose because they planned some greater benefit around it.

Didn't see your post before, sorry. That's not the point I wanted to make. My friends quit because they felt treated unfairly by the game after losing after a couple of retries and their conclusion was that it is because the magic system is too strong. They prefer to roleplay martial characters, so they naturally wouldn't be very proficient with the mages, especially as the rest of the game was fairly doable without them. I did better than them and was able to complete ToB, but I'm sure I wouldn't be able to finish the ascension mod final boss fight without heavy abuse of mages. My personal opinion is that mages were too mandatory in ToB because they were so strong. I'm not saying my opinion is any more valuable than any other opinion but I'm saying that I don't think that the implementation of mages in the IE games are uniformly well received, which was the original point I responded to. Fair enough. You have two friends that paid for the game and didn't like it because they felt that spell casters were overpowered compared to the martial classes that they wanted to play. They had a point, magic was very powerful. There are certainly martial classes in ToB that are well suited to the Draconis fight (or any magic heavy fight). Inquisitors, especially, but any paladin kit (or rogue with UAI) equipped with Carsomyr (or Carsomyr's bastard (sword) brother) were very effective. Monks could essentially ignore magic and just beat spell casters to death by that point. Wizard slayers could also be useful against spell casters (but were a weak kit overall). Let's assume that your friends weren't playing one of those classes and they got to the Draconis fight in ToB and found their PC to be under powered. Yeah, that sucks. Inquisitors and Monks, were, if anything, too powerful against spellcasters, but that doesn't help you if rolled a PC of a different class, play all the way through the main game and then find that it doesn't work so well half way through the expansion. My answer to that is that each class should have some way to deal with each encounter in the game (but that doesn't mean it needs to be easy to do or to figure out - at least on the harder difficulty settings; we want a challenge, right?). That said, I think your friends could have beaten Draconis with any party if they really wanted. The game does give you a lot of tools for fighters to use against spell casters. ToB was seriously lacking in the story department, so they may have decided that it wasn't worth the effort. (Seriously. Stevie Wonder could have seen that coming yet my uber intelligent PC mage, with divine help, follows Melissan around like an idiot. WTF. ) Total agreement here. Although you have to be fair in that if you play with the NPCs that TOB gives you, then you basically have to fall back to mages for most effects if you don't play any of the cool kits as your main character. You actually already said that part. I'm fine with mages having a wide variety of spells at their disposal, but I think they should neither be all exclusive nor equally good/better than all the stuff other classes can get. There should still be some unique benefit to choosing each class. I also think that josh explained himself very well, so if anyone still wants to hold a grudge against him, I guess it can't be helped. A more productive way would probably be to be creative about it and compile a list of cool spell effects you'd like to see in the add-on and keep it ready after release.

If your friends got from Candlekeep to Draconis' lair they aren't exactly noobs. It could be that a given fight was too hard but, I think the magic system is an orthogonal issue. Draconis was beatable without getting too deep into the magic system - by then, you had high levels summons to sic on him (if you had a mage, cleric or paladin in your party), spike traps (if you had a thief or bard), greater whirlwind (if you had any warrior types). Etc. There are lots of tools available and you don't need to stack spells in any particular way to beat the encounter. Again, it's possible that that encounter should have been turned down a bit, but I think that's a separate discussion. Draconis is too hard so, make the magic system less potent? I don't think it follows. Didn't see your post before, sorry. That's not the point I wanted to make. My friends quit because they felt treated unfairly by the game after losing after a couple of retries and their conclusion was that it is because the magic system is too strong. They prefer to roleplay martial characters, so they naturally wouldn't be very proficient with the mages, especially as the rest of the game was fairly doable without them. I did better than them and was able to complete ToB, but I'm sure I wouldn't be able to finish the ascension mod final boss fight without heavy abuse of mages. My personal opinion is that mages were too mandatory in ToB because they were so strong. I'm not saying my opinion is any more valuable than any other opinion but I'm saying that I don't think that the implementation of mages in the IE games are uniformly well received, which was the original point I responded to. There's our first problem right here. If magic has to be conceptualized and designed only within the constricting confines of soullessly gamey MMO and ARPG terminology, then this entire discussion is hopeless. You don't get the magic behind magic. And I lack the communication skills to explain it to you. Suffice to say, we're ALL going to need to re-condition our minds and try to erase the DECADE of damage that games like WoW and Dragon Age have caused to the entire RPG genre. You don't lack the communication skills, I get the magic behind the magic you people want, but that doesn't mean I want it as well. As everyone here agrees, the (arcane) magic in PoE is not the magic you guys want. In the actual game, wizards have the most damage spells and my point is that if you can't have the magic you want, then it's still probably better if mages are actually good at the stuff they are designed for. Given the most probable outcome that wizards will stay the way they are, it is not useful to increase the casting time of their stronger spells was all that I was saying.

I think many of us are operating under the assumption that Magic will be more powerful than a friggin sword or spear - and thus it should come with more restrictions (or 'Punishments', as you call them), as a matter of course. The suggestion was that the more powerful/higher level the spell is, the longer it should take a wizard to cast it. Reason being that magic is supposed to be serious business. Not the trivial, "pew pew", bolt-action nonsense it has become in today's modern "RPGs". Or to put it another way, It should take my wizard a LOT longer to magically open up an interdimensional gate to the 9th plane of Hell to summon forth a Pit Fiend, than to simply cast magic missile. Yes? I was operating under the assumption that the assertion that the wizards role is an almost pure magical damage dealer atm is justified and was thinking about damaging spells. You wouldn't want an improved fireball spell thats twice as damaging as fireball and then have it have twice the casting time, because then DPS is the same and you actually end up with the damage output equivalent of a sword or spear. Given the focus on damage spells, I'd at least expect the wizard to be able to spike damage very high for a short duration if his spells are limited per rest, that's where I was coming from. A higher level spell damage spell should grant more dps and increasing the casting time is working against that.

I think the enemies need some AI/abilities to actively engage the party. There is less kiting when the enemy uses CC to lock down your guy and/or teleports in. Not every enemy should be able to do that, but I think it needs to come up often enough.

I'm surprised that you're giving most every spell a uniform casting time. With the weapon system design you have, wouldn't it be more more consistent to have spells with graduated casting times? In that way, casting duration and recovery would be proportionate to the power/level of a spell. Emphasis mine. This is something that I just plainly do not understand. Especially before the skill system was changed, every class could do nearly everything anyway. Stealth, detect secrets/traps, disable traps, craft, overcome athletic/lore/survival challenges, succeed any dialogue check, wear any armor, use any weapon, etc. Every class already has/had the ability to do everything, more or less. How does restricting spell lists prevent any of that? This is probably the most severe complaint about the wizard class. The spell selection does not feel diverse or interesting. Fracturing spell selection across three classes may press them into a very specific roles, but it has worked against this class. Balance issues exacerbate it, but the poor spell selection is truly part of the problem. I think this could be critically alleviated by merging the Chanter invocations, Cipher abilities, and wizard spells into one pool. The classes would still be unmistakable differentiated by their resource mechanics. Balance will do much for this class, but it is inevitably secondary to the point above. The other thing is that wizard class is severely hindered by their friendly fire. Even if damage and durations were to be "ideally" balanced, the wizard class would still be a very impinged by their inability to freely target. Contrast to the druid who has roughly 13:14 Foe Only:Friend & Foe areas of effect. The friendly-fire aspect is all the more punitive with PoE's combat that quickly become a scrum, and where engagement severely inhibits arranging your forces in such a way to where the wizard spell will do more good than harm. Emphasis mine. Is that response surprising? The magic/spell selection in the IE games was a massive part of what made them what they were and are. Aside from the narrative and general glorious adventure, it's perhaps the most iconic part of the greatest success among the IE games, Baldur's Gate 2. Where gaming really changed after it was the word you use frequently within this quote: "balance". That word is the poison which has largely afflicted cRPGs since 2002 second only to the epithet: "streamlined". Both the individual spell design and the ability to access them all made the IE games have a spell system greater than the sum of their parts because it allowed the player input to utilize them beyond intended or imagined use. This is a major legacy of the IE games. The spell casting in PoE does not appear so much balanced between classes as it does fragmented. This is a stark contrast, and gives the wizard class in particular an unsatisfying and contrived feeling. Is it not worth considering that perhaps the class limitations through spell selection are simply not desirable means or ends? 1) Why do you want casting times to be longer for stronger spells? Weapons have unlimited uses while spells have limited uses. Why would you punish a per rest ability even further by making it time inefficient and making armor an even worse choice? 2) How does equipment and out of combat skills make every class being able to do the same? They still play very differently while in combat. Why would you restrict stuff that obviously everyone can learn? 3) I still don't think that different ressources make them interesting choices. I would pick the one I like best and never look at the others again. Care to explain what my incentive would be to consider them? 4) Whats the problem with friendly fire? A lot of spells in the IE games had friendly fire as well. I'm not sure, but doesn't intellect increase only the good AoE of the spells, or has that not been implemented yet? E.g. it increases foe only area for bad effects and friend only area for good effects. 5) From my personal experience, the magic system was a highly polarizing feature of the game, especially in Throne of Bhaal. I have a lot of friends that stopped playing the game because they were not able to beat Draconis. Now you can call them noobs and discredit them all you want, but that doesn't matter that they bought the games, liked them and that they would be buying this game as well if they had the time to actually play it. I don't think there is such a great majority of people that played the game and actually understood the magic system to its fullest intent, yet were able to utilize that knowledge. Even if you argue for the members of this forum, a lot of people won't actually play the wizard as their main character. Bonus: Josh commented in another thread that they would like to implement contingency/sequence spells and the like in a future installment.

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Monk There is some lore on monks on this link which is partialy inspired by flagellants, which actually existed in RL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant They should function more or less like in DnD as anti-casters characters, only that the mechanics are changed in a way that reflects the lore. So they are not asian monks but based on actual european monks, which is quite unique as far as video games go.

Every class can use any weapon in PoE, so yes, there are various ranged weapons for spellcasters: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Weapon#Ranged_Weapons The wizard also gets a small AoE bonus on using attacks with implements: http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Blast

I haven't looked into this thread for ages, and I'm actually surprised that it still exists. On the other hand, you seem to be talking about lesbians at the moment, so that's probably something the thread has going for it. Did it already devolve into lesbian sex scenes in video games or is that yet to come?

Yeah, I would also enjoy to go to a forum where I'm constantly blamed for everything I do in order to justify my everyday work, especially if I'm supposed to be busy working on my job during chrunch time.

It's funny that people act like the whole design is only because of joshs preference. Like everyone at obsidian is like 'No josh, you can't do that, it goes against all our principles' and then josh is all like 'I don't care, I use my supreme decision power of being lead designer, MUAHAHAH' and then everyone has to accept fate. I'm pretty sure they are still discussing stuff they do in their meetings without josh getting to dictate everything alone, being lead designer or not. It's almost like in this song from pink, Dear Mr. President where she accuses the president for things that go wrong as if he gets to decide anything alone.

I see. It's true that the trade-off changed in a way that armor is penalized, but do you think the trade-off in the current patch is fine? I don't think so and feel like they still have to balance this at some point, so they might as well slow down the game before they fine tune this before they fine tune it once before and once after. Again, I feel like this should depend more on the neccessity of armor, that is AI and damage of enemies.

Yep 1.2 Good way to make using armor at all except on the Fighter REALLY REALLY bad The global 1.2 shouldn't really matter for armor because it also effects your own characters. The 1.4 effects some non-humanoid enemies, which seems quite much depending on the acton. Almost everyone was complaining about the combat speed and now you complain that it got adjusted? Come on, cut the devs some slack. I think AI and damage should govern whether its useful to wear armor, not recovery time (I guess you are implying that because enemies are slower, you can kill them before they get too much attacks in such that armor is not necessary anymore - otherwise I don't get the point you are trying to make).

I think the most asked visual feature has actually been toning down the over-the-top spells effects and having more attack animations. People will look at the combat for way longer than at the grass and repetitive/obstructing combat animations will certainly attract more negative attention in the gaming press as well.

I disagree. Meta-gaming is a bad argument as your solution is meta-gamey as well. Just gonna skill some characters in lore for the dialogue bonus, shuffle your party around while speaking with people in towns and get to the dungeons with the characters that use other skills. The progression is also not very intuitive, I wouldn't consider it passing your point #4. It also trivializes the dialogue system and screws with replayability / roleplaying. For the most part, dialogue checks reflect your character and are used to gain reputation. There is a very specific reasons these skillchecks are hardcapped by your attributes. I'm pretty sure you can resolve a situation in almost every possible way without the skill checks if you just choose proper neutral options, so there really is no need for that. If you want to give lore an additional function, I'd rather argue to add something like better prices at shops or better yet some mechanism like the identification of magical items. The later would be most fitting, but might be a bit heavy on the implementation side. It is still going to be open to metagaming, but really, everything will be. Personally, I also don't think that power gamers should be the crowd that dictates the usefulness of skills. I'll probably take lore on any playthrough - I don't plan to memorize or write down the enemies stats. I think its actually good that the dialogue system averts metagaming to some extent, so I think that should definitely stay the way it is.

I wouldn't start arguing with the majority of backers, seriously. I'm not even sure about the majority on these forums, it's only clear what the vocal majority prefers. Your proposed change may be good enough for you, but that is (for a change) not good enough for me. This comes to personal preference, so don't tread this like an attack, but to me, different cast mechanics being the only difference is about the most boring system I could imagine to diversify classes. From a gameplay point of view, in the end, most of these classes will be overshadowed by some variant because balance is not possible, and then there is exactly no reason to pick the inferior ones up anymore. In the NWN games, I would never pick a wizard if the sorcerer is available. Without meta knowledge, the restriction of prepared spells goes away and if you pick the right spells and buy some scrolls, you can easily even out the narrow spell selection. Also, more prestige classes are available. What you have in the end is variant of a class, not a new class. At least I don't consider the wild mage or sorcerer totally new and different classes compared to the wizard, its more like a kit. Kits are fun, don't get me wrong, but I'm sceptical about the ratio between the cost of implementing them and players actually using them in the end, in particular when certain play styles seem way more attractive than others. Which leaves me with the sole reason of this being implemented for having kits for roleplaying purposes. By that line of argument, why should casters be the only class that gets kits for flavour? I may want 5 different kinds of monks with the same ability pool but different means to built up their class ressources then. That is why I feel that this proposal is really arbitrary.

Fine, I just wanted to know where you're coming from exactly, so thanks for this.