Doppelschwert

Not. A rigidly balanced magic system that adheres to the very same rules, structure, effects and delivery methods that govern melee/archery would NOT achieve #2. There's nothing unique about a class who's attack forms mirror just about every other class's. And PoE's beta is the quintessential 'Exhibit A' here. In combat, My ranged rogue playthrough did not feel different from my Mage Playthrough, aside from the occasional Fireball my mage was able to toss at the start of a few of the battles. They were essentially the same friggin characters. To be fair though, much of this probably had to do with the fact that PoE has total balance across the board (every class can wield every weapon, every class can wear every armor etc) It's just DULL design. Ok, but you still haven't answered my second, more important question. A game could have a very unique magic system, where magic sucks in combat. Would that be fine? That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that part of roleplay in a roleplaying game is how you can use the capabilities of your character/party to solve the problems that the game throws at you. The mage class in the BG series is powerful but it doesn't come with an "I win" button. You need to use the capabilities correctly and the seriously overpowered tactics that you have (such as Stun's second example) are complex to figure out and difficult to do correctly. That's why the class is as interesting to play as it is. Earlier, I asked the question if the spells in PoE, from all of the classes, not just wizards, combine in the same interesting ways as the IE spell system and for examples. I judge by the dead silence from everyone that the answer is no. I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth. If you disagree with me, I'm happy to hear the examples. If you get nothing else from any of my posts, understand this: For me, it would be fine if wizard spells and chanter spells combined in one way, wizard and cipher spells combined in another interesting and equally powerful way - having all three would open up new possibilities etc. That would also add replay value to the game. I don't object to balance, I object to achieving balance by removing all of the powerful things from the game. BG2 is still near the top of the best games list at metacritic. Whatever you think of metacritic, it's pretty interesting that people still like a game with relatively primitive tech. a decade and a half after it's release. It isn't there because it is balanced, it's there because it's still fun to play. Partly because there are new things to learn about how to play a character. I see where you are coming from and I got something out of your posts before as well. As I said, I think its just about personal preference. Its hard to come up with interesting spell combos because I don't really know what you'd consider interesting. Compared to BG1, in PoE you basically can't cast outside of combat, there is no magic invisibility and no instadeath / immunity spells. Apart from that, every spell effect should more or less be in the game on some class, so you can decide yourself whether there are interesting effects/tactics. For example, I don't think it's a problem to have a cloudkill ambush, it's just harder/different to pull off. Instead of summons, you use a character with an escape ability to bait them and then you immobilize them in the cloudkill with some control spell. Maybe you can also utilize traps in some way.

Does the BB party priest still have it? If yes, I think its a bug.

That didn't happen in Bg2, did it. In BG2, mages were very much omnipotent, as you say, in every role conceivable except perhaps melee (and once you got shapechange, EVEN melee...especially melee lol) But funny thing... I had more fun with my various sneak build runs (Rogues, Stalkers). Much of that had to do with the increased challenge, of course. But the main reason was because of ROLE PLAYING. People always forget this. Especially the Balance-firsters, like Josh. They forget that we're talking about a ROLE PLAYING game, not some PvP MMO. When you're role playing, the question of: "Is the class I chose just as powerful as the other classes?" is not relevant. It's not relevant because power differentials do not matter. There are only 2 things that matter in a role playing game: 1) Does the class possess enough skills to beat the game/overcome the game's challenges? 2) Does this class feel unique? BG2 (and all the IE games) get away with having an imbalanced magic system because they absolutely nail #1 and #2. PoEs design goals and Joshs motivation are very much 1) and 2) in my eyes. Access to effects are split up more or less evenly between all classes and they have unique mechanics for the most part. I'm also sure that 1) will eventually be met with proper balancing. By that logic, shouldn't get PoE away with a balanced magic system? If you disagree whether PoE achieves 1) and 2) or not, do I understand you correctly that a game that has balanced magic would be perfectly fine if it satisfied constraints 1) and 2)? This seems orthogonal to your arguments before, so I'm not sure I understand you correctly on this.

You know, I just typed up a response to the points each of you adressed, but for a good part there will be no respectful discussion here, no matter how much effort I put into it, so I deleted it. In fact, it can be easily summed up: You guys think its great to have an omnipotent class that is basically able to do anything in a game, and that is fine. I think it's not much fun because that makes it a clear better choice every single time, devaluing everything else in the game. I feel like your points are valid (but coming down to preference), but you blow them out of proportions, so feel free to disagree. I'll probably get a game that I'll enjoy more than you guys will, and I can live with that conclusion. For the rest, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Bold underline emphasis. And this is where the whole point comes down to. If you use those spells/abilities earlier in the encounter because it's not immediately clear that you should save them for later for a hypothetical retreat, then you could open yourself up to problems later in the encounter as you have very limited or probably no way of retreating for a character. And you're okay with this on the EASY setting. After all this is the thread from a casual gamer. It's not like I think it should be necessary to do this for every encounter in every difficulty setting. I think for playing optimally it should work like this across all difficulties with the difference that on easy, for most fights except bosses, the risk assessment should be straight forward and the penalty for playing suboptimal should not be very high. That doesn't mean that you can't play more/less effective on easy, however.

No doubt it's not problematic for you? Limiting yourself to using an ability for that hypothetical retreat that might never come? I think that's the part where I'm supposed to make a tactical decision of whether there may be an actual risk that I need the ability for or not. I can spam it at the beginning and get the fighter done sooner, but if it doesn't work I may be in trouble. Or I may hold on to it, and use it if I need to or spam it when I'm already winning to mitigate some health loss, which may be suboptimal in the long run. It's not immediately clear to me what's the best course to take in general, and that is probably a good thing from a tactical point of view. I asked my questions because I'm curious about your reasons, and I still am.

Quetzalcoatl made some excellent points and I'll reiterate. Admittedly, a wizard in PoE can't do the same stuff as a wizard in any of the IE games. However, that doesn't really matter anymore for actual combat tactics as soon as you consider a party with more than one wizard, which you probably had in the IE games anyway. Instead of two wizards in an IE games you can have any combination of wizard / cipher / chanter in PoE to more or less get the same number of spells per category per spell level, because summons, crowd control, afflictions and damage spells are all covered with these three classes. The only thing that is missing this way are invisibility and teleport spells, I'll give you that. On the other hand, I'm almost sure that stuff like contingency may make a return in the addon or PoE2, so there isn't really missing as much from the game as people pretend it is. Regarding prebuffing: Hate me all you like, I'm glad it's gone. I also doubt it gives you the magic feels to look at the screens for some time seeing some icons stack on your characters, which is repetetive for the most part and not really engaging. You can hate balance all you like as well, but I think it's a fair compromise when I'm able to pick up characters I actually like and like to play instead of having at least one wizard, one cleric and one tank in every party because the game rapes me otherwise.

http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Status_Effects Dunno, but the wizard gets plenty of screen time in this list, so I'm not so sure why he's not that versatile? Also, to be fair for once, compare this list http://mikesrpgcenter.com/bgate/magescrolls.html to this list http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Wizard_spell and disregard the spells from the add-on in the former list. The first list is the only list I could spontaneously find on the spell selection in vanilla BG1, which should be the object of comparison to this game. You're free to offer me a more exhaustive list. Or according to my list, in a comparitable game you could actually summon some skeletons, have the cloudkill you mentioned or make it freeze a bit. Not so interesting somehow. Apart from that I don't see how the numbers couldn't be rebalanced to make the wizard stronger by giving him spells/encounter or greater effects, it's still beta. I agree that there needs something to be done, but why is everyone so hostile and acting like obsidian won't?

Is that problematic in your eyes?

Thanks for being needlessly condescending. I know that you can revert the spell effect after the battle. How does that help you during the battle, however? Your guy gets teleported away, deal with it - that's what the game is like. If you want your guy to be back during the battle, you either have it memorized or you don't. If you don't know if the enemy has access to the spell, you memorize it in case he does and if he does, good for you, if not, spellslot wasted. And that's true for all hard counters. Either they are applicable or spell slot wasted.

See, you make so many references to your interpretations of the maths, and write these long-winded papers and suggestions, but ultimately it is posts like these that make up your argument. "Guess which is more fun? That's right, it's the one I prefer. Case closed." I know it's the internet, but there seems to be an increasing amount of posts from many parties that are set out like they're factual analysis, and are in fact no different from all the other opinion-based posts here on the forums, however well-typed they might be. I totally agree with this, and I think it's good that sensuki is called out on that for once. It's totally fine to argue by one's opinion in the end, as everyone does, but one might just admit it. He's not arguing for an objectively better game as that is not possible, just for one that would be more fun to him. Which is fine, as everyone here does this, but that's all there is to it.

Because there is no way to know which spells the enemy has until fighting against them, apart from meta-knowledge. You could always have these kind of counterspells memorized out of paranoia, but then again, you are sacrificing spell slots for the rest of the 80% of battles where the spell is not cast by the enemy. Apart from that, consider that in an actual ADnD game, strong spells require materials to be cast which are often rare and expensive for higher level spells. This restriction balances the strong but occasional spellcasting, but it is not implemented in any of the IE games, so spells tend to be way stronger than they were supposed to be in the original material. Lore dictates that wizards are powerful, but also that they spent most of their time to research spells and searching for components. There is some kind of trade off which makes it ok, but that's not in any of the IE games, basically stripping all disadvantages from them.

Thanks for the interesting writeup, however... ...this is all we need. Besides, wizards in the IE games where only cheap when you rest-spammed, they got different exp tables to level slower and had several other disadvantages. I don't even understand what's so fun about the mage fights in IE if you just spam hard counters until one of the mages runs out of spells. The only fun part about mages in BG2 that I remember was punching them in the face with my almost magic immune monk.

So I guess mystery item #2 implies 'Cheese-pet confirmed'? Though maybe it's 'pacman-pet'...

I have already. All or most of the replies are in here If not they're here That would be a programming and UI nightmare. Thanks for the information. Why would it be an UI nightmare? There is no need to know that stuff, IMO.

Disengagement attacks might as well just have their own separate recovery time per enemy (otherwise, if you want to engage more than one enemy, you could just draw all the attacks on one guy and let the others walk away freely) and overriding your actions is not a problem. However, I think that having a recovery time AND nerfing the attacks makes them pretty useless, so I'd argue that one should either tone down the damage and accuracy bonus OR implement a recovery time. Would you mind sharing your conversation with josh with us sensuki?

I tried it with yours and it worked, but it's not appearing for this one :S I think it's permenately liked. Thanks for all the help! There is an easy rule how this works. You can like/unlike stuff as long as you want until you leave the current page, then it's permanently saved. On topic: Maybe the patch this week will offer some new insight into engagement. Have you asked josh directly about engagement at the SA-forums, sensuki?

You should also note that exp is rewarded differently compared to the IE games. In the IE games, the total exp-per-party-member obtained is overall exp divided through the number of partymembers. In PoE you have a base value of exp that is rewarded to every character in your party, which is increased by some small bonus for every party member missing from the maximum of 6. I don't recall the actual value of this bonus, but I think it's somewhere along 5-10%, meaning you won't even get double the experience for soloing (I'm sure that the maximal bonus is below 100% extra experience).

Yeah. I think the main concern is that if the enemies have high resistances, then your grace may make no damage at all, even with the might bonus. So in order to avert risk and have some definite use of your spell, you want to make sure that it hits reliably. Again, I think the DT system is the sole reason for this and I personally think that is a good thing, because it makes these choices between attributes non-trivial. For physical classes which are not bound to limited abilities for damage however it may be nicer to use the might bonus for the reasons you pointed out.

What are you talking about? At the ACC-DEF +6 range or higher, you can't miss, and you have a 44% chance to graze, 45% chance to hit and 11% chance to crit. Over time in that situation a permanent +20% damage gives more DPS over a 10% increase of a better attack resolution. The extra accuracy only does anything if the attack resolution falls into the range where it actually pushes your roll from one attack resolution to another. These rules are uniform, doesn't matter if it's a per day or a per encounter. The situation you talk about only relates to a specific encounter. Over time, you'll get a better attack resolution with +10 ACC 10% of the time (statistically anyway), whereas you will get the might bonus every time it is cast. In the cases where the roll would not have changed regardless of that +10 Accuracy, the accuracy bonus does nothing, whereas the Might does. I think what he means with reliable is that although both attributes increase the expected dps, might leaves the variances as it is while perception effectively decreases variance. If you have a limited ressource it is nicer to have a more deterministic result in order for you to plan better around your use of the ability. If you take this to the extreme, then the difference would be that in the perception scenario, it is more plausible that you cast a fireball in two different fights and do normal damage both times while in the might scenario, you may crit in one fight for lethal damage and grace in another damage for almost no damage. The expected damage may be the same in both cases, but the former probably feels more fair. This is especially true if your ACC-DEF is negative, which may be the case when you don't invest into PER.

So it's at most 20 points of the grace range. That's good to know, thanks. So in moderate accuracy ranges it's way more beneficial to use the fighting style for single weapons instead of the weapon focus talents if you want to use a single handed weapon.

Actually, I remember reading that on the armor description in game, but I missed any update on this change so I occassionaly forget about it. Feels kind of strange/unneccessary to me. So basically, yeah, I forgot. I'll ask directly again because of all people you are probably the only one who knows this, but what does 20% graces converted to hits mean? 20% of the grace range or at most 20 points of the grace range?

Must've overread the part about armor piercing before. I believe that would be the best course of action in order to not break the DT system, yes.

Good job, although I'd still like to see a better solution for the class ressources instead of numbers that are crammed to the bottom of the screen.

I'm talking about function, not the numbers. Obviously you can make a deflection bonus high enough for it to be an equally attractive choice for some character concepts.