Christliar

He also said all spellcasters are going to be able to get more than 2 spells per level.

If I understood JS's tweet correctly, they are removing the restricted schools and all Priests have access to all spells.

The allure to being a Priest of Skaen/something else instead of Priest/Rogue is that you can essentially triple-class. A Priest of Skaen/Devoted is kind of a Priest/Fighter/Rogue triple-class, which is cool. That's a pretty unique selling point if you ask me.

Fast combat introduces a slew of problems that plague the whole game from start to finish, so it's not a good choice. It's not fast combat per se, it's the way recovery worked in PoE1. The shortest recovery you could get was insanely fast, to the point of being unable to manage 6 PCs and follow what is going on (remember the "game is too micromanagement heavy" complaints?). The unorganized and undisciplined individual "rounds" created a very frontloaded combat process in which mobs had only 1 gimmick - unload their entire repertoire in the first second of combat and then spam stuns to try to control how many actions you perform because they can't keep up otherwise, making Prayers and immunities overpowered since they nullified the enemies' only gimmick. It was all very improvised and disjointed. Combat needs to be reined in, with strict, manageable and consistent action times.

They said they are going to give spellcasters the ability to choose more spells. I also don't think it's a bug that the passive abilities don't show up, Priests just don't have passive talents. Or maybe it is a bug, who knows. They need to either bring back the general talents (and add more of them) or give all classes more class-specific talents. Single-class Priests now are just a gimped version of what they were in P1.

Purely scientifically this is correct, we have no way of knowing why people don't play on higher difficulties, in this case PotD, just that they don't, but that's obvious. It's way more interesting why they don't and my "interpretation" is that they either don't want higher difficulties because they "want to relax" (I've heard this many times, but it's anecdotal) or they think they can't handle it. At the end of the day, all I can say as 100% fact is that they don't complete the game on the highest difficulty and I'm fine with that. The problem is that Obsidian can only say and know that as well.

I'm not saying that the business side of things is bad, I was just stating it as fact, so I have no more comment about that. I also agree with this bit that I quoted, the game has 5 difficulties, so why not cater to grognards on PotD? Normal can have all the handholding they can possibly cram in there, who cares. It raises the question where we draw the line between Story Mode and other modes, though, if every difficulty below PotD starts aggressively handholding to the point of the game playing itself and giving you the illusion that you are doing something. @Katarack, I'm painfully aware that only very few people that buy the game complete it, and of those that complete it, only 4% complete it on PotD. And that's what I was saying, that very few people want difficulty and that's why they removed any possibility of actual challenge appearing. Sure, they'll try to hand-craft each encounter a bit better, but that rarely works consistently or even half the time. I also have no answer to the question of why people don't complete games. One reason is that people buy them impulsively on a sale and then let them rot in their backlogs forever, I'm also guilty of this, but only rarely. Of those who start the game, however, I hypothesize there are myriads of reasons - they get bored, the game is too long, too difficult and frustrating, they get distracted by other games, they realize it's not a genre they enjoy aaaand I dunno. 90% seems like a lot for just these reasons.

If we cannot find anything objective in a resting system, how are we supposed to talk about and improve it? It seems self-defeating to me.

Ok, if you prefer, read it as (using your own words) "make resting that good".

No zionist conspiracy, unfortunately, those are fun, the business side of things is the ulterior motive. It's unrelated to whatever you like or don't like. I'm just saying that difficulty is not what most people are looking for, hence the statistic, while fixing resting requires the game to be more difficult.

Resting was done well in both Knights of the Chalice and the Swordflight fan module for NWN (one of the best RPGs in years btw), and even the first battle at Stalwart, so it's not a problem. It makes the game immeasurably more difficult on a completely different level, however. They just have to be willing to do it, but they aren't because they are catering to a completely different audience/silent majority than whatever forum can muster. It's weird to say the least, but the business side of things speaks louder than any "hardcore" fan. That's why they changed the semi-Vancian system in the first place, instead of making it meaningful by restricting resting, they are removing it altogether because people rest after every fight anyway and hand-holding that audience is way more important. It's obvious there are some ulterior motives at play here, so it's no wonder the resting stopped making sense and it's a vestigial element trying and failing to appease grognards. Fun fact - only 0.4% of players completed P1 or PotD (at least in GOG's statistics). C'est la vie, I guess.

No, I never said he's a liar or a demagogue, I said he uses demagoguery, whether it's intentional or not. I don't care what he is as a person, I care that what he is saying is muddying the waters, using different concepts and ideas interchangeably, accusing the game of something the player is at fault for and other such things. That is completely different than what I've been arguing and what you've been telling me. It's supposed to push you towards resting, whether you do rest or not is your decision. A decision that has already been proven to exist even for players playing for the first time. What's the point of this thread now, then?

It doesn't matter what the intention of the system was/is, in practice it's about showing you when you suck. When they make it so you can't rest whenever then we can talk about that specific intention. There is no diplomatic way to say that you are just bad at the game or that you use manipulative demagoguery to try to twist facts. You repeatedly mentioned how you have to rest after 2 injuries and the game doesn't give you meaningful choice whether to continue or not. There's a video posted showing that you are demonstrably wrong, a player who has no idea of this 'debate' and is playing the beta for the first time, so now you are moving the goalposts.

He's missing the point of the injury system entirely, it's not about granularity, choice or difficulty as you can rest whenever, it's about telling you when you suck and that you have to improve. There's also a video where a guy with many more injuries than Katarack claims to be impossible to continue defeated the adra dimension fight, so he's demonstrably wrong even by his own standards. You can also see that he eschews any kind of confrontation by blocking me instead of arguing my points, so I don't think he's the person to go to about challenge advice ;p

He literally posted a video where a not-very-good guy beat the adra dimension fight with all his party members having injuries up the butt, so I think it's fair to say that normal is alright for players who want to play on normal.

There is no way to prevent save scumming unless we go into weird territory of checkpoints and the game deleting your save file when you load a saved game. If someone wants that Path of Iron is where it's at, that's what it's for. You can exploit it as well, though, but that's on your head, why play Path of Iron/Iron Man if you are going to duplicate save files or alt + F4 when things go awry?

You misunderstood me, I wasn't talking about not auto-regenerating health, but about the debuffs at certain health levels during combat. Auto-regen is there so you don't have to bring a healing class along for the ride and spend minutes after every fight healing up, at least that's the justification, I was never in favor of it. Since crafting materials are abundant then maybe it prevents the need to bring a healing class and you can rely on healing potions or bandages. The respawning enemies can work if they only respawn if you backtrack, so sure, whether it slams the door behind you or this it's functionally the same thing.

The first point has been tried many times, especially in PnP campaigns, but it creates the so-called "Death Spiral" where if you are going down then the encounter is already difficult and since the game piles on more and more debuffs on you it becomes outright impossible to turn the battle around. While I understand the sentiment it just doesn't really work well in practice. The second point will work, just without respawning enemies, it creates a grind-fest like Dark Souls where you are struggling with a boss, but the game constantly respawns mobs on you that you've already defeated and you are just going through the motions, mowing them down without any thought and it simply wastes your time.

That's in a sense how Stalwart Village worked at the start of WM1. You were thrust into a combat situation, quickly discovered you couldn't rest, and would need to defeat multiple groups with what you brought with you. That also IMO made it one of the most fun combat situations in the entire game, especially if you got there at an early level. There was an initial sense of panic: "ruh roh...", and then planning out how best to scramble to survive. I remember finishing several characters barely alive, and finding creative uses for lesser known spells I typically never thought about. It was brilliant game design. It's also lost, the more and more auto-regen there is. I'd love to see more of that "slam the door" dynamic, but realistically, most gamers don't like or want it, which is why games are moving away from it. It's down to different preferences: many people prefer effectively unlimited resources. I believe a reasonable solution is to provide both styles, keyed on either difficulty level, or an orthogonal new-game-screen switch. Then you and I can have our "lock us in the dungeon with no spell or health regeneration, slam the door, and wish us luck..." mode, and people who hate that can have their style of fun too. Unfortunately, it's more testing and balancing burden for the game developers, in an already niche genre. Of course it's one of the best combat encounters in the whole game, the combat system finally makes sense then. That's the whole point of limited resources and that's what I'm talking about. People like Katarack will always bitch about any kind of challenge and try to demagogue their way out of it with empty and manipulative phrases like "it doesn't give meaningful choice!" or "it creates developer-sanctioned save points!" instead of rising up to conquer said challenge, so what most gamers like or don't like is immaterial in that context. The point of gaming is to be challenged and to overcome, it's not about being on a guided tour where nothing really matters because you always have a get out of jail free card. Can't muster the skill to continue? Lower the difficulty until you get to story mode, since people are going to beat the game on PotD maybe then you'll (general you) finally realize that it is you who needs to improve, not the game.

Glancing over the fact that you CHOOSE to rest at 50% injuries, the game doesn't auto-rest for you, even though the point is not to give you a choice, but you aren't reading anyway, so whatever, this logic can be applied to everything. Why go into combat with 2 less high level spells? That wouldn't be "tactically smart". Because you can? You can with 50% injuries as well, you have this insane idea that it's somehow impossible, but anyway, so what? Why is it such a big problem that it doesn't give you this "meaningful choice"? Again, it's not supposed to be a choice, but let's pretend it's about that. Why is it so hard to just rest if you think you can't go on? The game doesn't incentivize not resting, especially if you don't have good food, so I don't get it.

Because people were trekking back every chance they got to rest at an inn. Yes, it's tedious, but people did it anyway. The solution is one-time use camping sites in dungeons and the dungeon to slam the door behind you so you can't go back. With an an autosave just before you enter the dungeon as a sort of compromise, so you don't end up trapped in the dungeon with no save file and no way out.

I was going to write a scathing post, but I unconvinced myself. This injury and empower systems are pointless, people are still going to rest after every fight anyway, which is why Obs decided to remove the semi-Vancian spellcasting and the Health/Endurance mechanic. They have to limit resting, that's where the problem is, the too free resting. Now that the only penalty to getting knocked down is pathetic I think they should actually do it. Maybe like Knights of the Chalice does it, you are only allowed to rest at camping sites strewn throughout the dungeons. These sites should become fewer and fewer at each more difficult mode. I think that's the only solution for resting to not remain a vestigial appendage that makes no sense.

Then you are very good. Not everyone is. And because not everyone is as good, every difficulty has to cater to the bad players? They can make injuries be less punishing in easy mode, where it belongs. And I've said why you are fundamentally wrong repeatedly, but that doesn't seem to phase you.

Like I said, there is no resource management, where are you even getting this from? Resting is allowed anywhere and at any time. What resource management? See, this is where you start confusing concepts and systems, using them interchangeably while that can't be further from the truth. The point of the injuries is not to give you the kind of choice you seem to want. It's a compromise and a hand-holding tactic, if I had my way characters would die after reaching 0 health, like it should be. What do you want? 20% per injury? Then you'll complain that you have to rest after 3 knock-outs, if we assume you'd be willing to continue with 60% health. You'll still be knocked out constantly anyway. 10%? Why have injuries at all? They just force you to rest.

Again, it's not a choice, let alone a meaningful one. You can rest everywhere and however many times you wish, we can't even begin talking about choices in that context. Would you cry and moan, and bitch if the characters died instead of being injured? Like it was in the IE games? Would you say there is no "meaningful choice" when they die and you have to reload or go to a temple? You confuse concepts and are trying to demagogue your way into the game catering to your bad playing. Can't muster the skill or willingness to continue on after 2 injures? Suck it up, rest and git gud, that's the point of punishing systems, to make you put in the effort to become better at the game.