forgottenlor

I also think I'd have gone with Duelist or Assassin over rogue, but I don't find names all that important. The Barbarian as an AOL character is interesting. I forgot about that description. Properly buffed he may replace a fireball flinging mage. If he also can run through opponents quickly to get at a spellcaster, he can replace alot of what a wizard could do in IE games.

You can build a party specifically around the deficiency of a wizard I suppose. You need a ranged killer to take care of wizards that stand behind a mob of creatures (plenty of ie battles run this way). You can use your mass buffs to grind through opponents and heals to take care of damage you might otherwise have avoided. However, IMO that shows what a wizard offers a party, if you have to plan around not having one. Its simply easier (and less challenging) to include a wizard (or sorcerer). That is personally why I like the idea of another class offering something of a good alternative. I have no problem with being able to build a combat oriented druid or cleric, but I'd also like to see the option to build one like the traditional mage, so that you have low combat power, but that you can sit back and concentrate on casting.

I disagree. D&D clerics have really good area buffs and de-buffs at just about every level. In low-level D&D for example a combination of Bless + Bane and, if necessary which it isn't, Cause Fear will make enemies go down like ninepins, and it just gets better from there. Blasting fireballs at them isn't the only way to deal with mobs. Druids OTOH have a crazy powerful mix of debuffs, area attacks, and buffs. Clerics/druids do need a bit more tactical thinking than wizards or sorcs, but IMO ultimately they're a good deal more powerful even when ignoring the melee aspects. Being able to wear armor is extremely useful even if you never pick up a weapon. I made a build like that in MotB who just waltzed through the tough optional fights; I was surprised myself actually. (Hint: Implosion. If you've boosted your spell penetration abiltiies to the max, it amounts to a Win button, generally speaking.) Druid is my favorite solo class actually, as they're quite decent in toe-to-toe combat, have a highly useful spell set, are provided with a handy meat shield, and have the most versatile mix of spells of any class. They self-buff like clerics, they heal, they deal area damage, they deal point damage, and of course nobody summons like a druid. Just to be clear, I don't think a wizard is better than a cleric or druid in D&D. I also agree with everything you say about their combat abilities and would rather have one if playing a solo character. However, in a 6 player party I think running with no sorcerer or wizard is disadvantageous, because you are missing out on a lot of area effect spells, which can make certain combats difficult. I don't see either the druid or cleric as an effective REPLACEMENT for the sorcerer or wizard in any I.E. games or in D&D 3.X. Mr. Sawyer indicated that this might be different in P:E. I hope in this case you can make the druid or cleric a replacement for a wizard. I would like to feel that I can effectively take a party with no wizard without hampering myself overly. I feel that in a game with 12 classes, that that should be possible. Just as an aside, I do like the cypher. I have always liked utility character who can do various things. Normally in a 6 player party there is room for 2-3 such characters.

It depends how you look at it. The cleric has no devestating area of effect spells until high level. The druid's magic damage output is limited compared to the mage. They do get healing magic and good summons in return. However, you don't take either of them do deal with masses of enemies. edit:Didn't see all of your response initially for some reason. Now that I know how clerics and druids work, I am more pleased that cyphers work as warrior/mages, since Druids and Clerics are filling that role less than in D&D

No. We have three "full" caster classes that can avoid melee entirely if you choose to do so (wizard, priest, druid). I'm sorry that you don't like the style of the cipher, but I designed the class to be distinctly different from the other casters in terms of managing their power resource. And again: ciphers do not have to enter melee to use Soul Whip. I think people's main concern maybe is that in D&D the druid and cleric are sort of in between a fighter and mage. Both are competent in melee and not overly potent as spell casters. Whereas in D&D the sorcerer presented a real alternative. I think people (myself included) saw the cypher as a possible alternative to a mage, whereas they didn't expect the cleric or druid to be able to do this. Perhaps we know too little about the other classes. Can one build a cleric or druid as a weakling caster and make the most out of their class ? (which was not really so in D & D as you "wasted" the good armour, BAB, and hit dice of the cleric or druid without getting much in return).

@KaineParker. I truly admire your level of patience. I would have left the conversation about 5 posts ago. And personally I could care less how xp is handled.

My number one fear as well.

There is no rule saying that every weapon/character type needs to be equal in damage over time, or preventing different characters from being powerful at different times over a game. However, understanding these things is something that usually only someone well versed in the rules of the game, or someone who has made a playthrough will realize. I suppose its like mages in the old D&D rules, who were wimps at level 1, and the best class at high levels because their magic became extremely powerful. The question is if this variable power developement is desireable. I personally prefer more balance over time, because it allows for fewer catastrophical party builds, but to each his own.

Those are great ideas, though I think it would take a good deal of work to implement them well.

Traits are very tricky, and hard to do well. They usually need to influence things that feats don't touch. I personally like ones that add something to the background of the character. I also I must admit like those that add an immediate benefit/penatly at the onset of the game but are less significant later like: Street Kid- You spent your childhood on the streets. You start with half as much money as a normal character but get a (x%) more starting hit points. Father's favourite- Exactly the opposite of above Biggest Kind on the Block- You've always solved problems with your fists. Get +1 to hit with melee weapons and unarmed combat, but start with 4 less skill points.

I like attempts at unusual settings, but for the most part they have bombed. The question is whether this has to do with the developers and the games themselves, or as Kjaamor suggests, simply that people need familiarity in fantasy. Post apocalyptic and Scifi rpgs make up the minority of games with at least moderate success. But consider that both Vampire rpgs, Jade Empire, and Titan Quest sold fairly poorly, which is a shame considering in my mind they all have many redeeming qualities. While I like the Middle Age settings fine, I would really like to see more games in other settings. I agree, though I'd say that MODERN western values can only be to some extent in the middle ages. Many medieval ideas about torture (and justice in general), slavery, the roles of women (and human rights in general), faith vs. reason, et. are hardly modern. One could also force such ideas back on any culture. Few games are historically accurate when it comes to the cultural values of the time. Few movies are as well, even when they purport to be historical. I think such media is meant to be entertainment, so the goal is that we relate to it, hence the quite intentional injection of modern values.

Well perhaps you are correct, but that's the way it worked with melee weapons in IE games. You normally were much more effective in melee if you have 5 dots in one melee weapon, rather than being proficient (one dot) in 5 different weapons. This is also consistant with most party oriented roleplaying games I have played. Especially with a 6 member party you can normally cover a good number of available weapons. Most party based games force a character to specialize in one or two combat stlyes to be effective. Of course most single player RPGS work differently, and there your one character can do everything. Well, IE games weren't perfect. A fighter did start with being proficient in most weapons, that's why when his chosen weapon proved uneffective (like when attacking a enemy that's highly resistant to a specific damage type), he had a fallback - he could swith to a different weapon and still be effective. Archer were usually built to use only arrows AND NOTHING ELSE. No fallback. No diversity. Specialization is good, over-specialization isn't. I agree with you, but I still think most other weapons were scaled better than bows. I think its good if a character maybe specializes in two types of weapons, but both should be effective over the course of the game, just in different circumstances. Lots of good suggestions about how one could implement this has been mentioned by many of you above.

I don't consider criplingly over-specalized characters a good concept to begin with. If you dumped everything into archery and have nothing else, then a guy in full plate with a tower shield should wipe the floor with you. Unless you got something up your sleeve. Like a tanglefoot bag - trap him, get behind him and shoot him in the back. Characters that focuse on one weapon to the exclusion of everything else are something that should occasionaly bite a player in the ass. Well perhaps you are correct, but that's the way it worked with melee weapons in IE games. You normally were much more effective in melee if you have 5 dots in one melee weapon, rather than being proficient (one dot) in 5 different weapons. This is also consistant with most party oriented roleplaying games I have played. Especially with a 6 member party you can normally cover a good number of available weapons. Most party based games force a character to specialize in one or two combat stlyes to be effective. Of course most single player RPGS work differently, and there your one character can do everything.

Its not as big a problem in Pathfinder or 3.5 because of the number of shooting feats. However ranged weapons still seem more powerful in those games because you can one shot kill monsters on low levels, providing everyone has a ranged weapon. Also a low levle character can be killed quickly by multiple monster archers. This becomes much less possible for parties at higher levels unless everyone is investing in archery feats.

Well, its not a problem if you know going into it that a character focusing on bows is going to kick ass at level 1 and be utter pathetic at level 18. It just eliminates some character concepts and that's not good. I didn't mention it because I actually haven't played through it recently. I played through it three times, once after it came out, once when Tales of the Sword Coast came out, and again maybe six years ago.

I think the portraits in the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale games were truly fantastic, especially when compared to alot of contemporary games like Might and Magic 7-9 and Wizardry 8, I also think they hold up very well compared to many modern games. Though I loved Torment, I felt the portrait art in that game was the weakest among the infinity engine games.

I hope this game will be able to avoid one of the imbalances of the infinity engine games that derived from Dungeons and Dragons. I'd forgotten it to be honest till I recently replayed both Icewind Dale (I) and Throne of Bhaal. Ranged weapons, and especially bows are grossly overpowered at low levels in these games and equally grossly underpowered at high levels. In Throne of Bhaal I almost never bothered to fire a bow except to pull an enemy out of cover or to soften up a monster I had kited. Either way I didn't really use it as intended. At the start of Icewind dale, concentrating fire on a monster with ranged weapons=instant kill. Likewise monsters with bows are extremely dangerous opponents for low level characters, and relatively weak opponents later on. I think the mechanic is all wrong. Case in point: a first level character fires two arrows in a round at a monster. At Level 7-8 the same character can maybe fire 3 times. A first level mage has one magic missle, at level 9 he has five. I point this out because I think magic missles scale well with the monster toughness in levles 1-10, while arrows clearly do not. There are two obvious solutions. The first is to scale the bow's damage potential in the hands of a competant wielder better, the other is to scale monsters and characters more like Fallout, so that they are not so fragile to begin with and not 10X as powerful later on.

SOZ was the "Neverwinter Nights version of Icewind Dale," so I really don't see how one can compare it to Mask of the Betrayer. It let you use all of the massive number of character builds to make a party, which I thought was pretty cool. Also it was the most "open world" of any NWN games, and you could actually explore and find nifty places, even if they were small, which I liked as well. In fact I really enjoyed the first few chapters as a nice change of pace. I was disappointed with chapter 3 though, which seemed a real anticlimax to me. It was very linear. The bad guys were also very undercharacterized for an Obsidian game. I think the mixture of these two things resulted in a rather unsatisfying ending.

Hmm. Why did you get Beta access again? Just personally, even if I paid for Beta access, I'd never use it. I just bought Might nad Magic X early access, and won't make use of it, because I want to play a whole finished game and not a work in progress. However, there are plenty of people who feel otherwise. So the question is what do you feel comfortable with? Do you like playing demos? (again something I really don't like) What for you is a spoiler? I think its a personal issue. Like what colour do you make your character's clothing, or what voice do you pick for them, or what difficulty level you play.

First I think there are a variety of gamers out there. Some of them like really really challenging games and others like to breeze through combat to get on with the story. Obviously games like the original Dungeon Siege, where your party pretty much won every battle without trying in one extreme, (though that game did sell well), where games like the original Wizardry where your entire party regularly died leaves a pretty big range. I personally like having to actively use a number of tactics at my disposal, but I also want to be able to win with a sub-optimal party. I know that others feel differently. Ideally a game should have multiple difficulty settings that offer SIGNIFICANT differences in difficulty (not just monsters have 20% more hit points, do 20% more damage)

Just a thought based on the game mechanics as we know them (gaining modal and active ablities). Let's say a Druid or Wizard wants to invest in summoning. May he should need to select an active summoning ability to increase his summons. So, for example, each active ability adds a new summoned creature. He could then also choose modal abilities to improve the quality of summons. Of course, had he not chosen these he could have improved his other spell casting abilities. I think this would be cool, as you could really specialize a character. I could have a mage who is a powerful damage dealer who maybe can summon one weak servant, or a necromancer with an army of undead, who can pelt enemies with weak missles to soften them up for his monsters. I love playing summoners. Both in Diablo 2 and Arcanum I did my first run through as summoners. My Arcana character was a true wimp. She had all of her points in charisma and summoning and by the end of the game I think I had about 8 followers and a mass of summons. The game was just about as easy the second time around with a melee based techbased no charisma dwarf. That's the way it should be.

Scrolls or wands might be interesting if they could either boost or modify spell effects. For example (using old D&D spells) The Wand of Everburning Fireballs. You shoot a normal fireball, and those who survive continue to take burning damage over the next few turns. The Wand of Thunder & Lightning. Anyone hit by a lightning bolt also has a 10% chance of being stunned. Scroll of Swift Missles. The cooldown on magic missle is reduced. Scroll of Deadly Elementals- Your summoned elemental is hasted and blessed.

I for one did not like the DA:O camp. I can't really say why, but it felt sort of artificial to me. I think because I felt like this was the place where I had to forward dialogue. Jade Empire was even worse, because it was basically the same, but arrows were pointing over the heads of the npcs who wanted to say something. The castle in Baldur's Gate 2 was the opposite. You had a reason to be there, but it no way felt like home. One game which I actually thought did a decent job of it was Neverwinter Nights 2. The Inn was in a specific place. It didn't belong to you. It wasn't always convenient to get to. Nevertheless it was "your" hangout, and it was the place your characters went to between acts. Sand and Bishop hung out there anyways. In fact they met you there. It had a much more organic feel.

If there is casting time like in the IE games, than friendly fire is still quite possible. For example if your characters kill an opponent and than move on to the next one, they could wander into the area effect (unless you turn off the AI).

I also in general avoid cursed items. I can remember in one game I played (can't remember which one) there was a powerful weapon that drained health at one point a turn. I used it in conjunction with a ring which regenerated my health at the same rate. I can see such item combinations where you need two wear items combined to get the benefits of a cursed item. Of course in that case the curse item must be good enough to justify loosing the bonus from the other item.