CatatonicMan

Most fights can be avoided, one way or another.

Pause on trap / secret detection exists, you know.

: (

Fine by me. People can bury their head in the sand all they want as long as they don't force me to do the same.

My opinion? Leave it in. There's no need to bend the knee to every offendatron that makes mountains out of molehills.

Have you tried AutoHotkey? It can rebind mouse buttons 4 and 5. For example, to set 'M4' and 'M5' to 'a' and 'b', respectively, use this as the AutoHotkey script: XButton1::a XButton2::b

The problem, I imagine, is that a "robust" skill system would end up entirely imbalanced with a lot of one-shot and/or worthless skills. This was a big problem with the D&D CRPGs that tried to be "universal", especially since there was often no indication as to what skills would actually be useful. Overall, a concise, well-supported skill system is a hell of a lot better than an expansive, sporadically-supported one (which could probably be condensed down to the previous one anyway). It makes a lot of sense to have many varying skills in a tabletop game where the player has a lot of agency, but, generally speaking, it's not been very practical for CRPGs.

Working within limits is an unfortunate necessity with game design. Adding content to fill out a large skill lineup would take a lot of time and resources. Making all the skills equally useful would take even more time and resources. I'd rather have OE focus on doing a few things really well than to do a bunch of things rather poorly. Besides which, very few CRPGs are open/varied enough to really make use of an expansive skill system. Oddly, that's the kind of thing that I could see implemented in Bethesda's games, assuming they weren't entirely awful at that kind of thing.

Should there be a skill system? Yes....but only if the skills will actually be used. There's no point including a skill that will have no meaningful impact on the game. How the skills should be gained is an entirely different question. Should they be bought with points? Packaged with feats/perks? Derived from stats? That is a better question.

What I'm not understanding is....why traps and locks? Why is OE assigning arbitrary XP rewards to these activities and not, say, persuasion? Perception? Stealth? Hell, even kills? These arbitrary XP rewards are the exact thing they were supposedly trying to avoid when making their XP system, and now they want to throw them back in? What gives?

I've never seen a pickpocket system that I actually liked. Most are just save scum to victory and/or quit when boredom strikes. Besides that, the risk of having the entire world trying to kill you was not worth the minor amount of pocket change you could get.

A lot of that boils down to, "Mechanic X, which I don't like, is different than mechanic Y, which I do like." There's nothing wrong with that, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the game is being rushed. What will the game be like outside the beta? Better? Worse? Will it have waves of enemies spawn in battle? Will the maps be lazily and obviously recycled? Will the player have any real agency? Will the skills matter or are they window dressing? Will the game be rife with bugs? We don't know. The beta doesn't tell us enough about the game as a whole to make any reasonable speculations about development speed.

The number of people who cared enough to vote but didn't care enough about the outcome is important, statistically speaking. While we're at it, so is the number of people who refused to take the poll at all (not that we can expect to get that number from a straw poll).

I'm occasionally seeing the excessive health pools as well, but they're not consistent. I hate random bugs. Resting seems to normalize it, though.

[Description of the issue] At least one beneficial spell - in particular, the first level Priest spell "Armor of Faith" - is using the plain "AoE" type. This AoE type prevents the spell from targeting friendly units in the outer circle even if the spell is beneficial. As such, it's easier to target enemy actors than friendly ones. See this thread for more information. [steps to Reproduce] Start a game. Select the BB_Priest. Start targeting the party using the first level spell "Armor of Faith". Note how the AoE type of the spell is "AoE". Attempt to target a friendly unit. Note how the spell will not affect the actor until it is within the inner circle. Attempt to target an enemy unit. Note how the enemy is targeted within the outer circle. [Expected Behaviour] Beneficial AoE effects should either: Affect only friendly units, or affect enemy units less than friendly units (use the larger radius for friendlies, and the smaller for enemies). [Other Remarks / Comments] I'm not sure if this is just the spell using the wrong type of AoE, or if it is supposed to affect enemy targets as well.

So there are four different kinds of AoE that I've seen: AoE: Affects all targets in the inner circle, but only enemy targets within the outer circle. Who is being targeted doesn't seem to matter. I should note that some beneficial AoE spells also follow this logic. As you pointed out, the Priest spell 'Armor of Faith' (+4 DT) can affect the enemy, and, in fact, has a larger radius for enemy actors than friendly ones. Obviously this is not a desirable outcome. Hazard AoE: Affects an area of ground for a time. Anyone in or entering said area during the spell duration can be affected, though if/how they are affected presumably depends on the spell. This one has only one circle. Friendly AoE: Affects all friendly targets within the outer circle. Foe AoE: Affects all enemy targets within the outer circle. From this, we can say that the Friendly AoE and the Foe AoE seem to be working as they should. Hazard AoE is also probably working correctly, but the lack of indicators for exactly who is in the AoE radius is odd. It's true that it's not directly targeting them, but knowing what edge cases will be in the affected area is still important. The plain AoE, on the other hand, is only really suitable for hostile/attack spells (e.g., Fireball). When applied to friendly/support spells, we get a weird inversion where it's easier to buff enemy actors than friendly ones. One solution would be to make all friendly/support AoE spells of the Friendly AoE variety, which has no problems. Another would be to create a Positive AoE type that only affects enemies that are in the inner circle (opposite from the way it is now). I went ahead and posted this as a bug. Here's the thread for it.

Quit making my eyes bleed.

PoE leaves several files and registry entries behind when you delete local files through Steam. These are, roughly: Save Data: %AppData%\..\LocalLow\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity\Registry Entries: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity HKEY_USERS\ [bunch of Random Numbers] \Software\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity There are some other random registry files that are left around as well, but I don't think they actually matter.

You used comic sans. I'm required by law to hate you. Seriously, that's like all I can focus on when reading your bug report. Comic. Sans.

Have you tried using the middle mouse click to grab and move the screen?

That only works under the assumption that a skill like mechanics will be useless in conversations. If OE is doing it right, all skills will end up having an impact on conversation options.

To play devil's advocate, there are actually good reasons why a caster might voluntarily nuke him/herself. The caster might have superior resistance to that element or effect, for example, or the cost to the caster might be worth the damage put on the enemies.

I brought this up previously. No idea what, if anything, is being done about it.

That sounds pretty cool to me, honestly. There's an added tactical layer here: is it best to perform some action now to maximize character actions, or is it best to delay an action in order to interrupt - reduce - enemy actions later? Is a delay better than an action if the action is likely to be interrupted itself? To misquote HL2, "The right action at the wrong time can make all the difference in the world."

You seem to be correct. The animal companion or ranger appears to be the problem.