Lephys

Agreed. Many people made a bigger fuss about it than need be. I'm simply hoping to channel some additional focus/purpose into it for the sequel. It was just one of those things that probably could've been replaced with additional, active-use, extra-accuracy attacks for Fighter-type characters. I don't think it worked very well when simply tied to freeform movement. It's great that they're at least moving in the right direction by limiting who all engages now and by making the breaking of engagement more punishing, but I hope it gets refined into the best subsystem it can be. It should integrate straight into the tactics, rather than being a strange game of movement Keep-Away mish-mashed with all the other active-use targeted stuff. I still almost feel like it should be built into the character mechanics of melee combat. Like... facings and whatnot. You could lock your facing when engaging/being engaged in melee combat. Then, you can still issue move commands and the like, without worrying about breaking it, or jogging goofily around people. You'd stay facing your opponent, while moving in a more strafing fashion, etc. Rogues and such could even gain bonuses to movement speed while engaged, so that they could circle people swiftly (especially slower-moving opponents) for sneaky counters and flanking attacks. I think the other thing that hurts my head is that, if you're simply running from point A to point B on the battlefield, and some foe comes straight for you to attack, he gets to make his regular attack, AND gets an attack of opportunity, because you get engaged by him, but keep running, so you immediately break engagement. Which is nonsensical. The only thing you'd be getting hit with is JUST the attack of opportunity. It's an opportunity because your focus is remaining on your destination, and you're not stopping/slowing to deal with the foe's incoming attack. At the same time, though, a la XCOM (as I mentioned earlier in this thread), you'd think that your speed and focus on AVOIDING someone in that situation would get you some kind of evasion bonus. Unless someone can plant themselves firmly in your way, you can always jump/duck their thrust and keep moving, and be away from them before they can attack again. They're essentially attacking from your side, WHILE you're moving (speedily, one would think, to get across the battlefield quickly). So, yeah. It just blanketed everything with sticky/gravity mechanics, and that was very strange. It needs to be more structured and deliberate, and breaking it needs to be a deliberate trade-off for something else gained

That's a good question. If there isn't one, then there should be. That's the point. My point -- to be clear -- was not "So that's why PoE2's way is better." It's that, when approaching a system like this, there needs to be a distinct difference in the manner in which you go about trying to achieve the ultimately-same result. For example (and purely for example), what if one class could bypass a locked door by T1000-ing (melting, if you're not familiar with the reference) his way through the tiny holes in the door? Basically, they could physically get themselves past the door, but couldn't do the same with the rest of the party. Boom. Instant method difference. You just bypassed a locked gate, but you didn't just open the gate, which is the method by which a lockpicker bypasses the lock. The result is "the same" (the lock has been bypassed), but it isn't the same (the door is not freely traversible by anyone who wishes to get past it). Especially with Deadfire's improvements to stealth (what with hearing radii AND sight, etc.), maybe a Lockpicker (it really doesn't matter if it's a Rogue or not who lockpicks, which is the point brought up earlier in this thread, I believe... just matters that it's hard to be awesome at multiple methods of getting past barriers) can pick the lock, open the door, get everyone past the door, then even re-lock it if they so choose. Whereas, someone with enough brute force (against the right type of door/barrier) could simply heel-kick the door in, but almost everyone on the floor would be alerted to your presence. And/or any patrolling guards who passed by behind you would IMMEDIATELY notice that something was wrong when the door was smashed in. Difference in method. Actual difference. Not just "Oh, I used a spell, and you used a lockpick, but the result was the EXACT same."

@Torm, To be fair, you listed various different problems with the engagement system immediately after expressing bafflement at why anyone would have problems with engagement, . Maybe you meant that more specifically? I know a lot of people were like... wholly against it from the get-go. "WHOA?! No, we should in NO way ever even ATTEMPT to simulate anything even REMOTELY similar to attacks of opportunity!" That was a bit silly. It did work "okay" in Pillars, but it wasn't the best fit. It's not intuitive enough, and it wasn't restricted enough. It was just this weirdly passive thing floating around. Also for what it's worth, attacks of opportunity work in tabletop LARGELY because an actual grid is defined, in 5-foot squares, for much of (if not all of? I'm not an expert) D&D. PLUS, everyone didn't move at the same time. PLUS, it was turn-based, so you had a lot more time to plan your movements and see the consequences of them. In Pillars we got "jog around and try to guess how fast the enemy will get within engagement range, and when you will leave it and get freely thwacked by them, etc." There wasn't even like a "break engagement" button (In D&D, you could be like "I wish to knowingly move one-square away from my opponent and risk an AoO"), so it was just "THIS pixel, you're fine... THAT pixel, though? You moved THAT pixel away? You're dead!" Another thing I was asking for while the first game was in development -- another possibility -- was for engaged peeps to sort of be locked into a melee range, but you could actually rotate around your opponent as you fought them. Like with each auto-attack, you step left, etc. Because, yeah... trying to suddenly turn and sprint away (or back away) would simply have your opponent continue to press towards you and probably get "free" attacks. However, it's not as if no one in melee combat ever moves around.

*adjusts spectacles... opens clipboard pad to fresh sheet of paper* *clicky* ... Why don't you just relax and tell me why you think you feel the need to run everywhere, and when this all started. Your childhood, perhaps?

Thanks, blotter! *Watches video* ... Okay, okay. Step in the right direction, at least. I just tried to watch that segment real quick at work, so I had to keep it super low so as not to disturb my coworkers. But, it sounded like the main difference so far is that not everyone will engage everyone anymore. This is good. Still wish there were three tiers: 1) No engagement. 2) Active-use engagement (limited by a cooldown or something, so you can't just switch targets every .3 milliseconds) --- [Most common] 3) Passive engagement -------- [rarest, maybe used by crazy beasts and such, or mega-elite fighters] Just... Managing that many people on a battlefield, and not-knowing what the enemies are going to do, and playing in an active environment... it's not the most intuitive thing in the world to just try and literally run your people into other people (and/or make sure they don't bump into folks). At the very least, you should have some kind of option to devote all your power to dodging or something. I'm thinking XCOM's sprinting. You could use your full turn to run to a spot, and you'd sprint there, gaining essentially a bonus to evasion against anyone who might be firing at you. Coupling that with Overwatch in that game, and it's essentially the same idea as engagement/attacks of opportunity. But, the Pillars 1 system just makes me think of The Last Remnant, in which you had squads of peeps on a battlefield, versus enemy squads of peeps, and they actually all had very specific placements on the battlefield. However, all you could do is say "Head towards enemy X" or "Head towards ally Y," then hope you actually encounter your target before an enemy encounters you. So, you had no precise positional control over anything. I'm not saying that in Pillars 1 you had no positional control, but the idea that just "Oh, I don't know these things' attack speed, or if they're going to speed up or slow down with abilities, etc., so I'll just send my guy where I THINK they won't bump into each other," then you hope that they're not going to bump into one another... it's not very intuitive. In the decision-making portion of things, you'd think your character would have the ability to focus on, essentially, anti-engagement. Like "I'm gonna run over here, and it's really important that I get there, so I'm just gonna powerslide under whomever's attack comes at me, and skip getting locked down altogether), rather than "Oh no, I came within 5 feet of this dude and he lunged at me. NOW what do I do, other than get critically stabbed in the buttocks OR waste my limited uses of Substitution Jutsu JUST to AVOID this one dude who should have a harder time engaging me in the first place." If you attack someone directly, then want to switch targets, I'm all for having to manually disengage. Or if you get stunned, then someone runs up on you and is hitting the crap out of you. Now you have to get away. But, until someone actually catches you with your focus lasered-in on something else, there's no reason you shouldn't have some kind of advantage as a moving target versus someone trying to tie you down. You shouldn't be forced to "get away" from someone who just is trying to approach you and hit you. When I move characters around the battlefield, I'm not clicking thinking "LITERALLY STEP RIGHT HERE NO MATTER WHAT!" I'm thinking that I want them to make their way to that place. They can football spin out of people's ways, or juke one way and go the other, or jump over people, or slide under them, or what-have-you all they want. I don't want them to just travel like a missile and hope no one moves a wall into their path.

Yes and no... It's not so much about the limits as it is about the differences. The whole point of a class-based system is to have one choice function in a unique way compared to another choice. That naturally generates a limit; if a Wizard casts arcane spells and a Fighter is not a Wizard, then a Fighter cannot cast arcane spells. He is limited to the things that a Fighter can do. However, it's the approach to this that matters. Some games just put a bunch of stuff in, then go "Well this class is gonna be LIMITED 'cause we're just gonna remove their ability to do X." That's different from having all your basic stuff in, then deciding "this class is going to get to be the only class that can do X, in addition to the basic stuff." There are just things that aren't contributing to class distinction at all. It's one reason I hate the whole stupid MMO "trinity" idea. "Ohhhh, this class deals the damage, and this other class doesn't deal the damage." That's ridiculous. All classes should deal plenty of damage. HOW they deal the damage should be what's interesting. Like, within the category of dealing damage in combat, "I want to take this big dude out of commission really fast... can I do that?" I dunno. Maybe as your class you can't, but you can deal lots of damage in a different way. A good simple example is just AoE versus single-target abilities. If one class has AoE abilities out the wazoo, and another mainly has single-target abilities, they're probably going to do more damage than the plethora of AoE abilities, but the AoE ones are still doing a large QUANTITY of damage, just not as much to each individual target. That's a good distinction. A bad one would be "No, your class is limited to ONLY hitting single targets, ever. And this other guy ONLY gets to hit groups for lesser damage." Feasibly, there are going to be times when you are trying to take down a big tanky dude, and it's useless to only have lower-damage AoE (that's extremely wasteful to spend on the big tanky dude). Basically, it's the difference in methods that is important, and not so much the difference in capability. So, even though a non-Rogue still has the ability to pick locks to get into places (which is good, since "I can just never get past barriers without person X" is a bit silly, in the grand scheme of things), the Rogue and non-Rogue aren't doing anything differently to get past locks. The Rogue's just doing it with a mathematical head-start. And, not that that doesn't have its place, but sheer numbers is the single most boring way in which you can differentiate ANYTHING between classes. "What's the difference between a Wizard and a Fighter? The Fighter gets +2 to hit and has 6 base damage instead of 4." No one would ever give a crap about that distinction, ever. If they're not doing cool different attacks, then I couldn't care HOW different their numbers are, to be honest. Numbers have to support dynamics. If there's no dynamic difference in function, there's no point in changing numbers. That's one reason I honestly hate the idea of "Oh, Fighters are tanky, and Wizards are squishy." I think if you want a beefy Wizard with 100 hitpoints, and a relatively "squishy" Fighter next to him with only 80, that should be a thing. Maybe a Fighter has more dynamic capabilities whilst wearing heavy armor or something, sure, so his hitpoints last longer and/or he gets to do cool defensive maneuvers in combat that a Wizard can't do, but why should he inherently be any beefier than a Wizard? Who says that a Wizard can't work out twice a day? Or wasn't simply born a behemoth? The numbers don't matter. The methods matter.

Do we know anything about Engagement mechanics in Deadfire? I've scoured the Q&A transcripts and haven't been able to dig up much in the way of mechanics design plans for anything, really. I DO hope it's a bit more refined than in the first game. I know in some discussions during that game's production, we were really hoping that engaging foes would be some kind of active-use ability, maybe that only certain classes got. It's a bit silly for everyone to just passively stick to everyone else. I love the idea of engagement and disengagement, 'cause it's equally silly to just nope your way out of active combat with someone. But... I just wish it worked a bit better. It should be a bit more intuitive. "I want to avoid that guy." Or "I want to stop this guy from getting past." Not just Katamary Damacy, "Oh no here come people towards each other! Oh no! OH NO THEY'RE ALL STUCK!"

To the "Yeah but a walk toggle wouldn't be used that much, while idle animations would see a lot of use" rebuttals: I agree, actually. However, if you read a little more into the arguments of myself and several others, we don't actually want a walk toggle. It just would've been logistically silly to make an entirely separate thread about put walking in the game, but technically not as a toggle. If you think about it, everyone basically walks everywhere. Doesn't mean we walk slowly. I used to work at Target, and running in the store was simply not allowed. However, I'd sometimes have to make it to one of those "Customer needs assistance" buttons within like... 15 seconds or something, so I'd walk like a man with a purpose. Probably twice the speed of a normal walk. Maybe if you're weak or tired, and/or you're traversing difficult slopes or terrain, you'd probably walk more slowly. It's more muscle effort to move you the same distance. It's all about pacing. Anywho... I'm not saying "calculate the slope of all the terrain and granularly adjust the characters' movement speeds by tiny percentages accordingly!". It's not about that. And it's not about something that is a super tiny technicality (the "everyone walks instead of running" thing). It's just a simple fact. There's no reason for the idle animations other than "Well, everyone doesn't just stand around like statues. Their knees would be locked and they'd pass out!". It makes things feel more natural and alive, and is pervasive throughout a game such as this (every character you see who stands idly is going to propagate the effects of idle animations versus a lack of them). Likewise, there's just as much reason to have natural-feeling movement in the game. Why is everyone jogging/running everywhere? I don't care about the realism of the weight of their gear, and the statistical probability with which people would do that in a real dimension. I just care that it intuitively feels weird. Not only that, but myself and others have mentioned before in this thread that it makes things harder to tell when someone's suddenly moving with a purpose. If you're already running, then how contrasting is a sprint? "Hey guys! Things just got dangerous! Continue to run because we're already doing it!". I likened it to shouting all the time, then becoming the angriest you've ever been. How do you convey the shift in your anger if there's no baseline? Not only that, but as Varana said, NPCs already walk around, so there's already a set of walking animations in existence (in other words, no huge resource cost to the devs to implement this). Even old, not-very-realistic JRPGs used to use walking animations to show that your party was trekking about, and just have them move at however many pixels-per-second they so felt you should move. So, it wasn't a realistic speed, but at least they were not just sprinting all over the place. Then, one day, when we got 3D games, someone just made a cool, energetic full-body running animation, and all dev teams the world over decided "Wow! We should just do this all the time and show off how coolishly we can animate a 3D character model!" And now everyone just still does it, for no reason. All characters run, everywhere, all the time. There are even games in which characters move ABSURDLY SLOWLY, but are still using running animations. Now, when we have plentily fantastic graphical technology to animate an actual walking animation that's not at some absurdly slow "I'm an old man just trying to make my 1-week-long trek to the neighbor's house" pace, no one thinks to even try it? Why not? Wouldn't it be great if your characters could actually run when they had reasons to? "Oh crap, things just got urgent, didn't they? They're BOOKING it!" If you didn't care about that effect, then why care about idle animations, or the effects of the grass blowing in the wind, or people smoking little pipes or making gestures whilst delivering dialog? Either it's important stuff, or it isn't. I won't say "no one" wants a simply walk toggle purely for realism's sake, but that's certainly not all that's being asked for here, or argued in favor of, for that matter. I would ask that you consider all of that before deciding what's pointless. I'm sorry for the wall o' text, but either the matter's important enough for you to consider the full discussion before formulating a conclusion, or it isn't and there's not much point in responding, to be honest. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying you SHOULD care. But you should IF you're going to take part in a topical discussion. So, if people still think it's pointless, I'd appreciate some "Here's what you didn't consider," or "here's why it's STILL pointless" positations, rather than "yeah but it's a silly thing and wouldn't affect much."

For what it's worth, in regard to this discussion, apparently characters' idle animation sets made the importance cut. So... Don't get me wrong. I LOVE that. But I don't know how anyone could say, with a straight face, "We'd love to put walking-vs-running into the game, but we just don't have the time or resources. We're too busy making sure your character can idly stand in a sassy fashion, as opposed to some other fashion." (Sorry... I'm kind of playing catch-up here on a lot of the details for this game).

My apologies. It is I who misunderstood you. I now know what you mean. You have a good point, but I think it is for us to discuss the merits of ideas, and for Obsidian to decide their value and priority. Whether or not they are going to decide to somehow get walking into the game should not have any bearing upon whether or not we ask that it be in there if at all possible (reasonably, obviously -- we don't want them to remove a chapter of the story so that resources can be re-allocated for walking animations). But, yes, in a way, we're asking them to reprioritize, if that is what needs to reasonably happen. In Pillars 1, we all asked for individual stealth. Before the game was actually coded and built, it was planned. So, A, B, and C were in the plan, none of which were individual stealth. Would we have liked for them to have removed something else and put Individual Stealth into the plan? Yes. Walking is a naturally lower priority than individual stealth, as it does not have as significant of an impact. Yet the point remains. It's actually quite an apt example. The out-of-combat stance isn't needed. There are numerous other ways in which to quickly and easily indicate that combat is over: music, icons, HUD-change, etc. Honestly, it's easier to indicate that without a visual character-model change than it is to indicate whether or not your character is moving faster/slower than normal without a visual character model/animation change. Let's say your main character gets slowed by 15%. How easy is it to tell that you happen to be moving 15% slower across the battlefield when he's just doing his joggy animation, but gliding across the screen slightly less speedily? Same goes for a speed boost. If you were to simply look at the person and see "Oh, they're running" or "Oh, they're blatantly walking," you'd very quickly know what's going on. As for the whole "People obviously want to move faster than slower," slow-er than what, exactly? Do they want to move infinitely fast? Or is there a certain amount of speed with which they want to move? Ultimately, that question all comes down to one thing: In any given part of a game like this, does a player want to instantly skip out of there, or does a player want to move at a finite speed through the area? Barring "Oh, I just want to go back to town now," I would assume that a reasonable player wants to move at a finite amount of speed through an area. Do they want to move 1 pixel per hour? Of course not. Do they want to move at the speed of sound, though? Of course not. It has to be somewhere in-between. So "faster" doesn't really mean anything. And how slowly would you expect physically fit characters to walk? They're not sneaking. They're just walking. People walk for exercise, for crying out loud. Let's look at it one more way. When you see, say, a Lord of the Rings film, and the party is traveling through the woods, are they constantly sprinting at full-speed? Nope. And when they walk for 20 seconds, then crazy stuff happens, do you stop and think "Man... that took way too long. They really should've been moving a wee bit faster through there, maybe a light jog, so that it only took them TEN seconds to get to the fork in the road where they were beset by orcs or some dialogue took place"? Most likely not. The rate at which a player becomes bored watching his characters move through an area has a lot more to do with the pacing of the area and dialogue exposition, etc., than it does with how fast the characters are traveling. And instantly intuitive visual cues of "Oh, my characters are hiking through this tough terrain" or "Oh, my characters are charging into battle like there's no tomorrow" would be plentily valuable, objectively so. Going back to what Baltic was getting at... am I to decide it's relatively MORE important than any of the other stuff they have planned? Of course not. That's not for me to decide. But, is it a pointless request/topic for discussion? Hardly. Nor was my example a bad one for its goal. Oh, and @gogocactus: Thanks. . I missed you guys, too. I finally have computer time on a regular basis once more, so I figured I'd drop in on some high-quality discussification.

A feature having been already added has no bearing on its ability to pertain to this discussion. Especially as it depends on how someone is using said feature. Also, I feel like you've misunderstood me, because you seem to think I'm arguing against walking being in the game, when it is quite the opposite. Allow me to elaborate: Combat-vs-noncombat stance = a distinct set of character animations that is already in "the game" (was already in the first game, so it's probable that it will be in Deadfire). What does this mean? That a line of reasoning was already followed leading to a "second" animation set being deemed worthy of their time and resources. What is walking? A "second" animation set for the characters, which we are arguing in favor of being deemed worthy of the developers' time and resources to add to the game. So... total bearing being had there.

It's objectively no less necessary than a non-combat stance in addition to a combat one. Everyone could simply jog around everywhere with their weapons out. Why waste animation resources on a non-combat stance?

This. People probably hear "walk" in regard to movement speed and think "THOSE A-HOLES WANT TO SLOW OUR CHARACTERS DOWN!", but your characters don't actually have an inherent speed that's getting "slowed down." PLUS, even if you didn't slow the actual movement speed down any, the characters could still have walking animations until something in the game had them actually run (maybe some escape sequence, or a sprint ability, etc.). It's kind of like... if one shouts all the time, how does that person easily emphasize sudden concern, anger, etc.? Thinking back, there are a lot of JRPGs and such that had characters animatedly walking/trekking around, but they still moved pretty quickly (probably abnormally so, but who really cares when it comes down to it?). Regardless of whatever animation your character is performing, they're either moving at a reasonable speed or they aren't. There's either a reason for it to take X amount of time to traverse an area, or there isn't. Hence the birth of fast travel. It often gets misused, but the purpose of fast travel is to skip travel when it's unnecessary. The reason you usually can't take advantage of it until you've cleared an area or reached a certain checkpoint is because the game is designed for you to actually reach that checkpoint at less-than-instant speeds. Kinda like how the purpose of level 10 is for you to have to progress to level 10, rather than immediately possessing all of the qualities of a level 10 character. TL;DR -- walking animations as the default, even with maybe unrealistically fast movement speed, would be fantastic, with sprinting/running/fast-stepping-during-epic-combat-maneuvers actually standing out and impacting things a lot over the course of an entire game.

So sorry, everyone! I've been stupidly busy for the last couple of weeks. I'll catch up on title requests right this moment!

*In the voice of a turret from Portal* "I don't hate you..."

The main problem with engagement is that it's so passive. And, shy of "I blatantly knock you down, then jog around you," it's really hard to make decisions on when to break it/move without getting screwed over. I do think the majority of problems with the combat are that the enemies pretty much always act in the same manner. As was already said in here, even just additional, random enemy decision-making would be better than virtually no AI-decision-making at all (other than the basic "be constructive instead of standing around doing nothing" decisions).

Not-yet-fixed isn't the same thing as "ignored." Maybe that issue's taking longer to iron out than others? Would you rather everyone else have to wait on all the other fixes, however long it takes? Or would you rather they go ahead and put this patch out, and work it into the next one?

Great list! I second these suggestions, for the most part. Another thing I'll add is that some of the abilities with really short durations feel really hard to make tactical decisions with. When something blinds someone for 6 seconds, how do you really tell how many attacks that is, or exactly when to cast it so that you can encompass 3 attacks instead of 2 (missing an attack by .1 seconds or something)? That, and I feel like percentages don't work best for everything. Again, when something has a 6-second duration, it's a bit odd to get +.7 seconds to it because of your stats. Not only is that negligible, but it's unintuitive. And lastly, I like the gist of engagement, but at times, I wish it were easier to tell when you were interrupting something. Or, to coordinate an interrupt with a move, so that you could avoid a disengagement attack. Unless they didn't implement that change to Interrupt that has it cleanly breaking engagement and requiring the enemy to re-engage. In which case, I think they should implement that. Then, there needs to be an easier way to tell when a character's disengaged so that they can move. Maybe a way to queue up a move command for when they land an interrupt? *shrug*

Wow, Crowfall definitely looks pretty interesting. I'm kinda sad I missed it during its Kickstarter campaign. Gonna hafta go check that out now.

^ Meh. I mean, I knew how they were doing it from about the halfway point. And it makes perfect sense from a purely-gameplay standpoint. "This stat affects potency in any way, shape, or fashion." Makes the design a lot simpler, etc. There are a lot of pros to it. I just happen to dislike the cons. I feel like, if it were any other genre of game than RPG, the way it is right now would be perfectly acceptible. But, it's just even stranger considering what we came from is the D&D-based IE games, and what we ended up with is "I don't really know if anyone is strong, or maybe just really magically potent? *shrug*. But, they have a number for how much force they can generate, whether it be healing force, bullet force, wand blast force, hammer force, etc.". As I've said before, I'm more just sad over what's lacking from this decision, rather than what's "wrong" with the current stuff that's there.

First rule of sarcasm club: If you could, please tell everyone you know about sarcasm club! *eye roll*

Another funny thing: In D&D, as a Wizard, if you had prepped 2 PewPew spells, and you cast both of those, you could still have the ability to cast more LvL-1 spells, but be unable to cast any more PewPew spells because all you had left was GlowShield spells. In PoE, if you cast 2 out of 4 spells, the last two can still be whatever is in your Grimoire, rather than specific, individual spells.

... I see what you did there.

@PsychoBlonde: In all fairness, there is no stat choice that lets you land proper hits instead of grazes more often. So, while I get what you're saying about build options beyond "DAMAGE!", one of those is not "ACCURACY!" where stats are concerned. @Cantousent: I agree that stats are not the most important thing in the game, but that's actually equally supportive of the "then why worry so much about making sure they're designed in such an abstract way that they can't 'ruin' everything?" argument. Or rather, if they don't pack THAT much punch, then why not at least let them do proper jobs?

I agree. I've never seen a reason not to have some spells be balanced around much greater frequency, and others balanced around much lesser frequency. In Pathfinder, all your LvL 0 spells are at-will. Now, sure, they're quite weak, but they have a bit of utility to them. The point is the concept. Only being able to cast one spell per year is boring, clearly. And being able to cast 1,000 spells per hour is a little ridiculous, clearly. But, these systems are always like "Well, obviously the smallest fiery projectile you can conjure is big enough to seriously injure 7 people, so we HAVE to limit that to like 2 per day, right? I mean, we just found the spell in nature like that, u_u..." And I realize that at-will spells are basically "auto-attack" minus the "auto" part (since you could cast DIFFERENT ones each time, just with as great a frequency as standard attacks could be made), but at least you're constantly able to make specifically-Wizardish attacks, rather than being forced to only "flame on" in rarer circumstances. I think having them jump from X spells per-rest at any level, to X spells per-encounter at the following level is still a terrible idea compared to having them transition, 1 "spell ammo" at a time, from per-rest to per-encounter. In other words, if, by level 5, you want all Lvl 1 spells to be per-encounter, then at Lvl 2, you should get 1 per-encounter and 3 per-rest (for example... tweak total spell ammo as you see fit). At Lvl 3, , you'd have 2 per-encounter. At Lvl 4, 3 per-encounter. And at Lvl 5, 4 per-encounter. Again, not necessarily one new one per level. The changes at each caster level could differ, but... the idea is a gradual transition, rather than "this is really tiring, this is really tiring... THIS IS NO LONGER TIRING! 8D! I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY!"