Lephys

This again. "I think picking herbs should give you XP, because I like to go and pick all the herbs. Crafting should give you XP, because I prefer crafting to fighting." No, the act of ending lives does not need to grant you XP. There's nothing "wrong" with an absence of kill-for-the-sake-of-kill XP. That being said, could something be improved in the distribution of XP? Yes. I think so. The originally-touted plan was Objective XP. Which, they kind of have in the game, but it's not as granular as I'd hoped. It's not BAD, it's just not ideal, I don't think. However, the fact of the matter is, you can run around slaughtering all the things while playing through this game, and you'll earn XP. OR, you can slaughter only some of the things while playing this game, and you'll earn XP. However you play, you don't suffer in overall XP gains/progression, which is pretty nice, actually. And, honestly, combat is fun enough that I try to kill all the stuff anyway, even though I know for a fact no amount of killing is going to level me up (well, you get a little Bestiary XP, but, I mean...). If you can't enjoy combat without getting mega XP directly for each and every kill, then you probably don't really enjoy combat all that much. You enjoy combat-based progression, like Diablo, or a lot of MMOs. And there's nothing wrong with that, but all games aren't required to be centered around sheer combat-based progression. Some of them are allowed to have combat for its own sake, and as a means to ends, rather than purely as a means to XP and progression. TL;DR: The game has the right to decide what warrants character progression, and what doesn't. You can't play a game that isn't built around XP rewards and progression, and expect it to bend itself to that design. Otherwise all games would be exactly the same, and that would be bland.

^ This has nothing to do with being bad or good at video games. It's conceptual design, and the results of that conceptual design. Were you referring to someone specifically?

I'm not certain, but I think the cloak was just the Kickstarter backer-exclusive item. The Obsidian Order was an $8 add-on in the pledge-manager. I'm not sure about the forum badge. There was a thread about it a while back. Lemme see if I can find it... Okay, I found it, but the thread was locked in the fall, with the instructions to send a private message to Fionavar (the Chief Moderator) if you're having problems. So, shoot him a PM and let him know your Kickstarter badge isn't working. 8P

On release day, or just before it, one of the devs said something about that they were working on 1.03, but that it wouldn't be locked down until next week (which would be this week). Dunno what that meant, but that leads me to believe they've got a big one coming soon. Either at the end of this week or early next week (Just my best guesstimate).

^^ Oh, true. I was only emphasizing the fact that simply copying all the spells you find doesn't really get you much with a single grimoire. The concept of swapping a grimoire provides greater value than just how many spells you know.

^ Agreed. At the very least (and I do mean that): 1) It wasn't necessary to mash Soul Power and Physical Strength into one stat (as I explained above, the lore already supported how you can do either) 2) There could've at least been your Class as a differentiating factor for how/what you can accomplish with your Might score. 18 Might + Fighter = physical feat. 18 Might + Wizard = magical feat. Thus, there could've at least been a significant difference between having an 18 Might Wizard and an 18 Might Fighter when it comes to handling dialogue/scripted interaction situations. This particular thing (the Might Conglomeration) was discussed to an extreme extent in older threads during the game's development, but my biggest issue with it is simply the lack of "something's diminishing your soul-related power, for whatever reason. How do you handle this situation now?" potential for circumstances/interesting dilemmas. Again, you can give Fighters soul-magic abilities that are very Fightery and not Wizardy or Druidy, and the natural limitation of Wizards' spells per-day and such already gives great benefit to physical ability and conventional combat. That, and you could even give Wizards some abilities that rely on their Might (like summoned weapons, off the top of my head). Etc. The lore was set up pretty great from the start, but then the mechanics didn't really take very much advantage of that, I don't think.

@OP: You are one of the many who have a knack for making a mountain out of a molehill. Some of the stuff could be improved, but the game hardly requires you to "spam" the pause button. You can basically just let things go, especially in slow mode, as long as you do a little planning. It's not like every single battle is going to be the death of you if you don't pause at least once every second. The enemies aren't performing actions that fast, so why should you? Also, don't Monks absorb the damage they take, and don't actually take the damage until they fail to "spend" it in the form of Wounds? You act like they just hafta come close to dying to be able to do anything. Again, I would say "you have some decent points," but you really don't. There are some decent points related to what you're saying, but you're not really making those points. Instead, you're just saying everything is awful and your life is ruined, like a teen girl who wasn't allowed to go to the party at her friend's house.

I would appreciate very basic party AI templates/behaviors, just to not have to constantly make sure people aren't doing nothing. But, I don't really want the AI to decide what spell to cast and where, etc., without my input. Maybe just "protect this guy, in general. Engage targets within X feet," etc. That might be kind of nice. "If something engages you, switch to weapon set 2 (melee)." That would hardly win the battle for you, but it would sure make a little more sense than "Oh no, I cast that spell, and now I'm still just standing here like an idiot while 3 things hit me!" I'd like just a tiny bit of autonomy as a groundwork for in-between player commands.

^ Well, if they're organized human beings that use tactics and strategic thinking, they're basically going to see enemies, and become more alert than they were previously. They won't focus ALL their attention on the few people they've seen. They'll be better prepared for unseen ones. Thus, unless your Rogue's already snuck all the way somewhere where he's just-plain invisible, they're more likely to spot him (the stealth skill vs enemy's detection check is just a representation of how undetected you currently are, because you're far enough away/behind them, etc.) Sure, there are some foes that might behave differently. Xaurips, maybe? But, wolves? They'd just smell you. Have fun hiding from a wolf. And Skuldr and such... they can basically detect your soul. So, yeah. Anywho, individual stealth would still be the ideal way to go. This little tidbit isn't about "SO THAT'S WHY GROUP STEALTH IS THE BEST EVER DESIGN!". But, there are plenty of things people would like to do with individual stealth that just make no sense whatseover, simply because games have let us do them in the past. For PoE's setting, stealth would have to be decently "realistic," however it was done. So, it would still have to be used tactically, and not just "since my rogue's unspottable for some reason, I'll just stand him 5 feet behind all the foes, and when they see enemies, they'll just NEVER look around or anything, and he'll always get a free first hit on them, battle after battle after battle." When Rogues just become invisible and get extra damage from attacking from stealth and such, it kinda makes me wonder why they don't just get a first-hit damage bonus, as the whole stealth thing becomes moot.

^ Yeah, but can't you only store 4 spells per spell-lvl in a single Grimoire? So, even if you take all the spells in the world, without swapping a grimoire, you can only ever cast 4 different spells from a given spell level at a time. Whereas, with a grimoire swap at your disposal, if a couple people unexpectedly drop unconscious in a fight, you can swap from, say, an offensive grimoire, to a defensive/protective grimoire to spend the remainder of your per-rest/per-encounter spell "ammo."

Okay okay, I know this was discussed a ton in like 50 threads before the game released, but I'm all for another pass at it now that we have our hands on the final game, . I like the general idea Skor has. I don't think his example changes are perfect, but... Here's the thing, and others have already touched on it: There are ways to let stats affect your character build style without directly catering only to your class. For example, melee versus ranged attacks. ANYONE can use melee attacks OR ranged attacks, right? So, if we're trying to get away from dump stats, then, by that very nature, wouldn't we want to steer clear of other cookie-cutter things? You know, "Oh, a Wizard is obviously going to use ranged attacks, or a Ranger is obviously going to use ranged attacks." I would think so. They already steered away from the whole "armor = spell failure" thing, and other "Oh, you're this class? Then THIS IS HOW YOU BE THAT CLASS!" stuff that wasn't really an inherent part of the class's design. So, as others have said, you've got Resolve. You've even got Intellect. I think what should've been done is for the abilities between classes to be designed with the same spread in mind. I mean, what we typically think of as "magic" damage could just be "damage that stems from the soul, rather than the physical force of the body." To use an extremely simple example, a Fighter can have an ability like Power Strike that is augmented by "magic" damage, and thereby, Resolve. So, if a Fighter were designed in such a way that you got a lot of customization for their abilities, you could still have a lot of different abilities to use, and a lot of options for "tracks" to follow. Basically, if Might affected the physical (rename the stat if you'd like), and Resolve affected the soul-based (aka "magical"), then you could design the Fighter (for example, as it's typically devoid of magic in most RPG systems that PoE's descended from) in such a way that a player could choose "Fighter" as their class, pump Resolve up to 18, leave Might at 10, and still be able to progress and choose things for the Fighter that are supported by Resolve instead of Might. Just as we always wonder "will a muscle-wizard be viable?", a "magic fighter" could be viable. He'd still get inherent, passive/base benefits to conventional combat (extra weapon training, core attacks that make him Fightery and effective no matter what, etc.), but, just as you can choose between Defender Mode or Disciplined Barrage and such, you could choose many other things, like a soul-magic-based power strike, or maybe some kind of weapon-lengthening ability that uses soul-energy to extend your blade's reach, or something that magically extends your shield for a brief duration to block ranged attacks from getting past you, etc. When everyone's powered by their souls, you no longer have that "Ohhh, the Fighter can't do anything but physically attack, because then he'd just be using mana or something just like another class!" There's no explanation for it if there's just "magic" and non-magic, and only certain people are supposed to use magic. But, with soul-based abilities, you're fueling your own powers, so they can exist and still be tailored to your class. You don't have to spew fire out or put people to sleep or summon stuff to use magic-type abilities. Another example is just the Duration effect. If you make that significant enough, then even without magical abilities, you can have Resolve be VERY useful for a Fighter. If you've got an ability that has you focus on defense, and grants you additional Deflection for the next 10 seconds, and 18 Resolve doubled that to 20 seconds or something, that'd be pretty useful. Now, imagine, again, that your Fighter could choose from a whole bunch of abilities similar to that, that are more just "modal"-type abilities, but are still active-use (maybe lots of them would be per-encounter?). Boom. You've got Fighter buildability that supports high Resolve, without needing the other stats. I mean, sure, you're not going to want to take 3 in other stats, but... still. That's as it should be. The system should make you really think about going below the average value on a stat, and should support going with high values in almost any stat. I think they had a good idea for PoE's stat system, but it's far from ideal. Things like Interrupt are great, but they don't really apply to the whole class functionality. Sure, you can build SOME characters to just be Interrupt beasts, but there we go again with the class-typing. If you really want the best stat system for your game, I think you have to build the classes with the stat system in mind, not vice versa. Not "Okay, we've got our Wizard and his spells, and our Fighter with his abilities... now how can we make sure nothing's a dump stat for one or the other, and that nothing's too specific to one or the other?" *shrug*

She's got HUUUUGE... tracts of spell-targeted land! Another weird thing I've noticed in relation to easiness, though, is that the minimum damage through DR/grazing doesn't seem to be working right. My PC Wizard was grazed for 0.0 damage several times.

'Cause he's INVISI-stealthed! Duh! u_u. He runs way out on his own, while everyone else is completely out-of-sight and earshot, then he stabs a guy in the back, and runs all the way back to his group, somehow without being riddled with arrows/bolts. Then, the baddies all follow him, even when they're intelligent humans who could just think "No, men! Stay here in our deliberately-setup-to-be-defensible camp! Don't just run off into the night foliage where everything's unknown!", but they don't. Of course, AI's understandably the weakest part of many a cRPG. I'm waiting for some uber-genius to invent the video-game equivalent of SkyNet. 8P

^ True. I wonder how they had it printed. I wonder how much it would've been to have a screenprinting shop do it. I mean, they print nice-quality stuff on cloth all the time for t-shirts and banners. I'd think a cloth map wouldn't be much different. Maybe a slightly different cloth? I dunno. I'm just curious about it, though. I just don't see the point in paying someone to have it printed if they're not going to do it right. It's like if you hired someone to rotate your tires, but they welded your wheels back on instead of attaching them with lugnuts. Sure, they rotated your tires. But, better to have them not-rotated than welded on. I mean, I'd personally rather they just spent the map-printing money on the game itself, than to spend it on blurry, "technically we printed it like you wanted" maps.

I kind of wish armor granted Deflection as well. I don't mean "take the game, currently, and just add on Deflection." But, maybe the Fighter, for example, could get far less natural Deflection (but still more than other classes), and roughly half of people's Deflection could come from armor. 'Cause, the biggest problem is that, on anyone with horrible Deflection (like Wizards), the heavier the armor, the more negative you're getting for every bit of positive you're getting. Yeah, that -50% action speed armor BETTER give your Wizard 9 DR, 'cause everything's statistically going to be hitting or critting (for extra damage, pretty much offsetting the DR you just got) him the whole time, and he's still operating at half speed. The pros don't match the cons, mainly because of base values being so different (CON's effect on Wizard Health, DR's effect on Wizards, etc.) So, with a Wizard, you're: - Going to be downed/die in fewer hits because of piddly Health/Endurance. - Going to be hit more often for full damage or 150% damage from Hits and Crits, and rarely Grazed and VERY rarely Missed. - Receiving half action speed, on top of casting times that already slow down your actions compared to, say, a Fighter's attacks, AND on top of low-Accuracy standard attacks that are already going to miss and Graze more often than they're going to do regular damage or crit. Armor is actually far less useful for Wizards, for example, than it is for others. That's the kind of thing I hope they tweak a bit. I think the base values for different classes need to have less variance in them. Just have a Fighter gain +4 Deflection per level instead of +3, etc., and let stats and armor do the rest. Especially with all the %-based modifiers in the game.

Can't check mine 'til I get home today (just arrived while I was at work). The thing is, if they were printed so crappily, couldn't they simply tell the people who printed it "Umm... do it over."? Unless the image they gave them is blurry, why should it be acceptable for the print-quality to be so bad. Forget for us, for Obsidian/Paradox! Unless they printed it themselves, they hired someone to print maps, right? Well, they didn't really print maps. They printed blurry, sort-of maps. Heck, you'd think someone at the place that printed them would've QA'd the first few that came out, and said "Hang on, guys. Something's not calibrated properly," and then they'd call in Garrus Vakarian or something to fix it. If you went to a photographer, and said "Hi, I'd like some photos taken, please," and he took super-blurry photos in which you couldn't see people's faces, wouldn't you have him fix it or just walk away?

Oh, we can totally do that. Why do you think the appropriate level of Mechanics skill bypasses the use of Lockpicks? Clearly, you just know where to apply force to break the lock. /jest

Melee Wizard's doable, for what it's worth, but I do kinda wish it were a little more feasible. I wish the Wizard didn't inherently get crap Accuracy and Deflection. There are some nice spells you can basically use to boost yourself in combat instead of tossing out fireballs, but, the trade-off isn't really worth it, unfortunately. You give up other spells to cast those (as well as cast time, etc.), and you make yourself a pretty decent melee-er, but the Fighters are still better than you. I get that Fighters (among others) should get better readily-available bonuses to conventional combat than a Wizard should. BUT, if you're going to let a Wizard build himself for melee combat and give him spells to support that, he needs to not just be "decent" after he specifically does everything in his power to support melee combat at the cost of supporting his allies with buffs and 'splosions. It's still kind of fun, but basically don't count him as a Wizard anymore (more like half-a-wizard, when it comes to combat output) if you're going to go melee Wizard. My PC is a melee Wizard, but he's kind of just support. You give up way too much stat-wise, too, to give him halfway-decent Deflection and Health. And since Health/Endurance get a percentage modifier from Constitution, and the Wizard has the lowest starting Health and Endurance of anyone, you can max out Con and it barely amounts to an additional hit you can take in combat before you die. Those are points you could've used to double your AoE range, or maximize your damage or action speed, etc. I'd recommend Dex, and no less than 10 Con for a Melee Wizard. Maybe Might and Resolve, or Resolve and Perception. You could just be an Interrupt Master who can also sling spells. You definitely cannot tank as a Wizard, but you can melee okay if you do it right. I just hope that gets a little TLC (among a lot of other inter-class crookedness) in future balance tweaks/patches.

I have never tried any kind of "Iron Man Mode" before XCOM:EU. I can't do it on ridiculous difficulty settings, but it's actually pretty fun at the appropriate difficulty setting. You kind of have to be really familiar with the mechanics, and just good at on-the-fly reactions that are at least somewhat optimized. If you get to that point, with any particular difficulty level (meaning, you really don't have to get THAT flawless at the game as long as you're good enough/familiar enough for a given difficulty level), you might want to try it out. It's kind of liberating. I just naturally always think "Oh no, should I have said that? Maybe I should've tried something else first, or done something differently!". But, in Iron Man/Trial of Iron-type mode, I just don't worry about it anymore, because I can't change it. It kinda gives you a different mindset as you play through. Maybe you don't want that on your first playthrough, but on your second? It can be really enjoyable, and I recommend at least trying it out. There's no shame in doing it on Easy or Normal.

See, more power to anyone who would like to cheat through the game, but that doesn't mean the game is wrong to not be designed for you to cast 73 spells per battle and never have to manage anything. Limited camping supplies (or any similar limitation that could be implemented for resting) is no more a hassle than finite HP, or finite anything, really. That being said, maybe it isn't mathematically perfect, and a lot of people have pointed out some things that might be a bit imbalanced in the game. The first thing that comes to my mind, as a Wizard character, is that it seems a little strange to me that the per-rest/per-encounter thing wasn't taken further advantage of. I get that at the highest levels, your entire bottom two tiers of spells shift to per-encounter. However, I don't understand why it wouldn't have been more prudent to spread that out a bit. At Level 1, you could start with 1 L1 spell per-encounter (PE), and 2 per rest (PR). With that in place, I'd've made Arcane Assault PR, or at least lowered it to 1 PE. Then, every few levels, all your PE spells would just shift up +1. So, maybe at Level 3, you'd get 2 L1 spells PE, and still have 2 PR. You'd just start with 2 L2 spells PR. Then, maybe at level 5, you'd get your first L3 spells PR, and you'd gain 1 L2 spell PE. You'd get a little head start with L1 spells, and the rest would be gained later, but not just at the last two levels. I just think a more gradual PR-PE shift would work better for Wizards. Even ONE PE spell from Lvl 2 tier or higher is ultra useful. Whereas, at level 12, you suddenly have like 4-6 PE spells from two different tiers, each, every single encounter. That's a pretty dramatic shift in spell-slinging output. I know they're much lower-leveled spells at that point, but... still. Also, I honestly kind of prefer the "spells scale in some fashion based on your caster level" notion. The Level-1 spells can still be far weaker, but it'd be nice if they got like +2 seconds to duration every couple of levels or something. Or +5% damage. OR, you could even pick that sort of thing. Maybe they get +something to Range, or Accuracy? That would be a cool thing to choose as you progress. You could just call it "LvL-X spell mastery" or something. And, again, the devs could pick the offset to use. Every odd caster level, or every 3rd, etc. I only have decent knowledge of the Wizard, so I'm just talking about that here, as an example, but this could probably be applied, in some way, to all the classes, to a greater or lesser degree.

It's just a limited style Wizard, as opposed to a "I just jog around spewing magic out wherever I go" type Wizard. I can assure you the PoE Wizard feels like he can do a LOT more than a DnD Wizard, especially at low levels.

Yeah, sorry. I wasn't very clear on that. I was just presenting a hypothetical, sarcastic response to the event of Obsidian actually removing it, to emphasize the absolute nothing that would be accomplished by that, especially in light of the poem/limerick not even expressly specifying any kind of anti-trans agenda.

I do believe that paying for camping supplies wasn't the best way to do it. But, more just because the paying money doesn't really limit you in a way that you aren't already limited, that's at all beneficial to anything. There are more "natural" ways to limit resting, etc. I dunno. I think that maybe the free room at the inn should only heal you back to Half Health or something. Or leave you with a debuff from crappy beds or something. Then, it's something, in case you're out of money/camping supplies AND Health, so you don't have to reload or start a new game. That, and maybe you could rest whenever outside of towns, but you'd only heal so much without poultices/etc. Survival could even be tied in, so that, the higher the sum of your party's Survival skill ratings, the more herbs and such they'd be able to track down to make basic poultices from when you rested. It would just happen automatically when you rested. That, and, maybe the amount of remaining enemies in the map area could shorten the amount of time you actually get to rest before you must wake and move or be ambushed. Again, automatic. No annoying "Oh no, we hafta fight infinitely respawning enemies who just wandered into us!" while resting, and no "You just can't rest 'cause there are enemies around" (I mean, except for if you try to rest RIGHT NEXT to some active enemies). But, that way, you're gently encouraged to take on multiple groups of enemies before resting, rather than just encouraged to rest every 10 seconds and always be full health (which defeats the purpose of the limited spells/abilities system and the style of tactical/strategic combat design). So, yeah, I think "Hey, the only way to always rest back up to completely full Health is back at town" would be a good thing to start, instead of "the only way to rest to full is to buy these things that you find quite frequently and that you can buy pretty easily, but they still cost money which is kind of annoying, especially early on." *shrug*

*sigh* Any further argument in here is pointless. People who've made up their minds in pursuit of a cause are not going to change them. And other people are just going to keep responding with weird, "We have the right to hate people just because of who they are!" stuff. On either side, the idea that you're winning some battle for whatever group you're fighting for overrides whatever the hell it is you're actually arguing about. You can't campaign an idea out of existence. Even if the person who wrote that limerick for that memorial stone was the leader of the Worldwide Transgender Hate Foundation (I just made that up, FYI) -- which we have no way of ever knowing, because the limerick doesn't specify at all -- what would that mean? Are people's children being exposed to this game, and taught that limerick in their upbringing? Is that limerick infecting the minds of people who already had enough brainpower not to arbitrarily hate other humans purely because of their differences? And Obsidian's removed it now, so YAY! No one can think that anymore! No worries! Right? Woohoo! Mission Accomplished! Jeez... it's like the military's knee-jerk reaction in every alien movie, ever. "Sir! There's an alien craft! What should we do?!" "Better nuke it! We can't risk it being hostile!" *pushes big red button* "Yeah! We totally just defended the CRAP out of the Earth just then!"

The irony in all of this: How often the people who are battling stereotypes actually stereotype the offenders. There are two types of people in this world: 1)Those who are trying to figure out what's true and what isn't 2)Those who simply decide what's true and isn't without knowing anything. You (general "you," to avoid confusion here -- not a specific person) can decide what agenda someone's got all day long without actually knowing, but that makes you no better than someone who decides that entire groups of people are bad because of some common trait that has nothing to do with badness. Obsidian's entire game deals with baby-killing, racism, etc. Doesn't mean they're actively condoning these acts. They're just telling a story about them. The person who made that stone was simply making a silly "how'd this person die" tombstone rhyme. It's the same reason we say "Oh no, such-and-such is going to KILL me!" when referring to someone's anticipated anger, but don't actually think that the taking of human life is funny.