Lephys

One thought is to make CON affect recovery time (between actions), and possibly other stats affect the "cast time" of abilities and actions (reload speed on guns, aim-time for ranged attacks, etc.). Obviously the cast-time spectrum is just an optional thing that doesn't have much to do with CON, but I feel it's related. Another thought is to have CON affect duration of Afflictions.

*sigh*... Okay... you aren't incorrect, but I feel like my point is getting COMPLETELY missed. And that may be my fault. I'm bad at conveying extremely specific thoughts, and for that I apologize. I genuinely try, but I often fail. Here's the point. It's not that you can't do whatever you want. It's that you run into problems if you don't govern your own fiction, and they aren't avoided by the "who cares, it's magic!" notion. Imagine you invent an arcane dimension, in which Wizards can travel. Fictional thing, just made it up. Wizards aren't real, it's magic, yada-yada-yada. Okay, now, say, some villain is traveling in that dimension, and other characters interact with him. Maybe he can travel in that dimension, AND in the regular "reality" dimension in that world, simultaneously, and no one else can do that. If they stab him, what happens? And if he dies in that dimension, does he die in both? And if he does, then you just have someone else NOT die in both, that's inconsistent. So, that's an example of the process you have to go through to figure out how your world works as it pertains to interactions in your story. If no one ever attacks anyone who's walking in both dimensions, then yeah, you don't have to care how that works. You don't have to sit down and write a physics book on an entire fictional magical world, but you have to acknowledge that the world is governed by rules, just like our own is, and you have to at least make those rules up when you come to them, and make them work together. If you just make up a "just because" reason every time something happens, you're not inherently incorrect in doing so. No Fiction Police are going to arrest you, and you're not going to cease to exist, but your story's just gonna become nothing. Annnnnnnywho. That's my bad for getting us off on a tangent, and I apologize. Back to the heated attribute debate,

See, I beg to differ. Just because the real world follows a fixed set of principles doesn't mean we know what they are, but we didn't create the real world. However, as a human is the one conceiving magic in the first place, I don't think you can just not determine how your own magic system works and say "it's magic." You don't have to tell all the users of the fictional world how it works in every tiny detail (and you don't even have to have ALL the details worked out), but you still have to know what's going on, in general, with your magic, as the creator of the world. So to be clear, no, we don't need to know everything about magic in a ficticious world. But, the world needs to know how magic works, in any applicable situations. Which, again, largely agreeing with the validity of the points you're making, but the core of all this was just "No, (insert random poster here), for the 1000th time, you can't just draw a result out of a hat every time magic interacts with something in the world 'because it's magic.'" Because people keep periodically chiming in saying "It doesn't matter at all how it works, 'cause it's not real! 8D!" As for Strength wands... it's not wrong, it's just lame. It's like the magic can't make up its mind. "Oh, you have high Resolve (potency of your soul)? Then that's what makes magic work more potently! Oh, unless it comes out of a stick, in which case the stick just measures your bicep, then multiplies the projectile potency by that number, u_u..." Now, if you had some unique wand that some guy imbued way back when to actually draw power from your muscles, then I guess that could work, because there's an extra amount of resources stored in that wand. Thus, the cost of the wand getting to do that is that it doesn't do something else that some other unique wand can do. Then, even that has to be within reason. Not because magic isn't allowed to go beyond reason, but that a fictional world is kind of a work of art, in a way, and it's not really in our nature to want to be entertained by things that we cannot comprehend or relate to in any fashion because they just say "to hell with reason." The game world is already adapting into it the things we already know (like strength and muscles), that are real and already obey familiar rules of physics. Introducing this mysterious, cool soul power into the mix that's completely fictitious, then just saying "Oh, muscle power makes this soul power" is dumb. Muscles already make physical power. Why make magical power that overlaps with it? Might as well make a fictional world in which a car battery supplies electricity to the engine, but it ALSO supplies explosionpower in this fictitious world! So, now it's redundant.

To be fair, science doesn't really explain why anything is the way it is. It just explains how it happens to work/exist. Why does matter exist? Why do thoughts exist? No one has any clue, and probably never will. PENGUINS! Why did I just type that word? Only I know that. You know that the word is there because I pressed the correseponding letters on my keyboard, then posted this message, but that doesn't say why it was those letters or why any word should've been typed there in the first place. It just tells how it got to be there. I'm not trying to get overly nitpicky here, as I feel a lot of this is getting into semantics and not actual disagreement. I perhaps spoke too broadly. I mean, "science" is basically the study of reality, if you want to get down to it. But, the term is often used to refer to all the things that we study. People often explain something, then say "that's the science of it," when really, they're just explaining something that naturally occurs, as discovered by the application of science. The very human notion of magic refers to things that aren't believed to be possible in the natural world. If you were to travel back in time and show a flamethrower or taser to people a thousand years ago, they would probably believe it to be "sorcery." Even though, if it really was sorcery, it would exist within the natural world, and therefore be a part of science from the get-go. It's just seen as something beyond our understanding or somehow outside of science, and thus labeled "magic." The point is, to clarify, I was merely referring to the fact that, in the real world, we do not have "mana" or something floating around in the air that a human can channel or manipulate in any capacity to perform magical feats. Or, if there is, we haven't discovered any evidence of it yet, . Specifically, in the case of PoE, souls are a measurable power source of energy that can be manipulated to perform "magic." So, in PoE's real world, soul energy and magic are just forces that exist. There's not science, THEN also lawless magic. No. Without a soul, you don't have any magical energy with which to do magical stuff. There are limitations to what can be done, etc. You can't make an infinitely large fireball that destroys the entire universe, then recreates a new universe in its image just because you're a Wizard. You can create a fireball of a limited size, and it's taxing on the person, etc. This is just fictional science. So, there is no "We can make it do whatever we want!", because it writes its own rules. You can say "there are no limits" in your fiction, if you so choose, but then the evil villain would be literally unstoppable, but so would anyone in the world, so either everyone would defeat everyone else because they couldn't be stopped, or everyone would be stopped despite being unstoppable, neither of which makes any sense at all, so it would be a pointless reality where nothing of any significance actually occurs. Now, when you get down to details, who's to say if a person with levitation can hover around at 20mph or 100mph? There's no real-world thing to draw from to say "Oh, well, I mean, they could probably only go Xmph, because I know how levitative propulsion works when fueled by a fictitious energy source." BUT, there are still things like wind resistance, etc. So, you'd either have to account for those, or adhere to limitations in them, etc. But, that's just additional science you're adding into real-world existing science. Heck, you can even change realistic, existing natural factors, like the force of gravity, or the specific effects of things that people can withstand, etc. Maybe in the real world human flesh starts burning at temperature X, but in your fiction, people are more resilient and don't burn until temperature Y. That's no different from magic, really. I mean, a lightning bolt's a real thing, we just normally can't produce them from our hands because we don't have a source of power that can generate them in our bodies. We'd have to use some kind of machine to build up a charge and an apparatus on our hand to discharge it, etc. Annnnnnywho... Magic is fictional, but it's a part of reality in a fictional world. So, it's not like science vs. magic. That's just a perception. Magic plays along the same rules of existence as the rest of science in a given world.

^ But you don't need a different system for each weapon. You're making it sound 7,000% more complicated than it needs to be. You have melee, and you have ranged. Then within ranged weapons, you have ones that are operated with strength (bows, even though ALL bows in real life don't necessarily gain a bonus from strength, it's close enough. You could even easily have certain bows gain a greater bonus, etc.), and you have things that aren't operated with strength (mechanical launching things like crossbows, and guns.) Maybe, as you said, crossbows and the like get reduced reload time from strength or something. That kind of makes sense, and being able to alter your reload time is a cool thing. Maybe guns get nothing, because you just make them super powerful and slow, and you just use talents and various other things to make them faster and/or more accurate, etc. OR maybe Perception affects all ranged accuracy, and that's just another thing you want but can't have all of. All that is is building the various things that you'd want to be able to affect in a character, in gameplay, into the stats. Wouldn't it be great to be a huge Barbarian guy who can Hulk Smash stuff really hard, but lacks finesse? And vice versa? Wouldn't it be great to be able to do things faster, but not necessarily as effectively each time? Etc. That's kind of what this type of game is all about. And that isn't very complicated, logistically. It's not like we're going to make 4 different stats effect dagger thrusts in a different way than 3 other stats affect hammer swings.

Not really, because in a slightly-overly-simplified way, "magic" is just soul-powered abilities. So, technically, even Fighters could have a spectrum from pure physical prowess (18 Strength) to pure soul-powered Fightery super-human abilities (18 Resolve). All classes have the same power source, they just use it differently. But they all ALSO have physical, non-magical capabilities. Thus you have Wizards summoning magical weapons, but still wielding them with their regular, non-fictional fighting capabilities.

... and your muscles simultaneously, or nothing measured the power of your muscles and/or everyone in Eora are just undead vessels that are animated solely (pun intended) by soul power, and they just happen to be all different-sized bodies for no reason at all. *GASP*... THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ANCIENT PEOPLES! They accidentally invented souls, thereby all dying in the process, then immediately repopulating the world with revenants! o_O Seriously though, stats are equal parts "how does this make gameplay interesting" and "how does this make role-playing interesting." So, to every single "who cares!" response to a stat doing something that blatantly makes zero sense, the problem is purely a role-playing one. Want that NPC in the world to react to your character being the strongest human they've ever seen and being a masterful gun user? How do you do that? "Oh, man... if anyone scrawnier would've said they were going to hunt down that dragon with that gun, I'd say that's dumb! But you! With those muscles, you should be able to fire bullets straight THROUGH that dragon!" The world wants to make sense, but the stats rebel like an angsty teenager. Am I saying you can't do that with stats purely because a guy couldn't comment on your muscle gun skill? No. It's just an illustration of the principle behind doing so with stats in an rpg world that yearns to make sense and allow you to roleplay through it. As many have said, however, magic and fiction work the way we want them to (within reason... they still have to hold to their own established bubble of reason, or you don't have a world, fictional or not). So, for example, maybe Intellect does affect magic. But it doesn't HAVE to be in power. Power is but one factor, be it for magic or melee weapons or ranged weapons or guns or class abilities. What if Intellect affects cast time? Boom. Want to be ultra-swift? Get Intellect. Want to be ultra-swift AND powerful? Intellect and Resolve. Want to also use melee weaponry with any effectiveness? Now you need THREE stats. The points are starting to spread thin. That's how it works. In a good attribute system, ideally you wish you could max out all the stats, no matter your character. You're never like "Meh, that only increases sock dryness for my class, u_u...". Granted, this doesn't mean that you could just say "Pssh, I don't care about melee weapons or refraining from getting knocked down!" and say to-hell with Strength. You can't build a character with all the stats high, so you have to pick and choose the type of character you want. That's fine. So, it's pretty simple. If fighting with a melee weapon and fighting with magic spells are two different facets of your character, they should not be the same thing in attributes. If ranged weapons function differently, then figure out how to interestingly make them work with the stats. If it's a separate option for character creation -- a different build/path you can take with your character, then it doesn't need to get neglected in the attribute system. It's pretty much that simple. You start with goals of how you want characters to be able to be played, and what you want to work in the RP aspect of the story and world, then you make attributes accordingly. It's not really a huge mystery as to what attributes you should have and what's the right way to do them. That said, I'm not saying it's super easy to get all the math worked out the way it needs to be. But, in general, it's not like "Oh man, I dunno. What if this is completely the wrong way to do it?" There's not a magical equation in the stars that tells you how attributes should work. And there's not some ease-of-use formula that makes them right, either.

Pong is more straightforward than PoE, but it's also a heckuva lot less interesting. I agree that straightforwardness needs to be considered, but function comes before form. If something being more complex better serves the RPG system, then I say do it. Again, though, this requires a sort of viability balancing of the opportunities you're offering to the characters. If you want ranged weaponry, for example, to be a viable option for any character of any class, and you also want melee weaponry or magic weaponry to be viable, then allow the stats to affect each of these three options in interesting ways. There's no reason to offer 3 options to people that are so distinct, then go "Meh, it's more straightforward to just say 'this attribute makes weapons do damage.' " That would be like coming up with classes, starting with the Fighter, then conceiving the Wizard and being like "Okay, all his spells are gonna be just Magic Kick and Magic Slash and Magic Leap." Oh, you've made a whole new class, but then just gone "Meh... they all do damage and cause effects. Who cares. Let's have an attribute called 'Classness' that just increases a bunch of numbers for whatever class you are." If you're gonna make stuff distinct, make stuff distinct.

I think you're partially joking, but you'd be surprised how many people firmly believe this. Magic is just fictional science. It still has to be explained, . Real things have real reasons for their existence/behavior, and fictional things have fictional ones.

Oh, it's mega hard. It's simple, but not easy. We just have to make as much of an effort as possible. I believe being conscious of this grand scheme of things helps a bit, though, when we feel compelled to ride the spiral with trolls or hold our tongues for fear that our post will be ignored or we'll somehow be interrupting a battle. Off-tangent, I'm glad Josh is addressing most of the things that seem problematic. I feel a lot better about their iteration flow this time around. I know they had a pretty huge time crunch on the first game, so there were things they kind of resolved themselves to, even though they knew a different system might have worked better (like individual stealth, and settling for group stealth, etc.).

I figure most people would be familiar with it so it's an easy shorthand. The point is that shows how increased physical strength allows for more damage with magic/spirit energy. That show is also a ludicrous exaggeration of sheer Willpower trumping all else. It is a bit akin to Resolve, in theory, but it's much more all-encompassing. Basically, they (as well as characters in dozens, if not hundreds, of other animes) manifest their "fighting spirit" in the form of visceral energy. Thus, they can form it into projectiles, shield themselves from attacks (which is also an exaggeration of martial artists utilizing controlled muscle contractions to block incoming blows, which is a real thing), fly, etc. IF you want magic/soul power to work like that in the PoE world, then great. But, the fact that soul power and Resolve exist does not automatically mean that soul power can just do whatever you want it to. That's a very specific design. To be clear, though, Constitution would be "how many punches to the ribs can you take before collapsing?", while Strength would be more "How hard of a hit to the ribs can you take without being knocked down by the blow?" In reality, you cannot measure one without overlapping into the other a bit. In the abstraction of a video game, however, you can. Strength is essentially the pure measurement of your character's ability to generate mechanical force (and/or withstand things via muscular strength... i.e. if something's trying to rip your leg off, but your leg is strong enough to pull in the opposite direction to mitigate the amount of force on your leg).

I think one problem is that people just don't know how to ignore people anymore. They either have to spiral off-topic, or just stop discussing altogether to avoid the firecrackers on a forum. And lots of people seem to get intimidated. "Well, I had lots of useful stuff to say, but those three people were having a shoutfest in the topic, so I just kept to myself." But, if people would just continue actual discussion and ignore anyone who isn't actually interested in it, threads would flourish and people who just wanted to cause trouble would very quickly find the threads not-at-all fun to be in.

Just a thought... maybe Transcendent Suffering could work in a limited capacity with spiritshift? Like... 50% for example? This kind of makes sense, since being a multiclass druid/monk sort of makes you half (I know it's not perfectly 50%, but still) monk. *shrug*

I do like the idea of charged/"held" spells, in general for games. However, I don't know about replacing simple retargeting with this. If it were merely an option and didn't allow for any unintended exploitation of anything, I would definitely be all for it. On a similar note, one thing I think could potentially be a compromise for people wanting pre-buffing of old is a held spell/ability. Basically, everyone could get to store up 1 ability outside of combat, to use instantly once inside combat. There could be a level/tier threshold on this, etc. Anywho... I don't see why it would be impossible or inherently problematic to do allow the option to hold a spell after you've gone through the whole cast time, etc., in combat.

^ I understand all of that. None of it, unfortunately, knocks the idea of what I'm describing being a paradox. I'm not saying that you can't get a thrill out of pulling a lever and receiving a reward AND a thrill out of actually utilizing your brain to overcome a puzzle, in the same game. What I'm saying is, when you're cognitively thinking about what you want out of the game, you either want it to present you with challenges to overcome, or you don't. In the moment, you may go "YAY! I BEATED ENEMIES WITH UBER EASE!", but you cannot simultaneously be considering how you want a challenge out of combat. It is impossible. They are opposite thoughts. Besides... all the examples he gives in that little segment are of MMORPGs. These games completely discourage you from fighting weakling stuff. The push is to fight stuff just long enough to improve (level up, equip new gear, etc.), then move on to the next thing that challenges you. So nothing about that says "Yes, I want all the challenge to eventually go away so that I can 'test out' my new powers on things that were already easily killable with my old powers."

Negative. It was physical strength and magical strength. OR no one actually had any strength, and people were still made out of muscle fibers for no reason at all, and even simple machines couldn't do any damage because they didn't have souls. Take your pick. I don't understand how that is unclear. In this world, people have strength. They ALSO have soul "magic" (i.e. fictitious power). Regardless of how you look at it, some amount of everyone's power had to come from mechanical force generated by muscles. That's not even getting nitpicky. That's an incredibly broad idea. And first of all, every stat was not important to every character. Secondly, it didn't need to be. The big complaint about this is "They're fixing something that wasn't broken," but that's the truth about combining everything into Might in the first place. Did PoE need to just directly copy D&D stats or other traditional stats over and not change anything? No. But mashing all power into one stat didn't do anyone any good. The focus needs to simply be to make all stats valuable (not necessary) to all classes. If I want a Wizard to do not use any weapons well, but just focus everything he has into blasting people with spells, then Might/Strength becomes a dump stat only for me in this one context. It's not useless to Wizards, as they have spells that summon weapons that rely on Strength to deal damage with. Should guns get a damage boost from Strength? No. Ideally not. There are a lot of things that could be bettered in the system, but not by arbitrarily eliminating two separate elements of characters by mashing them together into one measurement. As I've said before... if ANY system has a reason to separate physical power and magical power, it's the one in which all classes have both things (all classes use soul power, unlike other systems in which some classes aren't magical in any capacity, and others are). It's infuriating how many people are actually just whining about this, because they don't have any good reason to be upset other than "a thing happened that I feel like I hate." If Concentration or a certain defense is too lackluster or too powerful, or too many things are on one stat, you fix that isolated problem. You don't just go "My car's tires are pretty bald, so I just replaced my car with a semi truck that had new tires on it!". Well... problem solved, in that you now have a vehicle with grippy tires. But now you've changed about a dozen other factors about your vehicle that didn't need to be changed.

That's why some of us whine. Some only whine because they love the whining. I'm just now seeing the news of the stat change (still don't know the full extent of it... it sounds like a "power" split between Strength (previously Might) and Resolve? In which case, cool! I'm eager to see how it turns out and tunes. I'm also interested in Concentration becoming more interesting and valuable. Wha...? How dare you, sir! We should obviously all jump to extreme conclusions of pure assumption and speculation! Why would we wait and observe empirical evidence?!!! Can you be-LIEVE THIS GUY?!

You say the "I win" button doesn't work, yet you just said that different people get satisfaction out of different things. So, you're telling me that getting satisfaction out of overcoming a lack of challenge is fun and acceptable (because you understand/like it, I guess?), but a Victory button isn't okay? Which is it? Either everything's okay because someone might like it, or certain things aren't okay despite people arbitrarily liking them. But what are you figuring out? How to push the "things die" button? If you invent a sport called "do anything," then you do anything (even nothing is something), and you go "YAY, I WIN!", then what's the point? Your choices and skill are taken out of the equation. You aren't solving anything, or figuring anything out. At that point, the only challenge would be actually losing combat encounters, as it would be a challenge to do so even if you just left everyone to AI everything to death. You still don't comprehend the paradox. In the context of "I want to overcome stuff," you can't take away all the obstacles or challenges yet still derive enjoyment specifically from overcoming stuff.

Fair enough. I take my thoughts for granted sometimes. What I mean is, you cannot have the goal of making a game that isn't fundamentally about simulation for its own sake, and within that game, include piecemeal systems that simulate for their own sake, AND have a successful game. You can do anything. Some people will like it no matter what. But, well, even with that... let's just say that sometimes its wrong for humans to like things. The best example I can give is that small children might like to eat nothing but M&Ms all the time, but they simultaneously don't like dying from malnutrition and diabetes. So, their liking of M&Ms has to be tempered with reason, or it produces a measurably opposite effect. Obviously game systems aren't going to give anyone diabetes, and we're not all small children. But, sometimes, our desires become irrationally ignorant of reason, and we want things purely because we can't be bothered with fully considering the consequences of those things, even when the consequences are things we ultimately don't like. Kids think "Mmmm, candy is delicious! I want to taste the candy!", and they don't think past that. And sometimes, we do the same thing with game systems. "I don't care, this is fun, so I just want to do that in-game." We don't really care what it impacts in the grand scheme of things, because typing/reading through multi-page threads on forums about this stuff is not everyone's cup of tea. And that's understandable. That's just being human. But, part of being human is the fact that we have the ability to essentially circumvent our base reactions to things in the interest of ultimately achieving even more desirable long-term results. We're the only animals that can do that. We're still animals, and we still have reactions. And that's not wrong. But, ignoring consideration and reason in favor of our initial reactive impulses simply does us no good. Subjectivity is great, but it is secondary to objectivity.

I fear you misunderstand me. Why is anything a simulation of realness in the first place? Why is one end of the spectrum even reality, for us to even compromise towards? Why even care about disbelief if it's all fiction and no goal of the game is simulation because it's not a simulator?

Meh. It's a forum. I'm here to discuss. Just because others aren't doesn't mean I get to assume no one is and "give up." I'm not really struggling at anything here. I'm not here to make people's minds change. I'm just here to present information in case no one presented it to them in such a fashion before. I don't really care who dances. I just provide the music.

Actually, the direct cost is recovery time from swinging your sword. You swing your sword, and now you cannot cast a spell or use Ability X because you just swung your sword. So... why do swords damage characters? Why can't our characters run infinitely fast? Why are there so many simulated things in the game if "because this is a game, not a simulator" justifies the abandonment of any and all simulation whatsoever?

A fair point, but it's still 2 different things that are related. Why should you even bother yourself with any fights -- with combat in general -- if it's not going to present you with a challenge? Why would anyone play Tetris if all it gave you were straight/bar pieces? You're no longer even playing a puzzle. You're just stacking up layers of bars and watching them vanish. Who's like "Yeahhhhhh... I like pushing the 'down' button and making the bars fall faster so they'll go ahead and disappear. I like overcoming nothing at all!" Put a "Win the game" button at the start menu, between "New Game" and "Load Game," and watch people click it because it's so enjoyable. At the very least, if someone didn't like participating in the combat at all, they'd just want an option to skip the combat. That makes sense. Wanting to partake in combat that basically doesn't require you to partake in it is a bit paradoxical. So, yeah, rewards should increase as the difficulty does, but, aside from that, the difficulty should at least try to keep up with your power. No one wants to read a story in which Frodo backhands the Balrog off the stone bridge in the mines, and keeps walking, because he's the most powerful entity in the known universe, but for some reason all the bad guys don't seem to care and just attack him anyway and try to oppose him.

Well, ideally the walking speed wouldn't be the slow speed. It would just be normal speed. What I mean is, you'd walk pretty fast, actually, just like real people actually do when they're trying to get somewhere. Especially out adventuring in the woods. You'd be moving at "hiking" speed. Then, running would be the thing you toggle/temporarily activate, and it should have some kind of limitation (fueled by stamina, etc.). Then, THAT should have some kind of applicable consequences. You could even have stuff like reaction times for enemies, such that instead of just sneaky or no-sneaky combat starts, you could actually have your Barbarian sprint across the battlefield at that mage who's not paying attention. Sure, he'll hear him coming, or someone will shout out "Look out! A friggin' huge dude is charging at you!". But the Barbarian will already be cleaving the mage in twain by the time they get to "...out!". The cost of this? He's lower on stamina from full-speed sprinting into combat, so if things don't go his way, he's at a disadvantage. Just an example. Anywho... you asked what's the point of walking if you can run everywhere. That's a great question, is the short of it. But, going even further, if we don't care about any of this but minimizing player annoyance, why not just have your characters just teleport to move? You click, they're there. Let's cut out the middleman of wait time for movement. If that's unreasonable, then obviously there's some kind of a ceiling to a reasonable move speed. If so, then why is sprinting all over the place fine, but moving any slower than that is not? No one's trying to say that the slower characters move, the better. Just... this is an RPG with some semblence of reality and simulation in it, much more so than many other games. When would you base things on realistic/reasonable frames of reference if not in an RPG? So, the better question is "Why should you be allowed to run full-speed everywhere you go with no cost whatsoever?"

So, are you suggesting that the enemies should just all detect magic being cast outside of their range of vision/hearing and come running to attack you if you try to prebuff before entering a combat scenario? The problems with your "solution" aside, your entire argument is about how restricting buffing is fundamentally bad for the game, but when confronted with the problems pre-buffing introduces (which you've finally, finally directly addressed here in the quoted portion), your solution is to make the pre-buffing okay by restricting it with some kind of hostility threshold? Do you not understand what people have been saying this entire time?