Ineth

@Gromnir Thank you for explaining, that does make sense. One small thing you said got me thinking though: Now that you mention it , I do feel that seeing the XP values pop up after kills in the Infinity Engine games, served as performance feedback in a way. Not just in a "And another one bites the dust, good job, here have a gold star!" kind of way, but slightly more meaningfully - as in: "Oh wow, that monster gave 10,000 XP? Now I don't feel bad about having spent so many limited resources (spells, scrolls, item charges, potions, health) in this fight -- it was supposed to be that hard. Gotta remember the tactic I used!"or conversely: "Oh, only 200 XP for each of these monsters? Then I guess there must be an easier way to kill them than how I just did it. Next time I meet monsters of this type, I gotta remember to try out different weapon combinations or spell tactics..."So getting the kill XP might not be fun in and of itself, but it is also not completely useless. Although in PoE, the bestiary probably already covers that... (PS: Did I mention I love the bestiary? )

I find it much easier to "emotionally" relate to the characters as a group/party if their portraits are shown next to each other in a horizontal bar. When they're shown vertically on the side, the portraits feel so... disconnected, and impersonal. At least that's how I subjectively felt when playing BG2 shortly after IWD2. Maybe my brain is just weird that way, dunno.

You could do that in BG2, both left and right bars had hide buttons. Yeah I always hide that left bar too in BG2. No need for those inventory/spellbook/option/... buttons taking up screen space all the time, I use keyboard shortcuts for that. Same in PoE, I'd love to hide those "UI related" buttons completely, while still keeping the gameplay utility buttons like formations and force attack / initiate dialog.

I like it, except for: Instead, I think the combat log should be made much wider than it is now. Combat updates should not be forced to break into multiple lines. Of course, then the portraits will no longer be strictly aligned to the center of the screen any more. If that looks weird, go with your original suggestion and put the combat log in the middle.

I'm imagining my Orlan rogue sneaking into the cave and pickpocketing the Ogre's head right off his body...

Gromnir, why does it have to be "as simple and straightforward to implement"? Surely, when designing a game, the developers should start by asking "What will be most fun and rewarding for players?", and not "What will be the least amount of work for us?" Note that I'm among those who are fine with the PoE's XP system (although I also enjoyed how XP was handled the Infinity Engine, with the exception of XP scaling in IWD2), so I'm not trying to be combative, it's an honest question.

Maybe it should be implemented like in Planescape: Torment, where the main character always walked up to the person you attempted to initiate dialog with, no matter which party member you had selected when you clicked to initiate dialog. This way, it would be clear that the main char is the one doing the talking.

I won't be skipping it

A little feedback box next to the "OK" button would work too, where the game could display messages like "Warning: 3 STR is unusually low for a fighter. Unless you are an experienced player, a higher strength is recommended." Though of course it wouldn't solve the problem of missing build variety, which seems to be a bigger motivation for the "no bad builds" goal than the fact that it provides handholding for newbies. In BG2, extra variety is added by multi- and dual-classing. Want a muscle wizard who fights in melee and casts mostly "melee spells"? Build a fighter/wizard multiclass and try to give him at least 15 STR and 17 INT. Just as an example. PoE does not have multiclasses, so that kind of variety has to be supported using stats outside of the class system. That's the idea behind making every attribute somehow useful for every class - so the attributes can more or less "define" your "sub-class" and the play style that goes along with it. But as some of the beta feedback shows, simply having "no bad builds" does not automatically guarantee build variety in every way that players would like it.

This is also what's holding me back from being happy with the "Might as soul power" interpretation that several others have suggested... No interpretation really feels satisfactory: OPTION 1: Might covers all aspects of physical strength -- but then it's unintuitive why it is also invariably tied to spell damage. OPTION 2: Might is a kind of "soul power" that adds to your natural muscle strength -- then making it also affect spell damage makes sense, but now there is no way to describe characters with different amount of physical muscle size/strength using the attribute system, which is... weird, to say the least. Why even have an attribute system if it can't physically describe your characters? If it's just about giving bonuses on top of the character's natural abilities, it might be better to move those "attributes" to the skill/feat system. OPTION 3: Might means a kind of "soul potential" that can be "actualized" in different ways by different characters over their lifetime [see this thoughtful post by PrimeJunta] -- but this does not explain why the Might bonus is rigidly applied to all damage across the board by the game engine, i.e. the Wizard doesn't just get the bonus for his spell damage, but also for his melee damage. Again, this might be a better fit for a feat system, where different feats could allow you to choose both the amount of soul potential, and the areas in which it manifested... I can sort of accept PrimeJunta's explanation, squint really hard while building my character, and roll with it... But I wish the game had an attribute system that focused on being good at what attribute systems are there for in RPGs: Provide an intuitively way to describe the natural/innate* properties of your character which distinguish him from others of his race+gender Help to bridge the gap between roleplaying and combat mechanics "No bad builds" is a good idea, but it should not be allowed to diminish those goals. Hopefully** the current attribute system can be tweaked to get the best of both worlds... but I wouldn't know how. ----- *) as opposed to, things he learned / trained in / gained experience in **) since fundamental redesign or removal is unlikely to happen

You may have a point in cases where a Wikipedia link is presented as if it were a primary source sufficient for "proving" an argument where empirical evidence is in dispute. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with linking to a Wiki page in an online discussion, when it neatly summarizes something in a way you agree with. Writing & posting your own 1000 word essay about it instead, would be just plain silly (and disruptive) if it's just a minor definitional thing tangential to the main discussion in progress. The world wide web is all about linking rather than duplicating; Maybe you should start adapting your "teaching" to the 21st century... Translation: "Plebs using popular & commonly accessibly information resources threatens my sense elitism & superiority that I derive from having worked my way up the ladder in the quaint and opaque world of 'intellectual' academia". Did I get that about right?

Yep. If I remember correctly, in BG2, killed enemy mages (randomly?) drop some scrolls that you can't get anywhere else (or at least not as early), so even if there were zero combat XP in that game, powergamers would still make sure never to miss an opportunity to fight mages...

Yes. Playing a Wild Mage in BG2 is much fun. Wut, no. Chaos Shield just lowers the probability of getting a wild surge instead of (or in addition to) the intended spell effect when casting with Reckless Dweomer, it doesn't negate it. And its effectiveness depends on the caster's level - at lower levels, you will miscast a lot even with chaos shield active. I got wild surges like "all enemies in sight healed back to 100% health", "all enemies in sight hasted", "fireball on own party", "intended spell accidentally cast at wrong target", etc. all the time. Even vaporized some of my precious gold once or twice; and turned a party member into stone once, I think. Whether that "balances" the ability to, with some luck, cast an arbitrary known spell of any level while using up only a first-level spell slot (plus a level 2 one for previously cast Chaos Shield) is difficult to measure objectively; but it sure was fun, all in all. First of all, I'm not sure if that really works or is just theorizing, and even if it technically works, if it is viable as a go-to tactic in practice. I for one never did that. Wasn't there a risk involved in casting (Limited) Wish that prevented us from using it too casually? Secondly, in order to be able to cast a spell with Reckless Dweomer, the wild mage has to know it first. And unless I'm mistaken, Time Stop scrolls are only found pretty late in SoA - not that long before a Mage can cast in normally. So at best, a Wild Mage would allow you to start using your (hypothetical?) cheese tactic a little earlier...

Huh? I finished BG2:SoA three times, and I've never even heard of half of those exploits. Maybe because I've always played the game with the latest official patches + Gibberlings fixpack* installed? As for the other half, I'm pretty sure they're no longer possible either, when you play with the "smarter AI" components of the Stratagems mod**. Two things to take away from that: Those kinds of exploits are not consequences of BG2's class or attribute system or of the game designer's approach to balance; they are consequences of bugs (which can be fixed by patches) and stupid AI (which can be fixed by smarter AI scripts). So why bring them up in a discussion about the attribute/class system and balancing? They did not define the Infinity Engine experience for most of us. If they did for you, that's unfortunate, but please don't generalize. Do try to separate those aspects which ruined your enjoyment, from unrelated game mechanics. ----- *) Whose authors pretty much picked up the bugfixing work after Bioware stopped releasing patches, and should imo be considered canonical. **) Which is how I played my last BG2 playthrough, although I didn't specifically test each of those exploits. I did notice though that throwing spells at offscreen enemies caused them to run towards my party fast, and that they would even follow my party through doors.

Yes it can mean different things (as in "mighty warrior" vs "mighty wizard"), but that's the crux of the matter: they are different things, i.e. different concrete connotations that happen to be expressible using the same word. Using a single stat for them is an abstraction that may make sense if approached with a meta-gaming mindset (to achieve the "no bad builds" goal), but not in a down-to-earth roleplaying sense. In the (D&D based) IE games, each attribute was relatively clearly delimited to a single concrete aspect that characterizes a person. They were easy to relate to, easy to visualize for roleplaying purposes, and easy to predict/understand/remember in their effects for powergaming purposes. The PoE beta attributes, not so much. (Especially "Might".) That's why some of us call them uninuitive - because they are meta-gamey abstractions rather than concrete relatable characterizations (and not because we are some kind of cartoonish fanboys who cannot accept deviations from D&D, so please stop those personal insults, Tartantyco & co.) Can the attributes work despite being unintuitive? Well technically yes, we can simple treat them as (arbitrary) abstract values, read the documentation to learn what (arbitrary) things they affect, and work with that. They do fulfil the purpose of adding strategy and variety to the game. But still, I think the uninuitiveness/unreletableness/hamfistedness of the attributes and their effects, is a real loss. And I'm not convinced that the "no bad builds" goal (noble though as it may be) is worth that.

Ah yes, the Fell Woods... The part of the game where the designers must have thought: "Oh look, we've got this skill called Wilderness Lore in the game, which has no combat relevance and is practically useless so far and unsuspecting first-time players will likely not choose it for any of their characters. Yeah, let's add a puzzle that is near-impossible to solve without that skill, to the critical path in the second half of the game. MWAHAHAHAAA!!!"

Moving/Swapping items between party members can actually be done very efficiently in BG2, if you use both keyboard and mouse together like this: left hand on the keyboard; fingers resting on the 1, 2, 3, 4 keys right hand on the mouse Then click the inventory button; press the number key of one of your characters to switch to their inventory; click an item with the mouse to "grab" it; press another number key to switch to another character's inventory; and click into an inventory/equipment slot to drop the item there. If you want to swap equipped items of the same slot (e.g. armor) between two characters, you don't even have to move the mouse around... just keep it still over that slot, and with a quick "[first number], click, [second number], click, [first number], click" - they are swapped. Takes a little practice, but works really well. So yeah, I don't see the PoE beta inventory as an improvement in that area.

+1 I like how stamina works in the beta, but health runs out too quickly considering that there is absolutely no way to regain it in between rests.

Yeah, I find this a little concerning as well. Maybe "realistic" 3D character models rendered at small sizes are not such an improvement over the Infinity Engine pixel art characters, after all?

And also, unlocking information in the in-game bestiary.

Only if you knew ahead of time that you would encounter them... Surprise basilisk encounters never failed to get my heart rate up in BG1!

I tried to play that game, but couldn't really get into it. After a few not-that-interesting fetch quests, I accepted a quest to kill some spiders in a small forest area; Somehow I managed to muddle through that encounter, but one party member sustained significant injuries, so afterwards I decided to rest right there. A bad choice as it turns out, as I was awoken by a bandit ambush. The worst part was that they had spawned right on top of my party, so it was a giant cluster**** with everyone being in everyone's engagement circle (or whatever it was called). I read through all the combat ability descriptions in the built-in help system, and tried some "break engagement" type things but nothing worked (or maybe I didn't understand them correctly). Anyway, it became a very confusing fight where in the first three turns only small amounts of damage were sustained on both sides, and then in the fourth turn, my party members suddenly started dropping dead like flies. And I had no idea why it went down that way, or what I should have done to prevent it. So I concluded that this kind of turn-based combat may not be for me, and I should stick to my trusted RTwP games for now... Maybe I should give it another chance someday (Can you recommend any good combat tutorials or rule system documentation for it?), but right now I'm preoccupied with PoE...

Actually, Namutree's complaint of trash mobs being a significant challenge and not orders of magnitude easier than boss fights, would fit IWD2 as well. On my first playthrough of IWD2, the little groups of nameless Malarites on the Shaengarne Dam gave me big trouble and forced me to reload several times (just to name one example), whereas some of the named "bosses" in the game could be disabled in round 1 with Feeblemind or similar. It's true that this is different from the BG/BG2 outdoor area exploration experience, but those do not define the Infinity Engine "spirit" alone.

Only with the "Smarter mages" component from the Sword Coast Stratagems mod. Vanilla BG2 mages can be cheese'd too easily (and too repetitively). The aforementioned mod makes enemy mages cast (or activate brebuffs/contingencies/spelltriggers with) magic protections like Magic Immunity: Abjuration or Improved Invisibility, and also makes them move around more, in order to counteract the standard Dispel Magic / Breach tactic. Among other things, this increases the variety of mage battles since different enemy casters will (randomly) use different anti-magic and anti-weapon buffs, so you have to deal with them differently. Of course, it comes at the cost of making enemy mages effectively "steal the show", by being much more significant foes than enemy warriors (who, unlike the player's warriors, tend to be very under-equipped in terms of weapons, armor, and magic items with passive bonuses, and don't seem to use any active item-based abilities).