Iucounu

You get knocked out either if your hp = 0 or your stamina = 0, so depending on what is lower, that will be the deciding number how much punishment you can take in a fight

I don't know what HP in DA was, but it didn't have much to do with the IE games. Your hp was fully regained after every fight, and as long as your HP > 0, without consequences, even if you had only 1 HP left after every fight, you could fight on with the same efficency endlessly. PoE is more "granular" in this, as you get your "injuries" (health damage) for every stamina loss, not only when you're knocked out. You can fight with one hundred percent efficacy in PoE as long as you have Stamina>o and no maiming. Just saying. Not when your HP are lower than your stamina, or 1/x times your stamina, whatever the ratio?

I don't know what HP in DA was, but it didn't have much to do with the IE games. Your hp was fully regained after every fight, and as long as your HP > 0, without consequences, even if you had only 1 HP left after every fight, you could fight on with the same efficency endlessly. PoE is more "granular" in this, as you get your "injuries" (health damage) for every stamina loss, not only when you're knocked out.

Yes such games exist and could be made, but PoE isn't one of these games. You almost always require a tank who takes suffering hp-wise, and having a priest who can fully heal said tanks hp several times, with the hp being the deciding factor if you have to rest or not, would greatly decrease the numbers of rests required. And yes, downtime does matter, or at least that was the main compaint of most people against the current stamina/health implementation. I also think it should matter ingame more and I dislike the current tendency of some people to backtrack to the inn after every two fights.. that should be restricted by either making the inn much more expensive, or perhaps add random encounters (perhaps deterministic, to prevent savescumming) while traveling. Well, at least in the BGs I can say for myself that I used my thief to great effect. No healing spells because it would encourage healing batteries and/or make classes like a priest indispensable for every party (giving every class healing spell abilities sucks and doesn't feel right). Alternative would be to let all healing happen through healing potions, but that sucks and doesn't feel right. healing bandages and such stuff are lame Actually nothing of that sort ought to happen. And that is besides the point anyway. The player should have the freedom to decide how he plays. Artifcially restricting playstyles is pretty damn ugly way of designing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME. More importantly, if I understand your argument right, what you are saying is sas follows: "The HP/Stamina distinction exists because there is no healing magic. So you can not heal HP hence stamina must be healed instead." I have several obvious objections: 1) How the heck do you heal stamina? Do they call it stamina magic or something? 2) Why not just get rid of HP altogether? "Heal stamina" instead 1) It isn't really "healing", more like "stamina boost" or "energy boost". It doesn't affect your hp after all. 2) stamina is fully regained after every fight, so I don't really understand what your point is. Stamina regain is only used within combat tactically, and it in no way affects the standing time of your party over several fights, other than preventing your characters to get unconcious and maimed in the fight in which it's used.

No healing spells because it would encourage healing batteries and/or make classes like a priest indispensable for every party (giving every class healing spell abilities sucks and doesn't feel right). Alternative would be to let all healing happen through healing potions, but that sucks and doesn't feel right. healing bandages and such stuff are lame

Some of the ideas here make me wish there was something like crowd-development. Just take the most popular ideas in a community and let the professionals bother about how to implement them into a working system.

I think the staff of the Magi is a bad example to demonstrate how brilliant BG2 itemization were, since it was just ridiculously op. You could go as often invisible as you like, which basically made you invincible against everything that couldn't see through invisibility. Perhaps it would have been a cool weapon for TOB endgame, but for SoA it definately needed nerfing. Fair enough and, in games where I've used it, I tended to get it pretty late in SoA so I have mostly used it in ToB. The point of the post wasn't that these were the two best examples of weapons in BG2, it was that these are examples of items that enable new tactics as per the post I was responding to (maybe OP tactics, as you point out). I will repeat the question in my previous post: if you don't like those examples, what kind of items would you like to see in PoE to open up new strategic possibilities? I guess dispell effects (or some other strong effect), on a weapon only a mage can use is a good idea, which can lead to new tactics, at least if you don't play a muscle wizard. Something similiar to the Ring of the Ram in BG2, where you can push, or even pull enemies would be interesting and powerful imo, especially with PE's engagment mechanics. Since prebuffing won't be possible, an item that casts a certain buff on enemy contact, or even has a perma buff, would be especially powerful and memorable at least. For me it's not even an issue of restraint. I get it in all my playthroughs, then I'd equip it on my mage, then I'd...forget to use it most of the time. At best I'd use its per-day Spell trap power before a big fight. and that's about it. The reason is that it's a melee weapon. Mages are best when they're spamming their spells, not spanking people with their staves. Had the staff of the magi been a sling, or some other missile weapon, that would be a different story. But it isn't. what it IS, is a weapon that invites a mage to enter the fray and take combat risks in return for its very useful Dispel power, which only one other weapon in the entire game possesses (Carsomyr), and Carsomyr happens to be *better* than the Staff of the magi. When I'm playing a paladin, Carsomyr gets used. Exclusively. In all its glory. It's not so much about giving the mage more attacking power but about the defense. You can cast a spell like fireball, than go immediately invisible, wait or keep your distance from the opponents, cast another quick spell, perhaps even debuff an enemy who has restistance spells up with the staff, go invisible again without any risk. With this tactic, melee opponents don't even have a chance to touch you. If an enemy casts true sight, it only costs you like half a second to go invisble again immediately, so it isn't really much of an effort. I guess in most playthroughs it doesn't really make much of a difference and is just a fun, and yes, memorable gimmick, but when I had difficulty mods installed and really wanted a challenge, I normally didn't use it, especially if I was soloing for some time.

I think the staff of the Magi is a bad example to demonstrate how brilliant BG2 itemization were, since it was just ridiculously op. You could go as often invisible as you like, which basically made you invincible against everything that couldn't see through invisibility. Perhaps it would have been a cool weapon for TOB endgame, but for SoA it definately needed nerfing.

It works because chaos shield stacks with itself Which is, of course, a bug.. If you're willing to abuse such obvious stuff, don't hold it against the game. There are several unofficial patches that resolve these issues.

Disagree with both points. Classes are not defined by their attributes. A fighter is a fighter because he has a different fighting style and different training (perhaps even lifelong training) than a rogue. It's simply a different profession. A fighter does more damage with his weapon than a mage because he's better trained in it.. I don't see how you need to assume an higher base-value for might to justify that.. That's btw something a class system can represent that usual classless systems where you can learn everything can't. A profession in which you have several years of experience that serves as the fundament for everything else you can learn. Erm, I forgot, sorry

how about chess?

Muscle wizard is a dumb term, since it assumes that might requires muscle, when it bascially all comes down to soul power. I associate it more with something like in Dragon Ball, where a little child can have more strength than a giant, because of inner chi, or whatever. Of course, as long as it isn't clarified by the lore, everyone can make their own assumptions about that.

Gifted Some people are born stronger, smarter, faster and more talented than the rest. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Effect: Doubles the available attribute points at character creation.

Grimoire Imprint is one of the more interesting spells in PE imo, or it would be if the spell wasn't selected randomly.. somehow unusual for Sayersim.. If there's gonna be a PE 2, naturally there'll be a greater variety of spells, because you'll most likely be of an higher level. But the magic will never be as powerful than the magic in BG2 because of class balance. I think it's definately possible to make a complex and interesting magic system that is still balanced though.

I'm reading a lot about stealth and generally circumventing encounters as an alternative to combat, especially in exploration. I find using stealth as a game-element rather lacklustre so far tough. It would probably have helped if for example in wilderness areas, some creatures would actually move around, new creatures entering the map etc. to make the whole thing more dynamic, and perhaps giving survival skills additional uses for detecting and avoiding such dangers, as another possible approach. I think that would have been a fitting evolution from the IE games (especially BG1) in 2014, and give the omission of kill-xp more meaning. It might nevertheless be rewarding if you can avoid some encounters and save ressources in choking points, when for example all your party members have an above average stealth skill. From what I've seen so far however it might too often be too easy and thus rather boring to avoid filler combat in open areas, and just rush through to do more questing

One goal in PE was to make a wide variety of party builds viable. Making the fighter "tankier" by giving him more health or health regeneration and leaving everything else as it is, would leave party builds without a fighter as a tank even more at a disadvantage and suboptimal. You can counteract this by rebalancing the other classes, and give them greater attacking power, more crowd control etc. but that would just enforce the role of the fighter as *the tank*, and make it an even more boring class than it is already perceived. The easiest solution, if you think the party needs to rest too often, would be to simply raise the maximum health of every character, no matter of which class.

Understood, but if you look at it that way, the whole issue in the other thread that fighters might have not enough health doesn't seem as problematic either. If you want your fighter fit for several battles, you don't rely so much on stamina regeneration, and if you put especially much weight on him in one fight and use stamina regeneration, you suffer for it later.

Wasn't the original complaint in the other thread that a fighter loses disproportional much health when he has to use his stamina regeneration, so that you'd have to hold him in reserve after a while? Rather than solving this issue, enabling different ratios seems to enforce it. A character with high stamina and low health will become like a maimed character after a few fights, so you could barely use him, either that or the whole party would need to rest more often, even if most of them are still fit to fight.

So, what, a mechanism for kiting? Engagement/disengagement are given weight for important reasons. Why make it easier to circumvent and go back to the good ol' days of shooting Sarevok to bits while he chases your hasted fighter? If it's that easy to trick the engagement mechanics, you could still achieve the same by just pausing a bit more, so..

Now that I think about it, it was actually the same in the IE-games. A real spiritual successor it seems..

Dito, that would be my main concern. I remember how I found this very irritating in IWD1 (especially after playing BG) and it certainly disturbs me in PE. Some more ready weapon stance would pep up combat considerably imo, as it is now it looks a bit sterile. I've also noticed that the male character models appear to always leave their heads hanging to much to the front, as if they were slightly crooked or had problems with their necks, but perhaps that's just me.. Overall, these are still minor things however. Environment art looks good, even beautiful occassinally, the story and how it is told and the world in general gets me excited. Really liked how you can choose different cultures and several backgrounds.

Playing as a god would be something unique, if the game really has an unconventional appraoch to everything, that somehow conveys your divinity. And a "deep", "philosophical" plot, like the game series grows up with you. Still, probably hard to do justice to it, at least for hyper-nostalgic fanboys like me.

In RPG's with only one character the presence of a bottomless stack never bothered me, I didn't even noticed it. It was just there, and saved me a whole lot of tedious inventory management. Especially in a party RPG, like in the IE games, I think I spent about 40% of the time looting, reallocating, storing and searching items. I believe the only thing that I'd consider as "dumbing down" would be if the party members didn't have their own inventory, like I think it was handled in DA, that would strike me as too "communistic", and you wouldn't have to think about which items you make available to which character for utility. BTW, I wonder if you can exchange items between characters during combat, like it was possible in the IE game.. I hope not, at least it shouldn't be so easy, with auto-pause and no consequences whatsoever in combat.

Being able to kill a merchant and his guards is one thing, being able to kill all witnesses before they get away might be much harder, depending on where you encounter the merchant, and what people are surrounding him. For the sake of coherence there might also be cases where you just encounter a lone merchant on the street, and it's entirely up to your conscience if you kill him or not.. If it's a merchant of higher status, he might be able to trigger some sort of magical alarm, and depending how organized and powerful the local law enforcers are, the problem is not to kill the merchant and his guards, but to escape, and again, not to be witnessed. Also, if the merchant is trading really powerful items, it's reasonable to expect they are hidden or at a different place, so you might get nothing out of your killing spree.

Normally Liches can see through invisibility, so they don't even need to cast True Sight. The City Gate Lich is just a nerfed version. But yeah, off topic, whatever.