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rivetHead

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About rivetHead

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  1. That's fine, but my fingers are crossed that none of the companions with particularly profitable, informational, or moving sidequests happen to be monks as I'm likely to leave them in the Hall of Adventurers or their monastery. I completely agree with this. It would break my heart if Tsuga C missed out on monk related content, and would really appreciate it if you could make the monk companion devoid of content and totally boring to play.
  2. I had a similar idea. The initial decision might take some thought, but if we automate it to that degree it turns into "why have the mechanic in the game in the first place?"
  3. Like I said in my last post, it's going to come down to the frequency of swapping required and how easy the UI will be to use. I don't see it being much of a problem if it's only one or two swaps per encounter and the function is a key-stroke away. I guess the part I'm not sold on is the fact that these swaps or choices always have a correct answer, which doesn't make for an interesting decision imo. An exception, and this might have been the intention of the designers all along, is to extend the cool-down penalty to the point where misjudging enemy composition would cost you dearly. This way scouting will be important, ambushes would hurt, and weapon choice would become more about the initial strategy and less about reactive tactics. I'd still want to see more weapon distinction akin to the spear and flail example I gave in my previous post, which takes things like character placement and damage patterns into account. Perhaps that sort of stuff will be added in a later design pass. Looking forward to see what the designers come up with!
  4. While I think distinguishing damage type is interesting and has it's place in tactical combat, I'm concerned how the mechanic will actually manifest in gameplay and whether it will be, well.. fun. It will boil down to the frequency of weapon switching and how forgiving the UI is, but my knee jerk reaction to this mechanic is that it will quickly turn into a nuisance / chore. There are two reasons why I think this would be the case. 1. "The interesting tactical decision" only happens once when I first encounter a particular type of enemy or a type of loadout. After I figure out the optimal gear to counter them, subsequent encounters of the same type would just be rinse and repeat, and yet I still have to go through the micro management of weapon switching in order to optimize my combat performance. Another thing I wanted to point out is that the "choice" I'm making with damage type isn't really an interesting one with trade-offs, but rather about comparing stats and arriving at an optimal answer. Unless the intention of this system is to make the process of "figuring out the optimal weapon" fun, I see little reason to include a mechanic that makes you swap weapons all the time. Having said that, I really do like the fact that they are pushing to make the weapon types feel different in the game. That's awesome, I'm all for that, but I think there are more entertaining ways to make weapons feel and play differently. I'll get back to that later. 2. As hinted earlier the second reason is the amount of micro work. Picture this in an IE game for me. You see a group of half-orcs ahead, some wearing leather, some in mail, all wielding a mix of weapon types. You could take a guess at which orc will end up fighting whom, and optimize their gear accordingly, but if combat plays anything like the IE games it will quickly turn to chaos, and the amount of micro required to stay on top of things would quickly push combat out of "fun" and into "tedious". I don't have the game in front of me, so I'm not going to pretend I know more than anyone, but again that's just a knee-jerk reaction I had when I tried to picture the mechanic in action. As I said above, I'm all for giving weapon and armor types unique characteristics, and most importantly, to make them play differently. Josh had mentioned somewhere that pole-arms will let you attack while standing behind a character. That's exactly the kind of weapon distinction I'd like to see. For argument sake I'm going to throw out an idea that flails, on top of the primary strike, will have a chance to hit anyone standing adjacent to the wielder, including friendlies. That's another example with interesting trade-offs. Flails will now be a great choice if you're surrounded by enemies, but terrible when used in a tight corridor where friendlies are near. What's neat about distinguishing weapons this way is that map design directly influences your tactics, and thus we capitalize on the fact that each map/area is custom made in P:E. Encountering the same enemy composition in a wide field versus a tight corridor would lead to wildly different tactics. Whereas if we distinguish weapons only by how they interact with DT, changes in map design and character placement would have little effect on your decision making. Obviously the DT based weapon distinction and the kind I'm proposing aren't mutually exclusive, and I'm not completely opposed to the former as long as the micro work is kept at a reasonable level. But if they make us do the weapon type / armor DT dance, instead of it being a mild effect that is applied to encounters, I'd prefer it if the effects were acutely evident, and makes those types of encounters few and far between. (Such as the occasional golem who is pretty much immune to everything but a few things) I'm enjoying this discussion so far, keep it up and thanks for reading!
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