dirigible

Candles don't really provide much light. But yeah, it's just a stylistic choice.

Balanced does not mean homogeneous. You can have different weapons all of which have different areas of specialty, which are still balanced against each other. When each weapon is useful and best in different circumstances, and no one weapon dominates all the others, that's balance. When one weapon is the best weapon under 90% of situations, that's not balanced.

Anyone who thinks there's nothing wrong with releasing an unfinished game, or who doesn't think QA is vital to the video game industry, or who doesn't understand how Nintendo is relevant to this conversation needs to read up on their video game history.

From what I can tell, they're somewhat similar. D:OS had a couple character options which made the game super duper easy (may have been patched/rebalanced since then). PoE doesn't have anything like that, that I've found, but once you understand some of the basics of combat and positioning the game gets significantly easier. PoE is probably a bit more forgiving with your build. You can dump points randomly and still be functional, if not efficient. In D:OS your abilities could simply fail to work if your stats weren't right. That said, I think that D:OS has more robust character creation. It's a classless system where anyone can do anything, and I love them for that.

Anyone who says they haven't encountered any bugs should check their characters' stats. I didn't think I'd run into any bugs until I noticed that several of my characters had stats much higher than they should have been.

You realize that Nintendo has published a plethora of RPGs on consoles? Anyway, I'm not angry at Obsidian. Just disappointed. When you can duplicate a stat bug simply by saving your game on the same map you recruited a follower on, that's not some crazy weird one in a million who could predict it quirk of code. That's a glaring error. I don't know why they didn't catch it.

Also, I can't tell if this is some super advanced form of trolling, but you realize that Nintendo's Iron Fist QA is what literally saved the american video game industry?

If you want to have a conversation then you need to say something specific, like "In this article it says that X happened in Y century, which conflicts with what you said". If you want to ****post and waste your time, then continue being smugly vague. I'm not going to read an entire wikipedia article and then GUESS which part you want me to address.

Every Nintendo game up until 2014 (or maybe 2015) was released without patching. You can be damn sure that first party Nintendo games didn't have major gamebreaking bugs (like stats ballooning out of control if you save your game, or disappearing if you equip an item the wrong way). So much for PC Master Race. I like the game and I like Obsidian but it simply baffles my mind how such major bugs could have been shipped. I'm not one of the mouth-breathers who thinks that Obsidian should chain themselves to their workstations releasing hotfixes every 6 hours, but that doesn't mean I can't be critical of them either.

Every Nintendo game did.

You're gonna have to be more specific on how they're contradicting me.

Goes back to Baldur's Gate, where magical items had a blue background. Blue just means "improved".

Ranged attackers will attack until their target is dead. If there is another nearby target, they will start attacking that one. If there's no nearby target, they'll stand around doing nothing. Possibly on the basis that ranged (squishy) characters shouldn't be running around putting themselves in potentially hazardous positions unless you tell them to. I believe this is exactly how Baldur's Gate worked. You can queue multiple commands by holding shift.

Actually, this isn't what happened at all. Armor did not get heavier. People wore MORE armor because armorsmithing techniques improved, which allowed people to wear more metal without being more encumbered. A full suit of fitted plate armor was (is) surprisingly light. A cursory google search will show you people performing cartwheels and jumping jacks in it. Weapons, too, did not get heavier. Weapons which were designed to counter armor actually tended to be smaller. Daggers turned into spikes, swords turned into maces or hammers. Pikes evolved to counter cavalry, NOT to defeat armor. Finally, guns did not penetrate armor. That is, guns did not penetrate a breastplate. Guns certainly did not lead to the fall of plate armor (at least, not in the way you might expect). It's important to realize that articulated plate armor was developed at the same time guns were becoming popular. One didn't succeed the other, they were contemporaries. Guns stuck and armor didn't for the simple reason that armor is expensive and guns are cheap. It's much more cost effective to buy 100 guns than to buy a single suit of armor. Finally, people continued to wear armor (cuirasses) up until the 1900s.

I don't understand... Perception has nothing to do with landing proper hits.

No, for two reasons: rapiers and daggers wouldn't have accuracy bonuses (remember, the intention of my suggestion is for there to be just three weapon choices), and having an empty second hand wouldn't give you an accuracy bonus either. Heck, the shield probably wouldn't have an accuracy penalty. Even if it did, putting a shield in your hand would be prioritizing defense anyway, so if it lowered accuracy or increased recovery time it wouldn't be the end of the world. I'm open to there being some differences between the weapons, actually. I don't see much benefit (I mean, you can look at your character's accuracy and the deflection of your enemies and decide if an accuracy boost, a damage boost, or an increase to critical damage is more helpful and the entire point is to get rid of those fight-by-fight optimization problems), but if some cool differences could be found I'd be down. I mean, "these enemies are all over me, I need my shield" being followed by "he's alone, time to try to stun lock him"? I think that's a good use of the quick slot. A bad use of the quick slot is "this guy is vulnerable to crush damage, but some guys in his group are strong against it". That's the problem with proposing a single solution without explaining that you also mean to rewrite the stats for all weapons & change several other systems. You say you don't like sizing up your opponents before the fight starts. I'm sorry, but the entire game is built around that. There is literally no reason to have different armor types (crushing, slashing, fire, corrosive, etc) unless you intend the player to try to optimize their damage against certain groups of enemies. With your proposed system, you may as well scrap all DR types and resistances. Hell, get rid of Fortitude, Reflex, and Willpower, too, since those force magic users to consider which spells they should be using.

It would bias the game towards single-wielding a rapier or dagger, and HEAVILY PUNISH using a shield.

Just from a fundamental design standpoint, you're gonna want armor-piercing weapons to ignore a percent of enemy armor, not a flat amount of enemy armor. With percent-based penetration, the weapon gets more and more effective the more armor the target has. With flat penetration, the scaling of effectiveness tends to be very narrow. You run into issues like what Matt516 said, where an armor piercing weapon is equally good against light armor and heavy armor. When everything you hit has more armor than you're penetrating, your penetration might as well be extra damage. If the Estoc dealt 6 less damage than its peers, but ignored 50% of enemy's armor value, then it would be increasingly effective against creatures with 12 or more armor, and decreasingly effective against creatures with 11 or less armor.

The DoT tooltips are terrible. A lot of them are worded differently and they frequently give misleading information. DoTs deal damage every x seconds, and deal y damage on each tick. The duration, z, is modified by intelligence. A lot of tooltips say "Deals (y*z/x) damage over (z) seconds."

Pikes, bro.

This http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/10772176_chinese-carved-fish-bone-sword-and-scabbard-34-1 With a fire enchant.

As far as I can tell, helmets cannot be enchanted, period. However, you can find helmets that are already enchanted.

No, this simplistic view is just flat-out untrue. Managing probability and planning for failure is a major branch of tactics and strategy. If you just eliminate random chance entirely, you lose a lot of strategic depth. Also, a certain amount of unpredictability requires much higher analytical skills from players. Unsurprisingly, in ideal conditions there's a good balance between randomness and predictability. EDIT: That said, simply adding a random kill chance to a game is not good design. And while I love realism in games, I don't love it as much as I love good gameplay. Managing unknowns and uncontrollables and minimizing risks are - indeed - major branches of tactics and strategy. For instance, ensuring that your troops have proper clothing and equipment for all types of weather is a form of strategic planning, while throwing a flashbang before breaching a room is a form of risk-minimizing tactics. HOWEVER, both of these deal with a lack of information, not a randomly generated outcome. Creating a battle system in which you have a 50% chance of dying and a 50% chance of winning (no matter what you do) would destroy all other strategic and tactical concerns. The less the player is able to control the outcome of the game, the less the game is based on strategy or tactics.

Unless you're gonna call ALL systems homebrews, it makes no sense to call PoE a homebrew. There still is, to some degree, an element of "prebuffing" (that is, preparing your team before a fight). You can chug potions, eat food, modify your spellbooks, and shuffle equipment. Going up against a horde of mean looking trolls? Consider dumping your fast weapons and fort-targeting spells. Going up a gaggle of spooky specters? Might want to put some heavy armor on your squishies, since specters ignore engagement. About to tackle some firebreathing drakes? Consider chugging some potions of Bulwark Against the Elements. In a raw mechanical sense these are still forms of "prebuffing".

Not in this setting. Fair point. Strength of the Soul seems like it would already be covered by Resolve, but Resolve is used for lying, bluffing, and being gutsy.