Kjaamor

It got dumped, although I can't cite the actual moment where this was said off-hand.

I read the OP's post and got a massive sense of Deja Vu. Has the OP asked about this before? Personally, my grand thoughts on the topic this time are the same as they were last time. 'Whatever.'

Bravo on getting this out for Xmas. I know a lot of players will be delighted with this. Well done, team.

I agree with the OP, and have said since the first technical preview that the models are a bad idea.

Pratchett's Elves were also pretty boss. I'm a fan of the Tolkein elf, and to a lesser extent the D&D/Warhammer derivatives. I'm happy with the elves of PoE thus far, although a great deal will depend upon how they are explored in PoE's game itself.

Commiserations on your vassalisation.

If you group a bunch of enemies in a corridor and they're queuing up for your tank, the wizard can be very powerful. I had one playthrough where BB Wizard went from least damage in the party to most damage just over the course of the spider caves. It's a bit misleading, however, because not only is that dps highly situational, it's also more of a "bully" dps than a key dps. The mobs the wizard exterminated with such aplomb were of very minor threat to the party, and little more damage would've been taken had the wizard been absent. In the melee,the wizards AoE spells are impractical because they do so much damage to allies (rather more than the mobs do), and although the BG2 habit of leading with your most powerful AoEs evidently dies hard, practically speaking in PoE it's more effective to position your tank and off-tank and engage and then worry about dps.

Although given that attributes and class type won't change, that's a comparatively minor difference and certainly doesn't mean an adventurer's hall party is closer to what will happen for most players in game than the BB characters. Anyway, we're getting sidetracked from the original point, which was that if players needed four short rules to get to play on PotD, those are pretty good.

Indeed. My thinking on the matter, though, is that in the real game, most players will be using companions with personalities who are sub-optimal, rather than optimised player creations. That being the case, I encourage the use of BB characters in terms of play development.

Tanking with other characters, particularly in terms of the BB characters, is sub-optimal. There is no getting around this. You can use other members of your party, but if you had to take a PoE player from easy to path of the damned using BB characters in four points and less than forty words I stand by my post.

I think PoE lends itself particularly well to a certain style of playing, which is one that I happen to use. I would certainly not consider myself to be a "good" gamer, and my general preference for games with difficulty settings is to play it on easy first. Four simple PoE rules: 1. Pause often. 2. Use a fighter to tank the most enemies (as opposed to the hardest). 3. Focus fire everyone else on one enemy at a time. 4. Your wizard is more trouble than he is worth, just let him auto-attack. Obviously rules two, three and four won't see you through everything, but they're a good start.

Tried it with 2x Ciphers a few patches ago, might as well have been on easy for the most part. Tried it once without Ciphers, died at the third beetle group. Based upon the beta, I will probably play on PotD by default as "Hard" feels a shade too easy at present.

Random Fantasy Name Generator is still in beta.

Strongly disagree. I have an extensive list of complaints with DA:O, but the characters and the humour of those characters has never been one of them. For me, Alistair remains the funniest companion I have ever had the joy of experiencing in a crpg with Morrigan running a close second. I literally laughed out loud on more occasions than I could count during DA:O, although by the end when the mechanics had become undeniable it was the last game in the series I would play. I'm not averse to a spot of Bioware-bashing myself, but I think for crpgs to get where they need to be, you have to acknowledge what was done well and what was done badly. The DA:O characters I played with felt appropriate to the setting, funny without breaking the third wall, and had at least a small attempt at arcing. This should be praised. The experience was only somewhat spoiled by having a PC who could nob half of them by giving them the sweepings left from doing his job.

Meanwhile, in the Obsidian Offices... "Bad news, guys: The Witcher 3 has had its release date pushed directly onto our expected release." *Collective Groan*

If the original BG had been pitched as a modern day tribute to the D&D crpgs of old, given a relatively easy to mod system of coding, and was based upon large-scale beta from a kickstarted format, you can bet your teeth that some incredibly enthusiastic bod would have modded out half the features and systems.

That, like so many of the complaints about and praises for engagement, depends upon the AI targeting. Without environmental bottlenecks, if the AI is smart enough to realise that it should be focusing its efforts against the character behind the stand-your-ground character, then some form of engagement matters immensely to the playstyle.

No pun intended?

Two little ducks: Attribute rebalance.

True. While still deeply flawed at this point, this why we have engagement.

At first I was going to ask you to chill out over such a minor feature, but then I remembered that they talked so much about skeuomorphic UIs during the game's creation and I guess given that neither that nor minimalism achieved particular dominance within the forums you are allowed to be somewhat irritated that they went one way so far. Not that I particularly care, though my vote was with camp skeuomorph.

That "benny hill combat" was also normal part of pen&paper D&D. It is also part of LotR movies. You don't see Legolas standing still. In the first movie, the fight around the well inside dwarven kingdom was full of all kinds of movement. If you are ranged and can move and shoot that is a normal tactic. Similarly, however, if the most rudimentary tactics turn your characters invulnerable, a la the end of An Unexpected Journey, there is by definition no peril but for ineptitude and the scene or game become as interesting as an extended version of Bilbo chopping up cheese for him and Gandalf.

Tactical movement should be encouraged, but the sort of kiting that the IE games oft had was incongruous to the theme and would benefit from removal. Benny Hill combat =/= epic combat. Edit: That is to say, that tactical combat based upon varying risk/reward is a good thing, but strategic combat based upon the tactical risk-free movement of characters is not.

The other thing to note with this strategy is that it falls apart instantly should the onus be upon you to charge your opponents, for example if they start with superior ranged force to you. I don't know if there is an AI script yet that works on a guard mechanic, but that would combine with this to bring a new strategic/tactical edge to battle.

I don't think I have ever played a single-player CRPG where my created character wasn't the most useful thing in the party. Somewhat predictably, the reverse is true in MMOs.