Yonjuro

I did get stuck in combat mode at least once in that area and I also got the 'can't rest while hostile creatures can see you' message (even though hostile creatures couldn't see me at the time). It may have been the beetles (in the next room) or guards (two rooms away) that triggered both conditions - they were all still alive. Or, it might have been that combat mode hadn't ended before the cutscene? I will try to recreate it next time I get to that quest. (I have never heard Aelys say a word - either in the ruins or at the inn.)

Stoneskin stops attack as whole, so it don't cause any effects. Elemental damage still leaked through stoneskin and could cause interrupts even if the main attack did no damage (due to stoneskin).

(As we all know, Stun can speak for himself but,) I think you misunderstood his post: 'my skills' means the skills of the player, not the character. He was talking about increasing his own skills with the game, not making an uber character.

I wasn't entirely serious in my post and I don't think the combat log should go or is a bad thing in itself. I was just playing on your questionable claim that anyone who doesn't care about min/max'ing their character is a casual who should go play DA instead of PoE. If this is a private fight, I don't want to intrude ( ), but I will point out that learning the game mechanics doesn't necessarily imply anything like min/maxing a character build. Quite the reverse, if you know the game well, you can beat it with a weaker character.

Very good. I think the best part of the post is the analysis (you know, the red circles and arrows) showing how far you need to change your focus in the two layouts. Whatever the position of the combat log, in combat, the character icons should be next to it; you need to be able to see what it is happening and react to it. This should be uncontroversial if people are paying attention. (BTW, I reported a (somewhat related) bug regarding character level ups; the spell/talent selection icons are on the far left and the descriptions are on the far right. Stop doing that, OE. Just stop.)

Nicely done. I tried enchanting some armor. Overall, the usefulness of the enchantment system will depend mostly on how many (pre-enchanted) item you find vs. the number of ingredients. I like the idea that you can upgrade the armor you already have rather than swapping for something that you find - it, err, saves pixels or something, but it's a nice idea. The system works but could be improved. Right now, the only way to find out about enchantments is to click the enchantment button and then click all of the recipes to see what you need for each of them. To make the Armor of Might (+1, +2 or +3) you needed Ogre blood (makes sense and you'll remember when you get some of that) an herb (or something) that I can't remember and an emerald. I think the merchant who gave you the dragon egg quest hands you an emerald when you give her an intact egg (at least, that's when I noticed it). (You also need money in increasing amounts for increasing enchantment levels.) For the herbs etc. it seems like you just need to notice all of them and stuff them into your stash in case you want to enchant something. I'm not sure I like the scavenger hunt with mundane items. I still remember that I needed gauntlets of Ogre power, a belt of (I forget which, frost?) giant strength, the Hammer of Thunderbolts and the scroll with it's true name "Crom Faeyr" to make Crom Faeyr - and that was a while ago. I don't remember what I needed to enchant my hide armor to hide armor of might and that was two days ago. The only way to know when you can enchant something is to remember the recipe - I recommend writing it on a post it note and sticking it to the frame of your monitor - perhaps that indicates that some kind of UI element to notify you would be a good idea. The only other alternative is to check recipes early and often. Edit: Post was redundant and also said the same thing twice.

I always found the situations in the IE games where you face multiple solid adversaries instead of 1 giant baddie vs your team of 6 were more interesting. The group at the top of the Iron Throne headquarters in BG1 come to mind. They have a couple melee and a few casters. I think there are 5 or so in total. Yes. One thing that BG1 did really well was that there were so many interesting groups of enemies (and a lot of those fights were personal).

I think the above can be simplified by treating interrupt as a random variable and assuming for the DPS calculation that it hits in the exact middle of any attack. It's exactly how you would handle rotational latency for a disk access calculation, if you know what I mean - half of attack time is the average if you are equally likely to get interrupted any time during the attack. The result would be, for a given set of stats, a curve of DPS values that varies over interrupt probability (which itself would depend on the number of enemies, their attack speeds and their perception scores but the magic of the random variable glosses over all of that, hopefully leaving behind a clear signal about the Resolve stat). I'm reasonably sure I know what you mean, but if you wouldn't mind PM-ing me with more information it certainly wouldn't hurt. Sent.

Hmm, yeah, that might be better with the current effective range of the attributes. I think the reason that Perception and Resolve seem under powered now is that the other stats all directly attack or defend against deflection. Resolve and Perception do too, but indirectly and not as much (or, at least, it is harder to quantify their effect w.r.t deflection). Perception could be made OP - use a fast weapon and make the stat sufficiently powerful and an opponent will never get an attack off. If that were the case, Resolve would be necessary too. It's a compromise, rather than removing them altogether, with the benefit of taking a further step away from the IE games to make that comparison less likely (people see 6 attributes and expect them to work the way the 6 attributes in BG do - they're just not designed to though). It would still allow for tweaking of the effective ranges as you suggested, if that's decided to be neccessary. Personally, I'm far more interested in the skills and talents etc for class customisation - I think that's where the fun in designing your character will be. According to the wiki, 'Deflection' is not influenced by the attributes - It seems that it's built into the class and adjusted by armour. Yes, I didn't say that very well. What I mean is that weapons attack deflection and some of the stats make the weapon attacks more effective. Perception only does it indirectly by causing interrupts (and likewise resolve prevents interrupts).

They aren't at a (dis)advantage in regards to XP gain per timeframe, which by definition is the same for everybody. Completely true and completely irrelevant. The sleeping player will hit the level cap before doing anything. The speed run player will fail to hit the level cap by the game's end. One style is clearly advantaged. Your example doesn't even show the existence of something that satisfies Gromnir's requirements and you are claiming that it shows that everything that satisfies his requirements is absurd (or 'utterly retarded' if you like that better). I'd say they are about as persuasive as the arguments of the anti-kill-XP side. Of course you would. You just committed two logical fallacies and claimed victory. You're entitled to your opinion, but your argument does not support your opinion.

Hmm, yeah, that might be better with the current effective range of the attributes. I think the reason that Perception and Resolve seem under powered now is that the other stats all directly attack or defend against deflection. Resolve and Perception do too, but indirectly and not as much (or, at least, it is harder to quantify their effect w.r.t deflection). Perception could be made OP - use a fast weapon and make the stat sufficiently powerful and an opponent will never get an attack off. If that were the case, Resolve would be necessary too.

... If case you should say that it is impossible to satisfy all these playstyles without being game breaking, I will simply point you in the direction of BG/BG2. In that game some amount of combat was necessary, but if you chose to solve a quest in a diplomatic or sneaky way nothing required you to go back and kill everything just to have enough xp to move forward. You could choose to if you wanted to. I want to play a game with choice. That to me is much more important than balance. That was how the IE games worked and what initally intrigued me so much about Pillars of Eternity. Unfortunatly, many of the systems, if not significantly altered, simply do not support that principal. This is unfortunate as it was stated the game was to be a spiritual successor to the IE games. This post sums up how I feel, seems like a major amount of people also. Uh, really? Because you still have the choice to kill whatever you want in PoE. You even get loot for it - the extra loot probably pays for whatever extra resources you need to do the extra combat (plus a little extra on top of that). I don't think choice means what you think it means. I think it means, you know, actual choice (as opposed to killing more stuff = more XP). I get the argument that people really have: IE games were fun so let's keep the same formula - it's not even a bad argument necessarily - BG1 and 2 are my two favorite games. It has nothing to do with choices being limited though. They aren't limited. Play the beta. Kill the ogre. You even get a valuable item for doing so.

Yes, very clever (for sufficiently small values of clever), but, since we're in pedantic mode, leaving the game running as a play style is a huge advantage and a speed run would put a player at a huge disadvantage in your XP system. I know you weren't proposing this as a serious solution to Gromnir's challenge, but these examples only show the ridiculousness of your proposed solution, not to the challenge (which does have a solution, but it is at least as asinine as the time based XP idea).

Sure, in v. 0.B of the game. Mr. Sawyer just wrote an extensive blog post about the process of balancing attributes (a process that hasn't started yet). Concerns are fine but the level of angst in this thread is a little over the top. Very good - a concrete suggestion, but I will be surprised if the number of attributes changes. A suggestion that is more likely to be listened to and implemented would be something along the lines of how much a change to an attribute changes the capabilities of the character - a specific idea based on how the game works now and how you would like it to work (e.g. as might varies from X to Y, the amount of damage should vary from A to B). There are (at least) two good threads that look at the attributes in detail: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67815-on-the-significance-of-stats/?do=findComment&comment=1491233 and http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67761-dps-vs-accuracy-deflection-heres-the-maths-enjoy/?do=findComment&comment=1490531

This isn't a useful comment. Why do you think it's a bad idea? (1) Do you want people to inadvertently build a bad character? (2) Do you think that it isn't possible? (3) Do you think it necessarily means that the attributes can't have a large enough dynamic range? (4) Some other reason? As it is, you're adding noise to the discussion. Most of the discussion revolves around something like point 3 (which remains to be seen). Point 1 is ridiculous. Point 2 is clearly not true. Maybe you have an actual 4th point that would add to the discussion. Do you or not? Hey, Doctor Spock, it's called useless hyperbole and I like to bang on a pot lid with a large spoon. What's a cleric? Fixed that for you.

Source? I think the design goal was more to have a wide variety of good builds that play differently rather than to protect players from themselves. Source: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/64712-attribute-theory/page-2?do=findComment&comment=1398195

It doesn't necessarily mean that. If, e.g., you can build a wizard with bad direct damage spells (but presumably extra good, say, AoE spells as a result) and then (on purpose) you play this character using direct damage spells, you have a handicapped character because your play style isn't optimal for your build. Enjoy. We're talking about a handicapped character, not a handicapped player - presumably he has good reasons for wanting his character to be the way he wants it to be and will play it to it's best advantage. Precisely, that's why the (non-handicapped) player can choose to play against type (or, as CatatonicMan pointed out, don't spend all of the points in the first place). Fair enough - that's why specific feedback such as "I would prefer the starting character attributes to be X rather than Y so that if I choose to handicap my character by not spending all of my points I can have that option" would be useful feedback for the developers (and the 500 post bitchfest that we got in the previous thread and are on our way to here is not useful). The point of the beta is to get things like that right - specific actionable feedback helps to do that. "Ugh - magic box not work" does not help.

I think the above can be simplified by treating interrupt as a random variable and assuming for the DPS calculation that it hits in the exact middle of any attack. It's exactly how you would handle rotational latency for a disk access calculation, if you know what I mean - half of attack time is the average if you are equally likely to get interrupted any time during the attack. The result would be, for a given set of stats, a curve of DPS values that varies over interrupt probability (which itself would depend on the number of enemies, their attack speeds and their perception scores but the magic of the random variable glosses over all of that, hopefully leaving behind a clear signal about the Resolve stat).

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant the impact of a character's Resolve on the damage curve of that character. Your attacks can get interrupted which would impact your DPS because you need to start the attack/reload/spell or whatever over again. Resolve makes it happen less often.

It doesn't necessarily mean that. If, e.g., you can build a wizard with bad direct damage spells (but presumably extra good, say, AoE spells as a result) and then (on purpose) you play this character using direct damage spells, you have a handicapped character because your play style isn't optimal for your build. Enjoy.

It might be beyond the scope of what you want to model here, but how about interrupts/resolve?

Here you go buddy: Ok. So, no?

I don't know if you've heard of Albannach - they're .. well, they're a Scottish Drum and Pipe band but they, well, I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0mypcwk2M4

This isn't a useful comment. Why do you think it's a bad idea? (1) Do you want people to inadvertently build a bad character? (2) Do you think that it isn't possible? (3) Do you think it necessarily means that the attributes can't have a large enough dynamic range? (4) Some other reason? As it is, you're adding noise to the discussion. Most of the discussion revolves around something like point 3 (which remains to be seen). Point 1 is ridiculous. Point 2 is clearly not true. Maybe you have an actual 4th point that would add to the discussion. Do you or not? It is possible, just look at the attribute system that is now. No bad builds means minimum character customization, attributes have negligible effect, which makes race and culture pointless as well. Basically no bad builds means no builds. Well there's the cosmetic aspect of course. The attribute system is overly complicated while being bland( what's with the percentages). You can't even describe your character with the current attributes, because they're missing charisma and strength equivalent. If Might is strength then every caster has to be a muscleman or has to forfeit spell damage. Having damage, healing and spellpower on one attribute means that every character will max the same thing, every character will be able to move that boulder and it will make battlemages and cleric characters way stronger than the ones that focus on either melee or spells instead of on both. Not that any of this matters if the attributes aren't changed to be more impactful. A lot of spells are boring and confusing. Mirror image increases deflection instead of absorbing a number of hits. There's like a dozen spells that do the same thing, increase Deflection. Spells don't scale per level, which will make them useless at higher levels, also the reason why there are so many duplicates(wizard's duplicate, mirrored image, displaced image, minor missiles, bounding missiles). There are no immunities, the main thing I liked about BG2's combat system. Interrupt mechanic affects melee attacks from what I understand, confusing and unnecessary. I love ciphers and paladins! /end rant Hint: if someone tells you that you are adding noise to the discussion and your response ends with "/end rant" you are still adding noise to the discussion. The gist of what you wrote seems to be a restatement of what I called item 3. You seem to be under the impression that stats have minimal impact now (which is correct) and that they can't be made to have impact by increasing their range w.r.t. the baseline numbers for each class, which, as far as we know, is incorrect (and, indeed, is one of the stated tuning objectives for the beta). Do you have a point other the one that I just said buried in your previous rant?

Interestingly, the Dark Eye game Blackguards does something similar to this. All the way to offense ended up being almost unilaterally the favored choice though, partly due to the small party size that pretty much required everyone to be capable of doing damage. Sure, that's an interesting example. In PoE I think both are viable. They would be more extreme versions of rogue and fighter.