Katarack21

When you build elemental paper/rock/scissors into your games combat, you are basically building min/maxing into your game from the ground up. In that situation, having the ability to enchant elemental damage types as needed is much more important and, I would argue, an necessary aspect of player choice.

There are enemies in PoE 1 that are immune to both certain elemental types and certain damage types. Again, if you brought the wrong damage type you could at least enchant it for the elemental type they are not immune to. If you brought the wrong *both*, you could *still* enchant a crapweapon with an elemental type they are not immune to, and thus be capable of dealing damage. The encounters are not *impossible* if you don't have this ability--because mage spells etc.--but it's not a small thing; in these encounters you can literally go from a breeze to a party wipe based entirely on having the enemies being immune to the weapons you brought.

It's an option that's gone but it's hardly necessary to defeat certain enemies. Using the wrong elemental damage should not be making any encounter too difficult. I didn't change enchantments for certain enemies and I doubt that many people did too. Again, as I've said twice now, at no point does elemental damage make an encounter incapable of being completed, but it can make difficult encounters much easier--and if you have both the wrong physical damage *and* the wrong elemental damage some encounters can be nearly impossible to complete. There were at least two occasions where I was only able to defeat the encounter because I enchanted my wrong-physical-damage-type weapon with an elemental lash, which did *some* damage and allowed me to defeat the enemy. That was to some extent my fault, for bringing the wrong ****, but what I'm saying is that the system supported me and helped me to fix my mistake instead of punishing me and making it worse. PoE2 seems to have gotten rid of the system that would have helped me in that scenario.

Suit yourself. I prefer having the choice of which weapon to have which enchantment in which situation, rather than just take what the developer plans out and hope they predict my choice of weapon type and playstyle correctly.

You don't "need" to, but without the proper damage type some enemies, and therefore encounters, become signficantly more difficult and resource draining. And if you *really* screwed up and brought both the wrong (or no) elemental damage *and* the wrong physical damage, some enemies can suddenly become nearly impossible to defeat.

If you have a game where a solid part of the combat of the game relies on various different damage types, immunities and vulnerabilities to those damage types, and the exploitation's thereof then limiting access to those damage types is a kind of arbitrary difficulty limitation. One of the things I loved about Pillars was the ability to enchant any old weapon I had on hand with whatever elemental damage I needed at the moment. If the enemies around me were all immune to frost, and all I had was frost weapons, I could still have options because I could just put flaming lash on some **** sword and, while not do maximum damage at least get through the encounter. You could also keep sets of different elementally enchanted weapons to switch out as needed, maximising your damage potential against specific types of enemies. I will *really* miss that. Instead I will just hope to find a weapon with the needed damage type, and then just hold it until the end game because I might need it.

Sounds like there will be a lot of flavorful and unique items with interesting abilities and a total inability to custom enchant a useful weapon for specific needs or uses. So look forward to hording early-game items with crap stats just in case you need that damage type (fire, water, etc.) against an enemy later.

"That’s how I designed all of the unique items in Icewind Dale and, though there were gaps in the lineup (e.g. shortbows), there were a lot of memorable goodies even when they were relatively basic in terms of their stats. --Josh Sawyer" I'm honestly concerned about how their doing this, at this point. We're probably going to get screwed out of the ability to maximize our exploitation of the vulnerabilities of enemies due to lack of weapons with necessary attributes and an inability to imbue weapons with attributes (instead simply altering attributes they already have in limited ways). We're also probably going to see gaps in weapon set usefulness--ie, there *will* be categories of weapons significantly less useful because of a dearth of weapons of that type. At some point you will most likely be forced to hold onto a crap weapon because it has a specific attribute which enemies at a later point are vulnerable to. I'm *really* disliking this.

"May I have the butter?" vs "Where's the butter? I deserve the butter. I payed for that butter, remember, and I want to eat it." Do you understand how one of those will get a better response than the other?

This is a prototype, but I wanted to make sure that this is the basic format I should be using. Should I include "name" and "loot"? And do those count against my character limit? "Name: Katharak Loot: Twenty-one pistols. Got Palan in the face. Good loot. Hated Palan anyway."

I wonder how likely it is I can pass off "Katarack" as "a lore friendly name".

It makes enchanting into very a narrowly focused and narrowly useful sort of niche deal. You won't be able to keep equipment you like from early game, you won't be able to modify a weapon you like into a useful tool for different enemies, you'll be *stuck* with what the devs choose to give you. You want a flaming sword? Better hope the devs give you a flaming sword, and you better *keep* that flaming sword around *FOREVER* just in case you encounter an enemy that is vulnerable to fire, because you can't bloody make one.

I used enchanting consistently throughout the game; enchanting and crafting were the two big money pits for me. Although it clearly has flaws, one of the aspects that I heard people complain about--the way that that big-name found or purchased equipment in late game could be comparable or even out classed by old early-game loot that's been enchanted and upgraded regularly--is something I really liked and appreciated a great deal about the enchanting system.

Ignoring the rest of your post and focusing on this specific statement, I will say only that there was an entire time period where copper armor was common because it was in fact the Copper Age; in between the stone age and the bronze age, copper was the thing. Even in later time periods, I imagine copper armor is superior to no armor.

We can shoot blasts of pure energy out of a stick of wood and animate metal constructs with the souls of of a long-dead civilization. But a door as a shield is just to far. *smh*

All I'm saying is, they came up with a wading animation for a reason.

Well, I don't know if you're serious or not but he had the biggest writing role in PoE1. If you or anyone else hadn't heard of him its probably partly cos of Obs used more well known devs on marketing/panels etc despite they may have had lesser roles in the development of PoE. Okay, he's a writer. I'm still not clear why all the excitement. He has fans. That's why. An obscure RPG game writer from a mid-tier company actually has fans of his work who are excited about his presence working on a game. It's really not that complicated.

Ghost Blades is looking badass.

I feel Firefly has the perfect amount of jazz, actually.

I do like the idea of the engagement as long as it is not too weak/powerful. The problem with infinity engine games was than a melee fighter was weaker than a range/spellcaster as they had to chase their enemies. What's more as it is real time I feel like engagement gives the combat a bit of "structure" with the engagement zone. The mechanice of blocking specific targets is interesting. I do "enjoy" having my spellcasters locked and having to either tank extra hit, or quickly find a way to disengage quickly. I feel much the same, only probably more so. The fact is, melee was such a problem in BG1 that I found in much of the game it was almost *always* the ranged weapons and spellcasters dealing all the damage, often killing enemies before melee even got to them. The biggest problem I had was that, with the lack of any real mechanic to stop it, enemies would make a bee line for spell casters and I never really figured out how to stop them. I just kind of...minimized the effect as much as I could. I even managed to play through the whole series as a mage despite this problem and also sucking at combat, through sheer perseverance. It's always irked me, and I *really* liked the engagement mechanic when PoE came out. I was...less than pleased by the changes.

Being able to ACTUALLY TANK would be really appreciated. Like...not having the front line be entirely ignored and having characters just straight merc the squishies instantly and without hesitation? Yeah, not doing that. That would be *great*.

Check the second post of this thread in the future. Totally forgot about that. Danke.

This was discussed before; some people liked it, some people didn't. I don't know that any final call was reached.

This *has* been a long time. An update would be quite appreciated.

I took Knowledge Skill: Early 21st Century Tabletop Role-Playing Games. I'm allowed to metagame. (This is how I got away with crosstalk in Shadowrun).