Cubiq

Can casters decrease their recovery time between spells in any way? Like a Haste spell or equipping a different Grimoire?

You're right, i cant explain it but the more and more i listen to it the better it feels. I imagined guiding the party over the screenshots played on youtube and i thought to myself this is actually a really great soundtrack. But i just don't understand why do the images change for each song. As far as i know this is suppose to be a single soundtrack on a single map, is it not?

I am aware of that, but there exists abilities like 'Escape' or ' Rooting Pain' that allow you to disengage from combat without suffering the hit penalty, and unless the enemy has the 'Defender' ability active, they can only engage 1 character. So if it's 3vs1 like Sawyer described in the example, you should be able to get away without a problem with 1 or 2 of your characters. http://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/Melee_Engagement

I was referring to when your character is attacking your enemy with auto-swing attacks, like in all IE games and all NWN games. @teknoman2 i am aware of this Now let me give you a more specific example. Let's say for the sake of this conversation that your character is carrying a Greatsword which is really slow and requires 4 seconds recovery between each swing. This is how the battle will go: 1. Your character swings at the enemy 2. Your character is now recovering for 4 seconds 3. But after only 2 seconds you pause the game, and make your character attack a different enemy. 4. After un-pause your character will move towards the second enemy. 5. When he reaches him, your character will now have to wait 2 more seconds before he can swing at the new enemy, as the recovery time has not yet finished. Now what I want to know is the following: If during point 4. i stop my character midway. Make him stand still for 2-5 seconds and not attack anyone. Then proceed to order him, once again, to move towards the designated target and attack him. Will he now be able to swing as soon as he comes in contact or will he still need to wait 2 seconds for the swing recovery time. The reason i am asking this, is because i wish to know whether or not we can time the next swing so that you could potentially interrupt the caster's casting immediately after you get close. Anyway, listen, it doesn't matter. Only Sawyer knows the answer to the question, and if he doesn't answer then there's no point in talking about it.

No i wasn't confusing it with stamina. Sawyer said: This means that the attack recovery doesn't reset after you move, but requires you to wait for your swing recovery that was left over from your previous attack when you reach the next target. We know that recovery is paused for the duration of the movement. What i want to know is whether standing still will let it generate again, or do we need to specifically have the character in attack mode for the attack recovery to generate again.

So if your melee is standing still and not attacking anyone in the middle of the battlefield, his recovery time will start to generate again?

^ what Fox said. On the side note, I have mixed feelings about pre-buffing. The annoying one is that, because you can pre-buff, then that means that the AI must also be able to do that, with contingency spells. And that was one of the most annoying things for me in bg2. The amount of dispels i had to cast just to deal some damage to the opponent mage was staggering, and not only that i had to save those dispels for when my party would eat a chaos or confusion spell, so most of the time the combat just came down to me trying to outlive my opponent's buff durations. On the other side, i'm not sure how i will like the new buffing system in PoE, because i don't like the idea that my mage is unable to cast a buff outside combat because he's.....retarded? I hope there's a system in place that just makes it more sense to cast buffs during combat, rather than just fading out the buff spell button on your action bar when you aren't fighting. Only system i can think of, is having the buffs have short duration but extremely fast cast time, so it wouldn't make much sense to stand there pre-buffing yourself before the fight. But i can see how even that has flaws.

HAH! I remember people asking for full plate armor, and you guys delivered! And WOW, my jaw dropped when i saw the beach! I hope the animation on water will look as great as they do on the still image. I think it would be really cool if you could go in that hut, or behind the counter in at the merchant stand, i think it would really make the world more immersing. In the middle pic, the stones around the camp fire might look a little too clean considering it's near ashes. Also i'm hoping in the next update if you could give a few examples of how Talents would look like? Are they going to be mostly passive stat increase or something?

That's a good point, i just hope the developers have the same mindset.

Stun definitely brought up a good point when he mentioned the exploit of leaving 1 enemy alive to buff yourself before the next battle, i just hope the developers won't come up with some strange mechanic that would be made just to prevent it, like making you unable to engage the next enemy until killing everyone. Something like that would really break any immersion i would have in the game. If you can't fix it in a very, very natural way then please just leave it alone.

That got me wondering, do we know if there will be any Asian-like cultures in the game? Even if just armor or weapons?

You mean the lower half? It kind of looks to me like he has cloth over his mouth like a ninja.

The third portrait on Sensuki's post looks new. I can recognize the other portraits and where they were cut out from but i can't find where the guy with long black hair would be from. Looks like the elven wizard, but it doesn't appear to be from this image http://eternity.obsidian.net/

Instant kill spells aren't completely banned, you just have a small opportunity to react to it when it hits. We don't know what the requirement to countering the effects will be yet. Maybe it will be really hard, which makes it an instant kill in most situations. The reason the bonus time is added, is because death is permanent in that world, and you have a lot less chance of getting through the game without savescumming than in IE games. Unless you eat a Disintegrate spell you have a pretty good chance of reviving that character there. Also we don't know if there even will be a Deathward like spell in PoE, since there's no prebuffing and by the time you see the enemy casting the spell chances are it will be too late to protect whatever character is being targeted. There's clearly a give and take here, and not just dumbing down the game. The difference is that in IE games you can reload and prebuff yourself to counter the enemy effects and cakewalk it, but here you won't be able to do that.

You're still playing the game right? Maybe this will help. One of the things i like to do when my character is being chased is create a wall with 2 melee characters, while letting the fleeing character pass through them. The characters that create a wall need to be slightly apart so that they have a small gap between them, which makes them like a pocket around a monster when it tries to pass. The monster can't pass through the gab because it's too narrow and it can't move left or right because it's jammed between the 2 characters. It needs to move slightly backwards if it wants to go around and when it does it usually loses aggro.

Very similar to what i was thinking. I also felt that it lacked a leading melody or an instrument, but perhaps this was intended because it's a town song. But i don't think that has to be the case. When i first heard the IWD1 Kuldahar theme it gave a chill to how nicely the melody emphasize the town, that i waited outdoors just to hear the loop one more time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y96Y2JE5F8 The more and more i listen to Dyford theme, the more and more i like it, because i can now see that it does actually have leading instruments, but i feel they might be a bit too subtle. Like in 2:57 the bassoon could perhaps be a bit louder? Or at 3:39 i feel that the (what sounds like a) flute could be stronger? Basically things like that.

Speaking of "food for thought" here's mine: I imagine it's going to be like Icewind Dale 2 since Sawyer was also part of that project. As far as i can remember there weren't any sucker punch fights and i don't think many wizards had instant kill spells. I think if people want to argue why a game needs those things they should deconstruct Icewind dale 2 and explain why it didn't work there.

The difference between those spells is that Remove Magic dispels only your enemies, while Dispel Magic also dispels your party members. Remove magic is used when your party members are standing near and you don't wish to dispel buffs from them, While Dispel is used when you aren't buffed or have an affliction on your party members like confusion or fear, to get rid of it. Also Mages get both Dispel and Remove magic, while priests only get Dispel.

Get over it already. You can save scum in every cRPG for a billion various reasons. You might as well just come out and voice your dislike of the entire f*cking Genre. Stun i think the difference is that you don't want a game where you can savescum but a game where you have to savescum. Which i don't think is true for the whole Genre.

I know this is not the point you're making, but your example is sort of the opposite of what you're going for. Yes there are other ways to avoid a trap, but that is using the logic that you know in advance that there is a trap there without getting killed first and reloading. You can do that by looking for traps. That's not a sucker punch because you have a single mechanic, "Find traps", that you are expected to regularly use throughout the whole game when exploring unknown dangerous territory and can be used to stop every trap in the game. That's not really asking too much. But you can not expect people to know that Kangaxx has infinite Imprison spells when you first encounter him. You basically need to brute force your way through it by dying again and again, which can be seen as the same as the example you gave but you have no way of knowing where the trap are and the only way to get trough them is to equip the correct resistance and hope for the best. And that's why i think it's a bad thing. The only reason i can see why people would like this sort of thing, is because of puzzle solving aspect of it. (unless you just like getting killed) But you can put those puzzles in without having to get killed and reload just to see what you're suppose to do. Yes you can argue that clues that warn you in advance of what to do can sometimes be too obvious, but that's really up to each developer on how to implement it, as long as the probability of finding the clue isn't 100% dictated by luck. If i remember correctly Sawyer said that there won't be puzzle-like fights in the game, but we don't know if he only meant fights that you can only know what to do by getting killed several times. Maybe there will be sucker punch fights, but you have an option to find out a bit about them beforehand. (in which case, it's not really a sucker punch)

I don't see how you could be proud of the fact that you got your ass handed to you the first time, and then you came back prebuffed with direct counters to that, and feel victorious. The exact example is the beholder cave. You go in, you see there are beholders, you die, reload, and come back with cloak of spell turning, and ease-walk it. In fact it will be much harder if there aren't hard counter prebuffs in the game, but instead use the mechanic Sawyer proposed where you will require to react correctly when you get hit by a killer spell mid combat.

I think you're talking about bg1 Imoen's portrait was not available in bg2 and if you did take one that looked like one of your companions then, they, were given one of the portraits from bg1. But only if you didn't change your portrait mid game.

Well the main reason i liked the roll system is because the total of all the points was different with each roll and you could create a stronger or weaker character compared to other humanoid npcs. But if all characters will always have an equal total then i don't see much of a point in rolling for each attribute.

So you can't access your limited inventory during combat? Is this confirmed?