anameforobsidian

A monk with torment's reach and a retribution item turns abduction into a big opportunity. I imagine barbs would work similarly.

You do. I've had a few. I think they're based on prestige.

This screed is just flat out ridiculous. Let's skip over the slight on combat, that's a whole other kettle of wrong fish. Would I like a donkey like dungeon siege as an explanation for the stash? Yes. Does it ruin the game? No. Player inventories are ridiculous abstractions anyways. Playing inventory tetris can be fun but don't tell me medieval warriors walked around fully armored with three suits of plate armor in a backpack. Virtually every single game of the last twenty years has chosen inventory space over verisimilitude for a reason; this is one case where verisimilitude sucks. A lot of inventory management is an unexplained abstraction, and this has been true throughout games. Remember in Ultima 7 where you would have to have a squire travel with you at all times to put on and take off your armor in a lengthy and cumbersome process? No, because it didn't happen for good reason. And about fungible currencies; Morrowind did that. And it sucked. It turns out it's not fun traveling from trader to trader maxing out their available gold. It's a game not a Hayek simulator. Diablo did the whole gold and other valuable items take up space thing, and it also sucked. I would wander back to town, and just drop pile after pile of gold. Clearly it's unrealistic streamlining to want to be able to buy and sell your stuff all at once. The idea that finding larger and larger bags is realistic at all is stupid. What, it's easier to buy a sword than three pieces of leather stitched together? The main characters come from towns where everyone has purses? It might make for fun progression, but that's another case of the designer choosing what they think is fun over realism. The extra parts of RPGs are fun sometimes. It makes a nice bit of realism when you see mundane items included in the world. It can even lead to emergent gameplay, like Skyrim's bucket robberies. I wouldn't call it part of the core experience though. And there is a significant technical cost for including those types of elements. It costs time, money, bugs, loading time, and instability to put that stuff in. There's a reason that many of the best RPG companies have gone out of business. There's a reason that Jeff Vogel uses the exact same engine for all his games and has graphics that look like butt. I can appreciate those elements when I see them, but I can't blame Obsidian for not wanting to quixotically chase the perfect game over a cliff. The wilderness areas make it clear they had money troubles as is. Finally, the last and perhaps greatest flaw of this argument is that it's criticizing this game for not being a game it didn't want to be. I understand the criticism of the stash as not being like the IE games; I think it's wrong, but it's a valid criticism. This game was not trying to be Wizardry or Betrayal at Krondor. Sure, they may be decent games, but the Infinity Engine games felt significantly different to them in many respects. It also doesn't feel like a jrpg or an FPS; that's not a problem, that's not what they were trying to do. As a consumer, if you want those games, go buy from someone making those games, or back those games on kickstarter.

I like arenas. Make them fun and optional. NWN2's arena scene was fun for me, but sucked with the wrong class.

You find the bag of holding in Spellhold, long after you need it. The crafting pieces alone take up a ton of inventory space.

You get a ton of quests in inns. Medreth, stop the dozens from attacking the Salty Mast, Get the Item back from the Prostitute, Kill the Slavers, Raedric 2, the changed man in Copperlane, find the cook. I don't think there's an inn without a quest or in many cases several.

1. Deflection is definitely a factor. Enemies will run to my wizard then run away from my wizard when he pops hardened arcane veil. 2. DR is definitely a factor. Shades will move towards than away from a wizard who pops bulwark of the elements (e.g. to ranger with low cold resist). 3. I believe low health is also a factor, but less sure than 1+2. Pretty sure I seen enemies switch targets to pile on a ally with low health. 4. Engagements make enemy significantly less likely to pursue its preferred target. I believe multiple engagements further reduce the chance. Not sure if threat posed by the melee's free swings is a factor, or just the engagement itself. 5. Distance is a factor. Not sure about medium vs. long range, but simply being in melee range already makes you significantly more likely to be attacked. 6. I'm not certain whether move speed slow effects whether they chase. Its possible to completely stop or reduce to a crawl many dangerous opponents with spells like blind though. Move speed is not a factor. Health is definitely a factor. I had to hit an enemy with 3x disengagement attacks before they would stay away from poor bloodied Eder.

I haven't gotten to the WM pt. 2, but I enjoy the new content considerably more than several of the base quests. It seems more sure of itself and more varied while staying within themes. My favorite parts of the game are: - Yenwood field. - Durgan's Battery. - The change at the Wailing Banshee. - The Vithrack level of Od Nua. - The bird sidequest. - Eder and Hirviras' sidequests.

No thank you.

What difficulty you play on? By the time you cast the talent, enemy usually get a hit or two in before the cast is complete taking a huge chunk of endurance away (in some cases even interrupting the cast) and then no matter even if I switch the place with a tank an aoe from enemy caster would knock the rest of the endurance away before I can heal....... And this is happens pretty much every time ....... Honestly what's the point of having tanking talents but being unable to goad enemy into attacking you......I don't want to make tanking easy but at least enemy should take into account if some one is standing on his face and bashing his skull in with a big ass hammer, don't just keep shooting at a caster who is 50 feet away and is not even targeting him...... BUT THIS MAKES FIGHT EASY FOR ME......because even if my wizard falls unconscious I am still winning the fights because my frontliners are getting ignored......but its just the overall feel of the fight and how it plays out, it doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel realistic, it feels mechanical and repetitive rather than organic (this feeling was not there in BG or PST games), if I was fighting machines then probably it would make sense because they can't emotionally rationalise and react to the situation and act always the same as per their programming but when you are fighting humans they should react randomly, every encounter shouldn't be a mechanical copy of the previous one.......if you know what I mean....but this is kind of off topic. My frustration is not in regards to losing fights because I am not, its rare that I lose a fight.........my frustration is in regards to the fact that I am unable to tank with my tanks....... Or should I just retrain my tanks to be melee juggernauts rather than damage soakers? Go with Two Handers and ditch the shield? I play PotD, and I would say ditch the shields. Tanking is easier on normal difficulty, but there's just a lot of enemies on PotD.

Don't forget that both rogues and wizards have position switching talents. For outdoor fights with a large group of opponents (gleaming society), it pays to keep an off-tank to the side, draw aggro with the squishy, and then switch positions as soon as fights have been stabilized.

If you keep pursuing a running character eventually they give up and face you instead. I had a paladin hell-bent on getting to sagani who eventually gave up and went for my monk instead (monk had boots of speed / could not be outrun).

The thing about these builds you're talking about is that there are hundreds of them. There's no "ultimate" build - that's a myth. Some people will claim to have found the one true build - but they can never agree on which it really is. Also, people constantly seem to forget that any new and complex system will take time to exploit. The core of D&D has existed since the 70s. It's hardly a surprise that some powerful combinations have been discovered. But I recommend looking up some build guides available around the web. You'd be surprised at just how many "ultra" builds exist out there. Also, even if there was a single ultra build - why should the designers concern themselves with players going that route? Why did they introduce "Story Time" mode if they don't want players to walk through the combat? They introduced story mode so they could expand the playerbase to players who can't tolerate normal difficulty. Wanting money is not the same thing a debalancing the game. And it's not one ultimate build that's worrying. It's difficulty being designed around a few unskippable feats or races. How many martial classes in DnD online skip evasion? It was very few from what I saw.

I don't follow but perhaps I am unclear. Its already official. So far what we know about V3.0: 1) Story mode exists. 2) Story mode allows unlimited supplies. 3) The "resources" herp derp is obviously not an issue. 4) See above for "the devs vision". So trying to suggest that the existence of this option ruins the game is just hot air. Some players don't like the option, so therefore it must not be included in any form, else the source code for PoE will self delete, or something? C'mon. Don't push the button if you don't like what the button does. That is a terrible argument. Just willfully dense for the sake of being contrary. Tigranes argument is not that hard to understand. Games are defined by their limitations, i.e. rules. It is where designer intention shows itself. 1. The existence of mode of an optional mode of play is not a strong signifier of designer intent. Many times the designer, particularly this designer, estimates what challenge the market will bear and then adds their true intent as increased difficulty. Note the difference between base FNV, hardcore mode, and the JE Sawyer mod. Game makers put in easy modes all the time when they lavish attention on harder difficulties. It's called wanting to sell your work. There are philosophies of game design based around this concept (Nintendo for one). 2. The fact that resources were put in early on, and were specifically addressed in difficulty modes is a signifier of designer intent. The fact that the designer has acted to further limit the number of spells cast per day is a further signifier of designer intent. 3. This is doubly true of the spell and potion Barring Death's Door. It is rare that a semi-decent player ever runs out of health on lower difficulty levels, with more frequent resting. If you're consistently greylining characters or running out of spells that means either you're playing poorly or the limited rest supplies aren't much of an issue in the first place. It's not like supplies are scare. 4. Story mode exists and allows practically unlimited supplies. It already is an option in the game. If you want to reduce the challenge in the game, the button is already in there. And yes, rest spam is reduced difficulty. I don't see how anyone could think 4-6x the health and spells per battle does not reduce the difficulty. This is doubly true when your characters effectively get infinite level 6 spells. Yes, you can choose not to use them, but that's not the same thing as not being able to use them. Don't move the difficulty slider if you don't like what it does.

The idea behind less multiclassing bringing less diversity is that multiclassing creates ridiculously optimized builds, so no sane player could refuse them. And designers would either have to let a significant subset of players faceroll the content, or raise the difficulty so everyone is forced into those builds. You see this a lot in MMOs, but it happens in other games too.

Barbs can be a very effective part of certain parties. Combusting wounds + Barbs = fun.

I would love to get Hiro's mantle for my monk but Azzurro just flat out won't show up and I have all upgrades built. I've played through three or four times and only seen him three times always with the same shield.

I have had the same thing happen. It may be that they give you prestige / security, but it feels more like a bug.

I think that systems really gain emergent properties through a long series of changes, so I would just say that if that bothers you hold off on playing. I think the game has gotten significantly better, and you can reroll characters if changes get too much.

I like White March more than much of the base game. There was greater density of content, interesting use of scripted interactions, new enemies, a cool dungeon, and a town with a greater density of NPCs and sidequests.

I really like the Dyrford music.

I agree with the other posters above me that limited supplies offers an incentive to conserve resources, which leads to far more interesting gameplay. It also adds a way for level designers to put in situationally valuable loot (camping supplies) that are not monetarily valuable. I would add something else, since it disincentivizes rest spam and sends players back to inns, it incentivizes buying a nice room at a inns. One's the carrot for less rest spam, the other's the stick and they work nicely in tandem. The more I play the game, the more I'm impressed with the way small mechanics changes synergize to further design goals. Vancian spells, limited rests, and health push you to really drive into dungeons at the limited of your endurance. But knock-out injuries, permanent death, and TPKs exist to punish you as you push beyond your means. It really gives a great dungeon crawl feel. And underdark was a cool atmosphere, but rest anywhere with relatively easy random encounters meant that being far from civilization didn't affect gameplay much. And Baldur's Gate would just inconsistently shut off resting in some places without a warning to the player. That's not great system design.

I thought Pallegina was quite well done. Sagani maybe less so. Calisca maybe a little less than that. Oh and Madam Webb was decent.

It's also not that different from what 4E uses (short breaks where you use surges vs. full on rests). It sounds like fixing a problem that isn't there though.

I will say that the end of of PE was far more appropriate for an Epic campaign than a low level one. I think you should have just beaten up Thaos and ended his plans for animancy. Even though I love that part of the game, they probably should have saved Sun in Shadow for another game and done more wilderness exploring in this one.