thelee

This too is a nice idea, and it would guarantee that Resolve isn't some common "dump stat". I personally really don't like splitting up a different stat (Dexterity in this case) in Deadfire's system. I didn't like it when Might got split into Strength and Resolve, and I'm going to like it even less if Dexterity gets split into Dexterity and Resolve (because Dexterity's effect on your non-recovery action speed has to be bumped up to prevent this from being a stealth nerf to dex, which means combining Dexterity and Resolve becomes very good). At this point, we are so close to release that I actually want Obsidian to be a bit conservative. Maybe, maybe, they can get empowerment to work, and maybe there's some system that doesn't produce the variance complaints that I had in my earlier message. But if they plow on this for a while and still can't get it to work, I'd rather they revert to at least a tweaked version of PoE's system (like I said, maybe +2 deflection instead of +1) rather than introduce a potentially radical new change ahead of release with minimal time to put it through its paces. There'll be plenty of time post-release in patches to really deliberately evaluate the stat, but for launch you don't want to have too big of a moving part.

The thing is, your latter definition of "flexibility" is not the definition of flexibility that PoE shoots for and what I would imagine most players support, which you kind of sort of acknowledge but dance around. Your definition of flexibility appears to be "for any given of stats, there is a supported playstyle and weapon." But, what that is really saying is that "if you want to be a club-wielding fighter, you HAVE to invest in strength/con." That's not flexible. Put another way, my understanding of AD&D is that you rolled stats first and THAT determined your class (which is why fighters were important in having no required stats and why it's kind of insane Paladins had so many and so high). That seems to fall under your definition of "flexible" because for any combination of stats there is a class you could play, but the vast, vast, vast majority of players would not consider that a flexible system. My point was that in PoE1 there was no metagame trap problems (or at least very few) because it was built from the ground up to not have this problem. (JE Sawyer has a game dev conference talk where he goes on this for some length). Your proposed changes for PoE2's system would basically undermine that entirely Plus, if we're talking average players who play on normal, we're talking about a population that is just inherently scared of number vomit and being bombarded with rules; when Fallout: New Vegas was being developed, JE Sawyer had to fight really hard to try to get actual stats into VATS mode (hit points and armor and such) and the eventual compromise was that it would all be hidden behind the Living Anatomy perk so that it would be opt-in. Tossing up all sorts of reasons why a given player is sucking at combat and it turns out that their club uses strength and constitution, which is different from the stats needed to support the sword they had just been using is a lot of unfriendliness and unintuitiveness to toss at players playing on normal difficulty. Remember that intuitiveness is relative. It may be intuitive to you, but it's because you're in your own brain reasoning about weapons in a particular context. I would venture to say that most normal players are playing in a context that is either relatively stat-free (Skyrim or Breath of the Wild essentially) or a context where if there are stats the ones that are related to your build's damage output are limited to maybe one (Diablo 3, Dragon Age, WoW), and having your series of weapon-specific and attack-specific stats would essentially come off as being extremely arbitrary (which I am using distinctly from the word "random"). The thing is, I feel like your thing about rapiers has its roots in other systems (notably Pathfinder/3E D&D) and there it works reasonably because it's a limited narrow exception that is essentially opt-in. And D&D is not exactly well-known for its ability to avoid trap characters and its simplicity anyway. PoE justified having one stat determine all damage by saying that "Might" was in reference essentially to the strength of your soul (important for the lore of PoE). The dialogue didn't always support this (might checks might correspond to traditionally strong-person stuff), but it was the gameplay reasoning why a wizard who is good at fireballs would also be good at whacking with a two-handed sword. You might say this is "unintuitive" but ultimately all game design decisions are a balance between abstraction and "accuracy," and personally speaking having one damage stat was a gameplay abstraction that I <3'ed and that had the side effect of opening up a lot of design space (for example, martial casters are a lot easier to create in PoE1 than in similar systems I would say). Your system basically closes up design space by predetermining what builds could be good at what. See my first comment about your definition of "flexibility" versus general uses of the term. Edited to add: boy that went on for a while, sorry for long reply, just bored at work.

I haven't played much deadfire beta (too crashy for me). Is Devotions for the Faithful still an obscenely OP buff/debuff spell? Also everyone saying that priests weren't mandatory in PoE1. I mean, sure, you could play without one (and I have plenty of times). You could also beat the game just solo. That doesn't mean that having a priest was obscenely helpful. I don't understand why people don't think having a random party member who could randomly, instantly counter any affliction in the game (and Suppress anything else) in addition to having unmatched buffs would not make any encounter dramatically easier (plus, past mid-game the priest gets almost as direct damage power as a druid or wizard). Plus, speaking of Devotions, any time I play PotD with reduced party member counts, I can divide the game into two chapters: Before I get Devotions for the Faithful, and After I get Devotions for the Faithful.

Resolve in PE was mediocre, but selectively very good. In the absence of organic concentration/interrupts like in PE1, Resolve would become merely mostly mediocre. Maybe if they bumped it up to +/-2 deflection per point... And anyway, I am also surprised so many people are a fan of the random empower effect. I suggest it might just be people responding positively to a resolve solution that is not the current status quo, which I suspect is fairly unpopular. At which point, people might just be piling on to something in terms of the politician's syllogism instead of any actual merits on the resolve change itself (politician's syllogism: "1. we need to do something. 2. this is something. 3. let's do this") I didn't use empower much early on with Deadfire, but a few recent attempts in between OS X deadfire crashes I've actually used it to empower spells (instead of just getting more casts) and I have to say resolve randomly empowering spells would just be waaaayyy too variant, unless they dramatically change how empower works. Empowering interdiction gives me just some lame accuracy bonus AFAICT, but Empowering minoletta's missiles gives me so many more missiles that I can almost one shot a foe even on Path of the Damned. Not only is it inconsistent across spells, but having my per-encounter-finite spells randomly spike in power sounds to me to be extremely unfun, especially since in PoE stats are symmetric between player and foe (and in my opinion, maintaining the symmetry between the player and foe is an important element of PoE and D&D-like systems). So, I could absolutely crush one encounter by just being lucky with a few consecutive empowered damage spell procs at the start of combat, but I can do the same encounter again and be crushed in turn by getting no procs and the enemies getting a few lucky procs at the start. That is not fun to me. Variance is a natural part of infinity engine/D&D-style games, but that variance has to be in some reasonable bounds. Critical hits and such are fun and fine, and their effects have well-known long-run averages and the individual variance is not too strong. Randomly botching a fight because an important CC doesn't at least graze is an acceptable outcome, especially because such a disastrous outcome will only really happen when I'm doing a fight on the margin of possibility. Constant random empowerment on the other hand...

After watching the lead programmer die to Beetles in POE1, I don't have much faith in the internal team's play-style insights. https://youtu.be/FoyrKRoknp4?t=9m29s There's a difference between being good at a game and good at designing games. Edited to add: otherwise Magic: The Gathering design staff should all be world championship pros at MTG, or all MTG pros should be shoo-ins for new positions at Wizards of the Coast. Or Starcraft 2 players and Blizzard employees. Sometimes there's overlap, but one does not imply the other. Edited further to add: also, early in PoE1 backer beta there was some bug that made those beetles really tough. I remember dying a lot and being extremely disappointed/frustrated but also some later update that fixed it. It could be that's what was happening.

Also, most of the community complaints I've personally seen about Might->Strength is that it hurts flexibility and adds complexity for little gain, and forces some character types to spread their attribute points thinly across Strength and Resolve. (Also, I personally dislike the Tyranny-ification of the stats, and do not like how this change turned resolve from a caster-dump stat into an almost must-have instead of some in-between.) I'm not sure how your suggestion actually addresses community complaints, other than being your own idea.

One of the largest philosophies of PoE's system is to make it hard (or even impossible) to make non-viable characters and giving the player as much developmental flexibility, as well as to avoid trap builds where you create a character that seems decent, but without suitable metagame knowledge ends up becoming a developmental "trap." Adding more complexity of the type you suggest basically creates a million opportunities to create non-viable or trap builds and requires a ton of metagame knowledge. Pity the beefcake guy who maxed out strength and constitution and the only magical club in the game is a simple Fine one, whereas the rapier guy gets one with a bunch of unique enchantments. BG/2 and IWD had this problem in spades.

Sometimes I feel like having played PoE1 a lot is actually a hindrance, because I'm never sure what learned behavior I have to unlearn for PoE2.

Kind of +1. I used to always make my CHARNAME a wizard-type (occasionally branching out to be a cipher/rogue-type), until I went back and played World of Warcraft for a while. To do something different, I rolled a support/healer shaman, and I ended up loving the experience so much I rolled a healer druid, too. Since then my CHARNAMES in poe have mostly been priests (current count of run-throughs: 2x wael, 2x berath, 1x magran, 1x skaen). I think in party-games "support" take to mean "incidental" so people are reluctant to make their CHARNAME a support class. Whereas at least for me in WoW, while support role is not necessarily for everyone, it can tickle the right type of person's fancy to be critical for a fight in a way that isn't about taking down enemies or the opposing team but on saving your friends' lives. EDIT: that being said, if obsidian is interested in boosting the # of people rolling support classes (not that it really matters), they could just stop providing support NPCs. I have to imagine that back in the ol' Baldur's Gate/2 days very few people rolled a thief because the game gave you like a bajillion thief-y NPCs, some of them better than you could ever hope to be (thinking of Jan and all his special items). Same thing with wizards (Edwin would just pwn a CHARNAME wizard with his extra spellcasting, both in BG and BG2).

Wait, are graze/crit damage modifiers still additive in Deadfire?

Without constant interrupts like in PoE, it feels like perception really needs a helping hand. Especially since, as I understand it, MightStrength's weapon damage bonus is multiplicative, making it comparatively stronger in Deadfire than in PoE1. Humble suggestion: simply double the accuracy bonus (and penalty) from perception? You could do the same thing with the deflection bonus/penalty for resolve and restore StrengthMight to its former glory. Maybe I'm wrong and someone has crunched the numbers otherwise. But something tells me that +1 accuracy just isn't on par with +3% weapon damage, spell damage, action speed, or some bonus aoe/duration.

While it's true that committee-based or fan-based game design would likely be terrible, this is still ultimately a video game that needs customers, and "the customer is always right." Sometimes it means Obsidian taking its backer beta/fan feedback figuratively, not literally. (illustrative quote: "the cries of the poor are not always just, but if you do not listen then you will never know what justice is.") JE Sawyer had a story in a GDC presentation where people complained to him during PoE1 backer beta about how guns mechanically sucked. They changed the sound effects to be more dramatic and that solved most of the complaints, without affecting the mechanics of how the guns worked. There were several more stories like this.

It's kind of hard to follow the thread (I agree that Gromnir's in-character writing can be tedious to parse at times, though frankly I'm impressed s/he's kept it up for literally years), but I just want to reiterate some points, underlining something I wrote, and possibly distill some confused discussion: 1. Overleveling is actually important. There's no point in levels/experience/advancement/whatever in a RPG if every encounter feels just as taxing as the one before you leveled up. Anyone who's ever played Oblivion would get a firsthand experience of this, which actually had a game system that for min-maxers actually encouraged staying at level 1-5, because at those levels enemies were handicapped and past that enemies scaled virtually as strongly as you did (and for suboptimal characters, moreso). (There are many other games that have similarly broken systems--like Final Fantasy 8--but I suspect a game like Oblivion is more on the radar of people in discussion here.) Notably for Fallout 3/New Vegas (which was based on the same engine as Oblivion), Bethesda/Obsidian learned the lessons from Oblivion and stopped level scaling for enemies at a certain point (and focused more on enemy mixes), and made it more of a step function instead of a continuous function. 2. I don't think hitting the level cap should only be possible for completionists. Some of the assertions being made here sound like Obsidian screwed up by letting you hit the level cap without getting 100% of side quests and critical path in PoE. I disagree. PoE was a little too generous with XP before bounties got scaled back, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to let people play with high-level toys without having to do 100% of the game. Completely made up but illustrative numbers here: if the critical path is 60% of level cap, then doing all the side quests should get me to 120%, with 20% wasted exp. I should have the freedom to not do quests if I want, because forcing me to do every quest just so I can see the high-level toys seems to me like a grind. 3. I don't think the problem is overleveling, but simply that: if you design a game with a level cap, design encounters that are intended to be done at that level cap. Overleveling past even whatever nominal high-level scaling for critical path is fine to me, both for the sake of mainly-critical-path-players and also the sense of power that completionists should feel for juicing up their characters (e.g. grinding to the star level in Chrono Trigger or level 99 in Earthbound). But if you're going to design high-end toys, I want there to be some a significant number of encounters that actually needs it, or at least lasts long enough where you can unleash them (i.e. the Lavos fight in Chrono Trigger, lengthy multi-form bosses in many Final Fantasies; whereas in PoE I can roflstomp high-level-scaled Thaos in what seems like a few seconds). It doesn't need to be a critical path thing (because that would be a hard gate for normalsauce players), but just give me/us somewhere to play with our big toys for a while. It doesn't even need to provide rewards, it could just be some special sigil that appears next to your character portrait. I think if such a thing existed, I think it would quell a significant share of "PotD is too easy" sort of complaints. (Arguably for #3 Llengrath was the level 16 content in PoE, but I disagree. Concelhaut was a refreshing high-level playground for the White March I level cap [ignoring the fact that you could use the Destroy Vessels effect on that soulbound two-handed sword to one shot Concelhaut himself] but for whatever reason it feels like Llengrath's difficulty did not scale up to the power one could have with the White March II level cap.)

I've taken to playing PotD with five party members (partially inspired by deadfire's scaling down to five party members) to give the game more reasonable difficulty. I still end up roflstomping fights if I level up too quickly in e.g. the White March, but it's better than before where any priest or wizard in my party basically had only enough time to cast their per-encounter spells before the fight was over. That being said, I think feeling powerful (read: overleveling) is important, and anyone who's ever played Oblivion and its utterly broken scaling system should know that wishing for high-level scaling to make enemies universally harder is basically a cursed monkey paw wish. However, one thing that annoys me a bit about PoE is that there's not much to do at level 16. You have all these immensely powerful spells and abilities, but not really anyone to use it against. It's immensely overkill for Sun-in-Shadow even with high-level scaling, and even in part for the Kraken and Llengrath fights (not to mention that some of the end-game stuff you get from killing Llengrath herself, so that's one less hard fight to get a chance to use it). I'm mostly fine with the difficulty curve as it is, and--unlike apparently many others--I recognize that my PotD-face-melting (and The Ultimate achievement-getting) self puts me into a small percentage of masochistic players. BUT I just want a small section of the game where I actually need to use things like Wall of Many Colors, Defensive Web, Reaping Knives, Hand of Weal and Woe not as a roflstomp-win-more but as an important part of my arsenal. Otherwise, what's the point of having all these cool toys?

Maybe it's the fact that I play on PotD all the time, but I've never had any shortage of enemies to unlock every soulbound weapon. I mean, some reasonableness is required - you can't do the stronghold questline to get Gyrd Háewanes Sténes after doing everything else in the game and expect there to be enough fights left in Sun in Shadow to unlock it all. I actually found one of the quest-based unlocks to be far more annoying - the one where you have to drink in every bar in the Dyrwood. Maybe early on this is OK, but for me, by the late game, save/load times are looong from all the trash I've been accumulating/selling (even with an SSD), so hopping around maps to unlock the soulbound weapon involves many minutes of staring at loading screens and is just plain tedious.

True this. Companies like Google, or even Blizzard, do betas for products that are essentially already finished and they just want to generate some hype or lower some expectations while they finish polish. Whereas the backer beta is super beta. Case in point - I haven't had a single stable playthrough, too many crashes and problems. When I did the backer beta for PoE1 I got really bummed out, because it seemed so rough that I thought my hopes were going to be dashed and I wasted my kickstarting money. I stopped playing the backer beta and being involved after a couple weeks or so. Flash forward to release and several major patches and DLC later, and I've clocked 900+ hours on steam for PoE, done all the achievements, written up a detailed guide, and I personally consider it the closest a party RPG has gotten to my platonic ideal of what a party-based RPG should be. This time around I have more realistic expectations for the backer beta, so I'm not so concerned. It will be janky, the mechanics will be rough, but now I'm a lot more aware that that's what a beta is. We're not supposed to be even close to a polished game yet. Even PoE 1.0 was worlds different from what 1.05 or what 2.0 or 3.0 ended up being. We're just trying to help lay down the basic foundation for what will likely be a very a good game (and even amidst all the instability and jank there's a lot of promising stuff).

Unfortunately, I tried this, and I still am unable to progres beyond the black screen beachball of death. The forum sticky lists a KI of some machines crashing on black screen on new game, but correcting on second attempt, but this is definitely not true for me. Essentially this beta just doesn't work on my OS X machine.

Click new game, select difficulty, start up music plays and "Obsidian Entertainment Presents" shows up, I click to skip the rest, fade to black. ...and never fades in from black. Beachball appears, and I force close PoE. I am a sad panda No saved game to provide. Am not sure how to get at output_log (no instructions provided in stickied post for OS X). System info: Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro12,1 Processor Name: Intel Core i5 Processor Speed: 2.9 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 2 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 8 GB

I've been having a bit of trouble with combat, so I quick-load. Which bumps me back to the main menu with an error about loading the next map and that to prevent save file corruption, I've been booted back to the main menu. Dropbox link containing output_log, dxdiag, and save file I continue from: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ew7o95sfqwny2dy/AADgiyvYk-e_-Q9sjoQYQSMha?dl=0 To repro on my machine, get into a fight and quick-load. (Haven't tested to see if it matters if I'm in combat or not.)

Just casting a dissenting voice that I think spell casting speed (for at least chanters, priests, and wizards; haven't tried druids or chanters yet) seems fine to me now. The addition of grazes is a *huge* boost because it's much less likely that you completely whiff on a spell. Keep in mind that the slow cast of spells is counterbalanced by the fact that you can retarget freely, which is a fairly novel gameplay feature. Again, I haven't played the more dps-heavy druid and wizards or opportunity-cost-laden cipher, so perhaps the damage math doesn't work out too well with the slower casts, just wanted to round out the perspectives.

Just adding that after playing around some more with the beta updated, I'm convinced that something needs to be done with either Repulsing Seal or Pillars of Faith. To reiterate some points: I've really been trying, but I can't find a good reason why to pick Repulsing Seal over Pillars of Faith. The latter actually does damage, has an aoe that is actually affected by intellect, a longer range, doesn't target Fortitude, and is less prone to buggy targeting (sometimes it'll look like Repulsing Seal's aoe will overlap with an enemy, only to find out that the enemy doesn't get affected by it). The only thing in Repulsing Seal's favor is that you can cast it without a target (i.e. laying it like a pseudo trap outside of combat or to pre-empt a location where an enemy will go during combat), but because Prone is now just a strong interrupt instead of CC the utility of being able to do these is extremely low.

I don't know what game you were playing, because I don't know who on earth thought Resolve was mandatory. Even when it did more stuff in Pillars, it was essentially a dump stat for everyone other than tanks. The lack of concentration in Deadfire made Resolve even more marginal. It definitely needed a boost. Well guess what, from a roleplaying perspective it absolutely sucks having to completely change those fundamental characteristics (attributes) of my imported Wizard in order to have her fulfil the same role they did in Pillars. You can't please everyone, so stick to your original novel concept of a generic Might and find another way of making Resolve tempting. Who knows, you might even find a way that avoids Strength/Resolve being dump stats for Spellcasting/Martial characters respectively, and wouldn't that be better than the current situation where I now can't make an effective muscly Wizard even if I want to. As for non-feely arguments, Hieronymous pretty much summarises my views perfectly. I don't actually agree with the OP, since Resolve is a dump stat in Deadfire right now and was probably the most dumpable stat in Pillars too. The justification in the patch notes made no sense to me, because back in PoE a whole lot was made out of the fact that Might was named that way because it meant like spiritual/soul power, and that's why it amplified both physical and magical damage. Some odd historical revisionism happening here. Personally I'm a little ambivalent about the change. Resolve definitely needed a boost, but having Might be *the* damage stat was a nice distinguishing factor for Pillars vs many other systems (notably D&D).

Slow speed is gone, but I still like exploring in Fast Mode and it'd be nice if we had an analogous option to switch to Normal speed like how we used to be able to have auto-slow mode in PoE and Tyranny. Normally this is not too bad (I have auto-pause on enemy sight and I just disable fast speed when it triggers), but there's at least two encounters in the main critical path so far where this enemy sight auto-pause doesn't trigger (in similar cases to PoE where i there are hostile enemies that appear during a cutscene, the enemy-sight autopause may not trigger once the cutscene ends) and things start off frantically before I can disable fast speed. I'm only on Veteran, so losing some fast response time at the start of combat isn't too bad yet, but I imagine once I feel comfortable to do Path of the Damned this will become more annoying.

In many ways the combat feedback in Deadfire is better than PoE, but there are still some places that really lag. I don't know if it's because the game is still incomplete or deliberate misses that need improvements. But anyway, I have no idea when Mirage (Sand Blight) triggers and what exactly it does, other than a vague sense that I need to get out of there. Similarly, I just party wiped because "Boiling Blood" spread through my party without me really noticing, other than my characters suddenly taking damage very quickly. I feel like there's a surprising amount of stuff like this, where things happen without much signaling and if I'm not paying close attention to my combat log, things can get out of control really quickly. It's especially notable because some stuff (like the pain effects the Spirits lay down on the ground) are broadcast _really_ well. For Mirage, if it's an aoe zone control-type effect (like that ability the Engwithan Saints use), it'd be helpful if it was more obvious. In Tyranny, anytime there was a big "get out of here now" effect, it was properly broadcast. So again, I don't know if it's just learning curve pains for learning a new system (then again, everyone will be learning soon), incomplete spell effects and combat log records, or if this is important feedback to offer.

I haven't done this before. Do they usually expand the beta to other parts of the game for us to test later on, or are we just helping with this piece? For the PoE backer beta, and it was just the same place. It was mostly about testing mechanics, not the game at large. (When PoE came out for real and I got to the point in the game covered by the backer beta, I knew exactly everything I needed/could do, since I had played the backer beta several times through).