thelee

My comment was not directed at the general idea of rolling but at the sentiment that because this is an SP game we should let anything fly.

Its because it ends up having to do with how the game is built/designed. Theoretically, the game could just give everyone an omni-weapon at the start that kills everyone and people who want an enjoyable game could just not use it. Except that's dumb. Game design is about making choices for the player. Game design is about constraining what the player can do, and then letting the player have fun within those constraints. Just because something doesn't affect another player (the "it's SP" reasonibg) does not make it a good basis for doing it anyway, because "not negatively affecting another player" does not form the basis for making a good game system. I don't recall the ability to roll attributes in the BG series or ToEE being anything remotely akin to an "omni-weapon... that kills everyone." Just saying. It's called metaphor.

Its because it ends up having to do with how the game is built/designed. Theoretically, the game could just give everyone an omni-weapon at the start that kills everyone and people who want an enjoyable game could just not use it. Except that's dumb. Game design is about making choices for the player. Game design is about constraining what the player can do, and then letting the player have fun within those constraints. Just because something doesn't affect another player (the "it's SP" reasonibg) does not make it a good basis for doing it anyway, because "not negatively affecting another player" does not form the basis for making a good game system.

Possibly related: before this happened I comploeted the farmer's quick and clicked on a piglet and got a "Placeholder bark text. This is a programming error" message. No idea what caused it, but attached is both a screenshot and the saved game that has the problem (I reloaded a couple times and always happens). Loading my other quicksave after I had done the above has the same problem, but loading other games before hadn does not have te problem. Attached is screenshot. Save game here: http://www.upload.ee/files/4260970/1e3f19eb9b7944d2869094536a74a854_DyrfordVillage_7630413.savegame.html

Don't have many details - was going from the inn back to town after completing Blood Legacy. Loading crashed, got dialogue box that just told me to send the crash report to the developer. 2014-09-14_085104.zip

Worst was the original Icewind Dale (IWD2 didn't have this problem because it had a pseudo-point buy). Imagine doing that dice roll dance *six* times before you could start playing the game. Literally most of the time I ever feel like playing IWD again, I give up after trying to roll the 3rd or 4th character. IWD would've had a lot more replayability if I were just given a flat, say, 85 points to distribute. I couldn't remember if IWD 1 had rolling, as it's been a while since I last played it. But okay, so that means 3/5 of the IE legacy had it. The worst part of the game was rolling characters? Wow. I have always enjoyed this part of the process. Even if my first several hours ends up being character creation, I enjoy that as part of the process. For a game like IWD2 and ToEE I will usually add to that process by writing a biography for each of my characters and an overall background for the party. That for me can be just as fun as the game itself. A 6 person party? I literally might spend days mulling over how I want to create my party, changing, iterating, until I'm totally happy. The rolling of attributes just adds to the experience for me. Hell, it might take me an entire week from the point that I start until I'm actually ready to begin my adventure. Is none of this ringing true with any other of the supposed IE fans around here? I enjoy planning my characters. I do *not* enjoy waiting 30+ minutes per character to get essential stats so I can fulfill my planned-for characters. And the more combat-heavy IWD and IWD2 games *really* punished you if you didn't have sensible stat distribution (whereas BG was fairly forgiving and BG2 basically inundated you with stat-setting items so you could eventually get away with crummy stats; oh yeah and in Planescape: Torment as long as you put everything into wisdom you were set).

UI help is a very vague, slippery term. Would you argue that seeing your characters actually attack is "UI help?" After all, you have the combat log, so that should be information enough. With the combat overlay enabled you already have indications of your character actions - attack, spell casting, reloading, waiting. I don't see how adding "idle" to the mix is bad. EDIT - sorry, i now realize you were responding to a specific suggestion from primehydra, not somethin about adding to the Combat HUD.

[Description of the issue] Under circumstances I do not fully understand, the health bar does not actually reflect what a character's health actually is. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] In this case, 1. A character of mine got hit by a beetle poison. 2. After it wore off, the character's health was very low. The health bar was still near full. 3. After a bit, the health bar changed to reflect the health. [Expected behaviour] 2. The health bar should be an up-to-date representation of the character's health. See picture for explanation of the discrepancy. [Other remarks / Comments] The Auto-Pause for low health still worked. [Files]

I completely agree with this suggestion. It doesn't help that currently your character's "action" circle is blank while waiting for their next action or when completely idle. A simple "zzz" kind-of symbol for when the character has no action queued would work wonders for easing my micromanagement and would differentiate from characters who are just waiting to do their next auto-attack. (An auto-pause would not be great because sometimes I deliberately want some of my characters to do nothing, e.g. currently I keep my priest waiting around so they can do suppress affliction the moment someone gets hit with that damned-bugged Deep Wounds debuff.)

Worst was the original Icewind Dale (IWD2 didn't have this problem because it had a pseudo-point buy). Imagine doing that dice roll dance *six* times before you could start playing the game. Literally most of the time I ever feel like playing IWD again, I give up after trying to roll the 3rd or 4th character. IWD would've had a lot more replayability if I were just given a flat, say, 85 points to distribute.

Maybe this explains why some people find the combat log hard to read? [Description of the issue] Sometimes entries in the combat log are duplicated, and it's unclear why. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] 1. In this particular example, I went up to one of the *Missing String* cultist archers with my druid. 2. Cast Sunbeam on it. 3. Observe two entries for its damage (one before and after the debuff entry). [Expected behaviour] 3. Should only see one entry. [Files] This attached screenshot should hopefully explain what I'm seeing. The damage numbers show up twice. At first I thought that meant I was doing twice as much damage, but the red numbers that actually appear above the enemy suggest not.

Mine come back somewhat randomly, but it's almost always some kind of spell or combat cue that triggers it.

The problem with stat rolling is that it rewards being tedious in the worst possible way. People who want to just play will get punished because they'll have a stat total of say ~70 to distribute amongst their scores. Then there are people who will sit there for hours just to get a high total (85+) before playing. This is like the reverse of how it should work - more casual players should not find themselves immediately handicapped before playing the game for such an incredibly tedious reason. It's also more interesting if players are forced to make trade-offs. A game system that says "hey, you can have it all... so long as you are willing to sit here for 30+ minutes clicking 'roll' over and over again" is broken, IMO. Of course, the impact of stat rolling will be a bit more muted in PoE because PoE doesn't have insanely stupid stat thresholds like AD&D does (e.g. an 18/xx strength was worlds better than 17 strength, and a 14 constitution was useless but a 15 constitution was highly meaningful). It *would* be interesting however, if there was like a Pen-and-Paper-style stat rolling; kind of like the iron mode (one death = kaput), you get only one set of dice rolls to determine your stats, and you're stuck with it. This would ideally work best if you set your stats before you set your class so you could try to adapt to it if, say, you got terrible intelligence and your aoe-based character was no summarily handicapped. On a lighter note, while rolling a wizard in BG2EE, I ended up with the most stupidly awesome natural roll I've ever gotten in my life: 15/18/16/18/17/12 (yes, the 18s naturally landed on Dex and Int for my wizard and a perfect 16 for con, which would've been super great in a setting where I would not be allowed to arbitrarily move points around). I sat there dumbfounded for a while before shouting "BUT NO ONE WILL BELIEVE ME."

[DESCRIPTION] I tried shapeshifting, where upon I ran into the no-attack bug. I switched back. Later, at some point in time (after a reload) I noticed that the stag charge ability was available to my druid even outside her shapeshifted form. Nothing happens if I try to use it (though I can target it); then again, nothing happens if I try to use it while shapeshifted. [DETAILED] See attached picture for example. Don't know specifically how to re-create it. In the attached picture, I shapeshifted back into Stag to see if I could "reset" the state of the ability but instead just ended up with two copies of it. [NOTES]

This may be related to: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68363-v278-path-finding-with-reach-weapons/ I also feel like this is a common issue, but also don't see it in the known issues list explicitly (i wish there was a way to more definitively find confirmed bugs). [DESCRIPTION] 1. Sometimes, when casting a spell at a range that forces a spellcaster to move (footprints on the spellcasting icon), the spellcaster will move to point-blank range to cast it, instead of merely close enough to cast it. AND 2. Sometimes, when casting a spell at a range that signifies a spellcaster will have to move (footprints on the spellcasting icon), the spellcaster will in fact be able to cast without moving. [DETAILED] Neither of these scenarios are consistently reproducible. Just get a spellcaster, get into combat, and keep trying to cast say that level 1 Wizard Daze spell (which has a very small range) and note the weird mechanics.[NOTES] n/a

One of the best parts of IWD2 was not having to sit there for 30 minutes just to get a good character set up. Not having to roll absolutely forces you to decide on what's important and get done pretty quickly.

This seems like low-hanging fruit, but I didn't see it mentioned in the Known Issues list. [Description of the issue] The interaction with the dungeon entrance east of the main town has all its text cut off. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] See attached picture to know what I'm talking about. [Expected behaviour] Should be able to read all the text. [Files] Image illustrating the problem is attached:

In the long run, averages dominate, so variance (unless we're talking *extreme* variance, like 1-100 versus a weapon that does 50-50) doesn't matter much. EDIT - I'm not really disagreeing with Seari here, just summarizing what I think OP's response to Seari would be. That being said, the use of DT as a core mechanic impacts the math in an interesting way versus other straight up variant-damage systems (mostly D&D - I know DR factors in at times, but it's far less common) - a low variance weapon may be worse than a high variance weapon with a lower average simply because against DT small chance of doing a some damage versus 100% chance of almost no damage might make the trade-off worth it. So there's some level of itemization strategy. (EDIT - an example of this scenario is going up against a guy with DT 10. Would you rather have a 10-10 damage weapon or a 1-17 if there is a minimum damage of 1 after DT? I think most people will ultimately go for the latter, even though in the general case it is weaker (average damage of 9 versus 10) since in this contrived high-DT case the 1-17 actually gives you a chance of doing significant damage). Adding random ranges also helps in balancing the game, theoretically. Your granularity is to fractions of damage without needing to actually use fractions. (Though the game already shows fractional damage, so I'm not sure how much this actually factors in.) Lastly, there's just the visceral pop up of it. In fairly kinetic games (shooters, shooter RPGs) static damage works well because you can approximate variant damage by using physics - i.e. headshots, glancing shots, shotguns that miss some of their pellets, etc. In more macro-scale games (like tactical party RPGs like this), the variance helps capture the "flow" of the randomness of combat. IE if a kobold has 8 health and you have a 10-10 damage weapon, you will always kill it in one hit; whereas if you have a d20 weapon, that is far from certain.

Difficulty: Easy/Normal (I started on easy because everyone was saying it was super hard and buggy, moved to normal soon after and it's probably still too easy, but I generally play my games on normal so haven't bother going higher). I used a lot of CC: Crippling Strike, Binding Web, Halt, Repulsive Seal. Basically, used everything that have blind, paralyze, slow, stun, daze in the spell lists. I also use "pause on enemy sighting" which allow me to plan my attacks and surprise mobs most of the time. The DT bug is probably what most people are encountering right now that turn their games into a slow nightmare. Basically, sometimes, mobs will get a boost to their DT (and Deflection I believe) to the point where it is impossible to do anything but craze and minimum damage on them. So a mobs with 100 stamina will take like ~100 hits to go down. It makes fight last longer than supposed and cause your character to get hit more often and lose more health than expected for the encounter. I once encountered it against Medreth's group, the fight took almost 20 minutes and 3 of the 5 party members were at half health afterward (yeah for buff/debuff). The wiki has a lot of info on the gameplay mechanics. Oh man. This wiki will help a lot.

From my limited experience with the beta. 1. Pretty much which is why I always play a ranged Wizard and have my Fighter, Rogue and Priest on the front line. You also have to aggro an enemy with your Fighter first otherwise the enemy will dog pile onto your Wizard. And PoE is better viewed as an isometric party based MMO. You're quite right in thinking that. The default strategy at the moment in the beta is send defender in to tank, other characters to help with dps and crowd control. Rinse and repeat. Tip: Play as a ranged wizard. Ignore any melee type spells. I've found Wizards are quite poor in melee situations and aren't really designed for it. There's a good strategy with playing a ranged Wizard. Don't wear any armour. Wearing armour incurs penalties, and as long as you're playing a ranged Wizard without armour, you shouldn't get hit while your defender is tanking. And combat is better and faster. If PoE is a isometric party based MMO than so were the IE games. Party roles is the basic of every party based RPG ever released and you will always have a defending frontline and a ranged backline. How these work has some flexibility though. Saying that, if you use the "pause on enemy sighted" you can pre-plan most encounters in advance. This mean place you party members, decide who will do the opening salvo, etc. I never have anything attack my wizard despite him casting spells all the time that way. Have you ever played an MMO? None of the IE games has remotely this kind of all-against-the-tank gameplay, except when you need to degeneratively need to stack on AC to survive Heart of Fury mode for IWD. It's also far less punishing, 95% of the time, for a non-"tank" to recieve "aggro" in the IE games (case in point, priest classes could also serve as a meat shield, and with the right set up so could rogues (bards more than thieves) and wizards). Here, so far I've found that everything needs to go against your designated tank - that constant stamina recovery essentially means that no one else is going to be able to withstand a remotely similar amount of punishment (whereas in D&D, the difference in damage soak between a d10 and a d8 was not too huge). Melee engagement essentially acts like aggro. *Unlike* an MMO, there is no way to cancel engagement (except for the really buggy "Escape" ability), and the healing possibilities on a tank are extremely limited (because they only treat the per-battle Stamina). Much *like* an MMO, however, if my tank goes down, it generally means a party wipe. I'm not sure I like this kind of gameplay. I stopped playing WoW (with its incredibly specialized class roles and over-prescribed combat flow) for a reason. Considering I've played my first playthrough of PoE with everyone mostly on ranged weapons (using CC spells/abilities to stop mobs from swarming the party) I fail to see the requirement to have a tank in every fight or how the Figher needs absolutely to be played has one. I do find it extremely funny that everyone who seem to have issues with the combat are always talking about how they need to use the Fighter has a tank and play the game like a MMO though. Also, the only time any of my characters lose a lot of health in a fight is when I encounter the DT bug. I wonder how much people complains are actually a failure to detect bugs at this point. What difficulty are you on? How is this even possible? If my fighter doesn't engage everyone, whomever gets engaged by an enemy is going to go down soon. Caveat: now that I discovered Conscecration (or whatever that level 2 priest spell is that restores stamina in a gigantic aoe for a while), every fight in the game has now turned into "cast consecration, slowly win" though that still doesn't apply to my squishiest characters getting hit, though currently I am in glass-cannon mode (no armor for my wizards) so that may explain it at this point. It would be helpful to know just the scale of everything in this game. In other words, I have no idea how effective e.g. DT 6 is since I don't know how much damage I should expect average enemies to be capable of doing (or how much of a damage penalty "grazing" actually means). What's the DT bug? Personally, I keep wavering between "I'm disappointed in this game" vs "I still don't understand this game system and that's why it is frustrating." I guess this is one of the downsides to a Beta/not following the emails/updates as closely. At least when I first picked up BG I could spend an hour reading through the manual to learn the system, here it's *just* different enough from many other RPGs to confound my expectations but also in such a way I cannot tell if certain behavior is a bug or intended gameplay mechanic.

From my limited experience with the beta. 1. Pretty much which is why I always play a ranged Wizard and have my Fighter, Rogue and Priest on the front line. You also have to aggro an enemy with your Fighter first otherwise the enemy will dog pile onto your Wizard. And PoE is better viewed as an isometric party based MMO. You're quite right in thinking that. The default strategy at the moment in the beta is send defender in to tank, other characters to help with dps and crowd control. Rinse and repeat. Tip: Play as a ranged wizard. Ignore any melee type spells. I've found Wizards are quite poor in melee situations and aren't really designed for it. There's a good strategy with playing a ranged Wizard. Don't wear any armour. Wearing armour incurs penalties, and as long as you're playing a ranged Wizard without armour, you shouldn't get hit while your defender is tanking. And combat is better and faster. If PoE is a isometric party based MMO than so were the IE games. Party roles is the basic of every party based RPG ever released and you will always have a defending frontline and a ranged backline. How these work has some flexibility though. Saying that, if you use the "pause on enemy sighted" you can pre-plan most encounters in advance. This mean place you party members, decide who will do the opening salvo, etc. I never have anything attack my wizard despite him casting spells all the time that way. Have you ever played an MMO? None of the IE games has remotely this kind of all-against-the-tank gameplay, except when you need to degeneratively need to stack on AC to survive Heart of Fury mode for IWD. It's also far less punishing, 95% of the time, for a non-"tank" to recieve "aggro" in the IE games (case in point, priest classes could also serve as a meat shield, and with the right set up so could rogues (bards more than thieves) and wizards). Here, so far I've found that everything needs to go against your designated tank - that constant stamina recovery essentially means that no one else is going to be able to withstand a remotely similar amount of punishment (whereas in D&D, the difference in damage soak between a d10 and a d8 was not too huge). Melee engagement essentially acts like aggro. *Unlike* an MMO, there is no way to cancel engagement (except for the really buggy "Escape" ability), and the healing possibilities on a tank are extremely limited (because they only treat the per-battle Stamina). Much *like* an MMO, however, if my tank goes down, it generally means a party wipe. I'm not sure I like this kind of gameplay. I stopped playing WoW (with its incredibly specialized class roles and over-prescribed combat flow) for a reason.

Mirror Image in AD&D wasn't a hard counter. It's a pretty iconic example of a soft counter, actually. removal of rng and hard counters edit: Actually I don't know enough to say for sure, anyone is welcome to correct me. Is the deflection bonus from mirror image enough to make it do the same function as the dnd mirror image? Or is it just a "minor" bonus to make "muscle wizards" more tanky. In theory with a high enough deflection bonus it could do the same thing, no? The PoE mirror image sounds like it might be stronger than the D&D one, actually. Doesn't each individual image in D&D have the same AC as you do? That means it's easier to cut them down one-by-one than it is it break through PoE's mirror image. Except you're comparing two very different systems for rolling to attack - from what I gather (from parsing the PE wiki) - *many* attacks will hit, simply because the d100 roll has very few opportunities for missing - just a lot of grazing. In addition, the AD&D system had limited attacks / round (i.e. 6 seconds) as oppossed to continuous attacks. A wizard with 8 mirror images in the IE games could, even against a fighter who crit all the time, take 0 damage (with no impact/interruption) for several rounds. Mirror Image also granted immunity to many direct damage spells. Combine that with Stoneskin, Protection from Magical Weapons, Improved Invisibility, etc. and a single-class wizard had better (burst) defenses than any other class in the game. (This situation was significantly toned down in IWD2 which lacked many of the stupidly powerful abjuration spells and had the nerfed version of stoneskin.) My experience with Mirror Image in PoE is that my wizard gets a couple grazing hits and then gets knocked out pretty rapidly thereafter. GREAT. So I only skimmed the backer beta announcements, but what I'm gathering from these comments is that the wizard should basically just be considered DPS in PoE? Not really crowd control or illusion-y magical defense? That's a little disappointing I guess, and actually brings to mind more of planescape: torment's terrible arcane spell selection than the other IE's magic system.

Question 1: An enemy melee engages my wizard = inevitable doom?. Related: the "mirror image" icon spells and other defensive spells are useless? Can I do anything about an enemy engaging my wizard? Almost any enemy so far (Beetles to Cultists) can take my wizard from healthy to knocked out in a manner of seconds. I don't understand what good Arcane Veil or Mirror Image are when - if I cast them as soon as I see an enemy charging toward my wizard (either due to a bad pull or a bad confusion, see below), by the time they finish I've already lost half my stamina. I also don't see the point of any of these defensive maneuvers if I can't safely disengage from melee - all these spells do is delay the inevitable by a few seconds. At times PoE feels very MMO-ish (namely tank and having to "pull" enemies), but in an MMO, a tank would have some kind of Taunt ability or the DPS would have some kind of de-aggro or disengaging spell for these cases. Even 3e D&D had some kind of mechanism to safely avoid attack of opportunity. Question 2: Debuffs are pointless? At least at the start, I'm not sure what the merit of the various debuff spells are. First, and I've already made a post about it - I honestly don't understand the point of confusion. All it does is cause enemies to disengage from my tank--and generally try to engage my wizard. That is definitely not an effect I want to waste time and spellcasting slot on! I've tried a few others, and apart from having only the foggiest notion of what they do (enemies really need a debuff display like your party members do that you can hover over for tooltips), I rarely ever see an obvious effect in battle. Question 3: What spells are actually party friendly (if any)? I've been led astray several times by spells that imply that they either only affect one enemy, or jump to just enemies, or target just enemies in AoE only to see hapless BB Fighter get grazed or hit or critically hit with effects. The converse is true about BB Priest, BTW - a lot more spells are party friendly than I expect (or are just bugged - I feel like the glyph of warding-type spell is either party friendly or is really buggy about when it actually hurts things). Question 4: Am I missing something about how the pseudo-turn-based-system works? I'm not exactly sure what that little bar that empties from right to left and the pips and the little circle that occasionally has a sword in it mean. I *thought* it was like a Final-Fantasy-style active time bar, and when it emptied my character would do an action. Yet sometimes I can use an ability while the bar is still not empty, and still other times my character will gaily keep auto-attacking even after I've repeatedly selected a spell and a target. Is it like World of Warcraft where some abilities respect a universal cooldown and some don't? Still other times, I feel like it acts like a queue and when I click on an ability, the character will start doing it when the bar empties, while still others I feel like the character does an attack and then starts using the ability. Or is this just really buggy. Question 5: Is the "Spell cast" auto-pause buggy? For some reason, I feel like the tooltip strongly implied it would pause for enemies casting, but not the case. And it doesn't seem to always trigger when my characters cast spells, or triggers as they are casting a spell but no effect has started (so I'm unclear whether or not it's safe to do anything).

[Description of the issue] Sounds keep cutting out and only coming back after a load or some indeterminate amount of time. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] 1. Uh... play the backer beta for a while? This seems like a really obvious issue, but I didn't see it in the "known issues" list, so I thought I'd make a bug for it. [Expected behaviour] 1. Sound keeps playing. [Other remarks / Comments] 1. Granted, many sounds are missing. But these are sound effects that I will hear normally (spell prep, spell being cast, hits, my CHARNAME's periodic sounds) and will stop playing after a while

To play devil's advocate, there are actually good reasons why a caster might voluntarily nuke him/herself. The caster might have superior resistance to that element or effect, for example, or the cost to the caster might be worth the damage put on the enemies. I know you're playing devil's advocate here, but the main point is that for all other stats, each additional point is strictly better. For intelligence, in at least one facet at least, it is not necessarily strictly better. (Note: "might have" or specific workarounds are conditional, not "strictly better".)