thelee

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".)

being able to mouse-wheel through the area of effect still dodges the problem of when you have spells that have skimpy range. even if you could mouse-wheel, you're basically losing out on benefiting from INT because no one would voluntarily mouse-wheel the spell's area of effect to include the caster him/herself.

[Description of the issue] Sometimes hovering over an ability is "sticky," sometimes it is not and needs to be clicked. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] 1) Use a wizard/priest (or any other class that has a toolbar ability that triggers another). 2) Hover e.g. Level 1 spells. 3) Note that the level 1 spells toolbar appears above. 4) Move the mouse cursor to select a level 1 spell. 5) Sometimes the level 1 spell toolbar disappears once your mouse moves off the level 1 spells ability button. I do not know the circumstances that determines whether it stays or disappears. [Expected behaviour] Either the sub-toolbar should always stay OR the ability button should always require a click.

[Description of the issue] Example: When creating/starting a new adventure/character, auto-pause settings are incorrect. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] Example: 1) Create a new adventure/character. 2) Change your auto-pause settings. 3) Save/Quit. 4) Create a new adventure/character. 5) Trigger an autopause event from #2. Open your settings and note that auto-pause settings are completely blank. [Expected behaviour] Either: A) Autopause settings should be reflected in the settings pane for a new character/event. B) Autopause triggers should reset, reflecting the blank auto-pause settings pane for a new character/event. [Other remarks / Comments] This happens 100% of the time. I've been aggressively creating new adventure/characters as I figure out the game rules and start over with the new information I have.

It would seem that it'd be preferable to tie Intelligence to duration and *range* as opposed to duration and *area of effect*. More range is, by definition, strictly better. Whereas area of effect is definitely highly situational, especially with non-targetable areas and the currently constrained range on some spells (cough the daze spell). As suggested in catatonicman's thread, maybe range should be calculated to the perimiter of the AoE, instead of the center. Though this would run counter to infinity engine-based expectations for AoE spells.

One thing to keep in mind, and sorry if this point has already been made, but the BG/BG2 games already solved the XP problem. Combat, on a per-encounter basis, provided niggling XP in either game (less so in BG2 where they started tossing Dragons and Liches at you left and right). There was no incentive to grind (except for very specific cases like Basilisks in BG) because each fight rewarded you with like 35 XP/character when all is said and done (even less with the early kobold fights). Instead, all those many sidequests that dropped you off with thousands of XP was a major driver in getting your characters up. I've played BG/BGEE enough times where I can get my characters leveled up a couple times with only minimal fighting. The beauty of this system is that grinding was not encouraged - the marginal gain from any one fight was neglible. Yet at the same time, it rewarded general gameplay because overtime, that combat experience would add up. And on a per-incident basis, questing was still heavily favored because of the simple gigantic rewards numbers you'd see for accomplishing X quest versus just going out and killing some random enemies.

Having an absolute number of an XP reward with increasingly higher requirements for each successive level already solves this problem without the need for a complicated % scaling-based-on-number-of-enemies-killed system. To put another way, if you need 1000 xp to level up to level 2 and a kobold gives you 10, a kobold gives you 1% of the XP you need to level. If you need an additional 2000 xp to level up to level 3, a kobold gives you only .5% of the XP you need to level. If you need an additional 4000 xp to level up to level 4, a kobold gives you only .25% of the XP you need to level. So on, and so forth, until at high levels the kobold effectively gives you 0% of the XP you need. (Note: the "increasing requirements" part is necessary, because if you always only need an additional 1000 xp, then of course the kobold will always give you the same benefit.) This is what I never, ever, understood about the challenge rating system of 3e D&D. AD&D had already solved the problem of easy encounters providing trivial rewards to powerful characters, you didn't need to go out and add a whole complicated layer of abstraction on top of it.

Has this been pointed out yet or am I missing something? What's the point of expanding the AoE of spells if the range never increases? I have terrible luck getting CHARNAME to use that level 1 daze spell and that level 2 confuse spell, since their ranges are so low and the AoE grows so wide. Half the time (maybe more?) my CHARNAME will just run so close to the enemy that they hit themself with the spell(s). Or is the range actually increasing and the range for these spells is just that terrible?

So... since I'm new, is there something special I need to do to get these attacks of opportunity? It always seems like only the enemies get these attacks of opportunity against my squishy wizards when they try to flee, yet in this case when the beetles disengage from my tank, they seem to be able to quickly hop over to my CHARNAME without any consequences.

So I just started messing around with the backer beta, and one thing is a head-scratcher for my wizard. Never mind hte fact that it seems like area of effect and range don't seem to scale well with each other with Intelligence (so I keep hitting myself because my wizard runs too close and casts a spell that affects him), or also the fact that the game is really inconsistent about what spells are party-friendly or not... but man, what's the point of confusion status effect? When I enter the Beetle-filled area to the east, what invariably happens is: BB Fighter engages 2-3 beetles. CHARNAME runs close and casts confusion (that 2nd level spell that has sparkles for its icon). Combat log shows confusion is successful. Beetles proceed, in their confusion, to walk over to CHARNAME and engage him in melee. Within seconds CHARNAME is knocked out. Never mind the fact that the close range means that I have very little time to run away or that the Beetles have some magical teleporting power to engage CHARNAME from a character circle away, but what's the point of confusion if all it does is cause enemies to disengage from my tank and attack my fragile character(s)?