Mayama

As I posted you can solve any quest without fighting and it seems like the wilderness is overpopulated with trash mobs anyway. Fighting is a decision not a must.

I dont take a side here but you can afaik solve all the quests in the beta without a single fight beside trash monsters and it looks like they overpopulated the are with trash anyway.

Making a system that has bad builds is just wrong from a design perspective. AD&D had no bad builds if you played the pen and paper version because your ****ty strength as fighter was balanced out with the role play options that max INT gave you. Bad builds in pen and paper AD&D only existed if your Game Master was bad. That doesnt work in a computer game because the role playing part is reduced to a minimum. D&D in general is a anti-role play system because everything they introduced in later editions was counter productive to role playing. All that class hobbing etc. their was no role playing explanation for it and it was combat centered to the max. Look at any role playing game that is not build around combat like call of cthulhu or world of darkness. They have no bad builds because not beeing good at combat does not automaticaly mean ****ty character. So PoE is a computer RPG and like I said the role playing is reduced to a minimum. You just cant simulate a good game master. All that is basicaly left is combat which means its the only thing characters need to be good at. So why for freaking f*** sake design the classes in a way that makes them possibly bad at combat? Its the only real obstacle for your characters in the game. Theirs no reason to design, lets say a fighter in a way so hes not good at fighting. Its not that far away from AD&D as some people here think. In AD&D: - you made a fighter - maxed the attributes that the game system forces you to max - and select your specialization In PoE -you select a fighter -select your specialization The only REAL difference between the two system is that PoE removes a forced intermediate step. Creating a system that can produce characters that are useless in combat does not make sense in a system that is all about combat. You shouldnt compare PoE with a system like BG which copied tons of stuff of the AD&D rule books no matter if it fits a computer game or not. Compare it to something like all those JRPG/Strategy games like final fantasy tactics. Do you see a useless build in those games? No because they are all build for the only purpose that a computer RPG offers and that is combat. Bad builds aka no combat orientated builds dont fit the concept so why even let player make them. If I choose a fighter, why should I be able to make it so he is not good at fighting when fighting is all that he will do in the first place?

I agree because its such a hard stat to balance. It needs to be strong because its the only stat on that attribute. That leads to the problem that a very very high interrupt skill could let you cheese through the game permalocking enemies.

Right now the main quest (in the beta) about the missing girl has 3 ways to get into the final area, 4 if you count randomly finding it. Their are 4 endings + 1 extra ending if you play a cipher. Their might be more endings gated behind very high attributes. The quest will always end in you getting xp but choosing one is actually hard because the moral dilemma makes you rather uncomfortable. Theirs no clue about how your decision will influence the story but another quest, the bandit one hints that different endings lead to different side quest later in the game. The endings might be meaningless but what I really liked about it was that their was a option for every way you could possible solve it. With other words: Did you ever think about letting the blood thirsty demon free in some rpg's even if that means the end of dozens of (maybee) innocent bystanders because the angry mob that wants him dead is as guilty as the monster? Well it seems like you can do such things in PoE. Its approach to moral is quite similar to the witcher series.

Sorry to interrupt you but I interrupted my breakfast so I can interrupt you and say you might be right. (couldnt resist)

Really? You think 8 slots per character is enough? Not I. I found it rather tiresome having to do inventory house cleaning (moving things from the inventory to the stash) every other encounter because someone got "Full". For me the problem with the current system is that I cant organize stuff. In BG i could throw all scrolls in one inventory, all potions in another one etc... I wouldnt even care if I could only access it while resting but multible pages of inventory space was really a qualitiy of life thing for me.

If they use a real language for incantations they should use something like gaèlic or some old scandinavian language. Im not that deep into the lore but from what I read and how monster names and class names are spelled it woudl fit more than latin. Best option of course would be using their self made language.

-List of skills/spells for all classes, class progression from 1-12 -do they consider to remove healing from might and put it on another attribute

It is possible (dare I say, likely) that they released what they had knowing that some non-zero percentage of the feedback that they were going to get was going to be garbage. Considering the amount of bitching and moaning that took place before the beta came out, I can't imagine that they are least bit surprised to see bitching and moaning afterwords as well. I guess maybe the only thing to do now is take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we are the people helping or the people bitching. If they listen to the crowd, not single oppinions they are fine.

I dont care how long the first update takes because its the first beta version. They have way more stuff to work on than in the following betas. If the basics work its easy to implement single systems and observe what they will break. I think we will start to get fast updates when the game gets into the balancing phase because its most likley only adjusting numbers in a text file.

Thats only true for low level parties in DnD, a high level wizard has no weakness. Another reason to form a party is because you cant do something alone. If you group up in reality you seldom do it to cover weaknesses, you usually do it because its easier to do some things with more people.

Double the bonus of the attribute points, balance the enemies accordingly and all of a sudden you wont survive with spending zero points. So a simple number tweak fixed the fundamentally flawed core system... do you even math bro?

As I said, that's because, generally speaking, magical powers in mythology are not associated with regular (well, except for the magic) human beings, but with gods, half-gods and other supernatural creatures. In DnD, sorcerers, warlocks or druids would be far closer to this than wizards. So these other ways of gaining power are also present (at least in DnD). Well in a very limited way because their is no logical reason why a sorcerer couldnt learn sword fighting as good as a fighter. He has the time, to train it.

Actually, you may be confused. The IE games are the ones that tried to shoehorn things like "Rounds," "THAC0," "Attacks Per Round," "Initiative" (as "Speed"), "Vancian Magic," Die Based Damage, etc etc etc into RTwP. PE was designed from the ground up as a RTwP title. Afaik they wanted to make BG a turn based game but the producer forced them to make it real time.

Not really. There's more to being good at sword fighting than brute strength. Still, I feel that the examples given by Mayama (or D10000) aren't overly valid for this discussion. If 'wizard' makes you think of almost divine entities(Gandalf, Feanor) or just plain gods(Odin, Mercury), then of course you're going to imagine people who are absolutely excellent at everything. That's what being divine is all about. A regular fantasy wizard, however, is a human(like) being. To get the image of what a human wizard would be like from classical mythology, where magical powers are often reserved for gods and half-gods, is rather silly in my opinion. Sure, a travelling adventurer wizard will likely be a reasonably fit individual. Such a wizard not being at the absolute peak of physical condition is simply derived from the notion that for humanlike beings wizardry requires extensive studies, which don't leave time for the training required for physical excellency. Well the physicaly strong archetype exists for way longer than the modern bookworm one. In many cultures that archetype is still the way how magic users are presented. Actually in most cultures because reading books to get knowledge is a very western concept on how to accumulate power.

It scares me how popular elves are. D:

What you were expecting was something like AD&D because thats the system what baldurs gate used. The system in PoE is way more complex than AD&D which is basicaly as simple as it can get.

I was searching this post since the muscle mage debate started, finaly i found it. :D Its a short but interesting read about mages and physical fitness. Its from the Steve Jackson Games forum, from the user D10000, enjoy: Sorry for the text background color but I have no clue how to change it. Myth v. Stereotype, or "My Wizard Wears Plate and Has a 14 Strength" In another thread on plate armor and spell casting I got off on a Semi tangent relating to magic user stereotypes and their conflict with magic user's in pre-D&D fantasy (this also overlaps and parallels Elves). When I think of wizards I think of Odin, Mercury, Gandalf, Feanor, Elric, Kane or Simon Magus. Do any of them strike you as a skinny old bookworm? In many, many settings physical vitality is a prerequisite to surviving or excelling at magic use. To me, a mage is either 1) a superior being or 2) a man with a particular skill set which is for no reason incompatible with him being 7 feet tall and able to kill with an axe, especially if he's an adventurer. I mean, even computer geeks in the army have armor and know how to shoot guns, and adventuring is way more dangerous. If Bookmouse wizards exist they're doing bookmouse things, not getting their hair clipped by throwing axes in some hellish pit. Another example is the sorcerer Xaltotun from the Conan story "Hour of the Dragon", who is almost physically perfect in addition to being a super sorcerer. I feel like the weak wizard is more a projection of modern bookworm stereotypes than most genre literature that went before. There's some evidence that good looks, physical fitness and brains often cluster in the same individuals I real life, though obviously not always it makes evolutionary sense (it makes sense to evolve attraction to traits that are associated with the genetics for physical and mental fitness). Though it's not exactly fair I think plenty of us have met the straight A trackstar who became a stockbroker, or someone like him. IRL there's no guarantee of balanced CP, even if PCs are for character creation reasons there's no reason NPCs should be. Now put aside the character point issue for a moment (this is one reason I like random character attributes, and I've rolled them in GURPS before) it seems to me that somewhere the public image of wizards changed to be a lot different than Magi, wizards and sorcerers of the past. Sure, they're often ugly or anti-social, but wizard from Mazdaran to Baba Yaga are noteworthy for freakish, superhuman vitality. The difficulty of killing and keeping a wizard dead is central to many mythical plots from Iran to Scandinavia, and those are just the ones I'm familiar with. And characters not explicitly identified as wizards, but who use sorcery and magic, are often quite vital; I.e. the virtually-unkillable-except-by-brute-violence elves of Poul Anderson's the Broken Sword, where the Elf jarl is hung over continually burning coals with no food or water for weeks or months and recovers in a few days, or Tolkien's Elves and the Norse Ljosaelfar and Vanir, our the Finnish shape shifting smith-heroes. To pick an explicitly wizardry example, probably the most archetypsl 'wiz-ards' ever look at the gods of magic and knowledge, Odin or Mercury. One a god of war and kingship, the other of athletic speed; neither bookish or easily outdone in a fight.

and thats the problem, everyone thinks that the IE experience means something different

The trust of tattered veil spell discription has a missing string and the debuff too.

I would assume that gold level backers are really interested in the game. So it makes me wonder why they did not found that out earlier, reading the blog, interviews and watching videos would have made it clear in which direction the developer want to go.

Imo the "best possible spell at level up" dilemma hinders the system right now. I quoted your opinion on priest as a conversation starter because healing suffers the most from it. Its very hard to give other classes heals right now because even if your cipher or chanter is build as a damage dealer those heals might be the best spell/chants to grap at level up. If they are not good nobody would take them. That results in giving the priest all healing and almost no damage spells to avoid that problem complelty. To fix that they need to remove healing from might and add it to another skill.

Would be neat if the quest are not isolated. So for example letting the girl and baron life would trigger dialogues and more in one of the big cities.

Yeah it only suggests it so you are never sure, you basicaly let one stranger slaughter a whole family because another stranger thinks he did something evil. From what I get their are only bad endings to that quest, you kill the cultist that fought evil with evil, you let the girl go and let her slaughter the WHOLE family of the baron or you kill the baron. I dont know if their are more endings like telling the baron about the cult etc.Same with the ogre quest you will never know if the ogre really ate people or not. I like the serious approach but tbh I hope theirs a mix between dark and light harded quests.