Mayama

Its acutally quite hard to discuss attributes right now because the stats of everything are not balanced. Like Josh said in that balance interview. Edit: so for example INT duration impact would be a lot more significant if spells had reasonable base duration.

Well dual wielding in itself is not very realistic beside sword/dagger and similar stuff so why not

Because this turned into a "post your fav rpg music" thread here we go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znlHNvh-oNs

I never had that bug. I also never loot anything beside quest items in the demo. Could that be related?

A good analogy would be magic the gathering. I played it when I was young and it had two types of awesome cards. You had stuff like sengir vampires that people liked because they were just plain OP the mana/reward ratio was just wrong and they removed those cards in later editions. The other type of awesome cards that players remember were cards like stasis, those cards were build enablers. They let you play in a completly different way and enabled new strategies. They were not more powerfull than other decks but added more options to the game. I personaly think its better to aim for the second type of awesome items.

But where is the animated foliage?

So? I can show you a 2010 interview with Mike Laidlaw where he swears that Dragon Age 2 will be a deep and compelling epic. If you dont believe in the developers than why did you spend money on it?

The just need to add some specialisation skills, like for example: Musketeer, gives 20% damage and 10% acccuracy bonus when using a pistol or rifle. Select it and BAM! your jack of all trade master of none fighter is a firearm specialist. Such skills would also fix the problem that might influences the damage of all ways of damage.

I ignore your first sentence because it would result in a endless debate. Better for both of us I guess. http://kotaku.com/ho...-rpg-1625516832 Thats the Josh Sawyer balance article. You can read their that they did zero balance bevor the beta. The difference is that they try to balance the game. BG had the problem that they wanted to add tons of stuff but the AD&D license forced them to implement it in a way that made them unbalanced because their was no dungeon master to control all the over the top stuff flying around.

Their will be as many slap fights as their are oppinions on what the "spirit of IE games" actually is.

Aaah but that's the thing about BG2. You can play it on Insane and exploit-stuff like having your Simulacrum create an army of project images that spam the battlefield with timestop scrolls and Staff of the magi attacks, suddenly become so much fun to do. It only reveals how simple the combat system actually was. I'm calling your bluff. You're full of Sh*t and even you know it 1) we're discussing exploits that are discovered after several playthroughs of a time honored classic. 2) And even if someone were genius enough to discover such exploits on a first playthrough, it still doesn't render combat trivial, since BG2 is a game that crawls with hard counters to everything. Summoning an army of yourself works only sometimes. other times the enemy simply tosses a Death spell and the army disappears. "Exploiting" celestial fury + improved haste works sometimes. Other times the enemy just casts maze on you and *poof* you're no longer attacking him with Celestial Fury. you're no longer even there. Double clicking every 3 seconds on the Staff of the magi in order to become invisible works sometimes, other times the enemy has true sight active and suddenly you realize you're wasting your time doing USELESS things. etc. etc. etc. 3) Even Josh Sawyer agrees that BG2's combat isn't trivial, that it can be quite harsh with it's save-or-die, long lasting stuns, chance, etc. and has promised a more forgiving experience for PoE. No. If we were just dealing with "viewpoints" and "Opinions" here, I wouldn't bother responding to you. You're making *false* claims. factually disprovable false claims. And so I'm correcting you. Dude the caster army thing was mentioned in reviews when the game came out like many other inbalances or exploits. You just have to go to youtube and watch a random let's play to see that I dont make false claims. As I said bevor a well balanced game does not need build in inbalance and exploits for replayability. About images and death spells, their are ways to get around that problem. Baldur's gate is basically a sandbox full of tools that no one ever tried to balance. That is not what this game is all about and it was obvious from the very first minute of the kickstarter campaing. Afaik they talked a lot about all that stuff and why they dont want it in PoE. If you like that kind of game, PoE is not for you and they explicitly informed everyone about it multible times.

Aaah but that's the thing about BG2. You can play it on Insane and exploit-stuff like having your Simulacrum create an army of project images that spam the battlefield with timestop scrolls and Staff of the magi attacks, suddenly become so much fun to do. It only reveals how simple the combat system actually was. A balanced and deep strategy game does not need gimmicks to keep people entertained. It offers replayability through the different ways on how you can approach a situation. The most basic example would be chess, no expoits, no gimmicks, almost completly balanced but people are enjoying it for thousand of years. Its more like you dont get that different people have different views on things and that your point of view is not the absolute thruth about things. Reading through the beta forum suggests that the majority tends to favor a balanced game over a rollercoaster ride of expoits and imbalance.

LOL make that Blind Freak. There isn't a single sentence in your last post that I (and others) haven't already thrashed more than once. Go Play Dragon Age 2 or something and stop wasting your time with us. It has the rigidly policed, constrictingly balanced, totally unpowergameable, utterly-railroaded classes, abilities, and items that would make you scream "YES!!!!!". Go play the game on easy mode if you dont want a challange and fuel your power-mad fantasies. I really start to question if you are aware what balance acctually means.

So now you start to insult me because of the lack of arguments?

You dont want to know

You know you can use the robe and staff on everything that can multiclass, ever played something like a kensai/mage? All those options are insane power gamer options. So? PS: I'm not letting you move the goalposts. You can certainly powergame in Bg2. Who would ever argue otherwise? Also, What's your point? The powergaming is beyond the scope of what should be allowed. If a game lacks any challenge because you can powergame easily to levels that makes any content trivial than something is wrong. We dont talk here about power gaming like in most RPG'S where the maximum you can archive is beeing a good percentage better than your average hero. Their are tons of items, spells and class combinations in BG2 that make people question the thought process of the devs. Some people here act like that are minor balance issues. Stuff like robe of vecna that lets you instacast many spells or project images that lets you cast an army of yourself is not imbalanced its just broken.

Then bash Multi-classing, because THAT'S your culprit here, not the mage-weapon itself. Besides, if you're multi-classing then you've willingly gimped your mage progression in favor of being a better in Melee. That's also a balance in the system...or tradeoff, if you wish to use a more technical term. But you haven't trivialized combat. Its not a real tradeoff because that would mean that risk/reward is kinda balanced which is not. Its not some obscure exploit its common knowledge, everyone that played AD&D knew that multiclassing will rule such a high level campaign. The devs knew it, do you think they implemented "class X only" items without knowing that in the end everyone could use them? Its basicaly the first thing you do when you find those powerfull items, getting behind the restriction because the game gives you the tools to do so and encourages it. We could do a endless discussion about balance, itemization etc. here but baldurs gate2 was not balanced. I mean we are talking about basic stuff here not people doing solo runs with completly OP builds.

You know you can use the robe and staff on everything that can multiclass, ever played something like a kensai/mage? All those options are insane power gamer options.

What? I don't recall discussing the issue of exploitation at all. Only your silly claim that the staff of the magi = automatic win against Mage bosses. (in fact, it's suicide in many mage battles, since relegating your mage to melee when he could be using his spells instead is a MORONIC strategy to use against mages in BG2) You dont need to give it a real mage, multiclassing is the key here. You could get one mage level or you could multiclass with thief to get the "use every item in the game" ability.

It works because chaos shield stacks with itself

Hyperbole, thy name is Mayama. Celestial fury is edged. It's +3. It's magical. Its major affliction is a mind effecting property, And it's a katana. That's 5 strikes against it. It's useless against Clay golems, Enemies requiring +4 or better weapon to hit (read: Kangaxx, Demogorgon, Mellisan, Mantled mages) You can't hit any mage with it until you first dispel their Protection from magical weapons buff. Many enemies are immune to stun in BG2, and if you want to be effective with it even against trash mobs, you're going to need to spend proficiency points in Katana, which is a moronic thing to do since there are no other good Katanas in the game. That's called balance. And we can apply that to every weapon you cited, as well as every magic item in BG2 that you forgot to cite. So just equiping a item in the game and using it is exploiting for you? Seriously, if you can use an item in the INTENDED way or just play a class in the intended way like wild mages or kensai+x multiclass and it trivialize the whole game its not exploiting its just completly broken balance. Same with the katana, its not balance if the power gain is so immense compared to the effort you put into it. It just baffles me that people call items, spells or classes that trivialize any encounter balanced.

First level BB Wizard spell jolting touch, seems to have a cast animation.

Well uhm you could justify the gold by saying its a sacrifice to the gods.

Anyone else thinks that druids are way to damage orientated right now?

They also punch lions to death. Summons are awesome (OP?) for trap clearing and you can use your piglet for it too.