archangel979

Missile spell is bad. Casting it vs targets next to caster you don't even see it. There is a noticeable lack of Sleep spell. Characters need a getting up from prone animation and picking stuff up from ground animation, this is not 1998 anymore. Backer characters are just badly made. You click on them and you get a wall of text, wtf? Why couldn't you talk to them and get that info through a conversation?! This way they are pathetic as bonus for those backers and they stand out in the gameworld for everyone else. They sure don't motivate me to back any future OE game on KS at a level to get my own NPC (I don't have one in PoE but after seeing this I would not want to). Gibs with a wand, really? Please keep dibs to realistic weapons like the big ones. The lack of ingame music and sound, I don't know if those are missing in those levels or if they were turned off. But atmosphere was crap as a result most of the time both in the wilderness and in the town. I hope the first town has plenty of spells, I don't expect number like in Beregost as it seems smaller but I hope lots.

I don't have access to PoE beta but I been playing IWDEE and in tough fights (like those in expansion content) I would pause every two seconds as well. But that was lvl 10+ content so it might be expected although I had to pause much more than in BG2 lvl 10+ content. My guess would be it comes down to how lethal combat is. In those fights it was very lethal and my choices changed from round to round and sometimes I needed to choose to use a potion of extra healing during a round or change to new target. My point is that needing to pause a lot in PoE might be coming from super lethal combat as much as everyone being too fast. BG had much easier combat where you could easily get away by selecting everyone and focus firing on one target and then on next. Only some battles needed finer control. Combat more similar to IWD was one of the goals of PoE from KS. I would suggest people that have not played IWD or didn't play it in a long time to go play it now and not only base their expectations of PoE on BG games.

For the 3rd time... there's a counter to EVERYTHING in BG2. To protect against Imprisonment during a battle, any intelligent mage will cast Spell Immunity (abjuration). It will grant you immunity to imprisonment for many, many rounds. It's a 5th level spell, which means your mage/wild mage/sorcerer will have access to it (many copies of it, even) several dozen hours before ever facing anything that can toss an imprisonment at him. And in case you're thinking to yourself: "well, it seem silly to waste a spell slot on a spell that will only come in handy in very rare (almost never) instances when someone might Imprison you".... Nope. Spell Immunity has several uses in BG2. A good mage will always have it at hand anyway. The fact that you can use it to protect you from Imprisonment is actually kind of trivial in the grand scheme of things. When I play a mage in BG2, I typically find myself using its enchantment version right at the outset of any major battle because I dislike getting disabled by mind effecting spells. But I digress. Here I am ranting again...in an obnoxiously offensive debate that shouldn't be happening. There is no comparison between BG2's magic system and PoE's "magic" system. One is gloriously awe inspiring, while the other is an insult to the very concept of "magic" in a fantasy RPG. Spell Immunity is kind of required to take down Kangaxx

Let me add a bit more about engagement. With current implementation if I see anyone go for my archers or mages I will move them instantly away before engagement can be enabled. Than that will result in lots of pausing while I play the kiting game. It will be stupid. Why would I do that? Because in IE games when a melee guy comes closer to my mage or archer I can let him do that for a short while. If things become tough I can move one of my melee guys to help without a crazy penalty (except he will bring those attacking him with him) and I can try to run away with the mage to force the enemy to continue attacking the melee guy. In PoE melee guy will be stuck in engagement and mage will be stuck as well if he lets enemy start it. So my ranged will be running around like a headless chicken the whole fight until melee is free to come and help them. Not a fun concept or gameplay.

1. The hero character either dispatches henchman fast or just ignores them. They use many moves to do that and PoE cannot have all these animations. So you can simulate it by not having engagement be so punishing. 2. The relevance was that I was not talking out of my butt and that there are real life moves designed to go through those blocking you. After doing the roll you can as easily run past the person and go attack someone else. If that person then decides to follow you or attack someone else it not a question of engagement anymore but question of AI in PoE. And it is not a hard move, you will not be doing it with heavy armor but a trained warrior could do it in any other armor or he could use a shield or just unbalance his enemy long enough to pass through. Currently PoE does not offer any options but to suffer terrible, terrible damage that kills any movement. 3. Nobody said anything about strolling away. It is very possible to move in melee while facing your target without giving any benefits to that target. It could be done that moving out of melee engagement slows down the movement of your guy until he can exit it. 1v1 you should not be able to exit it (you could not in IE games as AI would just continue following you) but that is why you got allies that wil sue their engagement with the person chasing you to help you. 4. Using potions should not be an instant action anyways, while you drink them enemy should get an attack or two in. There should be a bonus to that attack during your drinking action just like I would give a bonus to attack vs someone using a ranged weapon or currently casting a spell. But his has nothing to do with engagement mechanic. If you manage to break engagement with help of allies you can do whatever your want after that (including drinking potions behind a rock). BTW, I am not promoting removal of engagement (although I don't consider it necessary in a real time game), but making it so tactical movement is a valid choice for all characters and not just those that have special actions.

If the movies show us something they show us that you are totally wrong. Heroes in movies all the time get past obstacles and get to their wanted target without getting murdered by the obstacle. If you are using your free hand example I want to use my use the shield to push them aside example. Or do a roll on the ground to get to other side (which is actually realistic: I did Ninjutsu for a few months and that was a standard dodge of a sword attack to create a good chance for a flanking counterattack) All of these are not options in these games and as such a middle ground needs to be used. Engagement mechanics need to have a gamist and simulationist reason to exist. It is a bad gamist reason to not let combat movement have a important part in battles. Xcom biggest fun is doing good movement to positions of good cover or flanks, so was in ToEE and in Blackguards and Expeditions: Conquistadors and so was in IE games where I would always move my guys to block doors and limit enemy engagement area so minimize amount of attack on my guys at same time). Moving back to heal is a valid gamist reason to make combat more tactical. In IE games often enemies would follow and I would lose formation and more enemies would get into attack positions so it wasn't without its cost.

Oh and setting up Contingencies and Sequencers in IE games and NWN and running into situations where they are useful or saved you felt like you are the smartest guy on the planet. No other game ever gave me this feeling. And I am not talking about putting two magic missiles in sequencers but setting up Stoneskin and Shadowdoor to activate once your health dropped below 50%.

Because there is no way to know which spells the enemy has until fighting against them, apart from meta-knowledge. You could always have these kind of counterspells memorized out of paranoia, but then again, you are sacrificing spell slots for the rest of the 80% of battles where the spell is not cast by the enemy. Apart from that, consider that in an actual ADnD game, strong spells require materials to be cast which are often rare and expensive for higher level spells. This restriction balances the strong but occasional spellcasting, but it is not implemented in any of the IE games, so spells tend to be way stronger than they were supposed to be in the original material. Lore dictates that wizards are powerful, but also that they spent most of their time to research spells and searching for components. There is some kind of trade off which makes it ok, but that's not in any of the IE games, basically stripping all disadvantages from them. What are you talking about. If you are at levels that you have a wizard with access to freedom you can expect enemies with most powerful lvl 9 spell. Not having Freedom ready and complaining about Imprisonment does not compute. And as said, you can rest as cast Freedom than. I just saved my sorcerer from Feeblemind that way in IWDEE two days ago (and found a bug where one spell that says it removes Feeblemind does not actually do that). And those spell component restriction are not needed in IE games because wizards lack so many powerful spells like Teleport, Fly and the rest. Not to mention you got no chance to hit a Improved Invisible Fly wizard without see invisibility while in IE you just get a small penalty to hit. Also IE games are much more combat heavy than PnP and you got no scouting abilities with your wizard. Normally you would send magical scouts and then research your enemies, while the IE games don't allow you that.

While I agree with Sensuki that AoO in real time game is not needed and should be done with AI instead in PnP it had more than one use. Its primary use was to balance (or make more realistic) ranged combat and spellcasting when someone with a sword is next to you and trying to murder you. Melee person has an advantage in this situation and AoO was added to mechanically represent that advantage. Engagement does not even work to do this, at least in IE games if you held a ranged weapon all melee would get a +4 to attack and you had -4 to attack with ranged weapon if you tried to attack them back. Wizards spells could all be easily interrupted with any damage.

Someone running like crazy for their life not being able to be hit easily with melee? Oh my God!!! How is that possible?! That is completely unreal! LOL. Rock, paper, scissors? That is much more fun that throwing a rock at each other and waiting until one falls down first! Spells that make you load the game? I am sure you never loaded a game when someone got stabbed to death! And Imprison is easily reversed with Freedom spell. What, you don't have it? Why are are you attacking someone with Imprison then? I agree that spellbook UI can always be done better but without changing its strategic nature. Oh, you didn't mean that? Well there are plenty of simpler games with mages that don't need to use strategy and planning, why are you on IE spiritual successor forums? Wizards and Clerics have good spells if you prepared them in advance. Once you use them, they rely on Fighters to take care of business. it is faster to clear stuff with fighters and let casters only buff and debuff. In IWDEE that I am playing my Paladin and Archer do most damage, not my cleric or sorcerer (Archer is beast mode with 5 attacks and 10+ damage per attack with nonmagical arrows without any buffs and he always hits except on roll of 1). Proficiency system does not favor Fighters, other classes get different bonuses. Fighters get to be best at one weapon. By claiming this you show you don't understand it. Game breaking spells? Lol. I rarely find Web to be useful in my IWDEE play. It is about creating good encounters. BG1 was not known for its difficulty, and in BG2 enemy saves were good enough for web to only be useful sometimes. Yes there were good combinations like sending a poison immune tank in front and using Cloudkill to kill everyone that surrounded him but that was not average play. Finding such combinations is called Game Mastery and it makes the game better when allowed in SP games as it lets players feel like they learned something and became better at the game. Plot invincible enemies? Wow, that is not possible! No game every had this! How can IE games dare to have such when no game in history has ever had plot invincible enemies!! Plot structure is what it is. I has nothing to do with engine and type of game and everything to do with people writing it. Obsidian is not Bioware (BG2) so this point means nothing. Melee characters stoped other melee by understanding how AI works. I rarely had the need to stop enemy melee from attacking my backline. Inferior or superior strongholds means nothing, those are added content and nothing to do with basics of IE games. And nothing stopped you from playing with another class and enjoying that superior stronghold as well. Spells are good in IE games, it actually makes you feel like you are in a believable world where people fear wizards for a reason. In so many games lore says Wizards/Mages are this and that and they turn out pathetic. In IE games they are just as dangerous as lore says they are. Basilisks are a good point, I always hated their AI which could not recognize that you are immune to their gaze and would not tell them to bite you instead. As a creature of at least animal intelligence it can recognize when its main weapon is not working. It does not know why but it should be intelligent enough to either bite or run away.

I saw two dragons and something smaller that might have been some kind of wyvern or a baby dragon.

I just hope PoE will not have "collect 3 bear claw" type of quests that I read DAI is full of. Putting MMO type quests in a SP RPG is just a terrible idea. It does terrible, terrible damage to my brain cells.

Actually that was part of the tactics. Saying this means you want to play simple arpg games. In BG you had a choice if you wanted to engage enemy mage with everything you got including stripping his protections or if wanted to use that spellcasting to kill or debuff someone else. Enemy mages were rarely alone and often didn't **** up your party unless you ignored them for too long. Short term you could get rid of others first so you can use your whole party of the enemy mage.

I don't like these suggestions. I don't wizard spells to stop being strategic. I don't want a sorcerer instead of a wizard. Wizard spells need to be more powerful, there need to be many more options more similar to IE spells and he needs to have more encounter spells.

Yea, visually the game is awesome. They just need to capture the combat feel of IE games now.

You can also kill the red dragon in BG2 at levels 10+ if you got enough spellcasters.

Looks awesome

I didn't have much trouble with them. I am talking about the Luremaster quest guards in expansion for IWD.

I've never really had a problem with units getting stuck in the IE games, although it requires a little bit of manual control sometimes to get it right. Sometimes units will get stuck on the edge of another unit and just stand there, and you just have to give them a little bit of help, because for some reason they can't see that there's free space. Obviously it's not as good as Starcraft's pathfinding It is a problem because you need to pause twice to fix it or lose attacks by doing it in real time. The problems like these should be eradicated, pausing should be for tactical decisions only not helping your guys do basic stuff like getting to weapon range And I was just doing Spectral Guards fights in IWD and damn every second counts and I already paused too much in those fights. And I changed my tune about not needing to pause a lot in IE games lol, I guess many fight are too easy in IE to need lots of pausing :D

As a person that has been playing IWDEE for the last week I can confirm that pathfinding is no better when it matters (battles indoors). Characters still don't know how to pass anything in formation without bumping into each other and trying to go back and find alternate routes, some characters still decide to go a different way from the rest that would be good if there was not a river blocking that way :D and characters still get stuck on each other when I select two or more and tell them to attack same target in melee. Not to mention ranged characters being just a bit out of range of their target and blocked by allies in small area and not being able to squeeze through.. These are all problems that I don't want to see in PoE.

Or course I will not dictate it, but I am trying to tell you that you and others keep repeating same points page after page and that I consider most of that input useless as a result. Secondly OE currently does not care about our input on these issues and that also makes the input useless.

Yes, but you guys have almost 10 pages of same stuff. It is completely pointless to waste anyone's time reading this with same arguments and same info. All the while those that are important to read and understand it (OE) don't think there is a problem or don't plan to do anything about it at the time. They trust their QA department more than their beta backers. So lets just let OE continue digging their own hole and hope they find a gold chest in it instead of not being to exit it anymore.

I think you guys are wasting too much time on this now. OE does not even care at the moment and Sawyer does not see any problems (as he told Sensuki). Lets all have happy holidays and come back next year to see how PoE stands then. Either they will change stuff or not, no going around in circles on forum will change that. At this point I can only have blind faith that eventually it will all work out and be good on release.

Maybe the should add Story difficulty where party members are immune to damage like IWDEE has :D

Except you are ignoring again that CC spells also need accuracy and don't need bonus damage. You are also ignoring the fact that people want reliable big spells, not those that to bigger damage on rare occasion they hit. It does not mean much if by casting that 1/day spell over 10 casts does more damage with Might, but that it does not Graze when you need it in that one important fight. Also +10 Accuracy ups the chance of not losing 50% by 10% and 10% chance to get +50% more. DT system makes Grazes terrible (Armor should not stop spells anyways, I hate that they do) and 20% bonus damage does not help it enough. As I said, on at will attacks that graph is correct and Might is better, but when you got your 1/day or 1/encounter you always want to maximize that it does not Graze, especially if it is not a damage spell/ability.