archangel979

Scimitars are only a signature weapon of one fantasy Ranger. Normal dual weapon wielding uses short weapons like you said. And they don't flail around, it is a fighting style no better or worse than others. It has advantages and penalties, but fighting in tight spaces is not one of its penalties.

I would like to see out of combat buffs as well. But I would like them to go D&D 5 route and have them limited to one active. In D&D 5 buff spells need you to keep Concentrating on them. While that does not stop you from casting regular spells, if you cast another spell that needs you to Concentrate, that one overrides the one that was active. Main reason OE decided to kill out of combat buffs is so the battles would not be determined by how many buffs you cast before it, but D&D5 solution lets us have our cake and eat it too. And D&D5 implemented this because crazy buffing before combat was a problem in earlier versions of D&D as well.

I would rather if people just stopped posting and let it die.

I think we can at least agree to disagree. We obviously want different design from games. I don't care about "degenerative gameplay" and prefer if game let me decide what is good or not, instead of limiting my options through game design. Some of your here think differently. Lets leave it at that. You cannot change my mind and I cannot change yours.

Maybe because that is so basic there would be a riot if it was not in the game :D

Talents and feats are not needed it two things are fixed: 1. Racial bonuses are meaningful - these bonuses are kind of like traits. In fallout you didn't get to chose your race so you chose your level 1 traits. 2. Class abilities allow you at least two choices at each level up. Instead of feats the class options can be rolled into class abilities.

It doesn't matter what you, specificially, do or for what reasons you do it. What matters is what the majority would most likely do and why. And how do you know what the majority will do? You can also speak only for yourself. Also this majority wants Skyrim level mechanics and Diablo 3 level action combat. Should PoE have those? Where do you draw the line?

I don't agree with melee ranger without animal. How will I make my Drizzt?

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design. It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices. Nobody is railroading/removing your choices, you just won't be able to exploit them for XP. So if you'll make a choice, you'll do it because you wanted to or because *gasp* it was simply fun to do it. I don't exploit XP, and even if I did that is my choice because I find it fun. Of course they are railroading me.

Indeed, except that it's a bad design choice, unlike having 4 difficulties. Says you. I say differently. What now? I dunno. End of discussion? It was long time ago.

No, it is same. The difference is that game devs know players will savescum and they expect them too. So they design fights that will take advantage of that while players don't feel like the fights are too tough. BG2: ToB was made similarly, most enemies had immunities and abilities that you could not find out about before you fought it. So you died and tried again and again. The game was built around save scumming. On the other side, Xcom could be finished on Classic(or Normal) Ironman without needing to know in advance all enemy strengths. Just by your conservative ways of playing you could deal with all new enemies and still continue without needing to savescum to finish the game.

As for WL2, people that complain more often than not just want to succeed at all rolls. Complaining about savescumming is actually a complaint about it taking so much time to always succeed. The threshold system is just such a system for people that want to always succeed. Same for all those minigames for unlocking and such (I don't remember last time I failed one of those in a game). The WL2 RNG is meant to be failed on occasion with the penalty being needing to waste time savescumming or giving up and continuing with a failure (oh damn, how will poor player's Ego survive that...). You just don't understand that and you think its purpose is to always succeed like those other games.

This. By the very nature of the ability to save the state of your game whenever/wherever, you are allowed to re-do things for different outcomes. Doesn't mean that the "rules of the game" are "just reload whenever you want a different outcome! 8D!" Even if that WAS the intention, it would STILL be terrible design, because the game's basically saying "we want you to always be able to get the optimal outcome on anything, but we want you to have to go through a bunch of random, redundant reloads until you actually get it! 8D!" That would be the most convoluted/inefficient design ever. You might as well just make Wizards cast a spell at random. And you'd have to reload and try again to get the spell you actually wanted, saving in between each success. Oodles of fun. Most games support save scuming in one way or another and build their game around it. Any game that has hard bosses where you have to learn its move before you can beat him are games that support savescuming. The Devs expect players to load previous save and go at it again and again until they succeed. And this has been going on since the games existed. Even Pacman was a savescumming game where it was expected that you would be trying same levels again and again but load game was the start not wherever player wanted. So when you are complaining about bad design you are complaining about who knows how many games. Shadowrun Returns had a kind of anti savescum save system where you could only save game at start of the mission and people went berserk because of it and accused the devs of being bad and not having real save system.

The game encourages you by having XP improve your character through leveling. Players having to police themselves is bad design. It is worse design if devs think they know how I want to play and railroad my choices.

A choice implies that it was deliberate. It seems more likely that it is simply a result of the mechanical design. I doubt there are many developers that sat down for a meeting to discuss how they can implement save scumming in their game. One of developers from InXile forums (Sea): https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9758&p=128998#p128820

Indeed, except that it's a bad design choice, unlike having 4 difficulties. Says you. I say differently. What now?

Good thing you are not playing a rogue or a fighter in IE type cRPG then, but you are playing the whole party. It is unfair to compare the experience of playing a single character both in such a computer game and PnP to a party based game.

The game didn't encourage you, it was your choice. That XP is not needed to continue playing the game. It was only in your brain that you felt you somehow would fail if you didn't do it. Don't blame the system for your own needs/wants.

Why?

They also knew a good number of players would want to play on Easy so they included that as well. Allowing savescuming was design choice just like having 4 difficulties is a design choice. Savescuming reduces the difficulty of the game and as such is not much different then difficulty sliders. You just choose to see it differently just because there is no button that says "Savescuming: Yes?". But the game does not limit you at all from setting the difficulty to Easy at any time, it is purely player choice to not set it on Easy. So also choose to not savescum if you are looking for more difficulty.

You can tell yourself that but it is no different.

Well trap/lock XP is still better then nothing. It worked well in IE games because other classes also had way to "disable" traps and open locks but only rogue got XP for it. It was a good system. But now, with everyone being able to take Mechanics with rogue having no advantage and no Open Lock spells, the same system cannot just be c/p from IE.

And that is your choice. Devs said they didn't want on purpose to remove people choices. My choice is to not savescum. Devs let both of us play as we want. What you people ask for is same as asking for only one difficulty in the game and then you complained that because there is easy difficulty you are forced to play on easy because that is most efficient. So tell me, do you play on Easy and if you don't why? It is after all most efficient way to play and the game does not make it hard to play on easy?

Save-scumming is not problem as itself, but it can become problem if using save-scumming is most efficient or in worst case necessary way to play the game, then one could argue that there is something wrong in how game mechanics are designed, especially how rewards and punishments are designed. In WL2 it is not necessary, main quest cannot be stopped by a random roll (outside of combat :D).

I forgot how many points you get to spend during character creation, but I know you can invest a fairly high amount in the stats that favor raise action points, skill points and combat initiative. Those things are useful for every type of character. There's really no point in not picking them. The game is combat-heavy and getting turns more often (combat initiative) and getting to do more on your turn (action points) are undoubtedly the best benefits you can get. Having more and better skills is also always the best thing, whether combat skills or non-combat skills. You cannot max Int and have 10 AP and big CI. Also you need someone with good Charisma and Leadership or your NPCs will be going rogue all the time. Also Luck reduces the chance of critical failure and increases the chance of critical success. And ignoring non-combat skills is not wise as you can run out of ammo and medical supplies if you cannot open enough containers (I seen people complain about it). It does reward savescumming. If you can pass every skill check in the game or maximize your HP by reloading, that's a reward. Save/(re)load is simply another part of a game's mechanics. You can design a game where skills don't have a random chance of success, you can design a game where you can only save at checkpoints, etc. The player is completely free to use these mechanics however he wishes. It's the designer's responsibility to regulate this (if he so wishes), not the player's. No, you want to savescum. The game just does not make it extra hard to stop you. It has skill use that needs few seconds so each time you savescum you need to wait a bit. And you cannot pass all skill checks, sometimes if your skill is too low it says Impossible. Random skill chance is fun, saving at checkpoints in a big no-no for PC games. Yes, the player is free. He is also free to not savescum like I am playing WL2 (except if one my rangers dies). The game give you the option to savescum or not, it is still your choice as the player to do it or not.