Clean&Clear

My main wish for the AI scripting is to allow me to script not the things I want to do myself, because I consider them the core of playing the game (casting spells, using abilities etc.), but the things I don't really want to do myself, because I find them a bit too tedious. Things I would like to have scripted are things like switching weapon sets for higher penetration/different dmg type and switching most of the modals on/off. Sure there are modals that are impossible to script because of their nature, but things like increased pen or accuracy traded for recovery time would be easy to script and quite handy. I'm sure there's more, those are just of the top of my head.

AI scripting and auto-attack behavior are two different things. If you keep the AI on, you will always have one of currently four auto-attack behaviours selected, but none of them does what I described.

I am missing an auto-attack behaviour that would make the character auto-attack anything in their range, but never move. Right now the only behaviour that kind of does that is defend self, but it's not really what I want for my melee front line. Defend-self allows a melee character to move to a ranged enemy that is attacking them, but sometimes the charater seems to move to the next enemy after killing the previous one even if they are not directly attacked, sometimes they don't start attacking even if there is another enemy right next to them (which is the correct behaviour based on it's description I guess). I would just like a simple auto-attack behaviour that says never move at all, but always auto-attack anything that is in your range.

I think this is the reasonable "I'm worried" take, and more or less where I am too. I don't particularly want to pay piecemeal for single quests with no overarching story. I mean, perhaps each content drop will be significant enough to make it worth it, I certainly hope so. But we've all seen DLC horror stories, and this emphatically isn't the same as the White March. It sounds more like the Tyranny DLC, which I thought was content light and uninteresting. Tyranny is owned by Paradox, their DLC practises are well known, but there's not really any reason to be worried that it would somehow change Obsidian's approach to DLCs. I personally don't see where all these concerns for the amount of content in the DLCs are coming from, WM 1&2 are sold together at 24E, Season pass for Deadfire was announced to be sold at 25$ I believe, se roughly the same, which indicates the 3 Deadfire DLCs combined could be about the same size as WM 1&2 combined, what's the problem here? The only appropriate concern I see is for people that like one big meaty expansion, yeah, we are not getting that this time around. I guess it's a matter of taste and you can never make everyone happy with a thing like this, because tastes differ. I personally don't mind 3 separate shorter stories, an example that springs to mind is Durlag's Tower in BG 1, imo that was a brilliant area and size-wise it could be around the same as the upcoming DLCs for Deadfire, so I'm fine with that. Also, the teased stories sound really cool, and 3 separate stories also mean some nice environment variety. Looking forward to them.

I think it's quite unreliable to judge the difficulty based on the beta, which is an area taken out of context, with your party put in on an arbitrary level with almost no gear at all. Things might be completely different in the full game.

I really like this idea. I find it quite tedious to adjust modals for half the party for each new enemy you're targeting, that's why I'm not too fond of the modals right now. I also don't like my characters acting by themselves, so I'm planning on playing with minimum AI enabled for my party. But if it would be possible to program toggling modals and changing weapons, that would definitely be a reason for me to start using the AI scripting more, and I think it would be a perfect fit. I feel like it would feel pretty good to see your characters change weapons and toggle modals based on what enemy they're fighting, while it doesn't necessarily feel good to do all the adjustments yourself.

This. The problem with the WM style expansion is, apart from scaling and balancing, that it takes you away from the main game and quest for too long, and it kinda feels weird jumping back into the suposedly important main quest to save yourself, after several weeks (or tens of hours in gaming time) of solving something else. I really like big side stories like this, but imo they should be set after the main game ends. Also, there will probably be more than one expansion, so one could be enriching the main game with some bits here and there, and one could add the whole new story seperate from the main game in a new area.

Just today I noticed my human-body fire godlike cipher is a bit faster than the mercenary fighter, but I wasn't able to find any effects relating to stride, so I got this idea. It would be nice if we had a total stride indicator on the stats screen. Same would go for total engagement limit, I know it's quite easy to compute yourself, but it would be nice to be able to tell it at a glance in cases where multiple things are effecting it (e.g. fighter using shield, in guardian stance, with some passives etc.) Also, is there a different base move speed for different races? Or classes?

I'm pretty sure they're not, Josh mentioned somewhere that death godlike heads require the biggest amount of work, so they're doing them last. Same could to some extent apply at least to the other godlikes.

I think these spells just haven't been changed yet, there's a lot of inconsistencies in various spells in the beta, that's probably one of the last things they're going to do. But it should be definitely changed in the way you proposed, to be in line with the inspiration/affliction system.

While I partly had the same feeling, I still think it was mostly because I had no idea what was I doing. A proper tutorial would really help a lot here. I'm still hoping that with the proper knowledge and various ship types, upgrades, different cannons and things like this, the ship combat will actually be quite a bit deeper and tactical. But I do have to agree that the encounters in beta don't seem too impressive.

This is a total must. The description of expert mode and it's purpose are pretty much the exact opposite of these markers.

Yeah, titan is ok, greater sand blights are very strong just with their regular autoattacks, but their Scirocco ability is just insane. It's pretty much a mass retreat anytime you seem them casting it.

You could easily make some, or even all spells be able to graze, or just give them an even higher acc bonus than they already have. It's mostly autoattack grazes that make it feel too cluttered in PoE1. Yeah, we don't know much atm, hopefully the next beta will arrive soon.

When the backer beta first hit, there was no graze on regular attacks, graze was a special property on some skills and abilities. In the first update, the graze on regular attacks was brought back. I think this change was a bit rushed and it wasn't really discussed in relation to combat speed, so I would like to talk about it a bit more. One criticism I have about PoE 1 combat is that it feels too busy, and I think it's mainly because of grazes. The constant hitting of everything makes it chaotic and hard to read. Also grazes imo don't feel rewarding at all, I very much prefer to miss more often, but to know that when I do hit the opponent, it makes an impact. With all the talk on combat speed, I think removing graze from autoattacks would also help this a lot. The lower dps output of characters would allow for shorter recovery times, because as many have said, watching your characters just doing nothing in combat doesn't feel very good. Even with shorter recovery times, the combat would feel less busy because of less hitting, while also feeling more rewarding, because your party would look more active. As a bonus, combat encounters could generally last a bit longer with this change, which would be good, because combat tends to be over too quickly imo. I really liked how graze was a special property in the first beta, it was just another thing to make abilities diverse. Knowing that it might be too late to make changes like this for final release, I think it's still worth discussing for future updates/DLC. What do you guys think?