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?

I think the empower system is one of the really interresting additions, it just needs more tuning and wider usability.

What you're describing is actually correct behaviour, but apart from that, yes, pathfinding is improved upon in Deadfire, the push effect is helping a lot.

Pls no. Making spells cast fast adds even more to the speedy combat issue. If the problem is that casting a spell takes more than half of the combat and then the spell is over too soon, just make the combats last longer in general and make spell effects last longer and generaly make spells more rewarding. Not saying spells don't need some balancing, just don't make everything cast in a blink of an eye, it would feel unrewarfing and bland.

I don't like grazes on everything, I think there are enough hits even without them atm, and the average miss ratio on autoattacks for an average character is not too bad, it is nowhere near what it was in old IE games on low levels, which IIRC was the argument for introducing grazes in PoE1 in the first place. I think hitting all the time for not that significant damage doesn't feel rewarding, while hitting every third attack while doing considerable damage does.

This. I also love the long casting times, the problem atm is in spells not having enough of an impact after they have been casted. Rather then having quick casted spells that barely do anything, I would like to have long casted spells with significant impact. With long casting times, another strategic layer of interrupting enemy casters and not getting interrupted yourself while casting comes into play, which is good.

Grazes are not coming back in full scale like they used to be in PoE1, just changing how they work for CCs and so. I also like the removal of grazes on normal attacks and how certain abilities now focus on grazing as a benefit. EDIT: Nevermind, watched the stream again now and I must say I'm not too sure about the idea of bringing grazes back on a larger scale, I like the clear distinction between hitting and missing and I like it when actually hitting something has a solid impact, and grazes make it feel kind of meh, but I don't want to judge in advance.

Having not enough skill points to be good at everything is kind of the point of having skills and skill points in the first place and part of roleplaying and RPGs. The argument that there is too many must have skills is not really an argument for getting more skill points, but it shows an achieved design goal, which is good. There has to be balance between the number of skill points and difficulty of in game checks, sure, but that is impossible to judge from the beta, since the area and the level you're at is taken out of context. We don't know at what level you are going to arrive to Tikawara in the full game and we don't know the difficulty of the area as well, it may be different from the beta.

Because it's not just Ciphers who are affected, and that a mathematically unbalanced game is not enjoyable for those who have to deal with it? Also you say you love playing Priests, but they are also one of the classes adversely effected by this change. Under this new change you will need Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Resolve, As opposed to Might, Dexterity and Intelligence of old. The reason this is so bad is that Priests although not to the degree of Ciphers, still relied on their weapon. For a majority of their career their spells are about strengthening themselves and their allies. You don't think it's immersion breaking for a priest of Berath to absolutely suck with his greatsword because it was the only way for his spells to matter at all? As i said in the previous thread lets take two statlines. This is with a Death Godlike who is a multiclass Priest of Berath/Devoted fighter to fully realized the RP of the Pallid Knight. Old System Might:18 Constitution:8 Dexterity:19 Perception:10 Intelligence:19 Resolve:3 New System Might:14 Constitution:8 Dexterity:10 Perception:10 Intelligence:18 Resolve:17 That is a -5% loss in duration, -6% loss in AoE size, a -27% action speed , -18 Ref, -12% melee damage, -8 Fort These are not little things, these are very large losses in overall efficiency. And if i were to run with a Cleric using the former statline just buffing myself and striding into combat. Not only will i have lost any ability to heal myself, but the Priest bonus spells per power level will be completely wasted as i have no ability to damage anything with them Somewhere in the equation you accidentally missed the +26 will and +14 deflection he gets in return. However, it doesn't matter anyway, because the important thing is not how the change affects specific classes or builds, because those can be changed afterwards. Stats' functionality is a fundamental design, and the goal to achieve here is for the system to provide as much meaningful and tough choices as possible, while reducing no-brainer choices, and this change probably comes closer to that. Specific classes and abilities can be tailored afterwards based on how stats work, not the other way around.

The normal combat speed is much better now than it was in PoE1, but it still feels a bit too hectic at times, and I believe it is mostly due to 2 things: movement speed and ranges+size of AoEs in general. These two things go hand in hand, so I'll talk about both of them, even though it's not technically combat speed related. One problem I had with PoE1 and it's at this point mostly the same in Deadfire beta is how short most ranges for ranged weapons and casting spells are. Coupled with that are really small AoEs even for traditional "big" AoE spells like fireball. From a thematic perspective, I would imagine that when casting a fireball in a relatively small room (e. g. the marked tomb in the top center of Poko Kohara second floor), the fireball should cover most of one half of the room, when cast from the other side. Right now, the proclaimed radius of fireball is 2,5 meters, which doesn't really feel good imo. I think it should be around 5m, then it would feel much better, like the good old fireball should. In-game example would be te current size of Merc. Priest Holy radiance. I know the sizes of AoEs were reduced due to it being hard to hit them, but this problem is now gone with retargeting, so they could be made bigger again. Also, I think the hazard of hitting your own characters is part of playing with big AoEs, and solving this through reducing their size imo doesn't feel good. For the ranges of weapons and spells, they are generaly quite short, and while for some spells and weapons it's intentional, even those that should be the long ones are often still quite short. Coupled with how fast movespeeds can get in combat, where most enemies can close the gap to your backline shooters in around 1 second, I feel like these things combined make the combat feel unnecessary cramped. It should feel like that in dark dungeons, but not on the surface in open maps. Oftentimes It's hard to react to an enemy fighter charging your back line mage, because your mage has to stand close because of his/her short range, and the enemy movespeed makes him get to your mage incredibly fast. While I don't think the game should be about kiting like IE games were, right now I feel like there is barely any kiting possible, and some amount of kiting would seem realistic, logical and would add more tactical options for you in the combat. For recovery times, I think they are generally fine, incereasing them could make the combat feel too idle. TL;DR: My feedback: Significatnly bigger AoEs, longer ranges and slighty slower movespeeds would imo make the combat pace and combat in general feel great. Slowmode: I think it fits the "play our own way" nature of RPGs, so it would be nice to have it for the people that want it, considering how well it worked in PoE1. EDIT: I went through some more fights trying to focus on movespeeds, and I'm not so sure about slowing them down anymore. Would still be interesting to try it though.

I actually don't really pay attention to damage types hahah, even on Hard it makes almost no difference at all. What matters are damage multiplier stacking, damage stacking enchantments and DR bypass and disables/debuffs. After that it's all alpha strike and positioning, if you get that right and don't play like a doofus - combat is over. In the Infinity Engine games, I did NOT remotely play like this at all. Character building is fun, but combat isn't really fun at the moment. Agreed, damage types are pretty much negligible.