Clean&Clear

This is definitely true, and it is IMO tied with the very high per hit damage. If there was lower per hit damage and the fights would generaly last longer, there would be more attacks thus more attack rolls and this could make deflection increase worth even for low deflection characters, because the improvement would have time to show.

Not a bad idea, but it would allow pre-buffing (not really, but technically), so I don't think they would go with it. AWith the length of buffs we currently have - prebuffing would be very, very hard even if allowed before combat (so yes, only technically). best case scenario a player would get a few seconds of buffs. The whole war on prebuffing is stupid, but that's just for another thread. I totally agree. Not a bad idea, but it would allow pre-buffing (not really, but technically), so I don't think they would go with it. We need to stop treating "pre-buffing" or specifically "avoiding pre-buffing" as a serious argument in favour of the "Combat Only" mechanics. Not only is pre-buffing a non-issue by itself, but in PoE, it's a literal non-issue. There are no buffs, to the best of my knowledge, that can even be considered comparable to the buffing system of the IE games. Actual, systematized, long-term Pre-buffing is not an issue in PoE, and it won't become one just because the "Combat Only" crazyness is dropped. If you buff before combat, you are expending valuable time (because buffs are short-term) and resources (limited per-day spells), a very viable, acceptable trade-off. Now, there may be other reasons a "start/stop combat"-toggle might not work with the current setup (I can think of a few issues at the top of my head) but we really need to stop taking "But the pre-buffing!" serious. I was trying to get the devs perspective why they wouldn't implement it. No prebuffing is a design goal they set on the very beginning and mechanically they are holding to it absolutely even though it has IMO proven to be just wrong (I mean the mechanical solution). I really don't see the pros of the mechanic. I started a thread about it here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70324-removal-of-combat-only-suggestions-and-solutions/ Unfortunately, it didn't evolve into a larger discussion. I still hope combat only will be removed at least in the expansion. Would be quite difficult due to save/load issues I guess. But it would be really nice.

Not a bad idea, but it would allow pre-buffing (not really, but technically), so I don't think they would go with it.

Yeah, Veil is just useless right now. I wouldn't make it per encounter for the same reason Sensuki pointed out. I would make it a per rest high level really strong defense ability (something crazy like + 80 deflection to make it count, literally impenetrable) that doesn't work against firearms, as it was advertised in earlier interviews. The problem however could be programming AI to deal with it properly.

And what's the problem with this? It's actually allright that when you make a party like this and all of you chars are bashing one enemy, they can interrupt him to death. One can assume that you will get annihilated by many other groups of enemies throughout the game with party composition like this. Nothing broken here.

Off-topic: There definitely should be one.

Or add an integer to interrupt recovery penalty. The way I described above wouldn't make concentration more important for fast attacking chars, with integer it would.

I think some problems of the attribute system could be solved by improving interrupt itself. Right now, interrupt is very weak, since for warriors you only add the duration of interrupt animation to their recovery. Against casters, you stilll can cancel current spellcasting, but since spells are generaly weaker and more importantly casting times are much shorter in many cases, interrupt is just bad atm (well, literally, atm it's strong cause perception is bugged :-P ). I think what interrupt should do is when a character gets interrupted, it resets his recovery time and he has to recover fully again. This would make interrupt considerably stronger against melee enemies, and at the same time make concentration much more important. This way, there would be 2 more worthwhile stats to put on attributes, making it easier to balance them.

PoE combat is definitely faster than in IE games. I didn't use slow mode throughout the beta, because i was used to normal speed and pausing from the IE games. But after I was watching the latest Josh's stream where he used it a lot, I decided to give it a try. And I must say, it worked really well for me! The fights actually look great in slow mode, you have time to enjoy watching the combat, and you don't have to pause nearly as much because you are able to use many abilities in realtime without screwing up. I almost think fights in the game, at least the harder ones, are meant to be played in slow mode. The only drawback is that if you quit slow mode in the middle of combat, it suddenly feels like fast forward speed, not normal. Personally I could do with overall slower combat, but whatever.

Adam, can you please be more specific about the design problems this would bring? I don't see any in BG for example. Summoned creatures can't enter building or traverse neighbouring areas, but that's just a minor thing, much better than nothing. Thanks for the reply in advance.

Combat only: I started a thread here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/70324-removal-of-combat-only-suggestions-and-solutions/, please continue discussing this there.

After the last BB update, there has been a renewed discussion about the combat only restriction on abilities in the game and some called for it's removal. Adam Brennecke commented on this a bit, which is great (Thx Adam!), because we can adress the points he mentioned. There are 2 main reasons why combat only was introduced - no pre-buffing and ease of programming. 1. No pre-buffing reason A) Pre-buffing in Eternity is effectively removed or at least severely limited by the short duration of buffs. Apart from food, most of the buffs are so short that you can't actually stack them, or you could (without combat only) stack like 2 of them, start combat and "exploit" the first 10 seconds with pre-buffed party. That's not the 'real' pre-buffing that was meant to be removed. Since 'real' pre-buffing is already prevented, there is no need to have a mechanic that does the same. B) Pillars of Eternity is a role playing game, where both combat and 'story' take place in the same environment (don't know how to express it precisely), and mechanic like combat only just severely doesn't fit in a game like this. You can have combat only abilities in games like Heroes, where combat is taking place on a separate combat map, but in PoE this mechanic is too obviously just an unlovely game-y solution, that is detrimental to gameplay and breaks (YES, the I-WORD :-P ) immersion. Preventing pre-buffing with short cooldowns is ok from this perspective. Preventing it with combat only is'nt. It's a roleplaying game. I want to role play a guy who likes to drink his speed potions in town and just run around the streets like crazy. Towns are in the game. Speed potions are in the game. Yet I can't do it? Such a shame 2. Programming reasons As Adam said in his posts, not having combat only abilities brings difficulties with save/loading. I'm not a programmer, so I can't say much about it. Since there were many save/loading issues throughout the beta, I can understand taking this solution to make things easier. However, there are many games around without this problem, and I guess Obsidian devs are experienced and skillful enough to overcome this. If there is not enough time left before release, just do it in one of the patches. There is one issue Adam mentioned particularly: Right now, some of the per encounter abilities in BB aren't even combat only (Lay On Hands for example), and you can use them freely. So the obvious solution would be to make all per encounter abilities like this. However, even though Lay on Hands doesn't have any effect outside of combat, it feels weird that you can use it repeatedly without restriction. So my solution to this would be - COOLDOWNS. Now, we already have 1 sort of strange 'cooldown' in the game - regeneration of endurance after an encounter. What i suggest is giving per encounter abilities (and only them) a proper cooldown, that doesn't refresh during an encounter. I'm not sure about the duration, but I think it could be similar to the time needed to regen full endurance on a character. If I'm not mistaken, endurance regen speed is an integer, not a percent of full endurance, so there would be some problems with the 'right' duration of the cooldown, because more 'healthy' characters take longer to recover, but this is solvable. Right now, I feel the game promotes classic cheesy tactic of pulling enemies one by one, because everytime you pull one, it is a new encounter and you have all per encounter abilities at your disposal. My solution would discourage this tactic a bit, because even if you didn't suffer any damage, you would have to wait a while for you abilities to refresh. Tactic still usable and viable, but less comfortable, which is actually a good thing from design perspective IMO. Off-topic: I feel the fast regen of endurance after a fight promotes pulling one by one as well, so i would advocate slowing endurance regen (per encounter cooldowns could be shorter than full endurance regen in this case), but that's a different thing.

Combat only topic: Let's make a separate thread about this. It's quite an easy to implement change (I guess) with a huge impact on gameplay, so it's worthwhile to try and advocate changing this before release. Or at least in a patch.

This would be great.

The ratios between character sizes, map sizes and particular combat area sizes are different, and in this circumstances the movement feels too fast IMO.

The movement speed is too high, got this feeling both from the beta and from watching the recent stream, sometimes slow mode felt almost like the right speed and when Josh returned to normal it felt like fast forward mode. Don't know about the LoS, it was bigger in the first versions of beta and it didn't feel good, but maybe it's been reduced too much.

YES! Deflection gone from intelect . I guess I can live with dump stats for particular classes (back to IE roots), but I really hated deflection from Intellect. Guess that's exactly how it works. Only Deflection is changed, the other 3 defences were derived from particular stats from the beginning. The only change is that it is now explicitly stated.

Nothing makes less sense than gaining deflection from Intellect, so it would sadly fit in

Exactly. I feel combat is starting to come together in v364 and feels much better (apart from obvious known issues I don't want to get into here because they are thoroughly discussed elsewhere). However, I also have the feeling that combat is nearly always over before it has even started. Decreasing per hit damage (and I can imagine even as much as 30-40% will be the way to go) would make combat feel much better and put more emphasis on what the player actually does during the combat, not just how it's initiated. Initiation is currently way too important, not that it shouldn't be, but good initition is by far the most decisive factor of victory at the moment. Alongside decreasing per-hit damage, I would increase duration of most buffs and debuffs. Currently they are so short to correspond with combat lenght (30 sec base debuffs often aspire to last the whole combat), but the 10 sec effects just don't feel good (actually it feels quite bad IMO).

I strongly disagree, because kiting is silly tactic that works only because AI programming is poor. Which of course don't mean that players should not use it in their tactics repertory if it works in the game, but if it works it is mostly because developers didn't do perfect job. The thing that's called "kiting" in (not only) IE games is one of the core elements of playing RTS games. It is a fact that IE games combat felt pretty similar to RTS games, one of the main reasons is the possibility to kite (and the general feel of moving units around during combat). Kiting isn't wrong, it is a logitimate tactic. As Shrek mentioned, it is the goal of AI to be potent enough to respond to kiting so it's harder to kite properly. If you dislike kiting, it means you dislike one of the core elements that constituted the feel of combat in IE games.

IMO it is irrelevant and superfluos information considering battle. When reading combat log, you want the information about what just (or earlier) happened, you don't need to know whether the game was paused or not at that moment. Game paused is a status information that should be displayed somewhere else so there is more space in the log for important information.

Source?

Great news!

That's not an argument in case there is no item damaging mechanic in the game. Your armor would eventually get damaged too in the real world, but the game does not contain this mechanic. So either way all of the equipment (including yours) would have to be subjected to damage, or none. The latter is the case for this game.