Matt516

In other words - nightmarish. Just.. Nightmarish.

They can use weapons with almost all of their abilities. Just FYI. The unarmed damage is there as a bonus (and what a bonus - they outdamage other fast weapons of comparable quality by lvl 4!).

+20 damage if engaged by 2 or more enemies? Is this really what this ability does? How is that not horrendously overpowered? That's got to be a bug.. surely...

So I've been looking at One Stands Alone... you get the bonus if engaged by 2 or more enemies, not 3. And it gives you plus TWENTY damage when engaged by 2 enemies. 20. Two-zero. Umm... is this a bug? This seems like a bug. No way can it be that good.

Worth discussing, I suppose, but not a huge deal IMO. Duration and AoE used to be on two separate attributes (Duration was on Resolve for a while IIRC), which helped things. I'd agree that INT right now is VERY strong.

This guy's been working through how to manipulate the dialogue and VO files (with some assistance from Justin Bell, lead audio designer): http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/75747-how-do-i-add-voice-acting-ogg-files-for-kolsc/ If there are any audio engineers or hobbyists reading, perhaps someone could take a look at filtering the VO for GM (and maybe a few of the other female voices, like Feisty and Stoic)? This would be a gamechanging mod.

OP, you rock. EDIT: As do you, Justin Bell. Beautiful music you've made, there.

I'm falling in love with this idea. If you don't do it, OP, I will. Human (Meadow Folk) Monk named Bruce. Wears a Hood and Padded or Leather armor. Uses fists, scrolls, and traps. High Stealth and Mechanics. Resolve stat of 20 a must. As is whichever talent gives you more quick item slots (AKA utility belt).

Do it. Rogue (for Stealth and Mechanics) or Monk (for Bat-fists and martial arts) would probably be best. Yeah, do Monk. Just use the console to give you a ridiculous fortune, and enjoy your time as Batman.

One man's quest.... For 100 Fine Greatswords. You can do it, OP.

There are much more important things to focus on. This game system wasn't designed with multiclassing in mind.

It's not about what you did, it's about what the optimal thing to do is. And in any fight in which you can door block, you should door block (if you want to play "right"). That's just dictated by the current mechanics of the game and encounter design. Do you want to play a game in which you know exactly what to do whenever things get too hard? Or do you want to play a game in which you have to thoughtfully consider what you need to do in each encounter? The fact that the game doesn't "force your hand" (i.e. force you to play your best) even on the hardest difficulty is another problem entirely. But I digress... I don't door-block much either, myself. But that's because I find it boring, not because I've found a better strategy. When door-blocking is possible, there is not a better strategy. Same thing with the other thing I complain about all the time, the Estoc. The Estoc is the best 2H melee weapon in the game, and its only shortcoming (piercing damage) is made up for by the Poleaxe (its sister 2H weapon in the weapon focus). If you want to play a 2H frontline melee weapon character, and you want to do it well, the Estoc is the best choice. Period. And I hate that. I want meaningful choices, not the choice of "right" or "fun".

Bump? Does no one else consider this a serious problem?

This is a silly reply. I'm not QQ-ing, I'm providing constructive criticism. No game is perfect, so to claim that there aren't any problems with the game is silly. I'm considerably on the "it's fine" or "they're not gonna change it so stop asking" end of the spectrum for most things, but I think it's absolutely worth discussing some of the more important issues. When there is one best strategy for most encounters, and its been discovered about a week after the game comes out, that's a serious problem for anyone looking to create a challenging experience. Unpredictability and requiring the player to adapt is how you keep your game from being solved and losing all replay-ability. Avoiding the creation of uber-dominant strategies is just good game design, and it's better for everyone. Are you actually implying that people didn't mob pulled in old IE games? Dude they did even worse things, like exiting a building to allow buff to wear off and a lot abuse that ain't allowed in this game. I want you to know that i agree with the OP, but this you said is ridiculous. My bad - when I used the phrase "mob pulling", I was referring specifically to the MMO-esque way in which we can see enemies standing in visual range, but they don't attack unless we enter "aggro range". Bad terminology on my part. People certainly did do something that could also be referred to as "mob pulling" in the IE games (as well as all the other cheese you mentioned). Cheese should stay on pizza and sandwiches - it makes for boring gameplay. I don't fault people for using it when a game is challenging, but a good game designer is going to be looking to eliminate as many exploitable strategies as possible. That was a fairly big priority in PoE if I understood Josh Sawyer's design goals correctly, so hopefully once it becomes apparent that this strategy is extremely dominant they'll do something about that. I wonder if Josh still reads these forums - probably not often. I don't know if I would. Absolutely. I'd be quite surprised if the AI doesn't already have some degree of probabilistic behavior built in. If X conditions exist, roll a die and pick your next action off of this weighted table. Etcetera. If their AI doesn't use something like that, that leads to some pretty exploitable stuff (as you mentioned). You might report that as a bug? More exposure for those kinds of exploits can never hurt.

I'm not sure you understand it correctly - it's not just the plants that are quest-driven, it's everything in the stronghold. They're driven by "turns", which happen when you do quests. So you'd have to keep questing in order to unlock the ability to continue building stuff anyway. Or at least that's what I thought. Not to mention that to do the fights and boss battle to even unlock the stronghold you'll have had to do at least some questing. I had a full party (4 companions + 1 adventurer) at level 4 and I still got my ass kicked a few times unlocking Caed Nua. It's probably not that big a deal - I'd imagine that even though they are technically limited, you get more than you need as long as you're somewhat judicious with your enchants. I think I will reload to before I enchanted that stuff though. Gonna save enchants for unique items. Especially since enchanting vanilla armor and weapons doesn't even make them look any different (though that could be a blessing in the case of padded armor - I hate the Fine padded armor ).

I don't mind the engagement system. Even without it, you can block a doorway. I'm concerned with the doorway blocking strategy - or, to put it more specifically, the fact that no AI creature or character seems to have any concept of trying to avoid chokepoints. I applaud players for using tactics, I just don't like the fact that this one tactic is so ridiculously (and unrealistically) dominant. The engagement system isn't really the problem in this case. I like the engagement system, myself - even as an IE game player.

One thing a few people have mentioned is increasing enemy sight range. While that's really a separate issue, I'd agree 100%. Enemies should have exactly the same sight range as the player, so if you reveal enemies while not sneaking, they instantly attack (as it was in the IE games). This MMO-esque/Diablo-esque "mob pulling" silliness does not belong in PoE. Not that that's bad, mind you - it just doesn't belong in an IE successor. We already have the tools to never engage unintentionally via the stealth system - and this wouldn't change anything about that. The eyeball would just appear and the yellow pie would just start to fill as soon as you see enemies, instead of there being this magical fringe zone where you can see them and they can't see you. There aren't many things (non UI related) I'd mod on a first playthrough, but this would be one. It's absolutely ridiculous that the player gets this crazy advantage in sight range - we can already use scouting mode to scout just fine. Don't need mob aggro zone mechanics in my cRPG.

No, I want to make it so there's not a single tactic that is always better in every situation in which it is possible to employ it. As I mentioned, I have no problem with "dumb" or "feral" enemies falling prey to this strategy - but intelligent enemies should be smarter, and should force the player to use more than one boring strategy over and over again. You wouldn't pile your party in front of an enemy fighter blocking a doorway while his buddies whaled on you - why do you want enemy parties to do so? It's boring and silly. This change doesn't punish tactics, it just encourages more varied tactics. BIG difference. I love tactics. I want this change to be made because I want to actually make tactical decisions instead of doing the same boring and insanely effective thing each time. A "solved" game has no tactics - only the "best" strategy. That's boring. Not good enough because it would result in stalemates where neither side would move from their most advantageous positions. You'd have to have monsters that have hard counters to certain tactics: charge abilities with knockback, destructable terrain, etc. In a case in which there are intelligent enemies who might reasonably be expected not to charge suicidally into a killzone and beat their heads against plate armor, a stalemate is acceptable. If the player really wants to get into that room (or cave, or whatever), they'll fight on the enemy's terms - as it should be in the case of an attacker/defender situation.

IE mod respec works fine. Just follow the directions and you should be fine.

Barbarian all the way. Estoc is ludicrously better than the other 2H weapons, so if you want to be optimal use that and Poleaxe. Or just use whatever 2H weapon you feel like using, because they're all viable. Then go to the forums and call for an Estoc nerf so we can finally use something else.

^ Yup. Do note that if you think any cRPG is released without major bugs, you're sadly mistaken. They fixed the major ones in the week 1 patch, and there's another patch coming. This game isn't squeaky clean where bugs are concerned, certainly not. But it's not in a terrible place either. Most people are encountering few or no bugs. You'll hear about those who are on this forum and you won't hear about those who aren't. It's that simple.

While this could help, and (as sparklecat mentioned) there are already abilities that do this, that's still more of a band-aid because unless every fight has enemies with those abilities (which would be annoying as hell - I still want my positioning to mean something), the flowchart remains the same. You just can't do that strategy as much, but you'll still do it every chance you get. Which I suppose would be the case with my proposed solution as well, but I'm completely ok with the party funneling unintelligent beasts into a killzone - I just don't want intelligent enemies falling for the same thing constantly. Also note that adding knockback abilities to mitigate this issue would require AI changes of its own to work with any degree of - so it's at least in the same ballpark as far as amount of effort goes. There's no denying that modders can't fix this issue given enough time. I'm not super worried about that. But I'd love to see Obsidian fix it themselves - I know they've been incredibly busy finishing the game and fixing gamebreaking bugs, so improved AI probably hasn't even been on the table for a while. And it's already improved a lot from the Beta, believe it or not. But now that the game is released, they're thinking about the expansion, and this dominant strategy has popped up very quickly - I figured it'd be a good time to start a conversation about ways to fix that. Which, in my opinion, must start with making the AI a little bit more intelligent.

I sat Sagani in my SH for all of Act 2 and when I pulled her out in Act III, she automatically leveled up to my parties level. Oh really? That's amazing. So companions autolevel to your party while in the stronghold? Awesome. Sure, it's not the most realistic thing ever (though you can explain it via them doing their own questing/training if you choose to do so, which I do), but it's absolutely wonderful from a quality of life perspective. Are you sure this is a thing, though? I could've sworn I'd seen other people talk about having to level up companions that had been sitting in the SH for a while.

Stronghold turns are based on quest completion. That's kinda crappy. Are there only a limited number of turns in the game, then? If so, are they more than enough to get everything done? Or are there repeatable quests of some sort? I've only just taken Caed Nua, so I'm not very far in the game.

So the "in" thing to do these days when looking to fight some chumps is: 1) Send a heavily armored tanky character (Fighter or Paladin, generally) to pull enemies into a doorway and block the doorway. 2) Pew pew with spells or guns and stab stab or thwack thwack with spears or staves while the tank tanks. Obviously this doesn't work in all cases, nor does it work with all enemies (*cough* Shadows *cough*). But in general, the tactical flowchart for the "good" PoE player goes: Am I about to be in combat? If yes, can I door block? If so, do it. This sucks. A lot. Both from a game mechanics perspective (because if there is a single dominant strategy, the game quickly becomes boring) and a realism/immersion perspective (because as far as we know, combat in the era of which PoE is a rough imitation did not consist entirely of blocking doorways and shooting through one really tough guy to hit the guys hitting the tough guy). So how can this be fixed? I've seen some murmurs of making Fighters less durable - this, while perhaps warranted (Eder is freaking immortal with the right gear, and he's not even minmaxed for tanking), will not fix the problem. And doorways or narrow passages can't be removed from the game without making all areas stupid. No, the problem is fundamentally a result of how the enemy AI works, and the solution will only come with fixing the AI. The solution is simple: Program the AI not to fight in disadvantageous chokepoints if it can help it, and (where applicable) to attempt to use the same strategy. A real group of bandits wouldn't wait in line to beat their heads against a suit of full plate while being riddled with holes, they would fall back and wait to engage on more advantageous ground. Maybe even see if they can get around through another entrance for a flank! I'm not asking for Deep Blue here - just a few AI routines beyond "blindly charge at my target". It shouldn't be all that unfeasible to implement AI capable of recognizing when its being funneled into a kill zone and of avoiding said kill zone in favor of a "sit and wait" strategy or some other move. Anything beyond just blindly standing in LoS of a completely blocked doorway. This would make the game much more interesting and add tactical variety. While this sort of behavior makes sense for spiders and the like (they're dumb), it's absolutely immersion breaking for intelligent enemies. If some guards know I'm trying to get past them, are they going to rush through the doorway, or wait for me to come to them, exposed and vulnerable? I know AI is not a simple thing to code, and that this isn't the sort of thing to expect in a balancing patch (though a guy can certainly hope ). But I beseech you, Obsidian - look at the AI for the expansion and the sequel. Consider a retroactive AI fix for the main game with the expansion, and for all PoE titles moving forward. Because super-dominant strategies are boring as hell, and you can build a better game than that. And the solution to this particular problem is conceptually very simple, although (I realize) probably not incredibly easy to implement.