Matt516

I've gotta stop following this thread so I'll be able to unsee it.

Bump? Just wanted to make sure this gets noted.

The damage dealing stats are balanced.

Much, much better, but it's still missing feedback on really important derived stats like the Might bonus. IMO either all the derived stats should be shown or none. EDIT: That said, displaying the damage ranges does help with that a bit. I think I can get behind this idea, actually. I vote yes. Also, great job on splitting the tabs to maintain symmetry. Regardless of anything else, having those 8 tabs in that order with the attributes in the middle is an unequivocal improvement and should absolutely be implemented even if they don't do the other stuff.

Much more reasonable. Do we know for a fact that they're multiplicative though? Like from the code or straight from a dev's mouth? Reason I'm asking is so I can update my DPS spreadsheet properly. Also, some of the numbers I've seen in these screenshots seem a little large even for the number of multipliers at play. I suspect bugz. Josh, help? How are multiple "+XX% or 1.Xx damage" boni combined? Are they all multiplicative, all additive, or a combination?

Dayum they done did their work on the art. Good job, art team!

This reminds me of the saga of Merric Brightsteel, a fighter from Baldur's Gate 1 my friend created for our multiplayer game who inexplicably started at lvl 1 with 22 health. 10 base + 4 from Con does not not equal 22. xD

I guess it's just personal preference - I really like health being a factor, myself. Helps me with immersion if my characters gradually get more beat up as the game goes on.

I'll check and see if its present on my game. Will say that I do actually like the intended system of being limited by both health and resources, so I personally wouldn't vote for this to be turned into a "feature". I'm ok with Endurance regenerating in between combats, but only because Health does not. If Health were removed or kept so high as to be irrelevant, I wouldn't like it at all.

D&D totally had dump stats.. Especially 2e, which is what the ie games used. Charisma was useless to Fighters, Rogues, and more... As was Intelligence. Non-fighter classes didn't benefit at all from raising Constitution above 14 (or 16, don't remember? ). And yeah, they remedied that a bit in the later editions. But certain classes still have stats they're pretty much terrible without. INT for wizards. CHA (I think) for sorcs. STR for fighters. Etc. If it is possible to balance the attributes between classes purely based on the boni, not requiring talents to "rescue" a non-conventional build, isn't that a good thing?

Initially thought it was a great idea, but then I realized: most attributes (Might, Dex, Intellect, Perception, and Resolve) wouldn't have some (or any) of their boni shown if this were implemented. Might and Dex would be especially affected by this. So this could very easily lead to those who aren't familiar with the game and its systems (i.e. everyone not in the BB or closely following it) having considerable confusion as to the value of various attributes. Some would have immediate feedback at the bottom there, while others would have none whatsoever. And if you say "let's just add all those stats into the display then" - well, then you end up with a display showing bonus damage/healing, action speed, range, accuracy, endurance, health, AoE, concentration, durations, and all 4 defenses. That's 10 different parameters to display. Too busy, plus many are still shown as percentages which does nothing to clear up the "non-intuitive" problem. Nah... IMO the values shown when mousing over the attributes are enough. Clean and clear, with just a few parameters per mouse-over. Easier to understand. YMMV of course, but my vote is a no on this one. It's fine how it is, just requires a quick mouse-over to see each set of boni.

I'll be highly disappointed if they don't have every single attribute in the Inventory screen display how it's calculated on mouseover. Not doing so would be gross negligence in UI design. The percentages can be a little less intuitive, to be sure. That said, D&D had its really unintuitive moments as well - THAC0, attribute boni every 2 points, etc. I think if they get all the UI feedback in correctly (and finally stop changing stuff so people can learn the system) it'll hopefully be a lot less confusing. Orly? O_o

My Charname in Baldur's Gate was a Dwarven FIghter/Cleric 9 times out of 10. A little disappointed to see that going away with the nerf to Priest health, but I suppose they can still be used as fighter characters, just not tanky fighter characters. And the Paladin may be able to fill that role as well. Is there a PoE equivalent to "Draw Upon Holy Might"? If so, I'll be happy.

Lephys - Agree 100%. Every single number in the Inventory and Character Sheet should have a popup breaking down how it is calculated when moused over. BG:EE did some great things in this regard, particularly with AC and THAC0.

That's rather clever. O_o

Really? Then PhDs in physics must be terribly good swordfighters. As Azrael Ultima said. Put two people of same skill to face each other and the more intelligent one is going to win every day of the week.If you watched Game of Thrones, Bronn duel to save Tyrion is pure intelligence win. Yeah and that's why the Mountain won his duel and was the most feared fighter in the entire kindgom, cause he is such a genius. (GoT spoilers) so that's really not a very good example. Besides, the argument isn't about if Int should make you win in a fight, it's if it should make it harder to land hits on you. With that criterion, your example serves the other side as

Not a bad idea, but I don't see them implementing it. Josh has mentioned wanting to keep the number of things affecting any individual parameter to a minimum.

Just don't get hit and don't use Duration-based abilities and you're golden! EDIT: It would be really freaking funny if a PC with 3 Resolve couldn't ever stand up to anyone in conversations. Like the 1 INT (or whatever) character in Fallout, except just spineless instead of stupid. Charname: "Let those puppies go!" Bandit: "Whatcha gonna do about it?" Charname: [Resolve < 4] "Umm... nothing.... nevermind......"

I'm fine with the shark-like look of the Aumaua, but dayum they need to clean up those textures on the character model. Also need more portraits for them, but those are probably on the way. Hopefully better textures are too. Head 2 for female Aumaua is just... oy.

It's really funny how this turned from a Might vs Perception thread into a primarily Intellect thread. I just typed up a whole bunch of crap on my opinions re: Might vs Perception (which is that the two are balanced) in the Grazes "How did you break 301?" thread lol. I guess I'll just quote myself if it gets back to Might vs Perception.

Lephys: I like your alternate spread for hits/misses/etc - though it'd require some balance changes as doing so would greatly buff Might indirectly by raising the average effective damage from Accuracy (and therefore the marginal benefit of each point in Might) since (by default) you'd now be hitting a lot more. Not that I don't think it's a good idea, just that it might be prudent to also suggest a buff to Perception. Maybe +2 Accuracy per point and increase Might to +3% per point. That gives Perception more weight. Fiebras/Kaine: All defenses (and Accuracy) are supposed to increase by +3 per level for all classes. At least in the last version, and I haven't seen any devs mention making changes there in the recent patch.

Lets hope Josh does the same thing, sticks with his excel spread sheets and us powergamers can have some fun. Well testing is really important for determining if the game is actually working properly. It's just not that useful for determining if the game mechanics are balanced as designed.

Sorry for making yet another post after my previous two - I wanted to make sure this got seen and wasn't buried as an edit. I just wanted to add that I'm not trying to spoil anyone's fun, or tell them their build sucks, or anything like that. Despite the fact that I like to look at game mechanics from a really mathematical perspective, I'm not a minmaxer. I'm really not. I tend to pick a build that is both viable and fun, then just go with it, optimization be damned. The reason I'm being so adamant about this is that I really hate to see people claiming X is overpowered or whatever when it's demonstrably not true. If Perception and Might are mathematically well balanced right now (and I'm still willing to listen to arguments that they're not), changing them due to an incorrect surge of opinion in the community would throw the whole thing out of whack. Then, months down the line, people would be really unhappy to discover that Perception actually kind of sucks now (or whatever). The whole reason I started with all this spreadsheet stuff was that I saw people making balance and game mechanics arguments based on incorrect information. The spreadsheets were created to give people the tools they need to make correct arguments about balance. There's more than just the graphs Sensuki and I put in our paper in that spreadsheet - there's a combat simulator that lets you set any variable I could imagine (from attributes to DT to weapon damage range to attack speed - and more!) and get the resulting DPS. With DT fully accounted for! Including minimum damage!! I didn't make it for fun.. well, not entirely for fun. I made it so that people who may not be as mathematically minded as I am could test various theories and such without having to spend hours and hours ingame doing it and having to deal with RNG and such mucking up the results. The current version of the spreadsheet (linked at the very end of Sensuki and I's paper, btw) is a bit out of date. It doesn't account for DR or the new 0 point of Might yet. I'm planning to update it though, and I'd love it if people would take that opportunity to use it to test theories and such. As for the current argument - I think I've said all I can really say. If some people still aren't convinced that my math accurately represents the damage dynamics, that's ok. I don't really know what else to do to convince you. Anyone stumbling on this midway can pretty much get 100% of what I would say about it from reading the posts I've already written. So... I guess what I'm saying is I probably won't keep arguing this (at least on this thread). I think the math and the explanations I've already given speak for themselves. I'd be happy to continue to answer questions in PM or whatever, but I think this would be a good point to retire this particular debate - at least for now. So with all that said - back to the OP. Fire Godlike Barbarian. Kind of great. Except for when you activate Frenzy while at low health and your fire blowback ability kills you instantly. Does that count as.. breaking the game?

Well, from the Beta (someone correct me if I'm remembering wrong), DT tends to range between 0 and 12, with buffs capable of taking it higher.

I've already expressed numerous times why I don't think in-game testing is the right way to figure this particular balance issue out. I'll enumerate again: Humans (myself definitely included) are absolutely abysmal at judging probabilistic events, statistical trends, etc just by running a bunch of tests. Really, we're terrible at it. We are subject to a number of heuristic biases that make our subjective opinions and judgments about probabilistic events really bad. There are entire fields of research devoted to helping humans learn how to make better decisions specifically because of how bad our natural biases are. There are too many other variables at play. Granted, this could be accounted for by making two identical characters with only Might and Perception varying so this isn't really a strong point. Ignore it - it doesn't really belong here. Just wanted to mention it because I think the other variables at play have affected other people's subjective comparisons between characters (like BB Rogue and BB Fighter). The amount of RNG involved in damage and to-hit rolls means that I'd have to run combat for a very, very, very long time in order to get reliable results. I don't have a good way of recording that much data other than screenshots and manually entering in 1000s of combat rolls from screenshots into a spreadsheet. Because of 3 and 4, it's not worth the time. This would be an endeavor of many, many nights, and it's not worth it because I already know the answer. This isn't like a physical experiment, where I have equations that kind of describe the phenomenon and I'm trying to get some approximate answer by neglecting a bunch of stuff. In this case, the equations describe exactly what is going on. Like - to the t. The systems are very clear, and it's all just math being done in a computer. I'm just using my own computer to replicate that math on a statistical scale. Calculating effective DPS is very straightforward, and I know I'm right unless there's a bug in the game or some completely random mechanic we've never heard about that would invalidate my model. That said, I'd be more than happy to change my mind if someone points out an error in my equations or assumptions - I've done so multiple times before (see the first threads where I posted my spreadsheets - Azrael Ultima and Caerdon both corrected me on various things and I changed my equations accordingly). But I don't really see the value of spending many hours testing something I know to be mathematically true. At the moment, the only major arguments against my math have been "but I played with high Perception and wrecked everything". Sure. I'm not disputing that. But the experience of any one person is colored by biases, RNG, confounding variables, etc... whereas going straight to the numbers on how the damage is actually calculated doesn't lie. So while I appreciate the suggestion, I'm going to have to respectfully decline.