Matt516

Probably. That's how it was the last time they rebalanced them. You can always change them with the IE mod (if it works with this new version).

I'd personally say: don't worry about it. This level of VO is just about right, even on the high side for this kind of game. If you can get more funding, put it into more quests/abilities/areas/QA instead!!

Great criticisms one and all.

If you have to rest after every encounter, you aren't rationing your spells properly.

This. The reward for filling out the bestiary is that the bestiary is filled out. It's a flavourful asset that serves a purpose in itself. The experience is contrived and counter-intuitive to the idea of goal-oriented experience. I've said it before and I say it again - I do not think Obsidian ever understood the discussion on Murderhobo-Based Experience vs. Goal-Oriented Experience. Well, they put lock/trap XP in... So...... Yeah. I'd say you're right. Either that or they just compromised on the original principles behind their XP system.

Metacritic is opaque, holds too much power, and I don't like it. That is all.

Dammit... I wish I'd known that. Still looking for those gloves in my playthrough. I like the random loot in general, but honestly those gloves should be guaranteed to be obtained at some point in the game. They're too important for finding other stuff, and it's too big of a bonus to hand out based on RNG. Yes, I'm sore that my roommate got them on lvl 5 of the endless paths and I still haven't found them partway through act 2. ;P

It's pretty doubtful that you can hit level 12 before Act 3 without the bounties/Endless. I did literally every possible quest that I could find prior to finishing Act 2, and that included every bounty and level ten of Endless and I just hit 12 after doing one of the first available bounties in Act 3. On my current playthrough, I'm about 20% through Act 3 and I just hit level 10 using the +50% XP requirement option with IE mod. Actually seems almost right. Not quite, but almost. Yeah, I'm planning on using the +50% requirement for either my second playthrough or just the rest of my current playthrough if XP doesn't get rebalanced in 1.05.

Good post with some very good criticism. One little thing - Monks do not suffer from being unable to enchant their fists. By the end of the game, their fists have only 4 less Accuracy than a Superb weapon - but with a +8 integer damage bonus, which is WAY more than the 45% a Superb weapon gets (about 73% to be exact). Monk fists are very, very strong. Monks aren't victims*. They victimize their enemies. ;P * Except for Lightning Strikes, which is crap - but that's been acknowledged to have a fix coming.

Sorta. It's still pretty useful - 30% damage is two whole levels of weapon enchantment or over half a crit all the time. Which is nothing to shake a stick at. But as PoE continues on to the expansion and sequel, Might will (if nothing is changed) become less and less important. As will graze/crit. It's a fundamental design flaw in the system - here's hoping they realize that and rectify it before coming out with more games in the series. A few changes that would help to fix these issues: 1) Make Might multiplicative. Obviously this would solve the problem, but could also make Might more powerful than they want it to be. 2) Make weapon quality actually change the base damage of weapons. This increases the effect of Might (and all other modifiers) as the series progresses and weapons get more powerful. 3) Make graze/crit multiplicative. This keeps Accuracy important, but could again lead to certain things (crit multiplier stacking for one) becoming more powerful than Obsidian would prefer. Personally, I prefer #2 the most. Since the base damage already changes in the UI, this would make things much more intuitive, but without severely disrupting the balance. Though honestly all 3 with appropriate balance adjustments would make the most sense. They originally switched from multiplicative boni to additive because some classes (Rogue) were reaching hideous damage numbers by stacking lots of multiplicative boni. It was a necessary change, but they went too far IMO. Might, weapon quality, and graze/crit boni should've stayed multiplicative. It's just super counterintuitive otherwise - not to mention the original issue I was replying to which is that Might becomes much less important over time.

Check the log above that - was he dead? You probably can't check it now, granted. But that's a thing that happens, you can hit someone after they're dead if your attack is in progress and it does no damage. A bug, yes - but not one that affects gameplay.

Couldn't find the old thread you made, Peddroelm, so this seemed like the place to ask: now that you can make a weapon with zero damage variance, have you gotten a chance to verify once and for all that graze/crit are additive, not multiplicative? And (though I think this one was already 100% confirmed) that weapon quality does NOT change the base damage of the weapon (as it seems to on the ui) but is instead purely additive as well?

Yeeeaaahhhhh.... That doesn't fix it. Good effort, though! ;P

It's a stupid argument that has gone on far too long.

Excuse me, but I never said that choice OR multiple resolutions were bad things. They are good things. Personally though I'll take better gameplay content with more linearity over worse gameplay content with more choice and multiple outcomes IF I have to choose between them. You said BG2 the game had larger scope. Yes it did. I was however talking about quest complexity and to me that involves steps required to complete a quests, quest overlap/intertwining and branching. I have not played the end of Pillars of Eternity, I stopped playing during Act 3. Maybe there is some better content there. I couldn't say. Act 1 and 2 quests were all pretty basic with a step or two with some choices. The Skaen Temple is the worst dungeon because it is a large dungeon that has very disappointing loot and the worst example of copy paste encounter design in the game. On Hard difficulty there's like 70 Skaen Cultists, most are the same five classes and most encounters are makeups of these classes. It was literally the most monotonous content I played in the game. I absolutely hated it. I didn't play that dungeon in the beta because of performance issues. I upgraded my PC to an i7 4790k shortly after the game came out so I could run the levels with more units. The game still runs badly in Copperlane though. The Skaen Temple should have just included the room with Wymund and maybe one other room. The rest of the dungeon was ****ing pointless. I never found myself saying "this should be smaller" in any of the Infinity Engine games. Just as a small counterexample... What about the mines in BG? Kobalds, Kobalds, more Kobalds and then some more Kobalds. A few slimes... and then the boss. Who summons Kobalds. That dungeon was pretty egregiously copy-paste, no? Maybe I'm remembering wrong, it's been a while. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong (as I enjoyed Skaen), but it was a pretty boring dungeon, all things considered. But if I am remembering right.. Does that put PoE off the hook for Skaen? Depends on your point of view, I guess. Obviously just because BG had a boring dungeon doesn't mean it's OK for PoE to do the same. But I think the counterexample is useful just to point out... Most (if not all IMO) of the varied encounters people typically mention to contrast with PoE are from BG 2, not BG 1. And (as I've said elsewhere) I don't think that's really a fair comparison, as PoE is more analogous to BG 1 in terms of level range and such. Not to mention that since they did invent all these mechanics from scratch (as opposed to using a tried and true system like AD&D) there are bound to be some growing pains. Now - I still think there are a lot of design issues with PoE that have been discussed and will continue to be discussed. But one boring dungeon does not make the game bad... not that that's what you were saying. You were just answering a question. But as you described the Skaen Temple I thought of the Kobold mines and thought I'd mention it haha.

Sounds like the one who's **** talking is you. I didn't know this was about Sensuki? How about discuss things like the review instead of **** talking other people.Yeah, I have nothing but respect for Sensuki despite our differences in opinion on this matter. I couldn't name a single person on this forum who has (to my knowledge) put in a fraction of the time Sensuki has on making the game better. Literally hundreds and hundreds of bug reports during the Beta. I thought the review was pretty terrible when I made that original post and I still do. But Sensuki has every right to think otherwise, and that doesn't make him a "coward". He doesn't like PoE. That's fine. I wish he did, mostly for his sake since he's put so much time into the game - but he doesn't and that's his right.

Wait, so... it's inconsistent. Why? That makes no kind of sense. It should be the exact same delay every time, or at the very worst a repeating pattern of two (if there were some sort of reset delay after the offhand hit or something). How did you measure your times?

Bah. Prebuffing. Feh.

The IE games also had a solution to the stalemate problem for NON-magic battles. They use the D20 system, where 1 is always a miss and And a 20 is always a hit. Personally, though, I've come to terms with the Miss--Graze---Hit--Crit system that PoE uses. I like it. My only issue with it is how....universal it is. It applies to everything. Which means we'll never see those dramatic high level magic battle moments from BG2 and IWD2 where a heated, intense battle could end suddenly in a nail-biting moment due to, say, a Finger of Death, or a Wail of the Banshee. After all, what's the point of scoring a critical hit with your death spell? or a Graze with your Destruction spell? One thing I'd love to see is for more than just the duration of spell effects to vary with attack resolution. Particularly, CC spells need to apply different status effects based on the attack resolution - so on a hit you might charm, and on a crit you might dominate, but a graze only dazes. (just as an example) This would allow for a bit more counter-play on both the part of the player and the AI against status effects. As it is, you can confuse or paralyze even extremely powerful enemies for a decent amount of time since you can generally get a graze even when their defenses are very high. Extremely powerful status effects like confuse, charm/dominate, paralyze, etc should be difficult to apply and (IMO) should only ever apply on a hit or a crit, with the possible exception of some very powerful and very specialized (possibly single-target) spells. Maybe slicken doesn't inflict prone unless you hit, and just hobbles on a graze? Etc... There's been some serious missed opportunity to do interesting things with spell effects and the attack resolution system. Maybe they'll implement some more interesting stuff in the expansion?

4/5 from me. Very good game. Has many flaws, but most of them had little impact on my actual game experience. Not that I won't keep pointing them out (especially the systemic issues that will become much worse in the sequel like Might's lack of scaling and the issues with the XP curve) because I'm interested in game design from a hobbyist's point of view and I want PoE to be the best that it can be... but it's a good game nonetheless.

Weeellll..... I did post this thread before you posted that post... But your contributions to our understanding of the game mechanics are indisputable, for sure. I'm just being a bit of a pedantic ass.

Thanks for the response... but.. it sounds like you're saying that abilities like Lightning Strikes (10% of damage vs 25% of DR) are intended to be utterly worthless. Is that true? I'm sorry... that just doesn't make sense.. I'm just stating how it's being calculated. Lightning Strikes is already in our database and is being addressed in a future patch to give it a bump. Oh gotcha. I thought you were saying that was intended behavior. So just to clarify - are procs supposed to go up against 25% of DR no matter what the proc damage % is, or are they supposed to go up against whatever the corresponding % of DR is for the proc damage %? Either way, good to hear Lightning Strikes is being addressed, I suppose. Yes, it's intended for proc damage to be calculated against 1/4 of the DR. Most proc damage is set to 25% or above. Lightning Strikes is being resolved soon, but torches were never supposed to be a "real" weapon and thus have lower damage than a club and less proc amount than a standard lash. Turning Wheel starts off a small % but if you keep the wound count high and the monk alive, you'll start hitting pretty well. Gotcha. That's interesting. Somewhat unintuitive (to me at least), but I suppose I can see the point in it. Really makes higher lash values feel "special", I guess. Good to hear Lightning Strikes is getting a bump. Thanks for the information!

I hate to be this blunt, but... That review is ****. It is. Obsidian's "worst game of all time"? Really??? There are plenty of problems with PoE. Plenty. I'm not denying that. But it is a very good game nonetheless. This isn't a review, it's a rant. It's rife with misunderstandings of basic game mechanics, which makes all his criticisms of the mechanics suspect at best.. and the fact that he couldn't think of a single thing to praise other than the aesthetics and the music is silly. This is a troll review at best. It's very clear that the reviewer went into it looking to take every single complaint he had about the game and magnify it to the point of ridiculousness. Sorry, Sensuki... I've gotta disagree with you 100% here. This review is the Codex at its worst. And I say that not in a "the Codex is terrible" sense, but in a "this is the kind of thing that gives the Codex a bad name" sense.

Very good work, peddroelm. Very good work indeed.

Fair enough!