Bazy

After watching the lead programmer die to Beetles in POE1, I don't have much faith in the internal team's play-style insights. https://youtu.be/FoyrKRoknp4?t=9m29s

Skills shouldn't be tied to background/class/culture at all. This is an Obsidian RPG, let the player build the character as they want with appropriate tradeoffs.

To be elegant solutions they would have to 1) apply uniformly, 2) be clearly described, 3) balanced against the games other systems, and 4) fit within the game's lore. I don't think either "power level" or "empower" do any of these. 1) The effects are not uniform across all of the games abilities. As many have pointed out, empower has actually no effect at all on some abilities (sworn enemy), I would imagine neither does power level. Further, I would think it would be a coding/testing nightmare to try to make a +1 power level/empower affect the dozens of abilities in a well balanced/uniform manner. Also, since empower and power level don't apply to active abilities, they disproportionally affect casters compared to melee. 2) The mechanics are not also clear. The tooltip descriptions are often either not helpful, or non existent. Probably because they affect each ability differently. 3) Power level/empower only effect active abilities, and therefore do not play nice with the passive abilities. In the current state of the game this makes power level/empower underwhelming, as the passives right now are so strong. As mentioned, any changes would effect casters much more than melee. 4) They also don't match the game's lore. Where does this "empower" trait come from? Why do members of my party have it, but nobody else? Just because? It is a very arcadey addition with zero lore or justification behind it.

Custom subclasses should, hopefully, be easy to accomplish with the presumably more accessible modding in POEII.

Yep, and often with hard CC (paralyze) which you can't really do anything about. Which I like because it's usually what a smart AI should do... But there isn't really any much counterplay. On the other hand the AI never seems to hard CC melee (except some confusion), because they are programmed to wait for casters. Even if this is not the case concentration does nothing about hard CC. And if a caster gets hit by it mid cast, I think the spell is lost? Melee just carry on afterwards.

Similarly, if you have more than one Paladin, only one Sworn Rival (etc) can be on a target. And only the Pally that applied the debuff can get the benefit. Not sure if either is intended.

I'm not a huge fan of the amorphous "power level" system, it doesn't play nicely with many abilities. It also only really only buffs active abilities, which currently are very weak compared to passives. Would rather they not force this to apply to melee as well. Game is already rather convoluted and a tooltip nightmare. Wondering why they didn't go for a Baldur's Gate/DND system where: Single class = faster leveling (less experience needed) and higher max character level. Multiclass = slower leveling and lower max character level Such that a single class character could max out at level 16, a multiclass toon would max out at 14ish.

Good chance I am missing something, but didn't POE1 get around that with minimum damage? Such as when DR > Damage.

I thought PoE did well, with “tutorial” zone being a legit dungeon. Brief, to the point, fun to explore. If the game has actual tutorial “now we will teach you how to play the game” I much prefer if it’s seperate from main game, or completely skippable implimented in legit opening zone (Deus Ex mankind divided) I feel like the tutorial was all the way through to Gilded Vale, up through talking with Caldara and Eder. After that you could finally realistically start doing your own thing without contradicting the narrative. I actually liked the model from a game called Privateer (1993) where you could do anything from the start. The main quest line didn't start until you discovered and talked to a particular NPC at your leisure.

I like the simplicity of the POE1/v1 style. But another option is to tone down the percentages. Not everything needs to be a 10-30% buff.

+1

Didn't think this was possible.

Trap killed my pet

Extremely difficult to balance (and put in place). All is not as simple as "divided by 2". Because if you have this system, passives abilities become less attractive and you go to active abilities. Problem is moved, not changed. Agreed. The problem isn't so much the power of the passives, but the overarching system. Passives do not require resources, last indefinitely, and can stack and synergize with each other. In contrast, actives compete for limited resources (class power, time), are limited in duration, are only usable one at a time, and don't really synergize well with each other. Regardless of how hard you nerf passives, I would still find it hard not to take the. Even if passives were Awful you would still only take a couple of active abilities because they compete with each other for resources.

I. GENERAL Difficulty: I completed a play-through on normal, hard, and POTD. No Scaling options. Custom Party usually consisting of a Lifegiver and multi-classed melee. No desire to play casters apart from Druid. Overall the game was very easy, even through POTD. My party composition was able to essentially autoattack to victory, with help from the new AI scripts and healing from the druid. Only on POTD did I feel like I had to do some slight party management with consumables/tactics. AI Scripts: Excellent. Looking forward to seeing where this goes. But makes the game much easier. Watcher visions: Huge improvement being able to watch the visions instead of having to talk with some spirit for 5 minutes. Dialogue: Still suffers from too much descriptive text. Please don't tell me what I'm seeing and how I feel about it. It's usually too verbose, doesn't add any substance, and often reduces the RP. Classes: Multiclassing is good. However, I would like to see this go a step further and make this even more of a classless game. Give us all of the abilities and let us build our own class. Something closer to D:OS and the other POE. Combat Speed: Needs to be slowed down. Both in movement speed and damage to health. Most fights decided within seconds. II. BALANCE Passive v Active abilities: The class resource system is really punishing compared to passives. Passives give powerful buffs during all moments. Most active abilities can only be used 2-4 times per fight, and compete with each other for class resources. Very rare for me to select an active ability over a passive. At the very least, I would recommend more way to replenish class resources during fights (such as sworn rival). Melee v Ranged: Melee are much stronger than casters. By the time many spells are cast, the fight has essentially been decided by the melee. The cast/recovery/class resource costs for spells are absurd compared to melee classes which rely much more on passive abilities and autoattacking. Dual-Weilding: As other have pointed out. Way too strong compared to 1-H/2-H. Not enough competing talent options: You end up picking the same abilities/passives for each class. No real variation. Spells generally: Such a hodgepodge. With the ability to choose this is not such a big deal, but spells really range widely in duration, cast time, power, etc. Most of which are meh, will never be used and make the game feel bloated and unpolished. Armor/Penetration: Way too important. Stack Armor and stack Penetration on every character. Downsides to heavy armor nothing compared to the damage reduction it brings and are offset easily by other abilities/potions. Weapon Modals/Proficiency: Rarely worth using, 100% recovery is way too penalizing. Makes proficiency system immersion breaking as I would never want to use these modals. Also, we are given way too many options for proficiency. I shouldn't be able to be proficient in four weapons just because. At the very least, don't force me to choose more proficiency. My Roleplay of a toon that only likes one weapon shouldn't be forced into being good at others. Most characters only seem use one type of weapon the whole playthrough anyway... let alone four. Injury/Health/Healing System: The injury system is good. But... The removal of the POE1 Health system has made healing rather absurd. Either I'm regenerating enough that I never drop below 90% or the mobs spike me so hard that I have to spam heals. This reminds be of TBC era Wow healing where raid bosses had to do absurd amounts of damage because that was the only way to counter the heavy healing. Further, thematically many abilities no longer make sense: Second wind now instantly heals wounds? Standing around after combat for ten seconds heals wounds? It made much more sense when it was to renew stamina. Also, why potions STILL have instant heals is mind-boggling. Josh made a mod for FO:NV to remove the absurd pause and insta heal with potions and food that is prevalent in Fallout and Skyrim. Healing potions should always be over time, never instant. I absolutely loath that I can pause the game, and instantly heal for 75% of my health with one click. Potions: Potions in general are far too strong, as they were in POEI. Potion of Deftness gives 6 accuracy and 25% action speed. That is a talent point and over 8 dexterity in value. Way too much. As with health potions, the effects are practically instant (1.3 seconds). This makes using potions much more important that almost any other consideration. Potions should be heavily nerfed and have much longer durations Drugs: As with potions they are far too strong. Mouth Char gives +1 armor and a whopping 20% damage to weapons. Durations are much better than with potions, but for all the hoopla over pre-buffing before POEI, I'm surprised these made it into the game. Should be heavily nerfed. On the flip side, the drug crashes are good, but probably shouldn't be so punishing. Food: Perfect. This is exactly how the system should be implemented. Long duration, low value, only one at a time. Excellent. Rest buffs: Good overall implementation. Thematically rest is important and having a resting buff should be almost mandatory. Like consumables, rest should give long term, low value buffs, which it does. Further, resting outside of inns is generally substandard which helps with rest spamming issues. My only complaint is that the different resting bonuses from each inn option are a bit silly in the variety, and some of the effects are far too strong. I would like an option to have negative penalties for lack of rest. III. AI Pathing: Mobs still run around like morons taking disengagement attacks all over the place. Consumables/Buffs/Empower: My biggest gripe is that the AI never seems to use consumables. If we can use them, the AI should too. D:OS pulled this off. Why is my party the ones ones with the capability of drinking a potion mid fight, or having rest buff. This is an immersion killing and removes much of the tactical challenge of fights. Also, why do we get empower and not the AI? Offscreen Aggro: Mobs need to have bigger aggro chains. Too many mobs being singled out because they were too far away from my party when I pulled. Also... some mobs should not just blindly chase. Make us go to them sometimes without requiring an ambush scenario. AI Interruptions: I do like how the AI appears to wait until I'm casting something to counter with an interrupt. But, this is another reason why casters are inferior to melee. IV. IMMERSION/ROLEPLAY Character Creation and Skill Points: Backround, Class, Culture should not affect skill points. STOP THAT. Let me choose how to build my character. My devoted fighter should not have a point in explosives. My nature druid should not have two points in explosives. My timid orlan should not have more intimidation than my aumaua just because she is a kind-wayfarer. My laborer should probably have points in Mechanics, not Athletics. Why are you forcing these absurd RP choices on us in a CRPG? Spell selection on level up: I love how classes (Druids in particular) are able to choose spells on level up instead of having a bunch of junk automatically thrown at them. This allows me to role-play the character I want and allows more interesting choices/tradeoffs on level up. I am sad that they decided to give priests automatic spells on level up, I would have just given an extra spell selection point instead of forcing a particular set of spells. More options is (usually) better than having them selected for you in an RPG. Overland Map: It's a bit jarring to go from the beautiful maps to the meh overland map. The point and click movement feels so dated, and like a crappy mini-game. I would prefer going back to the POE1 system. I prefer to imagine how the travel went over this wacky ship movement. It also has these terribly obvious corridors that you are forced to travel through which ruins any feeling that you are in a world to explore. At the very least, slow the ship down. I'm constantly clicking because the ship moves so fast and I can't give movement commands into the fog of war. Further, I loath at the omniscient ability to see herbs and equipment caches from so far away. This is terribly immersion breaking. Why does my party know about some magical boots on the other half of the island??? Similarly, why are you telling me that this zone is too high level for me? STOP THAT. At least make it optional. Don't magically tell me things about the world my character should not know. Where did this hand-holding come from? We didn't get a warning pop up for the Temple of Eothas and the game was much better for it. Combat only abilities/Pre-buffing: Still immersion breaking to only be able to use some abilities out of combat. I can attack the enemy, but not buff myself... wonderful immersion. The whole purpose was to avoid pre-buffing... but then they made ridiculously overpowered drugs, potions and other buffs. This is contradictory design. Storage: I was never a fan of the magical bottomless stash. It has reached new levels of absurdity when I'm collecting huge loads of cannon shot and ship repair supplies. Another immersion killer. V. MISC Modding: Please make modding relatively easy as has been suggested it will be. We were promised robust modding in POEI and that didn't happen. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61130-update-16-reward-updates-combat-with-tim-mods-and-the-mega-dungeon-grows/ Allowing the community to tinker solves so many issues and increases the replayabilty. Starting Zone: Please allow us to break free to explore immediately or shortly after game start. I loath tutorial zones. Having to go through the camp, the talking, and the ambush, and the talking, and the berry hunt, and the talking, and the storm, and the talking, and the tutorial dungeon, then the 2nd storm, and the RP, and the talking, and the talking, and then through Valewood... every... single time... ugh. Drop me into the game and let me go explore as soon as possible. Don't make me repeat the same start every play-through. Empower: Nothing particularly wrong with it. Just doesn't really make sense Lore wise that I'm aware of and seems kind of arcadey. Also rarely used with little impact in the grand scheme of things. Seems like a lot of development work to force in this remnant of the vancian spell-casting system. Firebrand: Actually looks like a fire sword now. \o/ (But a 6 second cast is laughable. It should be instant and last for the entirely of combat.)

I would point to games like Skyrim, Fallout NV, Xcom 2, D:OS 2, Witcher 3 as evidence that the best RPGs are successful, in large part, because of their mod tools.

Obsidian will never be able to give one ruleset that will please everyone. People will always disagree on the basic variables: - Classes: X class should have Y Talents and Z passive and active Ability choices available at levels 2, 4, 6... - Attributes: Attribute X should give bonuses to Y and Z... - Skills: This class should get X skills points per level, or should be tied to Z attribute... - Abilities: This ability should be used X times per encounter, should be Y strong, and last Z duration... The solution is to make the game Classless through proper Modding tools. Let the community run wild with all of the possibilities instead of forcing us into a default system full of compromises and subjective decisions. Modding was promised for POE I, but was not delivered. This time let the community add or remove talents and abilities to the default class trees Obsidian has created. The underlying game is amazing, but take it to the next level and make this a true RPG; give us the power to create our world. We just need the tools to do so. I don't literally mean remove classes.There is value in keeping the archetypes for scripted interactions, conversations, role-play. Instead I'm looking for everyone to decide individually what each class, attribute, skill etc. means to them without forcing us to accept the default Obsidian view. The underlying game system does support this. POE I was effectively a classless game through consoles commands. You could take a blank slate rogue and give them (nearly) every combination of talents and abilities you wanted. Turning them into whatever crazy multiclass roleplay mage/warrior/paladin with a shield, pet and healing spells idea you wanted. You could do the same with attributes, and for your companions via adventurers. This was an awkward work around, but it was possible. We can go back and forth forever about how our ideas of the game are best. Or they can give us proper Modding tools, and empower the community to create solutions for everyone. Edit: To be clear I'm not expecting a full blown modding toolset. Josh has said this won't happen, but that they will be making the data easier to access and allow people to "mess around with." I'm hopeful that this will be sufficiently robust. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/119024818?t=33m20s

Thank you. With POE being so hard to mod posts like these have been sorely needed.

Ran into this same problem and found it very annoying/immersion breaking. Not sure why people are fighting you on this. This is an oversight from the devs not you asking for some really uncommon roleplay solution. You literally do exactly what the lady asks of you but she doesn't let you finish the quest.

Wait... what? You were the author of one of my favorite threads and stated: "So Josh announced that PE won't do GM sucker punches. Meaning, encounters you're only likely to beat the second, third, or fourth time around because beating them requires foreknowledge of what you're going to be facing and how. That is good in my opinion. I always thought this kind of thing was lazy design masquerading as challenge. However, it's not obvious how the game will or should play with this element removed. Something could be lost. In particular, I think preparation is a fairly important gameplay element in the IE games, whether we're talking about spell lists, pre-buffs, or weapon loadouts. I would not like to lose that. Conversely, I also get a kick out of beating an encounter even when I wasn't properly prepared." You even state your preferred style is: New Vegas style. The game provides you with information about each enemy type through a variety of mechanisms. If you pay attention you can figure out how to fight them before you have to. If not, you can still play by trial and error. Encounters are balanced to be punishing if you play them wrong. (https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65944-no-more-gm-sucker-punches-and-the-gameplay-challenges-thereof/) And Mr. Sawyer agreed with you: "Where I draw the line are single-check long-duration incapacitation effects against which hard counters are the only practical defense. Their effects on combat and the immediate aftermath promote reloading and metagaming more than in-the-moment adaptation to temporary or progressive incapacitation. Yeah, you can lose a fight via progressive aggregation of damage over 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This is a different type of problem with a more diverse variety of solutions than a fight you lose (or win a Pyrrhic victory) in 12 seconds because a basilisk waxed two party members as soon as you came around the corner." That's what the encounter at Madhmr bridge is... a sucker punch. And playing solo is no reason to abandon this reasoning... As Mr. Sawyer has also said: If you want to play the game solo, or with all wizards, or murdering everyone, that's all fine. It's still my responsibility to make sure that all of these options maintain a good level of player engagement and enjoyment across the spectrum. Balancing and tuning is an ongoing process, but that's what I'm trying to do. I'm baffled how anyone can defend a forced encounter while zoning into a low level map for the first time with a RNG possibility for a perma stun sucker punch of a supported playstyle.

I've noticed this as well. Should just be labeled skeleton, or kith skeleton.

We should have the option. If not in the game, then through modding. But they really dropped the ball on the modding promises.

You are being pretty literal. I do not mean meta-gaming. I suppose "estimate" would be a more precise term.

None of those are caster builds, but you are right: don't have to be min-maxed to beat the game. It's more from a roleplay perspective and gameplay critique that if you do want to play as reasonably min-maxed caster your resolve conversation options are going to suck. I'm not saying this should or should not be changed, just that its a fair point that people are not addressing in the thread. I think the real solution is to actually have a game that is reasonable modable like we were promised. (https://eternity.obsidian.net/news/update-16-reward-updates-combat-with-tim-mods-and-the-mega-dungeon-grows)

I think this is the point people are missing. It's great that you can't do everything on any particular character build. But there is no good caster builds that involve high resolve. I think that is a fair critique.