Answermancer
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Posts posted by Answermancer
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I wonder if the reload speed is supposed to be that quick, because that is a lot ... but then again it is an animation, and animations are supposed to be 30% quicker. Seems like you get triple the benefit for firearms lol!
That's not really true though (triple the benefit), you just get a consistent benefit. 30% quicker should mean 30% quicker, regardless if your action has a recovery, a reload, a cigarette break, or whatever else. If you have a 30% bonus from Dex everything you do should happen 30% more often.
If it only affects the 'base recovery' while all weapons get a penalty to it anyway (unless you dual wield) that adds inconsistency again so I wish it didn't do that. Unnecessary inconsistency just makes things confusing.
And yeah, of course it's powerful, being able to do more things in the same amount of time is always more powerful. I remember half a year ago when everyone was rolling out what they thought the attributes should do I was arguing against something adding action speed because I thought it would be hard to not make completely overpowered. Of course as you and others have pointed out it does mean you attack DR more often so that does rein it in a bit for fast, small weapons.
Anyway, now that action speed is on an attribute I am glad that it is, my favorite character archetypes are always the quick and nimble types.
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dnd next ripoff, there a crit is maxDamageForThisWeapon+roll.
In the playtest?
In the released version of 5E you just roll twice as many dice as you'd normally roll.
Which can be great if you roll well, but it can also suck since you can theoretically crit for a lot less than a normal hit (although it's not likely).
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The first gives them +10 to Fort/Ref/Will, and the second gives them +8 to Deflection. Unfortunately, the second mode doesn't seem to stack with Cautious Attack. Food for thought, though.
That would be very frustrating to learn after leveling up.
Just as a note, spells/powers/active abilities never stack if they buff the same stat. I believe the highest positive and highest negative are added up and that's what is active (so if you get +15 deflection for a modal, +10 deflection from a Priest buff, and -12 deflection from an enemy debuff you would have +3 deflection, if you turned off the modal you would have -2, if the debuff wore off and you had the modal on you would have +15).
Bonuses from armor (anything not in a weapon/shield slot) don't stack either, and work the same way.
All passives (mostly from class and talents) stack, and bonuses on items in weapon slots stack.
Some of this is explained in the game when you mouse over stuff in the character sheet, some on loading screens, I really hope the tutorial in the final game does a good job making this clear or people will be confused (about the active ability thing in particular I think, the items not stacking has more of a precedent).
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So, engagement was originally intended to prevent kiting, right? It was to make life harder for casters, to counteract their advantages.
I just wanted to point out that this is... literally the opposite of why engagement was added to the game.
Engagement is there so that the entire group of mobs can't swarm your caster if he opens with a fireball, it's an aggro/threat mechanic intended to let you form a line (of tanky/melee characters) and keep your squishy people safe. It's also clearly inspired by attacks of opportunity and similar systems (I'm reading the book for the pnp RPG '13th Age' right now and the engagement system in that game is extremely similar so I think it might have inspired it, or whatever game 13th Age borrowed it from did).
I have mixed feelings on the implementation, personally, but I liked the idea originally and I don't think it's some horrible monstrosity right now, either. I think currently it does it's job but does it too well.
If I was making this game I would have made it work like it was supposed to originally and how 5E works (move around someone all you want, get attacked if you move too far away), and I would have added a lot more mobility abilities to classes (especially melee classes) and possibly also a generic "disengage" ability that everyone gets (again, like 5E or 13th Age).
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I'm not sure how much I trust them in that, especially when it comes to changing things like attribute bonuses, because those things are core parts of the system.
I'll give them that, that they are incredibly brave if they actually do it, because changing functionality like that is inevitably something that upsets a lot of people that are mid-game. Let's say for example that they'd re-separate +AoE and +Duration and make Resolve not terrible for non-tanking paladins. It'd basically ruin any ongoing game where someone min-maxed to any degree.
It'd screw over tanks, because Resolve was changed, it'd screw over Wizards, because Resolve is no longer a dump stat and Intelligence the win-all attribute, and it'd in general just invalidate a lot of builds. I'm not saying that shouldn't do it, quite the opposite, I just don't think they will. Hell, even if they implemented the exact changes I want, I would still probably be annoyed to hell and back, either because it ruined my current play-through, or because I'd feel like I'd have to go back to creation and create the character I wanted from the beginning.
Either would result in considerable bellyaching.
A lot of games these days lock savegames to a major version to avoid rules changes messing up existing saves. In other words if you save was made on game version 1.01, you will keep playing the 1.01 version of the game if you load it, and only new games you start would actually have the changes in 1.1, or whatever.
I'm not saying they'll do that, but it's not all that uncommon these days. I could see PoE version 1.0-1.09 or whatever being mostly bugfixes that don't invalidate savegames, and 1.1 introducing rules changes (attribute bonuses, combat rules, etc.) and requiring a new game.
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What was missing is PoE team, mentioning that loot mechanics are going to drastically change, and not be like in the beta at all.
they made a non-optional choice to make it area wide looting. So it is said, in another tread by developpers.
Funny how we been play testing all this for like a year, and they didn't think the backers should have some input to just drastically change how the game is played.
Anyways, here is a petition from change.org.
https://www.change.org/p/pillars-of-eternity-make-looting-functions-optional-not-forced-area-wide
I won't sit by as we screwed with, we're the fans, we made it possible too, we should have a voice. Or stop saying this is our game that we made possible, that we had influence on shaping.
This is one of the dumbest things I have ever seen.
I fear for the world that you have managed to rope 5 other people into signing that.
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I don't really understand the people saying that if the collector's box doesn't contain a game disk then it somehow has less/no value to you or others as a collectible.
Do you really think that a DVD is what will determine the value or collectability of the thing? That seems like a pretty crazy idea to me, it's all the "collectible" goodies in the box (which I assume will be sealed/shrink wrapped, just with no disk inside) that are collectible, a flimsy DVD that probably won't even be readable in a couple decades is not.
Consider that anyone willing to buy your backer box 20+ years from now can probably get the game for $0.50 or free on "Steam 2035" or whatever, they will have zero interest in a playable disk. All those backer goodies that were made for a handful of people in 2015, put in a nice box and never manufactured again though? That might have some value, both collectible and monetary.
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Well I imagine you'll make fun of me, but I like it when these sorts of quote-unquote "degenerate" incentives are eliminated. It protects me from myself, I know myself well enough to know that I respond strongly to incentives even if they make the game less fun (by being tedious).
I'm not a fan of trap of lockpicking xp, but of the two trap is definitely worse.
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This is very cool stuff
Well done! Nice stock Unity UI in that model viewer, amused me for some reason.
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I'm not following what you mean here about adjusting enemy targeting AI being a fix, can you elaborate?
Sure.
Melee Engagement consists of two components - an AI targeting clause, and a Disengagement attack.
When a unit (player or AI) engages another unit of the opposing faction (AI or player), the unit that is engaged stops, turns and attacks their engager. This is done through an AI targeting clause. If that AI targeting clause didn't exist, then the engaged unit wouldn't stop to attack.
This is the key part of the Melee Engagement system for 99.99% of people that enjoy it, including Shevek and Kjaamor. People like that it gives them easy control over the enemy AI.
The thing that I find annoying about this is that it overrides the actions of my units, and I am not a fan of anything that overrides my unit actions.
The Melee Engagement system does not have to exist for this behavior to occur. The Enemy AI can be programmed to stop and attack the first melee unit that they are attacked by.
I see, that sounds okay the way you describe it, though I wonder how it would feel in practice. Even if enemy AI attacked the first melee unit they were attacked by, wouldn't they potentially just run off right away if someone else hit them (a squishy ranged charater for instance)? If so it doesn't really give you more time to land CC (what I would like at minimum from front liners), unless the script had some kind of "hit this guy at least once before switching targets" clause.
Assuming such a clause did exist, wouldn't this still go against the way you want to play, even if it did keep your own units from having their actions overriden (which you've identified as your biggest issue with engagement, I think)?
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Ultimately I've been thinking that it should work more like zones of control in turn/tile-based games
This isn't a turn-based game. That is the entire problem with the mechanic. It's a product of turn-based design in the first place.
I get that, and I also understand that this is your problem with the mechanic as a whole. But I haven't seen anything that convinces me that the majority of people want to play this game the same way as an RTS. I'm sure there's some who do, but I'm not one of them and so have no problem with mechanics that stray from "this would work in an RTS game" being added when they make things I find frustrating easier to manage.
I mean, I'm not saying that my opinion is any more representative but I played the IE games with copious auto-pause and manual pausing, pretty much on every single fight, and I'm sure plenty of other people played them that way, so there's an immediate split there for what some backers want vs. others.
I'm not a huge fan of removing engagement altogether and relying entirely on CC abilities (as Sensuki advocates) but mostly just because of two reasons:
1. With recovery times, I think it requires too much micromanagement and luck to get a CC ability off at just the right time. In other words if there are enemies rushing past my "tank" I don't want to have to micromanage exactly what he's doing (making sure he's not in recovery at that moment) to get a CC ability off at just the right time. That just seems tedious to me, especially if there are multiple enemies. A slowing aura makes this much more manageable.
I don't know why this is so hard to understand, but as a player, using CC to control enemies will not be necessary if the AI targeting clauses were adjusted so that melee enemies turned to attack your units when you attack them in melee or something like that. If your problem is that you struggle to manipulate enemy targeting, a combination of positioning and understanding AI targeting will solve this problem completely.
I'm not following what you mean here about adjusting enemy targeting AI being a fix, can you elaborate?
And yes, to some extent my problem is that trying to perfectly time CC so that it goes off as enemies are trying to push past my front line feels very tedious right now (since you can't depend on such an attack going off as soon as you queue it up), and without some form of engagement I feel like too much of my time would be spent kiting enemies or micromanaging tank "recovery", which I don't find particularly fun.
I'd like to have more time to think about what abilities to use and where to move my people other than the front line, and having that front line provide something to facilitate that without a bunch of micromanagement.
This is why I like the idea of engagement being a passive slow. It provides me with a passive benefit to the front line that I can choose to micromanage further (or not) and something that the AI could likely be made to deal with more easily (ie. the choice of sticking to tank or moving through the slow, together with abilities that boost speed or counteract engagement).
2. I'm worried that "boss"-type monsters will be able to ignore/shrug off CC and I don't think they should be immune to "engagement" of some sort unless that's a specific thing about that boss.
There are no absolute immunities in PE, you will be able to Hobble a dragon.
You're right of course, I'm not sure why I forgot that.
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An Idea I've been juggling around my head:
Make melee equipped characters/monsters emanate an aura with a heavy slow effect instead of the soft-lock thing that there is now. The area depends on the range of the melee weapon and simulates this threat area existing now. Only affects enemies (relative to the melee equipped person). The slow effect doesn't stack with engagement areas from other characters (i.e. no double strength slow if you have 2 enemies engaging you)
Once you're caught you can walk away slowly (obviously only works if you're not being followed by the other character). If you have a skill that disengages you, you can use that and be moved outisde that particular engagement area or made immune to the slow. Every character would also have an options to force disengage (like the attack/cancel/talk to/guard buttons of IE games), which would function similarly as the aformentioned skills either moving you or making you ignore the slow for a second or two, but provoking a disengagement attack.
The attack is not provoked if there's multiple characters inside the same engagement area unless the engager has appropriate feats/abilities. The player can't be sure how many caharacters need to be in the engagement area to not provoke a disengagement attack when force disengaging.
When you are inside multiple engagement areas you provoke a disengagement attack from all of them.
Reach weapons generate a larger engagement area, meaning you can engage people from further away, but also meaning that when fighting a non-reach weapon you can hit them before they get close enough to hit you (due to them being slowed from further away).
This is similar to what I've been thinking while lurkishly reading all the drama about engagement. but I think you could get rid of the attack entirely and just slow the movement of engaged enemies. Personally I like engagement as a goal, and I was happy to see the idea in the game, but I do agree that there are issues with it presently.
Ultimately I've been thinking that it should work more like zones of control in turn/tile-based games, meaning it stops/slows movement without the free invisible attack aspect. I honestly don't think we need free engagement attacks, I think that "tank" characters should emanate an area that seriously slows the movement of engaged enemies unless they use a "disengagement" ability. The area (and magnitude of the slow) could be affected by weapon reach and talents.
At that point the tank can prioritize who to actually attack if they try to get out of the engagement, and can also reliably land CC abilities like knockdowns and the like.
I'm not a huge fan of removing engagement altogether and relying entirely on CC abilities (as Sensuki advocates) but mostly just because of two reasons:
1. With recovery times, I think it requires too much micromanagement and luck to get a CC ability off at just the right time. In other words if there are enemies rushing past my "tank" I don't want to have to micromanage exactly what he's doing (making sure he's not in recovery at that moment) to get a CC ability off at just the right time. That just seems tedious to me, especially if there are multiple enemies. A slowing aura makes this much more manageable.
2. I'm worried that "boss"-type monsters will be able to ignore/shrug off CC and I don't think they should be immune to "engagement" of some sort unless that's a specific thing about that boss.
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Wait, isn't this what I suggested months ago and you hated?
Granted, I've been pretty out of the loop for a while.
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Seems like a good change since it doesn't break reloading. Nice work!
I hope Obsidian responds to this one and at least makes some changes if they don't implement this exactly, the current system does feel off.
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This is a great thread.
I also think that we should get more talents, even if they are a little weaker as a result. One every two levels or even one every level would make it feel much more like there is real customizability to the classes even if the bonuses are more minor.
Alternately leave it as one every 3 levels but make them a lot more powerful and interesting because I think that, with a few exceptions, most of the current in-game talents are not interesting/powerful enough to warrant taking. I mean would anyone spend one of their 3-4 total talents to raise one of their defenses slightly? Personally I find that extremely boring and unlikely.
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I don't think PoE needs or should have actual threat/taunt mechanics for reasons that people have already stated.
That said, I do think the AI will need to be much better at switching targets intelligently, making assessments of when and how to break Engagement, etc. This goes without saying since it's an early beta, but currently the AI is terrible at this. From what I've seen it never breaks Engagement and most battles I've "pulled" with an AoE attack and then set up a wall with my fighter and priest that the enemies never go past while ranged attackers pelt them, and my rogue goes in a second later and never "pulls aggro" so to speak even if she's doing the most damage.
I think if the AI is better about switching targets things should be better.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a mechanic like Marks in 4E. For those who don't know, in 4E defender PCs and monsters can "mark" their targets and those targets get a to-hit penalty (-2 I think?) when attacking anyone else. Marks have various limitations that make them fall off, and they require a choice by the monster/PC of whether to ignore the penalty and go for a soft target or heed the mark and attack the defender. This is a much more interesting system than threat since it just creates incentives and a tactical decision for the victim of the mark, it also works on PCs as well. I've DM'd a lot of 4E games and that mechanic always made for interesting decisions for both sides when it came to choosing targets.
5E doesn't have a codified "mark" mechanic but the defender-type classes get similar abilities at high levels.
I practice I doubt we'll see anything like that though, because showing who is marked by what would be pretty complicated and possibly confusing, but also really important information especially if PCs could be marked. Also the Engagement mechanic in PoE might be enough to make defender types useful without having to mark anything. I do worry that once the AI is better though, my rogue will require a lot of micromanagement to keep alive since smart opponent would focus her down.
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Now if we could just get them to slow the combat speed down a bit so we can enjoy seeing the effects of our enchanted weapons in action, this game would jump several more spots closer to Ideal.
Before we start tuning a lot of values, we need to get the basic bugs fixed. The next update to the BB should clear out the most frustrating aspects of simply selecting, moving, and executing commands reliably. Then we can look at overall combat speed tuning, among other things.
Any update on when that might be? Even just "this week" vs. "next week" vs. "next month" would be super nice to know, I think.
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So does that mean that unique items are not enchantable?
No, they are, they just might have unique abilities that you can't enchant onto other, mundane items.
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Prime sorry but i will never ever buy this animeish explanation.
And Conan the barbarian as example of believability is not exatly the best one.
I also refuse to believe in any kind of magic except the kind that strictly follows the real-world scientific discoveries of Dr. G. Gygax.
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What I meant when I wrote that it is overly complex: The system is indeed not super complex at all, it is one of the simplest systems I have ever seen, just more complex than it needs to be. For example, it doesn't make sense that there is a graze category. You either hit and cause high damage/low damage or you miss.
I am indeed very critical, because what we were promised was flushed straight down the ****ter by a game designer who hates Baldur's Gate, has really no idea what he is doing and obviously dislikes good game design (which Sawyer would proclaim is something only for grognards). Even Dragon Age: Inquisition will have more complex gameplay mechanics than Pillars of Eternity... those "damn Bioware grognards".
Yeah well lots of backers don't agree with your assessment of what is good game design.
And grazes are there to smooth out damage so that it's not always an all or nothing spiky curve where half the time you do no damage at all and half the time you do a bunch. It's particularly frustrating when daily abilities miss and are wasted doing nothing. Personally I prefer it this way, you can disagree if you want but it's not bad design, it's just different.
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People who still defends the core mechanics should really try this little experiment...
When a PC build with all attributes kept to the minimum (not using the fifty something points awarded at the creation phase) is equally viable than a character with the points well distributed, then there is something fundamentally flawed in the core system, something no amount of re-balancing can easily fix.
If you adjusted the bonus scale for D&D's attribute system to go from -1 at 3 and +1 at 20, you would get the same outcome you're talking about, though -- and that would be a balance issue, not a fundamental mechanical issue. It may be that Might grants too little of a bonus from point to point, it may be that wizards' spells simply do so much damage that a low bonus doesn't have a large impact on their viability, or it could be something else.
And that's the reason why they didn't.
Are some of you people just completely incapable of responding to the point being made instead of some arbitrary point you made up in your head?
Yes, they didn't do that in D&D, and if Obsidian did do that here he is saying that's a tuning mistake and balancing issue as opposed to some fundamental unfixable "holy **** the sky is falling the game is ****ed" situation. They have several months to get those numbers right, and a big part of the beta is to get our feedback which so far has pretty universally been "make the numbers more meaningful (or get rid of stats altogether)".
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Thanks for this.
It shows that the system is a bunch of overly complex horse****. Who thought it would be a good idea to combine crits, hits, missing and grazing into one stat? they might as well have just made it a simple damage modifer like might.
That stats have two simple damage modifiers and everybody can use every weapon. Great.
Deprecate it.
It's really not that complicated and I think Accuracy is one of the better stats in the game. I agree that others need work but Accuracy work really well in my opinion.
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All in all, ignorance (and it's consequences) is not a problem because you learn in the end, and get better at it. Sure it's rough at first, but you overcome it.
This is not different than what I was saying.
If you are bad at the game, it's okay, because you get better, or you keep trying and you reload. It's not a major setback or a big waste of time. You can continue to progress, if slowly.
If, however, the attribute system is designed so that it's easy to make a terrible build, full of traps and requirements you may not be aware of (like "a Wizard without 18 Int is useless"), you can end up making a character who seems okay at first but then 10+ hours later turns out to be terrible as he develops (a 3rd Edition Wizard with 12 Int may not seem terrible until you get to the point you should be getting high-level spells and realize you can't have any). That's the part that is a major setback and an unnecessary trap with no benefit. That's what some of us would like to see avoided by making all stat configurations useful, albeit only with different playstyles.
You can always try adjusting your playstyle if what you were doing isn't working. You can't, however, change your stats 10+ hours into the game if it turns out they made you useless. You can only start over, which is a stupid waste of time, especially to inflict on new players.
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I like the contrast/whatever change on the character models, as it tries to solve the ghost effect. The backdrop and additional shadows don't look good, IMO, and I hope the devs don't go that way.
Again, the models look ghostly because of the poorly designed lighting here. Fixing the light should fix that. The photoshopped contrast changes here are not something that could be applied universally, nor would they be necessary in most locations. The shadow effect on the other hand could help everywhere.
Cipher Powers need to be tweaked for release...
in Backer Beta Discussion
Posted · Edited by Answermancer
I'm surprised that flanked stacks with other Deflection debuffs but I suppose it makes sense since unlike any (?) other effect you can achieve it with just positioning. That makes it more like a passive effect, and passive effects stack.
With the stacking, I could see the flanking Cipher spell being nice if your primary damage dealer was a rogue (ideally with a weapon or two that gives extra damage to flanked foes). Team synergy is fun.