Answermancer

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.

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.

But then how does one play the fabled muscle wizard Very simple, really, I explained this in another thread, people are just confused by the names of the stats. Really for a muscle wizard you want Con, that's what really determines how strong your body is. Here's the solution, super elegant and intuitive I think: So you're saying being physically strong shouldn't affect the damage you do with the weapons you're swinging? Sounds confusing. Almost as confusing as every character having "soul power" which somehow affects the damage you do with weapons. Pumping soul power increases the damage of your spells/abilities, makes sense. The other part, not so much, unless every character in the PoE univerese uses telekinesis. Well I wasn't exactly being serious But on the other hand there's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. Even in AD&D some of the best martial fighters draw their strength from "soul power" (monks, kensai).

There's a difference between playing poorly, which a player can mitigate in various ways (trying different things, reloading) and being stuck with a terrible build (which might not even become apparent until several hours into the game) because you didn't know what you were doing at character creation and the system was filled with traps for you to fall in to.

But then how does one play the fabled muscle wizard Very simple, really, I explained this in another thread, people are just confused by the names of the stats. Really for a muscle wizard you want Con, that's what really determines how strong your body is. Here's the solution, super elegant and intuitive I think:

I want it to be somewhere in the happy middle. Completing every quest at maximum detail should get you to the level cap a bit early, and should get you significantly better gear by the endgame. Completing most optional quest a little carelessly should get you to the level cap by the endgame. Completing only the crit path carelessly should leave you underleveled for the endgame, but no so much it would be impossibly difficult at Easy. (I wouldn't mind if it was a serious challenge at Normal and genuinely tough at Path of the Damned -- I'm sure the folks looking for a challenge would like that.) There's a lot of space between the extremes here. I guess so. Thinking about it that does sound okay if they balanced it carefully, after all it's not too different than skipping quests you don't like in BG2 or something. The part that makes me personally uneasy about it is that I tend to be the guy who does do every step and explore every nook and cranny, but I could easily see myself missing "steps" of a quest on accident, just because of the way I chose to play the quest or because I missed something (my previous example, in the cult quest instead of investigating the Ogre like the guy said I should I just broke into his backroom, if the Ogre step was worth XP that I missed out on, that would annoy me). That's just a personal thing that would annoy me, so perhaps it's less relevant. However, like I've been saying, it's also permanent. If I skipped a quest in BG2 because I didn't like the sound of it, I could usually go back later and do it if I changed my mind or decided I really wanted to get stronger (ie. the XP). But going back and redoing the middle of a quest is impossible.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. There's a big range between "insignificant" and "game-breaking." I believe that it is vitally important that P:E's systems allow accumulated XP to move in this range. Otherwise I would feel robbed of agency. -- The game has a lot of optional content anyway, including most of the Endless Paths. If it can allow that, it can certainly allow variable XP rewards depending on how completionist you were within quests. Maybe but the way you were explaining your model in your OP made me assume that you wanted each step to have a meaningful-feeling reward. If you think they'd be satisfying even if the ratio of "step XP" to "quest completion XP" was low then maybe you're right, I don't know. I just think it's dangerous to implement systems that let you permanently miss out on significant amounts of a limited resource. I think the progression should be made interesting by the order you do things in (which will effect when you hit what level and such since different quests will be worth different amounts of XP) rather than permanently cutting off big amounts of something you can never get back. I think they need to at least consider it closely, but maybe you're right and they could make it feel significant without creating a trap.

No, sorry, I meant as the game goes on the difference piles up and becomes an issue late in the game. Early on it's not an issue, but it compounds on itself. In other words, if you "skip through" a lot of quests early on, even on accident, you might end up significantly underleveled at the end of the game and have no way to fix that since those quests are "used up" so to speak. Progress doesn't need a follow a strict progression but the encounter design is going to assume at certain points that you are at least level X, that's inevitable unless you use some sort of level scaling (and level scaling is, generally, the devil).

None of those are shocking and I would agree with most of them to some extent. Please don't act like I'm an idiot or trying to dumb the game down or something. None of those are the same as someone potentially being stuck at half the level the game expects, which is exactly what will happen if you make the small-step rewards significant (and if you make them insignificant then what's the point?). There's a huge difference between "some content is unavailable due to your stats/class/party, but other content opens up" and "you played differently than we expected, **** you, you are permanently gimped and can't beat the game now."

Just wanted to throw that into the conversation. Loot is basicaly XP, at least good loot, because its either a powerfull item or money that can be turned into a powerfull item. Items in RPG's are basicaly stat boosters, means its basicaly equal to a percentage of a level. That also means it is equal to xp. It is an it isn't. The game has ways of crafting and enchanting items to make them good, but an item will not give you all the extra bonuses that a level does. You can buy items with money and that will increase your power, sure, that's why I said reward players with money or things like that. But levels are limited and more significant and your level 6 Wizard won't ever be able to spend money to get to level 7. That's why XP is special and need to be treated carefully. Ultimately I still think you should just make the quest worth 800 XP whether you do every step or skip ahead, but doing every step will get it to you early and potentially you might face the challenge at the end of that quest a level higher than someone who skipped them all. There are probably other solutions for "making up" the XP that you miss out on, and I'd be fine with those too, but I can't believe you guys are seriously advocating for a way for someone to miss out on a significant amount of XP forever due to inexperience or a different playstyle besides "super-completionist".

Those things should not be getting rewarded with a limited resource like XP in a closed system where there is a finite amount of XP you can ever get (and where you can lock yourself out from getting it). I am pretty confident the designers would agree with me on this one, the potential to gimp yourself forever is just too great. Reward those players with extra money or achievements or loot or something, but not XP. Again the problem is that there's no way to make up for it later. If I do the noble's daughter quest and rush to the end (even unwittingly, which is easy to do, I did the first time I got it, finding the cultist lair on accident and before going to see the ogre) there is now no way for me to get the extra XP for investigating the case (talking to people etc.). This is totally different than games where you can make up the deficit with grinding or some other way to "go back" and get that "lost" XP.

Maybe, but it goes directly against stuff Josh has talked about before: no XP for kills, no XP for lockpicking, or other minor things like that which skew the balance of power. And besides that's moot since it WOULD mess up the entire idea of being able to predict what level someone is at a point in the game unless you make the XP rewards so small as to be meaningless. Like I said above, if a person can do a quest and get 400 XP or 800 XP that breaks the entire system, how will that person ever make up the deficit in a game where there is no kill XP? In a game with kill XP someone who rushes through quests could grind to catch up or something, whereas here that person will just forever have half as much XP as someone who checked under every rock. It's a "trap" as well since experienced players will realize they need to check under every rock (even if that bores them) to have proper XP gain while someone new might end up skipping through every quest and gimp themselves without knowing or meaning to. It just seems really broken to me.

Considering there are no "dumb" character lines in the game (like there were in Fallout or Arcanum") your desire to play a "bloody retarded" character will never be fulfilled in this game anyway. The reason they couldn't do those by the way if because it's actually a huge amount of work, they would basically have to have twice as many lines in the game and they don't have the resources for that. Maybe in PoE 2.

I agree with you overall but I would make a modification: I think every quest should have a set amount of XP that it is worth (say 800XP for the example). Each step you listed can be worth 100XP. If you complete each step, you get 100XP each time and end up with a total of 800XP at the end. If you skip steps (say find the cult and finish it all before you even get the quest, or before doing any other investigating) you don't get the XP along the way but you still get 800 XP at the end. The reason I think it should work this way is because part of the rationale behind the XP system is that they can better know how much XP players will have at any point. If a quest can be worth 400 XP if you don't explore/investigate or 800 XP if you do, that breaks down. Furthermore, that XP would be irretrievably lost, because it's not like you can redo the quest, and once it's over it's not like you can go and do the investigative aspects then. With no kill XP in the game I think that would be a big problem. I think that just getting the XP early, in smaller chunks is enough incentive to explore/investigate more along the way (plus for a lot of people it'd be more fun anyway) and so it's not necessary to make it possible to miss out on XP. Edit: Here's a link http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67523-combat-xp-poll-lets-see-what-we-think-now/?p=1487430 to an example I posted for how I think it should work in another thread. Basically the same thing I said here but including pure exploration steps as part of the quest. In other words, just discovering the cult's lair would be treated as "part of the quest" behind the scenes but the player would just get 100XP as soon as they found it (as a reward for exploration) and it would be included in the final tally of the quest's XP.

Thanks for the more concrete example! However it illustrates why I at least don't like it and don't think it fits with the rest of the system. No other stat currently has threshholds below which it is useless. No other stat currently has no effect if you put 1 or 2 points into it but a significant effect if you put 3. Furthermore, while the current values need a lot of work I am strongly against introducing stats that do have these sorts of threshholds, I believe it has the following problems: It is both unsatisfying and unintuitive that putting 1 point into a stat does nothing It will have a weird effect on the rest of the system because suddenly you have a stat that must be pumped/dumped in multiples of 3 It creates a trap/trash option (as Josh talked about recently in the interview that was linked): putting anything other than a multiple of 3 in the stat. It makes the only current benefit of racial stat bonuses useless for that stat (going over the limit, currently a race that gave +1 or +2 to Resolve would effectively do nothing because even if you maxed the stat you would be at 20 which is a useless number under the threshold) These are just some of the problems I see with any suggestion that includes threshholds for stats, and I'm sure I could come up with more if I kept thinking about it. Consider also that in PoE your stats are permanent, you do not get periodic increases like in D&D. D&D (at least 3rd edition and up) have a threshholding system where essentially only every 2 points matter (since your bonus from a stat is [stat-10]/2) but there at least you get an extra point or two every 4 levels so that starting with a 13 or 15 in an ability score merely delays that stat being useful since you can raise it to a 14 or 16 after a few levels if you wish.

This goes in the bucket of suggestions for stat effects that I don't like because they seemingly ignore that every stat currently needs to meaningfully vary from 3-18 (although personally I don't see why they let you go that low and I'd cap the low end at 8 ). Currently every stat has some kind of increase for every point you spend, every point of Might gives a 2% bonus, how will every point of Resolve give a bonus in your suggested system? Please explain, with an example if you want, how your suggestion will work for someone with 3 Resolve vs. someone with 18 Resolve.

I'm curious why people want stats to go all the way down to 3. As I stated in another thread I feel like this makes balancing them much harder. The stated goal is for every build to be valuable, I think it's much harder to balance characters that have 3 Might vs. 18 Might and have both be viable. In fact that's why I think they bonuses per level are so wimpy right now. If you kept the same bonuses (or slightly stronger ones) but cut the number of points available and changed the range to 10 instead of 15, for instance (8-18) with 8 being the 0 point, or I suppose even 10 and make 8 a penalty, then each point would be stronger and it wouldn't be possible for someone to dump 1-2 stats down to 3 and then max out all the others, which personally I think is pretty stupid. A preliminary suggestion would be a range of 8-18, much more effective per point, and 20-24 points to spend so that you could max one stat and maybe another if you dump everything else. I get that the argument would be that that person would then have severe weaknesses to account for but I just think that some classes would have a much easier time of that (ranged dumping defensive stats mostly) than others and that seems to go against the spirit of the thing IMO.

Huh, so what is its' thing? Like 4th, but trying to appeal to 3rd fans? As someone who liked 4th edition a lot, and DMed it many times, no, not at all. It's basically 3rd edition but much cleaner and more, well, balanced. So far I like it, although I miss 4th.

And 5th edition is out, actually, at least the PHB.

As Stun said, it's not about wanting to increase the effect of Might, but to increase the effect of all attributes. Compare Constitution in DnD (2e & 3e) and PoE: In DnD the difference between 10 Con and 20 is +5 Hp/level, almost doubling HP for fighters (5.5 hp/level average) and nearly trippling it for wizards (2.5 hp/level average). In PoE the difference between a 10 and a 20 in Con is the difference between +20% and or +40% Stamina/Health, at most a fifth of the difference it makes in DnD. The difference between Con 10 and Con 20 in PoE is the same as the difference between Con 10 and Con 12 in DnD 3e/3.5e. This seems true for all stats, they've basically limited attributes to values between 8 and 12 and then made that scale pointlessly granular. I agree with this to some extent. I also frankly think it's a mistake to even let players lower their stats down to 3. The reason is because it creates a huge range that they have to balance around, so I think naturally it become too granular and each point becomes diluted. Remember, the design intent is that every build is viable (but not equally good). How do you balance a character with 3 Mig vs. a character with 18 Mig and still have them viable if each point is really significant? I am starting to think they should cut the range to 8-18 or at most 6-18, cut the number of points accordingly so that you can only have 18 in one, two if you dump everything else maybe, and then make each point much more significant. Obviously they'd also have to do whatever fixes they have in mind to bring Res and Per in line. Assuming they don't implement increasing costs for more points, they could give players 8's in all stats and around 20-24 points to spend and then you might actually have to make some real choices (and buff each stat appropriately so that the range is similar, possibly bigger even than it is now but within a spread of 10 instead of 15 points).

You're probably right. I really like high-Dex crit-happy characters too so I'd be all for it on a personal level ;P

Well... DEX affects Reflex save instead of Fort save. Aaaand..... the % increases in dps I've calculated also apply to spell/ability duration increases/decreases on graze/crit, which aren't affected by MIG at all as far as I know. So for scripted interactions that take DEX, characters who want high reflexes, and characters who rely on critting with duration spells for extra duration, DEX would be better. It does seem a bit weak, still. Sounds like they could reduce the Might bonus to 1.5% or lower and that might help a bit with it seeming overpowered. DPS is DPS, I'm not sure why it would matter? All Accuracy does for damage is increase crit chance and lower glance/miss chance, those chances are the same for a slow or a fast weapon so the way they affect DPS is the same (a faster weapon makes more total attacks but the same distribution of glances/hits/misses/crits as a slow one).

Yes. This would be my personal stance on the matter. But unlike you guys, I'm not convinced that alterations will be made to the ENTIRE attribute system (which IMO is what it's going to need to feel meaningful enough) I forsee them adjusting perception and resolve, because they've already said they wanted to. But that's about it. Why do you doubt they'll make other changes? Already people seem pretty convinced Might is too strong, based on the math thread someone made I could see them lowering the bonus to 1.5% or 1% even as a first test, that would be trivial. After that they can try more drastic things if it still doesn't feel good, seems like this is one the things they can mess with the most, it doesn't require new art or assets (the most expensive thing, time-wise) or probably even new code (second most expensive).

Cool, I wonder why they decided to make Dex give a smaller increase than Might, I'm sure they did this math as well. Seems like they should nerf Might slightly and things would be better.

But that's hardly all that distinguishes, say, a mage from a fighter in AD&D, is it. Fighters can't use wands or scrolls or cast spells. Mages can't wear armor or wield swords. Obsidian screwed themselves over by removing equipment requirements. The game has leather armor, but it is completely useless. There is no reason to use it because every class can just use full plate armor. I disagree. Attack speed is tied to armor. So, the heavier your armor the slower you are. Are the numbers right? I am sure they aren't, but I wouldn't put heavy armor on a ranged wizard with long cast times with no resolve. If they get attacked they will be in a world of hurt. On the same note I wouldn't have heavy armor on an archer build or a rogue/barb using light-fast weapons. Yeah, I feel like they just need to tweak the numbers to be much more serious and noticeable. Make plate armor reduce speed to 1/3 or 1/4 even instead of just 1/2 and instead of leather being 0.8 or 0.7 or whatever don't give it nearly as much penalty. And rebalance other things accordingly but that should really come as a given. That would also support changing one of the stats to increase action speed (which I support) since then a plate-wearer would really want that stat to offset the penalty while a nimble leather wearer could either invest in other stats or make themselves extremely speedy by pumping it. They should rebalance weapon speeds as well so that daggers and really light weapons attack 2 or more times as quickly as slow ones (assuming the damage difference is still as big as it is now). Then a person in plate with a heavy weapon would need to invest in that stat or attack extremely slowly while a character in leather with daggers gets many more attacks in that time, especially if they pump the stat.