Gromnir

empedocles... or perhaps kanye west HA! Good Fun!

I've been leveling different characters to see their stories... the one big thing that's annoying is the lack of gear to back up your leveling spree, so you can find yourself dying a LOT more as you level up because your pistols/lightsabers/blasters/whatever are from level 15 when you're level 33 am going to do the broken record thing and repeat our self: do flashpoints. even with the massive bonus xp for story-line, keep doing fps when they become available. as we noted earlier, one o' the best reasons to level via fps is that you will always have level appropriate gear. *shrug* or don't. nevertheless, there is an obvious solution to your problem. HA! Good Fun!

ps mc can always make self feel better about depictions o' catholicism by indulging in japanese media... and we don't mean the obvious anime liberties that include overly endowed, pre-teen battle nuns either. nagasaki actual has a goodly sized catholic population, so it always surprises us when we see such nonsense as sons carrying on the family tradition o' joining the priesthood. HA! Good Fun!

work has kept us away for a bit, so am only seeing these posts after some necrosis. apologies. nevertheless, am going to note dubious characterization. much like cant and others with experience following game developments, we has become jaded about release dates, so we took "2014" with a grain o' salt. and yeah, when gamescom and bb builds were released we made a few comments regarding how skeptical we were 'bout a 2014 release. obsidian silence on release date would not have surprised us one bit. the thing is, obsidian weren't silent. after the gamescom build and bb build were released, we were still heating that PoE would release in 2014. if you had made this kinda post after gamescom or after first bb build, or following the first patch, am expecting you would have had far fewer folks on the purchaser side "hooting and hollering that the sky is falling." *shrug* we has noted many times that we is happy 'bout the delay, 'cause the builds we has seen and played appeared to need a good amount of work. the thing is, you guys brought some o' the fan panic on yourselves when we kept being told, without equivocation, that 2014 were gonna be the release. am knowing you couldn't unilateral change the release date on your own, but am thinking you likewise gotta acknowledge that hearing that 2014 would be the release date AFTER we saw some o' your builds is not the same thing as obsidian silence while doing due diligence. HA! Good Fun!

ignorance. geography and advances in warfare had as much to do with euro city planning as anything. notions o' ancient ecological awareness or consciousness is hokum... and long, largely indefensible walls/fortifications has always been of suspect value (e.g. great wall of china, maginot line.) similarly, the checkerboard or wheel and spoke layout o' streets you see in more modern planned european cities were largely due to the advent o' the cannon and firearms in general. conversely, the hanging gardens o' tenochtitlan (http://www.history.com/videos/aztec-ingenuity#aztec-ingenuity) were the result o' incredible ingenuity and necessity rather than whimsical notions o' a pre-columbian aesthetic. the mexico valley suffered from poor soil quality, frequent frosts and irregular rainfall. chinampas were a solution to these geographical/environmental limitations. you like green? great, but toss the ecological nonsense as that is projecting modern values onto ancient examples that got nothing to do with your aesthetic. HA! Good Fun!

revised advice: get feedback from as many catholics as possible. ask 100 different catholics about such clearly proscribed activities as birth control, stem cell research or even abortion, and am expecting you will get considerable variety o' feedback. hypothetical: a teen-aged catholic girl is raped and becomes pregnant. am not gonna even start with all the possible legal and moral issues and sub-issues that might be spawned by the aforementioned scenario, but those persons expecting uniformity o' response from catholics on all such questions and permutations would be finding themselves surprised. HA! Good Fun!

am a practicing catholic, but am doubtful we can help if you are genuine interested in church hierarchy. ask a priest is good advice as we know only the basic priest<bishop<archbishop<cardinal<pope stuff. heck, we played golf with a monsignor 'least once a month for three years and we only got a fuzzy notion 'bout the specifics o' his title. am suspecting that your question is far more complex (or far more simple) than you suspect. ask a member o' a vietnamese catholic church down in lousiana questions 'bout catholiscism may result in far different feedback than you get from a mexican catholic in el paso, texas, or a a polish catholic in chicago. throw in the middle and upper middle-class catholic, but-only-on-sunday catholics who lives everywhere in the US, and am guessing you get a whole different set o' responses. european catholics we has met is frequent having much different perspectives than is North American or South American catholics. you need also be aware that there is more than a few religious orders as well, and they got different views o' catholicism. jesuits, dominicans and fraciscans, etc. see things different... so too does the various orders o' nuns. and don't even get us started on all the various lay positions and titles that is possible in the catholic church. 'course, it is possible that none o' the aforementioned is relevant to your needs. aside/example: am knowing that our monsignor friend irritated our sister because he drove a rather nice lexus and played golf regularly. we explained to her that monsignor o'conner had not taken a vow o' poverty. our sister went to a catholic high school and were a regular church attendee, but it nevertheless caught her off guard that a priest could have a nice car and an expensive set of golf clubs. ask a priest, but keep in mind that if you ask a priest in london about catholicism and then you set your story in mexico city, you may end up with readers who is just as dismissive o' your portrayal o' catholicism as you woulda gotten had you simply based your catholics 'pon multiple viewings o' the exorcist. HA! Good Fun! ps an exorcist is actual a lay position within the church... doesn't require a priest and is no specific sacrament attached.

not only were the whole moon landing faked, but the US space program were filled with ex-nazi scientists who escaped justice for war crimes by cooperating with the US military-industrial complex. furthermore, many dogs and chimps were killed in an attempt to ensure that space travel were safe enough for human astronauts. what about the chimps? not only that, but armstrong were a combat pilot in korea with the US navy, so armstrong's first steps on the moon were greased with the blood o' north korean and chinese dead. ... am knowing that the absence o' an emoticon might throw some o' you folks off, but one hopes that the sardonic quality o' the above were not missed. HA! Good Fun!

diamond is a hack? okie dokie. in any event, the guy we would mention first as a kinda poster boy for the notion that white disease gutted many native populations in the western hemisphere is a guy by the name of Henry F. Dobyns. am not a huge fan o' his, but he typical don't get described as a quack. is some considerable evidence that more than a few native american populations were destroyed entirely by european disease. when the british explorer, George Vancouver arrived in the puget sound in the late 1700s (am too lazy to look up the exact date) he observed that small pox had arrived before him. few survivors o' the horrific disease remained, and many o' those were rendered blind. Dobyns were the first guy that were suggesting a major increase in the native pre-columbian population o' north america from initial estimates, and he were also making specific guesstimates about the toll o' european disease on such populations. conversely, some o' the estimates o' native populations would appear to be based on... well, we don' t know what they is based 'pon. sure, the aztec capital were larger than paris, and far cleaner too, but there is few new world sites such Tenochtitlan that is making it easy for scholars to get a good estimate o' a population. the thing is, digging up north american sites has never resulted in the kind o' evidence one would need to back-up many of Dobyn's claims 'bout population numbers. there is considerable evidence that europeans attempted to use primitive biological weaponry 'gainst native populations. o' sure, the effectiveness o' such attempts were largely negligible, but the practice itself were hardly insular. however, perhaps ironically, the most effective means o' spreading disease amongst indigenous populations were entirely accidental-- pigs. the post columbus explorers invariably brought pigs with them, and some o' those pigs escaped before being eaten by our intrepid disease carrying explorers. sure, jerks such as de Soto lost much o' their crew to fevers and disease, but their pigs got loose into the native environment and thrived... and spread far more disease than did the explorers themselves. whatever intentional schemes were utilized to spread contagion, the accidental and natural means o' spreading far out weighed the intentional. and keep in mind that the colonials were dropping like flies from disease as well. https://www.armyheritage.org/education-and-programs/educational-resources/education-materials-index/50-information/soldier-stories/282-smallpox bah. all o' this is silly. the vikings discovery o' north america did not change the world. like it or not, columbus landing in the west indies were a pivotal event in human history. us native americans were happily killing each other before europeans got to the New World. whatever unspeakable atrocities the europeans unleashed were largely a continuation o' the atrocities we were indulging in before y'all discovered the western hemisphere. columbus changed the world. he deserves credit for that, whether we like how the world changed is a different question altogether. hey, some scholars is cheesed 'bout how many people throughout history has been killed in the name o' christianity, but am betting most such folks still give their kids christmas presents. columbus day? so what? as an aside, we got little animosity for euro explorers. as we noted earlier, native americans were hardly living in a peaceful utopia before 1492. slavery, war, and genocide were committed in the western hemisphere Before columbus arrived, so in our mind, we has always thought it were hypocritical to blame euros for visiting such evils 'pon us. nope, our anger is limited to specific treaty violations committed by the US... but that is a whole 'nother topic. HA! Good Fun!

Myself, mutonizer, Hiro II, swordofthesith, MoonWolf, morhilane, illathid and Fiebras think otherwise (among others). We know that Rogues are supposed to be a DPS class, but they are doing far, far too much at the moment. Especially considering that pretty much all creatures were nerfed in the latest patch. *chuckle* somebody is easily distracted. "Classes in PE have worse balance than a party of optimally made AD&D 2E characters at the moment." does the current classes need balancing? sure. actual, we mentioned more than once that the PoE classes need balancing. you telling us that you and others think rogue needs balancing is amusing, but not near as relevant as you think. we noted that removing a few weapons would significant diminish complaints about some classes being op, so you acting as if your observation is a rejection or retort is, well, not. *shrug* your initial point were ridiculous. am not sure why you are holding on so tenaciously to this. HA! Good Fun!

a point we see getting missed is that rogue and ranger is 'posed to be the heavy-hitters. furthermore, 'cause perhaps we didn't mention in the thread, developers is attempting to balance usefulness rather than power. extremes in power does diminish usefulness o' competing talents, weapons, classes, etc., but goal is not to make all PoE features balance on a spreadsheet. if our barbarian were doing more damage than our ranger and were a better tank, then we would have a balance problem. if our mage could effective wade into combat and be effective untouchable while doing the best single-target and aoe damage in the game, then we would have ad&d 2e... and we would have busted balance. at the moment, we feel that the paladin is weak, but folks seem to disagree with us. we also do not like that the cleric's buffing and healing role is essential... should be more than a single heal class. even so, compared to ad&d, we don't have any obvious chump classes, and the claims o' OP classes rely much on particular weapons and they is ignoring the class roles. HA! Good Fun!

actually, take away the arbalest, and a few other weapons, and you would see many o' the OP complaints from the recent build disappear. the ranger and rogue is s'posed to be doing the most damage, but the extreme examples is coming with a very limited number o' weapons. the crit numbers tend to shock and awe, but when we look at total damage output in our party, rogue and wizard seem to be having the biggest numbers... though again, am suspecting that the way the ui tracks damage, ranger animal companion is not included with ranger numbers. a ranger with a bear has ridiculous offense output that is not crit dependent. HA! Good Fun!

kinda proving our point(s). you played in a munchkiny ad&d group, so is unlikely you saw from a dm perspective just how bad ad&d 2e balance were, and your rogue example illustrates our concerns about PoE weapons and dt. is not that the classes is broken so much as is the dt and weapons. HA! Good Fun!

okie dokie. as we said, am having a hard time taking you serious, particularly as you now throw dark suns into the mix with all of its wacky balance issues. a "party of optimally made AD&D 2E characters" was a serious headache for a dm, especially if one or two players were not fully optimized. trying to keep the game equally fun for all 2e players were a chore given such balance concerns. in point o' fact, if every player were equal munchkiny, it were actual much easier to dm such a campaign. because o' the enormous gap between powerful and powerless and useful and useless, d&d 2e were at its worst for a dm when optimized and non-optimized mixed in one party... and there is nothing in our ridiculous high number o' hours o' total gameplay o' PoE that would make us think that it iseven remotely close to having 2e ad&d balance issues. there is indeed some serious balance issues related to dt and particular weapons, but those ain't specific class related. btw, for total weapon damage output, rogue and ranger is still tops for us. again, for the rogue or fighter, their damage is far too heavily tied to their weapon choice, but rogues get bonus damage that the fighter doesn't get. compare a rogue with a bow to a fighter with a heavy-damage weapon would be unfair, yes? also, for whatever reason, folks always forget to add animal companion damage to ranger total damage output. we made a firearms ranger who were getting consistent damage in the 40s... and his freaking bear is Still hitting for +50. HA! Good Fun!

closer to 8 hours as it were a weekend... but we did note earlier that we hadn't been exhaustive in our exploration o' balance. played ranger, cipher and barbarian in addition to the bb staples. 'course, we have considerable hours played with the previous builds o' PoE and nothing has jumped out at us that would even make us remote consider an optimized 2e AD&D party to be more balanced. we do note you said you played in the 90s, but you don't say how much? 20 minutes? *shrug* playing is also different than dming. a decent dm in a pnp setting can balance gameplay even if the rules ain't particular balanced. Gromnir frequent had to make adjustments to keep vanilla bards and thieves happy once combat began in a 2e session. perhaps your limited experience as a player of 2e, sans all the rules that could optimize, gives you a less clear picture o' ad&d than those folks with more experience... much as you believe our 8 hours o' gameplay is insufficient. *insert emoticon of your choice here* HA! Good Fun!

... I get the vaguest impression that you're not all that familiar with 2E beyond the IE games. Would that be accurate? that would be our guess. then again, sensuki is kinda schizophrenic with emoticon usage, so perhaps this time he ain't serious. *shrug* we loaded the new build up last night and this am. sure, is not enough time to discover all balance issues in PoE, but compared to a "party of optimally made AD&D 2E characters" there is such a vast gulf in balance concerns that we have a hard time being other than complete dismissive o' sensuki on this matter. HA! Good Fun!

... am suspecting that anybody who had to dm 2e and deal with 2e kits is having a similar reaction. is amazing just how many priests o' mystra and red knight sudden show up in 2e campaigns contemporaneous with splat books, and the proliferation o' bladesingers were amusing. hell, the base 2e stuff were not only woeful unbalanced, but leveling complete changed the balance dynamic for classes. 2e ad&d included such wonderful nonsense as psionic wild talents and pretty much everything in skills and powers, but even the core phb classes were balance broken from the start. PoE does have some notable fails for class balance, but using 2e d&d to contrast? yeah, am not certain if you is serious. sadly, am guessing that you are. HA! Good Fun!

am doubtful that bragging and boasting gets much attention in PoE, and that is kinda a shame. Gromnir is a fan o' the classics, and it always saddened us that judeo-christian notions o' heroism has forced humility 'pon us. would homer's hector pass up a chance to boast? come up with a list o' virtues for beowulf and you would never think to include humble or self-deprecating. the classic heroes were braggarts and it is almost criminal that we has mistaken classical notions o' hubris for modern when reading greek tragedy. for the hero, a good boast were as much a prerequisite as were skill at arms. what a shame that we has become civilized. HA! Good Fun!

well, if that is the direction these threads go, then we got a word about cheesecake. yes, we likes a good cheesecake. with halloween and thanksgiving nearing, we will have multiple opportunities to makes our pumpkin cheesecakes. everybody who isn't lactose intolerant or diabetic loves a Gromnir cheesecake. even so, is not a cake. we got a crust and a filling, like any good pie. is not batter per se, although a couple eggs and a small amount o' flour is added to give the cheesecake filling lift. would you ever think to add frosting to a cheesecake? 'course not. in any event, cheesecake is not a cake. oh, and when did folks start calling prunes "dried plums"? yeah, a prune is a dried plum, but sometime in the past couple years we began seeing prunes being marketed as dried plums... 'cause old people with bowel trouble eat prunes, but young & sexy folks eat dried fruit? and another thing... HA! Good Fun!

Considering most Baldur's Gate 1 areas were empty woods with nothing but a bunch of random enemies and sometimes 1 or 2 npc encounters I am not sure I can agree with this assessment. As for what they do with the extra time? I would hope they spend it primarily fixing bugs, improve the attribute system, continue to improve on combat feedback and feel, and work on the over all game balance. Beyond that some UI options would be okay, but that's about it. New features? I see no point in new features until what you have now is as close to perfect as it can get. it is good that folks give examples o' what they think is superior to PoE, but the bg examples does effective undercut the argument. if PoE had encounter design similar to the majority of circled bg wilderness maps, we would be extreme disappointed. as to priorities, we haven't played the newest builds, but our main concerns now is same as they were before: endemic bugs & balance. well, actually, combat feedback were seemingly improved already and that were our main gripe. score one for obsidian? no doubt the bugs is being addressed without need of Gromnir to identify each one. balance... balance issues is more difficult and somewhat subjective. as we has mentioned elsewhere, when we reference balance, am speaking o' balancing usefulness rather than power. sure, when power/powerlessness is so disproportionate it may impact perceived useful. attributes such as might and intellect is getting attention, and that is a good thing. am hopeful we see further balancing o' attributes. class balance would appear to need work. as we said, we haven't played the last couple builds, but as we mentioned elsewhere, the cipher were needing some adjustments. we personally were believing the paladin were kinda pathetic, but we were surprised by a few o' the player polls that identified paladins as a win class for PoE-- go figure. as we noted earlier, balance is subjective. one o' the drawbacks o' the extreme limited nature o' the beta is that we don't know if we is getting a good look at PoE skill use. one would hope that the full/final build has more skill use opportunities, and more meaningful uses o' skills. most o' the balance issues is also well documented, so this will be a matter o' seeing what obsidian does to address such issues. gonna repeat about bugs. am knowing folks has told us that bugs is easy to fix compared to features, but obsidian, fair or not, has a reputation for buggy releases. there is no publisher for obsidian to blame for PoE being rushed, so while we recognize that a bugless release is impossible, we would be extreme disappointed if PoE were released in the same condition as a few o' obsidian's previous titles. if the developers keep working towards completing PoE, we will be satisfied. am hopeful that obsidian does not try and make different game with the time they got remaining. HA! Good Fun!

until something fundamental changes with character creation, you may always re-enter the ability tab. what this means is that whether you get a +1 to an ability before or after the creating your ability spread is largely meaningless as you can simply re-click the ability tab and distribute your +1 however you so desire. doesn't matter if the +1 comes from backgrounds or culture. from a practical perspective, the +1 ability modifier impacts initial minimums or maximums of an ability score and nothing else. whether the point comes from backgrounds or cultures, what you get is a general +1 ability modifier unattached to any specific ability. HA! Good Fun!

with a few notable exceptions, there were nothing wrong with bg2 quest density. given the number of maps, there were quite a goodly number o' side quests in the underdark. sooooo... brynlaw and those empty maps after the underdark were the problem? yeah, the post underdark maps were anemic, but that were due to much content ending up on the cutting room floor as the developers rushed to finish the game. ... ultimately is a whole lotta nothing that is being debated. stuff such as trademeet's crisis with the druids were actual initiated in athkatla. firkraag also were initiated in the city.would it have made a big difference if you had to go to the windspear hills to get the firkraag (sp?) quest? would that have made it superior and increased the whimsical sense o' exploration we recall some folks waxing poetic 'bout? between companion and stronghold quests, areas such as the umar hills and de'arnise hold had a considerable number o' quests. sure, given that the game were an rpg with considerable replay value, you might not have realized just how many quests were tied to de'arnise on your first play of bg2, but isn't that a good thing? yeah, brynlaw, the asylum, the sahaugin city and the post underdark maps were all kinda limited, focused and/or empty, but am thinking josh's initial point were kinda weak. the quest density in athkatla were never a problem for us, but even so, we find the notion that compelling exploration (HA!) to uncover some handful o' quests would have improved bg2 to be a minor and largely illusory enhancement. were nothing wrong with athkatla quest density. perhaps there were an issue with quest density being unbalanced, but as noted elsewhere, some o' this were due to man-hour limitations... and the fact the asylum and sahaugin city didn't have much in the way o' tangential side quests did not surprise or bother us. HA! Good Fun!

am not certain we agree that more classes is inherently more complex. obsidian is devoted to a notion o' balance, so more classes likely does make more complex in that sense, but the addition o' more classes is not inherently more complex than a zero, two, or eleven class system. a classless system that relies on perks, feats or whatever, can result in as much complexity as an eleven class system if the feats and perks is numerous and diverse. in point o' fact, virtually any class we see in PoE can be recreated with a classless system. those unique class abilities is made available through feats n' such. with eleven classes you do not necessarily get more complex-- you get more limited. ironic, no? each class needs necessarily become more focused or at least more unique, otherwise there ain't a point to having the class. considering that an obsidian goal were to be allowing greater customization and freedom o' character development than we saw in the ie games, we saw eleven classes as unnecessary. in fact, we suggested that eleven classes were working at cross purposes with their stated goals. as we said, more classes equal less freedom as each class need necessarily fill a more limited role. nevertheless, we believe obsidian has done an admirable job o' making the classes unique... particularly the casters. even so, more classes don't equal more complexity. however, with more anything, you does make increasingly difficult to balance. HA! Good Fun!

You're sounding a bit sensitive there gromnir. lord help us. is that your response? we know pre-teens that do better than this. ... no doubt, option 2 was, "i know you are, but what am i?" yes, you got us. the First Amendment attorney who has been an advocate for gang members, nazis and religious nut-jobs is "sensitive" regarding your... posts. go easy on the narcissism. *snort* and to stay on-topic. am confused by the dungeon siege reference. "Dungeon Siege 3 had 4 for a reason." well, am s'posing that is true. there is always a reason. your axiomatic statement is hardly illuminating. HA! Good Fun! ps edit: we never actual defended gang members, nazis and/or religious nut-jobs. we hasn't done criminal for a long time, and we were prosecution side back then. we "defended" constitutional rights, but not criminal defense. apologies for possible confusion.

obviously you don't understand humor, or the codex, or... something. am not sure what the nazi iconography is s'posed to convey to us. regardless, that kinda thing is, no doubt, exactly what obsidian is trying to promote with their message board community. *insert eye-roll emoticon* HA! Good Fun!