Gromnir

"Most of this legislation has not been constitutionally controversial." ... on one level, we got no idea what that could possibly mean in relation to our love life. on another, it probable explains why we is experiencing a bit o' a dry spell. HA! Good Fun!

am admitting that 'tween bugs that prevent us from attacking and the combat log feedback that is often counter-intuitive, am getting a wee bit frustrated with PoE combat. for the time being, am gonna hold off to genuine rip into what we see as flawed combat mechanics as we can't tell mistakes from mindless at this point... give 'em til first patch. HA! Good Fun!

we do find the more normalized spread o' stats to be refreshing. d&d strength, for example, would have us, without magical boosting, challenging adult male rhinos in strength by the time we hit level 20. at level 1, we could manage an 18 strength in d&d and pathfinder. a 7' bugbear, by comparison, would have a str o' 15. centaurs, who got the body o' a freaking horse, average 18 str. a giant eagle, which could manage to carry a human in flight, also had an 18 str. gnolls, which is averaging 7.5' and weighing 300 lbs is getting str o' 15. griffons weigh 500 lbs and can carry men in flight... they got 18 str. a winter wolf is 450 lbs and has 18 str. a Heavy war horse has str o' 18. a crocodile is a bit stronger with a str o' 19... so wait til level 4. a mule gots a str o' 16, a Freaking Mule! has anybody here worked on a farm? clearly not the folks at wotc. am not minding that abilities in PoE is not like d&d. HA! Good Fun! ps keep in mind that we don't need or want reality, but if we can get enough variation with more normalized stats and still feel as if those stat choices is meaningful, then we will be happy. that being said, we does see inflated stats as being a tad bit ridiculous.

If Gromnir is going to make the effort to stay in character, the least you could do is to read it with Gromnir Il Khan's voice. Really now, is that too much to ask? well, to be fair, Gromnir predates the vo from ToB, so perhaps a mildly autistic austrian accent is actually more appropriate. maybe not. HA! Good Fun!

*chuckle* if you keep on with the "rest easy" kinda nonsense we got nothing to respond to. the original genesis post idea were silly. pushing and promoting were silly. we pointed out silliness. if that is all... *shrug* well, there is always a few such folks. in any event, nothing new from us til you get new material. is not a game to see how long we can go before you say something new or til we get bored. HA! Good Fun!

have been playing ranged characters for the most part so we cannot tell what is being interrupted. cipher, ranger, chanter and druid has gotten some gameplay, but they has most always been ranged. in fact, only our bb fighter is a genuine melee combatant, other than animal companions, and to be fair our fighter seems to have not been interrupted as yet... or maybe he has. is hard to tell. as we has noted elsewhere, a text or graphic indicator for interrupts would be very useful. HA! Good Fun!

Gromnir has mentioned this numerous times. marked prey is, for example, a very important ranger ability that gots 1 use per encounter, but is often very difficult to identify which beetle or spider or whatever is affected. is no simple way to track debuffs on enemies, which makes already chaotic combat more frustrating. HA! Good Fun!

people accuse lawyers o' playing semantics games? *insert dismissive emoticon o' your choice here* am still finding this far more ridiculous than annoying. set at 8 instead o' 3? *chuckle* keep plugging away in an attempt to... am not sure what is your goal at this point. elicit some kinda charged response? good luck. in any event, we applaud your verve and it is amusing to watch you keeps such a non-issue alive. we will oblige just so long as your wackiness doesn't become too repetitive. HA! Good Fun!

*shrug* whatever ros thinks were the possibilities o' fallout and arcanum, the developers recognized that functionally those games resulted in only a handful o' played builds. fallout and arcanum is the thing obsidian is rejecting, so holding it forth as the goal is complete missing the point. am, not having enough feedback to know if PoE system is balanced at the moment. if interrupts is as useful as they would appear to be, then perception is woeful underutilized. Gromnir is having much difficulty in ignoring intellect for any build we has made so far. might is extreme useful, perhaps too useful, but dexterity is also extreme important for near every build. our only dump stat so far is resolve, and am guessing that becomes more important once we figure out interrupts. people is making lots o' assumptions w/o having necessary feedback. am not knowing how we got 26 pages based on little more than gut feeling and comparisons to games that is terribad examples o' balance. HA! Good Fun!

as an aside, Gromnir's notion o' what we likes to see in visuals is as follows: and none o' which is likely to make it into obsidian catalog o' portraits, so we will be content to create our own. HA! Good Fun!

The point was not that these games were better "balanced" in the sense that most point distributions were equally hard to play the game with. The point was that these games provided a genuine character creation system where you the strengths and weaknesses of your character was very pronounced. This made for a lot of replayability and role playing opportunities. In PE the focus seems to be which classes you have in your party. I like the differences between the classes, but I think it is sad that stats make such little difference. Obsidian should really just take the stats pretty much as they are, then have them make double as much impact. Make low stats worse and good stats better. Start the balancing from that point instead. There is a lot of talk about how "all builds are viable" but really, that's hardly surprising if there is no practical difference between them. Yes, I know that would be harder to balance. But really, if the current approach to balancing is to make all bonuses/maluses so small they are practically irrelevant... Yeah, that's not the road interesting games take. There is a need for a slight refocus of priorities. and fallout and arcanum character generation is exact what obsidian were trying to avoid 'cause as much as you could build characters any way you wished, functionally there were a very small handful o' viable builds... at least according to the developers. you has chosen the worst examples o' balance and has illustrated exact what obsidian is fighting against with PoE. grats. HA! Good Fun!

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=683725&stc=1&d=1243609845 we liked jason manley not necessarily 'cause o' realism but 'cause o' more reserved and impressionistic approach. iwd paladin/knight with enormous and unweildable sword weren't realistic, but it were evocative. am not even gonna get started on sweet's realism, but that don't mean we disliked. fantastic use o' color and no ridiculous cheese-eating grins such as were typical in bg2 portraits. realism ain't a huge factor for us in the portraits... didn't seem that manley or sweet were over-concerned with realism either. HA! Good Fun!

seelah is the name o' the pathfinder paladin iconic. google can help find some nice pics. less pronounced b00b armour, and with a halo... much like the priest from leferd's link. in any event, is actually much easier for Gromnir to find very nice asian, black and semitic fantasy art than native american/indian. silly feathers and buckskins is the closest we typical get. usual we gotta go google and get portraits o' red cloud or chief joseph or somesuch, or we break down and find the wes studi dui mug shot... very intimidating. HA! Good Fun!

druid in shiny plate fighting off undead with a holy sword? no, does not give us a druid vibe. 'course, when we think druid, we immediately think o' 7th year sociology majors at csu humboldt. HA! Good Fun!

as an aside, am suspecting we create an ocean-folk human female paladin simply so we can get a portrait using a cropped version o' the following: leferd may hate it, but it looks nifty to us. HA! Good Fun! ps particular for the heavily armoured female portraits from iwd2, "realism" is not the word we would be looking to use.

we dislike many wayne reynolds iconics, but the investigator is, as we mentioned, our favorite current mage choice for portraits. we also offered the non wayne versions http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk199/MaskedBrute/ScreenShot2013-07-22at15157PM.png still has horrible barbarian with ridiculous sword, but the hate is over-the-top. sure, we would prefer justin sweet, but those is less available and less class specific. regardless, the point were that pathfinder were clear attempting to be racial/cultural sensitive, and leferd aside, they is very popular. HA! Good Fun!

"balance" used in same sentence as fallout and/or arcanum is meant as a joke, yes? HA! Good Fun!

I'm glad I didn't have to say it. It's expected for a game to have all white portraits with a single token PoC but since they deliberately made a setting with people of different complexions I was kind of hoping for more than "none." It doesn't matter that this is only the beta because that makes it seem like non-white characters are an afterthought. And PoC representation is way more important to me than fuzzy-faced hobbit representation. Also I would really like to see the supposedly plentiful black character portraits available on the internet. our current favorite wizard image is via the much maligned wayne reynolds over at pathfinder http://paizo.com/image/content/PathfinderRPG/PZO1129-Investigator_500.jpeg http://itsjustsoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/pathfinder-iconics.jpg Gromnir is lakota, but o' the 15 base pathfinder iconics in second image, 2 is black. considering 12.6% o' the US population is black, having 2 o' the humans being black seems pretty fair. one gnome is greenish and a dwarf is grey. is no distinct native americans or hispanics but there is two arab/semitic. the jade regent line o' adventures added a few assians to the pathfinder catalog. *shrug* you got it better than does Gromnir. but we still think the investigator looks good, even with all the wayne reynolds hate. HA! Good Fun! ps there is non wayne reynolds variations o' the pathfinder iconics http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk199/MaskedBrute/ScreenShot2013-07-22at15157PM.png

that topic is unrelated to this thread, but the answer is s'posed that all abilities is of equal importance to all builds. for instance, our ranger archer discovered very quick that low constitution were a bad idea as our animal companion transmitted damage to us. similarly, constitution represents your stamina pool, and so characters that use stamina regardless o' whether they is front line or not, will need high constitution. similarly, intellect affects size o' aoe and duration o' powhaz. if your barbarian or fighter has chosen abilities that does aoe damage, then a low intellect will be a handicap. perception has a significant impact on chance to interrupt enemy actions, which includes combat actions and spells. am suspecting that perception is vast under appreciated but as we have no feedback as to how/when it works, it is becoming a dump stat. ideally, there should be no obvious dump stats for any PoE class. HA! Good Fun!

we never could get worked-up over silly. is one o' our few redeeming character traits. ... perhaps that is why bio made so that we were the only bhaalspawn sensible enough to figure out melissan's plan. or perhaps dave couldn't figure out a way to work us into the game as a flatulent xvart. who knows? regardless, priority for this suggestion should come right behind visible shoelaces on footwear. HA! Good Fun!

the portrait selection is anemic and... odd. there is multiple nature godlike females, but complete absence o' any options for some other race/cultures. as you say, this is a beta, but am also guessing that much as with the ie games, people will prefer their own portraits. iwd and iwd2 were the only ie games that had portraits we liked, and even for those games we frequent used custom. priority should be to make adding customs ez rather than offering a plethora o' new portraits... save for perhaps the races that is unique to PoE. moon godlike and the fish peoples is gonna be difficult to find appropriate custom portraits. HA! Good Fun!

excessive use o' emoticons can push us to the point where e become mildly disappointed... is as close to rage as you is gonna get. current state requires an extra second or two o' clicking for folks who prefer more normalized builds? that is the complaint? *sigh* really? HA! Good Fun!

1) not an orc bioware depicted as a half-orc as a joke 2) not worked up is simply... stoopid. is like folks arguing over game trees. some saying bark is too light to be oak, but leaves look oak. should make leaves appropriately birch-like to avoid immersion ruin. is just... stoopid. Gromnir is observing that such stuff is stoopid, but we has been watching these boards too long to get worked up 'bout such predictably inane issues. HA! Good Fun!

is surreal that we is bothering to discuss this. *sigh* that being said, we prefer no set or established average scores. if developers give an "official" average, more than a few folks will be reluctant to drop scores lower than the average. who wants to be below average, particular if you is a new player? the absence o' developer approved average lessens, if only by a small amount, the likelihood o' uniformity. and again, ANY effort to change the status quo is a waste from our pov. HA! Good Fun!

that is a genuine concern? is something you see worth spending any resources 'pon? well, am guessing that once absolutely all the bugs is fixed and the serious balance concerns is addressed, if the developers has nothing better to do, then we can see them setting initial default scores at 8. ... is so far down our list o' genuine concerns that it don't even bear mentioning. HA! Good Fun!