ZornWO

What I was looking for in this update was a way to add in some intricacy and strategy on top of the raw tactics - in order to make up for having no prebuffing (which is understandable), no sequencers and no contingencies (which is really disappointing). Having lots of spells and filling a grimoire w/ them adds a touch of that back in but doesn't really fix the problem. I guess SCS has spoiled me utterly. The players that Josh Sawyer calls the "Rommels" (not the greatest name there lol) get maybe one or two rpgs a decade, if even that much. Players like that playtester Josh has cited a couple times who never thought to prebuff have essentially the entire market catering to them already; you hear stuff abt ppl buying more games than they can even get around to playing. Losing PoE to the second group is a bitter pill to swallow. I'll have to wait & keep an eye out for mods... thankfully I don't preorder as a rule. That said, I sincerely wish you guys @ Obsidian the best of luck. I'll go so far as to say, if I thought your success depended on my purchase I'd go ahead & "buy" (back) it now. It does look like you're producing a quality game & you completely deserve the love you're getting.

I totally support ppl expressing their subjective dislike of SCS. It's totally valid to say one didn't enjoy SCS. But it kills me to see this unfair criticism that it isn't strategic or it's somehow cheesy when DavidW put years of thought and hard work into making it strategic and into heavily reducing the cheese in the game. He put a lot of effort into keeping a consistent ruleset for players and opponents, closing off some of the broken nonsense like Cloudkilling enemies offscreen, and by avoiding Weimer Tactics-style "gotchas." He created a bunch of code so the AI can detect what you're doing and react sanely. Having fighters know to switch to ranged weapons when they're stuck in a Teleport Field makes TF tactical rather than stupidstrong. The first time seeing enemies move outside cloud AoEs was almost as impressive as the first time seeing an enemy priest cast Zone of Sweet Air to help his party. Not to mention the outlandishness of enemies that know how to open doors to chase after you as one of your characters tries to retreat! Those enemies were showing even more gall than that fighter who had the audacity to take an antidote when poisoned. I only found BG1 and BG2 when it came to Gamefly, which I happened to have at the right time. So I wound up exploring their mods, including SCS, before trying IWD. Yeah... it doesn't compare. IWD is a great game, and it had some fun to offer, but it felt like a much older game. Its AI just wasn't very responsive. Edit (on top of some re-wordings): I'll add abt Weimer's Tactics mod - one difference b/w it and SCS for me is metagaming. I try hard not to metagame BG2 except for quest order and maybe some inventory decisions. Not only is it possible not to metagame in SCS, the mod facilitates that goal. On a fresh install, it randomizes spellcasters' spellbooks out of a handcrafted set appropriate for their level so you can't metagame the spells you'll face. I found Tactics was too puzzle-like to do avoid some metagaming.

Thanks for the reply.

Just to piggyback on the AI question, but will there be any randomization to enemy types or their abilities? There's a mod to BG2 (SCS) that randomizes wizards' spell books from a set of handcrafted spell books each time you install, and so I only ever play on fresh installs. Also, will there be any classes that have sequencer/contingency type spells? That's a huge thing for me. I was looking at the art for scripted interactions; are they in an in-world style, i.e., are they how Dyrwoodians (sp?) or whoever illustrate manuscripts?

Alright, the comment's two weeks old, and sorry for dumping yet again on DA, but this point's a huge pet peeve of mine. Having several ways to build classes up is a great thing, but DA:O did it badly. I beat the game on the hardest difficulty setting, w/ a house rule against any potion use (health and lyrium), paying virtually no thought to my ability and spell picks apart from some healing spells. It's not that the game was too easy, it's that it was too simple (though parts were too easy too). Somehow "tactics" has come to mean "never having to think much ahead," and that's terrible. If the devs are going to ensure each class has several valid ways to build up, they should pay careful attention to making sure that abilities aren't all valid in just any arbitrary combination - each ability should be useful, but at least past the lower/lower difficulty setting(s), ability pick combos should matter & require some planning. That's a big part of the fun! This is why heresy is eeevil!!1!1

Stasis_Sword's requests seem pretty elementary to me, expect perhaps the "nerfed forms" request if the druid forms don't mimic actual creatures in the world. "Unlocking abilities over time" seems like an improvement over IE shapeshifting. If it's of interest, the BG1/2 spider form is useful against spellcasters since the several rounds of poison damage disrupt their casting. It's also better against enemies that are prone to going invisible etc.

Apologies if it's a duplicate request, but -- It'd be really great if you could talk to shopkeeps over the sales counter, or bartenders over the bar, rather than having to walk around to their side like in the IE games. It's probably not worth too many "zots" if that's what it'd take, but it feels a little silly talking to Barkis in the Smoldering Corpse on his side of the bar

It seemed as if TC there was saying that fire could create a status effect, being set aflame or the like, no? The wiki pg on defense mentions, "Fortitude (FOR): Represents a character's endurance to "body system attacks" such as poison or disease. It is based on Might and Constitution." It's fairly surprising there's no poison dmg, but it's probably not terrible that way.

It's really disappointing there won't be new stretch goals. (What a way to get a sense of what the promancers are feeling.) Druid & chanter companions that have dialog would've been very welcome; the wiki on companions doesn't even mention a fighter. Plus, BG2 had a dearth of wilderness. Valorian says it has 5 wilderness areas, but it's not clear what that's counting. There are the 3 that unlock when you exit the Underdark, plus a 4th if you count the UD exit area itself (which shouldn't count, really). Maybe if you count the druid grove and the Umar temple ruins? Overall, good update tho. The godlike are looking good & Ondra's Gift has so much open space it's crying out for a battle.

Ofc it's perfectly fine to disagree only in part. The issue was that I posted abt my interest in all these different kinds of tradeoffs, and your response was to enlighten me that tradeoffs don't all have to be one kind of thing. On top of a more general sense your replies tend to be... unresponsive to the topics discussed, and it creates an impression you don't give attention or thought to the posts you reply to. My schedule's far too hectic to view ignoring other ppl as "productive discussion." Even here, in response to a passage suggesting you didn't consider an earlier post's points, your reply isn't to clarify how you did consider them, or to acknowledge the problem and address it, or even to avoid replying to the point (which, as before, would've been fine), but it's instead to react as if the passage disdained partial disagreement - a leap that's just baffling. Lephys, it's clear (and appreciated!) you're well-intentioned, but it is frustrating having a conversation that lacks conversing. Perhaps it's best just to agree to disagree & move on. Some of what you've said to Mr. M has been rather ironic.

Well, given my hard-earned pessimism regarding game series that name-drop BG and promise "tactical" combat, hopefully Obsidian can make that 2-0 ftw.

To be fair, I suspect that passage was referring to my post, which explicitly stated I wasn't that into summoning. Meaning that, as I said, in BG2 especially except for Mordy Swords or Planetars (which were very OP), the summoning spells are heavily overrated imo for most of the game - and I'd love a game where the summoning system was more interesting/complex, and again, there was a lot of great discussion in the thread which generated some thought. Though, if someone's aim is to have a pure summoner, especially a solo one, then I can see why having a risk to some summoning spells that they'd rebel would be unappealing as it'd create a need for contingency plans that wouldn't rely on those summons.

Yes, but I was curious about what the specifics were. I'm asking b/c our sense of how IE combat plays is extremely different, especially when you say things like "I don't want to win combat because I had more positive effects on my party than the enemy did, and/or countered their dispels before they could counter my buffs, etc." Sorry we still disagree, but my overwhelming impression from many, many of your posts is that you dislike managing risks ex ante; you only ever seem to want determinism or pure ex post reaction. But that eliminates wholesale a source of complications and contingency-planning; it just flattens the dimensions of the tradeoffs the player faces. That's far more, as you put it, "primitive" than including those added complications. So for instance: "For example, having the ability to strike your ally to awaken them from a Sleep effect is, in my book, a far superior means of handling such a thing than 'I'll cast this spell that's the opposite of sleep, and/or is designed to remove effects.'" Look at what you're proposing: the player can only react, rather than having the option of judging in advance the risk of a sleep effect to be high enough that it's worth devoting resources to addressing. That's obviously an elimination of a potential source of tradeoffs and difficulty - you're homogenizing gameplay. Some of the rest of your post is a bit hard to untangle, partly b/c it intermingles three different things: buffing before combat, buff stacking itself, and hard counters. On buffing before combat, you know my suggestions. It's not hard to understand why ppl dislike rote pre-combat buffing. On buff stacking - again, I said why I like them and why they add strategic challenge; the response seems to be primarily, oh, it's "silly", "primitive," "ridiculous." When you say, "Well, the tradeoffs just don't need to be purely a choice between a direct action and a passive boost," it's fairly clear you simply didn't read what I wrote, which you know, is fine, but then why respond? On hard counters, I haven't really discussed them. I like hard counters simply b/c of my experience w/ them vs. other combat systems, which don't deliver the same complexity. (Yeah, that's ironic, given how they work vs. other buffs, which on paper seem more intricate.) Let's take a simplified example: Let's say your spellcaster-only party loads up on fire spells. That's a very simple tactical plan, and (past maybe a first handful of low-lvl encounters or such) you should lose for it. If the enemy has hard-counter PfFire, you will - so if a hard counter's in a game, you'll have to weigh the risks of facing it, and assess the opportunity costs of taking other damage types versus debuffs, etc. Sometimes this risk management will pay off big, sometimes it'll go terribly, and it lets combat be dicey in ways I haven't seen other combat systems deliver. All of that delivers combat diversity and strategic depth. Otoh, If the enemy has a soft counter to fire, well, either you're in the same boat b/c PfFire's effectively close enough to a hard counter (in which case, the change had no point), or there's no particular reason to change your tactical plan and you can still win with mindless tactics. The response here might just be Pipyui's point that if you know you're facing e.g. Fire Elementals, you can memorize PfFire and have a win on simple tactics. But that's a problem of enemy design given the spells and abilities, not the other way around - e.g., aTweaks' pnp Salamander Nobles had an ability that lowered enemies' fire resistance. And along those lines, have you played mage duels in BG2? Particularly with the SCS mod? They really bring out the potential of these systems. It's not at all a function of simply having more buffing, or countering them before they counter you, as you suggested above. You can win w/ fewer or no buffs, and you can win w/ no or minimal debuffing - or lots of both. You can also lose any of those ways, and I've done that too. It's partly a function of smart spell selection ex ante - you have to think abt the system and the spectrum of contingencies possible, especially in no-reload - but also how well you can implement that understanding on the fly. It's more an intellectual challenge. So I strongly disagree when you say it'd be better to have "something like Mage Armor to be more than just 'you're harder to hit for a duration,' instead being breakable or something, like the Wizard's Arcane Veil seems to be in PoE. Now it's strategic." That's not strategic; on the contrary, being breakable (what you seem to have in mind here, per the discussion w/ Gfted1) rewards the mindless tactic of just bashing away to break the spell.* Again, your preferences here tend towards simplifying and homogenizing gameplay. *(The particular mechanism Arcane Veil seems(?) to have where a single weapon type can pierce it is fine by me - it's analogous to the Mantle line of spells. It's a hard counter to most wpn types.) edit: rather than posting another dull book, I'll just mention here abt the Summoning thread discussion: regarding chance in combat, the reason it's strategically challenging is b/c the risk of an adverse event induces the need to create contingency plans, particularly in no-reload. If you take a risk-based spell, other parts of your spell/ability selections will change to keep it from being a disaster if e.g. the summon rebels. So the chance spells have an implicit resource cost that you're overlooking. As well, sorry to say, I disagree w/ the rest of your views there, but it's probably not worth pursuing.

I'm not bothered by it. I thought the dev's were trying to keep away from this sort of stuff? The reloading to get a better outcome? The reload to get your death spell off, a successful pick pocket, to do 'anything else better' type outcome? Wow, I thought that was just for a particular spell or two? Are they really examining every little mechanic for how it affects that issue? I don't get it. It's a single-player game. If some ppl save-scum I don't see why the game should nanny them. It starts to impact no-reload play.

Lephys, I'm curious, were there any specifics in IE combat that you liked? In terms of buff stacks, the main thing (hardly the only thing) I like about it is that it creates "stacks" of different, often challenging tradeoffs both in spell selection and w/in combat (both offensively and defensively), far more extensively than any other combat system I've tried. If you change some of your spell picks, it creates cascades of implications for what else you'd want to pick (even if you just restrict attention to "viable" spells (e.g. no infravision)). Combat against enemy mages is extremely diverse and unpredictable (particularly with good AI, per SCS), w/o being arbitrary, and can often close off the obvious ways to attack and force you to get creative more than I've seen in other systems, esp. in no-reload. I could go on about it but no-one's really reading. Anyway, in the IE games, prebuffing was just a small price to pay - though again, I think there are ways around prebuffing. I'd be more open to other systems if I had some expectation they could deliver tradeoffs like that. I've just never seen it. Your idea about a skill wouldn't address that really. As well, the game already has an interruption mechanic.

Meh. Why should no-reloaders pay for the save-scummers' sins? If that's what they want to do, why does it bother you?

There's no disagreement here! It's not a criticism of the established names at all (not even "monk", which obv they should use rather than my name for it). It's just for personalization/variety. Plus curiosity to see what other ppl associate w/ the classes. Nor is the post a veiled request for the option in-game (bells-and-whistles stuff shouldn't preoccupy devs that much). Surely though it'd be great to have the text files sufficiently editable/moddable that it'd be no trouble to change something so small. Besides, a Dave class opens up the possibility of having the Dave Dave.

I wasn't a fan of the hard cap on summons b/c it felt too "artificial". Maybe instead, you could have the risk of a summons going beserk start out very small for the first one, like 5% or something tiny, only to go up and up w/ ea. summon w/in a battle? ~~~~ Btw, thanks for the response, JS. edit: It's worth mentioning, it makes a ton of sense to give chanters a lot of summons now that you say it.

I'm so late to the party it's the after-after party! I'm not even a fan of summoning spells generally but the thread has some great discussion. I'd agree with some other posters that it'd work well to balance summoning by introducing a risk the summon would rebel. Having a summoner pull a lost soul (which I'd guess is the PoE route) into material form and subvert it to the summoner's will immediately suggests a mechanic of it going beserk or such. It strikes me as the obvious way to balance it, and hopefully it's the primary mechanic for doing so. It'd also open the door for metamagic spells to improve such risk. But I favor spell diversity. There's room for "summons" without such risk. The illusion school in some games/ game systems houses illusionary "summons" (a kind of an interactive holograph) that would make sense to have without a risk of rebelling. They'd also be commensurately weaker than true summons, and it'd make sense. One of my hopes is to have a vibrant illusion school. The gnome illusionist is one of my favorite archetypes. There are a lot of other good suggestions on the thread. Since animancy can be perverted to necromancy-like effects then perhaps having some summon spells harm the caster as josan motierre suggested might work for some "specialty" summoning spells. I also like his suggestion that druid summons would be loyal but could be balanced by having a high risk of fleeing. I'm not such a fan of the idea of having the summons' attack use up the summoner's own standard action. That seems overly punitive. Contrary to other posters, I already rarely find summons competitive in IWD and the BG games (particularly with the 5-summon cap). My big reason to post though is Osvir's suggestion of a "true-name" spell that commands mastery of a single, highly powerful summon. The game will require wizards to find spells around the world, and that brings to mind the possibility of extremely rare spells that are available in only e.g. hard-to-access/easy-to-miss coves towards the end of difficult quests. I was already wondering what those types of spells would be like. A true-name spell that gave command of a powerful being - perhaps a demon, perhaps the lost soul of a long-dead sorcerer, etc. - and had some of the mechanics he suggested would be great for one such spell. Perhaps that type of thing would fit a high-level expansion pack. The only other thing I'd say is that hopefully all this won't take away from the non-summoning spells, which I generally prefer.

On another thread, a poster suggested the option of letting players rename classes. I thought it might be interesting to see what custom names people would pick. Warrior monks can be really interesting. Tendai Buddhism had an army of warrior monks, and the idea of Buddhist monk fighters has an appealing paradoxical air. But I can't shake the association of "monk" with "peaceful monastery dweller," so I'd rename them. Perhaps "hermetist," since there's something to their mechanic that fits one definition, "impervious to external influence", though there's no real connection to hermeticism. It doesn't fit perfectly, but "hermetist" is just a funny word. On that note, I'd work in "theurgist" too. Maybe the clerics. I'd probably change the names up on different playthroughs.

If it's helpful - in combat, wizard casting will be very similar to BG2 sorcerer casting like others have said. You'll have a certain number of castings for each spell level (unless the level's castable at will), and each cast can be of any spell of the spell level that's in the grimoire. The wiki says that each grimoire can hold four spells per level, and outside combat you can fill with any spell the wizard knows. Josh Sawyer calls these grimoire slots. Grimoire switching is essentially a cooldown mechanic that will swap out the spells in these spell slots but (what's not mentioned yet unless I missed it) it won't restore the number of castings left. Maybe it'll be useful to separate out two issues, prebuffing versus what the buffs themselves are like. I usually didn't mind prebuffing but I fully understand the antipathy. Is anyone defending old-style prebuffing? There's maybe a post or two that reads ambiguously that way. I continue to think contingencies and sequencers and triggers ("C/S") would be fine as a replacement here; it'd be shocking if they reversed themselves on prebuffing wholesale (not that I'd really mind). Unless the grimoire-switching cooldown is so long it outlasts all spells' durations (which implies you wouldn't have C/S anyway), it could work just like in the BG games. You'd cast, say, a sequencer spell, fill it with spells you have available, and you're out the castings whether or not you switch grimoires. If it balanced better, they could also have the sequencers dispel upon switching grimoires. I'd propose that maybe once you set up a C/S type spell, when you have that grimoire equipped, upon rest (or maybe between battles, if spells are available) it would automatically recast the C/S to have the same spells as before unless you turn the option off. The Sword Coast Strategems mod for BG/BG2 has a scripting option that lets spellcasters automatically cast some buffs upon rest, so it'd be vaguely similar to that and eliminate nearly all express pre-combat spell prep w/o eliminating the planning aspect that was great about IE casters. If they include C/S type spells at all (which I'd certainly hope!), I'd say it'd be an obvious improvement to have that option (if it's easy enough to implement, anyway). In one BG2 playthrough, I had Imoen fill a sequencer with Minor Globe of Invulnerability plus two Skull Traps, which she'd cast on herself. That was one of her primary tricks, and it'd have been nice to have the sequencer automatically refill rather than refilling it manually each time. On buffs, maybe there's just little common ground. Some posters read as though they just disliked IE combat wholesale - a fair opinion, but I have no common ground there. Personally, I'd be fine if most classes de-emphasized spell-counterspell systems but at least one class should keep it (assumedly wizards but I'd be fine with druids, ciphers); otherwise they're delivering essentially DA combat minus cooldowns. There's also some talk about buffs' durations - long-lasting buffs aren't really the equivalent of a passive bonus since you have to decide whether to pay the cost of a spell slot for it. I've had playthroughs that were extremely buff-heavy and others where my characters decided the best defense is a great offense. If long-lasting buffs were folded into passive bonuses for the class it'd deny players that flexibility. I guess here too if there's disagreement then there's little common ground. ~~~ @Lephys, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. =) My point was exactly about your disjunction: the buffs are neither necessary (as the melee-only playthroughs people have actually done demonstrate), nor "pointless"/"unhelpful" (obviously; surely it goes without saying that buffs in IE were helpful? They're so helpful ppl often think they're necessary). I'd view disagreement on that claim - that buffs were neither necessary nor unhelpful - as a factual mistake about IE gameplay, but you're free to disagree both about the claim and about whether it's about a factual matter. It's also clear we have no common ground on what we find exciting, but that's the way things go. Happy gaming!

I sympathize strongly with the broad sentiment. I really dislike it when fantasy worlds ape the real world too closely. Where that line lies is always subjective, but it starts to feel unimaginative, and it reaches a point where I'd rather a story just be in the real world plus some fantasy elements like how they did with Darklands. (Even this has exceptions - Eisenwald sounds like it might work out, last I heard.) As a result, I'm usually unsympathetic to arguments that such-and-such couldn't work in the real world. Here though the characters will be really tiny, so having real-world armor will be a low-key way to maintain verisimilitude and perhaps a low-resource way to generate lore and design for the items (by which I mean, the real-world item armor types are kind of "pre-made" and so little-known apart from aficionados that the devs don't need to put much work into thinking why things would be the way they are for those item descriptions). The design elements you're seeking probably wouldn't show up well given the scale. Plus, arbitrary armor spikes annoy me. I guess it could work if it were associated with one culture in particular, but yeah... they really annoy me after DA2.

Nonek, you're freaking me out a little ^_^ When the devs say there's no prebuffing, are they including trap laying, or just defensive spells with duration? You're kind of "buffing" an area with traps, but that's really not how I understood the term. This part of IE combat is one of the things that gave it such a strategic dimension as well. Yeah, it might bear clarifying that it's not really speculative to say that a system with triggers and contingencies can retain the feel of IE combat. The SCS mod had three different options for enemy mages' prebuffing. I've tried each. The minimal-prebuffing option had mages (apart from end-stage Irenicus) start with just Stoneskin and maybe one or two other long-lasting buffs. It doesn't destroy their play or change the feel since they still slam up defenses by having a contingency or two go off and using a sequencer. Balancing issues are obviously important here. I'm sure your proposal will be good =)

I'd love the ability to rename classes easily, even if it were just through editable text files/modding.

You don't need pre-buffing to duplicate BG2-style mage combat. When I'd heard they were eliminating prebuffing, I had expected a system of buffs together with a wide assortment of spell triggers and contingencies. It wouldn't be anymore meta-gamey than merely preparing your mage book, which we know the devs have adopted for PoE mages. Sustained, strong buffs are essential for creating IE-style mage combat and those wonderful mage duels, and for avoiding Dragon Age-style mage garbage. Mr. Magniloquent's suggestion of a cap on sustained spells is an interesting one (very imaginative!), and could complement a trigger/contingency based system, but I have mixed feelings about having it apply to any spell with duration rather than just defensive buffs. If a charm spell costs you not only a spell slot, but a sustained-spell slot, it'd have to be very powerful to be better than unsustained offensive spells - whereas a sustained defensive buff wouldn't have much competition (looking at the IE spells, I'm not really seeing an instantaneous defense spell, unless BG's Dimension Door counts as defensive?). Plus, there'd be the risk mages start to play like a mana-system mage. Nonetheless, it's a very promising idea! Lephys, I'm sorry to disagree here, but the passage I bolded in particular is very wrong. People have soloed BG2 using monks. It takes potions, sure, but the magic resistance is key. People have also soloed BG2:SoA with fighters. That takes equipment, potions, and a knowledge of what spell school goes with what casting color so you know which potion (like an active ability) to hit. (So for instance, iirc a yellow casting animation is the Enchantment school, so if you see yellow casting, you should already have equipment that grants free action so you'll want a potion of clarity to counter chaos/charm etc.) That's not to say PoE should go that way for fighters and monks, since obviously BG2's class balance is out of whack. But that's because other classes often only could autoattack; it's not because of mage buffs. A solo monk can easily handle a buffed lich, and many of the other classes can too despite not having tons of buffs or even debuffs (again, not to defend BG2 class balance, which Obsidian is obviously improving upon). Above all, people who dislike a spell-counterspell system a la BG2 mages have nearly all the other games on the RPG market. Is it really too much to ask for one class in one new game to play like in the IE games? If you like a learning curve and a game that requires intricate strategies and tactics, you're nearly locked out of the RPG market nowadays, and increasingly out of the TBS market too.