Eurhetemec

I'm seeing four things: 1. Engagement seems to set up when you use an ability. For example with Swashbuckler Eder, if I Escape into the middle of the enemies (ghetto charge!) Engagement triggers correctly and boom a bunch of enemies are Engaged. But if I walk up to the same position and attack, it only Engages the one I attacked automatically. I can then add Engagements but clicking on nearby enemies. Weird. 2. You can Engage enemies outside your turn but you have to actively click. Ie if Eder is next to someone but hasn't Engaged them, despite still having more Engagements available, then even though it is his turn, I can click him and have him Engage them. 3. You can usually Engage people even if you already used your action. For example my Chanter main can shout, then walk up to someone and Engage them. 4. 2 and 3 don't work reliably for some characters for no apparent reason. With Pallegina for example, it seems a direct melee weapon attack is the only way to get Engagement. As I am typing this I am wondering if 2 and 3 only work right if you can Engage at least two targets, as Pallegina is 2h in my playthrough and cab only Engage one.

Once a turn minor action would be decent and balance some abilities better without making the game vastly more complex, though I don't think it is needed, strictly speaking. As some who has played pen and paper RPGs for thirty years, I would say tabletop rules generally are a bad point of comparison. TT RPGs typically have one player per character, and a very small number of combats, which means more complex action system can work. As for AP, if I wanted to play RtwP on the slowest speed and/whilst pausing constantly, I already could, and every AP suggestion so far has amounted to that.

Quite. I'm not sure why this notion is so difficult for some people. Obsidian aren't using description because they are obtuse or unwilling.

I'm just completely blown away that the OP thinks the only solution here is a full party of MC Bleak Walker Wizards.

Yeah it's mystifying that people are having difficulty with this concept. Pillars 1 was successfully because it was pitched as essentially "Baldur's Gate for the modern age", and that very specifically included certain elements like a high fantasy setting, RtwP combat, 6 attributes, classes, races, and so on. Had they done something else, and say, gone with the above but with turn-based combat, there would have been a huge amount of grousing and complaining, and the KS would probably have made significantly less money - quite possibly half as much or less. At the time, in 2012, the idea of a modern-style turn-based CRPG doing really well was also completely foreign and un-evidenced. It wasn't until 2014 when D:OS came out that that began to change, and even then, it was a slow burn - it wasn't really until around the Enhanced Edition that D:OS started being seen as this huge success. But even then question marks remained over whether it was a flash-in-the-pan, or part of an ongoing revival of turn-based, which hadn't really been much of a thing since the early '90s - real-time CRPGs, with or without pause had been almost completely dominant since Ultima 7 in 1992. Sure, there was Fallout 1/2, but despite being imho vastly better games than BG1 (not so much BG2), they sold a relatively much smaller number of copies, and had a much smaller place in the collective gamer imagination (at least in the West), and had since become real-time first-person. Shadowrun Returns hadn't even come out (2013). Pillars 2 was a sequel to Pillars 1, intended to be a BG2 to it's BG1 (which it kind of is), and thus they didn't make major changes - again this could have harmed the Fig campaign. It could, by then, also have helped, but we don't know. Only when D:OS2 came out did we really see a clear demonstration that modern turn-based CRPGs could be repeatably extremely successful, which again, was after Pillars 2 was in development. It's very easy to apply hindsight and say they always should have had the mode, but it's completely ignoring the actual context.

It's hard to guess what aesthetic exactly they're going with other than retro, but it doesn't look like conventional raygun gothic to me (whereas part of the original FO aesthetic was pretty on-the-nose raygun gothic). The stuff after the Auntie Cleo ad looks slightly too retro for raygun gothic (though not way too retro), but more to the point, the gun after the Spacer's Choice ad looks like something from the 1980s or early 1990s visual-design-wise, though the ad it is in retains the strange faux-1870-to-1920 advertising style. EDIT - Aha it's basically La Belle Epoque (with influences from other styles), which does indeed run 1871 to 1914. Re: the MS purchase, it's worth noting that MS does "Xbox exclusives", but their definition of "Xbox" includes the PC, because it's their gaming brand rather than limited to the console.

That's how I play with them already anyway. The real change will be that now I'll fret a lot about "wasting" charges etc. It's similar to the way some people hoarded per-rest resources in the first game. It's a psychological thing. I don't use figurines that often but when I do use them I don't want to fret about maybe needing them worse later in the game. Yep, I struggle intensely with using anything consumable in RPGs, and always end up with an endgame stash flooded with items I was saving for "a harder fight." I just want to say to you guys: YOU CAN BEAT THIS! You don't have to live your life this way! I managed to beat this problem myself. The only way forward is through. Use those items. Use 'em. Keep using 'em. For an entire playthrough, SPAM CONSUMABLES. It'll hurt, but you'll survive, and you'll be like "Wow, this is actually okay!" and it won't bother you in future.

Oh we understand the approach perfectly. The problem with this is... it gets old ? You're constantly using the same 5-6 spells In the BG series you actually had the *choice* to specialize your caster or not : - wizards vs - specialized wizards for bonus casts vs - very specialized sorcerers The problem with the current incarnation of the mage/priest system in POE2 is that you do not get to make that choice. Sure, Grimoires are around to help offset this specialization a bit and allow you to swap some spells in combat, but this is... I don't know, tedious ? I, for one, have mixed feelings about this. The BG example is pretty bad. Wizards were flatly inferior to Specialists, because the extra spell per day per level was gigantic, and many specializations were not a meaningful restrictions (esp. with scrolls and/or another caster to deal with any vital spells). Sorcerors were also not "very specialized", they had an entirely different approach to using magic, one more similar to PoE2. They had a limited selection but you could ensure it had all the very best spells you needed most in it. If you're using the same 5-6 spells in PoE2, that speaks more to the design of the spells than the system. Clearly those 5-6 spells are overpowered and need to be nerfed, or other spells need to be buffed to bring them up to spec. We saw much the same thing in PoE1, anyway. You might have a very large selection of spells, but given how few you could cast per-rest, on harder settings, if you weren't just cheesing resting (as many did), you had to be careful about what you used, which generally limited to you to a small selection of highly effective spells, with the odd situation-specific spell being used. I think one other part of the issue is PoE2 being too easy. If it were harder, we would see more grimoire-swapping at least, to pick spells people were vulnerable to.

PoE 1 did manage to do this quite well though... I can see the benefit of certain design changes, but the current system restricts my playstyle in a way PoE 1 never did. I'm sorry, not actually sure what the "this" in your reply is referring to. Certainly it didn't really offer a choice of playstyles, if that's what you're suggesting.

Yeah and I mean trigger is often misused but if there was ever anyone it was appropriate for, it's Aloth, man. I love that dude but holy **** does he object to an awful lot of things, like so many things. And this whole deal where he hates tradition and loves duty makes sense given his background but sure is hard to navigate around, given how often the two tend to be tied together.

In my game, he approves / disapproves in conversations occasionally but his approval rating is stuck at zero (after playing for about 20 hours). It might be possible that his approval is just building up extremely slowly but others who somehow managed to get it to 1 or 2 have reported sudden drops to zero. So sth seems to be off one way or the other. Unfortunately, there's no official info or acknowledgement about this issue yet. I suspect this might actually be that Aloth gets both positive and negative stuff a lot and thus hovers around zero. For me at 14 or so hours in he was still dead neutral, but then I cracked a ton of jokes with a couple of NPCs, and suddenly by about 18 hours Aloth went to -1 and had to have a talk with me about not taking things seriously enough (!!!). My feeling is that this is a lot of what people are seeing. Many players will be drawn to a lot of the (often very funny) joke-y options, which are often quite reasonable responses to ludicrous situations, and Aloth may be being impressed by how nice you are, then mad with you for making a joke, and seem completely stuck. The sudden drops to zero would also make sense here. Like when you meet a certain other party member for the first time, it is kind of hard for your entire conversation to not be that guy boasting, preening and joking, and the PC joking a lot, and MAN does Aloth not like that. He pulled so many pained faces in that convo. I felt like he should have been sent to sit on the naughty step. Also the Watcher's "duty" is something that most PCs will not be terribly happy about, and may oppose, so you are unlikely to pick up point for him there, where he gives them very freely to other NPCs.

You're being incredibly misleading here, to the point where I wonder if you're like 20-something and just talking about a time you never knew, based on fragments of articles you read about games. The sequence of events you outline is flatly untrue. I say that as someone who has been playing CRPGs and P&P RPGs since the 1980s (and still plays both). Yes that makes me terribly old. The "mass market"/"casual audience" stuff absolutely never happened. That is a complete fantasy, and basically from MMORPG culture, where MMORPG fans like to claim any change is "dumbing down". In the real history of CRPGs, they've always been extremely diverse in how you got mana, and how much of a true "per rest" resource it was, all the way back into the 1980s. And I say mana because virtually all games used that mechanic, unless they were D&D-derived. Indeed that's been by far the biggest change, far bigger than anything you're talking about - resources other than mana. And a bigger change still than that, and one I note you are not complaining about was making HP-style systems not be "you are damaged until you get a magic heal or sleep at an inn". Again, though, back to the 1980s we had CRPGs where: A) You had a Vancian/D&D-style deal, where you didn't dynamically select spells, but picked a fixed bunch before/after sleeping (D&D rules suggested it was after but games often made it be before). Obviously actual D&D/AD&D games worked on this basis. B) You had games where casters had a mana resource which could only be replenished by actual sleep, hard rests as you put it, and sometimes only in limited places, and perhaps if you were lucky by potions which randomly, rarely dropped. C) You had games like B, but where potions were pretty common, or possible to buy and/or manufacture, and often the real balancing point was the opportunity cost of using potions. D) You had games where mana regenerated continuously at some rate (often very slow), but where the hard-rest requirement was already gone. E) You had games where mana regenerated continuously, and perhaps quite quickly, but where reagents where a huge deal, and spells were more like consumables than anything else. And more! And this was all in the 1980s and very very early 1990s, long before any kind of "casual audience" existed, long before "marketing" and "audience feedback" (beyond angry hand-written letters!) were a thing. We're talking about another era here. Yet you're misrepresenting it as if it were some MMORPG-style player-developer feedback loop. That's ridiculous nonsense. This whole "lel casuals spam spellz like morons" thing is just gibberish, too, and again it reeks of MMORPGs, not actual CRPGs. "Casual" players have no specific way of playing. Some are cautious and barely even cast spells. Others are aggressive and rest frequently, and so on. The generalization you make is actively misleading. Further, on pen and paper games, what you're claiming is completely untrue, and we can walk through pen and paper game history if you like, but that's going to be a long walk. Fortunately I was playing P&P games from 1988 onwards and playing a wide variety of them so I am happy and able to discuss it if required. Your complaints about the impact of the changes are more interesting, some of them being valid, and some being kind of nonsensical. "I just want options" is an utter canard though. What you are asking for would require a top-to-bottom redesign of the entire game and encounter-flow. That's not "just wanting options".

I only just heard about this change because apparently I'd been missing my updates! But I just want to say YES! YES to this system. This is perfect and I kind of feel like coming to after so much hard work really kind of vindicates my long-held and probably misguided belief that AD&D2E's multiclassing system (which was basically similar to this, only with more limits and eccentricities but also triple-classing) was the greatest multiclassing system of all time (GMCSOAT).

The original system was great in a lot of ways, but I think people do need to accept that it wasn't flawless, and main problem was not comprehension, at least as far as I can tell - I mean, I'm sure some people had that problem, but I think the problems run a bit deeper. Specifically, the other problems with Health/Endurance are: 1) One character being on low health means you have to consider resting, even if everyone else is fine. This is somewhat out of your hands, unlike spell usage. It's not really an exciting or interesting choice, either, it just encourages a bit more use of resting (but even on Hard you typically find enough supplies to rest whenever you want - only on PotD does it get more extreme - but even then you can usually just go back and get more supplies, a bit tediously). 2) Perverse incentive - It often makes more sense to let someone go down than to try and keep them up with the Health system, because they're getting pummeled, and whilst you can keep them up, often fairly easily, they're going to be ground down to very low health - and the long-term problems with that are much worse than just having 5 out of 6 people in the fight. They put in the extra health loss on down and injuries to try and make this a bad choice, but it's still more often the right choice than it feels like it should be. It also penalizes lower-DPS, higher-survivability builds, but whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is very subjective. What they seem to be doing is dumping Health and making Injuries the main stick - this will eliminate the perverse incentive entirely, and also lessen the "one character is low on health" issue - making it instead "one character as a lot of injuries" - but that will be more your fault. It also eliminates the penalty to low-DPS, high-survivability builds, but that could be seen as good, bad, or neither.

I agree but with double the amount of voice, they will presumably be increasing the number of presets, so hopefully it'll be fine.