JerekKruger

Agreed, and the solution isn't to put a plaster on each of the new problems as they raise their head, the solution is to keep Might as it is and find a different way of buffing Resolve.

That's very much my feeling too. Not just with this change, but with a number of other changes made to the old Pillars mechanics in Deadfire.

Agreed. My point is just that looking at the real world is only useful to an extent when designing game mechanics. The whole idea of damage is a dubious one, since in the real world people don't have hit points: an accumulation of minor cuts and grazes don't eventually kill people, whereas a single well placed blow can kill someone no matter how experienced a combatant they are (being a "high level" fighter does not allow you to survive having your carotid artery cut by a well placed cut).

That might change once other damage dealing spells are buffed, which they really need to be.

Whereas strength isn't important for melee combat when you're wielding a weapon like a sword. It's not unimportant, but there's basically a threshold above which extra strength gives rapidly diminishing returns.

Agreed. I'd either go with affecting the duration of Afflictions or, as someone in the other thread suggested, separating out +Healing from Might and giving it to Resolve but leaving all +Damage with Might.

I prefer this to the current change. It fits well with Fighter's Constant Recovery, since a tankier fighter will both want more Deflection and to maximise their self healing; and it avoids Ciphers being screwed by needing too many attributes. Sure, Resolve remains a dump stat for most Wizards and a lot of other classes, but no moreso than with the current proposed change, and at least Might remains useful for spell casters who want to do damage. If Resolve also affects healing done by Athletics and drinking potions then Resolve might even become useful for other classes too.

Mass Effect is a good example of why this bothers me, and I ended up not importing there either (I just downloaded a save with the appropriate world state). I realise I'm probably a bit weird in this respect.

I lose the experience of importing. One of the things I enjoyed most about the Baldur's Gate series was importing my character, but if Baldur's Gate 2 had used D&D3e I wouldn't have. Feels the same here.

Hey, it might turn out great, in fact I hope it does, but I liked Pillars a lot so the changes don't sound good to me. I'm not going to make any proclamations like "I'll never play Deadfire" or similar, but my enthusiasm for it is diminishing. I might just leave the beta and come back in a few months to see how things are looking. It made sense from a mechanics point of view, and I quite liked the lore explanation once I got used to it. The only thing that wasn't great was that almost all Might dialogue checks implied physical intimidation, but this won't be an issue in Deadfire since we have conversation based skills including Intimidation and it sounds like attribute based dialogue options are mostly being removed.

Puts me off importing altogether. I might as well treat it as a completely new game.

Possibly, but it just feels jarring to me. It also bugs me from an import point of view: if I import a high Might Wizard from Pillars into Deadfire I have redistribute their attributes to achieve the same sort of character, and that puts me off importing at all.

Same. I'm not so much disappointed in Josh as I'm realising that, fundamentally, I really liked Pillars' mechanics so the more things change substantially in Deadfire the less I'm looking forward to it. I was hoping Obsidian would spend time tweaking the old ruleset but ultimately leaving it essentially the same, but they seem keen to change parts of it significantly.

Same. I liked Pillars attribute system where every attribute could be useful to every class. It wasn't perfectly balanced (Resolve was something of a dump stat in Pillars as well) but this change goes away from that. I also really don't like the change of name to Strength. Even with the change, Might describes the attribute just as well and ensures consistency with Pillars.

If weapon styles remain as proficiencies then yes, but if they become passive abilities instead then, so long as there are other good abilities, it becomes a choice. For example suppose Wizards get access to weapon styles as passive abilities. The Wizard is forced to choose between taking a weapon style or choosing a spell each time they get a new ability point. Most Wizards are going to choose a spell, but a Wizard who wants to specialise in using summoned weapons might sacrifice a spell choice in exchange for Two-Handed Style. I'd say that's a choice.

I see this stated quite often, but I don't agree. Sure, as a percentage of your base Accuracy +6 becomes smaller and smaller as the you level up, but that's not what matters when it comes to Accuracy. What matters is the difference between your Accuracy and the enemy's Deflection. A +6 bonus is equally good whether you have a base Accuracy of 20 or 60 when you're facing enemies whose Deflections are 20 or 60 respectively. Since enemy Deflection increases as you level up then, give or take, +6 remains equally beneficial throughout the game. Now, in Pillars there were loads of other sources of bonus Accuracy so it was true that Weapon Focus would, at high levels, become less powerful, but one of the things Josh has mentioned that they want to limit is the number of sources of bonus Accuracy in Deadfire, and given this I suspect +6 will remain equally good throughout the game.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. For example two-weapon style would give you +20% attack speed but at the cost of reduced accuracy perhaps. That said at this point I'd prefer them to remain the same but become passives available to all classes.

As Andrea says the assumption is that everyone who does a significant proportion of their damage with weapons will take it. That makes it a tax on using weapons and is why I favour removing it altogether (after all, enemies will have to be balanced around it anyway so it's not really a bonus).

Actually yeah, I can get behind that. Probably if remove weapon focus altogether, or perhaps give it to fighters, for precisely this reason.

If it's such a non-issue then why oppose it on the grounds of balance/power creep?

Simple solution: have them be out of character explanations that are toggleable in the options and, of course, are removed if playing on Expert mode.

Agreed on the topic of detailed and accurate descriptions. When I first read the various racial bonuses I didn't know what half of them really did, and I made the wrong assumption about the bonuses of Coastal Aumaua, Mountain Dwarfs and Wood Elves (assuming they simply got a +20 Defence against those Afflications). This made me view those three races' racial bonuses are fairly poor until I later learnt what they actually did and just how powerful they are (Wood Elves are immune to Paralysis and Coastal Aumaua are immune to Stun!).

No problem. I'd guess Obsidian realised that balancing Carnage with multiclassing would be very hard so simply changed the way it worked to make it easier. The fact that it's raw damage is nice at least, particularly if penetration remains reasonably punishing.

A lot of abilities don't have icons (for example the Conjurer's Summon Familiar). I am sure icons will come eventually.