demeisen

The problem for me is that I find some foreboding cave hidden behind a boulder, and I want to feel like going in there will be dangerous. Like I should proceed with extreme caution. It's a bit of a let down to get in there just destroy everything with no real thought to good tactics and strategy, no need to use consumables, etc. I'd rather have skin-of-my-teeth battles and "oh-#*(!" moments in places like that. I like the game a lot, don't get me wrong, and I'm happy I backed it and will back anything else they make. Still, I do think it's a little bit let down by the lack of difficulty. On the other hand, there are some genuinely hard fights now and then, and they are fun! Like, a seriously good time, which is why I'm optimistic for the future of this franchise. Not every fight has to be a battle to end all battles, mind you. But there's a happy medium to be found. I know it's hard for developers these days. So many players now have grown up on ultra-simplified hand-holdy games and want to feel "godlike" by wrecking everything in sight, rather than feel the nervous dread of poking into dangerous places and the struggle to survive what can just barely be survived.

Agreed. I think they could fix it by reducing the side-quest experience. Leave some, so there are reasons to do the side quests over and above the story itself, but tune it so they makes you a little more powerful and better equipped, rather than radically overpowered. That, and make tanks not so damn invulnerable, since that leads to a single tactic that works for 95% of the fights ("wade tank in, he can't be hurt anyway, and plink everything from range"). There's a lot of good stuff here. I believe some tuning could improve it and it'd be awesome. The system itself is good, and can be improved even more in the future with new abilities and spells and better monster AI.

The game is great! Not perfect, but great. I backed it on KS, and wish I'd done that at a higher tier. My only significant complaint is that the combat gets way easy after the first few character levels, so there isn't much sense of risk. But that's just balance: they can address that in sequels or even future patches. Otherwise, everything else feels a lot like the kind of game I wanted and we haven't seen since the end of the IE series. It's got fantastic artwork that leads to wanting to explore just to see the world, good writing, good music, a brand new CRPG system, etc. Even the combat system holds promise, if they can do something about over-levelling, and make a few other tweaks. It's not fundamentally broken. I'd give it overall about a 9/10. Good far outweighs the bad. Anyway, it's this or Yet Another Dumbed Down Elder Scrolls. I'll take this a thousand times over.

I'm playing a wizard main and yep, they are quite frail, especially near the beginning of the game. 1-2 hits and it's all over (assuming robes for armor). Which I'm cool with - they are supposed to be frail. For most outdoor fights without teleporting enemies, I just run Eder into the middle of things and he's pretty good about holding engagement. Plus the enemy AI isn't the brightest (I think this could use improvement in future patches), so it becomes fairly safe to have my wizard saunter on over to the action and cast his short rage per-fight spells, then back away again and watch to see if he needs to get more involved. Teleporting enemies that like to pick on the wizard are harder, but for those I sometimes just park him around a bend somewhere out of visibility, and finish the fight with the rest. Honestly the only fights that aren't quite easy in "Hard" mode are boss fights, so for the others, I don't really need the wizard for anything, and the rest of the group can handle things with one hand tied behind their back. PoD, I dunno, might be a different story. There are also some spells and abilities that will help if your wizard accidentally gets aggro, like Veil. Other classes can help too - e.g, priests get a spell that will temporarily freeze enemies and usually let the wizard get away without being hit. Also they have one to temporarily protect a single character from damage, and you can use that time to have the rest of the group pound on whatever took a dislike to your wizard. Use the terrain to your advantage too. Often in dungeons tanks can block doorways and your wizard will be quite safe back there.

I'm not a big fan of level-scaling encounters, but I end up thinking that just toning down the side quest exp could do a lot to address the too-easy-combat issues (as well as some folks reporting they hit the level cap well before the end of the game). There'd still be a benefit to doing the side quests (items, minor exp), so it'd be beneficial, but it wouldn't render the main quest combat almost effortless either. I'd say make the side-quests give somewhere around 10-30% of their current exp, and it might work out about right. Maybe a sliding scale based on the difficulty setting, like 50% of current exp on easy, 30% normal, 20% hard, 10% POD.

I can second that. Happens for me too. One tip: you can click on the little "offscreen" character icons to instantly move your view to center on your party.

Ditto. I've been madly searching the web every few weeks afraid that I might have missed a kickstarter for a PoE expansion or sequel. (I haven't... have I?)

I'm starting to think that some of this is down to how many sidequests you do before various parts of the main plot line. I've just picked up the main plot line again, and I'm feeling seriously over-levelled for it. (Still liking it for the story and atmosphere though!) Like someone said above, I'm steam-rolling everything in my path with no attempt to play "well", though I prefer genuinely hard fights that make me struggle to survive. That's with the story NPCs, no rest spamming, and a suboptimal character build (no min-maxing). But I think if I hadn't picked up a bunch of side-quest experience, it might feel harder since I might be a few levels lower. So I wonder if that explains part of why some folks consider PoE hard, and others much too easy. I seriously doubt I'm that much better than average at these kind of games. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad they don't have auto-leveling monsters, but that does make fight balance hard when you combine it with a world that lets you explore and do side quests in different orders. People then come into encounters with widely different levels of party exp. One person might get to fight X and find it almost impossible, and another, trivially easy. Auto-scaling encounters always seems like a terrible choice, and open worlds are more immersive than rails games. All I can think is to reduce side quest experience quite a lot so nobody ends up so over-leveled that most fights become trivialized.

When I looked some days back, PoE was the top selling game on both Steam and GOG, so presumably the sales numbers are continuing to increase at a good pace. I hope it stays up there a <minsc>good long time</minsc>, in order to fund amazing sequels and enhancements to the underlying RPG system.

Personally, I feel bad for the people who feel bad for the others who don't feel bad for the ones who do feel bad for those who knew somebody who tried to buy the game on the Playstation Network, but failed. Nobody deserves that.

wait dont you need steam to play nearly half the major PC releases now days? why the hate? You kinda do... and that's why the hate. It's not a future many of us want, having a single company controlling most PC gaming with everything else marginalized, having updates applied whether we want them or not, having to constantly get permission to play games we paid for, DOS attacks make the servers inaccessible (*cough*xbox/playstation), facing the risk that they'll go bust or get bought out without un-DRMing everything... Can't speak for anybody else, but I'll happily forgo playing half the games on the market to avoid that future for PC gaming, because I want to act in everybody's interest, not just my own. I don't want PCs to become a locked down nightmare. I think there's something bigger involved than whether I get to play AAA game #930143. Think of it like an RPG plot. There's always something bigger and more important than your character. There's decisions to be made that affect the future. *Edit* typos.

Yeah, there's no way this was meant as a troll thread to stir up a bunch of crap, I'm sure I can still play games I bought in the 1970's, 80's, and 90's. I can do that because there were no DRM servers to be taken offline when the companies behind them faded into history or were bought up by larger, less friendly companies, leaving "promises" not worth the paper they were printed on. If gamers aren't willing to deal with even the smallest inconvenience to support a world where you don't have continuously ask permission to use things you've paid for, I fear for the future of PC gaming. The short-sighted outlook ("but I want it now!") does not always produce the best long term results.

Which is a good reason to support GOG instead of Steam...

Lots of talk about Slicken... I think they should have gone for something mid-way between how it was and how it will be. Maybe reduced its duration to 1/3 of the old duration, rather than being instant only.

I'm not playing Iron now but I want to in a future run. I like the idea too. I agree with you that the lack of any way to determine relative difficulty (without out-of-character knowledge from a previous play through) would make it hard. But I also think a pure "con" system would break immersion too. I'd rather see some more subtle and story-appropriate ways to get this information from the game world. In another thread I posted this, which is the spirit of what I mean: Or maybe even just in-world hints, like villagers you can talk to who might say, "Sure, the woods east of town are a little dangerous, but you look capable of handling the local wolves. But we sent 5 other guys kinda equipped like you into that cave behind the waterfall last summer, and they never came out. We don't know what's in there, but I'd stay out if I were you." If you come back in 5 levels, they might change their tune to, "You look a lot tougher than the last bunch who went in that cave. Maybe you'll fare better than they did.

One thing to realize, too, is that (if what i read on the web was close to reality, anyway) Obsidian made this game on something like a $4 million dollar budget. Compare that to Skyrim, with a $90 million development budget, and I think it's amazing there's as much good content as there is! To me PoE is a hugely better game, and with 1/22 of the dev budget. But this is a good sign, because if this game succeeds in a big way, they can probably push the envelope a bit more on the next instalment. I'm of the opinion that it's better to start semi-modest and move up. Sometimes if you start too big, it can all fall apart under its own weight. I'd rather see them put together something solid and fun like PoE, which is their own intellectual property, and not beholden to publishers. They can expand on this in the future, adding new spells/abilities, new classes, and making new high quality stories all based on this basic system. I'm kinda psyched about where this could go. Could be another golden age of RPGs, almost. I won't call PoE perfect, but it's hit a lot of the right chords, and more notes can be played in the future.

I think you're onto something here. I also feel that much of the "easiness" comes from my tank being too invulnerable, and without that, suddenly a new dimension opens up in how combat works. Maybe there needs to be a modest exp gain nerf on Hard, and a bigger one on Path, and leave Easy/Normal alone for more casual players. Or like Sparklecat said up above, exp turned down for side quests so you don't over-level the main plot lines. When I find a level-appropriate fight, it's really a lot of fun!

I can assure you that you don't have to do that! I'm playing a wizard PC on Hard mode (max = 2 campfires, well short of 8000). I don't rest every time I've been in combat. I still manage to cast spells in most fights - the bigger the fight, the more I cast. If you're casting everything you have in every single fight, that's not how it's meant to be played. In PnP, most DMs won't even allow you to rest spam. In spite of playing the opposite of how you say I "have to", my wizard is the top damage dealer in the party by a wide margin, and that's on top of the AOE CC and debuffs he dishes out. It just takes a different style of play that rewards medium term thinking over short term thinking.

I actually never knew Chill was enemy-only until I read the patch notes. I had been treating it as if it would damage allies, and was careful not to cast it on them. It's not so bad.

Right, so, why did all the publishers spend a decade and a half utterly convinced we didn't want game like this? Personally I think it was some kind of evil plot. "How can we do the most harm to computer gaming? I got it... all games shall be first person shooters.... bwwaaa haha hahaaaaa!" A white cat may have also been involved.

Yeah, I wanted to say the same thing. Props to the artists and musicians who worked on this game - you nailed it! Wandering around this world is a pleasure, wondering what you'll see around the next bend. The quality of the art and overall atmosphere makes you want to explore it. It's a refreshing change from all the pure 3D engines out there, which are okay, but tend to feel a lot more cut & pasty than games like PoE or BG2.

Lordofdeath123, I'm playing a wizard with the story NPCs in the group. L5 so far. I love the wizard! He's an AOE damage monster, and he has a wide variety of types of damage and CC he can do, to attack different weaknesses of monsters. He's very flexible; if something is invulnerable to fire, he's got cold. If it's invulnerable to cold, he can attack dex. Etc. True the AOEs aren't just "blast away without consideration" like some arcade game, but that makes them fun. You can tilt the balance of difficult battles with a strategically placed AOE crowd control or debuff. Once you get Eder (fighter) in your group, I think he's kinda overpowered as a tank anyway, so he'll keep almost everything off your wizard. And (on Hard mode) you get 2 camping supplies, so you have to strategically pick when and where to use your wizard's "big guns". I don't "rest spam" - I play how it seems like they want you to play, by choosing which fights need the wizard's heavier spells, and which don't. Even when they don't, he still kicks out a lot of damage with his two per-fight AOEs and the blast autoattack. I might try another class for a future play through, but so far I'm happy playing the wizard. Nobody else can really tell you if you find them fun. It depends on the playstyle you want. If you don't like the tactical side of "where to drop this fireball so it doesn't hurt my guys but hits as many enemies as possible", then it might not be for you. But with the right mindset, they're a blast to play.

I'd actually like to, but I don't think I can. I tried to up the slider to PoD, but that is greyed out, so it won't let me change it in mid-game. Don't really want to start over at this point. So I don't have the choice you propose. Anyway I think even on "hard" there shouldn't be near-invulnerable classes. You can't address that just by saying, "well, there's one higher setting" - it's balance that needs tweaking. Fighters = too hard to hit, which trivializes strategy because they can just sit in the middle of any group of monsters and tank with no risk. If the fighter came down to about the tanking ability of a paladin, I think that would work better. Still, I think the game is fantastic. No matter what, any new RPG system is going to need tweaks as they see what happens when it hits the streets.

Wow, yeah, that's very different from me. So even with Defender and comparable armor, you'd have low 80's whereas i have 111! I can believe you'd have a way harder time of it than I'm having! Maybe my 111 is bugged somehow.

If it's any consolation, Tinderbox, I found Hard indeed pretty hard before I picked up Eder, and I wonder if I have a stat inflation bug. I'm running with a wizard PC using the story NPCs, not custom ones. I think the real issue for me is that my L5 Eder has, I dunno, over 100 deflection I think, with his "Defender" skill enabled, in Fine Breastplate, with a +16def shield and a minor ring of deflection. I've heard some talk about a bug making stats too strong... I wonder if I've got that, though I'm not sure how to tell. Anyway, he alone makes most encounters easy for me. I just wade him into the middle of almost anything semi-level appropriate for my group, and I believe I could go AFK and if the fight was still going 10 minutes later, he'd still be around 100%, with his endurance regen making up for what tiny damage he might take. Now the other group members feel better balanced. The Paladin Pallegina feels about right for how I think a tank should be. She can go up against nasty things, but not in the carefree way Eden does. She'll get hit and take damage, which means I have to think about tactics over and above "let Eder tank everything while others plink from range." Of course someone could say, "just take the shield away from Eder and don't use his abilities!", but I don't like that kind of artificial difficulty so much. Now having said all that, there have been exceptions. Like the teleporting shade guys - those encounters feel "hard" to me, because they like to teleport over and beat on the weaker wizard. Takes good tactics and creative use of abilities. Anyway Eder feels so imbalanced that I wonder if I've got the stat inflation bug, because it sounds like it isn't like that for folks like Tinderbox. What did all your Eder chars have for deflection at L5? I just looked: Mine is 111, with the above equipment and Defender mode.