gkathellar

/slow clap ... although Virgil wrote the Aeneid on commission, and ostensibly despised it and tried to have it burned. Couldn't have put it better myself (I know because I was trying and failing). Torment added some good stuff. It also added a few questionable things ... I'm actually still really bitter at how badly they screwed up the workings of portals.

Yeah, Ranger is ... Basing a class around an animal companion without focusing everything on that companion was a bad, bad, bad idea.

Of course. (On further consideration, I do kind of like the idea I had of giving it reduced versions of the bonuses from the others styles, though. Might make it too strong, but ... eh.)

You probably want Lore and Survival on your main PC, if only so you can use them in dialog trees.

Poe's Law applies.

Planescape was a D&D setting preceding PS:T by 5 years, so ... that claim is a little bit off. No, there were design decisions made in particular to be a subversion of the genre. For example, the lack of swords, elves, dragons, etc. All of these exist in the Planescape setting but were not included in the game. ... but none of which are included very prominently in Planescape, either (there are planar half-elves, but it is specifically mentioned in the Planescape player's guide that most of the classic races don't have any significant presence in Sigil). The Blood War, Sigil, the Factions, the Rule of Three, the focus on philosophy, "belief shapes the planes" - all of that setting stuff that pervades and drives PS:T? - all from Planescape, and Planescape is original to D&D. I take your meaning, and I'm not trying to undermine PS:T's successes, but most of what appears in said game is from the Planescape setting. You could certainly make the case that Torment is meant to be antithetical to typical swords-and-sorcery heroic fantasy, and I'd agree with you. But Planescape is uniquely D&D-esque in that it mostly dispenses with the swords-and-sorcery inspirations of the game it comes from, takes a huge chunk of said game's weirdness and original material and does something novel with it. Torment, in turn, is uniquely Planescape-esque, and that kind of inextricably ties it to D&D. I think we may be on the same page in terms of ideas, and it's just that when you say "D&D" you're talking about generic FR and Greyhawk and bland bland bland. When I say D&D I mean the weird stuff: Athas, Eberron, the Demiplane of Dread, the Great Wheel, crystal spheres in wildspace, and all of that jazz. So that would naturally have different implcations to either of us.

God I hope so on those sparkles. While I can appreciate sparkles in some contexts, sparkles on corpses or game loot in general is definitely not one of them. On the general subject of loot. IE games did it better than any other RPG games out there I've come across with the exceptions of the tedium one encountered in shops (simply allowing the buying of more than one item at a time would have gone a long way), and one might encounter when managing their inventory. For the latter an on toggle (meaning not always active) auto sort for individual characters as well as the party would have been all that was needed. But these were UI issues/improvements. Insofar as how the character interacted with loot in the game, and how loot appeared in the game it was done no better in any other RPG game I've seen. If what we have in PoE is glowing piles that all look the same (ala NWN2), this is the opposite of an improvement over what IE had. As of the BB, it's really just that the corpses are selectable like any other container until emptied. I would tell you if the sparkles can be turned off, but I honestly do not care enough to load up the beta just to find out. (Also, you actually can buy more than one of an item in the IE games. Double-clicking will bring up a quantity window that you can adjust that from.)

In all fairness, Shadowrun and PoE had a pledge levels that got backers made into character portraits. So it could be the exact same person, with exactly the same source photo. So maybe this reaction was a little unwarrented? If it's the exact same person with the exact same source photo, then one of the artists threw out the source photo and drew someone completely different, because (as I said) they don't look alike. At all. The dress is gold! WHY CAN'T YOU SEE IT? WHATS WRONG WITH YOU

Cool, maybe I'll give the monk a try. To be honest, I was really turned off by the wound mechanic, despite normally liking crazy magic kung-fu. It just didn't fit my image of a monk. I guess the draw here is that the monk isn't so much the crazy magic kung-fu guy as he is the tanky guy who can also do punches I guess or whatever. Are you using any armor? I presume that's obvious, but I haven't really looked at the class, so ... yeah.

Containers are indicated by a hovering cursor (or the TAB key) pretty much as you'd expect in an IE game. There's translucent blue shading over the container; or green shading if it's locked. An empty container (except for a corpse, which ceases to be a container on emptying) is a pale white shade, though, which is a nice visual cue for "you have dealt with this already." Note that only corpses have loot sparkles. Containers in general do not.

Plate actually held on for a fair while after firearms appeared, adding more curvature to its design to help repel bullets. If you consult training manuals, you'll find that heavy cavalry studied how to fight with and against guns. It's as firearms improve in accuracy and power that plate goes out of fashion, but the age of the arquebus is also the age of plate, pikes, longswords, rapiers, and bucklers.

Yeah, because an elf with a face in half-profile is a totally unique image. I mean, there's no way two different people could come up with that! And it isn't like that's the only thing they have in common, or anything. Their torsos and necks are obviously at the same angle, and the structure and shape of the faces - why, that's just identical, and in no way differentiated by the cheekbones, noses, brows, shapes of the eyes, and jawlines! Plus, their complexions are the same, and their hair ... they're practically twins!

If you're looking to real life for inspiration, you may have some difficulty. Using a weapon with two hands is generally how you get the most control out of it - you simply have better leverage, and can put more of your body behind the blow. In truth, a fighter using a single weapon tends to shift back and forth between one-handed and two-handed grips as the situation demands. Only certain polearms and heavy clubs actually demand two-handed use, and only weapons with short hilts actually demand one-handed use. With many battlefield weapons, one-handed and two-handed use really don't constitute the pair of distinct styles that RPG players often imagine. If you need to narrow your body's profile with a one-handed grip, you do that. If you need to put your whole body behind a thrust, you do that. Etc. Putting that aside, the greatest advantage of a one-handed grip is probably balance, because it serves as a counterweight and control mechanism for the body in general. The hand can also grab, punch, push, and even parry weapons if you know what you're doing (disclaimer: this hurts and you can break your hand doing it). Such variety is mechanically difficult to represent, especially without treading on the toes of the other combat styles (TWF is fast, two-handed hits hard, shield has good defense). The only thing that occurs to me is giving it a bit of everything - a smaller speed boost, a smaller damage boost, and a smaller defense boost - to represent single-weapon as the "jack-of-all-trades" style.

I doubt it'll even matter for most bosses - unless you're stuck doing ping damage, you can basically dust an enemy with only 15% endurance by accident.

Do I know it right that if an enemy dies, its corpse has a sparkling, shining(or somekind) effect on it? Will that effect disappear, if I open the loot window for that corpse? Because that way I could see which corpses were looted in the 3m wide area loot, and which ones should I check again? If a corpse no longer has loot on it, it will not have sparkles. Just like previously, you cannot interact with a corpse that has no loot on it. I suspected that. What I meant is if I check a corpse, and I leave the ****ty loot in it,will it still sparkle? Or the sparkling only stops if I loot every piece of item from the corpse. (a) You have a stash to hold that ****ty loot. (b) There's a Loot All button. It makes dealing with vendor trash pretty effortless in practice.

The animal companion is basically the entire point of the class, so no, not really. If you want to play an effective archer, rogue is probably your go-to class.

Planescape was a D&D setting preceding PS:T by 5 years, so ... that claim is a little bit off. It's not so much that they've strayed from the middle ages, since most fantasy settings are Medieval In Name Only. For example: early versions of plate armor first came into use in the 13th century, after all - while the earliest firearms may have existed as much as 600 years earlier. Going for the Renaissance angle is as much about technological realism as it is about doing something different.

There is a difference between "obsessing," and switching to a suit of armor that's better against cold If you knows you're going into a cave full of Ice SpidersTM. Is that the cave with the sign at the entrance - beware of Ice spiders? How many suits of armor should your average adventurer carry "just in case"? Are you seriously going to tell me that you have never encountered a plausible scenario in a CRPG where you had a rough sense of what you would be going up against? This is putting aside the possibility of adjusting your strategy after a TPK, which is a thing that happens in games.

Given that the development process has like a week left, the discussion of any effects it could or could not have had became a moot point some time ago.

... and?

There is a difference between "obsessing," and switching to a suit of armor that's better against cold If you knows you're going into a cave full of Ice SpidersTM.

for you perhaps. Personally I find dying repeatedly because of poorly explained mechanics a lot less fun. I want my character to be effective, not a bumbling buffoon, and from an RP perspective, I'd expect the character wants to survive, not take up a calling they are particularly bad at, with fatal results. But then understanding how things work doesn't strike me as spoiling the story in any way whatsoever. While I agree with your second premise, my general feeling from the BB is that the first doesn't really apply. You can get along acceptably with unoptimized stats.

So weird. I take it this was a model clipping issue? It certainly isn't a balance issue, and if I were a mutant freak (and honestly, just that ugly) that people tend to stone to death, the first thing I'd do is hide my face. It's intended as a balance issue, actually. Godlike are supposed to have their superior racial abilities balanced against the inability to wear helms, as per their introduction way back. Mind you, their racial abilities aren't actually very good (2/4 of them are garbage, 1 is decidedly lame, and 1 is pretty okay I guess), so the whole Godlike premise doesn't actually hold up to examination.

Tabletop games have produced approaches that might be workable under PoE's core mechanics - D&D4E and Thirteenth Age spring to mind immediately as inspirations, should the developers have any interest in working on this.

Persona Q. Oh yeah, that's right, I went there. I'm playing a JRPG on a handheld. COME AT ME BRO