gkathellar

OP, it seems like you're assuming that no new ideas can be better than good old ideas, without giving their creators any opportunity to prove themselves. Sure, the larger sweep of Dungeons & Dragons has produced a lot of cool, weird, wonderful stuff (especially the less traditional settings, like Dark Sun, Birthright, Red Death, Eberron, and Ravenloft, and the supersettings of Planescape and Spelljammer). Part of why there's so much good material is the sheer quantity of it, an inevitable result of its long history and the many, many people who were involved in writing it. But once, a long time ago, it wasn't any good, because it didn't exist. It didn't have a long history. It didn't have hundreds of imaginative people cranking out material and ideas for it. It was only after people gave D&D a chance to grow and develop that it produced one of the biggest, strangest, most wonderfully varied universes that has ever been imagined. And if you don't give the Obsidian people a chance to show you their own universe, how is it supposed to rival the one you already like? Also, on another note, I think that when you say, "the IE games were good because they were set in the Forgotten Realms," you have it backwards. FR is a big dumb setting with a lot of big dumb things about it. The IE games took some of the better material, and made certain segments of the setting work - but it was the games that made FR look good, not the other way around. (I do not like the Forgotten Realms.) Wait, Dragon Age's setting is about magical forest supermen and divinely sponsored monarchies fighting a proxy war against not!Lucifer on behalf of a council of archangels and Norse deities, where all the wizards are actually ancient spirits, religion never comes up because it's assumed that everyone is roughly Christian, and basically all of the conflict in the setting was caused by one lady's really nice hair?

Pffffhahaha, are you serious? You think there are less than 6 enchanted helmets in the game? The enchantment doesn't even have to be amazing. A permanent +stat and +skill beats +20% dmg when the enemy is under 15% health any day. QFT. Godlike have a small advantage for the 10 minutes it'll take you to find better headgear. Maybe Silver Tide will hold up, but I find it unlikely.

A fighter or paladin with heavy armor and a shield are the obvious choices. Beyond that, Resolve, Perception, and Constitution should cover most of your needs.

I agree with pretty much everything that's been said so far, so I'll see if I can sum up: Godlike bonuses are bad, with the exception of Moon, and that's still not good enough to make up for the loss of helms. Personally, I'd say that Godlike bonuses have to scale with level, or else they will naturally fall behind helms. The bonuses in general are absurdly situational - special mention goes to the island aumaua ability in particular, which is downright insulting. But what's worse is that they're mostly boring. I just ... find it difficult to care about most of them (except Wood Elf and Hearth Orlan). Abilities that have nothing to do with Endurance that trigger at certain Endurance percentages kind of feels like a class or talent thing, and inappropriate on races. To my mind, races and cultures both need a group of several small features (to make them feel distinct), and one significant (but passive) feature each so you can get a little mileage out of them. As for stat bonuses? As they're insignificant unless you max the stat, I find myself not caring at all about them. I'd rather have geegaws and shinies.

I've been away from PoE and off-board since the end of November, and I'm hoping you folks can give me a hand at catching up with any significant news or easy-to-miss changes from the last two months. If anyone can help out, I'd be much obliged. Thanks.

Wait wait wait they STILL haven't fixed this? That's ... auuugh come on Obsidian. This is one of the central ways to make large numbers of ability-users manageable.

Well, that depends on what you mean by deep. Divinity: OS (which I enjoyed a lot, for the record) has hella utility spells, and it's mechanically deep, but I'll be damned if I was emotionally involved in it. Most IE games come down to maybe 6-7, 4 of which are just different versions of Invisibility (disclaimer: these numbers are not carefully considered). More, if you count some of the spells that gave the game tactical depth, but I'm not sure I'd count those as "utility." But I actually cared about some of the stuff in that game, you know? Would an IE successor be a weaker game for the ability to teleport, or squeeze coal into diamonds, or dig trenches with a telekinetic shovel? Probably not. But it's certainly not what made people call the IE games deep. Wait, what? Break that down for me. How are those two things (thinking and roleplaying) the same? Certainly, thought goes into roleplaying, but the two are by no means always aligned. You could just as easily make the case that the D&D approach to spell prep encourages metagaming (not implicitly bad, but not the same thing as roleplaying). Avoiding this has been an explicit design goal from the start, because reasons. What does this even mean? Are you saying it did a good job of accurately representing something that doesn't exist and therefore can't be accurately represented? They are there to fill a niche, both tactically and in the setting - and it's pretty much the same niche people have expected them to fill forever, minus the absurd versatility that veteran players have long known how to exploit. And why are the two at odds, exactly? Is there something about the notion of a wizard who can't do absolutely everything that makes same harder to roleplay?

Emphasis mine. Over half of the classes in PoE are mages of some sort or another, and as originally pitched, all of them were supposed to be. The necromancer minion-master archetype is there. It's in the Chanter class, which is immaterial, unless your issue is that necromancer archetypes should also be able to do everything else. If your only gripe is that it's not in the wizard class, that's ... well, I guess that's your gripe. But wizards aren't supposed to be able to do everything in PoE. Them's the breaks.

That's what Non-detection and Spell Immunity: Abjuration are for.

For the sake of precise argument - what you're referring to isn't tactics, but rather, strategy. There is an excellent article on the distinction, although it's been a while since I've read it in full, so I may be inconsistent with it in terminology. I strongly encourage everyone to read this article, but here's the best TL;DR I can offer without diluting the content: Tactics are used in an individual engagement or a more confined set of engagements - and there's a lot of sophistication and complexity to tactics. In a firefight, tactical decisions like providing cover fire, advancing or retreating, and using terrain, are made by field officers and individual soldiers. In baseball, the pitcher and catcher make tactical decisions about how to strike an individual batter out. In a business deal, it is persuading the other party to give you more in return for less. In an IE game, the decisions to use a fireball on a given group of enemies, to use a debuff before you try a stunning fist, and to have your archers concentrate fire on the guy who's going for your wizard are all tactical. Good tactical decisions are made on the field of play. Tactical victories are victories within the scope of a particular engagement. If tactics are used in battle, strategy is used in war. Strategy could be called the art of winning by planning, or the art of winning by cheating - sometimes the distinction is fuzzy. In a firefight, the officer thinking about how much ammunition they need to conserve for future firefights is thinking strategically. In baseball, the manager deciding who will play in a particular game and when to take the pitcher off the mound, the coach figuring out training regimens, and the owner deciding whether a player is worth hiring, are all thinking strategically. In a business deal, the strategist skews the other party's sense of value before talks even start, ensuring a favorable outcome. In an IE game, strategic decision-making includes everything from party composition to how you use your limited supply of gold - but the use of out-of-combat buffing is strategic, too. Good strategic decisions are made before reaching the field of play. Strategic victories are victories within the scope of a larger, broader set of objectives than the ones immediately in front of you. Virtually all games have both strategic and tactical decisions, but it's definitely true that some games focus more on one than the other, and that they limit the degree to which one effects the other. You can customize your characters and jobs and whatnot in many games, which give you strategic advantages, but at the end of the day, you can't sneak up behind the bad guy and fireball him until you're both in combat. As often as not, there are good reasons for that. So when people (like Josh Sawyer) talk about "opportunity costs," and minimizing the number of decisions that are always correct, they're thinking about the game's tactical play, and how certain strategic options could compromise it. Opportunity costs, to be clear, refer specifically to time and resources that you could spend doing something else - taking one option costs you the opportunity to take another. You could cast magic missile, or you could cast a buff, for instance. Memorizing one over the other, and using your limited ammo for spells on either, is a strategic opportunity cost. But if you can cast the buff out of combat, well ... why would you ever cast buffs in combat? The worry that follows is that it affects tactical play negatively. Buffs cease to be tactical spells, becoming wholly strategic (and then we get into this whole set of uncomfortable and obnoxious accusations about metagaming and whatever, and nobody needs that). The flip side of this is the view that being unable to pre-buff affects strategic play negatively in much the same ways, which is no less important. Moreover, as you say, giving players opportunities to think strategically can have a distinctly narrative edge to it, and the alternative may seem to some as though the game is lacking something. This is a strong argument. I can't give it as much detail because I've put less thought into how to put it forward, but I want to be 100% clear that I think it has real basis. I know that earlier in this thread, I was against pre-buffing - I'm less certain, having given it some time to stew. There's merit to either side, and the more I think about this, the more I think that there's no magical equation or formulation that says, "well, this negative effect is more problematic than the other, so we'll go with this one." But what I do maintain is that there's got to be a balance point, where both concerns can be addressed to a degree. Players should be able to make strategic decisions that give them an "unfair" tactical edge - that's part of the legacy of the IE games, it's part of the genre, and if we're being totally honest, it's just a thing that makes nerds like us happy (going in with a knowledge-based edge is very chic in the dedicated PC gaming crowd, and we all know it). But at the same time, saving your resources for tactical decisions shouldn't be objectively inferior, because that's no less degrading to play than the alternative. The tactics vs. strategy question at the core of the conversation about pre-buffing is a complicated one, with origins in tabletop gaming. I have views on how it plays out there (where, honestly, it can be a lot easier to manage because of the often inherently ad-hoc nature of tabletop gaming), but I don't have the depth of knowledge in video game design - or even just Pillars of Eternity's internals - to feel confident in putting forward answers. But I do encourage people to think of this not as a yes-or-no question. There are a lot of different things that play out in any decision, and it's easy to overlook criticism of one's own viewpoint in the certainty that the critic must have very different priorities than one's own, when in fact they're often very similar (this particular remark is not directed at anyone in particular). tl;dr gkathellar why you so optimistic about human beings

What if I just want to walk the earth, like Caine from Kung Fu?

They may also have attempted to draw on its general atmosphere. Not all inspirations are concrete.

All he's actually articulated is that he doesn't want the traditional casters to be capable of doing everything better than everyone - which has, traditionally, been the case. And while I'm all for nostalgia, this is one of those traditions that is doing more good in the world as burning garbage. This is not a change. Most damaging spells in the I.E. games have a save for half damage, and many non-damaging spells have a save for reduced effect. Some people may perceive a difference, but it's not because of graze. Partly, it's because it's easy for saves for half damage to go unnoticed in the Infinity Engine. Partly, it's because enemies in the IE games tended to have something like half of their maximum HP, and so most mooks go down when you toss an AoE at them - play BG1 modded to give all enemies max health, and you'll see the difficulty jump a fair bit. And partly, it's because save odds in 2E are pretty abysmal at early levels, around 5-15% IIRC, and scale to about 50% in mid-levels and virtually 100% by 15 or so. I look forward to your results, but bear in mind that the chance to do mediocre damage is not actually new, so if you're really looking to keep with nostalgia, it would be better to increase base damage. (I also think there's a pretty fair argument for keeping spells on the same accuracy system that attacks use, but I don't feel up to supporting that view with a pseudo-essay right now, so I'll let it slide. One of the designers of D&D 4e did a good piece on that, but I'm not sure it's applicable, since 4e placed casters on the same "usage" track as attackers ... mmm. I'll think about how to present this, and maybe see if I can't find that article.)

The other thing is to make sure everyone can contribute. Fighting mages in BG2 often came down to "dispel immunity spells, keep them down while otherwise-helpless fighters do the dirty work." Immunity spells aren't such a big deal if there's a large suiteof counters against them. And really, I could stand to have EVERYONE cracking mountains in half and ripping souls out with a glare and breathing out tornados at high levels.

what nawww discussion are for pwnz and being right all the time oh man pwnd

Bro, I respect and agree with your point here, but I feel obliged to point out: we're on the internet. It's always us vs. them on the internet. Unless you're one of them. Then it's ME vs YOU. AND YOUR GOIN DOWN

Well, you're also starting at level 5 with 5 characters in the beta. It might be easier with a learning curve, both in terms of level (complexity) and number of characters.

A lot of people only buy a new game when they're done with their current one. So if DA:I and PoE release at the same time, and one of those people is looking for something to play, and DA:I is higher on their priorities list, PoE will go unnoticed. Check out the Planescape Torment fixpack and tweakpack. Both make it much less buggy and much more bearable.

I like all that a lot more than just "BEGONE, MAGIC!" dispel. Wiping everything that could possibly be beneficial to your enemies isn't a tactical choice. It's like Samuel Adams... it's always a good decision. Well, it's a decision when it might be useful to have the other one around. Remember Remove Magic in BG2? It was always a tough choice, deciding whether to memorize one more Remove Magic, or one more Dispel Magic. "Just remove negative effects on allies" actually strikes me as more boring. I mean, that's always the right choice.

They keep up with the boards, but some things, much as we'd like them, are probably too low on the list of priorities (and the cost : benefit analysis, where cost = time and resources) to realistically happen. It would be nice if backgrounds weren't just a thing I glanced at briefly and then forgot about, but that may genuinely be too much to hope for - there's a lot of other stuff to work on, things that really need attention. Still, one can dream!

@forgottenlor Wait, there are adventurers that aren't sociopaths?

@redneckdevil: In PNP, yeah, the milestone approach works great. It also works well in games with "mission" or "level" structures - but the IE style is just too open. You can't fit everything organically into missions or quests.

The thing is, unless enemies are going to respawn on a timer, which they shouldn't, then ALL combat encounters should be special encounters. There's no reason to have trash mobs in a story-focused game. And that's totally doable. BG1 had tons of minor quests and weird conversations and violent altercations out in the wilderness. Once you cut out the random gnolls and wolves, they actually made up most of the wilderness encounters. Some wacky druids try to murder you? They should TALK to you first, and give you a chance to get out of (or into) trouble. And if you fight, they should come at you in a tactically sophisticated way. If you bump into some lions, they should be an actual pride, sneak attacking your party from above as they wander through a gorge, or whatever, such that finding easier ways through - like poisoning or distracting them, or going straight for the pride leader - is just as reasonable and XP-worthy as fighting off seven 500 lb cats. So on and so forth. Get rid of trash mobs, make every encounter significant, and these problems all go away.

@wanderon Naw, man, that was the best. Rock-paper-machine gun-philosophy-enchantment-blindness-scissors for the win.

I voted for 1, 2, 4 and 5, but I wouldn't mind any except Bestiary XP, tbh. Bestiary just annoys me. Really, combat XP should be handled on a per-encounter basis, and encounters should be allowed to reconstitute to a degree within reason.