gkathellar

That's theres no "opportunity cost" to prebuffing. Which is a very good point - if prebuffing is available as it was in the IE games, it is always the right decisions. That said, there are two concerns I have with it: With the very short durations of spells in PoE, that's less of an issue right now. Now, mind you, pre-buffing with short-duration buffs is something I absolutely hate, because it stresses me out, but that's just a me thing. If the lack of an opportunity cost is an issue, why not find ways to give it one? Take the "invest mana to maintain buffs" approach of Dragon Age, for instance - something like that isn't impossible to implement in PoE. A wizard could enable a buff for the duration of a rest by memorizing it, costing both XYZ spells/rest, and some of their normal versatility. There are other approaches as well: off the top of my head, maintaining buffs might slow down other spellcasting, or otherwise penalize the caster. Having a buff of a particular level up might prevent you from casting spells of the same level. Buffs might shut down if their caster took too much damage, as their concentration (eh? eh?) was broken. Of course, in reality, it's probably too late for this. Too bad, but ... honestly, it's not the worst thing in the world, and I find that a lot of PoE's short-duration buffs are not only quite charming, but much more tempting to actually use than short-duration buffs in the I.E. games were. One spell that does need to be fixed, though? Kalakoth's Minor Blights. They're obviously Melf's Minute Meteors (actually my favorite spell in BG2), and that was a spell that had an opportunity cost, and it worked: it had an indefinite duration, but once cast, you only had a limited number of meteors to throw, and you couldn't attack with any of your other weapons until they were exhausted. KMB should not be running on a duration timer.

No, no, just ... just no. I know it's tradition, but I am so, so tired of that tradition. A ranger is a guy who roams across the wilderness. There is nothing linking that archetype to fighting with paired blades, other than giving players a way to play the Drizzit (and that wasn't even related to his being a ranger! 1E drow were all ambidextrous!). You want a ranger? This is a ranger. These are some rangers. And you know what, fine, this can be a ranger too; but he fights with a blade in each hand because he got a racial feature or spent some feats or whatever, not because he's a ranger. /nerdrage

Putting aside all of the rationalizations, and they are many, the actual reason is that Gary Gygax was a big fan of Jack Vance, so he copied a lot of idea from his fiction for D&D's magic system. Since virtually all RPGs trace their roots back to D&D at one point or another, it's simply a matter of tradition. Mana, the FF3-style pseudo-Vancian casting used by Wizards in PoE, known spells divided by level ... doesn't matter. They're all variations on Vancian in the end (better variations, mind you. See, to my mind, that's an intrinsic problem, and I'd honestly hoped PoE would do more to give melee nice things. It's certainly better than BG1 and IWD were, though, so I'll take what I can get. As 3E psionics demonstrates, those numbers aren't really that difficult to keep track of in PnP. It's simply that Vancian casting was tradition by the point mana systems were devised. And I will say, there is something to Vancian magic in that it inspires ... strategic thinking. You have to plan ahead, and take tremendous pains to get the greatest possible amount of bang for your buck. But for all that, it still has problems. If mana systems have anything really striking in the same way, though, it's in games that allow you to invest mana in buffs, rather than making them duration-based expenditures. This was something I really liked in Magic of Incarnum, and that I liked even more when Dragon Age copied the idea. It's just so much more ... elegant? Elegant. It's so much more elegant than having durations that force you to count the seconds in your head.

I think it is partially because it is assumed that you play the game with a DM who can make judgement calls and tailor the adventures to the characters present. It is supposed to only be half-baked, with the players shaping it as they see fit and then finishing the baking process. No. D&D isn't intentionally half-baked so much as the devs stopped cooking in the middle because they weren't clear on the difference between dough and bread. It mostly suffers from ginormous QA failures, and then doesn't even bother to tell you so (like Mutants and Masterminds does, an approach that is either brilliant or lazy, depending on who you ask). Having worked semi-professionally on tabletop game design before, my experience is that most problems in tabletop games are due to: Lack of a coherent design ideology throughout the team, either because different devs have differing ideas of what the game should be, or because no one has any clear sense of it at all. Example: Exalted 2E, the game of flashy cinematic action where every fight just ends up being an endless, boring war of attrition. Not having play-testers/copy-editors/QA other than the devs themselves. This is because good tabletop QA is not just about making sure intended things work, but about actively trying to bend the system until it breaks. Example: D&D3E. By all accounts, playtesting was limited to the least creative, most stereotyped styles of play imaginable. As a result, virtually every other style of play is broken. Confusing development for GMing - or worse yet, confusing development for writing fiction. Example: Pathfinder, where they don't need to fix the balance issues, because those are features, not bugs. Math ****ups. These are easily fixed before release, but become a huge issue once out of the gate, where the only face-saving solution is to hastily patched them with non-optional options in later supplements. Example: D&D4E is a good one, since it actually tries to have working math but drifts off-target by about 3-5 points by later levels. All of the games mentioned above are examples of a different type, where no one bothered to do any numbers work at any point. It bears noting that these are mostly TTRPG issues, not issues with games. Certainly they're unlikely to hound PoE through its full release. (1) is a larger possibility, but it's a mistake Obsidian has rarely, if ever, made. (2) isn't a huge issue for video games, and also ... backer beta. (3) just doesn't affect video games much, if at all. (4) is what patches are for, which are thankfully much easier to use comprehensively on core systems than errata is.

The guard by the bridge in Dyrford, for instance, mentions how badass you must be if you come from the Living Lands. I love things like that - they're charming, and they enhance the roleplaying experience. But I'd still like to have things more mechanically concrete than just little conversation tidbits - things not unlike some of the racial powers, for instance. To my mind, mechanics should serve to enhance fluff, so it'd be a lot more interesting to get something like a bonus to Cold Resistance for coming from the Wight That Wends, or a bonus to wilderness-related skill checks for hailing from the Living Lands. Neither of those are great examples, but that kind of thing. If your Culture and Background each gave one of those, I'd be glad to give up the existing bonus attribute point altogether, just for the flavor of it.

Pretty much identical to my own experience, except that I used Spell Cast. That and Enemy Sighted were both really good in terms of reducing worry. You'd be surprised, at least with respect to the IE games - and if PoE played like that with auto-pause options equivalent to the IE games, I'd hold that to be a problem with PoE. For me, auto-pause lets me relax somewhat, and take my time figuring out the micro so that it can run interference-free.

Lessssee, RotD, RotW, UA doesn't count cause that's OGL, and CM ... wait, three splatbooks is a lot? In all seriousness, neither depends on brain dead DMs, because both are theoretical optimization, not actually intended for play. Which is why I used them as examples - they're easy examples, used for the purpose of illustrating a point about how depth of experience can lead one to approach subject matter in a way that occasionally makes it difficult to discuss. And that's all. I have no interest in discussing or debating 3.X in any way, except maybe to provide comparisons, or humor. I really should have known better than to even mention it. Mentioning 3.X on a forum with tabletop gamers is like saying "Macbeth" in the theater.

That's because BG:EE is basically just an installation of BGTutu with a bunch of mods. IIRC, virtually all of its new technology is stuff that was developed on the major modding sites, with various more-or-less minor updates. And since Weimer's Icewind Gate flickered out in early development like a decade ago ... yeah.

I stand corrected. I think you and Gromnir may just be approaching this question from different points of reference and different depths/varieties/types of exposure. Going by your accounts, it seems like you have more PoE experience and Gromnir has more 2E experience, so you're talking past each other referring to balance issues with either that the other hasn't had a chance to experience. I'm not a 2E guru, myself, nor have I put tons and tons of hours into the backer beta, but my D&D3E kung fu is decent, so I'll try to make a comparison. I know a lot of gamers who don't think the issues in D&D 3.5 are that severe because they played in a party with minimal optimization and a forgiving DM. 3.5 is, of course, a game so broken that at the low end of optimization you've got 1st-level wizards using 9th-level spells, and at the high end you're defeating omnipotent kobolds through a mix of non-temporal logic, imaginary numbers, and multiple aleph orders of infinity. Also you can bring someone back to life by drowning them. Considering that, I wouldn't be surprised if there were egregious imbalances in games I'm less familiar with, that I'm not aware of due to a lack of familiarity. The same may apply.

I always just sort of approach each of the major dungeons as a separate module, personally. So it would be less, "Let's Play: BG2," and more, "Let's Play: De'Arnise Stronghold," or "Let's Play: Planar Sphere," or "Let's Play: Umar Hills ..." ... man, Umar Hills was a fantastic quest. I'd play BG2 again just for that. Well, that and Watcher's Keep.

... I get the vaguest impression that you're not all that familiar with 2E beyond the IE games. Would that be accurate?

Well, there are already cases of that - Wood Elves, for instance, force you to ask yourself "why am I not using this?" every time you create a ranged character. I think giving each race a little more of interest - or anything, in some cases coughcoughpaleelvescoughcough - could increase their viability in a variety of roles. I'm not advocating for more attribute bonuses, mind you. "Larger numbers," is rarely, if ever, a good solution. I'd much rather see more unique ability thingies, or see the existing ones assigned greater value.

Because, at least in the several specific cases I mention above, a particular multiclass is better than a particular single class at the same total experience points. A C/R with 89,000 xp is strictly better than a druid with 89,000 xp, for instance. That has a lot to do with the way the xp scale worked in 2nd edition AD&D, but it's not the sole cause.

OP, I think you've misunderstood the kind of balance that I think the designers (and a lot of us here on the boards) are referring to when we yammer on about balance. See, to my mind, there are two kinds of balance - competitive, and cooperative. Competitive balance requires that all classes adhere to certain norms, and demands that they all strive to have a similar level of overall power. This is ... not an undesirable goal, but only really an essential one in multiplayer games. TF2, Starcraft, and League of Legend, for instance, all try to have competitive balance. The issue with competitive balance is the one you raise - homogeneity. Variety requires that balance be asymmetric, and asymmetric balance is really ****ing difficult to achieve. Homogeneity is a solution, or at least a stopgap, to this difficulty. Unfortunately, when we talk about balance, people advocating both for and against it often adopt the position that all balance is competitive balance, and therefore assert either that (a) games should not be balanced, or (b) options in games should be mostly homogenous in the interests of balance. There are problems with both of these two positions, especially when it comes to games like PoE, where cooperative balance is of crucial importance. Cooperative balance is about allowing every option (classes, in the case of PoE) to fill a distinctive role, having unique things that they do best. Ideally, those unique things should be no more or less valuable than those of other classes, but that's less important. What's very important is avoiding traps in character creation and customization, such that one option is simply like another, but worse. Balanced design is about creating a variety of distinctive choices, none of which are wrong by virtue of not treading on one another's toes. This is a place where the IE games were really a mixed bag, actually, if you were playing in an optimized way. For example: In BG2, unkitted, Stalker, and Beastmaster rangers in are flat-out worse than Fighter/Thieves (or Fighter/Mage/Thieves, if you really want to insist that ranger spellcasting is significant, which it isn't). There is nothing that any of those rangers can do that an F/T (or F/M/T) can't do better, and many things an F/T (F/M/T) can do that the Ranger is incapable of. One class is strictly superior to the other - such that if I want to play a vanilla ranger in BG2, I'm better off playing an F/T and just calling it a ranger. There are lots of similar issues - by mid-levels, for instance, a buffed-up cleric is better at fighting than a fighter; Berserkers are largely just barbarians with better equipment options; Cleric/Rangers are druids with better THAC0, more and better spells, and no worthless shapeshifting abilities; so on and so forth; etc (who, me, bitter?). PoE, in trying to be conscious of balance, has presented us with classes that actually are very different from one another. Ciphers, Rangers, and Chanters are weird and interesting. Priests and Druids show tremendous promise. Paladins and Fighters feel like different classes 90% of the time, instead of the 10% common to the IE games. These are just a couple of examples - for all of my concerns about PoE's beta, class diversity is absolutely not among them. And I'm confident that it will be maintained, and probably even advanced, as development goes forward. tl;dr Balance is good, and PoE's take on it does not restrict class diversity, but rather produces it. ... why? How? Soloing was doable with any class in the IE games. It was dramatically harder with some than with others, but that wasn't a good thing.

I actually think they should remain as they are. Magical helmets should give bonuses, but since mundane ones aren't interesting, I'd rather they remain a cosmetic decision. That, or Obsidian should give them an invisibility switch, as per Divinity:OS. "Make helmets invisible," is an almost ubiquitous mod in fantasy CRPGs at this point, and it's that way for a reason.

For some time now, I've been a little bit bothered by the positioning of the head on female1 elves, humans, and aumauauaua. It strikes me as a little too far forward, with the neck angled a little oddly - but at the same time, I've felt like this isn't quite on target. What I've finally realized is that the issue doesn't lie in the neck or head at all, but in the knees and the arch of the back. See, if you look at them in profile, females of these three races are currently animated so that their knees are always slightly couched2. That's sort of fine, and is actually consistent with having the head a bit forward3. The hips, feet and legs are all consistent with this - but as you move up the animation to the torso, you'll notice that the back has a very, very prominent arch, and the chest is puffed out. This is neutral posture in many dance and athletic disciplines, and is how people can wear heels without falling over4, but it's tremendously inconsistent with the couched knees, forward head, and practical footwear that taller PoE females have. Basically, the posture of the current models is ... Neck (couched) / Upper torso (neutral) / Legs (couched) ... which looks bad, structurally. Personally, I'd much prefer to see Neutral/Neutral/Neutral, posture, as is the case on the Orlan and Dwarven models (see FN2). But if the point of the couched posture is a "combat ready" look5 and there's a real desire to keep it, there need to be adjustments to the upper torso adjusted to straighten the spine, pull in the chest, and tilt the collarbone so that it's consistent with the position of the neck. The only other approach would be to give the female models high heels, but if that happens I WILL COME FOR YOU6. tl;dr Skeletons are spoooooky 1 It could be a problem for males too, but I never play male characters, and I'm too lazy to check. It probably is. 2 This isn't objectively problematic but it's ... a little weird, honestly. Orlan and dwarves are comparatively centered, with their knees straight but unlocked and their hips placed firmly on top of their feet - reflecting what I've been taught is good posture. The animators have done an A+ job of making those little bodies look real and structurally sound. 3 If you stand up and couch your knees, you'll notice that your hips tend to move back a bit, your shoulders advance to compensate, your chest hollows, and the angle of your neck and collarbone change. This puts your head forward. 4The hips are also pushed back as a result. This is the point of heels, for anyone who doesn't know - they adjust the wearer's center of gravity so that they stick out their chest and butt slightly more than usual to compensate. 5I sure hope not, because you've got neutral stances on the one side, and fighting stances on the other, and there's very little real in-between. A good neutral stance shifts effortlessly into a fighting stance while being perfectly natural. 6No I won't.

As a heavy user of auto-pause in IE games, this is one relatively minor feature I'd love to see improved before release. I find it makes parties heavy with micromanagement (like six mages) far more tolerable. Here are a few things that I think should have auto-pause options, in addition to present ones: Ability readied: Classes like the Cipher and Chanter, which have abilities that may become unexpectedly available mid-fight, would be a lot more manageable with an auto-pause to tell players, "hey, your whatever is now charged!" Recovery completed: Pausing when the character finishes recovery for a non-repeatable action (i.e. basically anything that isn't attacking) would help to avoid wasting time. Ability used: There should be better visual feedback for this type of thing in general, but it would be nice to have an auto-pause to alert us that a command was completed. If possible, I would like separate options for spell-type abilities (the traditional "Spell cast") and for special attacks (like Knockdown, Finishing Blow, etc.) so that it could be adjusted to fit party composition. Idle: This falls under the same umbrella as some of the others, but basically, I'd like an auto-pause for when a character (a) can be doing something in combat, and (b) isn't. In addition, there are some convenience improvements to the auto-pause system in IE games that I think would be wonderful: Accommodating simultaneous pauses: Sometimes, for unrelated reasons, I'll pause at the same time that an auto-pause goes off - resulting in neither actually working. It would be fantastic if the system had sensitivity to timing, and could figure out when it shouldn't unpause. Chains of "Target Destroyed": If a bunch of characters are focusing their fire, and the target goes down, the "Target Destroyed" option will go off several times in a row. This is a little obnoxious, and if possible, I'd like these to be compressed into one pause, indicating all characters it relates to.

Or, alternately additional minor positives. Race, culture and background are all largely cosmetic at the moment (yes, even for godlike). It's not exactly a dealbreaker, but I would love it if they gave more definite features.

I think I'd tell you to troll smarter, not harder, except that you've already derailed this thread so hopelessly that you must be trolling pretty smart. tl;dr WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE

I hope I can stop laughing before I die.

Good to know. Thanks for the update!

Expanding on your point somewhat: there are some stories where certain characters are inappropriate to roleplay. You wouldn't play a roguish X-Wing pilot in Westeros, for instance, because that goes against the assumptions of Westeros on a basic level. But that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with playing roguish X-Wing pilots, just that they need to be in the right place. My point in mentioning this is that the "muscle mages, how awful, that goes against roleplaying," as an argument, fundamentally misstates what roleplaying is. It may go against the particular type of setting and universe that some players expect, it may be an archetype that they think would rather be inappropriate in roleplaying they would enjoy (although I'd encourage such players to keep an open mind), but that's the extent of it. The fact that it's an archetype not (usually) encountered in D&D does not prevent it from being roleplaying, because roleplaying is inherently much more expansive in nature. Yeah, it's CHA, though i never quite understood why. For somebody who relies mostly on intuition, i'd have expected INT or at least WIS. Charisma measures force of personality and strength of conviction, which sorcerers rely on to power their spells. Wisdom is more about being aware and centered, which isn't really useful if the aesthetic empowering your spellcasting is, "reality will obey me because I am great." So what, are you just posting here to make a show of yourself? You can't actually care about giving money to any kind of worthy cause, or you would already have done it. You can't believe that anything of value you have to say about PoE will be listened to, or you wouldn't have jumped at the chance to withdraw your support. I can't think of any logically coherent reason for you to participate in this discussion (especially with this), other than to criticize without critique and to troll. (Donate it to me. I deserve it. For science.)

I understand where you're coming from, but things like that sometimes end up constraining roleplay based on desired build type, so I'm happy with the current approach and how it just serves to encourage roleplaying your order.

I don't know if they'll have hair, since they are supposed to be scary or repulsive. For me it's ok, since they have the black mist and more of their head covered by their "masks". Oh, no, I love the weird black hair-mist. But at the moment, most of the masks look terrible.

Aye, I find Moon and Fire godlike much more bearable to look at now. Now for Death godlike! ... please?