gkathellar

That was added for Moon Godlike, at least, on 301 when I tried it on the first day.

At present, the wizard has a limited number of weird tricks, but I'm actually very encouraged by some of the Priest's weirder spells - I love Iconic Projection, for instance. I know that's not even close to the BG2 level of rock-paper-scissors, rabbit-summoning-diversion, thousand-layered-defense nonsense, but it's clever. I agree in general that it would be great to see wacky spell combos and such, but I'd really like to see them on more than just the spellcasters, since the other classes are mages to a degree as well - especially if it could be integrated into the same system of back-and-forth as spellcasters get. Things like the Monk HLA section here would be a good start, if perhaps of a slightly lower magical intensity. OK, let's pretend for a moment that you are not a developer with a new account, I have a simple inquiry. When you saw the Wizard attack with his wand, did the "bolt" seem in any way visually related to the paltry motion of the wand, or was the "bolt", such as it is, summoned in the near vicinity; awkwardly mimicking what was suppose to be a simple, effective visual? You know, I feel like legitimate complaints like this one would be better-taken if you didn't post them in threads they have nothing to do with, couched in crazy paranoia and hostility.

I'd be fine with ugly. Aumaauauauauau look ugly, and I'm not complaining. As it is, though, they look stupid. I think you mean MINUS one, right? I WILL END YOU

That's why all of our cultural depictions of masculinity have either a huge matted tangle or a clean shave on their head, right?

Aye. When I finally played PS:T, the ugliest, clunkiest, most unpleasant parts of my experience were (a) the bottom UI and (b) the radial menu auuuugh.

I still want XP for combat.

It also needs to be contextualized for the endurance/stamina/whatever/whocares system. Which is to say, once again, that if grazes stay they really shouldn't do health damage. Also, it occurs to me that certain classes might get access to Talents that adjust the percentages. So, like, melee rogues might get something that shifts Miss from 1-5 to 1-10, or something. Barbarians might get an ability turning more hits into grazes (partly compensating for their abysmal deflection). Etc.

EDIT: Oh, hey, six pages of thread I somehow failed to notice. Guuahsdfusaufhuf This. As others have pointed out, removing grazes would only remove granularity, not change statistical averages. I don't really care about damage averaging and how it ultimately works, but right now grazes feel like a totally artificial way to increase party attrition - ideally, I think they'd be a way to reduce attrition without eliminating it entirely, because even if attrition does have a role, it's pretty obnoxious at the moment. That is practically what is MMO thinking. Bringing all gameplay down to banal but "balanced" level. You can have consistent gameplay there, true. But it is also assured to be boring and repetitive. "MMO thinking," as you call it (although plenty of MMOs don't do this), is just the easiest way to achieve superficial balance. Moreover, it creates a false dichotomy between balance and interesting, dynamic gameplay. My finding has been just the opposite that a lack of balance creates very uninteresting gameplay for large swaths of the game in creation. Neither of these two extremes are a good thing, but then, extremes often aren't. True balance in a customization-friendly game can only be achieved asymmetrically. It's an extraordinarily difficult task, but a worthy one nonetheless, because the result is fantastic. In fairness, while BG's swingy RNG could be a pain in the ass, that was a feature, not a bug. A lot of character abilities were essentially ways to manipulate or eliminate the presence of the RNG, because the risks of failing to do so were too great. I agree that a lot of this comes down to preference, but it does bear noting that it's not just more RNG vs. less RNG - there's also the question of how player abilities interact with the RNG. Yeah, that Cowled Dwarf was stupidly tough. Reflex attacks were pretty much the only way to reliably hurt it. Stop. Please, just stop. This "real fans" nonsense (what does that even mean?), the oversimplification of others' critiques into statements of dislike, the fearmongering about how those people are the source of all of PoE's real and imagined ills, the unjustified prophesying about how it's going to be too similar to XYZ-modern-game-that-we-are-all-supposed-to-hate ... stop. It's not helpful, it's not fair to anyone in the discussion, it reduces nuanced opinions down to us-and-them diatribe, and it's frankly insulting.

Ooh, exciting! Looking forward to giving this a shot. Also, have you given any thought to splitting Duration and AoE onto different stats, as Obsidian did for 301? I actually felt that was quite reasonable, but I dunno if there's a way to make that fit into your model of things. With respect, remember Poe's Law.

There is little or no agreement on what "general intellect" constitutes, least of all IQ (it definitely measures something of value in modern society, but the what is a baffling question). And of course, as Matt516 notes, IQ absolutely does shift around. But you'll never be as strong as someone who works out the same amount and is six inches taller. That core difference in talent is roughly what Strength (or any other ability score) represents in an idealized AD&D model, while the difference in how much training you have comes down to your level.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't really think that would solve the problem, since it would make Con the god stat. I feel as though the recent changes, while a huge improvement, serve to demonstrate just how much obnoxious padding the Stamina/Health system ultimately is.

Any inside information about the company's assets / liabilities you care to share with us and are any of our business? I'm no expert, but unless I've misunderstood some things I learned recently, since Obsidian is neither public nor an LLC, that information shouldn't be available to anyone outside of the company.

As a perfectionist, you should bear in mind that biology doesn't recognize perfection as a concept - there is only the spectrum of what is advantageous, and what isn't. Why is it that, in a world with numerous different humanoid species, all of them should be expected to conform to the same set of phenotypical norms as human beings? If anything, they would do exactly the opposite, since each would occupy a distinct niche. We hurt you because we love you.

Yeah, it's a huge improvement, and I found combat to be much more playable - although still a bit too slow. Attributes also still need work, but again: improvements!

I love it as a ranged combatant. Just as the fighter needs more tricks available to it for ranged combat, the rogue needs more to help it melee..

Technically, it's more of a Skinner box reward mechanism. ... gpedantellar, away! No, but seriously, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Some people just, you know, want different things. It's okay. Take a deep breath. You don't have to make up interesting new pejoratives just because some people aren't hardcore enough for you. Fairly said. It's a point of aesthetic taste, I agree - but since PoE is rooted in IE games, it's an aesthetic which has always been a component of the experience. You could just as well argue the opposite - huge numbers of people work tirelessly at athletics, but only 1% of them ever get anywhere, while actual neuroscientific research points increasingly towards the brain's mutability. I'm not advocating for any particular side of those arguments, only noting - the greatest problem with trying to simulate "realism" in a game is that first, you have to determine what reality is. And more often than not, reality is weird, and does not obey simple axioms. Better to focus on verisimilitude than try to simulate what is, at best, debatable.

I'd much rather they got normal speed in hand, and fixed auto-pause so that it actually works in the helpful way that it did in IE games. I mean, hell, they could just add a "recovery completed" auto-pause, and that would solve virtually all of my problems.

While I generally agree, I think the issue is less related to the game's being "real time," and more related to its being "rts-esque," if that makes sense. To whit: AoOs were very manageable in NWN and NWN2, and could even be manipulated actively. I would say this was because you generally controlled one character from 3rd-person perspective. DA:O, being a 3rd-person game, did also benefit from this. But managing a whole party around the issue in RTwP is somewhat more obnoxious.

+1 to shrinking the gigantic dwarf heads (as well as aumuauauauaua heads, to a lesser degree). The adjustments to character posture, female moon godlike heads, and orlan heads since 278 are a huge improvement, but dwarves still look kind of like they've been summering in the uncanny valley. Also, I know it's too late, but [insert generic complaint about death godlike looking awful].

(a) If you're going to make that claim, I'm going to need you to break that down for me, point-by-point, because I don't follow you. (b) That's why 2/3 of my post is devoted to the fact that real life masters used many different weapons, depending on the opponent and situation, right? When I was eleven, I was frustrated that I was effectively penalized for making a decision that felt right for my character. Grouping weapons helps to avoid that, by ensuring that no matter which group you choose, there's probably something of value to you (and, in the meantime, appeals to fighting nerds like me by maintaining consistency with reality). To whit: If a fighter chooses anything other than Large Swords in BG1, they chose wrong, and would always be inferior to a fighter who chose Large Swords - even though the options were presented to players as if they were all equally viable. A paladin in BG2 who didn't take greatsword proficiency? Too bad, no Carsomyr, you chose wrong. And heaven help the player who wanted to use a katana but didn't want to break into a completely random building to get the Celestial Fury. Being penalized for a lack of metagame knowledge is not fun. That's not the point. If I were just interested in finding and using the best weapons, I would just do that. I want to be able to make character creation choices without having to feel like I made wrong choices - because this is a game, not an exam. I feel like I need to introduce you to the Stormwind Fallacy. The tl;dr version is that powergaming and roleplaying are not fundamentally at odds - when they are, it's the result of bad game design. I'm absolutely a powergamer, but what you'll find many powergamers want is not the "optimal choice," but a framework in which many choices are optimal. This is the guiding philosophy behind a lot of PoE, from the attributes which benefit every character to the classes which try to be roughly balanced against each other. It shows Sawyer's background in tabletop RPGs, a background that I share, and thus have a huge appreciation for.

One more thing we still need: individual stealth. Also I'm pretty sure I only spot hidden items while stealthed? That's kinda weird. I agree. Without it, engagement is obnoxious to track. This is an elegant solution.

Advice: If you have actual suggestions, you may want to post them in a non-caustic thread focused around those suggestions. Although I still don't know how this can bother you so much, since without the beta you're clearly just getting all this from youtube videos.

Yes it does because range is not a combat stat that is useful for all classes and builds and therefore fails to meet the system design goals. QFT. Ranged options for fighters and barbarians are a must - right now, it is impossible to make a competent archer who is neither a spellcaster, a beastmaster, nor a sneak-attacker. Monks and paladins should get something. I actually like Perception giving a range bonus, although I don't think that should be all. But right now, 4/11 classes cannot contribute meaningfully at range.

I've encountered this bug in build 278 as well, exactly as described. Reporting it had slipped my mind ... knew I had forgotten something.

More than you'd think (especially since I doubt you're talking about real pikes, which were fifteen feet long and pretty much only used in formation fighting). As any martial artist can tell you, movements between apparently dissimilar weapons bear striking resemblances when you actually practice them, and learning one improves your technique with all others. More crucially, different weapons have different applications, and as such they'd both be taught in one school of combat (this is true even for "specialized" schools that favored particular weapons, like TSKSR or German longsword). Professional soldiers, duelists, and fighting masters did not study single weapons within a discipline, but rather, an entire discipline. I split this off from (1A) because they are completely different, unrelated statements. There are two responses to this part: (i) This isn't D&D. (ii) It's also an incredibly metagamey, trap choice, that punishes players for lack of advance knowledge of which magic items are going to be both consistently available and ultimately useful to their particular character. My first time through BG2, I didn't know about the Flail of Ages, or the Celestial Fury, or any of the zillion amazing magical axes in the game. Ultimately, a whole bunch of my proficiency points were wasted. That sucks. Then, remember that irritation from when your halberd-spec fighter kept finding +1 longswords. And if you specialize in axes instead, do they say the exact same thing, except with a substitution for the word "axes?" How is that less of a character identifier than training in a knightly combat school, or some other actual set of disciplines, which NPCs might even have meaningful commentary on? Except what that actually means is that unless you spend all of your pips in one category, you end up hamstrung, especially since the differences between weapons were rarely, if ever, great enough to justify switching. The weapon is always an extension of your body. That is literally the entire purpose of weapons - they are prosthetics that lengthen, weight, and sometimes sharpen the arm. The difference between a master and a student is that even in it's sheath, the master's weapon is always in their hand. That's why we have stories about things like masters killing opponents with oars when their normal weapon would have been at a disadvantage; it's why virtually every historical text on complete combat systems incorporates sections on swords, daggers, polearms, and unarmed combat, among other things. I think it's clear that the exact opposite is true on every one of these counts.