Forkedman

Perhaps I overstated things. My main point was that the ratio of running out of spells to running out of health is totally out of whack in my opinion.

This has come up a couple of times in this thread and while I think I understand your point. I don't totally agree with it. How is the quest completion exp any different? It doesn't negate this possibility at all. Unless you remove all non-critical path exp from the game players will reach final/late game encounters are different levels and strengths with different play styles. The only thing it does potentially is give you a base level that the party will be at due to exp from critical path quests. Edit - I don't actually feel totally beholden to the idea of exp per kill. But I think per encounter/achievement is important. A sense of progress for challenging content that is not totally bound up in the questing mechanics adds a lot to the game.

Removes the incentive for a melee heavy party. With the current system you're better off taking a party that is ranged/magic focused with just one or two tanks. Or potentially removing tanks from your party entirely depending on how strong CC ends up being in the final game. A party with few or less tanks and more CC is less rest dependent than a party that focuses on melee. If the only reason you’re having to rest is because the inability of your tank to survive another encounter, the system encourages you to bypass tanking/melee role as much as possible and thereby allow your party to make more progress with less resting. It doesn’t currently suitably punish failure to control the encounter. In fact it's the opposite, it punishes you (in the form of more forced rests/less progress) for trying to control the encounter with your tank. You're far better of using mages/priests to root/hold the whole encounter while you nuke/range it down from afar. With the current system it might even be preferable to take more hits as a more squishy class and save your tanks overall HP for more challenging /later fights. And it doesn’t suitably represent the wear and tear of battle on anyone other than your melee characters. Your mages and archers, presuming proper tactical approach don’t suffer from combat. They don’t tire (bar a few per rest abilities) the same way melee characters who take the brunt of the damage do. On top of this it encourages save scumming to minimize damage to your tanks while maximizing your damage output. A set of bad rolls could potentially screw you for the rest of your exploration of an area/force you to return to town while 80% of your party are still perfectly viable. That doesn’t make for a fun mechanic. You mentioned in a later post that it adds to immersion. Gotta say, I couldn't care less. I'm playing for fun. Not immersion and this currently isn't a fun mechanic at all. It just encourages people to 'game' the systems. Both of Mrmonocle’s suggestions are good ones. A party pool of tiredness/fatigue that is an aggregate of things like damage taken(tanks), spells cast (casters) attacks made (damage classes) would make a lot more sense and allow for a more balanced load out of classes. Or simply upping the stamina/health ratio for melee tanks and lowering it for squishy classes would also make sense.

So... character creation. There are a couple of things that really stand out to me. 1) Lack of option to view your character as they would be actually seen in the game. Why isn't there a button tab that will show me what my character will actually look like when I start playing? To be frank I don't really care what my character looks like up close as I'm not playing a third person action RPG. I'd rather have a good sense of what the character will look like when the action gets rolling. This should at the very least be an option. Also the size of the character at creation isn't doing your models any favours. They look a lot better either at the scale that they appear in the inventory screen or as isometric characters. Being blow up to full size for close inspection just makes weaknesses that otherwise wouldn't be apparent very obvious. For example the strange clipping/shape/design of the 3rd male death head. 2) Order of some of the menus. Currently class selection works like this Class > Order/deity/spells > Attributes > Culture This order is doesn't 'feel' right. It doesn't make sense to choose your culture which has an impact on your stats, after you've already allocated the rest of your points. It's means that you don't get the full picture of your builds stat layout until after you've made the decision on how to allocate the majority of your points. It also feels thematically wrong because culture has a lot more in common with 'order/deity' than it does with attributes. It makes the jump from roleplaying to technical attribution and then back to roleplaying. A better order in my opinion would go Class > Order/deity > Culture > Attributes > Spells/talents (if they end up on character creation). To me that feels a lot more sensible. It's a transition from the roleplaying (class) to roleplaying with attribute impact to straight up attributes and technical make up of your character. 3) Summery of class skills during character creation. It doesn't have to be anything more than a page outlining your starting skills and icons the same way that your spells are described. At the moment they show up as tiny boxes below your class selection. It would be a lot more readable and clear if they were either added to the class selection description box when you have a class selected or presented on a page like the spells page. It would give people a much clearer sense of what they're starting out with and possibly also assist on the attribution of stats. 3.1) Same deal for leveling up your character. At the moment it's like "Oh, I got a new little icon, cool.' There is no sense of impact or advancement to this. A description of the skills within the level up menu that is more than a tiny icon with some minor description of the skill is needed. Also your icons are so inconsistent. They need to all share a border style or something. At the moment spells and weapon skills feel like they belong to different games. 4) Stats. Not nearly enough information on how they affect different skills and the impact that they have on your character. Not nearly enough. If you think it's intimidating for new players to have large amounts of information thrown at them from the start, make the information optional through a tick box for advanced information. And that's it for now.

@AdaMusic - I think you misunderstood what he was saying. With the current mechanic fights/frontliners are the only reason the party actually needs to rest and rest far too often. Their ability to take a beating in combat is fine. Their loss of health after combat is not. With the current mechanic the party doesn't need to rest because everyone is running low, the party is forced to rest because the frontliners are losing large chunks of HP (not stamina) after every fight. It doesn't make you push your party to the limits, it instead cripples 1/2 of your characters and leaves the rest virtually unaffected by moment to moment combat unless something goes seriously wrong.

It disincentivizes exploration and combat for me. I know I'm better off waiting until I have a quest for tackling an area before actually going out and tackling it. I also know that with the exception of named NPC's there isn't any reason not to bypass random encounters with beatles/animals/etc because I'm not going to be rewarded even slightly for it. With no exp rewarded for encounters it's less rewarding to stray from the critical/quest path and do your own thing. I doesn't have to be a lot either. Even minimal exp can make a big difference.

Totally agree with this. The lack of any movement is very jarring. Especially when other parts of the world don't suffer from being totally static. I suspect this is something that is too late to change to be honest but it's very noticeable and makes the world feel a little dead.

Have to agree with most of the above. Combat needs to slow down and probably more importantly combat needs more feedback and more responsiveness. There is a real lag between the action shown and the impact of the action. This makes it harder to judge what's happening results in combat feeling so 'behind the scenes' that it's hard to feel like you've had much impact. The other thing that I think would greatly help is a better sense of spacing and area. At the moment everyone just sort of crowds in on each other into a big jumble of characters that is frankly rather confusing. With one or two characters it doesn't matter so much if there is some clumping. With 6... matters a whole lot more. It doesn't feel tactical at the moment. It just feels messy.