Poll - Do you like POE1 casting and ability use system better or POE2s

[ThacoBell]

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per encounter system simply don't understand and therefore do not accept that it has destroyed the challenge, interest and difficulty of the game, the very soul of it really.

 

The only hope really is that Obsidian realise this from the sales figures.

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per rest system simply don't understand that those mechanics are not remotely difficult and are only tedious. Challenge can come from ANY system, you just need to figure out what you want the focus of the combat to be.

 

Seriously, this game IS challenging. I've wiped several times on normal difficulty. Everybody wants it to be "difficult" but no one can define what that even means. I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase can/are willing to beat PotD. I'd call that a more than reasonable challenge.

[no1fanboy]

how can a poll be depressing?

 

Becasue other people offer views different to yours?

 

 its depressing that Obsidian introduced all these changes from the first game and its looking like the community has rejected it

 

thats depressing

[cokane]

how can a poll be depressing?

 

Becasue other people offer views different to yours?

 

 its depressing that Obsidian introduced all these changes from the first game and its looking like the community has rejected it

 

thats depressing

 

It's depressing because the history of gaming has shown that iterating on a system often produces superior results than nearly completely reinventing a system. Compare the difference in the BG series with the now difference in the Pillars series. Combat was in a joke state on Deadfire's release. This is because the team set up an enormous labor sink for itself by making fundamental changes to the system. There's a huge opportunity cost here. Deadfire could have had a lot more content, fine-tuning, sophistication, if the team didn't have to reinvent so many core elements.

[no1fanboy]

^^^^^

so well said agree 100%

 

They reinvented the wheel for nothing

[misterjimmy]

Resting system better than camping,But need some restrictions.I think they shouldn't remove Endurance and Health.Hope they bring it back or maybe just remove auto restore, add more Injuries and they need medical supplies to recovery not the food.Add ambush when you are resting.

[Lorfean]

I don't mind Deadfire's system but I prefer PoE's. Playing on Hard, I really enjoyed the camping supplies limit and the decisions it forced me to make during encounters.

[Zelse]

Per encounter spells are much easier to balance and much more fun to play with simply because you can always use spells whenever you feel like it (even if it is overkill and u just want to blow some dudes up ). The system in POE1 had its upsides but in the end i think i prefer the deadfire version for that reason alone. In addition having full spells to use in an encounter in PoE1 felt too powerful (because of how many spells you had)

 

Can we talk about the insane 7+ second action time on some spells tho? I mean yes the spell is "slightly" better than an ability attack but goddamn i can do the latter 3 times in the same amount of time ~.~ .

Ive already mentioned the lack of +accuracy and +pen for (damage) spells when compared to weapon abilities in another thread. Theres really no reason that abilities get +10acc/+2pen on average while not a single spell gets any at all.

Edited July 5, 2018 by Zelse

[Takkik]

I say none. System of both games, and even tyranny are far from perfect. The rest/camping system don't work. Just look at dev stream in the nemok dungeon : active traps > rest. Active new traps just after > rest again. There is issues how 'dungeons'/encounters are build.

 

I think there is some interesting concept with cipher, chanter & monk classes. Around generating resources to spend on your abilities to prevent just spamming all your high level abilities. The only thing I hate about cipher (&chanter) it's the lack of 'base' abilities. As a single class cipher you can only auto attack to generate focus. Miss a system of abilities to generate resources and other to spend it. Like Diablo 3.

I find auto attack just too passive and boring. Each class could get a bunch of 'free' abilities, like the cantrip in d&d5.

[Silent Winter]

i think the poll needs a third (or fourth) option for those of us in the middle.  I like meaningful resource management, but Deadfire also has more interesting 'food on rest' rather than generic camping supplies (but that also makes resting even more trivial in Deadfire than it was in PoE1).  I'd like to see a 'best of both worlds' moving forward.  Give us a reason to rest, make it not too easy (or introduce a 'limited resting' malus for certain conditions) while making it a meaningful mechanic with resource management...while still fun ... .. .. just don't ask me how

[no1fanboy]

I just really hate casters being limited to 2 spells per level and the whole empower BS

[heldred]

I don’t feel like there are casters in POE 2, I feel like every spell is an ability with slightly different graphics. The worst change for me was moving spells to an ability-like progression system. Add in the muddled grilmoire system and you have a train wreck.

 

It is too late to go back, but the devs should have read the boards better for feedback. I don’t recall “Change the Grimoire System” as a hot topic, but I could be mistaken. Waste of resources to only split the community in half... they should have channeled those dev hours into a better story (enough with the wheel/gods), open world, and unique/balanced classes.

Edited July 5, 2018 by heldred

[Loren Tyr]

It is too late to go back, but the devs should have read the boards better for feedback. I don’t recall “Change the Grimoire System” as a hot topic, but I could be mistaken. Waste of resources to only split the community in half... they should have channeled those dev hours into a better story (enough with the wheel/gods), open world, and unique/balanced classes.

 

Except that we have no clear evidence that the community *is* split in half. Unless you define 'community' as 'the active participants of this forum' perhaps (though even then it's questionable whether the poll participants sufficiently approximate a random sample of this community). But I highly doubt whether the preferences of the people posting in threads like these is representative of Obsidian's target audience and/or the average PoE player. So catering primarily to the preferences of a vocal minority here is probably not the best design (or business) approach. Especially since, as the poll seems to indicate, there is no consensus on which way to go anyway.

 

In addition, I would say 'split in half' is rather overstating things. Reading through people's comments in this thread, it's not nearly so binary. I see various comments to the effect of 'I somewhat prefer X over Y', indicating that those preferences are not actually that strong either way. But the absence of something like an "I'm largely fine with either system" option in the poll invites people to pick one (or not vote) even if they're not that bothered either way. Similarly, there are various comments criticising specific elements of one or the other system (or PoE implementation of said system anyway), which cannot be read as a wholesale rejection of that system.

 

So as with any source of empirical data, polls like these can't really be interpreted quite so straightforwardly (though to the perennial frustration of statisticians everywhere, they oh so frequently are; particularly unfortunate if they happen to be called a referendum, of course).

Edited July 5, 2018 by Loren Tyr

[Gregorovitch]

 

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per encounter system simply don't understand and therefore do not accept that it has destroyed the challenge, interest and difficulty of the game, the very soul of it really.

 

The only hope really is that Obsidian realise this from the sales figures.

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per rest system simply don't understand that those mechanics are not remotely difficult and are only tedious. Challenge can come from ANY system, you just need to figure out what you want the focus of the combat to be.

 

Seriously, this game IS challenging. I've wiped several times on normal difficulty. Everybody wants it to be "difficult" but no one can define what that even means. I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase can/are willing to beat PotD. I'd call that a more than reasonable challenge.

 

 

The game is not remotely as challenging as either PoE1 or DOS2. It's about as challenging as Tyranny (apart from the one battle at the end of the prologue). Far more importasntly it doesn't feel challenging either. It has no drama, no terror. Once you've figured out how to fight your party, you just rinse and repeat for success every time. That's why streamers are dropping LPs of it. No drama, no views.

 

People are not looking for difficulty per se. What they are looking for are thrills, chills and spills. They want to be terrified. But they will see through illusory versions. You have to have real difficulty, real chance of failure to make it work, You can read the long verison of this in a post I made about this on my favourite Steam group, eXplorminate (a 4X group promarily) if you are interested.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/explorminate/discussions/0/1729828401663390942/

 

The evidence for this is everywhere. Most notably in the fact that according to Steam's overall sales for 2018 currently published on the end-of-sale page DOS2 is Gold and PoE2 is Bronze. In 2018, note, DOS2 was released Sept 2017. So DOS2 is still outselling Deadfire by maybe 4:1 even ignoring the millions it sold in the first months following release last year. It also has a rock solid 94% review rating.

 

And DOS2 is a genuinely terrifying game, certainly on Tactician. It's not hard to join the dots.

[mant2si]

I liked PoE I rest/cast/recovery/armor system, I didn't get why obsidian change ALL of them, they spent so much time on balancing game engine and ... then develop new one. They also didn't give good tools for mod developers for PoE I, but I dream maybe somewhere they make PoE I engine opensource :D
 
I liked resource management aspect, when you need diced what and where you want to use you abilities, but you can use all of them at once or dived them for multiple fight
I liked PoE I bosses with 130 Deflection, In fact to make PoE II bosses stronger, they only need rise their deflection and lower health
I liked PoE I stun/paralyze/confuse cc's
I liked PoE I barbarian carnage
I liked PoE I priest buffs
....

[Loren Tyr]

 

And DOS2 is a genuinely terrifying game, certainly on Tactician. It's not hard to join the dots.

 

 

No, not hard at all. Confirmation bias rarely is, though. 

[Gregorovitch]

Per encounter spells are much easier to balance

With repect that is factually incorrect. Within the PoE ruleset per encounter spells are next to impossible to balance becasue:

 

a) you have to be absolutely sure exactly at what level the player will arrive at the encounter

b) and even if you can do that you have a very narrow space between "impossibly difficult" and "easy" to work with.

 

You may say that DOS2 has a per encounter cooldown based system and it works very well. True and true, but the DOS ruleset is very different:

 

a) You have a very steep level power curve which automatically herds players into specific small sets of encounteres balanced for their exact current level

 

b) Attack damage output relative to HP pools is extremely high compared to PoE and almost all attacks are 95% To Hit. This means that one mistake by the player can have serious if not catastrophic consequences, the merciless AI was coded specifically to exploit player mistakes ruthlessly. The upshot is that the outcome of encounteres can swing wildly according depending on how well the player plays. Thus the margin between "imposaible" and "easy" is actually pretty wide.

 

c) DOS has a huge smorgasbord of "cheese" options available to the player. Dirty, sneaky tricks bascially. This enabled Larian to push the on paper difficulty of encounters far beyond what would be possible at all in a straight fight. Thus, on Tactician at any rate, the player had perforce to employ "cheesy" tactics, and be pretty damn creative about it too, or for them the game would be over. Again this opens up the margin between "impossible" and "easy". Essentially by removing "easy" and replacing it with various grades of "impossible" where nothing is actually impossible even if it feels like it.

 

The PoE ruleset has none of this, it wasn't designed for per encounter casting, and Deadfire's open world precludes a) by definition.

[Sergeant Arch Dornan]

And DOS2 is a genuinely terrifying game, certainly on Tactician. It's not hard to join the dots.

 

Nah, even on Tactician game became too easy from middle of second act (thx to ridiculous stat scaling and OP source spells). Maybe, it will be fixed in Definitive Edition.

[ThacoBell]

 

 

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per encounter system simply don't understand and therefore do not accept that it has destroyed the challenge, interest and difficulty of the game, the very soul of it really.

 

The only hope really is that Obsidian realise this from the sales figures.

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per rest system simply don't understand that those mechanics are not remotely difficult and are only tedious. Challenge can come from ANY system, you just need to figure out what you want the focus of the combat to be.

 

Seriously, this game IS challenging. I've wiped several times on normal difficulty. Everybody wants it to be "difficult" but no one can define what that even means. I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase can/are willing to beat PotD. I'd call that a more than reasonable challenge.

 

 

The game is not remotely as challenging as either PoE1 or DOS2. It's about as challenging as Tyranny (apart from the one battle at the end of the prologue). Far more importasntly it doesn't feel challenging either. It has no drama, no terror. Once you've figured out how to fight your party, you just rinse and repeat for success every time. That's why streamers are dropping LPs of it. No drama, no views.

 

People are not looking for difficulty per se. What they are looking for are thrills, chills and spills. They want to be terrified. But they will see through illusory versions. You have to have real difficulty, real chance of failure to make it work, You can read the long verison of this in a post I made about this on my favourite Steam group, eXplorminate (a 4X group promarily) if you are interested.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/explorminate/discussions/0/1729828401663390942/

 

The evidence for this is everywhere. Most notably in the fact that according to Steam's overall sales for 2018 currently published on the end-of-sale page DOS2 is Gold and PoE2 is Bronze. In 2018, note, DOS2 was released Sept 2017. So DOS2 is still outselling Deadfire by maybe 4:1 even ignoring the millions it sold in the first months following release last year. It also has a rock solid 94% review rating.

 

And DOS2 is a genuinely terrifying game, certainly on Tactician. It's not hard to join the dots.

 

Are you sure? I think the dozen of threads complaining about "difficulty" would disagree with you. Also, what data says Deadfire isn't selling well? It was top of the charts for awhile at launch, and its still selling well.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

I prefer Deadfire's consistency, particularly for martial classes. Something that bothers me about PoE are the per rest abilities like Finishing Blow or Clear Out, which are inferior to the rest of the classes abilities in terms of availability and inferior to the per rest spells in terms of power. I also remeber the cluster**** that was per emcounter spells before Spell Mastery got introduced and I see Deadfire's casting system as an attempt to avoid either of those patchwork solutions, which I personally enjoy more.

[Celan]

I prefer Deadfire's, simply because the system in PoE 1 not only makes the "big three" overpowered but just dominates the game in a very unhealthy way. Tactics begin with "how many of those classes' spells are you willing to blow in this encounter?". The other classes' daily abilities are honestly often pathetic. Yay, I can stab someone twice per day to weaken them. Or I can have a druid do that to the whole enemy group.

 

That being said, I agree that Deadfire's system is this weird in-between thing when it comes to the casting classes. It hasn't been changed much, just scaled down to per-encounter spells. I do think they should have altered it further and maybe even gone whole-hog and dropped this whole pseudo-Vancian casting. Or at least made it a bit more dynamic.

It's not just the per-rest vs. per-encounter that bothers me, but the restrictions on leveling up. I liked having a large toolkit open up every couple levels. It gave me a variety of spells from which to choose for various situations. Now I'm restricted to a few, and since the druid class is weakened as a whole, I'm almost obligated to pick just a couple all-around useful ones. It feels a lot more restrictive.

 

I personally preferred the POE1 system, that being said i don't think one system is better than the other, it's a matter of preference really :

 

Some people want to be able to use their high level spells or ability often. It makes no sense to them to gain those abilities and then rarely be able to use them. This lead to them having to rest often in POE1, which was tedious. POE2 per encounter system also makes the whole balancing act much easier because developers roughly know how many resources the player has for any given encounter.

But does it make sense to gain those abilities and not be able to use them during a fight because you ran out of casts?

[Gregorovitch]

 

 

 

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per encounter system simply don't understand and therefore do not accept that it has destroyed the challenge, interest and difficulty of the game, the very soul of it really.

 

The only hope really is that Obsidian realise this from the sales figures.

This poll is so depressing. Indicates the community is split right down the middle on the matter. And there is very little hope of solving this becasue those who support per rest system simply don't understand that those mechanics are not remotely difficult and are only tedious. Challenge can come from ANY system, you just need to figure out what you want the focus of the combat to be.

 

Seriously, this game IS challenging. I've wiped several times on normal difficulty. Everybody wants it to be "difficult" but no one can define what that even means. I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase can/are willing to beat PotD. I'd call that a more than reasonable challenge.

 

 

The game is not remotely as challenging as either PoE1 or DOS2. It's about as challenging as Tyranny (apart from the one battle at the end of the prologue). Far more importasntly it doesn't feel challenging either. It has no drama, no terror. Once you've figured out how to fight your party, you just rinse and repeat for success every time. That's why streamers are dropping LPs of it. No drama, no views.

 

People are not looking for difficulty per se. What they are looking for are thrills, chills and spills. They want to be terrified. But they will see through illusory versions. You have to have real difficulty, real chance of failure to make it work, You can read the long verison of this in a post I made about this on my favourite Steam group, eXplorminate (a 4X group promarily) if you are interested.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/explorminate/discussions/0/1729828401663390942/

 

The evidence for this is everywhere. Most notably in the fact that according to Steam's overall sales for 2018 currently published on the end-of-sale page DOS2 is Gold and PoE2 is Bronze. In 2018, note, DOS2 was released Sept 2017. So DOS2 is still outselling Deadfire by maybe 4:1 even ignoring the millions it sold in the first months following release last year. It also has a rock solid 94% review rating.

 

And DOS2 is a genuinely terrifying game, certainly on Tactician. It's not hard to join the dots.

 

Are you sure? I think the dozen of threads complaining about "difficulty" would disagree with you. Also, what data says Deadfire isn't selling well? It was top of the charts for awhile at launch, and its still selling well.

 

 

Nay, I don't pretend to be sure, which is why I call this a hypothesis in my eXplorminate post. As far as I can see at this time it fits the evdience and has little evdience to invalidate it. The central evidence is (generally speaking amongst all games) there is a general trend that sales are directly proportional to the number of threads whining about difficulty and inversely proportional to threads whining about the game being too easy/no challenge. Anotrher key indicator is the number of snarky "Git Gud" posts, the more of them meaning the higher sales.

 

This observation would seem to directly contradict another piece of evidence that is clearly true of both cRPG and 4X/grand strategy that only a very small % of players play at or even near max difficulty. The same effect is seen in 4X and strategy games, for example extremely complex games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings selling more than 2m each and continuously making ground against the 1000lb gorilla of the genre, Civilization.

 

There is a contradiction here in that the conventional wisdom that the overwhelming majority of players don't care about the issues a small bunch of stroppy vociferous opinionated veteren PotD players have appears on the evidence to be flawed, it doesn't fit the facts. My hypothesis offers what I think is a reasonable explanation for why.

 

On sales data, the evidence is incontravetable that DOS2 has sold overwhelmingly better than Deadfire, it still has three or four times as many concurrent players on Steam etc 9 months post release. DOS1 also sold better than PoE1, but not by that much, they were in the same ballpark (1m-2m range each).

[Loren Tyr]

Nay, I don't pretend to be sure, which is why I call this a hypothesis in my eXplorminate post. As far as I can see at this time it fits the evdience and has little evdience to invalidate it. The central evidence is (generally speaking amongst all games) there is a general trend that sales are directly proportional to the number of threads whining about difficulty and inversely proportional to threads whining about the game being too easy/no challenge. Anotrher key indicator is the number of snarky "Git Gud" posts, the more of them meaning the higher sales.

 

This observation would seem to directly contradict another piece of evidence that is clearly true of both cRPG and 4X/grand strategy that only a very small % of players play at or even near max difficulty. The same effect is seen in 4X and strategy games, for example extremely complex games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings selling more than 2m each and continuously making ground against the 1000lb gorilla of the genre, Civilization.

 

There is a contradiction here in that the conventional wisdom that the overwhelming majority of players don't care about the issues a small bunch of stroppy vociferous opinionated veteren PotD players have appears on the evidence to be flawed, it doesn't fit the facts. My hypothesis offers what I think is a reasonable explanation for why.

 

On sales data, the evidence is incontravetable that DOS2 has sold overwhelmingly better than Deadfire, it still has three or four times as many concurrent players on Steam etc 9 months post release. DOS1 also sold better than PoE1, but not by that much, they were in the same ballpark (1m-2m range each).

 

 

And I suppose you have actual, verifiable data on this? Of systematically processed forum threads on game-specific forums, quantifying the relative degree of complaints on games being too easy versus too difficult (as well as assorted relevant confounders that would need to be corrected for, of course)? Or is this 'evidence' really more your subjective, unsystematic impression?

 

And even given such data, how do you get from there being a preponderance of specific (lack of) difficulty complaints, to the conclusion that people are not buying the game because it is too easy? Even if it  is predictive, that hardly makes it the cause. Certainly, at best it would be the perceived rather than the actual difficulty (since by the time you experience the actual difficulty you've already bought the game), but indeed it also clashes with the common observation that most players don't play at the highest difficulty anyway. Most potential players therefore would have an easy remedy to get the level of difficulty they desire, and having to turn the difficulty knob up a notch seems unlikely to be a prohibitive barrier. Sales figures of games are influenced by any number of factors, many of which don't even relate to the gameplay itself, so the notion that sales of DOS2 vs POE2 can so easily be reduced to a single factor (which so happens to coincide with your particular views and preferences when it comes to games) just doesn't track. You'd need a whole lot more evidence to even remotely make that stick.

 

I would also point out that the observation that most players don't play at or near maximum difficulty contradicts your earlier claim, in this thread and before, that players "want to be terrified", etc. You keep making these kinds of claims without much to back it up, and given the quite likely possibility that lots of different players have lots of different preferences and things they seek in games (as evidenced by the very poll in this thread, as well), any claim to the effect of "(all/most/the majority of) players want X" are almost certainly false for any non-trivial value of X. 

 

Finally, I also do not see how this actually relates to the actual topic of the thread, which relates to the different ability/casting systems in PoE 1 vs PoE 2. Although it can certainly be argued that PoE 2 is not as difficult as PoE 1 (certainly PoE 2 at launch vs PoE 1 in its more polished later iterations, though that would be a rather unfair comparison to make), it doesn't follow that this is because of the system used.

 

The difference in difficulty is only pertinent if this is inherent to the difference in systems, if a PoE 2-like system simply cannot be made more difficult (which again would seem only relevant to players playing at the maximum available difficulty setting, which is a minority). There is no particular reason to believe this is the case, nor have you given any arguments to that effect. In fact you have actually said very little about PoE 1 at all, instead comparing it to an entirely different game in DOS2 for no clearly discernable reason. The closest you come would be your claim that a PoE 2 ruleset is next to impossible to balance. A very ambitious claim but sadly lacking any kind of supporting argument, since the two calims you cite as the cause for this are themselves not supported by anything, nor are they so evidently true that they have no need of further support.

[no1fanboy]

^^^

Man if you are going to rant try and keep it to a minimum.

 

No one is going to read a rant that big

[Loren Tyr]

^^^

Man if you are going to rant try and keep it to a minimum.

 

No one is going to read a rant that big

 

Had you actually read it, you'd have known it wasn't a rant. Though I must commend you at least for being consistent, and keeping your whinging brief. 

[Rheios]

I myself marked POE1, as I'm actually fine with per-rest spells and most mechanics, although I think there's a *really* solid argument for martial classes to have the per-encounter thing stick.

So far as 'why does a spellcaster just forget their spells', I don't think they do. I always envisioned it more as spells were a thing that took time to weave and hang around you and when you finally cast them you were just using the prior set up trigger. It also explains how certain spells could copy or steal them in some games and fits the concept that casters prepare their energy (soul or otherwise) for external use in large impacts/realty modification whereas most martial classes invest their energy into their own forms and become something more than a normal town guard or even skilled swordsman - which is why I do like the empower system for martial too, although I don't feel like I got a chance to utilize it as much for them because I never really find myself running out of resources in POE2 for them at all, nor did I ever feel like the +10 power level impacted them as strongly as casters. It might, I just didn't notice feeling as significant, even when I empowered stuff like Penetrating strike or the Flagarant's path.

So far as why I like spellcasters as per rest? I personally liked the micromanagement. Making a choice between 'blow it all now and fight with a wand on this character or prep for later' and my own risk adverse nature, coupled with limited resting supplies, meant that I was always trying to push as long and far as I could go without resting but also didn't want to waste my resources too early as a result so it was a lot more judgment calls and management. I never felt like my back was against a wall in POE2 in the same way as when my actual health is low, but I have a few more big spells left, and a bonus from the last inn I was in that I want to stick around, so I push on in POE1.  Although I would propose poe2's food buff if you eat it while resting, in place of just inn/survival buffs (or make their effectiveness depend on survival instead), compounded with the limited resting resources (I'd be fine if they knocked it down to 2 or 3) could be nice.

Not that I hated POE2's system, just that it wasn't really an improvement, just different, and wasn't really *that* new or unique as of 4e D&D.

Edited July 10, 2018 by Rheios