Who has finished the game?

[house2fly]

Why should healing always be a good thing?

[thelee]

Why should healing always be a good thing?

 

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 )

 

In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise  your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast.

Edited November 20, 2018 by thelee

[thelee]

 

Why should healing always be a good thing?

 

In the basic system, it should always be a good thing. It doesn't always always have to be a good thing. (example trope is undead being damaged by healing. other examples include effects in various games and CCGs that trigger bad effects if a player tries to heal, e.g. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=107358 )

 

In the basic system, why should healing always be a good thing? Because otherwise  your basic system is broken and leads to unintuitive outcomes. It's almost axiomatic, because in virtually all other non health/endurance systems, gaining more health just meant gaining more health (up to a maximum) and there was nothing more to it and then you layered complexity and interactions on top of it. It's almost like "why should mathematics define real numbers as an ordered field?" I mean I guess you don't have to, but boy does it make everything else messy real fast.

 

 

possible alternative fix to health/endurance in PoE1. same thing, except you can always be healed up to your maximum endurance (instead of capped at your health if lower), and you only permadie if both your endurance and health are 0. (if you have endurance > 0 but your health is 0, you're basically in "last stand" mode. if you end up surviving combat you go back up to 1 health). you still need to do something about knockouts being a "safe" alternative to permadeath... maybe a bleedout? or some enemies will keep attacking a knocked out character with some damage multiplier?

 

it's all moot anyway because I doubt we'll see health/endurance come back in any future PoE, if any.

Edited November 20, 2018 by thelee

[anameforobsidian]

Maybe I'm in an extreme minority, but I completely agreed with and supported the move to the per-encounter system.

• I thought the health/endurance system was creative and interesting, but I think saying that it was merely "confusing to new players" undersells just how unintuitive of a mechanic it is; there's virtually nothing like it out there. It also had really weird edge cases, because sometimes you wanted your character to get knocked out instead of healing them, because otherwise they might run out of health instead of running out of endurance, which is the difference between permadeath and a wound. This is something that I frankly noticed in Backer Beta and I guess everyone else just shrugged this obviously broken edge case away (I think I advocated for some sort of enemy coup-de-grace option). Don't mind me, I'm just deliberately not casting Consecrated Ground so that my wizard won't get gibbed in this fight.

 

 

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance.  Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways.  Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance?  Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe.

 

• This also had the probably unintentional effect that sometimes unwinnable fights against enemies could actually become winnable because the health/endurance system meant there was a "cap" to how much health the enemy could heal.

 

Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism.  Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches.  Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies.  The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources.  The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong.  That's the whole point of health.

 

• With per-rest you can't balance encounters knowing a set amount of player resources... you go for an average case, but it means that rest-spam can completely trivialize it. And objectively, many players were just hauling back and forth to stock up on rest supplies to do almost precisely this (and then complaining about having to do this), because if you told the average player that they could make battles easier by just blowing their entire spell wad in one go and then just resting up for the next fight, that's what they would do. I must've been like the 1% of players who actually treated rest supplies as a strategic constraint and not a tedious "time to go back to town" countdown.

 

That's not quite true.  With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources.  PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too.  That's what made them feel like bosses.  In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight.  Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again.  And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy.

 

Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics.  With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam.

Edited November 20, 2018 by anameforobsidian

[thelee]

 

Maybe I'm in an extreme minority, but I completely agreed with and supported the move to the per-encounter system.

• I thought the health/endurance system was creative and interesting, but I think saying that it was merely "confusing to new players" undersells just how unintuitive of a mechanic it is; there's virtually nothing like it out there. It also had really weird edge cases, because sometimes you wanted your character to get knocked out instead of healing them, because otherwise they might run out of health instead of running out of endurance, which is the difference between permadeath and a wound. This is something that I frankly noticed in Backer Beta and I guess everyone else just shrugged this obviously broken edge case away (I think I advocated for some sort of enemy coup-de-grace option). Don't mind me, I'm just deliberately not casting Consecrated Ground so that my wizard won't get gibbed in this fight.

 

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance.  Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways.  Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance?  Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe.

 

Wounds added a malus, but you could still play through them. They weren't designed to be super crippling. And the edge cases are *not* "you're in an easy fight after having just rested" but "you've been in a couple fights and now these edge cases are occuring." And yes, for e.g. wizards, it's in fact very very easy to keep healing and blow through x4 endurance. Even with monks and fighters you can (especially with fighters because they can be taking a lot of "invisible" damage e.g. plinking damage that gets healed by constant recovery so your endurance isn't changing much but you're losing health fight over fight).

 

 

• This also had the probably unintentional effect that sometimes unwinnable fights against enemies could actually become winnable because the health/endurance system meant there was a "cap" to how much health the enemy could heal.

 

 

Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism.  Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches.  Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies.  The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources.  The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong.  That's the whole point of health.

 

It is a fair, and it is literally believable because it happens. It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is.

 

Similarly, if you have strong regen and are tanking real hard (easily possible with a slightly metagamed build) health/endurance means you can still end up losing the fight even if in the long run you could've won.

 

 

 

• With per-rest you can't balance encounters knowing a set amount of player resources... you go for an average case, but it means that rest-spam can completely trivialize it. And objectively, many players were just hauling back and forth to stock up on rest supplies to do almost precisely this (and then complaining about having to do this), because if you told the average player that they could make battles easier by just blowing their entire spell wad in one go and then just resting up for the next fight, that's what they would do. I must've been like the 1% of players who actually treated rest supplies as a strategic constraint and not a tedious "time to go back to town" countdown.

 

 

That's not quite true.  With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources.  PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too.  That's what made them feel like bosses.  In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight.  Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again.  And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy.

 

Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics.  With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam.

 

It's not bad form. It's called hyperbole. (The 1% number that is. I would've hoped it would have been painfully obvious that I was using a small number for exaggerated effect.) But objectively, JE Sawyer and co had plenty of feedback about people running back all the time to get more rest supplies and anecdotally the internet/forums were filled with these sort of complaints that it seems completely credible that JE Sawyer and co  would think that this was a problem and that relatively few players saw this as a "fun" strategic constraint rather than an encounter-countdown-tedium that they had to fix somehow. There is literally some comment somewhere on the internet, either in the forums, a backer update, or an update video, or his own blog where JE Sawyer cites this as part of the reason to change the system in Deadfire.

 

Also per-rest doesn't change anything about ability variance. E.G. IWD2, I knew several friends who converged on the same "web, then fireball" strategy. Per-rest simply meant that they had to click a rest button every now and then to keep doing it.

 

edit: more specifically, the per-encounter resources numerically are set so that in effect it approximates a partial use of per-rest resources. It doesn't let you spam x3 or x4 top-level spells like you could in PoE1, but it also means that fundamentally there's not much of a distinction between per-rest and per-encounter in terms of whether or not you vary what abilities you use. What does narrow down variability is the ability tree system where priests and druids now have to make explicit spell selections instead of getting a lot of spells for free per spell level and wizards having a very different grimoire mechanic. I would in fact argue in some cases per-encounter system in Deadfire enables much greater variability where martial classes are concerned (e.g. in one fight pallegina can be a lay on hands heal monkey, in another she could mix it up with lots of sworn enemy and flames of devotion, in another she's just reviving and liberating everyone whereas in PoE1 you'd have a hard per-encounter limit on all of those abilities, or possibly even a per-rest limit).

Edited November 20, 2018 by thelee

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

 

 

A better solution is actually from Tyranny. There they don't have health/endurance, but they have wounds. Unlike in Deadfire, you need 10 wounds before they are fatal, but also unlike in Deadfire you also get wounds for being brought down to low health (in addition to lots of wounds from knockout). This performed a similar function as providing a resource constraint over many fights despite being healed to full each time (because while I've done no-knockout challenges in PoE1, it's extremely hard to avoid getting bloodied in Tyranny to avoid those wounds) without the weird edge cases that health/endurance introduces.

 

I believe this feature was removed from Tyranny and now only knockouts cause wounds. Given that wounds also decreased stats, that was rational change, because otherwise it could send a player who was winning, but not winning by large enough margin, on downwards spiral towards the bitter end.

 

Nope. I loaded up Tyranny again a few days ago and you still get wounds just from being dropped to low health. (Might be limited to PotD-only though.) Wounds used to decrease stats a lot at first, but in more recent versions are a little bit less painful.

 

 

You are right, wounds were retained, but do not decrease stats (other than health).

 

 

 

Anyway, it has the same problem (well, edge case): at some point you might want to stop healing and have a character knocked out, because it would survive wounds from knockout now, but not another wound and wounds from knockout later.

 

Perverse incentives exist in Deadfire too. For example one can sacrifice a companion to pull enemies to a gunpowder barrel and then blow them and the companion up. Or conversely hide with one companion and sacrifice the rest to kill some enemies by any means, then rest and repeat.

 

So the problem in PoE 1 is rather that death is not permadeath, and it has similarly weird consequences in Deadfire even though it abandoned heatlh/endurance system.

Actually I'm not sure that's right. Whether or not you damage your own characters, they still have to get through low health, which triggers wounds, and once they do so I don't think they can trigger more wounds by healing up and then falling back down (I could be wrong and if so, this is also a bad mark on Tyranny's approach).

 

 

I checked it a while ago and they do not appear to be able to get more than one wound, though I have hunch it was somehow possible.

 

Similarly, decoys are not unintuitive, nor is it a perverse incentive. In fact, in many games, it is a great strategy to lure enemies into dangerous situations with a decoy. People do this IRL in wars and stuff.

 

Decoys are not, that they are no cost is. For example, one would intuitively expect that using Eder as decoy would be more costly than using sparkcrackers.

 

Anyway to reiterate - the fundamental brokenness is the fact that in your basic system (before adding the complexities of one-off effects), healing should always be a good thing, instead of potentially extremely lethal. And not to mention that no one has touched on the fact that health/endurance could lead you to win unwinnable fights or lose unlosable fights because the health effectively meant that healing was capped (because bizarrely aside from Infuse with Vital Essence, all healing only affected endurance.)

 

Well, to not win or not lose are pretty unsatisfying outcomes.

Edited November 20, 2018 by Psychovampiric Shield

[thelee]

 

 

Anyway to reiterate - the fundamental brokenness is the fact that in your basic system (before adding the complexities of one-off effects), healing should always be a good thing, instead of potentially extremely lethal. And not to mention that no one has touched on the fact that health/endurance could lead you to win unwinnable fights or lose unlosable fights because the health effectively meant that healing was capped (because bizarrely aside from Infuse with Vital Essence, all healing only affected endurance.)

 

Well, to not win or not lose are pretty unsatisfying outcomes.

 

 

I elaborated more on what I meant in a follow-up post:

 

 

 

It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is.

 

Basically what I'm saying is that it's purely an artifact of the health/endurance system that you can take on fights that really should be or would be impossible in a "saner" encounter-based system (where encounter-based means enemies are grouped into encounters, which is more the norm these days instead of 90s-era CRPGs of just going from enemy to enemy and being able to cast any spell whenever). This to me illustrates how much of a hack health was for providing a multi-fight resource constraint, because it was completely irrelevant for enemies except in cases where it let you do things you really shouldn't have been able to (or the rare case that happened to me where I had tons of healing but just couldn't kill the enemy fast enough so I ran out of health).

[thelee]

I guess my big question to health/endurance defenders is: what does health/endurance get you that you can't accomplish some other way?

 

To me, it's an overly complicated and unnecessary hack that leads to unintuitive outcomes. You can accomplish the same thing with other mechanisms, and I cited Tyranny as an example of accumulating wounds even when just injured (whereas Deadfire theoretically you can have zero multi-encounter constraints if you never get knocked out, which isn't that hard especially on lower difficulties). You could even do more creative things than that. (it's worth highlighting that health/endurance was even more confusing early in backer beta where isntead of health being a multiplier of endurance, your health = endurance but there was a damage coefficient that reduced weapon damage as it affected your health but affected your endurance at full strength. boy, even though mathematically it was the same as the eventual final system and even though intellectually i understood it, in practice it was a confusing mess in pre-release early PoE1).

 

It just seems like some people are rationalizing health/endurance but not really demonstrating why it's so great compared to actual real alternatives. It smacks to me of a little bit of status quo bias, or preferring it simply because "that's the way PoE1 did it."

[house2fly]

It's not unintuitive to let a party member go down because you may need them more in the next fight than this one, it's just a trade-off

[thelee]

It's not unintuitive to let a party member go down because you may need them more in the next fight than this one, it's just a trade-off

 

That's not the scenario though, the scenario is letting a party member go down because if you heal them instead they die.

Edited November 21, 2018 by thelee

[house2fly]

Yeah, if their health runs out. Presumably you're healing them because the fight is more winnable with them in it, so if you heal them hopefully their health won't drop to 0 and you can win the fight and rest after. If a party member's health is as low as their endurance in a fight you're not far from resting anyway

[thelee]

Yeah, if their health runs out. Presumably you're healing them because the fight is more winnable with them in it, so if you heal them hopefully their health won't drop to 0 and you can win the fight and rest after. If a party member's health is as low as their endurance in a fight you're not far from resting anyway

 

This is what I'm talking about. This is a rationalization that dodges the issue. In the basics of any system, a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before. (We're not even talking about interactions with other effects or abilities, just simply a heal when you're at low endurance and low health). It is easy to run into situations with the way health/endurance was handled in PoE1 where healing will actually put you in a worse situation. Your response glosses over this.

 

I mean, I feel like this is a trivial statement, but it's really because "a heal should put you into a better situation than you were in before" was so axiomatic in virtually any other RPG system that it feels really headache-y to explicitly have to say this, and it really is a mark on health/endurance that it needs to be made explicitly clear.

 

edit: it's not even a matter of being "not far from resting anyway." with a lot of druid or priest heals and several squishies (including said druid or priest) e.g. a wizard or anyone else with a low health multiplier, all it takes is a few enemy aoes that you heal back from and suddenly you've drained through a huge amount of your health. if you roll a spellblade-y type (wizard with summoning weapons and buffs) it's not uncommon to get to lower health much faster than everyone else in your party.

Edited November 21, 2018 by thelee

[Franknstein]

Wow. Wasn' that the "Who has finished the game" thread? =)

 

I didn't like the health from PoEI. Was tedious to keep track of camping supplies, and weird that with all the survival expertise one couldn't rest without them.

 

And I did finish the game! =)

Took me only 422 hours and a few cool gifs from Boeroer to stop me from restarting. Still hope for that build of his monk. Endgame made me to kinda start to respect Eothas. He's badass.

[InsaneCommander]

Endgame made me to kinda start to respect Eothas. He's badass.

 

He is.

 

Endgame spoiler:

 

 

I still can't believe all the other gods couldn't stop him. You let them know what he is gonna do and they just stay there bickering.

 

Ok, they obviously have some limitations, but couldn't they do more? In the end it was too easy for Eothas.

 

I imagine Galawain was the one who sent the krakens. Since that didn't work, Hylea should've sent the birds to s*** the floor in front of Eothas. Maybe he would've slipped.

 

 

 

Don't look at me like that, I'm talking about finishing the game. Staying on topic, right?

[thelee]

 

Endgame made me to kinda start to respect Eothas. He's badass.

 

He is.

 

Endgame spoiler:

 

 

I still can't believe all the other gods couldn't stop him. You let them know what he is gonna do and they just stay there bickering.

 

Ok, they obviously have some limitations, but couldn't they do more? In the end it was too easy for Eothas.

 

I imagine Galawain was the one who sent the krakens. Since that didn't work, Hylea should've sent the birds to s*** the floor in front of Eothas. Maybe he would've slipped.

 

 

 

Don't look at me like that, I'm talking about finishing the game. Staying on topic, right?

 

 

isn't this more a complement to the engwithan? eothas tried before, and got annihilated (as waidwen). he inhabits the adra statue made by a crazed engwithan king,

and makes it, even with magran pummeling him with volcano explosions and ondra tidal waving him.

 

 

those engwiths really knew how to make things.

[InsaneCommander]

isn't this more a complement to the engwithan? eothas tried before, and got annihilated (as waidwen). he inhabits the adra statue made by a crazed engwithan king,

and makes it, even with magran pummeling him with volcano explosions and ondra tidal waving him.

 

 

those engwiths really knew how to make things.

 

They certainly pay attention to fire and crush AR when designing their builds.

[anameforobsidian]

 

 

Maybe I'm in an extreme minority, but I completely agreed with and supported the move to the per-encounter system.

• I thought the health/endurance system was creative and interesting, but I think saying that it was merely "confusing to new players" undersells just how unintuitive of a mechanic it is; there's virtually nothing like it out there. It also had really weird edge cases, because sometimes you wanted your character to get knocked out instead of healing them, because otherwise they might run out of health instead of running out of endurance, which is the difference between permadeath and a wound. This is something that I frankly noticed in Backer Beta and I guess everyone else just shrugged this obviously broken edge case away (I think I advocated for some sort of enemy coup-de-grace option). Don't mind me, I'm just deliberately not casting Consecrated Ground so that my wizard won't get gibbed in this fight.

 

I don't think that edge case was really valid once they added wounds, or at least narrowed to insignificance.  Wounds added such a strong malus that if you have one of the nastier ones, let alone two, it drastically lowered the combat effectiveness of a character to the point where rest was better anyways.  Furthermore, healing just wasn't that effective to keep a wizard going through an extended beatdown session lasting four tiems their endurance?  Furthermore, it wasn't too common for you to start loosing party members and not have a tpk / wipe.

 

Wounds added a malus, but you could still play through them. They weren't designed to be super crippling. And the edge cases are *not* "you're in an easy fight after having just rested" but "you've been in a couple fights and now these edge cases are occuring." And yes, for e.g. wizards, it's in fact very very easy to keep healing and blow through x4 endurance. Even with monks and fighters you can (especially with fighters because they can be taking a lot of "invisible" damage e.g. plinking damage that gets healed by constant recovery so your endurance isn't changing much but you're losing health fight over fight).

 

 

• This also had the probably unintentional effect that sometimes unwinnable fights against enemies could actually become winnable because the health/endurance system meant there was a "cap" to how much health the enemy could heal.

 

 

Again, this just isn't a fair or believable criticism.  Pillars rarely had tank and spank endurance grudge matches.  Those fights were not about outlasting the enemies, because realistically, you couldn't raise your defenses high enough to be immune to the enemies.  The enemies themselves could heal through your damage if you got to the point where it was a grudge match, and then kill you after you burn out your resources.  The system favors an offensively built party that uses alpha strikes and cascading defense failures to kill enemies, by the time health is an issue, you've already done something wrong.  That's the whole point of health.

 

It is a fair, and it is literally believable because it happens. It won't happen in "normal" gameplay, but it enables or disables solo encounters (and considering that PoE1 had like four separate achievements for beating the game solo, cheevo hunters would run into this in a way that you couldn't in e.g. Deadfire). It also enables cheese, because you can just range an enemy, kite, and if they disengage, range them again, etc. until even the toughest enemy keels over dead because they regenned through all their health. This is an artifact of the health/endurance system. In "saner" systems like Tyranny, Deadfire, Dragon Age, etc. where enemies are tied to a specific encounter, if you can't outdamage an enemy's heal potential or are just taking potshots and running away, the encounter is fundamentally unbeatable. IN fact, health is mostly just a hack for the player to feel some sort of multi-encounter resource constraint, because it's mostly irrelevant for enemies and the fact that it's mostly irrelevant for enemies except in these weird interactions where it enables you to do things that you really shouldn't demonstrates how much of a hack it is.

 

Similarly, if you have strong regen and are tanking real hard (easily possible with a slightly metagamed build) health/endurance means you can still end up losing the fight even if in the long run you could've won.

 

 

 

• With per-rest you can't balance encounters knowing a set amount of player resources... you go for an average case, but it means that rest-spam can completely trivialize it. And objectively, many players were just hauling back and forth to stock up on rest supplies to do almost precisely this (and then complaining about having to do this), because if you told the average player that they could make battles easier by just blowing their entire spell wad in one go and then just resting up for the next fight, that's what they would do. I must've been like the 1% of players who actually treated rest supplies as a strategic constraint and not a tedious "time to go back to town" countdown.

 

 

That's not quite true.  With per rest, you can't balance all encounters knowing a set amount of player resources.  PotD boss encounters assumed you would drain your abilities and probably crack some scrolls and potions too.  That's what made them feel like bosses.  In Deadfire, there's less variance because parties are using their best spells every single fight.  Circle of death and Wall of Colors over and over and over again.  And the variance is still there, just based on level instead of level and strategy.

 

Finally, it's bad form to make up statistics.  With the exact same amount of proof you have, I can say that 95% of players used rest supplies strategically and only a vocal 5% went back to town to rest spam.

 

It's not bad form. It's called hyperbole. (The 1% number that is. I would've hoped it would have been painfully obvious that I was using a small number for exaggerated effect.) But objectively, JE Sawyer and co had plenty of feedback about people running back all the time to get more rest supplies and anecdotally the internet/forums were filled with these sort of complaints that it seems completely credible that JE Sawyer and co  would think that this was a problem and that relatively few players saw this as a "fun" strategic constraint rather than an encounter-countdown-tedium that they had to fix somehow. There is literally some comment somewhere on the internet, either in the forums, a backer update, or an update video, or his own blog where JE Sawyer cites this as part of the reason to change the system in Deadfire.

 

Also per-rest doesn't change anything about ability variance. E.G. IWD2, I knew several friends who converged on the same "web, then fireball" strategy. Per-rest simply meant that they had to click a rest button every now and then to keep doing it.

 

edit: more specifically, the per-encounter resources numerically are set so that in effect it approximates a partial use of per-rest resources. It doesn't let you spam x3 or x4 top-level spells like you could in PoE1, but it also means that fundamentally there's not much of a distinction between per-rest and per-encounter in terms of whether or not you vary what abilities you use. What does narrow down variability is the ability tree system where priests and druids now have to make explicit spell selections instead of getting a lot of spells for free per spell level and wizards having a very different grimoire mechanic. I would in fact argue in some cases per-encounter system in Deadfire enables much greater variability where martial classes are concerned (e.g. in one fight pallegina can be a lay on hands heal monkey, in another she could mix it up with lots of sworn enemy and flames of devotion, in another she's just reviving and liberating everyone whereas in PoE1 you'd have a hard per-encounter limit on all of those abilities, or possibly even a per-rest limit).

 

 

• The malus on wounds is huge with the right one.  If you get burned in a place with a lot of fire damage that's bad, but wrenched shoulder and swollen eye particularly lowered the effectiveness of characters.  Barbarians especially struggle for every point of accuracy in Potd.
• And if you've been in a series of fights and the health is making you play differently, that's working as designed.  The great part about the health system is when you have some party members half-way down; it creates a risk / reward decision, and a lot of times you have to dip into different skills.  This can create a battered but not broken feeling which just isn't present in Pillars 2, except for the Trial of Endurance.
• If your wizard is taking a bunch of damage you're not handling the encounter or the build well, and health communicates that.  The communication is far less granular with the dead not dead binary.
• Kiting through health on the type of enemies you have is unbelievable.  I did plenty of kiting and cheese on my TCS run, and it would have taken a long, long time to cut through health.  It took a long time to do it without letting the enemies regenerate endurance.  You have to cut through a significant multiple of what it takes in the first place, and those fights are already long.  So I guess if you're willing to stretch the system out into hour long trash mob fights and longer on bosses that can one shot you if you do a bad kite, then yes the health system becomes apparent.  Otherwise it's just invisible in enemies.  And that's fine; this was never supposed to be a very simulationist game. A bit helps, but eventually the focus needs to be on fun.
• If you have strong regen and are tanking really hard, you're building a pretty ****ty character.  The system is designed for alpha strikes, cascading status effect defense failures, and focus fire.  If health causes you to lose a fight, you're playing the game poorly and health is communicating that as designed.  Either you're hoarding rest and abilities too much, or just using bad tactics.
• JE Sawyer had lots of feedback, including plenty that said health worked just fine.  It was and remains contentious.  He chose to side with criticism over his instincts.
• Of course per rest fights converge on repetitious strategies when there's unlimited resting; it's functionally the same thing as not including rests at all.
• The problem with the argument that in effect you see the same ability use is that in PE1 you see different ability use, not just Wall of Colors or Circle of Death every fight.  Overall it may come out the same, but there's more variability in each fight. 
• I don't see how less per encounter enhances fight variability for a class that already had per encounter abilities.  Paladins had enough per encounter abilities that the real limit on their behavior was time constraints and disengagement.

[bringingyouthefuture]

I'm a rest hoarder ... I never rest ... wait are we talking about a video game or real life?

[Triple - A Foxy Lad]

 

isn't this more a complement to the engwithan? eothas tried before, and got annihilated (as waidwen). he inhabits the adra statue made by a crazed engwithan king,

and makes it, even with magran pummeling him with volcano explosions and ondra tidal waving him.

 

 

those engwiths really knew how to make things.

 

 

ooh, i didnt think about that. this not only compliment regarding engwith, but eothas too. he clever boy who grasps an opportunity when he finds it. using that big statue shows initiative.

 

god of redemption may be the god of collateral damage but hes got some nous.

[juanval]

After playing 80 hours (reading interesting lore in books and items too), I stopped playing my campaing in July in order to wait for the 3 DLC, but this week I've resumed the game and now I'm at 100 hours and I love this game. Today I've started the first DLC and the beginning is great. I hope devs add more areas/quest content in the future. I don't care if I don't finish the campaign soon. After finishing the Beast of Winter DLC, I'll stop playing and wait for the last DLC, megabosses and 4.0 version.

 

PoE2 is a real gem.

Edited November 28, 2018 by juanval

[Franknstein]

Come to think of it, there is no prominent antagonist in the game. No Big Bad Guy. No one is evil for the sake of being evil. The slavers and fapyrs get kicked in the head 'till they are totally dead in my playthroughs, but I guess they have their understandable motives too... No one is really nice, but I could sympathize with all the major factions. And the god of collateral damage. That should be one of his titles.

 

And I think that's great!

[thelee]

Come to think of it, there is no prominent antagonist in the game. No Big Bad Guy. No one is evil for the sake of being evil. The slavers and fapyrs get kicked in the head 'till they are totally dead in my playthroughs, but I guess they have their understandable motives too... No one is really nice, but I could sympathize with all the major factions. And the god of collateral damage. That should be one of his titles.

 

And I think that's great!

 

I think an interesting thing about the slavers in this game is that there is a legal regime for slavery; iiuc outside of the Deadfire slavery is legal, and so the legal loophole that slavers and some factions in the Deadfire use is to only trade in slaves obtained from outside the Deadfire. and I might be wrong, but it's a little ambiguous whether or not the crookspur-aligned power interest think they are actually breaking this legal regime (Wahaki allege so, but aspects of both VTC and Principi think they the slavers are being legal or at least parts of the VTC/Principi are very willing to believe that their wares are procured legally). Meanwhile in games like Fallout 2/3/NV, slavery is illegal or at least nonlegal (e.g. evil anarchists oppressing people because no one can stop them).

 

It might make one want to more carefully press the point to involved parties that something that is legal is not necessary the same thing as that thing being ethical.

Edited November 28, 2018 by thelee

[Franknstein]

 

Come to think of it, there is no prominent antagonist in the game. No Big Bad Guy. No one is evil for the sake of being evil. The slavers and fapyrs get kicked in the head 'till they are totally dead in my playthroughs, but I guess they have their understandable motives too... No one is really nice, but I could sympathize with all the major factions. And the god of collateral damage. That should be one of his titles.

 

And I think that's great!

 

I think an interesting thing about the slavers in this game is that there is a legal regime for slavery; iiuc outside of the Deadfire slavery is legal, and so the legal loophole that slavers and some factions in the Deadfire use is to only trade in slaves obtained from outside the Deadfire. and I might be wrong, but it's a little ambiguous whether or not the crookspur-aligned power interest think they are actually breaking this legal regime (Wahaki allege so, but aspects of both VTC and Principi think they the slavers are being legal or at least parts of the VTC/Principi are very willing to believe that their wares are procured legally). Meanwhile in games like Fallout 2/3/NV, slavery is illegal or at least nonlegal (e.g. evil anarchists oppressing people because no one can stop them).

 

It might make one want to more carefully press the point to involved parties that something that is legal is not necessary the same thing as that thing being ethical.

 

 

Now that's heavyweight.

Than, there is the idea that free trade brings peace. And progress. And those basterds are kinda just trading totally legal assets.

Edited November 29, 2018 by Franknstein

[Manveru123]

Come to think of it, there is no prominent antagonist in the game. No Big Bad Guy. No one is evil for the sake of being evil. The slavers and fapyrs get kicked in the head 'till they are totally dead in my playthroughs, but I guess they have their understandable motives too... No one is really nice, but I could sympathize with all the major factions. And the god of collateral damage. That should be one of his titles.

 

And I think that's great!

There is literally no antagonist in this game. That's horrible from an RPG perspective. The presence of Thaos was one of the reasons why Pillars 1 had a much better story. I can't image BG2 without Irenicus. And the list goes on. Every protagonist needs an antagonist.

[xzar_monty]

An antagonist is not necessary. Ultima IV, for instance, did brilliantly well without any kind of antagonist, and its approach remains very commendable, although the game of course is outdated as heck.

 

An antagonist tends to lead to a simple and direct narrative. It can work extremely well, of course, and sometimes does, but it's not subtle in the least. Personally, I think there are narrative problems in Deadfire, but the lack of an antagonist is not one of them. I also think it's a very good game.

Edited November 29, 2018 by xzar_monty