Might is botched the same way as in PoE1

[MountainTiger]

POE's stat system is explicitly designed to contribute to within class build specialization, which it seems mostly successful at. The fluff around Might in particular is a bit weird, given the coexistence of "Might is not Strength" and "Might checks are always Strength checks", but it's beyond strange to me that this is still a major area of contention years after the first game was released.

[thelee]

You're just too blinded by your love of Deadfire that you will try to curve any argument to come back "Deadfire does it best".

 

I remember reading a review of PoE 1 and in one of the first paragraphs, the reviewer says that he had to re-roll again bc he didn't realize Might affected spell damage instead of Int. Yes, he's just one reviewer, but that's the point I'm trying to make. It's not intuitive. And you clearly disagree, but to act like Deadfire has a brilliant stat system is just ludicrous.

 

i do like deadfire a lot, but it comes from the fact that i believe its stat system is very well-designed. it's not that i like deadfire first and then therefore think its stat system is great. you don't know me and how i evaluate games, there are plenty of games that are "fun" or that are GOTY winners that i think are medicore because when it comes to RPGs I start very systematically bottoms up, and occasionally it bothers me way too much when a game can be narratively very fun but its core mechanics so ridiculously broken (FF6, FF7, FF8, heck most of the FFs).

 

i just thought it was hilariously self-unaware (hence lololol) to think that the most intuitive system is a game that literally did things that are uncommon in RPGs, while arguing that deadfire's system is bad and unintuitive for doing things that are uncommon in RPGs. it's not a slight on dark souls, I am all for pushing the boundaries of game design and finding clever/new ways to use stats and items together. just again, what i thought was hilariously self-unaware.

 

also I backed out of this thread before, because in this thread you have a weird tendency to go off on the warpath over mis-perceived slights (e.g. page 2 or so w.r.t. xzar_monty).

Edited February 13, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

You're just too blinded by your love of Deadfire that you will try to curve any argument to come back "Deadfire does it best".

 

 

One could say the same about you and D&D.

 

I think thelee and others makes some solid points - and he has a pretty flawless chain of reasoning - while you contradicted your own arguments.

Edited February 13, 2019 by Boeroer

[Verde]

The fact that Dark Souls was so playable being different and vague, shows how intuitive it was. Relying on intuition and experimentation was the only way to progress until you learned the ins and outs.

Edited February 13, 2019 by Verde

[Verde]

 

You're just too blinded by your love of Deadfire that you will try to curve any argument to come back "Deadfire does it best".

 

 

One could say the same about you and D&D.

 

I think thelee and others makes some solid points - and he has a pretty flawless chain of reasoning - while you contradicted your own arguments.

 

 

I don't think DnD is the end all by any means.

 

Can you explain where I contradicted myself?

[thelee]

POE's stat system is explicitly designed to contribute to within class build specialization, which it seems mostly successful at. The fluff around Might in particular is a bit weird, given the coexistence of "Might is not Strength" and "Might checks are always Strength checks", but it's beyond strange to me that this is still a major area of contention years after the first game was released.

 

in terms of naming, they probably didn't do enough to separate from "strength" of D&D yore. Maybe if the stat was called "power" or even just "soul" people wouldn't fall back on old heuristics developed from the days of Baldur's Gate.

[Boeroer]

You say things like that it's unintuitive that MIG determines spell damage and that PoE' stat system is not good because it does things differently from other RPGs like D&D - and at the same time you praise a system as intuitive that lets INT determine weapon damage (in some cases for whatever in-game reason) and does things differently than other RPGs.

 

It sounds as if you are curving your arguments, not the others. Theirs were pretty straight.

Edited February 13, 2019 by Boeroer

[thelee]

shows how intuitive it was. Relying on intuition and experimentation was the only way to progress until you learned the ins and outs.

i feel like this passage indicates that you're using a very different definition of what "intuitive" means.

 

When I see the word "intuitive", it means to me that I don't *have* to experiment or work real hard to learn the ins and outs of a system. It just works as apparently as possible. (in this respect, intuition and experimentation are at odds.)

 

In terms of PoE/Deadfire, I would consider "might" extremely intuitive. Virtually anything that does damage will do more damage with might. Virtually anything that does healing will do more healing with might. (In this respect PoE is better than Deadfire because Deadfire carved out a fairly broad set of exceptions with consumables, a design decision they made in like 2.0 that I continue to dislike.)

 

By contrast, in terms of PoE/Deadfire, I would consider stacking rules extremely unintuitive. Even with some general rules you basically have to manually test everything out to see if things interact in the way you expect them to and you can never be sure if the next item, buff, or debuff follows the rules you've tested before.

Edited February 13, 2019 by thelee

[Verde]

It's intuitive because Int affects any sorcery-related damage and some weapons say, or imply, or even look like they do magic damage. Therefore it's easy to games to infer that a weapon is going to scale with Int, because it does magic damage.

 

Doing it differently is not a good argument, so we can move on from that. But I still stick my intuitive argument.

Edited February 13, 2019 by Verde

[merkmerk73]

 

What?! Genius and best?! Please. It's mediocre and one of the most unintuitive.

 

I'll take JE Sawyer's stat system over most other stat systems I've ever seen in an RPG. It's not perfect, but very few are good enough to have even what little flaws PoE/Deadfire has.

 

 

It's almost like the very fact that one of the main complaints is about...drumroll...strength checks using might...is a huge indicator of the system's success and lack of flaws.

[thelee]

It's intuitive because Int affects any sorcery-related damage and some weapons say, or imply, or even look like they do magic damage. Therefore it's easy to games to infer that a weapon is going to scale with Int, because it does magic damage.

 

Doing it differently is not a good argument, so we can move on from that. But I still stick my intuitive argument.

 

I think I see what you're getting at, and I think this back to a "in the eye of the beholder" situation.

 

If I try to summarize what you're arguing, an analogous situation would be elemental damage types in PoE vs Deadfire. In PoE, the various Scion of Flame, Spirit of Decay talents increased any damage source of the given elemental type. In Deadfire, the damage source has to be explicitly keyworded with corrode, fire, etc. to get +1 PEN.

 

You are arguing that "intuitive" here means the consistent approach of PoE1, where literally any damage source (even if it was a lash) would get boosted if it was the right element (this sounds like the Dark Souls interaciton with int). And you are similarly arguing that Might in PoE/Deadfire is more like the elemental talent approach of Deadfire, where even though it is very explicit and universal in how it works, it defeats the consistent approach because you will do fire damage but not be fire-keyworded and thus not benefit. (Personally I would consider either approach similarly intuitive; they are both pretty consistent but also still both require a "does it really work here?" testing every once and a while *cough* wall of flame *cough*)

 

In that respect, the "eye of beholder" thing comes into play, because I think it matters what gaming context you are coming from. I was less bothered by Deadfire's new spell talent system perhaps because I'm really used to games like M:TG where paying attention like a lawyer to every single keyword is now second nature to me, but I can see how coming from most other RPGs where you expect something to do fire damage to be, well, fire, that that would be extremely unintuitive. Similarly, I'm less attached or fixated on the 1st stat of a 6-stat system being a physical strength stat, so might being a universal damage/healing increase is not really upending my expectations, it's just a new system with new things (and I've spent way too much time playing D3 so i'm used to the oddity of agility boosting how much damage my grenades do). So I find it more intuitive that might has a universal explicit rule rather than that it connects explicitly to how things were done in the past; and even if in the past it was not consistent e.g. throwing weapons and darts in BG in terms of strength but it would inform one's sense of what would be "intuitive" in this respect.

Edited February 13, 2019 by thelee

[wih]

 

It's intuitive because Int affects any sorcery-related damage and some weapons say, or imply, or even look like they do magic damage. Therefore it's easy to games to infer that a weapon is going to scale with Int, because it does magic damage.

 

Doing it differently is not a good argument, so we can move on from that. But I still stick my intuitive argument.

 

I think I see what you're getting at, and I think this back to a "in the eye of the beholder" situation.

 

If I try to summarize what you're arguing, an analogous situation would be elemental damage types in PoE vs Deadfire. In PoE, the various Scion of Flame, Spirit of Decay talents increased any damage source of the given elemental type. In Deadfire, the damage source has to be explicitly keyworded with corrode, fire, etc. to get +1 PEN.

 

You are arguing that "intuitive" here means the consistent approach of PoE1, where literally any damage source (even if it was a lash) would get boosted if it was the right element (this sounds like the Dark Souls interaciton with int). And you are similarly arguing that Might in PoE/Deadfire is more like the elemental talent approach of Deadfire, where even though it is very explicit and universal in how it works, it defeats the consistent approach because you will do fire damage but not be fire-keyworded and thus not benefit. (Personally I would consider either approach similarly intuitive; they are both pretty consistent but also still both require a "does it really work here?" testing every once and a while *cough* wall of flame *cough*)

 

In that respect, the "eye of beholder" thing comes into play, because I think it matters what gaming context you are coming from. I was less bothered by Deadfire's new spell talent system perhaps because I'm really used to games like M:TG where paying attention like a lawyer to every single keyword is now second nature to me, but I can see how coming from most other RPGs where you expect something to do fire damage to be, well, fire, that that would be extremely unintuitive. Similarly, I'm less attached or fixated on the 1st stat of a 6-stat system being a physical strength stat, so might being a universal damage/healing increase is not really upending my expectations, it's just a new system with new things (and I've spent way too much time playing D3 so i'm used to the oddity of agility boosting how much damage my grenades do). So I find it more intuitive that might has a universal explicit rule rather than that it connects explicitly to how things were done in the past; and even if in the past it was not consistent e.g. throwing weapons and darts in BG in terms of strength but it would inform one's sense of what would be "intuitive" in this respect.

 

It seems that your definition of "intuitive" is "something that is easy to explain and remember and which is also consistent". My definition of intuitive is "something that most people would expect to work certain way and then it turns out that it indeed works that way". My definition is a lot more fuzzy, because people's expectations differ and can also change over time. We can probably say that most people's expectations will be based on what the real world has taught them (that's one reason why "realism" is important to some people, including me).

 

According to your definition Might stat is intuitive, but for me it is extremely counterintuitive. I would expect that Might stat governs things like melee damage, ability to draw a bow and reload a crossbow, probably ability to deal with firearms recoil (which you mentioned). It turns out however, that Might stat governs all damage (melee, ranged, spell) and also healing.

I have even more trouble with Inteligence stat, to the point that I am trying to think of it not as "Intelligence" but as "something that gives AOE and duration".

 

But I'm not criticising POE system. It was made to ensure balance between builds and realism wasn't it's primary goal. That's fine. Some people will love it and some will just accept it in order to enjoy the rest of the game.

Edited February 14, 2019 by wih

[Verde]

The definition of intuitive is - using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive

 

This is the opposite of your reasoning for keywords ala paying attention to like a lawyer. That is not intuitive. What I'm arguing is that for an RPG gamer, Deadfire's stat system, both abilities and skills, is not intuitive. It needs to be overly explained. Whether it's Might dictating spell damage and healing, Resolve mostly being a dump stat, or the keywords that you mention. Or even the checks - as mentioned, why are there no spell based Might checks? Why is every Might check physical, yet we have Athletics? Also I want to focus on a poison build...so which keywords is it? Poison, Decay, Desease? How do Power Levels affect them? If it needs to be explained and combed over like a lawyer, it's not intuitive.

 

For Dark Souls, which again I don't know how well this come off since you haven't played it, is a very intuitive game, because it is so vague from the beginning. While you are figuring out the systems, you have no choice but to lean on your tuition as a gamer. And in the case of Intelligence, the game tells you is that Intelligence increases sorcery/magic damage. So when you fight a bright blue dragon or butterfly that shoots bright blue missiles, along with a basic understanding of the lore, it is easy to infer that the enemy is magic-imbued and doing magic damage. Therefore when you make a boss weapon from them, and the weapon is bright blue and only has a letter in the icon for magic, it's very easy to infer that the weapons do magic damage. That is intuitive, without a need to explicitly state all of this, which Dark Souls doesn't usually do. The entire premise of Dark Souls is figuring out the basic systems, and one does that through gamer/RPG intuition. In Deadfire, everything needs to be explicitly stated to a degree that renders the game unique, but not intuitive. 

 

To give you the flipside of Dark Souls, in Demon Souls, the Moonlight Greatsword scaled with Faith, which confused the heck out of gamers, because it appeared to be a solely magic-based weapon. A great example of being unintuitive that Dark Souls resolved.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Verde

[xzar_monty]

Btw, there's a whole another layer to this intuitive/counterintuitive system in the sense that many of the things that may need explaining in Deadfire are actually explained in a way that occasionally leaves you more baffled than you were before. Whoever, or whatever system wrote the in-game explanations did not do a good job. Some of them are frankly self-contradictory. There was one ability that "sometimes gives an added bonus whenever you hit", which is like, d'oh. So is it sometimes or whenever? It can't be both.

Edited February 14, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Verde]

The sheer number of bugs also doesn't help. You can't trust everything you read - effects stick when they shouldn't, certain effects aren't even applied, and others aren't calculated correctly.

[xzar_monty]

Can you give examples of the type you listed? I haven't been that bothered by bugs -- but perhaps all the ones you mentioned are counteracted by the fact that combat tends to be on the easy side.

[Verde]

Sure. So Palleginas breastplate, which I sold many hrs ago, is still providing its bonus.

 

When I remove Xotis gear she is still getting the spell resist bonus.

 

My Lunar Heart bonus (only at night) persists during the day.

 

Certain abilities like spell reflection I can't tell are being applied by any stat sheet unless I test thru friendly fire.

 

I don't want to get into previous patches, but paladin auras were sticking indefinitely.

 

Then there's issues with keywords. Is Toxic Strike a poison ability? Nope. Neither poison nor decay based kn the lack of keywords.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Verde

[wih]

Btw, there's a whole another layer to this intuitive/counterintuitive system in the sense that many of the things that may need explaining in Deadfire are actually explained in a way that occasionally leaves you more baffled than you were before. Whoever, or whatever system wrote the in-game explanations did not do a good job. Some of them are frankly self-contradictory. There was one ability that "sometimes gives an added bonus whenever you hit", which is like, d'oh. So is it sometimes or whenever? It can't be both.

With all the rebalancing happening with PoE games, this is not surprising. Whoever wrote the descriptions probably didn't feel like investing much care in them, knowing that anything can be changed later.

[Crucis]

 

Then they should look at someone pointing out their grammatical errors as a learning experience and take responsibility for their errors, rather than blame others for their own inadequacies. 

 

mate, u straight up failed to comprehend that no one asked u to correct their copy. u might want to work on ur own communication skills before going in studs up on someone else.

 

You may not need grammar to figure out stuff like this, but you sure as hell need it to communicate effectively and for your comments and opinions to be taken seriously.

 

who cares. a clown wearing a bowtie is still a clown.

 

on that note, uve spelt ur username wrong. its supposed to be 'circus'.

 

 

Why do people always ask this silly question, "who cares?".  Obviously, I care, otherwise I wouldn't have posted what I did.   I place a great  deal of importance on proper use of the language.  If you sent me a cover letter for a job with poor spelling and grammar, I'd toss both the cover letter and the resume straight in the trash basket.  And I stand by the comment that proper spelling and grammar are important if you want your opinions to be taken seriously.

 

And lastly, no my username isn't spelled incorrectly.  "crucis" a name used in astronomy for some  star clusters and star names.  Furthermore, it was a name I used in some sci-fi related material, as well as used by friends of mine who used the name in a fictional race in a sci-fi series about 15-20 years ago, and still shows up once in a while when another book in the series is written.  It's a name that has some personal history with me, and I've used it (or some derivation thereof) on forums for the past 20 or so years.

[Crucis]

 

 

 

 

No, it shouldn't affect … AFFECT … gun damage either. Why would strength AFFECT melee weapon accuracy? Your strength would AFFECT [...]

(Right up there with not knowing the difference between "affect" and "effect".

This is low. And it doesn't help your reasoning.

 

 

yeah,

1. English is not everyone's first language on these boards, so one should make allowances.

2. All you're demonstrating about affect and effect is that you're fully capable of parsing the pragmatics of a sentence, but you're choosing not to because you want to be an annoying pedant about the semantics.

 

moving on...

 

 

Then they should look at someone pointing out their grammatical errors as a learning experience and take responsibility for their errors, rather than blame others for their own inadequacies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No, it shouldn't affect … AFFECT … gun damage either. Why would strength AFFECT melee weapon accuracy? Your strength would AFFECT [...]

(Right up there with not knowing the difference between "affect" and "effect".

This is low. And it doesn't help your reasoning.

 

 

No, it's truth.  People should learn from their mistakes, not blame others for pointing them out.

 

 

What you have done is not pointing out another person's mistake (note: you can do that very simply by saying: "FYI, it's spelled 'affect', not 'effect'"). What you have done is deliberately and maliciously mocking another person from your self-appointed superior position, sneeringly underlining their perceived inadequacy in every possible instance (i.e. every single time you use the word affect) and then finally emphasizing that you regard the other person as stupid -- you wrote that the stupidity of something is "Right up there with not knowing the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'."

 

That's petty, immature, mean, and unnecessary, and gives the impression of a person with astonishingly poor social skills.

 

 

No, what you're doing is defending either incompetence, ignorance, or laziness by trying to deflect.  How typical.  Refusal to accept responsibility for one's errors and blaming others for your own errors (well someone else's, in this case) is just so typical.  The only person being immature here is your with this really pathetic defense.

[thelee]

 

 

Then they should look at someone pointing out their grammatical errors as a learning experience and take responsibility for their errors, rather than blame others for their own inadequacies. 

 

mate, u straight up failed to comprehend that no one asked u to correct their copy. u might want to work on ur own communication skills before going in studs up on someone else.

 

You may not need grammar to figure out stuff like this, but you sure as hell need it to communicate effectively and for your comments and opinions to be taken seriously.

 

who cares. a clown wearing a bowtie is still a clown.

 

on that note, uve spelt ur username wrong. its supposed to be 'circus'.

 

 

Why do people always ask this silly question, "who cares?".  Obviously, I care, otherwise I wouldn't have posted what I did.   I place a great  deal of importance on proper use of the language.  If you sent me a cover letter for a job with poor spelling and grammar, I'd toss both the cover letter and the resume straight in the trash basket.  And I stand by the comment that proper spelling and grammar are important if you want your opinions to be taken seriously.

 

And lastly, no my username isn't spelled incorrectly.  "crucis" a name used in astronomy for some  star clusters and star names.  Furthermore, it was a name I used in some sci-fi related material, as well as used by friends of mine who used the name in a fictional race in a sci-fi series about 15-20 years ago, and still shows up once in a while when another book in the series is written.  It's a name that has some personal history with me, and I've used it (or some derivation thereof) on forums for the past 20 or so years.

 

 

This said by someone who in these small two paragraphs:

- inappropriately did ["who cares?".] when it should have been ["who cares?"] (no full stop after), and many style guides would have probably suggested a colon preceding that quote (e.g. "Why do people always ask this silly question: "who cares?")

- random extra spaces

- missed commas everywhere, and excessive commas elsewhere

- missed capitalizations

- missed hyphenizations ("sci-fi-related" not "sci-fi related")

- starts sentences with conjunctions

- fails to properly use accented e's in "résumé"

 

Get over yourself. forums where people sh*tpost about games they like or dislike are not job applications (and frankly even that hypothetical is moot given that I work in an industry where recruiters and HR folk would happily look over typos and grammar errors in a job application if you can code worth a damn, so your "high standard" would likely get you axed pretty quickly).

Edited February 15, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

It makes me cringe if people can't just say sorry and be a mensch but instead keep on digging themselves deeper into the sh!t. That can include myself by the way.

 

Usually if everybody tells you that you didn't behave decently you might want to stop and reevaluate your position.

[xzar_monty]

Given how very poor the arguments are, at this point it's surely simplest just to ignore them.

Edited February 15, 2019 by xzar_monty

[thelee]

Given how very poor the arguments are, at this point it's surely simplest just to ignore them.

 

sometimes i find it extremely hard to avoid feeding the trolls. sigh, like moth to a flame...

Edited February 15, 2019 by thelee

[xzar_monty]

I know very well what you're talking about. But when someone gets as obstinate as in this case, there's apparently no hope of the message getting across.

 

It's funny: when you make a mistake as blatant as this, owning up to it nearly always gains you respect, 'cos we all do the same from time to time. But continuing to dig the hole always makes things worse, always.