The Insane Beta Battles @ Crossing

[swordofthesith]

Backers!

 

Now that 278 is released, I just read that Obsidian has modified our first encounter at Dryford's Crossing. They have increased the number of beetles to 6. That is a huge increase in difficulty but I think that's exactly what they are intending.

 

They want every fight in the Beta to demand players use their class, party, powers and talents to the fullest to figure what is working and what needs boosting or nerfing. So be forewarned, combat in the Beta will never be easy and will demand your complete attention in order to triumph.  

 

I would be very surprised if the current difficulty curve in the Beta carried over to the final release version of the game. I think they just need that feedback regarding mechanics and the only way to do that is to force players to use every trick in the book. 

 

Go On!

Edited September 4, 2014 by swordofthesith

[Helm]

Just skip the combat, it is completely optional anyway.

[Sensuki]

Here's my posts from the other thread:

 

I got wiped by the beetles on Hard. I cast a Fireball to open and 6 beetles bumrushed my Wizard before my Fighter could even trigger engagement. Arcane Veil did not help and he was dead from DoT poison in about 4 seconds.

 

Things went bad from there.

 

Doesn't look like I'll be opening with Wizard spells anymore unless I make a wall in front of him to block pathing lol.

What difficulty though?

 

There's 6 Beetles in the first encounter on Hard (which I think is actually MORE than v257 bb) and once a Wood Beetle applies poison to a character, they're done for for the encounter unless you immediately dump a cleric healing spell on them - which you can't if you've already assigned the Priest an action, because you have to wait 3-4 seconds for them to have another action due to the long recovery time.

 

edit: There we go, beat them. Still lost three party members due to poison though.

 

Also Stone Beetles teleport if you pause during their burrow ... lol! They instantly appear at their location.

BB Fighter down to 8 Health after 2 encounters, and only one Heal cast on him xD

 

dat adventuring day (ftr, that's with 3 characters front line)

Yeah slowly improving. I found out that Binding Web doesn't trigger enemy AI targeting so that allows you to get a whole ranged volley in. Also swapped some party gear around - gave the BB Fighter the Morningstar, gave the Priest the War Hammer / Shield and removed the armor from the BB Wizard (screw plate mail) and the Rogue.

 

Still had two party members drop to poison, but an improvement anyway. Also had some issues where Stone Beetles are permanently stuck in burrow mode, and never reappear at all. You can still target them, but since I was playing with Combat HUDs off, I didn't know the beetle was still there until I pressed tab.

Possibly. Beetles still charge at you at 100 miles an hour in combat though, whereas character move speed is slower.

It's not just the fact that enemies are fast, there's also the issue of the space in the area.

 

So far, most enemies I have encountered have a very large selection circle. Characters are sorta larger than they were relative to the IE games AND areas themselves appear to have a much smaller scale than at least the BG games had - BG games had lots of openness in areas, whereas the IWD areas were more like tunnels.

 

Stormwall Gorge is pretty open, but the Dyrford Crossing is very tunnel like (at least as far as navmesh is concerned) and there are lots of bits of geometry with no navmesh that makes available space for encounters with enemies that have a large selection circle not very large.

 

Currently you can abuse the fact that you can see farther than you are meant to due to the fog of war not being correct and you can pre-position your party members to kinda block the beetles from getting through. Stone Beetles can teleport behind your lines however and if you're fighting in a space that's blocked by some rocks on one side, and a tree on the other, it makes moving through combat an issue which is HUUUUUGELY magnified by the fact that movement pauses recovery time - which I think is an absolutely terrible design decision, rooted from a turn based mindset.

 

Movement should reset/pause gun and crossbow reloads only, IMO.

 

TBH I reckon if they could possibly scale down the beetle size to be smaller - that would be good. Bombardier and Boring beetle size for the Wood Beetles, slightly bigger again for Stone and Adra - they're just too big.

[Sensuki]

Oi man, we should make this the official First beetle encounter thread - and then do a thread for every other 'major' encounter for tuning purposes

 

Everybody please remember to post the DIFFICULTY you're playing on when you post your feedback on the encounter

Edited September 4, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Smashed the encounter this time - with video - going to upload now

[Silverbarr]

Even on normal the BB is ridiculous, managed to get to the Queen Spider and now I've permanently lost 2 characters.... Yup, completely gone, and can't even afford 2 adventurers to replace them.

 

Balance is insane, the spiders seem to consistently miss my Paladin main character, but every other character is getting completely annihilated before they are able to utilise their abilities. In fact the Priest is incredibly frustrating as he doesn't even seem to perform the abilities when needed due to the recovery time, and the stamina healing is pointless as the damage from 10+ spiders is impossible to deal with. Strangely the beetles are a whole other issue where even killing small groups is a huge frustration.

 

Glad to see the patch resolve a number of issues I was having, but I can only see myself playing the BB on Easy mode, otherwise it's not fun at all and just completely full of frustration.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Silverbarr

[Sensuki]

Sensuki vs The Beatles Part 1: Barbarian

 

[Infinitron]

Add this as a soundtrack:

 

Edited September 4, 2014 by Infinitron

[Zed]

I see you also got ****ed by the "healing no longer aoe" change.

(I like that change tho, but tooltip hasn't been changed to reflect it).

Edited September 4, 2014 by Zed

[Sensuki]

I just use a simple transcoder so I can directly upload my videos after I record for high turnover.

[archangel979]

You were in pause in that video more than I was in BG2EE with my 6 man lvl 11 party vs 6 higher level Thayans. I cannot say I liked it that much. 

The game might as well be turn based

Edited September 4, 2014 by archangel979

[Sensuki]

Combat requires that amount of pausing if you want to be able to issue your commands efficiently, unfortunately - especially due to recovery time.

 

Note: I was not using any of the overpowered classes or weapons either. Or maybe every other class is just underpowered

 

Thinking on it, perhaps I should have given the Arbalest to the Rogue.

 

Also - my Fighter's Health is at nearly HALF just after one encounter, and that's in Plate Mail with 12 DT. So yeah, length of adventuring day is wackT atm.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Just played again as a Monk and gave my Rogue the Arbalest - Fighter didn't take any damage and characters only lost ~ 50 Health points across my whole party. Also aggro'd the 5th beetle too.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Recorded a Monk video where I did all of the immediate Beetle encounters on Hard, video coming shortly

[Starwars]

I just did a runthrough (well, not completely finished) on Normal and I haven't had much trouble with the fights. The beetles in particular have been some of the easier ones for me actually.

 

What did get me is that sometimes it appears my guys get afflicted with some kind of status thingie that drains there health/stamina, yet there appears to be not status effect on them that I can see above their portrait. Maybe I missed something? It happened mostly in the Skaen dungeon.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Starwars

[swordofthesith]

Sensuki vs The Beatles Part 1: Barbarian

 

 

 

Hoi Sens!

 

Thanks so much for your combat walkthrough. Stuff like that is immensely helpful to both Testers & Developers. Please do think of uploading more videos highlighting classes/powers that you feel are overpowered or underpowered in the latest Beta build. I wish I had a video capture card, otherwise I would be doing the same!

 

RE what happened to your Priest. Beetle poison happened and yes, I agree that poison is just pure pwnage right now in the Beta. I hope they turn it down a notch for release. 

[archangel979]

You don't need a video capture card, just any program that records your desktop. There are 100 of them out there.

[Sensuki]

I just did a runthrough (well, not completely finished) on Normal and I haven't had much trouble with the fights. The beetles in particular have been some of the easier ones for me actually.

I just did it again with a Monk and fared better. Still took a lot of Health damage though.

[Sensuki]

You don't need a video capture card, just any program that records your desktop. There are 100 of them out there.

I use Bandicam.

[WebShaman]

@Sensuki - you can totally avoid pausing while fighting if you use your speed adjustment buttons, you know.

 

Just hit S to slow things down, do your stuff, then hit S again.  If you want to speed up, hit D.

 

By doing this, you avoid the pause-go sort of thing.

 

I noticed in your video that you just pause, order, fight, pause, order, fight...very...ummm...well, try the speed buttons, they are better IMHO.

 

What I find better in slo-mo is that I can actually SEE everything happening as it happens, and things like recovery, etc. are not a big obstacle.  If you pause, you don't see this happening (as the game is paused, obviously).

[Karkarov]

 

I just did a runthrough (well, not completely finished) on Normal and I haven't had much trouble with the fights. The beetles in particular have been some of the easier ones for me actually.

I just did it again with a Monk and fared better. Still took a lot of Health damage though.

 

I did some testing myself, it is the poison 100% that is the issue.  You get poisoned whoever took it will eat like 30-40 health damage.  All dots in this game right now are horribly over powered.  All they need to do is fix it to where dot's only damage stamina and never damage health and problem is solved.

[Sensuki]

Yeah I assumed they'd have a varying duration depending upon grazes, hits and crits too - doesn't seem to be the case.

[Sensuki]

@Sensuki - you can totally avoid pausing while fighting if you use your speed adjustment buttons, you know.

 

Just hit S to slow things down, do your stuff, then hit S again.  If you want to speed up, hit D.

Sorry but I won't be using the speed buttons. They are not helpful at all for tuning combat speed, and I enjoy the pause and play system from 16 years of playing the IE games.

 

Pressing S doesn't solve the problem of the combat speed being wrong, the default speed should be perfected. I want to add these videos to the 'here is my experience' that the developers can use as a reference.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Sensuki

[IndiraLightfoot]

Yeah I assumed they'd have a varying duration depending upon grazes, hits and crits too - doesn't seem to be the case.

Deep wounds, Poison and other DOTs should be transformed into diminishing returns over time (preferably pretty quick). Right now, they can cause a lot of pain, especially if some of your party members get cornered somewhere crammed.

[Sensuki]

They should act like the other status effects. Once durations are tuned, just lower the damage.

 

Poison in IE was 1 hp / sec ... and worst case 3 hp / sec - Poison i PE is 97.5 / 15 which is 6.5 damage / sec