The Insane Beta Battles @ Crossing

[Ink Blot]

Been TPW'ed by the Crystal Spider twice already on hard.

Meh. I can top that. Was TPWed by the small spiders on Normal. But that was my first crack at the new build and I was pretty lax about the combat - didn't even bother trying to buff until it was far, far too late.

[mutonizer]

Been TPW'ed by the Crystal Spider twice already on hard.

 

Same. I can manage top left pull if I unload but the one on the right really takes crazy damage-front loading and even then, I get a couple death.

I stopped counting the amount of back and forth between that area and the tavern I did, since I seem to have bought all supplies across the land.

 

Between poison beetles outside, crazy crystal spiders inside and insane Deep Wounds supra high DT dudes down below, I kept a couple wolves alive for later just so that my guys don't just suicide out of desperation

Edited September 4, 2014 by mutonizer

[Hiro Protagonist II]

I'm on easy and most battles kill me. Especially now that they made the mages wand an AOE attack, my party is wiped out within a few rounds by my mage's basic attack.

 

To be fair, I'm playing the same way I played the IE games, and I cheated like mad with those to make combat super easy since combat is my least favorite part of anyRPG and I just want it over quickly. So I just focus everyones attacks o one guy until he's dead then move to the next. Worked in the IE games, results in dead party for every encounter except single enemies in PoE.

 

I'm unsure why people are finding the battles hard on Easy. I mentioned in another thread yesterday my party composition and finding it relatively easy. Yes, I'm powergaming but the battles are very easy on Easy. I may have to start cranking up the difficulty on my next playthrough.

 

Also, I gave a comparison to the pacifist and combat options with the Cat and Mouse quest. The Medreth fight was very easy. Admittedly it was on Easy. I ended up taking the pacifist route as both options give you the exact same xp rewards and the combat route gave you trash loot imo.

[Karkarov]

But what Im saying here is that everyone has a Fighter in their team atm and we dont know how it is without one. Maybe the other "front line" classes are woefully unable to hold the line? Maybe having two frontliners is even better than having a fighter? Maybe the party does more DPS without the Fighter?

You can always make one for your main pc or hire one at the inn.  Bear in mind I am not pulling what I said out of a hat, the Devs stated each class is designed for a specific main goal and the classes that were covered in "the front line/aka the tanks" were Fighter, Barbarian, and Monk.

[Ineth]

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

 

Maybe there should be an "auto-pause when a party member's recovery time is over" setting.

 

Simultaneous turn-based, so to speak... :D

[Sensuki]

Auto-pause, Slow and Fast game speeds should not be taken into account when tuning the default speed of the game.

[Qiushui]

Finally killed the Crystal Spider. Then went to Dyrford Ruins and got summarily destroyed by the archers in there.

 

Poison and Deep Wounds are, if not outright game-breaking, completely fun-breaking right now.

 

Also having massive performance degradation, setting in after 15-20 mins, that I never had in the earlier build.

 

Save/reload fixes it.

[mutonizer]

Finally killed the Crystal Spider. Then went to Dyrford Ruins and got summarily destroyed by the archers in there. 

Poison and Deep Wounds are, if not outright game-breaking, completely fun-breaking right now.

I did the other way around, and yea, them Deep Wounders are crazy as well and everything got like 15 to 22 DT in there! That's why I tried the spider cave, thought it'd be an easy break from the head vs wall banging....it wasn't.

 

Also having massive performance degradation, setting in after 15-20 mins, that I never had in the earlier build. 

Save/reload fixes it.

Same here a bit though I have no earlier build comparison yet.

Do you Save/Reload or Save/Quit/Load? Loading for me just keeps on making the memory usage grow after each load..and grow..and grow...and crash once it goes over 4GB because of out of memory. Only completely quitting helps.

[Qiushui]

Save/reload helps but it just builds back up again, and probably faster. I didn't time it but it chugged again after 2-3 fights.

[vril]

I find the battles a tad on the easy side as they stand now.  I am currently playing Normal mode and have used a mix of mindless attack, where my party takes a lot of damage to tactical attacks where my party is taking very limited damage.  This is exactly as I hoped, the game requires tactics and smart use of spells like the Infinity engine games.  Again, I'd say they're slightly on the easy side, I usually play the IE games on Normal too and felt they were more of a challenge, this includes my current playthrough of BG:EE.  I will have to try going through the beta on Hard next which I have actually never done in an IE game.

[Bryy]

Wait. People complain about the combat being too cumbersome and boring.

 

So they respond by adding more enemies.

[Fen(rir)tastic]

The teleporting and randomly switching aggro of creatures does my head in. A mage fireballs the group of mobs but my rogue or ranger criticals and all of a sudden they have 2-3 mobs pillaging them. Not to mention the poison of impending doom. Suppression Affliction on constant cast as often as i can seems to be the way with multiple spiders. 

Still those issues aside i think this build and this level of difficulty is a step in the right direction. Ironing out the bugs and refining some more feedback/ability balancing will make this a pretty rewarding tactical game. If you find it too easy on normal my recommendation is to play with just 1 tank and stretch your resting as much as possible, once spell exhaustion becomes an issue and health drops below 50% on 2-3 characters you are forced to play different which i enjoy immensely. 

Edited September 5, 2014 by Fen(rir)tastic

[mutonizer]

So they respond by adding more enemies.

As far as I understand it, difficulty level (easy, normal, hard, etc) define how many enemies (and their types) you will encounter for each given "spawn point".

 

For example, for a given spawn point.

- On easy, you'll face a group of 2 easy mobs.

- On normal, you'll face a group of 1 normal mob and 1 easy mob.

- On hard, you'll face 1 hard mob and 2 normal mob and 3 easy mobs.

- On crazywtfisgoingwiththisfrakkingblah!, you'll face everything, their mother, their sisters...or something...or maybe just a nuclear bomb.

 

Add to that the diminishing maximum amount of camping supplies, also based on difficulty level (6 on easy, 2 on hard, etc)....

 

Edit:

And I don't know if it's the same on lower difficulty levels (haven't tried yet) but DT across the board on Hard is crazy. It's like everyone, everything (except wolves, because: reasons!) is wearing double supra legendary platemail of doom or something.

Edited September 5, 2014 by mutonizer

[vril]

Wait. People complain about the combat being too cumbersome and boring.

 

So they respond by adding more enemies.

 

The part about it being cumbersome I feel has been improved upon.  It's still not there, the reactivatity of the interface still does not tell you what is going on during combat so that is a definite barrier to entry and increases difficulty for first-time players.

[GreyFox]

Try to remove degenerate gameplay and create degenerate gameplay with your solution!

 

Hence the issue with trying to fix what isn't broken.

 

 

@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).

 

 

 

....No....slow mo and all that jazz is extra and shouldn't have anything to do with standard play.

 

It's actually an unnecessary feature and I have no idea how that got in over other more important features. I'd be impressed if more than 5% of the people who buy the game actually use it. What is this the Matrix? comon Neo...

Edited September 5, 2014 by GreyFox

[Tartantyco]

I don't pause any more in PoEt than I do in Baldur's Gate. Sensuki is just playing horribly in that video.

[Sensuki]

I definitely played horribly in the Barbarian and Chanter videos, but I did well in the Monk one.

 

I don't think how much I pause is a measure of how well I am playing though, if the action bar icons had hotkeys I would hotkey them and not pause as much. What matters is how many daily resources I used up in the fight (Health, Daily powers/spells). I am pausing for every action so I make sure I command every action of my party members. 

 

If you think you can do better, feel free to post a video of yourself playing on Hard with those classes without any auto pause or slow usage 

Edited September 5, 2014 by Sensuki

[Cantousent]

Funny, on normal I didn't prepare for my battle with Medreth... and before someone accuses me of metagaming, my character isn't stupid.  I don't need outside knowledge to know telling Medreth I let his prey get away would probably lead to a fight.  Still, the first and only battle I had in my first stab at the beta led to a cluster **** slugfest.  This time, I'm paying more attention to combat and, for the same reason, I thought it was fair to set up my folks expecting a fight which my character would know to be imminent.  I got in position but didn't buff, engaged in dialogue, engaged in combat, and used a *ton* of spells.  With one more character than last time, I didn't exactly coast.  Only one person went down, but it was close and that includes *a lot* of healing.  Clearly the other guys are receiving a lot healing, and I suspect some of it comes from overlap from my own spells.  The description should get rid of the word 'enemy' if the spell can lead to friendly fire.  I mean, I was trying to be careful about the area in aoe spells, but I don't think it's as fine as that circle suggests.  Maybe I'm wrong and I'm happy to hear some abuse if it explains things better to me.

[Ink Blot]

The description should get rid of the word 'enemy' if the spell can lead to friendly fire.

I really hope they document this accurately. I ****ing hate reading a spell description and finding out in the heat of combat that it affects everyone when the description leads you to believe it's only targeted at enemies.

 

I also hope they don't go overboard with the number of 'affect everything' spells. There need to be a good mix with a substantial number that don't cause friendly fire. Or spellchucking in battle will be useless.

[Fiebras]

I noticed Corrosive Syphon did in fact affect party members a while ago. That thing does loads of damage (to party members since every enemy is a damage sponge atm). Easy half dead party.

 

So I tried the enounter with several diferent characters on Hard. Should they fix poison dots people will probably complain that Adra beetles hit from half to 1/4 of their hp. Its fun though and not too challenging. Still havent lost to any beetles.

To be honest I dont think they added more enemies to make it harder but to get feedback on enemy mob counters and for us to experience the diferent types of enemies. The mob count for that encounter is the same as before, only with the new Adra Beetle replacing some Stone Beetles and the mob pacement shifted around.

 

If you think the beetle encounter is hard the Spider Cave is hell itself. I dont see how to even kill the Spider Queenpart with so many spiders. Ive only managed to pull one since the rest are so clumped up once one agroes the entire pack agros.

They literally swarm your whole party and stunlock your casters because your fighter and barbarian cant engage so many of them at once.

And since your offensive AOEs mostly come with frienly fire its quite the tricky situation. And its a rather cramped enviroment to boot so the new "pinball" pathfinding results in you being unable to move because there a million spiders. Its making me seriously consider the +1 to engagement limit trait.

And as soon as battle starts your party gets webbed somehow.

 

Its really fun though. A tricky situation and challenge. If I remember correctly the hidden treasure there is a decent ring. I would like it if more of the standard loot containers didnt have randomized loot but fixed loot (some already do but its mostly scrolls that dont work atm).

 

I also noticed considerably more XP being awarded at diferent stages of quests so I hit level 6 as soon as I entered the cave simply by completing Cat and Mouse and picking up the other two quests. It feels very natural. Thanks to that I saw that the wizard has some pretty useful spells (expose vulnerabilities andburning wounds respectively) beyond "blow your whole party up unless perfectly positioned" and the fighter has more abilities than I previously thought.

 

The one thing that worries me is how much camping supplies are gonna drain your funds as oposed to how much money is available in the game since atm I anticipate needing 2-3 rests per area on hard simply because of how much hp enemies have and how much damage they do.

Edited September 5, 2014 by Fiebras

[Qiushui]

Wait till you get to Dyrford Ruins...

[Cantousent]

Well, I'll own to the fact that I had a bunch of beetles eat my lunch.  Of course, I was being lazy after my Medreth fight.  It was close, but I've gotten into bad habits and didn't really use all my people at first.  I don't know that the fight is broken.  I'm on normal, which is how I'll finish at least one run, and I think it's totally legit to get a beat down on normal if you're not paying attention, especially the first time you fight a certain creature.  Plus, I have a lot of caster, and micromanaging aoe spillover makes me sad.  Mages are my faves, and I think it just plain sucks that they have such limited single target options.  At least as it seems to me, I'm listening to what you guys have to say on the issue.

[Ashen Rohk]

The beetles are challenging on normal, but once that poison is on you you're pretty much screwed. Thankfully wood beetles aren't half as hardy as stone beetles, a few well placed range shots and magic missile were enough for me to take them down.

 

After patch, combat is maybe a little harder - I assume to due to skill rebalancing. Challenging but doable. Have to say, after the beetles I waltzed my way through the spider cave until my cipher got caught in a wall and bought it.

[Sensuki]

Sensuki vs The Beatles Episode 4 - Fighter with Estoc

 

I played a bit lazier this time and didn't pause as much, made a couple tactical errors because of it as well. 

Still fared pretty fine. Estoc is beast.

 

Keep forgetting to use the Figther and Rogue modals, laf.

Edited September 5, 2014 by Sensuki

[morhilane]

The beetles are challenging on normal, but once that poison is on you you're pretty much screwed. Thankfully wood beetles aren't half as hardy as stone beetles, a few well placed range shots and magic missile were enough for me to take them down.

 

After patch, combat is maybe a little harder - I assume to due to skill rebalancing. Challenging but doable. Have to say, after the beetles I waltzed my way through the spider cave until my cipher got caught in a wall and bought it.

 

There is a Priest's spell that cancel negative effects. It is an overtime AOE called Suppress Affliction (level 2). There is no reason to not use it against the beetles. It will cancel the poison effect in place and make it impossible to get poisoned has long has it's up...