My thoughts on the Beta

[tobajas89]

So I had a try at the beta at a friends house and decided I wanted to give some feedback on what I saw.

 

First of I have to say I am really happy to see an old style RPG as I am a huge fan of them and I pretty much have played and own all of them. Really looking forward to when I get my hands on this sadly I was not able to get into the backing on this project since I discovered this game to late.

 

Now to my feedback, these are in my book mostly minor things while some of them are a tad bit annoying.

 

- Spells information, this is mostly for a single spell and I am honestly unsure if this a bug or if it is intended. The spell in question is Concelhault's Corrosive Siphon. The information say's this, Attacks fortitude, On attack +15 accuracy, 136 Corrode damage over 10 seconds, +136 stamina over 10 seconds, Eats away at the target's spirit, inflicting corrosive damage and converting that essence into stamina for the caster. Now what this would imply to me atleast that it's a single target spell that affects a single target by draining their stamina and giving it to the caster. What it actually does for me atleast is it first of all does 297 damage over 29 seconds which is 3 times the damage and lenght of time that it actually say's in the info that it will do. Secondly when I actually use it, it does'nt just use up a single spell lvl 2 usage but instead uses up all 4 of them instantly. It also has a huge area of effect and for me affects multiple targets. As an example while standing in the inn I decided to test out my spells on my party members to see how they worked and what they did. I was at the time standing close to the stairs on the right of Lord Harond when I cast this spell on myself every single NPC in the inn turned hostile on me and were affected by this spell, this also included everyone in my party except for the BB rogue. The spell killed everyone in the inn except for the rogue. After this while trying it outside on enemies it pretty much hit every enemy on the screen.

 

Overall I would like to see more indepth description of what the spells does and what affects them like in the old infinity games where it was very easy to understand.

 

- Inventory is waaay to small in my opinion 8 slots per character now I do understand that it is 8 slots per character but you also have a stash, not sure how much you can put in the stash but it has 28 slots and a slider so I guess more then 28 slots? Weakness with it being that you can only access it at a resting area. Maybe I am just a bit of a horder but I would have liked to see 16 slots, it also looks alot more natural with the 16 slots look, also saw that there is already a mod for this but it would be nice if it was implemented from the start.

 

- Health,  stamina and resting now as I understand it health is lost at around a 1:4 ratio compared to your stamina there is no way to heal health from what I understand only stamina. This had a somewhat negative effect for me since I decided to kill Medreth I was able to kill Medreth and his goons and warthogs but even though I was able to keep the tanks stamina up he eventually went down because of the health loss. This whole mechanic kind of made me annoyed since even if I can manage to keep my party up and alive with "healing" if a fight is prolonged to long or to many hits are taken it wont matter how much "healing" I can do since they will fall down anyway. With the limited amount of rests you can do while outside anyways this will severly limit your exploration time since you will be forced to return even if you dont want to, the back and forth part has always been one of my most least favorite things to do especially when nothing really happens while running back and forth. I mean the higher your difficulty the less rest times you have before you must return meaning that the higher your difficulty the more time you will have to spend running back and forth, this is especially true in POE where you atleast in the beta cant exit a map from everywhere but have to use certain exits. I can even now picture myself being forced to run back to town as much as 10+ times just to clear out a map on the highest difficulty while on the lowest I might not even have to or just return once or twice.

 

This is to me one of the worst mechanics in the game at the time since it pretty much forces me to X mins or even X hours just running back and forth, while it does as mentioned force me to be more thoughtfull with my resources and better my tactics since I cant rest as much on the higher difficulty there will be a certain amount of dmg taken and you will be forced to use up spells to win. But overall it does'nt really change the difficulty as much as it punishes you by playing on a harder difficulty by forcing you to run back to a rest place alot more.

 

- I dont really understand how the combat works at the moment to be honest or rather I dont understand how a hit and damage is calculated, for instance BB wizard grazes enemy for 7 dmg, Acc: 61 - Def: 44 = 17, (up to here I understand) Roll: 24 + 17 = 41 (Graze) (Now I am lost I understand the +17 is my acc vs his def but what is the 24 roll and why is 41 a graze?) 21.3 - 12.0 = 7 (also wtf I understand 21.3 is my dmg vs the enemy 12 D.T but why is 21.3 - 12.0 = 7 it's simple math it should be 9.3 but somehow 21 - 12 for the game = 7????)

 

- Also while this is not a huge thing why is it that when I try to innitate conversations with NPC's it will not always pick my party leader most often it will pick the closest party member to send forth sometimes the game just randomly pick a party member and sends it into a conversation. Would really prefer if the game would only send the party leader and not just seem to pick the closest one or a random member.

 

Okey enought ranting for now atleast, overall I really liked the game even though there were quite a few bugs, the game was extremly slow which I really dont understand why and there were alot of *missing string*.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Very good feedback from someone who has jumped in and not knowing a great deal about how the game works. You're not alone with your concerns as many backers have expressed these concerns as well and we know how the game works as a lot of us have followed the development over the last two years. I imagine when this game is released, a lot of people who jump in not knowing a great deal about the game or thinking the mechanics will be like the IE games, it's going to be a huge shock and go down like a lead balloon.

[archangel979]

- You are not alone in wanting more than 8 slots in inventory. Stash is limitless

- Health/Stamina system is highly contested on the forums and there might be some changes so you don't need to rest as often but needing to rest and go back to get more camping supplies is part of the core design and will not change.

- all attacks roll 1d100 + your Accuracy - enemy Defense score related to the type of attack. The result is compared to table. In short if you get less than 50 as total score that is either a miss or a graze.

- someone else is better fit to answer your conversation question.

[Sensuki]

Good points on Corrosive Siphon, Health, Which NPC initiates dialogue ... I agree with those. There's an altered Health system coming in the next patch, but I think they need to split Health and Stamina into two pools - one that takes damage and one that heals your Stamina.

 

Would be nice if we could have a bit more control over how the combat log displayed information too. I would like to see hit rolls by default for instance.

Edited September 17, 2014 by Sensuki

[tobajas89]

- You are not alone in wanting more than 8 slots in inventory. Stash is limitless

- Health/Stamina system is highly contested on the forums and there might be some changes so you don't need to rest as often but needing to rest and go back to get more camping supplies is part of the core design and will not change.

- all attacks roll 1d100 + your Accuracy - enemy Defense score related to the type of attack. The result is compared to table. In short if you get less than 50 as total score that is either a miss or a graze.

- someone else is better fit to answer your conversation question.

 

Hmm yeah I kinda figured that the rest system would no change and to be honest it does'nt have to, atleast not much in my opinion. Still my opinion is that combined with how the health/stamina system works combined with having resting maxed at 3, 6, 9 depending on the difficulty (if the wiki is correct) at the highest difficulty it will be more of a point of frustration compared to a difficulty increase.

 

So it's 1d100 + acc - def = miss,graze,hit or critical. Makes sense the thing I was more curious about was the dmg point why 21 - 12 = 7 when it should be 9 I mean it's almost a 25% decrease without it showing in the hit why it counts like that, been trying to find info on it but to no avail so far.

 

Still thanks for the feedback on my post to everyone who responded

[teknoman2]

1d100+acc-def

if the result is 1-5 you miss

if it is 6-50 you graze

if it is 51-95 you hit

if it is 96-100 you crit

the 21-12=7, is because it was a graze. if it was a hit it would have shown 9 and if it was critical it would be 11

[Matt516]

1d100+acc-def

if the result is 1-5 you miss

if it is 6-50 you graze

if it is 51-95 you hit

if it is 96-100 you crit

the 21-12=7, is because it was a graze. if it was a hit it would have shown 9 and if it was critical it would be 11

I believe that's incorrect - the 50% damage reduction from graze should apply before DT (so you rolled 42 damage, then it was cut in half to 21). The incorrect math is just that, bugged math (or not displaying everything, or something like that). I've got a bug report about that somewhere in the bug forum (on mobile so I can't really link it at the moment).

 

Glad you're trying the Beta, OP! Don't get discouraged - the game is in a very rough state right now and a lot is subject to change. I've high hopes for release day.

[tobajas89]

1d100+acc-def

if the result is 1-5 you miss

if it is 6-50 you graze

if it is 51-95 you hit

if it is 96-100 you crit

the 21-12=7, is because it was a graze. if it was a hit it would have shown 9 and if it was critical it would be 11

Thanks for the numbers on the hit but I have to ask is that really correct on the dmg calculation, because the dmg is suposse to be 39-52 if the roll in this case becomes dmg 21.3 does'nt that mean that the graze hit already lowered the dmg count by my guess 50%, you mean to say instead that it lowers the dmg by 50% and then after the dmg - d.t is done it lowers the dmg by 25% again?

I went to my friend and got some more numbers to look at.

Critical hit Acc 61 - def 64 = -3. Roll 99 - 3 = 96 (Critical).69.0 - 6.0 = 54.2

Normal hit Acc 61 - def 27 = 34. Roll 47 + 34 = 81 (Hit).42.2 - 6.0 = 32.6

Graze hit Acc: 61 - Def: 44 = 17 Roll: 24 + 17 = 41 (Graze) 21.3 - 12.0 = 7.0

Miss hit Acc 61 - def 64 = -3. Roll 5 - 3 = 2 (Miss)

So again I understand the hit and miss factor but still dont understand the dmg, for a crit the dmg is increased by 50%, normal hit has normal dmg and graze has 50% less dmg. But on all three different hits the total end dmg is lower then what it should be in my eyes. 69.0 - 6.0 should be 63.0 not 54.2, 42.2 - 6.0 should be 36.2 not 32.6 and lastly 21.3 - 12.0 should be 9.3 not 7.0. I am gonna check to see if this all is because of difficulty or something before I write anything more.

 

Tried it on different difficulties and the dmg calculation seems to be the same on all difficulties. This means that on a critical hit there was an extra 14% dmg reduction, on a normal hit the reduction was 10% and on the graze it was 22%.

Edited September 18, 2014 by tobajas89

[archangel979]

 

- You are not alone in wanting more than 8 slots in inventory. Stash is limitless

- Health/Stamina system is highly contested on the forums and there might be some changes so you don't need to rest as often but needing to rest and go back to get more camping supplies is part of the core design and will not change.

- all attacks roll 1d100 + your Accuracy - enemy Defense score related to the type of attack. The result is compared to table. In short if you get less than 50 as total score that is either a miss or a graze.

- someone else is better fit to answer your conversation question.

 

Hmm yeah I kinda figured that the rest system would no change and to be honest it does'nt have to, atleast not much in my opinion. Still my opinion is that combined with how the health/stamina system works combined with having resting maxed at 3, 6, 9 depending on the difficulty (if the wiki is correct) at the highest difficulty it will be more of a point of frustration compared to a difficulty increase.

 

So it's 1d100 + acc - def = miss,graze,hit or critical. Makes sense the thing I was more curious about was the dmg point why 21 - 12 = 7 when it should be 9 I mean it's almost a 25% decrease without it showing in the hit why it counts like that, been trying to find info on it but to no avail so far.

 

Still thanks for the feedback on my post to everyone who responded

 

Look at it like this: Hardest difficulty is not for average gamers and not for first play if your primary goal is just to have fun. The difficulty itself should frustrate you, the need to go back to get more supplies will be the lesser frustration. My guess it was implemented so in bigger dungeons you don't rest spam 9 times but can only do so 3 times. Since you don't want to go back all the time, it will force you to only rest when really needed. Also there might be dungeons where you cannot leave until you finish it, and having limited supply will contribute to game difficulty you chose.

Edited September 18, 2014 by archangel979

[teknoman2]

could be... i dont play the beta myself and i dont know if there is any other factor that further reduces the damage

Edited September 18, 2014 by teknoman2

[Captain Shrek]

Hi OP.

 

Right now the HP/Stamina is being handled with the bloat solution. The Stamina for the Tank classes has now been made 4 times that of the HP instead of a smaller multiple. All the while the HP is now tied to a class, thus further pigeonholing them into MMO roles. 

[archangel979]

Hi OP.

 

Right now the HP/Stamina is being handled with the bloat solution. The Stamina for the Tank classes has now been made 4 times that of the HP instead of a smaller multiple. All the while the HP is now tied to a class, thus further pigeonholing them into MMO roles. 

D&D from the start had Martial classes with more Health and spellcasters and rogues with less.

[Captain Shrek]

 

Hi OP.

 

Right now the HP/Stamina is being handled with the bloat solution. The Stamina for the Tank classes has now been made 4 times that of the HP instead of a smaller multiple. All the while the HP is now tied to a class, thus further pigeonholing them into MMO roles. 

D&D from the start had Martial classes with more Health and spellcasters and rogues with less.

 

That would imply me saying it was a good thing in D&D. Personally I dislike level 8+ gameplay in D&D. It sucks. period.

 

Still, in the defense of D&D the difference was not that prominent until high levels (8+), where the bonuses from constitution were completely meaningless. A wizard with HD 4 and CON 14 would have a max HP of 48. While the fighter with the same CON would have an HP of 96. At this point fighters could not really use their tactics effectively in the party and were relegated to the "Tank" role. The wizards were just too efficient. The druids and Clerics were basically master of all-s. 

 

Same problem in D&D with skills. Eventually the attribute bonuses to skills became irrelevant. One of the reasons why D&D high level is crap. Looks like this game will take that approach early on. Which could result into gameplay that is pretty much narrowed to MMOness.

Edited September 18, 2014 by Captain Shrek

[archangel979]

At best you can claim MMOs took this from D&D, not the other way around. So in this case you cannot accuse PoE of trying to be a MMO, but trying to be a spiritual successor to a line of D&D games. 

And there are many more that want PoE to be more like IE games based on D&D system, not less. 

 

And let me add a bit more. The whole point of classes is to have predefined roles with little wiggle room within it. When you choose to play your character you choose a role by choosing a class to play. If you don't like fighter class, play something else. 

What you want is some kind of classless system, and neither IE games or PoE is or will be that. The big advantage IE games (and D&D) have over PoE is multiclassing. That lets you choose you role but also go beyond it. Unfortunately PoE will not have this but they think they can replace this with a more balanced basic attributes system which is a far cry from multiclassing. 

Edited September 18, 2014 by archangel979

[Captain Shrek]

I am not sure if D&D intended to have MMO-like combat at all. It was a flaw in the design where the rule-makers did not think through the resource cost of casting spells or invocations. If the spell casters were not so free with their abilities (vancian day casting) the game would be way better. You may be right that MMOs took from there though. Who can tell?

[morhilane]

I am not sure if D&D intended to have MMO-like combat at all. It was a flaw in the design where the rule-makers did not think through the resource cost of casting spells or invocations. If the spell casters were not so free with their abilities (vancian day casting) the game would be way better. You may be right that MMOs took from there though. Who can tell?

 

It would be hard for D&D to intend to have MMO-like combat when the first edition was released decades before the first MMO was ever made.

Edited September 18, 2014 by morhilane

[Captain Shrek]

 

I am not sure if D&D intended to have MMO-like combat at all. It was a flaw in the design where the rule-makers did not think through the resource cost of casting spells or invocations. If the spell casters were not so free with their abilities (vancian day casting) the game would be way better. You may be right that MMOs took from there though. Who can tell?

 

It would be hard for D&D to intend to have MMO-like combat when the first edition was released decades before the first MMO was ever made.

 

 

 

Yup, You showed me. Good going!

[archangel979]

I am not sure if D&D intended to have MMO-like combat at all. It was a flaw in the design where the rule-makers did not think through the resource cost of casting spells or invocations. If the spell casters were not so free with their abilities (vancian day casting) the game would be way better. You may be right that MMOs took from there though. Who can tell?

I don't have a clue what you are about. D&D is fine as it is witnessed by 5e having Vancian casting again, and witnessed by Pathfinder overtaking D&D 4e in sales after 4e took out Vancian casting. And witnessed by D&D 5e PHB being a best seller online. 

If you don't like D&D and how it plays, there are other systems out there that do it different. 

[Captain Shrek]

 

I am not sure if D&D intended to have MMO-like combat at all. It was a flaw in the design where the rule-makers did not think through the resource cost of casting spells or invocations. If the spell casters were not so free with their abilities (vancian day casting) the game would be way better. You may be right that MMOs took from there though. Who can tell?

I don't have a clue what you are about. D&D is fine as it is witnessed by 5e having Vancian casting again, and witnessed by Pathfinder overtaking D&D 4e in sales after 4e took out Vancian casting. And witnessed by D&D 5e PHB being a best seller online. 

If you don't like D&D and how it plays, there are other systems out there that do it different. 

 

Well. If you feel that spellcasters (primary) aren't broken in D&D post level 8 then bully for you. Me, I have severe problems with them as soon as they get level 3 spells with vancian magic. I feel that the Vancian system is not itself to blame. But rather the fact the resources needed to cast spells are the trouble. Which is what I mentioned and you missed out. 

[archangel979]

It does not matter. D&D is about asynchronous balance of classes. At some levels some are better and at some other the other classes are better. Also different situations put forward one class over the other. Run into a Golem or high SR enemy and suddenly Fighter is at the front doing all the work.

 

And in 5e they made the difference even smaller although it is still designed around asynchronous balance of classes. That balance also gave use the awesome IE games. 

Some people claim that IE games were great despite their flaws, and I am sure they were great because of their "flaws". 

Edited September 18, 2014 by archangel979

[Captain Shrek]

That sounds pretty counter-intuitive. What flaws are you talking about? I personally liked IE games for how they told the story and how awesome the spellcasting was. For me the other classes sucked hard. Not because they were ineffective but rather because they were boring outright and repetitive. 

[archangel979]

That sounds pretty counter-intuitive. What flaws are you talking about? I personally liked IE games for how they told the story and how awesome the spellcasting was. For me the other classes sucked hard. Not because they were ineffective but rather because they were boring outright and repetitive. 

I don't know, but people here and there leave posts in different topics where they say IE games were good despite D&D flaws, but never go into much details.

 

Other classes were boring because the game is faster that way and because they mimicked PnP where you played a fighter if you wanted a less complex play.

I personally don't like that PoE has so many abilities to manage and RTwP system. It would be perfect for a Turn Based game. 

 

They need to take a page out of the D&D 5e book that lets previous "boring" classes get to choose sub-versions that have more active or more passive abilities. Than people that want to play PoE like IE games they will chose fighters with passive abilities and others will choose the active abilities.

Edited September 18, 2014 by archangel979

[Captain Shrek]

 

That sounds pretty counter-intuitive. What flaws are you talking about? I personally liked IE games for how they told the story and how awesome the spellcasting was. For me the other classes sucked hard. Not because they were ineffective but rather because they were boring outright and repetitive. 

I don't know, but people here and there leave posts in different topics where they say IE games were good despite D&D flaws, but never go into much details.

 

Other classes were boring because the game is faster that way and because they mimicked PnP where you played a fighter if you wanted a less complex play.

I personally don't like that PoE has so many abilities to manage and RTwP system. It would be perfect for a Turn Based game. 

 

 

D&D would be way better than PoE in TB. PoE will only be better in TB than its current RTwP analogue, that much is true. But it has a lot more problems which are not only related to having a lot of options.

 

As for other classes: Monks and Fighters can be fun if you choose to play tactically in D&D.  And not simple at all. Try getting some of the tactical feats and using them on the combat map; I assure you it feels awesome if you pull it off. But my perspective is, that no matter what you do, Clerics are always better fighters than fighters and Druids can easily beat off even the High SR Golem you mentioned, faster than a fighter can. 

[archangel979]

Ok, people mostly abandoned 3.5e for a reason and switched to 4e and Pathfinder. The problem of 3.x D&D was not that spellcasters could to crazy stuff but that they could with a few spells be better at melee that a fighter. Druid was the biggest offender in this. 

 

Still it worked well in singleplayer games like NWN because you actually needed to do all those clicks to cast those buffs. Most of the time I would not bother but kill stuff with true melee characters. There was also elegance in IE games where you would cast Haste with Mage, Bless with Cleric and clean up the map with few melee focused guys. Than if more was needed you would cast spells for that situation. It was fun and didn't need lots of clicking. 

Edited September 18, 2014 by archangel979

[Captain Shrek]

More than agreed. NWN was practically the best RTwP D&D game because of no-party gameplay. Just had **** encounters.