Graze gotta go, no?

[prodigydancer]

Misses are just as much promotions of attrition.

No. In a well-balanced system if you miss too often you're doing something wrong (most probably attacking an enemy who is too powerful for your level).

 

Conversely, attrition is a constant stream of low (but nonzero) damage that under certain conditions may be a winning strategy on its own. Usually the conditions are:

1. very high overall damage reduction and/or deflection on everyone in the party (often also crit immunity);

2. combat system that reduces incoming damage to negligible levels when condition 1 is met.

 

If you don't take any noticeable damage and still deal some you're probably going to win the fight. Maybe later rather than sooner but still. In fact, even if you do take damage but always in predictably low amounts, it's no different. As long as you're certain you can kill them before they kill you, it's just calculated losses. And "calculated" is really the key word here. An ultimate attrition-based party may be godmode powerful (if the system allows that) but playing such party will be boring as hell because it removes all surprises, pressure and tactical choices from combat.

 

I'm not in beta so I don't know how much the above applies to PoE at the moment. But grazes spam in combat log is a bad sign and a cause for concern. Why? Because what looks odd and unnecessary on lower difficulties may easily end up being the only way to go on higher difficulties.

Edited September 30, 2014 by prodigydancer

[Fiebras]

I don't like this. RNG was a feature in IE games, not something to fix. At this rate, PoE might be worse than NWN2... good thing beamdog make BG2EE, at least I can continue play that until mods come for PoE. 

 

RNG is still a feature. Theres just more options for the diceroll to choose from now.

[Caladian]

Yeah, RNG is definitely still a feature.  You just don't have insane wild swings of it, which is just fine.

[archangel979]

Yeah, RNG is definitely still a feature.  You just don't have insane wild swings of it, which is just fine.

And that is the problem. When Miss is only 5% chance and only if your accuracy is not 5 or more over deflection, it is not longer a real RNG system. 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

 

Yeah, RNG is definitely still a feature. You just don't have insane wild swings of it, which is just fine.

And that is the problem. When Miss is only 5% chance and only if your accuracy is not 5 or more over deflection, it is not longer a real RNG system.

If it relies on random numbers, it is a RNG system. PoE relies on random numbers.

[illathid]

 

Yeah, RNG is definitely still a feature.  You just don't have insane wild swings of it, which is just fine.

 

And that is the problem. When Miss is only 5% chance and only if your accuracy is not 5 or more over deflection, it is not longer a real RNG system.

You should be thankful there's a miss chance at all. IIRC there wasn't going to be misses in PoE at all originally, just grazes, hits, and crits.

[Sensuki]

Yeah there wasn't going to be miss. Glad it was put in.

[IndiraLightfoot]

I was one of the vocal proponents for having a miss in PoE back then, thank you very much.

[Seari]

With the low chance of misses it might as well not have been.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Seari: I was a proponent for critical misses/fumbles as well, and as things are now, I'd love to see these "misses" be replaced with critical misses with some "fun" negative effects attached to them depending on what kind of attack it is.

[Seari]

Yeah that would be better than how it is now at least, since the miss chance is so low. But I really want them to increase miss chance, every attack being a hit is just silly and I hate it.

[archangel979]

With the low chance of misses it might as well not have been.

This. 

I am sorry people but Grazes are not misses. Current system it almost MMO like where each attack does something and combat is rotating attacks and juggling cooldowns. Leave that **** out of my IE spiritual successor. 

[Sensuki]

If your ACC-DEF is less than -5 you'll have a lot of chance to miss.

 

Miss isn't gone, you'll miss a crap load if your accuracy is a fair bit lower than an enemy defense.

Edited September 30, 2014 by Sensuki

[archangel979]

If your ACC-DEF is less than -5 you'll have a lot of chance to miss.

 

Miss isn't gone, you'll miss a crap load if your accuracy is a fair bit lower than an enemy defense.

It is still too low. Also if your accuracy that low, you lose critical hits. I want miss, hit and critical hits to always be possible at same time.

Luck must be part of these game, it is what brings best excitement. Just like in games like Xcom where missing that 95% shot or hitting that crucial 20% shot is what brings out the biggest emotions and makes you remember it.

Edited September 30, 2014 by archangel979

[teknoman2]

If your ACC-DEF is less than -5 you'll have a lot of chance to miss.

 

Miss isn't gone, you'll miss a crap load if your accuracy is a fair bit lower than an enemy defense.

if ACC is 6 or more than DEF you dont miss, you get more crit and the chance to graze reduces

if DEF is 6 or more than ACC you dont crit, you miss more often and the chane to hit decreases

so if you try to kill someone with 15 more DEF than your ACC, you will miss and graze a lot with rare hits. isnt it better to be able to slowly grind down the enemy's health than just miss all the time and pray for a hit? it's better to make slow progress than just wait for the one lucky shot that may win the fight... at least for me

[Hellraiser789]

I like grazes. I think they are cool. Kinda seems more realistic and gives you something other than Hit. Miss. Hit. Hit. Miss. Seems like a good idea to me.

 

And was randomness really THAT much of a factor in Baldurs Gate1/2? I remember when I first starting playing (mustve been 12 or something) I had no idea what 2d6 meant but just looked at damage and descriptions and went from there. Figured 2-handed swords would do the most damage (i.e. BIGGER = BETTER! YAY MINSC!) and just kinda rolled with it. But I wasn't a combat junkie either, calculating all the combat stats and stuff (at least not til I got older and understood the system haha). 

 

And to base hows the biggest fan off of how many times you played it or specific pieces of the game or "loving the whole package" isn't cool. Everybody took away something a little bit different. THATs probably the reason why everyone loved it. It was unique, you felt connected to it, it had a good story, and it was FUN. That all wrapped up = great game. Doesn't mean we need a copy and paste of all systems or anything. I loved them, but they can always be improved, and personally I look forward to trying some new stuff. If everything was exactly the same, it wouldnt be boring per se, but new things can be good, you just have to give them a chance.

 

And if you don't like how the system is, offer some ways to improve it, or just wait until the game is released. Right now, everything is liable to change, so if you want a clear-cut, obviously finished game that has great mechanics and playability, you should probably just wait until its released.

 

YMMV though.

[teknoman2]

since someone anti-graze mentioned the priests that raise DEF with their spells eaarlier. how would eliminating graze, make a fight against a priest with a huge DEF buff less tedious?

well here's an extreme idea on how to make the game less log spammy an tedious: if roll+ACC-DEF > 89 the enemy dies (or you die if the enemy rolled) with a roll of 100 being a critical (ignore 50% DEF), else it's a miss. no hp, no damage rolls no stamina, no healing. whoever is lucky enough to get that roll first wins the fight 

[Lephys]

No. In a well-balanced system if you miss too often you're doing something wrong (most probably attacking an enemy who is too powerful for your level).

In a well-balanced system, if you graze too often, you're doing something wrong. That's kind of my point. If you're not doing something wrong, and you're grazing too often, then the system needs some tweaking. Not the removal of the thing that happens to be occurring too often.

 

Miss or graze, it matters not. Either could be out of whack, and either would need to be brought back into whack, rather than outright removed, in response.

 

Lephys: I like your alternate spread for hits/misses/etc - though it'd require some balance changes as doing so would greatly buff Might indirectly by raising the average effective damage from Accuracy (and therefore the marginal benefit of each point in Might) since (by default) you'd now be hitting a lot more. Not that I don't think it's a good idea, just that it might be prudent to also suggest a buff to Perception. Maybe +2 Accuracy per point and increase Might to +3% per point. That gives Perception more weight.

Oh, definitely. I just whip examples up to convey the basic idea of the change. Actually changing the spread would require a lot more thought and calculation, and almost definitely changes to other factors/values in the system, to make it work.

 

Really, though, just dropping the graze threshold, while not the perfect solution, would probably show some huge improvement in regard to this issue people are having. I mean, with the current spread, when ACC-DEF = 0, you're grazing almost half the time, and hitting almost half the time. I don't mind going up against a tougher enemy that means I graze a lot more often, but grazing almost half the time even against just a perfectly average foe is basically just half-as-frustrating as missing 30+ percent of the time (which was the original thing they implemented grazes for).

 

Or, to put it another way, if grazes were thought up in response to the frequency of missing in the older games, and the frustration that caused, then you wouldn't think leaving the whole not-hit range at a whopping 50% (5% for miss now, and 45% for graze) would be the way to go. I mean, even in the IE games, you typically had better than a 50% to hit, right? Unless you were attacking dragons in melee with your untrained Wizard. It was probably more like 60-70%, at least. So, really, you should be splitting up something like 30% into misses and grazes.

 

That, and you really want the base frequency of something like not-hits to be relatively low in your exact-middle/average scenario (my Accuracy is exactly the same as the foe's Defense). That way, you can STILL decrease it (with higher Accuracy/bonuses) to maximize actual hits (not to mention crits), but you're at least still hitting more often than you're not-hitting, be default. Then, if the enemy has high defense, or your character just has crap Accuracy, you'll run into more grazes (and misses).

 

But, doing half-damage is pretty frustrating, even though it's way better than doing no damage. So, I don't think 50/50 is really the baseline to use, since grazing half the time is not what someone wants to be doing just because they don't have far-above-average Accuracy.

 

And yeah, I definitely think Accuracy bonuses need to be more significant.

 

*shrug*. There are all kinds of adjustments that can be made there, depending on the exact goal desired. I don't know how you would do it, exactly, with an equation (off the top of my head), but maybe misses stay locked at 5% for a 10-point stretch, instead of just ticking away the second you start gaining an Accuracy advantage. Basically, you could have a reduced chance to Graze, but STILL have a 5% chance to miss. Maybe every THREE points reduces your chance to miss by 1%, instead of every point? Same with crits. Maybe your ACC is 7 less than your enemy's DEF, but you actually still retain a small crit chance?

 

*shrug*. Seems like the shifting scale of attack resolution works quite well in general, but it could use a little finesse, perhaps. Again, I'd have to check the effects of those actual changes to tell you "this would be a good number to use," but the general idea remains.