333 Quick Impressions Thread

[Sensuki]

Here's an example of Dual Wielding compared to Beast Slayer. Both seem to be good. Dual Wielding may look better. But I don't want Athletics for my character. I'd rather the Lore and Survival skills for the non-combat dialogue options. So if I choose Beast Slayer, I get a bonus to damage against critters in combat. And I get a bonus for the dialogue options out of combat with the Lore and Survival dialogue checks.

I think I understand you perfectly. I would not choose Beast Slayer, it only gives a bonus some of the time - when Fighting Beasts. If you're planning to make a TWF character, why on earth would you not get the TWF talent ?

 

The Talent system appears to be suffering from the same issues as D&D Feats - stuff that's useful all the time, and stuff that's only useful in certain situations. Most of the added actives seem pretty garbage to me as well, I'd never pick them over stuff that gives me a flat passive bonus all the time.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

I think I understand you perfectly. I would not choose Beast Slayer, it only gives a bonus some of the time - when Fighting Beasts. If you're planning to make a TWF character, why on earth would you not get the TWF talent ?

 

The Talent system appears to be suffering from the same issues as D&D Feats - stuff that's useful all the time, and stuff that's only useful in certain situations. Most of the added actives seem pretty garbage to me as well, I'd never pick them over stuff that gives me a flat passive bonus all the time.

 

It's just an example I quickly grabbed. I could find a better talent with the Lore and/or Survival skill. The reason I wouldn't take it is because it's lumping me with a skill I don't want. I want to be able to do combat well but also have non-combat skills that I want to use. What I don't want is to pick a whole heap of talents that makes my character great in combat but skills I never wanted and possibly useless in dialogue. So for me, the talents are also governed by the skills and I weigh up both the usefulness of the talent as well as the skill that's been stuck with it.

[Seari]

Not all talents have to have the same level of usefulness, just having the option and variety is good. Not everyone is a powergamer.

[Sensuki]

Not being pigeonholed into picking certain builds to be good at certain skills is a complete 180 of what the whole character system was supposed to be about. I have to say I am very surprised by the turn around, and I don't like it. I don't want to be forced to pick certain talents to get the skills I want. So I am just playing how I normally do and ignoring skills, because I'm just doing testing at the moment anyway.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Not all talents have to have the same level of usefulness, just having the option and variety is good. Not everyone is a powergamer.

 

I don't see the variety where I want to make a dual wielding character with good survival skills.

[Seari]

I didn't like the idea of stealthy fighters or barbarian scholars, so I actually like these changes.

 

edit: Then pick dual wielding and something that gives survival. Makes sense to me that you would be athletic to be adept at dual wielding weapons.

Edited October 25, 2014 by Seari

[Sensuki]

Screw simulationism.

[Jotra]

Tying skill points to talents is definitely by far the best thing about this build. Really like the character progression now.

 

Now just remove the whole stamina system, and make the characters stand out from the background better!

[Quantics]

Finally had a chance to test the BB. Installed it on my old macbook (2011 hi-end 15" model). My computers'  fans were going through the ROOF throughout, really not enjoyable. Didn't think PoE would tax my GPU so much.

 

 

 

Going from plusses to minuses :

• I enjoyed the title music and the general atmosphere. 
• Liked the many options at character creation (lots of **Missing strings** though). I had a very tough time choosing which is a good thing.
• I haven't 100% figured out combat yet so I'm not going to comment on that too much. Generally (and although I have recently been playing BG2:EE so you could argue that switching to a game like PoE should feel mostly natural) I found combat a bit unintuitive. Especially Combat UI is quite confusing. 
• I was very disappointed by the graphics, which have still not been fixed. I wonder how such a glaring issue has not yet received more attention. The first NPCs you meet outside the village are literally transparent, I thought they were supposed to be ghosts or something. Same goes for the beetles at the crossing. Plus they continued to move even when dead (!?!). 
• Pathfinding is a mess. Especially in crowded areas such as the Inn. I'm sure it'll get fixed though. 

Edited October 25, 2014 by Quantics

[Jon of the Wired]

I didn't like the original skill progression system, I found it far too fiddly, but I don't love the new one either. Now every talent is a bundle of two things, one you might want, and the other you might not. It means that I'm rarely totally happy with a talent choice; it almost always feels like a compromise. Choosing a new talent should be like being a kid in a toystore, and you just have to choose the most awesome thing from a room full of awesome things. Now it feels like I'm always just settling for something that's "good, but".

 

I'd prefer a system more like either 4e or 5e. That is, remove all of the random skill bonuses from talents and either have the base value for a skill be (character level) + (class bonus) and for each skill have a proficiency talent that gives you a +5 (or so) and a second specialization talent that gives another +3 (or so), or have the base value for a skill be (class bonus) and have a proficiency talent that gives you (character level) as a bonus, and a specialization talent that gives you +3 on top.

[morhilane]

Thing are starting to get prettier and buggier. Like the tanner's shadow, well I think it's his shadow...it's more like a shadowy double.

 

I'll add my voice to the new way of increasing skill being kind of crap. I don't mind having talents that does just that I guess, but getting all skills increase via taking talents just seems kind of random and might end up making everyone spread out has opposed to focused. For example, nobody in my party was able to unlock the chests in the Inn or find the hidden staff. I would have had to pick talents that especially increase mechanics to do that. I do like the background +skill though. Also, without skill increase level up can be bit drab when you don't have a to select a talent.

 

Opening inventory/character sheet/level up screen all have noticeable delay. I had does before too, but it appear to be longer now. On the other side, loading screen seems to take less time for once. I guess we can't have everything.

 

I haven't tried combat yet.

[MoonWolf]

So firsts impressions from a few bite-sized bits of playing

 

Something must have changed about either my characters or the stats of the enemies because Path of the Damned just became hell to play. Going to look more into this later. So far I have not made it past the beetles on Path of the Damned.

 

Overhauled talents, talents taken more frequently and more talents to play with. Great.

Current talent UI is awkward for it though. Add some organization, categorize stuff.

 

Skillpoints tied to talents. Not sold on this one at all. It turns everything into a double choice and not in a good way, and that has been mentioned and debated above in this thread so I won't reiterate it.

 

However I have some other points to add to it. This step has reintroduced some horrible things that exist in tabletop DnD games with feats. Where feats that do drastically different things compete with each other.

 

Small example Linguistics is a feat that lets you learn a bunch more languages, cool, neat, flavorful, useful at least on the face of it. But it competes with feats like Weapon Focus which improves your hit bonus by 1. The second is way more boring. And also much much more useful. And no amount of additional languages of linguistics will fix that. Because the two feats are not operating in the same part of the game. And dnd, like it or not. Features a whole lot more combat than it features needing to know esoteric languages.

 

And the same thing has now been created in PoE. Lore Keeper ( but also the other +4 skill talents ) sound great, I get 4 whole points of lore, that is a lot of points of lore. Except. It competes with Weapon focus or Intense Flames. They are not even part of the same pillar of the game. There is no competition here, its a choice I don't even consider.

 

I'm no game designer but if I wanted to keep the same Idea of tying skill progression to talents in this way then I'd divide talent choices in two. Remove the skill points from direct combat related talents. Separate out talents like Lore Keeper, Fast Runner, Deep Focus into Utility Talents. Then let players pick at appropriate times a talent from those categories.

[Skie Nightfall]

I like the idea of the new skill point system and tying it to talents, though I do understand all the points made against it mentioned above. I guess it would need more work.

I actually like MoonWolf's idea of dividing utility and combat oriented talents.

 

Wish I had more time to play >.<

[Doppelschwert]

Not being pigeonholed into picking certain builds to be good at certain skills is a complete 180 of what the whole character system was supposed to be about. I have to say I am very surprised by the turn around, and I don't like it. I don't want to be forced to pick certain talents to get the skills I want. So I am just playing how I normally do and ignoring skills, because I'm just doing testing at the moment anyway.

 

I almost never comment when I agree with you and only pick out the things where my opinion differs, but this time I want to emphasize just how true this is.

 

Due to timezones and slow internet, I'm only downloading the new patch at the moment, but tying skills to talents is one of the worst changes I can imagine. Granted, there is still the philosophy of not choosing between combat and non-combat skills as you can only choose both, but the dependence shown in this thread is something I really don't like. At the very least, I think its stupid to tie skills to the background, as this really takes incentive away from roleplaying if you want to be good at stuff.

I don't consider myself a powergamer as I'm too lazy to do all the maths involved and like to have some consistent character concept for role playing, but I do care for optimizing stuff I want to do a lot in the game (even if it is worse than alternatives). I wouldn't care if it was just stuff that I apply like mechanics, but getting locked out of dialogue because you want to have a specific fighting style sucks big time.

[PrimeHydra]

Love that we have something to read while waiting for areas to load. And that I can play a ranger with a bear companion again.  But the bear is still very small! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE BEARS

[Skie Nightfall]

It would be nice if priests/druids would have a place to view and read about spells quietly, like the mages have the grimoire screen

[Sensuki]

However I have some other points to add to it. This step has reintroduced some horrible things that exist in tabletop DnD games with feats. Where feats that do drastically different things compete with each other.

This. I am very surprised by this choice, almost seems like a curve ball from Josh Sawyer that seems a bit at odds with his design style / ethos IMO. I thought this was the exact type of stuff he wanted to avoid.

 

I also noticed that Obsidian has added in recommended attributes ... this seems strange to me because sometimes the Recommended attributes are IMO not great/not quite accurate, and kind of seems like an admittance of failure to achieve the design goals of "All attributes are useful for every class" and "No dump stats". At least they got the Paladin one right - INTELLECT HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ... yeah no shizer, and along with Chanters and maybe Fighters, it's about the only class worth taking it on.

Edited October 25, 2014 by Sensuki

[Seari]

How are all attributes not in some way useful to every class atm?

[YunikoYokai5]

My first impressions are as followed:

 

Lovely new features but they seem to have broken a lot of older stuff. And it just seems bugger than last time.

 

I've had conversations with key characters (the farmer for 'Farmer's Plight' and Aelys' 'father') where part of the conversation says *missing string* so I missed some key bits (thankfully I knew what they were saying roughly). That didn't happen last patch. I've also gone into shops and none of the items have the names beside them (eg, Grappling hook etc). Happened in the blacksmith and the Inn. Once I entered the underground temple I was stuck if I didn't leave immediately because I was stuck in combat. A ton of little things, really. 

 

Also, have they altered the difficulty at all? I had to change the difficulty down to easy to try and beat one fight only to be defeated as if it didn't recognise that I had changed the difficulty setting. They still killed me. Although, they might just be me being a horrible player who is terrible at strategy. 

 

I also don't like how they combined skill points with abilities. I'm not sure if this is what they normally do in RPGs but maybe I want to have this ability but put my skill points into this instead. Also, images of the abilities might help rather than generic pictures. I struggled to remember what ability I really wanted because I couldn't remember the name of it. I don't know, I'm not a fan. 

[Doppelschwert]

Just started up the game and leveled my character up to lvl 5.

I really like the new progression with being able to choose something every level and getting less talents overall in exchange. Turning a monk into a kensai seems easier to do now, for example.

 

Then again I agree that there are too many talents doing different stuff competing for your attention at the moment. At this rate, they might as well put the talents into categories and let you choose one from each category just in order to have some balancing between them.

 

However, the talents that give you a plain +4 bonus to skills are the worst offenders of the new skill system, as they completely disregard anything ever said about separating combat and non-combat skills before.

[Sensuki]

Yes it's harder than before. What you have witnessed is some "doubling and halving". The difficulty took a nose dive in the last patch and you could basically walk around killing mobs with auto attack. Now the difficulty has been ramped up quite significantly in this version and coming from how easy the last version was, it seems like a large difference.

I actually had to cast spells against beetles ... haven't had to do that since v278. Managed to only beat Medreth's group once with a starting character & starting party off the bat now too (Fighter, I think?). Various tries with other classes have all resulted in failure, BB Fighter dies in about 6 seconds from focus fire, Priest can keep him alive with a heal as the first action, but he still dies shortly afterwards. Can't dish out enough damage to take them down (on Hard). 

 

I'll bet a Druid does it easily though.

 

However, the talents that give you a plain +4 bonus to skills are the worst offenders of the new skill system, as they completely disregard anything ever said about separating combat and non-combat skills before.

Yeapppp lol

Edited October 25, 2014 by Sensuki

[YunikoYokai5]

Ah, that explains why 2 stone beetles nearly killed me. I don't know if this is a 'normal' difficulty level for other RPGs but for someone like me (who is still very new to these style of games) it is a bit off-putting. I tried to beat Meredith (since I don't have the skills to deceive him) 3 times and one of those times was on easy. He still beat me. I'm wondering if all the quests have been ramped up to the point even on easy I will struggle, if not fail, to progress at all. I'm not good with strategy, one reason why I never play RTSs! XD

[Sensuki]

Well combat is still too fast. A level 5 Fighter cannot die in 6 seconds in Icewind Dale, no matter what enemy you are up against.

[YunikoYokai5]

Don't get me started on characters dying quickly. Christ, 3 seconds and my rogue is a pile on the ground. Even my Paladin struggles to survive more than 10 seconds of actual (non-paused) combat if I don't have my priest constantly healing stamina. My Wizard usually is the last one standing purely because he's always in the back! Poor Wilbur...

[Falkon Swiftblade]

can anyone share screenshots of the new loading, or anyone doing a quick video of this build? It sounds like the changes are a big.