How to fix combat? It's still the big offender in the BB.

[IndiraLightfoot]

After 333 was released, most things are coming together quite decently, but there is one thing that does not simply fly: combat and combat feedback.

 

PrimeJunta just did a great sum-up of how I feel about it:

 

 

 

The combat however isn't progressing as fast as I'd like. Despite the individual improvements to the combat UI the overall experience hasn't jelled. It's doesn't "feel" any better than in 278; it's still chaotic and confusing, and it's hard to tell what you did wrong when you get your ass handed to you. That's a bit disappointing since they have had a while to iterate on it by now. I think the main problems right now are with pathfinding (still!), movement speed (still!), and numbers balance. The balance also appears to swing wildly from buld to build; 278 was pretty hard, 301 was easy, 333 is very hard. Keep banging on at that though, you will get there... but this part does need attention.

 

 

I'm afraid, OE ain't allowed any shortcuts and quick fixes on this one. They really need to make party-based combat fun, intuitive and challenging for all the right reasons, and not the wrong ones (too fast, too black hole-y, imploding, chaotic, and nonsensical).

 

If you don't pause, or use autopause often enough, and just let it all rip, then a fighter will go down in 6 seconds on Hard, IIRC what Sensuki wrote on this issue.

 

How can it become PoE's strength, instead of its apparent weakness?

 

Discuss!

Edited October 26, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Quetzalcoatl]

Automatically toggle every character/enemy to walk speed as soon as combat initiates.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Quetzalcoatl

[Seari]

Just decrease the movement speed, probably the worst offender. Removing the engagement mechanic altogether might be needed as well, but not sure on that one.

[Sensuki]

Lots of tweaking, and the removal of Melee Engagement.

I have some broad ideas, and some concentrated ideas - but I'd rather take the time to investigate them first. Unfortunately Matt516 has been pretty busy and hasn't had time to update his DPSCalc Spreadsheet with the new info.

Here are some of the general problems:

• Party members still have AI that cancels your actions - I think it's related to engagement
• Player controlled units do not have IE style auto-attack clauses
• All monsters have a faster movement speed than the party.
• Movement speed in combat is too fast
• Pathfinding is a nightmare
• Action speed *might* be too fast in some cases, too slow in others
• Per-hit damage is ridiculously high - party members can die in a single hit.
• Spell FX is way too over the top, what do I have to do to get RTS style spell FX design ?
• Enemy AI Targeting needs more development
• Melee Engagement flat out sucks donkey balls and restricts tactical movement in combat

There's a HUGE emphasis on the combat opening in v333, the fight is usually decided in the first few seconds

• Did you miss or graze with your opening AoE Attack or disable?
• Did the Rogue score a miss or graze with his opening Crippling Strike?
• Did the enemy score a 150 damage critical on your Fighter on the first hit?
• Did your issued commands to your party members get cancelled due to Engagement?

In the current build, if any of these things happen, you're probably going to lose the the fight against Medreth's group, a larger group of beetles, or one of the harder spider groups on Hard. You can abuse chokepointing to win both of the party fights by using the Dyrford Bridge, and the badly outlined navmesh at the Dyrford Crossing Ridge, or if you made a certain PC (Fighter, Druid, Cipher?) that has a bit of crowd control, it is more manageable with just the stock BB party.

I think the DT system (well, the Armor system in general) is causing some of the issues with the numbers. Due to the fact that starting armor alone scales DT to 12, per-hit damage has to be very high to compensate and takes the designers outside their familiar design territory (D&D numbers). The balancing appears to be random, and by trial and error, rather than some pre-defined mathematics.

I would like to work with Matt516 further on the numbers when he has time, and I would also like to do some combat comparisons to some of the Infinity Engine fights and explore what the differences are. One issue I can see is that higher active ability use is required in PE at the moment, and Priests and Wizards still have D&D style spell numbers per day - currently this doesn't scale very well for the Adventuring Day, you'll be out of spells after a few encounters just like Baldur's Gate 1.

 

edit:

 

I also think that the Attack Resolution system in Pillars of Eternity is more extreme than the IE games system when you hit often. In the IE games (assuming you optimally built characters), it was common for your warrior classes to have a good THAC0 (or BAB) and be able to hit fairly often, and when you didn't you just missed a bit more often.

 

In the IE games, you score critical hits very occasionally, an optimized THAC0 has you dealing regular damage numbers pretty consistently. In Pillars of Eternity, when your accuracy is higher than the enemy defense, your damage becomes insane due to scoring Critical Hits more often. I find the Pillars of Eternity system to be waaaaaaaaaay more swingy than the IE games. It wasn't as big of a deal in the previous patches, but now that it's harder - grazes and misses are a BIG DEAL, if you miss or graze on anything you are royally screwed.

 

In PE if your Fireball attack rolls are bad, you just wasted your spell, essentially. It was impossible to waste a Fireball in BG1, IWD or IWD2. In BG2 you could waste it on Mages with protection or enemies that were immune to fire, but it worked on everything else.

 

Edited October 26, 2014 by Sensuki

[Namutree]

Lots of tweaking, and the removal of Melee Engagement.

 

I have some broad ideas, and some concentrated ideas - but I'd rather take the time to investigate them first. Unfortunately Matt516 has been pretty busy and hasn't had time to update his DPSCalc Spreadsheet with the new info.

 

Here are some of the general problems:

• Party members still have AI that cancels your actions - I think it's related to engagement
• Player controlled units do not have IE style auto-attack clauses
• All monsters have a faster movement speed than the party.
• Movement speed in combat is too fast
• Pathfinding is a nightmare
• Action speed *might* be too fast in some cases, too slow in others
• Per-hit damage is ridiculously high - party members can die in a single hit.
• Spell FX is way too over the top, what do I have to do to get RTS style spell FX design ?
• Enemy AI Targeting needs more development
• Melee Engagement flat out sucks donkey balls and restricts tactical movement in combat

There's a HUGE emphasis on the combat opening in v333, the fight is usually decided in the first few seconds

• Did you miss or graze with your opening AoE Attack or disable?
• Did the Rogue score a miss or graze with his opening Crippling Strike?
• Did the enemy score a 150 damage critical on your Fighter on the first hit?
• Did your issued commands to your party members get cancelled due to Engagement?

In the current build, if any of these things happen, you're probably going to lose the the fight against Medreth's group, a larger group of beetles, or one of the harder spider groups on Hard. You can abuse chokepointing to win both of the party fights by using the Dyrford Bridge, and the badly outlined navmesh at the Dyrford Crossing Ridge, or if you made a certain PC (Fighter, Druid, Cipher?) that has a bit of crowd control, it is more manageable with just the stock BB party.

 

I think the DT system (well, the Armor system in general) is causing some of the issues with the numbers. Due to the fact that starting armor alone scales DT to 12, per-hit damage has to be very high to compensate and takes the designers outside their familiar design territory (D&D numbers). The balancing appears to be random, and by trial and error, rather than some pre-defined mathematics.

 

I would like to work with Matt516 further on the numbers when he has time, and I would also like to do some combat comparisons to some of the Infinity Engine fights and explore what the differences are. One issue I can see is that higher active ability use is required in PE at the moment, and Priests and Wizards still have D&D style spell numbers per day - currently this doesn't scale very well for the Adventuring Day, you'll be out of spells after a few encounters just like Baldur's Gate 1.

 

edit:

 

I also think that the Attack Resolution system in Pillars of Eternity is more extreme than the IE games system when you hit often. In the IE games (assuming you optimally built characters), it was common for your warrior classes to have a good THAC0 (or BAB) and be able to hit fairly often, and when you didn't you just missed a bit more often.

 

In the IE games, you score critical hits very occasionally, an optimized THAC0 has you dealing regular damage numbers pretty consistently. In Pillars of Eternity, when your accuracy is higher than the enemy defense, your damage becomes insane due to scoring Critical Hits more often. I find the Pillars of Eternity system to be waaaaaaaaaay more swingy than the IE games. It wasn't as big of a deal in the previous patches, but now that it's harder - grazes and misses are a BIG DEAL, if you miss or graze on anything you are royally screwed.

 

In PE if your Fireball attack rolls are bad, you just wasted your spell, essentially. It was impossible to waste a Fireball in BG1, IWD or IWD2. In BG2 you could waste it on Mages with protection or enemies that were immune to fire, but it worked on everything else.

 

 

This.

[aeonsim]

For starters I agree the movement speed of enemies needs to be reduced.

 

Some other things that would also be useful are:

Show the current action of a party member on their picture, the floating bar is too small and get's hard to see in a messy melee.

Make individuals automatically attack there previous target once they've completed a special action, as doesn't always work at the moment.

Balance buffs to allow them to last longer, precasting for the most useful would be nice though not essential.

Allow party members to partly clip when moving (ie pass through 30-40% of the selection ring), this would help with path finding a lot!

[Zed]

Instead of controlling a party of Forrest Gumps, maybe they could all walk, all the time, by default.

~Like in a certain series of games~

[Sensuki]

I have to admit I do sorely miss pre-buffing haha, combat is over before I've had the chance to cast 3 Priest spells usually.

[Monte Carlo]

I agree with y'all.

 

IE combat might not have been 'gamist' enough, but it was fun.

 

This isn't.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

You can abuse chokepointing to win both of the party fights by using the Dyrford Bridge, and the badly outlined navmesh at the Dyrford Crossing Ridge, or if you made a certain PC (Fighter, Druid, Cipher?) that has a bit of crowd control, it is more manageable with just the stock BB party.

 

It can lead to resorting to exploits, abusing the stealth mechanic and setting up choke points. Dyrford Crossing with the small rock passageway over the river before you get to the statue is a good choke point and you can have BB Fighter run back while the beetles chase him. Same with the Spider Queen as she's too big to get around the other spiders and she sits there waiting for the other two in front of her to die. First screen shot is in stealth mode to get their locations (admittedly for the maps I were doing). Second screen shot shows my Wizard just threw a fireball at the Spider Queen and she can't do anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sensuki]

That won't work on Hard difficulty, there's way more spiders - but the Queen still gets stuck at the back. 

Edited October 26, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

One thing they could do to make attack resolutions less extreme is normalize miss and crits to

 

natural roll 96-100 = crit
natural roll 01-05 = miss

 

Everything else is either hits or grazes.

 

And then have spells, abilities, items and such that alter the natural ranges - like the "Keen" property. A blur spell could raise the miss % etc

 

Because critting on every second hit is extremely f'ed up - as we found in v301.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

@Sensuki I strongly disagree with you about melee engagement. The one thing I hated about IE combat is the way toons could just scoot past each other with impunity. To make for interesting combat challenges the maps had to be really contrived, with choke points designed to be plugged by two toons shoulder-to-shoulder. Restricting movement is the point. 

 

I.e. if they do remove melee engagement, they had damn well better come up with something else that lets us control the battlefield in the same manner. 

[Sensuki]

You use crowd control spells and disables just like every other game that doesn't have some horrible incarnation of an AoO system (aka everything that isn't based off D&D 3-3.5E).

 

Are you complaining about enemies in the IE games getting past your frontline, or the opposite?

 

Besides if you're fighting in a wide open space, there shouldn't be anything to restrict your movement.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

Both. (In all honesty though, primarily enemies getting past my frontline. If I line up three characters, it should not be possible to just run through them.)

 

The entire point of having a front line is that it stops enemies from getting to you back line. If there's no mechanism in place to let it do that, a big dimension of tactics is gone. Sure, this was the case in all the IE games and their DnD successors, but it's not the case in any RTS game worthy of the name, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible to make it work in P:E.

 

AoO's were an attempt at addressing this, but not very successful in a RT game (although they worked well in ToEE). There's got to be a better way. I would start by allowing a zone within which you can move while being engaged so that e.g. you can reposition yourself. Two combatants circling one another.

Edited October 26, 2014 by PrimeJunta

[Sensuki]

No they aren't. They're a leftover from turn-based brought across into realtime, when you can react to enemies moving up to you in real time.

 

In the IE games, frontlines were perfectly effective for player characters because you can control the units. Enemy AI was designed so that you could ~90% of the time, force enemies to attack your front line. If an enemy was targeting your backline, all you had to do was move a melee character to incercept, and block the path of the enemy, and by that I do not mean issue an auto attack and let them walk past you, but actually physically block the path of the enemy. This would cause them to change their AI targeting to attack you. And for the other 10% you can micro.

However, Enemy AI is not sophisticated enough in the IE games to do this. I have played some RTS games where enemies do block you to protect units (usually games with hero units) - but that is unavoidable and unrealistic for Pillars of Eternity. I do not enjoy MMO Aggro mechanics, and every single implementation of an Attack of Opportunity system, including the Pillars of Eternity one, is horrible.

I believe this could be improved by ramping up the crowd control AI for enemies, have enemies dump CC spells on top of player units and whatnot. Interesting encounters with tactical challenges can be created through encounter design and creature placement. It's not my fault that the encounter design in PE is very simplistic, and I don't want to have to suffer a horrible aggro mechanic system or an AoO system because of it.

 

Here is the final episode of my Let's Play Icewind Dale. You will notice how I use tactical retreating, unit blocking and micromanagement to control Belhifet so that he does not kill any of my characters - that is textbook Infinity Engine gameplay.

 

Edited October 26, 2014 by Sensuki

[Starwars]

I understand the reasoning behind getting rid of pre-buffing but I have to admit that I kinda miss it also, at least to an extent. I also find the combat situations go past so quickly that there's barely enough time to do any buffing once you're actually in combat. Perhaps there could be some sort of compromise there but I'm not sure what it would be.

 

I think that's one point I find interesting though. We have a wealth of things to use in our arsenal but since combat goes so quickly, there's a load of stuff I simply don't use. Perhaps that's just me being inflexible though.

 

Aside from that, for me, a lot of the problem is just... again, everything feels chaotic and messy still. It's *so* easy to lose focus on what the hell is happening in this game during combat. The visual clarity is still the number one bandit for me in regards to the combat system.

[Gorionsson]

I just can't help thinking that even a simple taunt mechanic would be better.

Then add a few select enemies that can ignore said mechanic, to keep it tactically interesting.

Players also need better crowd control. (spells preferably). 

 

Concerning combat in general, the speed and overall feel of it is still terrible in the latest patch.

I'm starting to worry that this will be the case even in the final product.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Gorionsson

[Cubiq]

I believe this could be improved by ramping up the crowd control AI for enemies, have enemies dump CC spells on top of player units and whatnot. Interesting encounters with tactical challenges can be created through encounter design and creature placement. It's not my fault that the encounter design in PE is very simplistic, and I don't want to have to suffer a horrible aggro mechanic system or an AoO system because of it.

Don't worry this already happens, except you don't actually notice because your characters are already standing still, because of the engagement mechanic.

(i managed to get some videos with your mod where i got cced, couldn't run away and got killed.)

[PrimeJunta]

No they aren't. They're a leftover from turn-based brought across into realtime, when you can react to enemies moving up to you in real time.

Perhaps. Then P:E needs a mechanism better suited for RT for the purpose.

 

In the IE games, frontlines were perfectly effective for player characters because you can control the units. Enemy AI was designed so that you could ~90% of the time, force enemies to attack your front line. If an enemy was targeting your backline, all you had to do was move a melee character to incercept, and block the path of the enemy, and by that I do not mean issue an auto attack and let them walk past you, but actually physically block the path of the enemy. This would cause them to change their AI targeting to attack you. And for the other 10% you can micro.

No they were not. If they were, the IWD maps wouldn't be designed with all those narrow doorways that were the only thing that put any structure into the encounters.

 

Again: if you put two fighters side by side both within striking distance of the gap, enemies should not be able to just run through it. A heavy's role is to block movement. You should not need to micromanage this. "Forcing the enemy AI to attack your front line" is a lousy way of doing it. Why not add aggro mechanics while you're at it, and go full WoW?

 

Sure, there were lots of other tools you could use to win battles, but IMO it is no too much to ask that a game with tactical combat has a decent implementation of the most basic element of combat tactics, controlling battlefield space by the positioning of your units.

[Quantics]

To me the most glaring issue about combat is the completely OTT visual effects. 

 

I was in the inn today trying to pick a fight with everyone. 

 

Then this happened:

 

 

 

 

 

I think it's supposed to be some kind of spider web. It's completely opaque and follows your characters around (and before you ask, no this is not my own sloppy MS paint job )

 

Not only is this completely unappealing visually (ahem, to say the least), it masks absolutely everything around it and makes it impossible to tell what's going on in combat. 

 

EDIT: Actually, looking at it this image, there are so many things that are wrong visually. For instance look at the two (or is it more?? I can't tell) enemies that are still inside the room on the left side :

• It's impossible to tell them apart from the decor, it looks like they're inside the walls or something.
• You can't really tell where the doorframe is
• All the textures around them are semi-transparent. Look at the wall with the square painting on it. The brick wall texture blends into the painting.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Quantics

[Gorionsson]

To me the most glaring issue about combat is the completely OTT visual effects. 

 

I was in the inn today trying to pick a fight with everyone. 

 

Then this happened:

 

 

 

 

 

I think it's supposed to be some kind of spider web. It's completely opaque and follows your characters around (and before you ask, no this is not my own sloppy MS paint job )

 

Not only is this completely unappealing visually (ahem, to say the least), it masks absolutely everything around it and makes it impossible to tell what's going on in combat. 

 

EDIT: Actually, looking at it this image, there are so many things that are wrong visually. For instance look at the two (or is it more?? I can't tell) enemies that are still inside the room on the left side :

• It's impossible to tell them apart from the decor, it looks like they're inside the walls or something.
• You can't really tell where the doorframe is
• All the textures around them are semi-transparent. Look at the wall with the square painting on it. The brick wall texture blends into the painting.

 

WTF?  Ha ha. That looks just terrible.....

I remember one of the most popular mods for Obsidians Nwn2 was the one that killed the over the top spell gfx.

Edited October 26, 2014 by Gorionsson

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Wait until you get to the four adventurers at the Dragon egg. That blue AoE they use still hasn't been fixed and it's arguably worse.

[Sensuki]

No they were not.

Fully disagree. You can completely manipulate the melee enemy AI in the IE games, in any game - BG1, BG2, IWD, IWD2 - they all have the same or very similar enemy targeting clauses. Even in open enough spaces, you can force most enemies to stop targeting their current target through micromanagement. Not all enemies, but most enemies, and the ones that you can't, you can still run the character they are targeting around in circles while the rest of your party hammers on them.

 

Again: if you put two fighters side by side both within striking distance of the gap, enemies should not be able to just run through it. A heavy's role is to block movement. You should not need to micromanage this. "Forcing the enemy AI to attack your front line" is a lousy way of doing it. Why not add aggro mechanics while you're at it, and go full WoW?

WHAAAT? It actually requires tactical unit movement and isn't a snooze stand still fest. Automation of such things is lousy, in my opinion. Like in Warcraft 3, if you wanted to stop a Huntress from kiting your hero, you had to use a unit to block it - it's basic freaking RTS gameplay.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIT4jxAh32c

 

Tactical Unit Movement.

 

**** automation.

[Namutree]

I think the problem was in the design stage. I feel that Obsidian made sure playing every class is fun on their own and I think they achieved that all right. But I get a feeling after designing the classes they just throwed them to us and said "go play".

I don't see or feel anything in the game that would indicate there were any design or mechanics choices to have a party based combat.

Right now It feels like playing an MMO that forces you to fully control more than one character.

Just check how the game plays with one character, it's actually decent in combat feel and responsiveness but introduce a couple of more chars and it's a clusterf**k everyone is complaining about.

 

And for real Sensuki it's supposed to be RPG tactical game not RTS. I like micro in Starcraft, but not in my RPG.

That type of gameplay was present in the IE games.