Sensuki vs Medreth [Youtube Series]

[Seari]

Nice flaming swords bruh, very dragon age. Any idea if it will be possible to mod spell FX?

[Sensuki]

Yeah the effect is a bit strong isn't it. I would prefer if it looked more like the IE flaming swords - a bit more toned down.

[Kjaamor]

While - or rather as - deep wounds remains overpowered, since Medreth tends to lead with Knockdown in my experience it is preferable to take him out before he gets a chance to use it.

[Sensuki]

I don't think he's as important as the Monk is, but I did read your above post and have considered trying that tactic in a future video.

 

Medreth, the Monk and the Ranger are definitely the top three characters to kill first in that group. I don't like it how the other guys don't have names though. It would feel more Baldur's Gate / etc if they were named characters.

[NegativeEdge]

Been trying this fight out on PoTD.

 

 

My Wizard after the fight. She killed everybody.

[Sensuki]

Haha, min-max that sh1t.

 

I suppose as long as your Wizard doesn't get hit she'll be pretty right. You'll run out of spells after a few encounters though.

Edited October 29, 2014 by Sensuki

[Seari]

ARE YOU HAPPY NOW OBSIDIAN?

[archangel979]

Who needs intellect wizards... pfff

[Guest 4ward]

NegativeEdge, i have to say many thanks for posting this! Great stuff! May i ask what spells you did choose at character creation and which one you found most effective in that fight and generally which spells you used. Did you take any AoE spells and if yes did the AoE size bother you?

Btw, also seeing now the record sheet i think a nice addition would be ‘your most favourite spell’ and ‘most dangerous enemy dispatched’.

 

 

 

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Yep, CON and INT are dump stats for a lot of ranged classes. My Cipher and Druid.

 

 

[Kjaamor]

I don't think he's as important as the Monk is, but I did read your above post and have considered trying that tactic in a future video.

 

Medreth, the Monk and the Ranger are definitely the top three characters to kill first in that group. I don't like it how the other guys don't have names though. It would feel more Baldur's Gate / etc if they were named characters.

 

In my experience, it's a case of who is most dangerous to your party on a practical level. As the monk is placed to immediately be tanked by a fighter with both high health and sky-high deflection, his danger is mitigated, while lonesome Medreth has an easier target which he can probably unleash hell upon.

 

In the event that the PC is also a tanky fighter, and BB Fighter is serving as off-tank on Medreth, then perhaps the monk could be first to go.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

 

Here's a video with a Hearth Orlan Chanter

 

Something strange happened here when I told my Rogue to Crippling Strike Medreth, she ended up not doing it, even though I clearly commanded her to *shrug*, so fight would have been shorter if she did.

 

Deep Wounds is still OP.

 

I noticed a lot of pausing. I know you were explaining what was going on but it highlights the problem with combat in this game. The fight started at 0.49 and finished around 3.42. There's was around 25 instances where you unpaused to battle and the majority was for 1 second. 17 times for one second and 8 times for more than one second (usually 2-3 seconds). And this is for a ~3 minute battle.

 

Time where you un-paused for combat that I quickly saw. It's a rough guide as I only watched it once.

 

 

0.49

0.52

1.06

1.14

1.15

1.18

1.33

1.35-1.39

1.40-1.41

1.52-1.55

1.59

2.19

2.27-2.31

2.36

2.38

2.40

2.43

2.46

2.54-2.56

3.02

3.04-3.07

3.13

3.26-3.29

3.33-3.35

3.37-3.42

 

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah I haven't practiced that fight. If you want to win when you're playing a class you're not super familiar with against an encounter you're not super familiar with on Hard, you have to pause a lot.

 

Some of those pauses were me just needing to pause the game to read the combat because the Spell FX, Combat HUD clusterfûck, lower camera angle, tall grass with character blending etc etc make it difficult to be able to properly understand everything that's going on.

 

Long story short : This game has problems.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hiro: Interesting and pretty dismaying stats. Yup. Combat needs a pretty big overhaul. It shouldn't be or feel this way.

 

EDIT: And I mean, come on, it's Sensuki playing - the guy with probably most hours on the BB - and still all this excessive pausing. A fight like that, by someone that seasoned, even if Medreth is supposed to be tough and our starting gear is too sucky for level 5, etc, shouldn't need any pause at all, or like 3-10 times, tops, if it was designed as a RTwP-CRPG (still speaking about a seasoned player used to RTS games).

Edited October 30, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Kjaamor]

o_O

 

...it's a RTwP game.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Not this game. It's a pause with very little real time game.

Edited October 30, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Kjaamor]

I think that's hyperbolic. The combat-based IE games left you paused a good portion of the time.

 

If there is more pausing in this game, however, it is a consequence of having the combat abilities spread over all classes rather than just the spellcasters.

 

I would hardly describe that as being as problematic as Sensuki implied, however.

[Cubiq]

I find most of my pausing mainly comes from anticipation of high damage spikes.

Since you can't run away (or use knockdowns, since they are so slow) you need to be pretty fast with that heal.

Edited October 30, 2014 by Cubiq

[prodigydancer]

Not this game. It's a pause with very little real time game.

The Attack at Nightfall Nightmare Edition.

Edited October 30, 2014 by prodigydancer

[IndiraLightfoot]

Cubiq: Add to this that you can't escape damage either in PoE, at least not in the clearcut hit or miss RNG-minigame that came with D&D CRPGs, and you certainly need to pause more here. I still think the speed needs to be lowered, less damage needs to be dealt, we need easier escapes (at least a to hit roll and some NWN2-like AoO system) and we also need more misses instead of grazes.

Edited October 30, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Sensuki]

I think that's hyperbolic. The combat-based IE games left you paused a good portion of the time.

 

If there is more pausing in this game, however, it is a consequence of having the combat abilities spread over all classes rather than just the spellcasters.

 

I would hardly describe that as being as problematic as Sensuki implied, however.

There are some fights in the Infinity Engine games where you pause a fair bit and that's mostly in Baldur's Gate 2. But even in those fights, you still pause less often than you pause in a moderate encounter such as this in Pillars of Eternity.

 

I don't play with auto-pause, or slow modes and I am trying to help test the game to get the default speed of combat with manual pausing correct. Currently the game requires you to manually pause too much. If I played that fight with the Chanter multiple times in a row, I would need to pause a bit less, yep. If I tried some different tactics (such as you suggested), I may not need to pause as much - yep. BUT the amount of pause is still ridiculously high.

 

It's a combination of things - units pretty much always scoring hits, units doing very high percentage of character endurance per hit, action speed formula being janked - very disjointed feeling compared to IE style rounds. Can't see wtf is going on in combat due to various visual and graphical issues ... etc

Edited October 30, 2014 by Sensuki

[Hiro Protagonist II]

I think that's hyperbolic. The combat-based IE games left you paused a good portion of the time.

 

If there is more pausing in this game, however, it is a consequence of having the combat abilities spread over all classes rather than just the spellcasters.

 

I would hardly describe that as being as problematic as Sensuki implied, however.

 

It's been brought up many times by a lot of people. You pause a lot in this game. And 'a lot' is an understatement. Some AoE's completely block out your party members and you have no idea where they are. Sometimes you might be able to make out the bar on top of your character but it still doesn't tell you where your characters are.

 

The adventurers at the Dragon's Egg have a blue AoE that when it hits your characters you can't see them. Seriously, and no hyperbole. I posted a screenshot some time ago and you can't see my BB Fighter or BB Rogue or the enemy in the AoE. It's just a blue AoE on the screen and it lasts for quite a long time. While the blue AoE is due to implantation, there's a lot of spell effects that make you pause and go WTF. And this blocks out important things like the engagement arrows because you need to see who is engaged with who. When you're casting spells, sometimes you can't see the enemies due to an AoE so it can be guesswork where to cast it. If I have to spend 5-10 seconds working out where my characters are, then there's a problem.

 

Oh, I just remembered. That new attack from the Crystal Eater Spider with those shards that fall from the sky. Holy ****, where did they come from. And you can't see your characters.

Edited October 30, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Starwars]

The crystal shard attack puts a hurt on me, but yeah, the real problem is indeed that... yep, I can't see my bloody characters in the middle of it all.

 

At the very least, if they're not gonna tone down the spell effects, at the *very* least, character selection circles should cut through all the effects so we can at least get a grip on where we are.

[Cubiq]

To get through the crystal shard spiders, just send your tank forward, cast the priest level 1 spell Withdraw on him and watch the AI kill himself with it.

[NegativeEdge]

NegativeEdge, i have to say many thanks for posting this! Great stuff! May i ask what spells you did choose at character creation and which one you found most effective in that fight and generally which spells you used. Did you take any AoE spells and if yes did the AoE size bother you?

Btw, also seeing now the record sheet i think a nice addition would be ‘your most favourite spell’ and ‘most dangerous enemy dispatched’.

 

Level 1 : Fan of Flames, Eldritch AIm, Minolettas missiles and Kalakoths Sunless grasp

Level 2 : Rolling Flame, Combusting wounds and Ray of Fire

Level 3 : Fireball and Minolettas bounding missiles

 

I picked Scion of Flame and Secrets of Rime as my talents as those two increase burn and freeze damage.

 

Eldritch aim is really good because it's an instant cast and gives +50 Acc, I wanted lots of resolve to get as much use out of that as possible and as it applies to spells my fireballs were coming in at 90+ Acc. On top of that I would have the priest use Dire Blessing which gives a 20% increased crit chance and if I placed the fireball correctly it would scream in and crit everybody it hit. As they were all bunched up around the fighter the small AoE wasn't a problem and honestly I had more problems not hitting the fighter as i didn't have aoe markers on.

 

I had long enough duration on Eldritch Aim to get off two fireballs and then run in to apply Sunless Grasp which can also do insane single target damage if it crits, I've had 150 off that before and then reapply Eldritch and try and deal with anything that's left. Unfortunately I didn't find much use for Rolling Flame because it is extremely likely to clip a party member and for some reason the Acc bonus form Eldritch isn't applied to Ray of Fire (bug perhaps?). Fan of flames can also potentially do a huge amount of damage but due to melee stickiness you're almost guaranteed to hit one of your own guys.

 

Obviously this was a Wizard I made just to try and dish out as much fast and accurate damage as possible at the expense of everything else so not something I would make for a PC but having said that both Int and Con are easy picks for dumppable stats imo. Smaller AoEs just aren't a huge problem and can even be a boon for offensive spellcasters and it doesn't matter how much health, endurance and deflection you have if you're not getting hit.

Edited October 30, 2014 by NegativeEdge