Thoughts from a casual gamer

[Sensuki]

As a person that has been playing IWDEE for the last week I can confirm that pathfinding is no better when it matters (battles indoors). Characters still don't know how to pass anything in formation without bumping into each other and trying to go back and find alternate routes, some characters still decide to go a different way from the rest that would be good if there was not a river blocking that way :D and characters still get stuck on each other when I select two or more and tell them to attack same target in melee. Not to mention ranged characters being just a bit out of range of their target and blocked by allies in small area and not being able to squeeze through..

 

These are all problems that I don't want to see in PoE.

Pillars of Eternity's pathfinding in combat is much worse than the Infinity Engine games IMO, especially with the ring-around-the-rosey stuff. In tight spaces in PE, units get stuck because they are too big and the pathfinding code doesn't facilitate movement through spaces smaller than the character's selection circle.

 

I've never really had a problem with units getting stuck in the IE games, although it requires a little bit of manual control sometimes to get it right. Sometimes units will get stuck on the edge of another unit and just stand there, and you just have to give them a little bit of help, because for some reason they can't see that there's free space. Obviously it's not as good as Starcraft's pathfinding

 

The good thing about the IE game combat is you can MOVE IN MELEE, and if there's not enough room, you can shuffle your units to the left and right to facilitate the room for another of your melee units You can't do that in PE without suffering disengagement attacks. Another reason why the Engagement system is retarded.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Shevek]

I have no problem with pathfinding in Eternity during combat. Out of combat, characters sometimes get stuck and stop or two characters run into eachother and do a funny shuffle across the screen.

 

As a side note, it must be the difficulty because I dont have that many issues with engagement attacks on normal.

 

You might wanna try dialing the difficulty down seeing how the game plays on normal for you.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Shevek

[Sensuki]

No, I am testing for the difficulty that I will play the game at. The problems exist when there are many enemies in melee at once. If you only aggro one unit at a time like you did in your video, then there's not a problem.
 
Pathfinding in games generally uses A* which is an extension of Dijkstra's Algorithm. The problem with pathfinding in combat in PE is that there are never automatic re-checks for first shortest path, once a unit determines their target there is never correction of the best path, if you run around a bend, that unit will follow you all the way around the bend, rather than determining that the shortest way to you is to go the other direction. Units in the IE games had way better auto correction than that. The game only seems to recheck the shortest path on certain conditions.

 

Josh has repeatedly stated that they are designing the game for Hard difficulty at a base. Hard is the default design level difficulty and then they tune the game down for normal and easy and up for Path of the Damned rather than the other way around. There are multiple quotes here and on SA where he says that. This is because it's apparently easier to dial stuff down than it is to dial them up (which often ends badly).

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Mr. Magniloquent]

@ Nipsen

 

Keep in mind that disengagement attacks currently posses an accuracy bonus, damage bonus, operate without a recovery time, and ignore weapon reach. Essentially, engagement attacks function entirely outside of all normal combat mechanisms. If disengagement attacks were to respect weapon reach, possess a recovery time, have their damage bonus removed, and an accuracy penalty (more reasonable) than a bonus, do you really think disengagement would be broken or abusive?

[Sensuki]

possess a recovery time

 

Yes. If they overrided your actions, you could trigger them to cancel unit actions such as spells, and they would also trigger and cancel your own actions if enemies triggered them (which would be annoying). If they did not override your actions, you could just move in the middle of a unit animation and avoid them completely

 

That's why they're independent of it in the first place.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Doppelschwert]

Disengagement attacks might as well just have their own separate recovery time per enemy (otherwise, if you want to engage more than one enemy, you could just draw all the attacks on one guy and let the others walk away freely) and overriding your actions is not a problem.

However, I think that having a recovery time AND nerfing the attacks makes them pretty useless, so I'd argue that one should either tone down the damage and accuracy bonus OR implement a recovery time.

 

Would you mind sharing your conversation with josh with us sensuki?

[Cubiq]

I really don't think nerfing disengagement attacks will work very well, because you can only really balance it to 1 difficulty.

If you balance it on normal then it's not even going to work on path of the damned and vice versa.

Probably not even going to work on hard since you will need to disengage from more enemies.

I would rather they fix the active abilities so that they are more reactional and reliable.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Cubiq

[Shevek]

No, I am testing for the difficulty that I will play the game at. The problems exist when there are many enemies in melee at once. If you only aggro one unit at a time like you did in your video, then there's not a problem.

 

Its impossible to agro just one unit at a time for the entire beta - even on normal. The druid things in east Dyrford Crossing come at you in a large group, as do the spiders in the cave, etc. That being said, I am not experiencing massive difficulties. One guy (at worst two) may go down when stuff is REALLY hairy, but they get right back up at the end of combat and you keep on trucking. No biggie.

 

Also, they may be tuning combat at Hard, again, for a well geared party. So, you are kinda stuck at this position where, ya, you could test out hard but if you want to test a variety of weapons, then you have to use non-fine ones and you lose of on the 25% bonus to dmg. That means you have to build for mostly one handers and a single two hander (the stuff the BB characters are holding) to be somewhat decently equipped to try hard level difficulty. I dunno, seems like a pretty skewed test.

 

It might be nice if we requested that they load up the BB characters inventory with fine weapons for the next version (pikes, poleaxes, flails, etc). We can use those weapons or even sell a bunch of them and remake the party from scratch. That open up the testing to really try out a variety of weapons and varying party combinations. That might give a different impression of hard difficulty.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Shevek

[Sensuki]

Would you mind sharing your conversation with josh with us sensuki?

I have already.

 

All or most of the replies are in here

 

If not they're here

 

separate recovery time per enemy

 

That would be a programming and UI nightmare.

 

Also, they may be tuning combat at Hard, again, for a well geared party. So, you are kinda stuck at this position where, ya, you could test out hard but if you want to test a variety of weapons, then you have to use non-fine ones and you lose of on the 25% bonus to dmg. That means you have to build for mostly one handers and a single two hander (the stuff the BB characters are holding) to be somewhat decently equipped to try hard level difficulty. I dunno, seems like a pretty skewed test.

I'm not complaining about the difficulty though. I can add any item from the game I want to. I've rolled through with a party of level 12 characters before. I am complaining about the pathfinding.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[IndiraLightfoot]

Josh's answer:

 

"Hi, Sensuki. Right now I'm trying to focus most of my efforts internally on bugfixing and getting team feedback. That isn't to say that we're not doing any tuning, but we're in a stage right now where I'm trying to temporarily limit outside input. At a high level, my feedback would be that I don't think it would be good to switch to "natural die roll only" for crits for a few reasons. First, it creates a separate type of resolution for attacks, one based on modified die roll and one based on natural die roll. Second, it means that "true" crits and misses are things that the player achieves purely through random chance instead of by pushing the odds in their favor. That's the AD&D style, but I never thought that resolution model was rewarding because it never happened based on me doing something other than rolling the die.

 

 

That said, I could see a scenario where crits occur on higher rolls, e.g. 105+, meaning you need more significant Accuracy advantage to even have a chance of pulling them off. Even so, I don't personally think that the Crit system in place causes serious problems. While +50% damage or duration is not trivial, it's also not insanely powerful. In some cases, the Crit exacerbates what is an extant balance problem like a Paralyzed effect with a base 20s duration, which is nuts. In that case, the base effect needs to be modified.

 

DT can be harder to balance than DR and DT + DR can be even harder, but DR alone has a lot of problems. First, DR-reliant systems cause a huge inflation of damage values as the DR values start to rise and the characters' HP are also rising. Unless you tightly control DR escalation (a problem in its own right) eventually you wind up with armor absorbing 80%+ of incoming damage on massive hits against characters with enormous amounts of HP. In Fallout and F2, DR was the primary component of high end armor and it led to plinking back and forth until someone was hit with an armor-bypassing x3 crit to completely annihilate the target. With DR, you also eventually "run out of runway" in terms of equipment progression. You have 100 points to play with, that's it. Unless the progression is really tightly constrained (in which case you won't notice much change), you will eventually top out where the equipment can go.

 

Though it's more difficult to balance DT than DR, it's not incredibly hard and in the BB areas I really haven't done much tuning at all. People have moved around creatures and whatnot but I haven't been trying to create the perfectly balanced area or anything. There's another element that can help alleviate some of the pain of low damage vs. a particular DT type, which is to raise Min Dam Through DT to 20%. It's currently 10%, which is half of what it was in F:NV.

 

I've talked to QA about Dexterity and they completely disagree with it being a dump stat. Its effects are harder to observe but speed is always valuable.

Armored Grace is not the same as an 18 Dexterity because Armored Grace affects Recovery Time, not base speed. Dexterity actually directly affects base speed, which means in turn it affects Recovery Time because RT is derived from the time to perform an action. Weapon Focus grants the same Accuracy bonus as 20 Per to one class of weapons and has no effect on Reflexes. It also stacks, so I don't really see how that creates a problem.

 

I could see bonus Accuracy from Per going from +1 to +2 and Dam/Heal from +2 to +3, but from +1 to +3 is enormously influential. An 18 would be +21, greater than what you'd get from an 18 on an attack stat in A/D&D (already too high, IMO).

 

QA also disagrees with you on Intellect, though we're doubling the AoE effect that it has because it was never actually supposed to be 3%, but 5%. After fooling around a bit, 6% seems a bit better. It has a large influence on AoE. While you could argue that classes don't necessarily need huge AoEs for their attacks/spells, watching them dramatically shrink is actually a real problem that they have to deal with.

 

Interrupts and Concentration need to be communicated better on equipment/attacks and the character sheets since people still don't really make the connection that the basic offensive component comes from the attack."

[Shevek]

Hell, how do you add items to your game?

[Sensuki]

They took the ability to do it out in the last patch, but I made a mod that adds it back and unlocks the level cap. Also heaps of other things as well. Bester and mutonizer have also made mods that do various minor things. I don't use mods to report bugs though.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Josh's answer:

The conversation was longer than that, there were 3 or so replies and they may be of interest to some people. He had some pretty good answers for some of my concerns (but not all). Either way I won't be following up on anything in that thread for the moment.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[IndiraLightfoot]

At the very least, any disengagement attacks should be plain to see and hear for the player. We can't have invisible attacks that only show up in the combat log.

[Shevek]

I really don't think nerfing disengagement attacks will work very well, because you can only really balance it to 1 difficulty.

If you balance it on normal then it's not even going to work on path of the damned and vice versa.

Probably not even going to work on hard since you will need to disengage from more enemies.

I would rather they fix the active abilities so that they are more reactional and reliable.

I don't see that. If they reduce the dmg from disengagement by a percentage then the dmg reduction will vary with the dmg mobs do. That will work across difficulties.

 

When you need to disengage from multiple enemies, you may need to get your teammates to help out with an AoE daze, knockdown or whatever. Multiple classes have skills like that.

[Sensuki]

It should be the opposite - if you want to control combat you should use status effect abilities. Disengaging in PE is pointless because it's simply not worth it. It's far better to just deal raw damage to the enemy or heal the frontliner every single time than it is to do anything else. It is so boring.

 

That one of my and Cubiq and other people's problems with it.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Sensuki

[Cubiq]

I don't see that. If they reduce the dmg from disengagement by a percentage then the dmg reduction will vary with the dmg mobs do. That will work across difficulties.

No it won't. That would only work if mobs did more damage with each difficulty not if there are more mobs.

They do equal damage on hard and normal.

When you need to disengage from multiple enemies, you may need to get your teammates to help out with an AoE daze, knockdown or whatever. Multiple classes have skills like that.

You already need to use them and it's working like ****.

[Shevek]

Sensuki:

 

Where does one get this item adding mod?

[Shevek]

 

No it won't. That would only work if mobs did more damage with each difficulty not if there are more mobs.

They do equal damage on hard and normal.

 

1. More mobs = more dmg

2. Encounters tend to have tougher mobs at higher difficulties.

 

 

You already need to use them and it's working like ****.

 

Thats a separate issue.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Shevek

[Cubiq]

1. More mobs = more dmg

2. Encounters tend to have more dmging mobs at higher difficulties.

Not all encounters have more mobs on hard.

So you're suggesting that when more mobs attack you they deal magically less damage, and when an equal amount attack you, they deal more damage again?

Wat?

 

Thats a separate issue.

Not by a long shot.

[Shevek]

Thats not at all what I am saying. I am just saying that this quote by you...

 

I really don't think nerfing disengagement attacks will work very well, because you can only really balance it to 1 difficulty.

 

...is incorrect.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Shevek

[archangel979]

 

As a person that has been playing IWDEE for the last week I can confirm that pathfinding is no better when it matters (battles indoors). Characters still don't know how to pass anything in formation without bumping into each other and trying to go back and find alternate routes, some characters still decide to go a different way from the rest that would be good if there was not a river blocking that way :D and characters still get stuck on each other when I select two or more and tell them to attack same target in melee. Not to mention ranged characters being just a bit out of range of their target and blocked by allies in small area and not being able to squeeze through..

 

These are all problems that I don't want to see in PoE.

I've never really had a problem with units getting stuck in the IE games, although it requires a little bit of manual control sometimes to get it right. Sometimes units will get stuck on the edge of another unit and just stand there, and you just have to give them a little bit of help, because for some reason they can't see that there's free space. Obviously it's not as good as Starcraft's pathfinding

 

It is a problem because you need to pause twice to fix it or lose attacks by doing it in real time. The problems like these should be eradicated, pausing should be for tactical decisions only not helping your guys do basic stuff like getting to weapon range

 

And I was just doing Spectral Guards fights in IWD and damn every second counts and I already paused too much in those fights. And I changed my tune about not needing to pause a lot in IE games lol, I guess many fight are too easy in IE to need lots of pausing :D

Edited November 11, 2014 by archangel979

[Cubiq]

Thats not at all what I am saying. I am just saying that this quote by you...

 

I really don't think nerfing disengagement attacks will work very well, because you can only really balance it to 1 difficulty.

 

...is incorrect.

No it's true and i already pointed it out why.

You came up with the idea to nerf damage based on number of mobs, since this is somehow equal to more damage,

even though it isn't since it affects other things, like if 1 got through your front line to attack your weaker character then you would have an easier time escaping since it's only 1 enemy that's actually attacking him and you balanced the damage so you can run away from several more mobs.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Cubiq

[Shevek]

That wasnt what I was saying at all. I just want to nerf engagement dmg across the board. I think we have a bit of a miscommunication. I might have misunderstood what you were saying and you misunderstood what I was saying.

 

Perhaps you can clarify why this can only be balanced at one difficulty despite it being a percentile reduction. This is where, I think, we may be having a difficult time communicating.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Shevek

[Cubiq]

Ok i "think" i get it, but one of the clever (i use the term loosely) things that Josh was trying to do is not actually affect the damage of the mobs at all from easy-normal-hard.

Just the number of mobs to set the difficulty. Probably roleplay consistency or something.

From what i know they won't really change that.

 

 

I don't know what exactly you wish to achieve with this.

From what i can tell you're trying to create a more passive gameplay (assuming from your video), which i don't really think will help with making combat more tactical.