392 Discussion

[Sensuki]

I believe the IE games were made for D&D players, so when they were released, it wasn't a problem - and they sold very well for their time. I actually had never played D&D when I first played Baldur's Gate, and I did fine. Sure I died a fair bit, but I learned as I went. I don't believe being able to steamroll a game without dying much is very fun. Some games require you to improve your skill in the game, others require you to improve your knowledge of the rules. RPGs often have the latter rather than the former. Pillars of Eternity isn't much different, other than the fact that people need to realize the emphasis on strategy and planning over tactics (which seems to be a problem for some new players).

 

I did mean RPGs rather than all games, my bad.

 

I think Pillars of Eternity's mechanics require a lot of learning of the rules, just like the Infinity Engine games. There's also a very steep roadblock for newcomers. I remember when I first played the game I was perplexed at how fast I got TPK'd just by a beetle encounter. Everyone at Gamescom seemed to have the same reaction. Jesse Cox got himself into trouble a few times during his PE stream and generally had no idea what was going on, they had to cheat him through the prologue multiple times just so he could progress.

[archangel979]

In the original Baldur's Gate, I have never reloaded the game because I cast a spell and it didn't work. There are no encounters in the game where it is that big of a deal.

 

There's plenty of times where I've mucked up and been killed by Tarnesh or Nimbul because I failed to interrupt their Mirror Image, and then proceeded to have my PC killed by an onset of Magic Missles, but not actually cast something to no effect (Magic Resistance / Save vs Spell) and reloaded. It's not that drastic in BG1.

And I am only talking about reloading where enemy spells frack up your team.

[PrimeJunta]

BTW I finally saw that framerate slowdown. Happened in Korgrak's cave. I was fighting the spiders. I had been careless and was getting swarmed by both groups of spiders near the entrance. I had cast the L3 priest spell that buffs defenses in a wide area, then someone got knocked out. Boom, framerate dropped through the floor. As bad as PS:T with some of its spell FX.

 

I eventually recovered and beat them and the framerate picked up too, but yeah, that was ugly. I think it must be triggered by a combination of things -- lots of sprites, FX, and getting knocked out -- as I haven't noticed it with any of these things in isolation.

[Sensuki]

The FPS drop is from getting knocked out.

[PrimeJunta]

I haven't noticed it elsewhere when getting knocked out. I don't have FPS displayed on-screen though; it's quite possible it drops, just not so much it bothers me.

[Sensuki]

I have an FPS overlay on most of the time, reported many FPS issues.

[Doppelschwert]

I finally figured out how to make a custom party and played through the beta the first time. Was on normal. Encounters with humanoids were kind of fair, but animals were kind of OP, so I guess this goes back to the armor change.

I built a party without any spellcasters. Fighter/Paladin/Monk/Barbarian/Rogue/Chanter. I mostly invested in passive and modal abilities to see whether its feasible to have health as the only ressource and no priest.

I still don't really have a feeling for combat; after some levels, my rogue acquired the ability to crit every enemy in the game for 400 damage, killing them instantly. Which is kind of ironic - I killed the ogre boss in the first shot and then his bears one-shoted every party member they got a hold of as well.

I was able to dish out 900+ damage with a crossbow and some debuffs, but switched to a hunting bow of 400 damage for faster killing. Don't know if this is a bug or just because of my heavy stacking of passive abilities on accuracy and damage and crit range.

 

I saw a lot of content and talents for the first time and they really seemed nice for the most part. I often found myself not able to choose which ability to get, which is good design in my book. However, the general feats seemed kind of lackluster. For the most part I just choose to take the class related ones and then a weapon focus, weapon style and interrupting blows.

[prodigydancer]

Nothing stopped you from rest spamming or doing any of that cheese 90% of the time. Again, unless you are artificially limiting yourself, IE combat was fairly straight forward.

This passage shows that you don't understand what "artificial limiting" means in RPGs.

 

Let's start with some examples. "Ability X is overpowered, don't use it" is artificial limiting. "Class Y is godmode, don't roll it" is artificial limiting. What does "artificial" means here? It means that it's natural to assume that all abilities and classes are reasonably powerful. Without metagaming you can't know what is overpowered because at role-playing level nothing is. Imagine that a mage character is a real person who obtains a spell that proves to be devastating in combat. For simplicity's sake let's assume there's no catch (plain overpowered). Should the mage use this spell to get an edge against a dangerous enemy? Absolutely, why not? You can't reflect metagame knowlegde at RP level and that's why metagame-based limits are artificial.

 

But "don't rest every 5 minutes" is not metagame, it's common sense. You wouldn't do that IRL especially if you were in a clearly hostile environment half-expecting to be jumped upon at any moment. Doing something that is common sense from RP perspective doesn't qualify as artificial limiting in a CRPG. In fact, rest-spamming is itself a cheat based on purely metagame knowledge that the game world is static and reactive. And, well, nothing stops you from using cheats in any single-player game.

Edited January 2, 2015 by prodigydancer

[Lord Wafflebum]

I'm of a mind with Sensuki that combat isn't necessarily fun. I have fun playing with class abilities and spells in combat, but the combat itself feels like a chore even when I'm challenging myself.

 

The beta is short so when I make a character I'm not terribly committed to it, so once the appeal of a new race/class/build type wears off I haven't progressed through a meaningful story and become attached to who I've created. That won't be the case come full release.

 

In fairness, there is not a lot of encounter variety. I may be getting bored because just because there's only one strategy I use to successfully get through almost every encounter, or the encounter is so stupidly hard the only option is death.

 

That said, I think I'd be content with combat once balancing and bug fixes are done. 

[PrimeJunta]

Kiiinda. My main problem is that Slicken is such a win button. If they nerfed that, and made some foes less susceptible to it than others, it'd shake things up a quite a bit.

 

I've played through the BB a couple of times resolved not to use Slicken, and it forced me to use more variety with tactics, making the encounters more fun generally. The encounters themselves are actually pretty varied for such a small slice of the game; there are those damn beetles and spiders, of course, but there's also an adventuring party, a mini-boss plus minions, temple guards with priestly magic, spirits with some rather scary specials, and so on.

 

Still, compared to BG1 where the encounters were almost exclusively "aggro them with armored priest, then shoot them to death" or "neutralize enemy spellcasters and get your 'win this encounter' spell out first;" this is actually pretty damn varied. More IWD than BG1. BG2 and its dance of spells and counters isn't a fair comparison since it's higher level.

[Sensuki]

They have indeed changed their minds about tuning for harder difficulties

 

Individual creatures are tuned for Normal difficulty since only PotD modifies their stats. The encounter sizes/compositions are tuned for the individual difficulty levels. I do not believe that the Hard encounters have a substantive enough increase in a) population and b) positioning. It's one of the things I've been focusing on over break.

Which is probably why normal feels the most sensible these days.

 

A lot of those side effects of Wounds were confusing to players so we drastically simplified how they work. Every X amount of damage (default is 20, IIRC) that a monk takes (after DR) adds a Wound to the monk. Wounds are a resource that can either be spent or can sit on the monk for about 30 seconds (again IIRC). Wounds do not prevent or absorb damage.

A bit about Monk wounds.

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[Luridis]

That's just a made up stat, but in general it's true. Eternity is more about strategic planning and less about per-encounter tactics. I don't like that. I do like the fact that planning and strategy are required, I don't like the fact that the actual gameplay in the encounter isn't very fun, or very tactical.

 

LOL I wrote out that whole thing on taking you at your word that weapons really did 1-40 on the roll! I noticed the numbers but never went to look how they got applied.

 

Silly.

[Luridis]

I'm a little inclined to partially agree with Josh S. about cleanse, dispels, etc.

 

Did you play NWN1 & 2... Blind Fighting was a not optional talent for melee characters. In fact, I remember being in this warehouse once with the ranger, who was DW and had a cuisinart-like number of attacks per round. When I started running into wizards that cast either blind or darkness on a regular basis... I'd go whole fights swinging at air if I didn't have anything up to counter it. So, I took blind fighting and never much cared after that. Every melee build I made after that, it was one of the first talents I took, every time.

 

Yea I know that is a black/white example. Really, the difference in those mechanics between visually impaired or not were too great, making the talent just about mandatory.

 

What I am glad to see is that the magic isn't going to gimmick route of Divinity:OS. I like that game, but I'm really getting tried of it all coming down to the deft usage of the billions of oil and water barrels that exist in the world. Sometimes I just want to nuke stuff to death with brute force.

Edited January 3, 2015 by Luridis

[Sensuki]

LOL I wrote out that whole thing on taking you at your word that weapons really did 1-40 on the roll! I noticed the numbers but never went to look how they got applied.

I meant Karkarov's 70/30 split is just a made up stat.

 

1-40 while still a guesstimation, is a relatively accurate one. The actual damage range might be 18-28, 1 damage would be minimum damage on a graze, where 40 would be maximum damage on a crit

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

Too bad about the change to Wounds. I like they way they work now, a lot. But we'll see how it plays out in practice. It does seem to mean that monk specials are now a limited resource as they're directly coupled to Health loss. :/

[PrimeJunta]

1-40 while still a guesstimation, is a relatively accurate one. The actual damage range might be 18-28, 1 damage would be minimum damage on a graze, where 40 would be maximum damage on a crit

 

In DnD most of the grazes would've been misses (or saves, or magic resistance, depending). I.e. zeros, not 1's. So that's not a fair comparison IMO. It would be like saying that a level 6 fireball's damage range is 0-36. Technically true, but misleading.

[Sensuki]

It is a more than fair comparison. On a successful attack resolution for a weapon attack in the IE games, you get a fairly normalized outcome because of the small damage range combined with integer bonuses.

 

The pacing of combat with optimally built characters in the IE games is fantastic.

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

The unfairness comes from the fact that "successful attack resolution" is different in DnD and P:E. Miss/hit/crit is not the same as miss/graze/hit/crit. If the hit/crit range is roughly similar in both (is it?) then it's not fair to include the grazes in the damage range, since they would have counted as misses in the other system.

[Sensuki]

It does not matter what you consider a successful attack resolution or whether graze is or isn't one. The fact is that damage outcomes are extremely swingy compared to the Infinity Engine games (The armor system also contributes to this). More damage more often also contributes to the issues with combat pacing. While it may be less of an issue playing on lower difficulties, it has always been a problem on Hard, since the very first beta.

 

Also for a system that is supposed to be simple in concept and easy for new players to understand, it's actually more complicated than how D&D works, and more difficult to determine the efficacy of options or actions.

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

IME damage outcomes were extremely swingy also in the IE games at low to early mid levels. Damage on a successful hit was relatively constant, but you had to roll pretty high to get a successful hit in. This also means that a high percentage of hits are actually crits. Moreover, a hit represents a large percentage of a creature's hit points. I.e., whiff whiff whiff whiff crit dead. If that's not swingy, I don't know what is.

 

P:E does not feel more swingy to me than IE at a comparable character level, and certainly not "extremely more swingy." It also gets significantly less so over the course of the BB as I level up and get better gear.

[Sensuki]

Damage outcomes themselves were not swingy. People sometimes complain about missing a lot, but that basically boils down to poorly building characters, which has nothing to do with the actual combat itself, but the character system.

When I play a Fighter in BG1, I build 18/XX STR, put 2 points into the weapon style i want to use (usually Large Sword) and that gives 15-14 THAC0 at level 1. Low level monsters have AC higher than 0, so hitting them is not difficult for the PC, nor for Imoen.

I'm sure that in Pillars of Eternity if you dumped Perception, attack resolutions would be very swingy too, but no one does that because we know it's the absolute worst character creation choice you can make. I've always had as high STR on my warriors and as high DEX on my archers in the IE games as I could, and the NPCs, while not 100% optimal are not terrible either (although there were some in BG1 that had bad stats).

The combat here certainly isn't swingy either

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[Sedrefilos]

Sorry to interfere being someone that is not playing the backer beta, but saying that IE combat is not swinging sounds... stragne. Last night I'm playing IWD EE, I'm at Vale of Shadows or something like that and I'm fighting a single lesser shadow. 2 successful ranged hits bring it down to Near Death, then 6 people gang up the poor thing relentlessly attacking it. So I put my hands behing my head and watch the fight, only to see 7 characters missing all the time and then the Shadow downs my cleric before the others put it down. Now this is some annoying stuff! This should have not happend no matter how bad the character builds are. And this, or something like this, happened several times afterwards.

If 95% of attacks are hits (grazes, normal hits or crits) in PE, things like above can not hapen, no?

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sedrefilos

[Sensuki]

 

That didn't happen for me.

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sensuki

[PrimeJunta]

I was thinking more of being at the receiving end of whiff-whiff-whiff-crit. -- Also, yes, swinginess can be greatly mitigated by optimal character- and party-building as well as tactics. Just like in P:E for that matter. (Perception is a bit too much of a required stat ATM IMO.)

 

-- By the way, I've been going over what you and Stun have been saying about IE vs P:E combat, trying to understand why we experience it so differently, and I think I may have figured something out. 

 

First off: it's not true that I don't enjoy IE combat. I would not have played all of them otherwise, several of them more than once, and certainly not IWD which is pretty much all combat, and which I played through twice (and intend to return to again). I do enjoy it. However, I think we play some of the encounters in them differently, and I, arguably, play them wrong -- or can't enjoy them for what they are, anyway, whereas you particularly relish them.

 

Consider your "standard" IWD encounter. You're pushing into a dungeon, and find a group of foes, mixing melee and ranged with a couple of casters. I think all of us would play this encounter in more or less the same way: hold the choke point with melee units, use ranged attacks and spells to take down or suppress the enemy casters and attempt to counter their spells if possible, then CC to debuff, and damage in various ways to destroy. 

 

However, then there are those other kinds of encounters: the ones which happen on an open map, where the enemies materialize from thin air, or which start after a cutscene, or you're locked in a room with them. There is no choke point, and you're kind of mixed in with them. I hated those ones because there was no way to control and stabilize the space: my side here, their side there. Instead it just felt like mad chaos, something I would eventually only win through trial and error and a certain amount of luck. (Thinking especially about one or two mage encounters towards the end of IWD here, for example.)

 

You, on the other hand, I believe, especially relished that challenge. You had to rush to gank the highest-value enemies quickly, rush to help a fellow in trouble, react quickly when something happened, maybe use AoE's that are likely to hurt the enemy more than FF hurts you, and so on. Fast-paced, frantic, and, no doubt, extremely thrilling if you're good enough at it.

 

The upshot is that I like features like engagement, because it lets me stabilize the space in an open area more or less like if there was a choke point, whereas you dislike it because it stops you from making those quick moves to gank the enemy caster or help a buddy out; having to do something special to disengage gets in the way, costs resources, and changes the pacing of the game. Conversely, you strongly dislike features like uncertain attack outcomes, because it means you can't rely on the heroic move you're doing working even if you did pull it off, whereas I'm much less bothered by it because in the stabler battlefield I like an individual attack matters less. 

 

You're clearly not getting the IE experience you want. Those open battles decided by daring moves through enemy lines won't happen, or at least there's much less room for them. I, on the other hand, will enjoy those types of maps and encounters more because I'm able to control the space better.

 

Ultimately this is a matter of preference: what I see as weaknesses and the least enjoyable aspects of the IE games, you see as strengths and their most enjoyable aspects, and therefore central to the experience. There's no way P:E can make both of us entirely happy. That's unfortunate, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy to be on the winning side here -- even if you, personally, through the effort you've put into the BB, would very much have earned that privilege.

[Sedrefilos]

Well, Sensuki, it happened to me. And of course I believe you when you say it didn't happen to you -you don't have to link a 50' video to proove it -  Sometimes a combat might end in seconds, other times it takes longer. Sometimes I might fight a group of enemies and clear each monster with one hit, then I fight the same group of monsters and it takes longer, I might lose a character and other strange stuff like that. And this is annoying. At least that's how I'm seeing it now replaying the IE games. Maybe my builds are not good enough? Then why sometimes the party does great and other times does crap? I don't know, I can't see all these as good design. And you don't have to have an RPG diploma to see this. Or break down the rules into pieces. You just play it and you get frustrated. By nonsensical stuff. At least that's how I'm seeing it now.

 

Is anyone experiencing the above in PE combat? That's what I care most about. And this is a real question. I mean, I ask it. Does someone that agrees with the above experinces similar situations in PE gombat?

Edited January 3, 2015 by Sedrefilos