[Defense Discussion] They're testing the 'fenses for weaknesses...

lol enchanted T-Shirt builds....derp

I'll have the most powerful T-Shirt the world has ever seen.

 

 

No luck needed. A tank with a good two-handed weapon is just as good. Arguably better. In fact, I wouldn't even suggest using a medium or large shield. The small shield is probably the only shield worth using.

 

A tanky fighter with a fine large shield and W&S style is going to be around twice as durable as one with a two-handed weapon, so that's going to be a tough argument to win.  Unless Josh goes through with nerfing W&S and then shields are going to be terrible on PotD and still  pretty good on all the other difficulties.

 

 

On the other hand isn't the tanky fighter with the two handed weapon going to be doing a lot more damage and thus not need to be around as long to prevail?

 

Hermit and Sensuki are right about everything. This is not turning out to be the game that some of us thought it will be. 

 

This is not a tactical game. The fights are 90% positioning... rinse and repeat. I'm baffled as to why it's still like this. 

 

All the jazz about different armor types vs different damage types, attack speed differences, attributes, classes. None of it really matters as long as your tank is in front.

 

And the best party is still 1 Tank and 5 naked ranged. And good luck building a tank that doesn't use a shield.

I actually don't really pay attention to damage types hahah, even on Hard it makes almost no difference at all. What matters are damage multiplier stacking, damage stacking enchantments and DR bypass and disables/debuffs.

 

After that it's all alpha strike and positioning, if you get that right and don't play like a doofus - combat is over. In the Infinity Engine games, I did NOT remotely play like this at all. Character building is fun, but combat isn't really fun at the moment.

 

Agreed, damage types are pretty much negligible.

On the other hand isn't the tanky fighter with the two handed weapon going to be doing a lot more damage and thus not need to be around as long to prevail?

 

No.  Even though a two-handed fighter might be doing double the damage of a hatchet and shield fighter thanks to not having an accuracy penalty and two-handed weapons being far better than one-handed weapons, they are still dealing a fraction of the damage that your damage dealers are.  Wearing plate armor and using cautious attack they have a 140% recovery penalty and are getting about one attack in for every two that a naked fighter is getting.  In the context of a six person party, having an extra 5-10% party damage just isn't as worthwhile as having someone who is twice as durable.

 

Of course, you can ditch the armor or modal penalty, but at that point you're not really tanky at all.

sup bros
 

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113466098696/how-do-you-respond-to-the-claim-that-pillars-of

 

 

melnorme asked: How do you respond to the claim that Pillars of Eternity strongly incentivizes specialization in terms of of offense or defense? That is, going either all out on deflection, or all out on damage and accuracy, with no viable middle road, at least on the harder difficulty levels. Since different classes have different base deflection scores, this becomes a class archetype viability problem - the game discourages defensive mages, etc.

 

The gulf between the class with the lowest Deflection and highest Deflection is 15 points, roughly equivalent to 3 points of AC in D&D terms.  It’s not a trivially narrow window, but it’s relatively small.  Deflection is also not the only means of providing/creating defense.  Wizards have defensive spells that they can use to do things like provide DT (Ironskin), DT and Concentration (Spirit Shield), retaliatory damage (Flame Shield), and contingent AoE knockdown (Llengrath’s Safeguard).

 

 

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/113466978636/the-damage-is-too-damn-high-in-pillars-of-eternity
 

 

melnorme asked: THE DAMAGE IS TOO DAMN HIGH in Pillars of Eternity according to some people. Which is harming your goal of allowing a wider variety of builds than D&D does, since only parties consisting of builds hyper-optimized for either defense or offense can survive. Is this issue being addressed?

 

Some of the hardest-hitting creatures have had their upper-end damage reduced.  I’ve also been playing on Hard for about 50 hours in the past few weeks and haven’t found it necessary to “hyper optimize”.  I do have characters who toggle between being defensively oriented or offensively oriented (e.g. Eder alternating between pike or war hammer and shield, my monk toggling Cautious Attack when things get too thick).  But more often than not, I’m using Kana’s chants & invocations, Aloth’s CC spells, or Durance’s buffs to emphasize an offensive or defensive angle.

 

When I’ve had to reload after a difficult fight, the issue has never been that my party wasn’t ultra-optimized for offense or defense in terms of attributes, abilities, or talents.  It’s always been solved through different target prioritization, a different gear choice, a slight reshuffling of consumables/spells/chants, or some other combination of tactics.

Edited March 13, 2015 by Infinitron

I'm pretty sure that Josh's opinion of successfully beating an encounter and mine are different, and if you want to beat a hard encounter - chain disables. But getting dropped from a single hit is not very fun and is a 'boring' way to make combat difficult.

Edited March 13, 2015 by Sensuki

I like how by namedropping all the companions, it seems like he's sort of making the argument that "I don't care about these guys' crazy Adventurer's Hall theorycrafting - the combat is fun and flexible with the companions that we're going to give you, and that's all that really matters".

 

(that's fine by me btw, "balanced for your available companions" made Shadowrun: Dragonfall a lot of fun even though the system as a whole was anything but balanced)

Edited March 13, 2015 by Infinitron

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

Given Josh's performance in various PR videos (which I find pretty painful), I think the takeaway is not that everything is fine, but that hard difficulty isn't. 

 

It is notable that his answers are handwaving the math and dodging the real issues-  the 15 points matters a lot more when you realize you're potentially quadrupling the amount of times you miss or crit, or even denying those possibilities altogether. (Something that doesn't happen in D&D, except on the very far end of messing the RNG when it comes to misses) Similarly, if you recognize the limitations of the AI and use basic positioning absolutely zero of those defensive mage spells matter.  Ever and if you have screwed up, in the hurly-burly of combat it is quite possibly too late to even put those up in order to save the poor squishy. 

Edited March 13, 2015 by Voss

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

I think that is usually intended. We are talking about RPGs after all, and characters are supposed to be flawed just as real characters, rather than being super heroes.

 

A min-maxed party of super beings can never be 'good' or 'righteous' in my book.

Edited March 13, 2015 by Striped_Wolf

 

 

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

I think that is usually intended. We are talking about RPGs after all, and characters are supposed to be flawed just as real characters, rather than being super heroes.

 

A min-maxed party of super beings can never be 'good' or 'righteous' in my book.

 

I'd settle for effective, and often that is too much to ask.  It certainly was for a huge chunk of the companions in BG, and since we're stuck with only 8 (and one or two in functionally broken classes), the bar needs to be a little higher.  

 

Granted PoE isn't coping with AD&D ability scores, which makes it a bit easier, since -9% damage for 15 might rather than 18 might isn't as non-functional as 15 strength vs 18/88 strength.

 

Though I'll admit, good and righteous aren't qualities I look for in NPCs anyway.  When I hear those words I start worrying that some donkey is going to start setting innocent people on fire. 

Im guessing (and hoping) that we'll get characters across the spectrum.

BG had a good mix imo.

 

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

 

I think it's more that developers aren't making games for min-maxers...and I approve.

 

 

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

 

I think it's more that developers aren't making games for min-maxers...and I approve.

 

 

Well, in this game, min/max makes the strongest characters, easily. And you can make your entire party out of hired adventurers with min/max stats, potentially.

 

Their point-buy system, and their emphasis on making all stats do something decent for all classes, seems aimed at removing the point in min-maxing. It just hasn't succeeded so far. Stacking either offensive or defensive attributes and talents is simply better.

I think it's more that developers aren't making games for min-maxers...and I approve.

But the game PROMOTES extreme min-maxing ....

 

 

A game developer being unable to effectively optimize characters for the game they work on isn't anything new or shocking, in fact it's quite common in computer games, P&P RPGs and tabletop wargames, to the point of being almost universal.

 

This is very true. Pre-made characters are almost always poorly built in these games. I'll hopefully find some way to customize the companion builds up to my standards, without taking away their "spirit" and keeping them the same class of course.

 

 

I think it's more that developers aren't making games for min-maxers...and I approve.

 

Eh...  I dislike being punished for enjoying a companions story by making the companion worthless (looking at you, dwarven ranger), or being forced to take an irritating companion to unlock content.

Or have a no-brainer companion that is an obvious choice to take every time (which is a big worry with PoE, for example, being able to tell Eder to piss off doesn't seem doable, unless you're min-maxing your character for a solo run, especially in the early game).    If players (especially new ones) want to even try the game with certain classes, they're going to have to take the meatshield or have a very bad time. 

Edited March 13, 2015 by Voss

Seems obvious Josh has a clear disconnect here...when viewing the SA forums there are like the same few people egging him on so I guess we get a game optimized for 12 people.

Edited March 13, 2015 by GreyFox

Seems obvious Josh has a clear disconnect here...when viewing the SA forums there are like the same few people egging him on so I guess we get a game optimized for 12 people.

Part of the problem is the attribute system is really disfunctional when it comes to companions.  The attributes really dictate how you run a character, which in some ways is really good for customizing your primary character- you can get it to perform exactly as you like (at a cost of the fairly high system mastery requirement- you absolutely must understand how the background math works).  At the same time, it is really bad for companions.  If the mage companion has a low might, there is nothing you can do to make him a good damage dealer, and you have to focus on support abilities instead.  There simply isn't anyway around that, short of being able to assign attribute points when you recruit the companion.  The attributes absolutely dictate play-style, and some classes really aren't functional if there is a mismatch. 

 

That is going to really frustrate players with no prior exposure to the system.  And it's going to double down if the classes don't do what they expect them to do (as D&D re-skins).  The knee jerk reaction of many players is going to be that the class (or even the game as a whole) is junk.   

Edited March 13, 2015 by Voss

Yea I think I agree with you there.

The whole idea of companion stats is to make the combat personality and the roleplay personality being an organic "one", even with sub-optimal builds. I'm totally fine with that since I'm kind of addicted on sticking to the "vanilla" view of the developer of the game I'm playing, rather than forcing my optimal build on it (it often provides interesting challenges that optimal builds kind of dismantle).

 

If Aloth is not a great damage dealer by design, I shall play him like that and experience what does it mean gameplay wise, if instead I want a magic dealing mage I shall make one of my own. I think of combat-related stats as personality traits that fit with the rest of the character, and making it completely customizable kind of defeat the purpose of handwritten characters and alienate the two spheres of the character (combat-roleplay).

It's like how some people thought Glory in Dragonfall was junk because they wanted to use her as another ranged shooty character instead of activating her implant and going into melee. That's okay, those people are just dumb.

 

 

The attributes really dictate how you run a character

 

 

Anyway, I'm sure the people who thought the attributes in Pillars of Eternity have extremely minor effects will be thrilled to hear this. :smug:

Edited March 13, 2015 by Infinitron

Glory in Dragonfall was junk though. Seriously. The dog was better.

Hermit and Sensuki are right about everything. This is not turning out to be the game that some of us thought it will be. 

 

This is not a tactical game. The fights are 90% positioning... rinse and repeat. I'm baffled as to why it's still like this. 

 

All the jazz about different armor types vs different damage types, attack speed differences, attributes, classes. None of it really matters as long as your tank is in front. 

 

And the best party is still 1 Tank and 5 naked ranged. And good luck building a tank that doesn't use a shield.

 

I actually don't really pay attention to damage types hahah, even on Hard it makes almost no difference at all. What matters are damage multiplier stacking, damage stacking enchantments and DR bypass and disables/debuffs.

 

After that it's all alpha strike and positioning, if you get that right and don't play like a doofus - combat is over. In the Infinity Engine games, I did NOT remotely play like this at all. Character building is fun, but combat isn't really fun at the moment.

I have the same experience with around 80 hours of playing the BB.

 

I've never been much interested in the combat, more in the story and characters, even in the IE games. Probably that's why I've played BG much more than IWD (series). The moment I start getting interested in combat is when I reach an encounter which stops my progress, only then I normally start researching ways to optimize my party's combat performance. PoE will be one of the games where I know the most about combat at the start from all RPGs I've played.

 

I think it's more that developers aren't making games for min-maxers...and I approve.

But the game PROMOTES extreme min-maxing ....

 

 

The rules set promote focusing on a role, not on min-maxing for it.

 

+/-10% damage is not going to make a huge change in how a fight turns out. That your party members all get under 50% Endurance versus only 25% isn't going to be the end of the world either (funny enough there is enough under 50% proc to make that something you should wish for and I know you find those useless).

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what's going on in this thread to be honest.

 

You have Josh Sawyer saying the game plays fine on Hard with the unoptimized, non-min-maxed default companions, and in here, a bunch of people saying it's punishingly difficult if you don't use a party consisting of "one tank and five naked spellslinging mages", and that you can't make a defensive character without sacrificing literally every offensive ability.

 

Can we get some clarity here?