The No Bad Choices Thread

[Katarack21]

 I have hit level 10 in game. I am starting to think there are no longer any wrong answers.

When you hit level 20, man, you know *all* the equations. They say that, at 21...Accuracy becomes it's own stat.

[Hatred]

 

 I have hit level 10 in game. I am starting to think there are no longer any wrong answers.

When you hit level 20, man, you know *all* the equations. They say that, at 21...Accuracy becomes it's own stat.

 

I know the level cap is 12 so I am not sure what you be saying.

[Katarack21]

I've been up for 20 hours. Ignore me.

[Caerdon]

 

The only way to fix that is to make stats give you diminishing returns. In simple terms, going from 5 to 6 in a stat should give you more bang for the buck (either by giving larger bonuses or having smaller "cost") than going from 18 to 19. This way even if stat A is more preferable for you than stat B, there would come a point at which you wouldn't want to raise A on B's expense anymore. A major benefit of this system is that there'd be no obvious threshold at which point this happens, everyone had to go with what they prefer on a personal level instead of a no-brainer, clear-cut best build.

 

There's another way to fix that: make stats come with negatives that matter. This can be hard to do in a way that makes intuitive sense, but if strength, for example, comes with a little expense to speed, then a lot of strength comes with a significant expense to speed. Eventually the negatives will make your character so weak in one area, you'll question whether you really need to be that strong if everything's just outrunning you. It makes being balanced more attractive, without forcing you into it. It's also more realistic in the sense that in real life almost everything comes with a corresponding downside.

 

Yeah, that's one way to approach the problem, though whether it actually addresses it depends largely on how different bonuses and penalties would stack.

 

I'm not a big fan of such a system though. I think it'd make it difficult to get a good overview of the strenghts and weaknesses of a character, and it'd fundamentally change the idea a that a high stat is a good thing, making stat bonuses lose their purpose as bonuses. Besides, even in the current system putting a point in one stat comes with a corresponding downside: it's one point away from some other stat.

 

I like such an approach when it comes to customizing characters as opposed to improving characters though. For example, I'd like a system where I could pick any number of Traits that come with both positives and negatives, with the idea that they make my character distinct, unique and more specialized, not strictly better.

[Hatred]

I've been up for 20 hours. Ignore me.

 How could I do that ! Your comment while being nonsensical is more sensible than most of the chat on the forums. You can follow what people say but not the reasoning which allows them to say it.

[freche]

Regarding armors, I personally like that there are no restrictions for them.

However if you basically live in them you should be able to handle yourself pretty well with them. I'd like to see each class get a talent for free (at creation or an early level) that allows them to use a specific armor type without penalties. Fighters, Paladins gets Heavy, Rogues, Rangers, Barbarian gets medium etc.

At a later level the ability to specialize in additional armor types becomes available for everyone by spending talent points.

[Monte Carlo]

 ^ Very good idea.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Over the course of the development and then the beta, there was a lot of bellyaching about Josh's stated intent to eliminate "trap choices" in the game, to make light and medium armor viable, and to make all or most weapons attractive for at least some characters, without having hard restrictions à la AD&D armor and weapon restrictions.

 

Stats

 

Fail. The intent was to reduce the incentive to minmax and make every ability useful for every class. The outcome is that now there are pretty much two optimal stat distributions -- one for DPS characters, another for tanks. DPS takes MIG, INT, DEX, tanks take CON, PER, RES. Support characters and some gimmick hybrid builds can tweak these a little, but that's about it. I.e. it ended up in the same minmaxing place AD&D started from, except that now there's no optimal stat distribution for each class, but for each build. 

 

With all the iterations the stats have gone through, by now I'm kinda convinced that a six-stat system is just plain bad. There's no way to make one that's at the same time intuitive, non-minmaxy, and genuinely impactful. As it is it doesn't really bother me but considering all the angst the discussion caused, they might as well have gone with STR-CON-DEX-INT-WIS-CHA and left it at that.

 

Armor

 

Qualified fail. I'm honestly finding no use for light or medium armor, once I get to the point I have the resources to genuinely choose what to wear. I mean of course wearing it isn't unviable, but mechanically it's really simple -- Edér and Kana (my off-tank) get the heaviest armor available, everybody else wears one of those snazzy outfits you can get by murdering backer NPC's. However, since the armor restrictions have been removed, there is slightly more scope for tactical variation; I have been in a situation where Edér's been so badly beat up I've temporarily switched Sagani to the front line in heavy armor. Also, because of the speed penalty, at least it's not "always wear the heaviest armor," but "tanks wears heaviest armor, everybody else wears nothing."

 

However: I think this may be a learning curve thing. If you're unfamiliar with the mechanics and haven't yet figured out how to keep your squishies out of trouble, light/medium armor does give a bit more margin for error. I do not find the trade-off worthwhile.

 

This is a bit of a shame as the armor models look really cool. The only way I can think of to mitigate this would be to sprinkle in more unique armors with attractive side effects so your off-tanks might want to wear them despite the speed penalty, or put in higher-tier lighter armors first, so they'd become the best choices. The expanded AoE Aloth's armor gives is so useful I've kept him wearing it, for example.

 

1. You're now kinda convinced? Already knew about the stats and how you could min-max them before the beta went live. I even mentioned it on one of the KS update threads a year or so back that you'll be able to min-max and have optimum builds for classes. Of course the usual suspects came on and said no you wouldn't be able to, this was going to be different! And the beta confirmed what some of us already knew, that you could min-max. And no matter how many changes the stats went through, min-maxing was always part and parcel of this new system. There is no way around it with a 6 stat system. I was one of many who were min-maxing every minute of the beta regardless of the changes. Change the stats? No problem, I'll keep min-maxing because regardless of what is changed, the system will always be able to be min-maxed.

 

2. Just like the beta, haven't needed to wear any armour on my ranged characters in my current game. I've said this before in the beta threads, if there are penalties on armour, my ranged characters won't wear it.

[Dunamin]

While I love this game, I do agree on some points regarding armor.

 

There's just little incentive to put any armor on characters that are away from the frontline, when these impose recovery penalties.

 

This is very nitpicky, however - I do enjoy dressing my backline in fashionable clothing rather than armor, and you can still get punished when foes occasionally slip past your defenders.

[Monte Carlo]

^ Again, it's totally rescue-able (new word there) because the armour recovery values need some gentle tweaking. That's all.

[Fearabbit]

Stats

 

Fail. The intent was to reduce the incentive to minmax and make every ability useful for every class. The outcome is that now there are pretty much two optimal stat distributions -- one for DPS characters, another for tanks. DPS takes MIG, INT, DEX, tanks take CON, PER, RES. Support characters and some gimmick hybrid builds can tweak these a little, but that's about it. I.e. it ended up in the same minmaxing place AD&D started from, except that now there's no optimal stat distribution for each class, but for each build. 

 

With all the iterations the stats have gone through, by now I'm kinda convinced that a six-stat system is just plain bad. There's no way to make one that's at the same time intuitive, non-minmaxy, and genuinely impactful. As it is it doesn't really bother me but considering all the angst the discussion caused, they might as well have gone with STR-CON-DEX-INT-WIS-CHA and left it at that.

 

The six-stat system isn't the problem. I don't see the argument for that at all.

• You can always make a build that excels at one thing and fails at another. It's literally impossible to avoid that and it wasn't a design goal to avoid that. The design goal was to make several different builds viable for one class and in combination with a certain party setup.
• The fact that you can separate the attributes into 3 DPS and 3 tank stats that are always the same no matter what class you play as means that a design goal was reached: Make it clear which attribute does what, keep it generic, keep it simple. I don't see anything bad about this.*
• The real question you have to answer is: Is, for example, a high-INT high-CON frontline warrior always worse than the high-CON high-RES tank build? Or are there party setups and/or combat situations where it might be the superior choice?

I feel like there are a lot of assumptions hidden in this. One of the more important ones is that minmaxing is bad because it makes better characters and therefore the game is unbalanced. But how good a character is depends on how you use him, and I feel like we haven't really figured out all the different synergies within all the different party setups to really make such a claim. (Especially if we can't even tell conclusively whether the Fighter or the Paladin is the better tank!)

A Fighter who is not a tank build, but who also has high INT and MIG might be superior in situations you haven't thought of. For example in a completely different party setup where all other characters are Chanters or something. I don't know, it feels too early to say, which is why your "the stat system has failed" verdict rubs me the wrong way somehow.

 

Also, if you ask me: I believe that the real problem is the fact that classes change the derived attributes. That's a major flaw that undermines the whole idea of an attribute-based system. This is what's unintuitive, and this is what makes certain classes better for certain builds. The six stats are supposed to represent your character's physical and mental capabilities, while the classes are supposed to represent the character's way of fighting. In the current system, it's completely muddled.

 

If I make a ranged Chanter, my first instinct is to lower CON because he doesn't need health as much. But then I realize that the class itself lowers health. So now the clear and simple system where I choose based on "does this character need X?" turns into "does this character need X, and how much of X does he already have based on their class?", which is unintuitive and makes the attributes as a whole less impactful. These are large criticisms you have against the six-stat system, and I blame the classes to 100% for these. The six stats aren't the problem at all.

 

*) Except that I personally dislike the system because it screws with the idea of attributes and uses them in non-intuitive ways. I still think that a system with dedicated physical and mental attributes that are still useful for both warriors and wizards would have been more interesting. For example having a Willpower stat that affects "standing your ground" and keeping enemies engaged, while also affecting the strength of spells - so that it does something completely different for different types of characters, but is still generic.

[Bayzent]

Over the course of the development and then the beta, there was a lot of bellyaching about Josh's stated intent to eliminate "trap choices" in the game, to make light and medium armor viable, and to make all or most weapons attractive for at least some characters, without having hard restrictions à la AD&D armor and weapon restrictions.

 

Many feared this would make every class, weapon, spell, and ability play effectively the same. I thought I'd jot down some of my thoughts on how the game is doing relative to this design intent in a few specific areas.

 

(Usual disclaimers apply: I'm having a huuuuuuuuge amount of fun with this, I think Obsidian hit it out of the park, it is the best cRPG of the decade hands down etc etc, so do not construe this as hating on the game because that I'm not doing. And yeah the bugs need fixing, and perhaps Obsidian's coding practices need some improvement so they don't make so many in the first place before it gets to QA.)

 

Classes

 

Success. Yay for the classes. There's a good deal of griping about how wizards have been nerfed and whatever, but at least I'm finding all the classes useful and fun to play. I hated the Ranger during the BB, but am quite liking it now, to the point that I'm thinking of rolling one at some point. We can argue all day about which one makes a better tank, the fighter or the paladin, or if druids are OP relative to wizards, if chanter Invocations come too late (yes they do, especially if you're using the higher-level chants), and so on, but all in all I'm really, really happy about the classes. They're as varied as they can be with 11(!) of them, they're all effective, and they're all fun. (Okay, some I don't personally find as much fun as others, e.g. the barbarian, but that's due to personal preference.)

 

Stats

 

Fail. The intent was to reduce the incentive to minmax and make every ability useful for every class. The outcome is that now there are pretty much two optimal stat distributions -- one for DPS characters, another for tanks. DPS takes MIG, INT, DEX, tanks take CON, PER, RES. Support characters and some gimmick hybrid builds can tweak these a little, but that's about it. I.e. it ended up in the same minmaxing place AD&D started from, except that now there's no optimal stat distribution for each class, but for each build. 

 

With all the iterations the stats have gone through, by now I'm kinda convinced that a six-stat system is just plain bad. There's no way to make one that's at the same time intuitive, non-minmaxy, and genuinely impactful. As it is it doesn't really bother me but considering all the angst the discussion caused, they might as well have gone with STR-CON-DEX-INT-WIS-CHA and left it at that.

 

Armor

 

Qualified fail. I'm honestly finding no use for light or medium armor, once I get to the point I have the resources to genuinely choose what to wear. I mean of course wearing it isn't unviable, but mechanically it's really simple -- Edér and Kana (my off-tank) get the heaviest armor available, everybody else wears one of those snazzy outfits you can get by murdering backer NPC's. However, since the armor restrictions have been removed, there is slightly more scope for tactical variation; I have been in a situation where Edér's been so badly beat up I've temporarily switched Sagani to the front line in heavy armor. Also, because of the speed penalty, at least it's not "always wear the heaviest armor," but "tanks wears heaviest armor, everybody else wears nothing."

 

However: I think this may be a learning curve thing. If you're unfamiliar with the mechanics and haven't yet figured out how to keep your squishies out of trouble, light/medium armor does give a bit more margin for error. I do not find the trade-off worthwhile.

 

This is a bit of a shame as the armor models look really cool. The only way I can think of to mitigate this would be to sprinkle in more unique armors with attractive side effects so your off-tanks might want to wear them despite the speed penalty, or put in higher-tier lighter armors first, so they'd become the best choices. The expanded AoE Aloth's armor gives is so useful I've kept him wearing it, for example.

 

Weapons

 

Success. This is largely thanks to the Weapon Focus groupings. Each of the groups has one or more really, genuinely attractive choices, and after you've picked one, all the other weapons in that group become interesting. After that, it's all up to the unique item properties and finding the right character to use them. It's not perfect but it's really very good. Also the special properties in different weapons are highly interesting when combined with different character roles. In the early game, having Edér wield two hatchets for the extra DEFL and the benefits of dual-wielding is interesting for example. Needs a bit of tuning of course, but it really has worked. I've experimented with most of the weapon groups and have found all of them satisfying and varied.

 

Talents and Abilities

 

Partial success. On the plus side, there are enough talents and abilities and they're varied enough that you really can skew builds in different ways. Rogues can become straight-up damage dealers, or focused backstabbers, or gunners, or ranged death-dealers. Wizards can focus on spellcasting or improve their pew-pew-pew. Durance can become a competent gunner or a pure dedicated supporter. 

 

However, many of the talents are just... not very good. Bear's Fortitude? Also some of them combine in uncomfortable ways, Backstab for example is next to useless before you get Shadowing Beyond, which really isn't that great for a 2/rest talent. (Should be 1/encounter IMO; there would still be a reason to pick Escape also as that'd let you duck out of trouble twice per encounter.) And, conversely, some of the talents are fairly obviously much more useful than the alternatives -- Flames of Devotion as opposed to Lay On Hands, for example. 

 

This could be fixed by tuning: turning some of the weaker per-rests into per-encounters or increasing the number of uses (turning Lay On Hands into a small-radius area heal would make it attractive, for example). 

 

I still don't get armor. I purchased the game for me and a Friend and really have a hard time because for some reason Heavy Armor doesn't seem give any DR to our priests, and the same armor seems to give more DR to Fighters than to Paladins...it seems weird and forced to be honest.

 

I agree with the rest of the post.

[Voss]

Disagree on classes, weapons and talents/abilities.

 

I find the classes to be straying pretty heavily into the failure state, with several (chanter, priest, paladin) providing very little of use to a party.  Spells for wizard, cipher, and druid are another problem area, as the vast majority aren't ever worth using.  Just spam the good ones over and over.  Barbarian is questionable at best (other heavy hitters do better, aren't forced into melee, and carnage is... meh).   Ranger is actually decent, though the pet is still a burden more often than a help. Chanter is probably the most egregious problem class now, since it just doesn't function with the games combat.  It wants a slow buildup and the combat wants to be quick, nasty and effective.

 

 

Weapons are an unqualified pile of junk with a handful worth taking, and the weapon groups are simply unintuitive and bizarre collections of random crap.  There are just too many weapons that are simply never worth using.

 

Talents and abiltiies, like spells and weapons are mostly garbage, with a handful that should always be taken.  Except, sadly, the percentage is even higher- I'd say about 90% of talents are utterly worthless, with the remainder only useful for specific builds.  At higher levels (8+), most ability and talent choices felt odd- like I was picking something because I had to pick something, not because I found something useful or interesting.

 

Armor and stats, I'd agree are failures.

 

As a game it has a fair amount of potential, but it needs a complete mechanical overhaul, preferably by someone not protecting his (very bad) pet ideas.

[sparklecat]

There are just too many weapons that are simply never worth using.

Which?

[Matt516]

I'd have to disagree a bit on the stats and armor fronts. While I'd agree that there are some theoretical issues with the stats, in practice I really do feel like I can make any build work as long as I play it right. My main is a 16 MIG, 16 INT, 18 RES controller/AoE damager Barbarian, and she's wrecking shop on Hard. 8 PER, if you were wondering where the extra 2 points came from.

 

Of course there will be *optimal* builds for DPS - the realities of math dictate that. But you are no longer just *stupid* for not following the optimal stat distribution for each class. Everyone gains something and loses something from every stat, so you pay for dumping stats.

 

Could the stat system be better? Always. Is it better than in the IE games? Abso-fricken-lutely. And did Josh accomplish his design goals? I think so, more or less. Yes, some stats are optimal for some builds... That's the *definition* of a build, for goodness' sakes! But there's definitely a lot more freedom, and I'm loving that.

 

 

As for armor.. My experience has been that it's a playstyle thing. Obviously you want your "tank" to wear heavy armor. That's just... Yeah. But other classes have some leeway. Naked is optimal for action economy, obviously - but there are enough encounters in the game where you can't fully control all the enemies that you might want *some* protection on your backliners. Aloth wears his leathers, and he's still the most downed member of my party. Durance switches between clothes and robes as the situation dictates.

 

And Barbarians and Monks (I have one of each) are best in the light/medium armors - padded, hides, *maybe* leather or scale if it's a tough fight.

 

In general, I've found that it's really a spectrum. The armor system lets you trade durability for action economy with a nice degree of granularity to find what works best for you. Some people prefer an all-or-nothing approach. Fair enough - but if anything gets past the frontline you're gonna have a bad time. I like to find the balance that works for me. Again - could it be better? Always. Is it good? Yup. I'd even call the armor system better than in the IE games as well.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Matt516

[Matt516]

I still don't get armor. I purchased the game for me and a Friend and really have a hard time because for some reason Heavy Armor doesn't seem give any DR to our priests, and the same armor seems to give more DR to Fighters than to Paladins...it seems weird and forced to be honest.

 

That's... not a thing. The same set of armor will give the same DR to the wearer, no matter who is wearing it. Mind if I ask which armor, what the DR was, and which characters? Might be you found a bug.

[Voss]

 

There are just too many weapons that are simply never worth using.

Which?

 

Almost all of them.   I could make a fairly reasonable argument for only ever using hatchet (for tanks) and arbalest/arquebus for everyone else.

  I wouldn't actually want to play that way, but the weapon system definitely leans to that level of optimization.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Voss

[Ganrich]

 

 

 

 

There are just too many weapons that are simply never worth using.

Which?

Almost all of them. I could make a fairly reasonable argument for only ever using hatchet (for tanks) and arbalest/arquebus for everyone else.

I wouldn't actually want to play that way, but the weapon system definitely leans to that level of optimization.

Not to mention that Estoc outclasses the other melee 2 handers in damage in most encounters. The weapons with reach are the only ones that still have purpose.

[sparklecat]

I don't really care if some other distribution of stats is better for my PC; I care that I can build a character concept and have it be viable.  Likewise, I don't care if some other weapon might be better for a character, I care that I'm not completely screwing myself over by taking a non-optimal choice.

 

My Eder's wielding a spear and we've been doing just fine.

Edited April 3, 2015 by sparklecat

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Huh? Weapons and Classes are definitely fails.

 

Rogue is cancer. Tried several builds using hirelings and found that they aren't a very good choice in almost every circumstance I encountered. Needs some serious tweaking until it even approaches a viable substitute.

 

Weapons also fail. Going for high damage and high armor piercing will give you the most consistently good damage output while using lower damage weapons will not perform well against enemies with good DT. Then if we're talking about styles, single handed gets BTFO by twohanded or dual wielding when it comes to dealing damage.

 

Disclaimer, I play on hard or potd with full party. It might be easier on low difficulty or different with one character, but I have no interest in playing casual mode or soloing.

[Parsong]

Huh? Weapons and Classes are definitely fails.

 

Rogue is cancer. Tried several builds using hirelings and found that they aren't a very good choice in almost every circumstance I encountered. Needs some serious tweaking until it even approaches a viable substitute.

 

Weapons also fail. Going for high damage and high armor piercing will give you the most consistently good damage output while using lower damage weapons will not perform well against enemies with good DT. Then if we're talking about styles, single handed gets BTFO by twohanded or dual wielding when it comes to dealing damage.

 

Disclaimer, I play on hard or potd with full party. It might be easier on low difficulty or different with one character, but I have no interest in playing casual mode or soloing.

 

Yeah. I've tried parties with single target classes who have no real spammable CC. It was do-able, but miles below what others can do.

 

Wiz/Druid/Cipher are on a different level than the others.  Chanter comes close due to the Arrow Chant, but that is going bye-bye.

[Ondb]

@Ondb Whatever you may think of the resting mechanic, that doesn't have much to do with the "no bad choices" design intent. Also, there's another thread for that.

 

) Maybe. Its in category "no bad game mechanic" leading to degenerative gameplay

 

On the topic of attributes. I was here several months ago, saying they are bad...like very bad, but nobody listened.....

Edited April 3, 2015 by Ondb

[TheUsernamelessOne]

Disclaimer, I play on hard or potd with full party. It might be easier on low difficulty or different with one character, but I have no interest in playing casual mode or soloing.

 

Yeah, nuts to those lame casuals! Go back to the Wii, losers! I bet those casuals don't even use totally radical MMO terminology like CC and DPS and tank and aggro!

 

Pretty sure Rogues are actually the best class at hammering down a single target by far? Different weapons are in fact better for different situations because often it helps to use different tactics than just whatever does the most damage in one shot? Someone back me up on this.

[Xionanx]

Simple solution:  No stats

 

You class gives you a "baseline" of whatever, and then you gear determines everything else.  

[GreyFox]

Yea the stats are bad and they should have just used the tried and true IE ones.

 

Armor is also done in such an asinine way and a lot of us said it was lame from the get go....armor does not impair you in the way this game does so it really makes no damn sense.

If armor was such a liability no one would have ****in used it....it was designed very well and worked very well.

 

The major IRL impairments armor(mostly helmets) gives you is sensory...sight/hearing.

 

A person in 17th century plate is not going to have some sort of ludicrous penalty to movement or "recovery".

 

 

It's also funny to me that a person with money would have a gambeson(padded armor), chain, and plate on at the same time....guess realism is too OP because no one is stacking armor in their games. History tip...armor was really ****ing good and worked really really well...as a matter of fact gambesons can stop warbows but yea padded armor is always **** in games/RPGs.

 

Edited April 3, 2015 by GreyFox