No buffing outside of combat, why?

[glenn3e]

Raedric's Guard: Boss, those 6 tresspassers are standing at the foot of the throne 20 feet away making themselves glow with funny lights. That one just burst into flames and looks very threatening.

Raedric: Its fine, we'll worry about it when they reach 10 feet.

[endolex]

@Hatred:
 

"Surely using spells which are a prelude to combat would make anyone around you who was inclined to fight you aware of your presence and have them rush on over?"

 

It depends how close 'around' is. I'd argue as long as the enemy haven't detected me yet, purely defensive / supportive spellcasting does not initiate combat.

[Hatred]

 

 

The main issue is because a lot of people think it's bad for game balance.

 

In short: if you allow prebuffing, then you either A) balance everything with that in mind, punishing all those who don't want to go trought the tedious (and rather brainless) routine of prebuffing before every fight, or B) balance everything as if it didn't exist, which would make fights trivially easy when you do prebuff.

 

How does this matter if they don't balance any of the fights and encounters ?

 

No matter how much you think the encounters haven't been balanced, they could be balanced much, much worse.

 

How ? you can literally afk during combat on hard. How could the balance get worse than that ?

[Caerdon]

It'd be fun if the world of Eora was full of magic sensitive people and creatures, so that when you start casting buffs, you'd just invite every nearby enemy to your location...

[Spivo]

The following is not the truth, it is my view of things...

 

Pre buffing ruins the sense of immersion for me, since in most of the cases your pre buffing will be due to beforehand knowledge.

In most rpg games the player has knowledge, either from earlier games played or from actually knowing the game, of what is about to come. And so, I think, pre buffing ruins the whole sense of experiencing the fights as "real" (laughable concept in game) as possible.

 

I absolutely love when I attack 2 lions, and only seeing 2, and then have 5 more rush me, changing an expected easy fight to hard.

That feels real. Knowing this will happen, them stack up 10 buffs, spread out the group and lay down 5 traps, does not feel real.

 

That aside, the whole immersion concept, which is ruined when you act upon knowledge your character should not have and so in most cases makes pre buffing and talk of immersion feel out of place.

That aside... Pre buffing, as has been debated, means every fight where a non-trash fights are involved, and def. Boss fights, that pre buffing is expected, and not pre buffing means you are doing it wrong.

It does not matter if only one pre buffing would be available every rest, any pre buffing would mean that the game would need to have the end fights, boss fights, require pre buffing!

 

That said, I find it very very odd, that you would NOT allow pre buffing with spells, but allow it with consumables...???

Consumables should have been (my opinion) have been either scrolls/pots for in combat, or food that your group ate when resting which gave minor bonuses till next rest.

 

I am baffled at no pre buffing, but still pre buffing, and this tells me that the whole concept was half-hearted thought through.

[Sabin Stargem]

I would prefer it that buffs could be cast out of combat, and have their duration paused until combat begins.  Resting cancels paused buffs.

[Horrorscope]

 

How ? you can literally afk during combat on hard. How could the balance get worse than that ?

 

 

If anyone can do that, it is a very small group. I can't do it. Since you talk big, can you make a video and link it for us? How about we learn from recent TB history. The game will be balanced much further over the next 6 months. I do find Hard like a Normal, but far from a total roll, unless you've found a super combo and if one did, why need buffs on top then? I'd say report it and see if they can nerf the power, but then are you really after that or wanting to prove that there are crazy powers, but also reap the benefit of those in the comfort of your own?

 

Fantasy games need to adopt the rule of alcohol, do not mix. So here, have your buff, make it strong, make it long, but no mixing. At least it alleviates the chore of it and would be easier to balance a single state boosted vs every one. NWN's was ridiculous, imo.

Edited April 5, 2015 by Horrorscope

[Spivo]

Raedric's Guard: Boss, those 6 tresspassers are standing at the foot of the throne 20 feet away making themselves glow with funny lights. That one just burst into flames and looks very threatening.

Raedric: Its fine, we'll worry about it when they reach 10 feet.

This is my problem, it just feels very wrong to allow it.

 

Also the player casting fire protect on everyone, because player knows there is a wizard, and knows he uses fire magic.

[Spivo]

 

How ? you can literally afk during combat on hard. How could the balance get worse than that ?

 

 

If anyone can do that, it is a very small group. I can't do it. Since you talk big, can you make a video and link it for us? How about we learn from recent TB history. The game will be balanced much further over the next 6 months. I do find Hard like a Normal, but far from a total roll, unless you've found a super combo and if one did, why need buffs on top then? I'd say report it and see if they can nerf the power, but then are you really after that or wanting to prove that there are crazy powers, but also reap the benefit of those in the comfort of your own?

I also would like to see a vid of this, and since the word "literally" was used, I expect poster was not just full of bs

[Hatred]

 

 There is only one answer to this question : No reason at all. The developers (people seem to think it was entirely J.E.S.) arbitrarily decided it would somehow unbalance the game. Since they went to no effort at all to balance the content this is meaningless. What is the point in stopping people from pre-buffing if the content of the game is all trivial ? How does it even matter. 

 The game is already too easy. Why are the forums clogged with people asking why it isn't even easier. I could understand if they specifically complained that easy was too hard. Maybe it is for some people I really do not know. 

 Your complaint that it doesnt "feel right' from a story perspective is as arbitrary and strange as the decision to leave out pre-buffing. Surely using spells which are a prelude to combat would make anyone around you who was inclined to fight you aware of your presence and have them rush on over ? Surely if they were inclined towards fighting you but waiting upon you starting to cast they would immediately take counter measures ? From a common sense standpoint pre-buffing doesnt make any sense.

It is not arbitrary if it is believed to unbalance the game. That's everything but arbitrary. Also, got a link?

 

 A link to what?  Also they never balanced the game. Its like say ... having an unpainted house. If someone were to randonly get some paint and paint a few strokes of paint on a few random walls would that not be arbitrary ? If you asked the person doing the painting "why are you doing this?" and they responded with "its because the house needs painting" wouldn't you feel like that doesn't answer the question ?

 The removal of pre-buffs is like a teensie tiny polka dot piece of 'balance' put into a game which otherwise doesn't have any. Oh if you meant a link to where the devs decided to take out or not include pre-buffs no I don't have a link to their original statement on this. I did read it in the backer beta forums a couple of years back. The backers had a good old time arguing about it. 

 Personally I feel like a fair amount of the reason they do not have pre-buffs is because in the context of pillars of eternity it would mean priests wouldn't exactly have a lot to do during actual combat besides auto attacking. That is just a guess based on my game experience though.

[scrotiemcb]

Since everyone likes giving short answers, mine is "efficiency."

 

Could one balance the game so that prebuffing was taken into consideration, and that NPCs viewed certain buffs as hostile actions rather than allowing players to do whatever right in front of their noses? Yeah, probably. But boy, would that ever be a lot of work.

 

I feel this is something a lot of players don't take into account, while good developers use this technique all the time. The amount of developer effort put into a game is always finite, and thus means cuts will need to be made. So it makes sense for devs to avoid mechanics quagmires, places where a balanced solution may be possible, but the potential gain isn't worth the work needed.

 

Would it be more realistic if we had precombat buffing? Absolutely. But the amount of balance attention it would require from devs is too much; the cost is too high. I'm glad they dodged the issue and worked on more important things instead.

[endolex]

Pre buffing ruins the sense of immersion for me, since in most of the cases your pre buffing will be due to beforehand knowledge.

In most rpg games the player has knowledge, either from earlier games played or from actually knowing the game, of what is about to come. 

 

I absolutely love when I attack 2 lions, and only seeing 2, and then have 5 more rush me, changing an expected easy fight to hard.

That feels real. Knowing this will happen, them stack up 10 buffs, spread out the group and lay down 5 traps, does not feel real.

 

Those are two completely different situations. There are lots of points in the game where not only you but also the characters know that some big fight is about to happen. Not being able to prepare for these situations because spells are blocked breaks immersion for me.

 

Savescumming, acting on player knowledge and the like is a decision of the player however, the game should not prevent you from doing it. For Torment: Tides of Numenera, they actually try to counter this by rewarding 'failures' to some degree instead of prohibiting player from playing the game the way they choose to play it.

[Hatred]

 

 

How ? you can literally afk during combat on hard. How could the balance get worse than that ?

 

 

If anyone can do that, it is a very small group. I can't do it. Since you talk big, can you make a video and link it for us? How about we learn from recent TB history. The game will be balanced much further over the next 6 months. I do find Hard like a Normal, but far from a total roll, unless you've found a super combo and if one did, why need buffs on top then? I'd say report it and see if they can nerf the power, but then are you really after that or wanting to prove that there are crazy powers, but also reap the benefit of those in the comfort of your own?

 

Fantasy games need to adopt the rule of alcohol, do not mix. So here, have your buff, make it strong, make it long, but no mixing. At least it alleviates the chore of it and would be easier to balance a single state boosted vs every one. NWN's was ridiculous, imo.

 

Nope anyone can do it. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72554-hard-mode-is-too-easy/page-16?do=findComment&comment=1637512. This is a link to the forum about hard being too easy. Just to clarify it doesn't start off too easy. Its the XP issue. If you are stupid enough to explore and do sidequests you get horribly over leveled. Its not some kind of skill thing or anything. Just get to defiance bay and make the mistake of doing all of the quests there. After that you will rarely if ever need to use abilities in combat. If you happen to go down into the Dungeon of the Endless or go and do some bounty quests because it sounds like fun .... you will seriously be in trouble.

[RedSocialKnight]

I love this feature.

 

Pre-buffing is obviously an advantage to the player, but it's a boring advantage. It's a no-brainer.

 

Buffing in combat is a strategic trade-off -- buff or attack?

 

It's nothing to do with "balance" (which is kind of meaningless in a single player game) and everything to do with keeping combat active and interesting

[endolex]

I love this feature.

 

Pre-buffing is obviously an advantage to the player, but it's a boring advantage. It's a no-brainer.

 

Buffing in combat is a strategic trade-off -- buff or attack?

 

It's nothing to do with "balance" (which is kind of meaningless in a single player game) and everything to do with keeping combat active and interesting

 

Nope, you can decide not to do the pre-buffing, save time and start offensively even if pre-buffing is possible. Many encounters wouldn't require any pre-buffing. I certainly did *not* pre-buff for every fight in BG, IWD and NWN.

[Gallenger]

Look this is simple.

 

If you allow your players to pre-buff, with the assumption that they will *know* there are enemies ahead, either due to saving and reloading, or because they used a sneaky scout, you have no choice but to:

 

1.  allow the creatures to come pre-buffed as well, or they'll be at a decided disadvantage to the player.

2.  Make the creatures significantly more powerful in their own right, so as not to be at a disadvantage to the buffed player. 

 

The 1st case creates unpleasant scenarios where the enemies have to pre-buff instantly whenever they are seen by the player, this happened quite a lot in BG2 for example, where simply detecting the existence of a mage would set off all of his prot spells.  Then you could simply walk away, put the kettle on, and when you came back, walk back over and detect him again, and then the mage wouldn't have any more buffs once you got your tea all set up. 

 

In the second case, that's all well and good - but you necessitate pre-buffing to not get waxed by the monsters. 

 

On the contrary if you don't allow pre-buffing, you can just plop your monsters down and be done with it, and you wont have to build a sequencer mechanic or anything!  Nor will you make a pre-buff period necessary. 

[Odd Hermit]

It was a common and dull tactic to just buff yourself like mad and spend less than the time you spent buffing to kill an enemy.

 

I'm not 100% anti pre-buffing but this is definitely better than having to cast "immune to getting completely wrecked by save or die stuff" before fighting enemies with such abilities, and definitely also better than stacking a bunch of long duration stuff every time you rest as well. Wasn't really interesting casting a bunch of +2 attribute for 9 hours sort of spells before going off and fighting stuff.

 

I think the solution is turning a few spells into "upkeep" spells that come with pros/cons and take up a spell or two. This would give some of the Wizard buff spells a purpose. Still, Wizard would also need some other options to really make gish builds work but it'd be a step in the right direction without adding any tedium.

[Valsuelm]

I love this feature.

 

Pre-buffing is obviously an advantage to the player, but it's a boring advantage. It's a no-brainer.

One of the primary arguments Sawyer gave against pre-buffing is that it wasn't a no-brainer to a lot of players. There's a post around here somewhere from a year or two back where he talks about this.

 

Count me in the there should be pre-buffing crowd. Arbitrary limitations such as not allowing it are bad for all sorts of reasons. It's not good game design. Not for an RPG based on the IE engine games or the legacy of AD&D anyways. A console game? Perhaps.

Edited April 5, 2015 by Valsuelm

[Horrorscope]

 

 

 

How ? you can literally afk during combat on hard. How could the balance get worse than that ?

 

 

If anyone can do that, it is a very small group. I can't do it. Since you talk big, can you make a video and link it for us? How about we learn from recent TB history. The game will be balanced much further over the next 6 months. I do find Hard like a Normal, but far from a total roll, unless you've found a super combo and if one did, why need buffs on top then? I'd say report it and see if they can nerf the power, but then are you really after that or wanting to prove that there are crazy powers, but also reap the benefit of those in the comfort of your own?

 

Fantasy games need to adopt the rule of alcohol, do not mix. So here, have your buff, make it strong, make it long, but no mixing. At least it alleviates the chore of it and would be easier to balance a single state boosted vs every one. NWN's was ridiculous, imo.

 

Nope anyone can do it. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/72554-hard-mode-is-too-easy/page-16?do=findComment&comment=1637512. This is a link to the forum about hard being too easy. Just to clarify it doesn't start off too easy. Its the XP issue. If you are stupid enough to explore and do sidequests you get horribly over leveled. Its not some kind of skill thing or anything. Just get to defiance bay and make the mistake of doing all of the quests there. After that you will rarely if ever need to use abilities in combat. If you happen to go down into the Dungeon of the Endless or go and do some bounty quests because it sounds like fun .... you will seriously be in trouble.

 

 

Yes some will find it very easy, really we don't know the percentages on this. But if it is that easy, then we don't need buffs at all, so using a Drew Rosenhaus line, next question.

 

Thanks for the link though, I will review it.

 

Happy to see there was a command line to bump up to PotD, when needed.

Edited April 5, 2015 by Horrorscope

[endolex]

Look this is simple.

 

If you allow your players to pre-buff, with the assumption that they will *know* there are enemies ahead, either due to saving and reloading, or because they used a sneaky scout, you have no choice but to:

 

1.  allow the creatures to come pre-buffed as well, or they'll be at a decided disadvantage to the player.

2.  Make the creatures significantly more powerful in their own right, so as not to be at a disadvantage to the buffed player. 

 

The 1st case creates unpleasant scenarios where the enemies have to pre-buff instantly whenever they are seen by the player, this happened quite a lot in BG2 for example, where simply detecting the existence of a mage would set off all of his prot spells.  Then you could simply walk away, put the kettle on, and when you came back, walk back over and detect him again, and then the mage wouldn't have any more buffs once you got your tea all set up. 

 

In the second case, that's all well and good - but you necessitate pre-buffing to not get waxed by the monsters. 

 

On the contrary if you don't allow pre-buffing, you can just plop your monsters down and be done with it, and you wont have to build a sequencer mechanic or anything!  Nor will you make a pre-buff period necessary. 

 

As I said before, buffing is a limited resource. It is not something every player always has for every fight. Therefore, fights in general would not need to be designed around it.

[manageri]

 

@manageri:

 

"As for tactical options, no, having prebuffing means you MUST use prebuffing which means fewer tactical options."

-- No. And I wrote above why not.

 

"This is so because the ability to cast spells which affect the fight before the fight actually starts is the equivalent of getting free actions in the start of the fight."

-- Yes. As is has been in every single tabletop and C-RPG I can remember, and for good reason.

 

 

You realize these two answers directly conflict with each other? Now that you admitted it is indeed not optional, tactically speaking, to prebuff, the only question is why the hell would we then make the player go through the same stupid routine of standing there for X rounds buffing before every tough fight, when we can instead just lower the enemy's difficulty so the difficulty of fighting them unbuffed remains the same. You have absolutely no GAMEPLAY related answer to this. And no, your nonsense about immersion doesn't matter, especially when most of the time it's metagaming, which is the exact opposite of immersion, that informs the decision of when the player chooses to go all out with their buffs/consumables.

 

"Is it a valid tactical option to choose to not utilize such an advantage?"

-- Yes, when the amount of times you can use this advantage is *limited* and the choice when to use it should be left to the player.

 

There's nothing truly limited about the resting system in this game.

 

"This is quite obvious to anyone with any experience with D&D CRPGs, so please don't insult our intelligence and your own intellectual integrity by suggesting otherwise."

 

-- I don't recall having insulted anyone, but right now you seem to on the agressive side of things.

 

"Now that prebuffing is not an option, it's ACTUALLY a tactical choise whether you choose to start the fight by having the priest cast a buff, or whether you'd perhaps like him to cast something offensive instead. This ACTUAL added tactical depth stretches even further into character build considerations, as you can, for example, choose to keep your priest's strength low if you want him to only play a buffer role, and vice versa."

 

-- This makes no sense, because you can make precisely the same decision with pre-combat buffing enabled. In an encounter where blasting the enemy head-on ends a fight much faster than buffing your party, you will want the agressive option. You could also always choose not to take a priest with you at all and rely on fast damage output and little in the way of support.

 

 

No, because with prebuffing you're doing BOTH, you're buffing the party (before the fight) AND THEN you can start using that buffing character to nuke. Long term buff spells are simply not optional in D&D CRPGs; You either use them or you're playing badly. Only when the fight starts without the possibility of having buffs already up does it truly become an option whether you cast that bless, or throw a pillar of faith to knock those enemies down, as an example.

[anameforobsidian]

Here are some of the basic arguments back and forth.

 

Arguments Against:

• There's no drawbacks to casting spells outside of battle.  It provides a tactical non-choice; you do it every time before entering battle and there's no interesting tradeoff.   This is especially true if what you're using is a cipher power, or something else that comes from limitless resources.  This is partially countered by the fact that rests are limited and buffs are relatively short.  This in turn is partially countered by the fact that you're still getting a relative (if smaller) advantage by having buffs up when combat starts.
• Another line of argument against prebuffs is that it gives player characters a definite and immediate advantage over enemies.  Enemies can't chose to prebuff since they "don't know" the player's there before combat starts.  This problem existed in the IE games, and the most popular difficulty mod, Sword Coast Stratagems, partially solved this problem by giving enemies the unfair advantage of three instant buffs right at the start.  This has a minor counter with, "the system could be rebalanced to support prebuffs," which is weak because most of the ways to support it are tedious/ 
• It's boring to cast the same sequence of spells over and over again.  This is made irrelevant by the fact that boring is not an agreed upon state.  One person's boring is another's deep mastery, etc.

 

Arguments For:

• An argument for prebuffs is that they incentivize cautious and smart play.  You want players to sneak around, observe their surroundings, and gain an advantage for doing so.  This is mostly countered by the existence of save and reload, metagaming knowledge works just as well as cautious play.  This goes on into a "you don't have to play that way," "but the game rewards you for using metagame knowledge..." spiral.
• Another argument for prebuffs is that it breaks immersion.  There's a weird hard limit between when you can and when you can't cast spells.  This is partially countered by the fact that immersion is incredibly relative, and there are a ton of things that may break immersion.
• Another argument for prebuffs is that it makes sense from a simulationist perspective.  Generally you should let all characters in the game, player or not, use their ability on the environment whenever and however they want to.  This leads to emergent play, which is good because it increases player ownership of their experiences and creates a wider variety of tactics.  One fairly significant counters to this is that by strongly incentivizing a particular type of gameplay, they actually reduce the variety and viability of non-prebuffing strategies.  The other is that this system is not designed to be simulationist, and not every system has to be.

 

In the end, I find the whole thing comes down largely to personal preference.  Personally, I find the simulationist logic interesting, but think the gamist logic has made some solid points about absolute and relative player advantages.

Edited April 5, 2015 by anameforobsidian

[Gallenger]

The enemies' spells are not, however, limited in the short term, and it's much harder to predict whether or not the player will have buffs remaining at their disposal - as I say, it makes designing encounters much more difficult - every person who has DMed for a long period of time knows this. 

 

You *know* your players will have some long term buffs on them, so you can counteract that in some ways if so you choose, but for your bigger fights it gets a lot more tricky to try and make good high level encounters. 

 

I got around it by making a "max" and a "min" encounter - so if my players were really getting hammered the opposition wouldn't be carrying all of their prot spells, but that's not possible for the game to do lol. 

[Prime-Mover]

 A link to what?  Also they never balanced the game. Its like say ... having an unpainted house. If someone were to randonly get some paint and paint a few strokes of paint on a few random walls would that not be arbitrary ? If you asked the person doing the painting "why are you doing this?" and they responded with "its because the house needs painting" wouldn't you feel like that doesn't answer the question ?

 The removal of pre-buffs is like a teensie tiny polka dot piece of 'balance' put into a game which otherwise doesn't have any. Oh if you meant a link to where the devs decided to take out or not include pre-buffs no I don't have a link to their original statement on this. I did read it in the backer beta forums a couple of years back. The backers had a good old time arguing about it. 

 Personally I feel like a fair amount of the reason they do not have pre-buffs is because in the context of pillars of eternity it would mean priests wouldn't exactly have a lot to do during actual combat besides auto attacking. That is just a guess based on my game experience though.

 

 

I read your post like you were saying that there is "no reason at all" as to why they don't allow pre-buffing, and that they used "balance" as an excuse. That certainy implies that you have some knowledge about Obsidian's design decision. So I ask you for the source of that claim. And apparently they posted it in the beta forum. So, did they actually write something like: "we don't have any reason to do x, but we're doing it anyway"? Or are you simply making the assumption that they didn't have any reasons for doing it, because you don't follow/agree with the decision?

 

Further, the painting analogy doesn't hold up, because they actually gave a reason (namely balance, according to you), and didn't just say - "because we need to make a game". Rather, it would be like if the painter had said: "because I this is a good color pattern/color variation".

 

But that's besides the point now. I personally never enjoyed the whole tedious IE pre-buffing to begin with. However, I really dislike dislike the clear distinction between combat and non-combat allowed abilities in PoE. I would prefer if all abilities were usable all the time, but just limit the buffing in some other way, like a choice between permanent toggles, where you could e.g. have a combination of, say, three different abilities toggled at the time, all the time, and then pick and chose between them, depending on the context/encounter. The Chanter is e.g. pretty close to that notion.

[Luckmann]

 

The short answer to this is "Sawyer". The long answer is slightly more complicated but ends up as a largely indefensible position. The shorter answer is really the easiest and most correct one. Sawyer did not like pre-buffing in the IE games, and therefore there is no pre-buffing whatsoever in PoE.

 

No. Mainly because of technical issues with Unity's "saving of the game state".

Which I have yet to see any truth in at all. Why would there be problems with one set of buffs, but not other sets of buffs? Food, Rest and Aura buffs persists through saves just fine, but another kind of buff would not? Oh please.

 

What's the long answer? Just to make sure you're not misrepresenting his view.

 

I'm not misrepresenting his views, I am simply parahrasing them. At the end of the day, it was his decision and is attributed to him. At that point, the rationale he used for it in itself is largely irrelevant. That being said, I'm sure most of the "arguments" will crop up in the thread, some have already been mentioned, most of which are, of course, blown out of proportion, and based on how pre-buffing worked in the IE games, which did have some issues - issues that do not exist in PoE, whether you can buff before or after combat.

 

It was a common and dull tactic to just buff yourself like mad and spend less than the time you spent buffing to kill an enemy.

 

I'm not 100% anti pre-buffing but this is definitely better than having to cast "immune to getting completely wrecked by save or die stuff" before fighting enemies with such abilities, and definitely also better than stacking a bunch of long duration stuff every time you rest as well. Wasn't really interesting casting a bunch of +2 attribute for 9 hours sort of spells before going off and fighting stuff.

 

I think the solution is turning a few spells into "upkeep" spells that come with pros/cons and take up a spell or two. This would give some of the Wizard buff spells a purpose. Still, Wizard would also need some other options to really make gish builds work but it'd be a step in the right direction without adding any tedium.

There were definitely issues with pre-buffing in the IE games, yes, and I largely agree with you. For example, "this is definitely better than having to cast bla bla bla".

 

I'm inclined to agree, yes, but it is a false dichotomy based on the premise that if there is pre-buffing, it has to work like in the IE games, with the same issues, and the only alternative is to not just curtail pre-buffing, but to artificially prevent it completely.

 

I'm not saying you adhere to this dichotomy, just that that part of the argument between pre-buffing vs. no-pre-buffing is inherently flawed. There are many ways to make buffing viable without making pre-buffing an issue. The vast majority of buffs in PoE already have very short durations, and the number of spells per day are already limited, and the amount you can actually rest - and thus how much you can buff - is already restricted.

 

There are definite, concrete tradeoffs to pre-buffing already built into PoE in how the buffs themselves work. You are expending effort, you are expending time, and you are expending limited resources. Restricting buffs to "Combat Only" on the basis "pre-buffing was **** in IE and therefore we have no pre-buffing" is just such horse****.

 

As for the argument some bring forth "Hurr, then the encounters need to be rebalanced" or "Pre-buffs encourages metagaming, hurr"; No.

 

The encounters are already not "balanced" in this regard, assuming you have spellcasters of X or Y type - they are not "balanced" with you having a priest in mind. They are not balanced with your Wizard having Slicken memorized in mind, so why would they be balanced with buffs in mind? The game isn't balanced with resting bonuses in mind, either, which are objectively buffs. They are not balanced around you having specifically a Paladin. Why would it be?

 

You buff, you lose access to spells, that's the balancing factor. You also lose time, very valuable time, considering how quickly buffs actually run out. This is no different than spending any spell in battle, whether it's a buff or a fireball.

 

As for metagaming, if you don't scout in a game that already awards scouting and positioning massively, you deserve to die in the game and be punished for moving around. Metagaming has done nothing for anyone in PoE that scouting can't already achieve, in 9 cases out of 10 (I'm saying 9 times out of 10 just in case someone can think of a case where this might not be true; I sure can't).