Let's talk class balance....

[SilchasRuin]

Costing them time = having to run back. How much time you waste is entirely dependent on how well you play. Playing on PotD, if anything I felt the resting system was too lenient, and I could easily get away with nova-ing in fights where it wasn't necessary and I would either find more camping supplies or finish the questlines in an area and need to return to town anyways. There are occasions where access to camping supplies feels strictly less consistent than it perhaps should be but thats to be expected. In order to have strategic resources, limited resting is a requirement, otherwise the game has to be balanced around a strictly pure encounter basis, which means any encounter less than the most challenging is functionally pointless as it has no actual effect on your gameplay beyond the context of that encounter. Within a per rest system, encounters can be more flexible and meaningful, as long as rests are meaningfully limited in some fashion, as it means even minor encounters can soften the players party up over time, which requires a player to manage attrition as well as large scale single encounters.

[Schyzm]

Costing them time = having to run back. How much time you waste is entirely dependent on how well you play. Playing on PotD, if anything I felt the resting system was too lenient, and I could easily get away with nova-ing in fights where it wasn't necessary and I would either find more camping supplies or finish the questlines in an area and need to return to town anyways. There are occasions where access to camping supplies feels strictly less consistent than it perhaps should be but thats to be expected. In order to have strategic resources, limited resting is a requirement, otherwise the game has to be balanced around a strictly pure encounter basis, which means any encounter less than the most challenging is functionally pointless as it has no actual effect on your gameplay beyond the context of that encounter. Within a per rest system, encounters can be more flexible and meaningful, as long as rests are meaningfully limited in some fashion, as it means even minor encounters can soften the players party up over time, which requires a player to manage attrition as well as large scale single encounters.

 

 

first of all it should be noted, resting is not limited. this is important...resting...is...not...limited. I also dislike how much groups are able to power spike for "tough encounters" but lets stick to one discussion at a time, and certainly other bad mechanics shouldn't justify this bad mechanic.

 

costing time is not an equivalent thing, which appears to be the divergence in our perspectives. for me dying involves a question of how I could have not died, and a failure of some amount. in ironman the failure is absolute in non-ironman its more a small failure, but the important aspect isn't time, its failure. having to run back is not a failure, it is in fact a smart decision, its just a boring and tedious decision.

 

it might be said that the game designers would like you to treat resting as a limited resource, that is probably the implication being handed out, but it is not limited. and because of this raw fact the actual game mechanics encourage a very boring and tedious play design.

[Sanctuary]

Camping Supplies are an abstraction which serve to fulfill an important role, that of insuring per rest is a meaningful mechanic and that classes can be allowed the option of going nova at the cost of relying on a smaller portion of resources in later encounters. People who complain that it's easy to circumvent through busy work ignore the point, virtually any mechanic that intends to punish players for poor play, and thus reward good play, punishes players through time. From game overs to repair on death mechanics to the limited resting mechanic in PoE. almost all of these systems are fundamentally just time sinks that can be avoided with good play.

 

With the current limited resting system, a balance can be constructed where players are encouraged to move forward until they run out of resources and to conserve resource. In the old IE games you could rest almost anywhere, and there was little incentive to not simply nova all of your spells and then rest immediately, thus trivializing all but the most difficult encounters. The IE games made use of a random encounter system when you rested which could be avoided very easily via save scumming. In my opinion, game designers should work to make sure that a player fully utilizing all available systems, that are accessible normally (without cheats/mods) will receive a properly balanced game experience. Limited rests mean that players must accommodate limited rests, either by maximizing the efficiency of their rest limited resources (health, spells, etc) or by spending the time to go find/purchase camping supplies.

 

The tradeoff given here insures that it is viable, and indeed ideal, to focus on the efficient and best usage of resources, rather than being able to spend all of the resources immediately, thus in effect reducing all per rest resources to per encounter. In order to balance a system where all resources are per encounter, on average every fight has to be more difficult and carry serious risk of game over, otherwise encounters become trivial and the difference between a player who adeptly manages their resources and wins fights by large margins is not being rewarded any more than the player who doesn't take care to manage their party properly and allows their party members to spend all of their resources and lose massive amounts of health, and indeed the more aggressive player is likely being rewarded with encounters that go faster because they don't take the time to micro each character to maintain resources.

This keeps being repeated over and over again as though if it's said enough times that it will somehow make sense.

Explain why the Druid, Priest and Wizard suddenly get level 1 spells as per encounter at level 9 and the same with level 2 spells at level 11?  Why does this mechanic exist (extremely limited spells early on and all per rest) at all if it's just going to be removed, making an already mostly trivialized game even more trivial than it already was?  And you know what?  As obnoxious as it is, and with how ridiculous it is playing a Wizard at the lower levels (and the class most hurt by limited resting early on), the more Wizards you stack in a party, the more trivialized the game becomes.  That's just with level 1 spells too. 

 

One Wizard in a group feels semi-useless.  Each Wizard you add though makes the previous more useful.  Why?  Because you get more casts of the most useful spells.  And on Hard - PotD, the most important spells are CC.  It's also more useful to have ranged than any melee at all outside of the tank, despite how much you really want to play a wet bag Rogue.  For the majority of the fights, you can simply stack Chill Fogs and watch enemies just melt while aimlessly attacking your tank.  Those 3 - 10 ticks add up when it's hitting everything at once and lasts 20+ seconds (while also blinding and snaring).

 

It's like Obsidian really had no idea how to balance the class at all.  But at least they aren't Rangers and Paladins, so that's something?

Edited April 29, 2015 by Sanctuary

[SilchasRuin]

Ideally the spells become encounter because they're no longer valuable enough to warrant conservation. As is the spells that become encounter are probably a bit too powerful, but this may be an issue with the early game of the wizard. Further, it does not remove the consideration of conservation of valuable spells any more than the existence of the wizard's arcane assault does. Frankly, even without per encounter spells at 9 and 11 Wizards and Druids are already fairly overpowered by those levels as the amount of resources they have by that point is fairly enormous. This is a balancing problem, but is not really related to limited camping supplies. Which are limited by the way, in order to bypass the limit you spend time returning to town to refresh your supplies, if you ever have to return to town in the middle of completing content, that indicates you are either underleveled for the content, and therefore should come back later, or are playing poorly and need to do a better job conserving your resources.

 

I don't see how you think a wizard, even a single wizard is useless. Once you get to level 5/6 I would argue wizard (and druid for that matter) begin to become by far the most powerful characters, possessing the greatest utility and damage output of any other class. Note, all of my arguments center around PotD, which in a way is both better and worse for Wizards/Druids. More limited supplies is an issue on PotD, but classes like Cipher become much less consistent compared to Wizard/Druid as battles take longer and it becomes more difficult for Cipher to generate resources, also the power of Wizard/Druid's aoes become greater game changers as a Wizard/Druid can pretty consistently wipe a large pack of trash in 1 to 2 spells, something Cipher cannot do consistently (at least until they get access to 6th level spells, at which point the balance of the game kind of drops out of whack anyways).

 

Inherently, when you run out of camping supplies, your health is getting low and your spells are getting low, if you are not near a point where return to town would be normal without camping supplies, or you find more supplies (there are quite a few of them scattered about, enough that I've often went ahead and nuked a few nearby fights and then ran back to grab the supplies because I had too many to pick them up when I found them) then you've made or have been making mistakes. Now, admittedly you may not realize you're playing suboptimally initially because the feedback isn't necessarily as strong as the feedback given by the gameover screen, but once you get an idea of the game's pacing and when you can expect to see more supplies, then if at that point you're still having trouble managing resources it's purely an issue of your capability at managing resources.

[Schyzm]

Ideally the spells become encounter because they're no longer valuable enough to warrant conservation. As is the spells that become encounter are probably a bit too powerful, but this may be an issue with the early game of the wizard. Further, it does not remove the consideration of conservation of valuable spells any more than the existence of the wizard's arcane assault does. Frankly, even without per encounter spells at 9 and 11 Wizards and Druids are already fairly overpowered by those levels as the amount of resources they have by that point is fairly enormous. This is a balancing problem, but is not really related to limited camping supplies. Which are limited by the way, in order to bypass the limit you spend time returning to town to refresh your supplies, if you ever have to return to town in the middle of completing content, that indicates you are either underleveled for the content, and therefore should come back later, or are playing poorly and need to do a better job conserving your resources.

 

I don't see how you think a wizard, even a single wizard is useless. Once you get to level 5/6 I would argue wizard (and druid for that matter) begin to become by far the most powerful characters, possessing the greatest utility and damage output of any other class. Note, all of my arguments center around PotD, which in a way is both better and worse for Wizards/Druids. More limited supplies is an issue on PotD, but classes like Cipher become much less consistent compared to Wizard/Druid as battles take longer and it becomes more difficult for Cipher to generate resources, also the power of Wizard/Druid's aoes become greater game changers as a Wizard/Druid can pretty consistently wipe a large pack of trash in 1 to 2 spells, something Cipher cannot do consistently (at least until they get access to 6th level spells, at which point the balance of the game kind of drops out of whack anyways).

 

Inherently, when you run out of camping supplies, your health is getting low and your spells are getting low, if you are not near a point where return to town would be normal without camping supplies, or you find more supplies (there are quite a few of them scattered about, enough that I've often went ahead and nuked a few nearby fights and then ran back to grab the supplies because I had too many to pick them up when I found them) then you've made or have been making mistakes. Now, admittedly you may not realize you're playing suboptimally initially because the feedback isn't necessarily as strong as the feedback given by the gameover screen, but once you get an idea of the game's pacing and when you can expect to see more supplies, then if at that point you're still having trouble managing resources it's purely an issue of your capability at managing resources.

 

 

you still labor under the idea camping is a limited resource, it is not. you also labor under the idea that going "longer" w/o camping is somehow "optimal" that is also false. I will confess that if you continue to believe things that are simply not true then your argument is much stronger.

[Jimmysdabestcop]

Honestly resting is just a throw back to the IE games which was neccessary because spells had to be memorized and sleep to activate. But almost every party had some kind of cleric dual or wizard dual.

 

You can easily have parties in PoE without spells per rest. I honestly don't see the need for 3 different magic systems either. 1 for divine casters (priest/druids) one for arcane (wizrds) and 1 for ciphers. Should have chose 1 and made it universal. If Ciphers were loved so much then why not use their focus magic for all spellcasters??

 

Then could have just made resting at inns and gotten rid of camping all together. Unless I lose track of a member because of trees, objects, or spell effects I very rarely ever have had to camp for HP reasons alone.

 

And 1st and 2nd level spells become per encounter base its insane. Priests and Wizards have rings. Wizards have 2 rings. No spell boost items for druids. But they all have extra spell talents.

[MoxyWoo]

Most classes are great after level 5, which also happens to coincide with much of Act 1.  Which I think gives the first part of the game an inflated difficulty if you're not sure what you are facing or similar.

 

For trash encounters, wizard can use arcane assault which is RAW damage and on hard this is pretty handy for a spamming.  I played a main wizard on hard and was amazed at how easy it was just because most of the damage racked up by AoE was so handy, while having more single target or similar was redundant with everyone else.  The only other class that compares is Cipher really for ease of play and aoe resource but the wizard quickly caught up and had more impact for difficult encounters as needed.

 

Due to this, I ranked the classes for Act 1 in the following manner.

 

Tier 1:  These classes can deal with all kinds of threats, not care about resources, and the resources they do have are game changers.

 

Cipher (Use a spell every encounter, even for trash mobs and have a 40% dmg increase is amazing)

Wizard (Arcane assault spam and spells that game change)

Dracozzi Paladini with Fires Talent (they get retaliation ridiculously early and target REFLEX with it so the act 1 shades are easy with them.).  

 

Tier 2:  While not as versatile as Tier 1, they do their job really well and have some cool spamming abilities or similar that can turn the tide in your favor.

 

Monk (Torment's reach with Moon God-like means free healing and wounds to power them.)

Rogue (alpha strike is still handy to take down one mob.  They can enable their own sneak attacks if needed via crippling to take down another or two.)

Druid (spiritshift, despite the accuracy issues is a decent resource and they can game change via spells)  

Priest (lower end of Tier 2, they have support spells that do game change for the group but not as much damage)

 

Tier 3:  They're good at their task, and though don't have game changing mechanics like the Tier 1 or Tier 2 classes, they're 'good' enough.

 

Barbarian (Frenzy is amazing along with Carnage, they just take a little bit to mature and Fire God-like + retaliation isn't available early).

Ranger (They could be Tier 2 if not for the bugs, ranger's grief, and similar issues plaguing them.  The bear tank does provide a great off tank for a single or 2 targets with resilient companion though, so I view them as versatile, just not 'great' until they get all their talents they want as build choices force them behind a rogue until 5+).

Fighter (Limited experience maining this one, from what I saw of Eder they could last forever but didn't have game changing mechanics).

Chanter (Only placed down here due to their slow ramp up, overall, they are effective once the 18+ seconds are up.)

 

Tier 4:  The job they have, they can be okay at with extreme optimization but most classes do it better or easier.  In a bigger meta sense, why take them over the other classes?

Paladin (any other besides Dracozzi)

 

Of course, after level 5 all classes get more powerful, or their game changing skills, or resources via potions and similar are readily available to anyone.  Basically, the game becomes easier for any class.

Edited April 29, 2015 by MoxyWoo

[SilchasRuin]

 

Ideally the spells become encounter because they're no longer valuable enough to warrant conservation. As is the spells that become encounter are probably a bit too powerful, but this may be an issue with the early game of the wizard. Further, it does not remove the consideration of conservation of valuable spells any more than the existence of the wizard's arcane assault does. Frankly, even without per encounter spells at 9 and 11 Wizards and Druids are already fairly overpowered by those levels as the amount of resources they have by that point is fairly enormous. This is a balancing problem, but is not really related to limited camping supplies. Which are limited by the way, in order to bypass the limit you spend time returning to town to refresh your supplies, if you ever have to return to town in the middle of completing content, that indicates you are either underleveled for the content, and therefore should come back later, or are playing poorly and need to do a better job conserving your resources.

 

I don't see how you think a wizard, even a single wizard is useless. Once you get to level 5/6 I would argue wizard (and druid for that matter) begin to become by far the most powerful characters, possessing the greatest utility and damage output of any other class. Note, all of my arguments center around PotD, which in a way is both better and worse for Wizards/Druids. More limited supplies is an issue on PotD, but classes like Cipher become much less consistent compared to Wizard/Druid as battles take longer and it becomes more difficult for Cipher to generate resources, also the power of Wizard/Druid's aoes become greater game changers as a Wizard/Druid can pretty consistently wipe a large pack of trash in 1 to 2 spells, something Cipher cannot do consistently (at least until they get access to 6th level spells, at which point the balance of the game kind of drops out of whack anyways).

 

Inherently, when you run out of camping supplies, your health is getting low and your spells are getting low, if you are not near a point where return to town would be normal without camping supplies, or you find more supplies (there are quite a few of them scattered about, enough that I've often went ahead and nuked a few nearby fights and then ran back to grab the supplies because I had too many to pick them up when I found them) then you've made or have been making mistakes. Now, admittedly you may not realize you're playing suboptimally initially because the feedback isn't necessarily as strong as the feedback given by the gameover screen, but once you get an idea of the game's pacing and when you can expect to see more supplies, then if at that point you're still having trouble managing resources it's purely an issue of your capability at managing resources.

 

 

you still labor under the idea camping is a limited resource, it is not. you also labor under the idea that going "longer" w/o camping is somehow "optimal" that is also false. I will confess that if you continue to believe things that are simply not true then your argument is much stronger.

 

Exactly how is it false? I have yet to have to return to town because I needed camping supplies. Either your argument is it's not limited because it's already effectively free, in which case the solution would be to make it more scarce, or you believe it's impossible to optimally utilize resources such that you don't need to camp constantly, in which case you're just wrong. Or you think that the game should be balanced around single encounters rather than attrition in which case you disagree with the direction they took the game. Going longer without camping is optimal to the point where you are only need more supplies at points where you find more supplies, or when you would return to town for other reasons, optimal is reaching a point where your usage of resources precisely equates to the most optimal division of your time, which is that you never want to return to town in the middle of a dungeon (thus requiring backtracking) or otherwise need to turn back in order to continue onward.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

 

 

Ideally the spells become encounter because they're no longer valuable enough to warrant conservation. As is the spells that become encounter are probably a bit too powerful, but this may be an issue with the early game of the wizard. Further, it does not remove the consideration of conservation of valuable spells any more than the existence of the wizard's arcane assault does. Frankly, even without per encounter spells at 9 and 11 Wizards and Druids are already fairly overpowered by those levels as the amount of resources they have by that point is fairly enormous. This is a balancing problem, but is not really related to limited camping supplies. Which are limited by the way, in order to bypass the limit you spend time returning to town to refresh your supplies, if you ever have to return to town in the middle of completing content, that indicates you are either underleveled for the content, and therefore should come back later, or are playing poorly and need to do a better job conserving your resources.

 

I don't see how you think a wizard, even a single wizard is useless. Once you get to level 5/6 I would argue wizard (and druid for that matter) begin to become by far the most powerful characters, possessing the greatest utility and damage output of any other class. Note, all of my arguments center around PotD, which in a way is both better and worse for Wizards/Druids. More limited supplies is an issue on PotD, but classes like Cipher become much less consistent compared to Wizard/Druid as battles take longer and it becomes more difficult for Cipher to generate resources, also the power of Wizard/Druid's aoes become greater game changers as a Wizard/Druid can pretty consistently wipe a large pack of trash in 1 to 2 spells, something Cipher cannot do consistently (at least until they get access to 6th level spells, at which point the balance of the game kind of drops out of whack anyways).

 

Inherently, when you run out of camping supplies, your health is getting low and your spells are getting low, if you are not near a point where return to town would be normal without camping supplies, or you find more supplies (there are quite a few of them scattered about, enough that I've often went ahead and nuked a few nearby fights and then ran back to grab the supplies because I had too many to pick them up when I found them) then you've made or have been making mistakes. Now, admittedly you may not realize you're playing suboptimally initially because the feedback isn't necessarily as strong as the feedback given by the gameover screen, but once you get an idea of the game's pacing and when you can expect to see more supplies, then if at that point you're still having trouble managing resources it's purely an issue of your capability at managing resources.

 

 

you still labor under the idea camping is a limited resource, it is not. you also labor under the idea that going "longer" w/o camping is somehow "optimal" that is also false. I will confess that if you continue to believe things that are simply not true then your argument is much stronger.

 

Exactly how is it false? I have yet to have to return to town because I needed camping supplies. Either your argument is it's not limited because it's already effectively free, in which case the solution would be to make it more scarce, or you believe it's impossible to optimally utilize resources such that you don't need to camp constantly, in which case you're just wrong. Or you think that the game should be balanced around single encounters rather than attrition in which case you disagree with the direction they took the game. Going longer without camping is optimal to the point where you are only need more supplies at points where you find more supplies, or when you would return to town for other reasons, optimal is reaching a point where your usage of resources precisely equates to the most optimal division of your time, which is that you never want to return to town in the middle of a dungeon (thus requiring backtracking) or otherwise need to turn back in order to continue onward.

 

 

there is nothing in the games mechanics that rewards resting fewer times besides possibly paying less for camping supplies, which is trivial. you may feel better that you rested fewer times, but thats more or less you imposing things. if you are concerned with not resting then just run ciphers, they have no rest mechanic outside of health(or some other classes).

 

you keep implying that resting fewer times is optimal, you are just wrong. I doubt we are going to come to agreement on this, but imagine if you will a game that gets increasingly harder, you would rest more often, the reason you would rest more often in a harder game is because resting more often is optimal and you would be forced to make a more optimal decision because the game is harder. 

[SilchasRuin]

The reward is not returning for camping supplies. if you have to return for camping supplies that is the game telling you you are not playing optimally. No, if harder difficulty can be solved by resting more, that's problematic since it removes the actual difficulty achieved by having an attrition based resource system. If you decide to backtrack to get more camping supplies so you can rest whenever your casters run out of spells, and opt to throw as many of your casters per rest abilities per encounter as possible. And perhaps for good measure, don't adequately manage your squishies to prevent them from taking damage, the backtracking is the price you pay to circumvent the intended functionality of limited resources reduced by attrition.

 

An example of how poor a 0 resource rest system can work is the IE games, they're good games, but the per day spells are functionally per encounter, but are balanced to be per day, because it is very easy, and indeed optimal to spam buffs/high power spells and rest every time the buffs wear off. For instance, I'm doing a run through Icewind Dale at the moment, the optimal strategy for most areas is to have my cleric and bard cast all of their buffing/summoning spells (in order from longest to shortest) then to cast haste, turn on Bard song, then have my characters shoot through the map murdering everything in their way. Once haste ends, I send a character with boots of speed to pick up any loot then rest and repeat. This strategy makes little narrative sense, but functions extremely effectively at trivializing all but the hardest encounters.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

The reward is not returning for camping supplies. if you have to return for camping supplies that is the game telling you you are not playing optimally. No, if harder difficulty can be solved by resting more, that's problematic since it removes the actual difficulty achieved by having an attrition based resource system. If you decide to backtrack to get more camping supplies so you can rest whenever your casters run out of spells, and opt to throw as many of your casters per rest abilities per encounter as possible. And perhaps for good measure, don't adequately manage your squishies to prevent them from taking damage, the backtracking is the price you pay to circumvent the intended functionality of limited resources reduced by attrition.

 

but the resource system isnt attrition based because...camping...is...not...limited. and btw people already rest more to do solo potd, which is harder and requires more optimization, other somewhat tedious optimization also happens on potd like eating the a bunch of different types of food buffs before fights which I doubt many groups bother with. you don't pay a price for resting more often, or not a price any good game designed would want you to pay, making you annoyed by tedium.

 

again, for the large #th time. camping....is....not....a....limited....resource.

[MoxyWoo]

• Camping is not limited except by your loading screen.

This is why the rest system gets annoying once you figure this out. ^_^

[SilchasRuin]

The game is not balanced (and should not be balanced for) around solo. The camping resource system IS LIMITED. It is limited in the same fashion that inventory in the IE games is limited. It is limited in that you can only carry so many resources at one time. You can subvert the limitation, but the price is backtracking, wasting time returning to town at a non-optimal time. Tedium is one of the primary ways you pay for any mistake in gameplay. Repeating a hard encounter multiple times can get tedious, if you're poor at the game but attempting higher difficulties, even relatively simple encounters can become tedious. Tedium is an entirely reasonable punishment for refusing to attempt to avoid it. it is certainly within your capacity to play the game, rest at appropriate intervals and never need to trek back to town to get more supplies. The IE games were arguably worse for a tedious punishment for failure, in that a single character being reduced to 0 hp prior to getting a priest with raise dead/resurrection meant a return back to town to get a priest to raise them, and required you to distribute the character's inventory between party members. The only advantage the IE games had was easy save-scumming to avoid this, if an iron man game mode was instituted. the IE games would be extremely punishing for having a party member die.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

The game is not balanced (and should not be balanced for) around solo. The camping resource system IS LIMITED. It is limited in the same fashion that inventory in the IE games is limited. It is limited in that you can only carry so many resources at one time. You can subvert the limitation, but the price is backtracking, wasting time returning to town at a non-optimal time. Tedium is one of the primary ways you pay for any mistake in gameplay. Repeating a hard encounter multiple times can get tedious, if you're poor at the game but attempting higher difficulties, even relatively simple encounters can become tedious. Tedium is an entirely reasonable punishment for refusing to attempt to avoid it. it is certainly within your capacity to play the game, rest at appropriate intervals and never need to trek back to town to get more supplies. The IE games were arguably worse for a tedious punishment for failure, in that a single character being reduced to 0 hp prior to getting a priest with raise dead/resurrection meant a return back to town to get a priest to raise them, and required you to distribute the character's inventory between party members. The only advantage the IE games had was easy save-scumming to avoid this, if an iron man game mode was instituted. the IE games would be extremely punishing for having a party member die.

 

the fact that its solo is meaningless, it was just a way to more concretely imagine something that is harder, because harder things require more optimization. you could if you wanted also imagine a game that simply gets harder and harder, as it gets harder you would need to make more optimal decisions, one of those would be to rest more often to optimize your power. 

 

your conflation of tedium with failure is also a poor connection, failure is the fundamental mechanic of difficulty, running and seeing bunches of load screens are not. 

[SilchasRuin]

What does failure do except cause you to reload and run back to try a fight again? The rest system just institutes a soft, rather than hard, failure system, where failure is when you choose to run back early, rather than being forced to enter load screens and run back (possibly with the added tedium of losing additional progress if you failed to make a recent save game). In increasing difficulty, instead of resting more often, I would make use of better tactics, better utilization of my abilities. If I'm forced to rest more often than there are camping resources when playing 100% optimally, then there's a problem with the balance. Given that it is never the case in the game for a 6 party group that it is impossible to complete the content without trekking back to town early, this is a non-issue as harder setups, such as 1-5 man groups, are not what the game is balanced around.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

What does failure do except cause you to reload and run back to try a fight again? The rest system just institutes a soft, rather than hard, failure system, where failure is when you choose to run back early, rather than being forced to enter load screens and run back (possibly with the added tedium of losing additional progress if you failed to make a recent save game). In increasing difficulty, instead of resting more often, I would make use of better tactics, better utilization of my abilities. If I'm forced to rest more often than there are camping resources when playing 100% optimally, then there's a problem with the balance. Given that it is never the case in the game for a 6 party group that it is impossible to complete the content without trekking back to town early, this is a non-issue as other harder configurations are exclusively not being balanced towards.

 

 

running back is not failure, if that was true then getting athletics and picking ciphers would cause less failure then picking wizard, which is not only untrue but also a little absurd. as to your question as to why is failure different then running back (since both take time). they are different in numerous ways, the most obvious is that you will have to rest (suffer failure under your paradigm) whereas you don't have to die. 

 

I agree that if you think resting and dying are equivalent then you have a point, I unfortunately do not, and I think its a little goofy that someone would think that resting and dying in a game are equivalent. 

 

you continually make poor connections (dying and resting are the same), assume things about game mechanics that don't exist (resting is a limited resource) and even make pretty tenuous assumptions about game design (that all levels should be completable w/ the "natural" number of looted campfires). you need to pull back some mate.

[SilchasRuin]

If you're running back because of your wizard that is failure (and I consider the wizard's early game quite poorly balanced, so problems with resting early mostly have to do with the fact that wizard starts off with a small pool of per encounter spells and a just as small pool of per day spells, as they grow in levels, their number of per day spells increase rapidly, to the point where by around level 7/8 they have so many spells it's exceedingly rare to need even most of them). If you don't put 3 in athletics and have to keep running back because of fatigue that is also failure (that's the game telling you, put points in athletics! although i don't necessarily think its a good idea to have a requirement of 3 in athletics to reach reasonable fatigue levels). If you're managing your wizard/druid/priest's spells appropriately you will rest just often enough that at the point in a dungeon where you would find more camping supplies or would naturally return to town (end of dungeon/quest or grand staircase in caed nua) you will have exhausted your resources. If you are able to reach this point you will have optimized the value of both the resources of your per rest spells and of your camping supplies as you will not have wasted time by overconserving or wasted time by spending too freely and being forced to backtrack.

 

Resting and dying are not equivalent. Backtracking and dying are equivalent. Both of these indicate you are doing something incorrectly, in this case not spending your resource at the appropriate rate.

 

You keep saying resting is not a limited resource, but it is limited in the exact same fashion that inventory in the IE/Diablo/pretty much any other RPG ever is limited. The limit is a soft limit, it is completely possible to negate the limit (by returning to town early) but in all cases the cost of negating the limit is the same, time and loading screens (some more than others).

 

The game is clearly designed with an idea of how often you should return to town (hint: it's when the quest/dungeon is done or when you see a master staircase in Od Nua) and the placed supplies are clearly intended as a way to insure you make it to these points by extending the amount of time you can remain without returning.

[Schyzm]

If you're running back because of your wizard that is failure (and I consider the wizard's early game quite poorly balanced, so problems with resting early mostly have to do with the fact that wizard starts off with a small pool of per encounter spells and a just as small pool of per day spells, as they grow in levels, their number of per day spells increase rapidly, to the point where by around level 7/8 they have so many spells it's exceedingly rare to need even most of them). If you don't put 3 in athletics and have to keep running back because of fatigue that is also failure (that's the game telling you, put points in athletics! although i don't necessarily think its a good idea to have a requirement of 3 in athletics to reach reasonable fatigue levels). If you're managing your wizard/druid/priest's spells appropriately you will rest just often enough that at the point in a dungeon where you would find more camping supplies or would naturally return to town (end of dungeon/quest or grand staircase in caed nua) you will have exhausted your resources. If you are able to reach this point you will have optimized the value of both the resources of your per rest spells and of your camping supplies as you will not have wasted time by overconserving or wasted time by spending too freely and being forced to backtrack.

 

Resting and dying are not equivalent. Backtracking and dying are equivalent. Both of these indicate you are doing something incorrectly, in this case not spending your resource at the appropriate rate.

 

You keep saying resting is not a limited resource, but it is limited in the exact same fashion that inventory in the IE/Diablo/pretty much any other RPG ever is limited. The limit is a soft limit, it is completely possible to negate the limit (by returning to town early) but in all cases the cost of negating the limit is the same, time and loading screens (some more than others).

 

The game is clearly designed with an idea of how often you should return to town (hint: it's when the quest/dungeon is done or when you see a master staircase in Od Nua) and the placed supplies are clearly intended as a way to insure you make it to these points by extending the amount of time you can remain without returning.

 

I see no such clear design. I see a lazy haphazard unlimited resource that enforces tedium, not some subtle brilliance. running back is still not equivalent to dying, the main mechanic in the game is defeating the game, dying hinders that goal, running back doesn't. you're still wrong. parties that are inferior at "going longer w/o resting" are not worse than parties that aren't. they are in most ways equivalent, just one takes slightly longer due to load screens and other tedium.

 

your whole house in built on incorrect, lazy and wrong assumptions about huge numbers of aspects of the game.

[Sanctuary]

Somewhat back on topic:

What's the point of a Ranged Rogue, over just using another Wizard?  Maybe I just built my Rogue wrong, but the skills I took were:

 

Blinding Strike

Crippling Strike

Deathblows

Deep Wounds

Dirty Fighting

Withering Strike
Vicious Fighting
Weapon Focus: Adventurer (War Bow)

Penetrating Shot

Marksman
Wood Elf Racial

Ended up with 21 Might, 21 Dex, +10% crit damage helm, +10% sneak attack damage boots.  Used a Fine War Bow until Cloudpiercer, then switched to The Rain of Godagh when it became available.

For a while the Rogue was usually 10% - 20% ahead, then jumped up briefly, but near the last fourth of the game dramatically started losing ground.  It's hard to tell how much single target damage she was actually doing compared to the two Wizards and Cipher I was also using, but in the end it came out to:

 

Rogue - Total Damage: 61,804 (701 crits, 770 hits), highest single target damage: 97.1
Bow Wizard - Total Damage: 69, 440 (1,039 crits, 2,247 hits), highest single target damage: 100.0

Wizard - Total Damage: 61, 437 (667 crits, 2,220 hits), highest single target damage: 138.5

Cipher - Total Damage: 64, 644 (638 crits, 2,113 hits), highest single target damage: 94.5 < jumped way up when Mind Lance spam on 3+ targets became common.

This wasn't a matter of neglect either.  I would try to use all cooldowns on the Rogue when possible.  Sometimes the fights would be over though with 1-2 of them remaining.  I would even pull with the Rogue for an opening shot for about 75% of the game.  I haven't taken a bow Rogue through PotD yet, so maybe that will change things?

[SilchasRuin]

 

If you're running back because of your wizard that is failure (and I consider the wizard's early game quite poorly balanced, so problems with resting early mostly have to do with the fact that wizard starts off with a small pool of per encounter spells and a just as small pool of per day spells, as they grow in levels, their number of per day spells increase rapidly, to the point where by around level 7/8 they have so many spells it's exceedingly rare to need even most of them). If you don't put 3 in athletics and have to keep running back because of fatigue that is also failure (that's the game telling you, put points in athletics! although i don't necessarily think its a good idea to have a requirement of 3 in athletics to reach reasonable fatigue levels). If you're managing your wizard/druid/priest's spells appropriately you will rest just often enough that at the point in a dungeon where you would find more camping supplies or would naturally return to town (end of dungeon/quest or grand staircase in caed nua) you will have exhausted your resources. If you are able to reach this point you will have optimized the value of both the resources of your per rest spells and of your camping supplies as you will not have wasted time by overconserving or wasted time by spending too freely and being forced to backtrack.

 

Resting and dying are not equivalent. Backtracking and dying are equivalent. Both of these indicate you are doing something incorrectly, in this case not spending your resource at the appropriate rate.

 

You keep saying resting is not a limited resource, but it is limited in the exact same fashion that inventory in the IE/Diablo/pretty much any other RPG ever is limited. The limit is a soft limit, it is completely possible to negate the limit (by returning to town early) but in all cases the cost of negating the limit is the same, time and loading screens (some more than others).

 

The game is clearly designed with an idea of how often you should return to town (hint: it's when the quest/dungeon is done or when you see a master staircase in Od Nua) and the placed supplies are clearly intended as a way to insure you make it to these points by extending the amount of time you can remain without returning.

 

I see no such clear design. I see a lazy haphazard unlimited resource that enforces tedium, not some subtle brilliance. running back is still not equivalent to dying, the main mechanic in the game is defeating the game, dying hinders that goal, running back doesn't. you're still wrong. parties that are inferior at "going longer w/o resting" are not worse than parties that aren't. they are in most ways equivalent, just one takes slightly longer due to load screens and other tedium.

 

your whole house in built on incorrect, lazy and wrong assumptions about huge numbers of aspects of the game.

 

How does dying hinder your goal other than to force you to reload? What is the consequence of not going back and instead pushing on despite not having enough resources? If the answer isn't death, then clearly you were not required to go back at that point.

 

Your arguments are fallacious and built on poor understanding of game mechanics and game design. See? we can both throw pointless insults at each other. You have yet to demonstrate that the points you are making are true, nor to adequately demonstrate that my points are false. You keep falling back to simply declaring me wrong and yourself right without adequately explaining nor defending your position.  Would you prefer if going back to town was instead of a soft failure, a hard failure? You could simply have every mob respawn without dropping any loot. Now that would be a tedious system, but perhaps it would better illustrate that the idea is that the goal of completing the content is to do so in such a way that trekking back is a failure of yours to adequately conserve resources.

 

@Sanctuary

Honestly ranged weapon based damage dealers are pretty poor at the moment, their single target at best slightly outshines casters, but loses out vastly in terms of total damage done and utility, and is completely inferior to melee weapon wielders in single target damage, making up for that only in ease of play and lack of risk.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

 

 

If you're running back because of your wizard that is failure (and I consider the wizard's early game quite poorly balanced, so problems with resting early mostly have to do with the fact that wizard starts off with a small pool of per encounter spells and a just as small pool of per day spells, as they grow in levels, their number of per day spells increase rapidly, to the point where by around level 7/8 they have so many spells it's exceedingly rare to need even most of them). If you don't put 3 in athletics and have to keep running back because of fatigue that is also failure (that's the game telling you, put points in athletics! although i don't necessarily think its a good idea to have a requirement of 3 in athletics to reach reasonable fatigue levels). If you're managing your wizard/druid/priest's spells appropriately you will rest just often enough that at the point in a dungeon where you would find more camping supplies or would naturally return to town (end of dungeon/quest or grand staircase in caed nua) you will have exhausted your resources. If you are able to reach this point you will have optimized the value of both the resources of your per rest spells and of your camping supplies as you will not have wasted time by overconserving or wasted time by spending too freely and being forced to backtrack.

 

Resting and dying are not equivalent. Backtracking and dying are equivalent. Both of these indicate you are doing something incorrectly, in this case not spending your resource at the appropriate rate.

 

You keep saying resting is not a limited resource, but it is limited in the exact same fashion that inventory in the IE/Diablo/pretty much any other RPG ever is limited. The limit is a soft limit, it is completely possible to negate the limit (by returning to town early) but in all cases the cost of negating the limit is the same, time and loading screens (some more than others).

 

The game is clearly designed with an idea of how often you should return to town (hint: it's when the quest/dungeon is done or when you see a master staircase in Od Nua) and the placed supplies are clearly intended as a way to insure you make it to these points by extending the amount of time you can remain without returning.

 

I see no such clear design. I see a lazy haphazard unlimited resource that enforces tedium, not some subtle brilliance. running back is still not equivalent to dying, the main mechanic in the game is defeating the game, dying hinders that goal, running back doesn't. you're still wrong. parties that are inferior at "going longer w/o resting" are not worse than parties that aren't. they are in most ways equivalent, just one takes slightly longer due to load screens and other tedium.

 

your whole house in built on incorrect, lazy and wrong assumptions about huge numbers of aspects of the game.

 

How does dying hinder your goal other than to force you to reload? What is the consequence of not going back and instead pushing on despite not having enough resources? If the answer isn't death, then clearly you were not required to go back at that point.

 

Your arguments are fallacious and built on poor understanding of game mechanics and game design. See? we can both throw pointless insults at each other. You have yet to demonstrate that the points you are making are true, nor to adequately demonstrate that my points are false. You keep falling back to simply declaring me wrong and yourself right without adequately explaining nor defending your position.  Would you prefer if going back to town was instead of a soft failure, a hard failure? You could simply have every mob respawn without dropping any loot. Now that would be a tedious system, but perhaps it would better illustrate that the idea is that the goal of completing the content is to do so in such a way that trekking back is a failure of yours to adequately conserve resources.

 

@Sanctuary

Honestly ranged weapon based damage dealers are pretty poor at the moment, their single target at best slightly outshines casters, but loses out vastly in terms of total damage done and utility, and is completely inferior to melee weapon wielders in single target damage, making up for that only in ease of play and lack of risk.

 

 

how dying hinder your goal? it means you literally can't progress, how did that question even come to you? how does dying hinder your ability to complete the game? thats a silly question. and I take offense, my insults were pointed.

[SilchasRuin]

Dying and backtracking both temporarily halt progression. They functionally have the same goal. You died, now if you don't want that to happen again do better, either leave and get more experience or try better tactics. You had to leave in the middle of the dungeon because you used up your resources, now if you don't want that to happen again do better, either get more experience or manage your resources better. The functional effect is the same, you're being told that you are doing something wrong. The game is not designed around the idea that you should have to go back to town in the middle of content, if that's happening it's a failure on your part, the same as dying.

 

Also insults have no place in a discussion or debate. If you cannot argue a point without resorting to insults, you would be best to simply cease trying.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

Dying and backtracking both temporarily halt progression. They functionally have the same goal. You died, now if you don't want that to happen again do better, either leave and get more experience or try better tactics. You had to leave in the middle of the dungeon because you used up your resources, now if you don't want that to happen again do better, either get more experience or manage your resources better,

 

Also insults have no place in a discussion or debate. If you cannot argue a point without resorting to insults, you would be best to simply cease trying.

 

backtracking doesn't halt progression and even if u imagine some theoretically amount of "time added" dying is still not the same, you are not guaranteed to progress when you die, backtracking just adds a tiny bit of tedium to your progression.

 

sure insults do, they signal to you my exasperation with your poor arguments. insults serve as communication:). for example like the argument that backtracking and dying are the same when I've already shown multiple meaningful differences. 

 

your arguments are consistently built off poorly thought out connections between things that do not bear the relation you think they do.

Edited April 29, 2015 by Schyzm

[SilchasRuin]

Unless you are literally unable to progress in the game at all due to dying the results are the same. Given the chance of that, for most people the difference between dying and backtracking is negligible except that, if anything, backtracking may waste less of your time since if you had forgotten to save in a large area you could lose a fair amount of progress.

 

Your exasperation is irrelevant when you have not proved your point. If anything you have exasperated me because your points almost all boil down to effectively: no you're wrong, I'm right. Without making any progress at explaining why what I'm saying is wrong other than to handwave it away as: that's not the same and you're stupid to think that.

 

You're a poor debater who relies on pointless personal attacks because of your lack of ability to argue effectively and inability to critically consider the role of punishment and reward in the context of a game system. You can't effectively make a point because you're incapable of understanding and making logical arguments and your arguments fail to withstand even the most basic scrutiny. Now was any of that needed? I could just as well have simply made my points without attacking you; we're discussing a game system here, we're not even debating politics, if you can't keep civil in this context what do you do in arguments about things which actually matter?

 

Also I believe we've derailed this thread enough. If you must continue, please send me a private message, but at this point I think it would be best to agree to disagree.

Edited April 29, 2015 by SilchasRuin

[Schyzm]

Unless you are literally unable to progress in the game at all due to dying the results are the same. Given the chance of that, for most people the difference between dying and backtracking is negligible except that, if anything, backtracking may waste less of your time since if you had forgotten to save in a large area you could lose a fair amount of progress.

 

Your exasperation is irrelevant when you have not proved your point. If anything you have exasperated me because your points almost all boil down to effectively: no you're wrong, I'm right. Without making any progress at explaining why what I'm saying is wrong other than to handwave it away as: that's not the same and you're stupid to think that.

 

You're a poor debater who relies on pointless personal attacks because of your lack of ability to argue effectively and inability to critically consider the role of punishment and reward in the context of a game system. You can't effectively make a point because you're incapable of understanding and making logical arguments and your arguments fail to withstand even the most basic scrutiny. Now was any of that needed? I could just as well have simply made my points without attacking you; we're discussing a game system here, we're not even debating politics, if you can't keep civil in this context what do you do in arguments about things which actually matter?

 

even if your lack of progression is not infinite the results and the impact on the player are not the same. the player treats dying as a hurdle, in fact dying is the basic way to enforce difficulty. backtracking is, again, just tedium, it is not a measure of the game. and to the extent you make the tedium necessary as "punishment" its a bad design.

 

it should also be pointed out that lots of these tedious mechanics have been removed from games over the last 10 years, and that lots of people have pointed out that the rest mechanic in poe is basically just obnoxious tedium.  

 

your arguments are nothing but poor conflations with errant reasoning. you basically say, "dying and backtracking are the same because they both take time." but that is not the only relevant factor and you are being ignorant and obtuse if you think I haven't pointed out numerous other factors.

 

btw its curious that you chose to insult me in the same post you say this, "if you can't keep civil in this context what do you do in arguments about things which actually matter?"  your lack of self awareness is impressive.