Lack of combat information

[Ferrante]

I have played 150 hours. I like the game. I like the combat too. But It cant be called Strategic if you must take your decisions following your heart. This is mostly because the lack of attack frequency feedback. I mean, I cant know if a Fast weapon with 10-15 damage is better than a slow weapon with 20-30 damage. How slow is slow? how fast is fast? are these factors percents modifying the seconds taken in the action?, how is dexterity use here? i.e. fast is 10% faster than normal and then dexterity is applied or is dex applied before the weapon speed. It is impossible to take strategical decisions if I cant tell the DPS (Damage per second) of a weapon. This could be really easy of fix if you could see your Speed just like you see the accuracy and damage for each weapon slot.

 

Now, spell speed presents a similar problem. Will my archer hit them before my Priest weak them? Who knows!

 

I play a Druid, so I must decide if I use my spells or my weapons to deal damage, I cant right now because even if I have the DPS of the spells, i cant know it for my weapons. Do you think that's bad? it gets worst. I can shapechange into a Cat. Its description says: "It has a naturally fast attack". Great. No idea how fast is my cat form. (btw, in the description is not the damage or accuracy modifiers or even the duration of the skill). This means I cant know if I deal more damage in my cat form than with a weapon. Really, no idea. Somehow, I "feel" its better to shapechange when I'm in melee, but I have no numbers to back up that. Probably i'm wrong. Again, Who knows!. 

 

Just to make it worst, I found an item with the description: "Wildstrike Bonus: Modifies wildstrike burn". Modifies?? How and how much? Must I keep it or it is just something like +1% damage? is it 100%? I don't know and yeah, that sucks.

 

But even when the speed problem is the big one, there are more issues: Health, Endurance values are magical numbers for me. There is no place in the whole game or in the manual where they say how they are calculated or improved with leveling. Taken from the manual "but characters have much more total Health than Endurance". Much more? is that a number?? 

[Achilles]

Items and talents that modify abilities will have the modifier listed on the ability's properties.

 

Doing this from memory, but iirc, base health is 3x endurance in most cases (+/- any constitution modifiers). Don't have the base endurance for each class memorized. Sorry.

[Xarastier]

I have played 150 hours. I like the game. I like the combat too. But It cant be called Strategic if you must take your decisions following your heart. This is mostly because the lack of attack frequency feedback. I mean, I cant know if a Fast weapon with 10-15 damage is better than a slow weapon with 20-30 damage. How slow is slow? how fast is fast? are these factors percents modifying the seconds taken in the action?, how is dexterity use here? i.e. fast is 10% faster than normal and then dexterity is applied or is dex applied before the weapon speed. It is impossible to take strategical decisions if I cant tell the DPS (Damage per second) of a weapon. This could be really easy of fix if you could see your Speed just like you see the accuracy and damage for each weapon slot.

 

Now, spell speed presents a similar problem. Will my archer hit them before my Priest weak them? Who knows!

 

I play a Druid, so I must decide if I use my spells or my weapons to deal damage, I cant right now because even if I have the DPS of the spells, i cant know it for my weapons. Do you think that's bad? it gets worst. I can shapechange into a Cat. Its description says: "It has a naturally fast attack". Great. No idea how fast is my cat form. (btw, in the description is not the damage or accuracy modifiers or even the duration of the skill). This means I cant know if I deal more damage in my cat form than with a weapon. Really, no idea. Somehow, I "feel" its better to shapechange when I'm in melee, but I have no numbers to back up that. Probably i'm wrong. Again, Who knows!. 

 

Just to make it worst, I found an item with the description: "Wildstrike Bonus: Modifies wildstrike burn". Modifies?? How and how much? Must I keep it or it is just something like +1% damage? is it 100%? I don't know and yeah, that sucks.

 

But even when the speed problem is the big one, there are more issues: Health, Endurance values are magical numbers for me. There is no place in the whole game or in the manual where they say how they are calculated or improved with leveling. Taken from the manual "but characters have much more total Health than Endurance". Much more? is that a number?? 

I hear ya Ferrante.  You've played over 150 hrs, and "like" the game and appear to be wary & frustrated over the whims of the programmers in creating their character & combat algorithms.  Get over it!  Continue enjoying the game making do with what you have while listening to Stevie Wonder's Superstition:  "When you believe in things that you don't understand then you suffer."  Also quit taking responsibility for that which you can't control freeing yourself of that way to heavy burden. 

Edited April 24, 2015 by Xarastier

[LadyCrimson]

But if they gave all that info in descriptions, people couldn't have all that fun of doing their own tests to discover the numerical breakdowns!  

 

...a lot of games have never been forthcoming about actual formulas under the skin, so to speak, but it does sometimes feel like more and more the trend is to be ever more vague with in-game descriptions.

[Ferrante]

I got that something like "Fast" in the weapon description sounds better than a number like "0.6 seconds per attack". But to hide the speed of a weapon is too much. I don't care too much about the maths if I can see my final speed. I.E. games were pretty specific and you always new your stats. You never found a weapon with "secret" damage. You new the damage done every round. Every other RPG in the world tell you what damage your weapons deal, but in PE the damages numbers are completely useless. What is the use of the damage numbers if you have no idea when will it be done?.

Lets say you find the the weapons of my example "A Fast weapon with 10-15 damage" and then the other one "a slow weapon with 20-30 damage". Should you change it? Are you upgrading your character or not? Actually, what you have is a weapon with "I deal some damage sometimes" and another with "I deal some damage sometimes". The whole porpoise of looting or changing weapons is missed. Are you telling me they could use just "This armor protects you", in each armor and you will be ok with it?. Why do you accept this on your weapons then?

[b0rsuk]

I feel you. Even the most detailed "Attack Speed" thread doesn't mention how fast scepters are exactly. Wands and rods - sure, but not scepters.

[Bleakwalker]

I don't think giving you weapon speed would help you much.  The DPS a weapon does depends on the creature you're attacking and their resistances and deflection.  Besides, there really is no such thing as weapon speed, per se.  You have recovery time, and that depends on your armor as well as the weapon you're using and your dexterity.  I don't think the developers are failing to provide information, I think things are just too conditional for them to be able to do that.

 

My feeling is that you should learn from experience what works in what situation with what creature.  If you're really obsessed with numbers I suppose you could use a stopwatch to time the cool down bar above each party member and see how long the recovery time is for different combinations of weapons and armor.

[Ferrante]

 

 

My feeling is that you should learn from experience what works in what situation with what creature.  If you're really obsessed with numbers I suppose you could use a stopwatch to time the cool down bar above each party member and see how long the recovery time is for different combinations of weapons and armor.

 

I'm not obsessed with numbers, it is just a thing of common sense. We don't have damage values for the weapons and every one is ok with that?? Why spells list the damage and weapons don't (aka the damage numbers you see means nothing)? the whole "number thing" is just normal in almost every other aspect of the game and normal for every game. They even tell you the duration of spells, but they dont tell you what your weapon does. By the way, I play the game in expert mode, so I don't have those cooldown bars or so, and what you say about armor and dex modifying speed just makes everything worse. Why they bother showing your health? your endurance? your defenses? Because that's the whole point of the stats and leveling. They could just show us the calculated speed with the chosen weapon slot, in the same way they show the damage (which is doing nothing right now). 

 

You guys are telling me numbers are not important, but the game has numbers everywhere (spell damage, spell duration, defenses, damage reduction, health, endurance, stats, talents) for a reason, just speed was removed from the feedback. What I think is people simply dont realize they dont even know how damage is dealt by their weapons, because I don't think they would like spells just saying "this deal some damage". The weapon problem es "concealed".

Edited April 29, 2015 by Ferrante

[Khalid the bear]

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78749-needed-qualyty-of-life-improvements-information-and-transparency/

is Slow weapon with Speed (x1.2 speed) enchantment as fast as Fast weapon?, or close to, or somewhere in the middle between Fast asnd Slow?

[manageri]

Yeah, this is bull****. I mean I understand if the devs make the descriptions vague at first, because numbers probably change a lot during development and they don't wanna change the descriptions every time, but ffs people, start making a pass before launch to provide proper goddamn numbers on these things. It's absolute horse**** that players don't have such basic info readily available as weapon speed. Imagine if you didnt have RPM numbers for your guns in online shooters. "This gun shoot kinda fast, this one is pretty fast, this one is even fastier".