So why can't we pre-buff before engaging yet?

[hk79v1]

it's really aggravating, ESPECIALLY on Path of the Damned as we can't actually prepare for combat, we just rush in and hope our buffs actually have a chance to go off and our debuffs hit.

[Springwight]

I think Obsidian wanted to avoid the whole "taking 5 minutes to stack as many buffs as possible" thing in this game, which is honestly pretty boring. The restriction is kind of silly, but the difficulty was designed with this in mind. Also, most buffs have such short durations that casting them before combat would be difficult.

 

To be honest, even casting such things as Chill Fog and Tanglefoot before combat is kind of dull and repetitive, and I try to avoid it.

 

IE Mod has the option of enabling combat-only abilities and spells out of combat, though this option can cause some bugs (in particular, never save while spirit shaped). It also lets you turn Path of the Damned on and off.

[Torm51]

it's really aggravating, ESPECIALLY on Path of the Damned as we can't actually prepare for combat, we just rush in and hope our buffs actually have a chance to go off and our debuffs hit.

Design decision for more of a challenge. Likely wont happen unless you get IEmod.

[Springwight]

Anyone remember buffing in Mask of the Betrayer?

[MunoValente]

Pre-buffing in Baldur's Gate was often essential, but also really boring, I don't miss it one bit.  I'm fine with buffing in battle provided the buffs are worth the time cost of casting them.  I think with pre-buffing you also can't make the abilities too strong either because you'll have so many stacked on you at once all the time.

 

Maybe they could add a few more interesting foods, for a bit more diversity more in pre-buffing.

[Boeroer]

There are some buffs that work out of combat. Tactical Meld for example can be cast before combat. When you start combat you will have +20 ACC and full Focus.

[Elric Galad]

There could also be a new class specialized in slow casting prebuffing rituals.

 

Some kind of scientist planning stuff in advance.

 

Let's call it "animancer" )

[hk79v1]

There could also be a new class specialized in slow casting prebuffing rituals.

 

Some kind of scientist planning stuff in advance.

 

Let's call it "animancer" )

A support class who's crux is pre-battle buffs? Sounds like a good idea to me.

 

I think Obsidian wanted to avoid the whole "taking 5 minutes to stack as many buffs as possible" thing in this game, which is honestly pretty boring. The restriction is kind of silly, but the difficulty was designed with this in mind. Also, most buffs have such short durations that casting them before combat would be difficult.

 

To be honest, even casting such things as Chill Fog and Tanglefoot before combat is kind of dull and repetitive, and I try to avoid it.

 

IE Mod has the option of enabling combat-only abilities and spells out of combat, though this option can cause some bugs (in particular, never save while spirit shaped). It also lets you turn Path of the Damned on and off.

Eh, it's just as soon as I try to get one spell off, the enemies superior numbers overwhelm my blockers and rip apart the spellcasters in milliseconds due to superior accuracy and damage.

 

It's just, you need EVERY advantage to win in combat in Path of the Damned. And why not more than one trap for someone with a high Mechanics skill? Oh hell why not a TALENT for the Ranger or Rogue that lets them set up extra traps?

Edited September 1, 2015 by hk79v1

[Springwight]

Eh, it's just as soon as I try to get one spell off, the enemies superior numbers overwhelm my blockers and rip apart the spellcasters in milliseconds due to superior accuracy and damage.

 

It's just, you need EVERY advantage to win in combat in Path of the Damned. And why not more than one trap for someone with a high Mechanics skill? Oh hell why not a TALENT for the Ranger or Rogue that lets them set up extra traps?

I think you're still in the early levels. Path of the Damned gets much, much easier later on because casters get much more powerful. You might start to miss this feeling

[Nobear]

Eh, it's just as soon as I try to get one spell off, the enemies superior numbers overwhelm my blockers and rip apart the spellcasters in milliseconds due to superior accuracy and damage.

 

It's just, you need EVERY advantage to win in combat in Path of the Damned. And why not more than one trap for someone with a high Mechanics skill? Oh hell why not a TALENT for the Ranger or Rogue that lets them set up extra traps?

 

I find that, for fights where you can line of sight pull around a corner with a trap set in place right on that corner, I can get a couple of buffs off before the enemies are fully in place around my tanks and it's time to start unloading. With my level 12 PoTD party, Aloth usually has time for Merciless Gaze + Eldritch Aim, and Durance for two buffs as my mechanic, Grieving Mother, is running back after unstealthing to start combat, and Hiravias to place a Tanglefoot and get ready for a Nature's Mark before spamming massive AoE with his preferred elements and/or debuff secondary effects.

[Ymarsakar]

Pre buffs are food, traps, and having scrolls/pots ready to go.

 

Spell levels are too valuable in path of the damned to be used on things like buffing much. Only when needed, like when the tank hits 40% endurance and more dps is incoming, we have to choose between direct heal or armor of faith. Or dps and cc.

 

People who have a lot of spell levels in Path of the Damned, are using their spells and then rest spamming. That'll work, up until you hit the last boss fight or run out of health on one character while you still have spells left after a rest.

 

If anything, I usually go through the Caed Nua dungeons with one rest per level. Rest spamming, or using 2 or 3 rests per level, is way too easy for me. I have to do things in Path of the Damned to make it harder after level 5-6 party wise. Like, not leveling up my characters.

 

<B>Eh, it's just as soon as I try to get one spell off, the enemies superior numbers overwhelm my blockers and rip apart the spellcasters in milliseconds due to superior accuracy and damage.</b>

 

That's a tactical positioning issue. You can get around it by buffing up your stats so you deal more damage or take less of it, but I prefer to solve tactical problems by changing my positioning and changing my party builds. For example, generally you need 2 tanks if the front line is breaking through to your backline dps. The druid and wizard also have some interesting melee abilities that can make short work of enemies that break through the line.

 

Crowd Control spells such as the cipher's paralysis, is pretty good. It gives a lot of time, although ciphers don't get as much focus now so they might need to shoot first with the special blunderbuss before they can cast that. The reason why I think Path of the Damned gets easier after level 6 is because you have a lot more resources available to deal with things like that. 

 

The harder fights early on I used the kiting trick with cc slows and kept using range hits on enemies I couldn't tank, while out running them. Forest lurker is so easy to do that with, since it's slow and big. Ogres are too.

 

The priest druid combo with moonwell, once you get that, tanking things for a long time using aoe heals gets a lot more feasible. Especially if you have the 2 priest combo with the 2 cipher combo. For fights where even that doesn't work, because the wildlings have heal buffs of their own and they have huge numbers, I use a terrain bottleneck so they can't attack me all at once. Using the corners, just like nobears said. A few times I even had to use withdraw, the priest level 1 emergency spell. Which means the fight itself lasts a lot longer than 30s.

Edited September 2, 2015 by Ymarsakar

[Skie Nightfall]

I'm glad we can't <.<

[Crucis]

I'm glad we can't <.<

 

Same here.  I like that the game is balanced around NOT being able to pre-buff.  Otherwise, you end up having to spend silly amounts of time pre-buffing before every friggin' significant battle, and that gets really boring, not to mention forces you to rest more ... which to me breaks the immersion of the game. 

 

The few times that I've made a major effort to pre-buff with food, etc. I found it incredibly boring to have to spend like 5 minutes going through each party member and drinking or eating each food item or potion and filling up their consumable slots with the potions I wanted them to have in place for the battle.  INCREDIBLY BORING!!!   I would much rather that the game be balanced (as it is) around NOT having pre-buffing so that one isn't effectively required to pre-buff before nearly every encounter of consequence.

 

Also, it seems much more (pardon the term) "realistic" for there to be no pre-buffing, because while the players may know that there's an encounter around the corner (from multiple run-thru's of the game), the characters themselves probably rarely do.

[lameover]

Ciphers can pre buff the whole party with Pain Link for example

[pi2repsion]

It is a design decision to make strong buffs a tactical choice carrying a significant opportunity cost rather than a strategic choice without it.

[Wozzeck]

Eliminating prebuffing is one of the wisest design decisions they made to improve the good old IE-game-mechanics. The cipher exceptions are probably just oversights/bugs that would get fixed, if anybody where mean enough to report them.

[spardeous]

Eliminating pre-buffing was a poor design choice, since all it basically did was add a line of unnecessary hoops for the player to jump through to buy themselves enough time for buffing. It takes away from players who like to take their time setting themselves up for combat.

Instead of buffing and running into battle, I now pull with rolling flame, set a chill fog to slow them down, and have my party run the opposite direction. There's nothing amazing or unique about this, it's pointless and unnecessary. Instead of being able to play a mage-tank(which is a viable build in any other game including PnP), I'm forced to play a battlefield controller, nevermind how absurdly easy it is for enemies to land /anything/ on you on POTD, even fully buffed.

Edited September 7, 2015 by spardeous

[lord_wc]

Eliminating prebuffing is one of the wisest design decisions they made to improve the good old IE-game-mechanics. The cipher exceptions are probably just oversights/bugs that would get fixed, if anybody where mean enough to report them.

It's just the same kind of lame artifical difficulty as the general item/class nerf and stat buff of enemies in the first few patches instead of a giving us working AI (which we still don't have if you just spend 10 mins in the game to check enemy behaviour). Or like the lack of multiclassing, to later on getting some lackluster skills to provide us the illusion that we are mixing classes. It's more and more of a patchwork techical rules wise - half-assed solutions for extremely basic rpg mechanics that somehow got forgotten in a multi-million dollar project. A shame really.

 

They could also set that you can only cast damaging spells if you type the spell name under 1s without any error, becuse 'OMG, that's so difficult'. Or you could control your characters only by keyboard arrows which would get shuffled every 10s. It's just stupid and reeks of going for the easy way to provide something resembling a challenge.

Edited September 7, 2015 by lord_wc

[lonelornfr]

If you can buff your party to the teeth before engaging, the game has to be balanced around that fact (or be a walk in the park).

 

But i do agree that not being able to cast most spells unless a ennemy spotted you is a bit silly and feels artificial.

 

To counter that i often pull the ennemy back long enough to let me cast a few buffs which feels even more artifcial (dire blessing, devotion of the faithfull...).

 

So while i understand why they made this decision, i have mixed feelings about it.

[Crucis]

If you can buff your party to the teeth before engaging, the game has to be balanced around that fact (or be a walk in the park).

 

But i do agree that not being able to cast most spells unless a ennemy spotted you is a bit silly and feels artificial.

 

To counter that i often pull the ennemy back long enough to let me cast a few buffs which feels even more artifcial (dire blessing, devotion of the faithfull...).

 

So while i understand why they made this decision, i have mixed feelings about it.

 

 

 

It's much less "artificial" than pre-buffing before an encounter that you as a player know is about to happen, but that the characters would have no knowledge of.

 

[lord_wc]

 

If you can buff your party to the teeth before engaging, the game has to be balanced around that fact (or be a walk in the park).

 

But i do agree that not being able to cast most spells unless a ennemy spotted you is a bit silly and feels artificial.

 

To counter that i often pull the ennemy back long enough to let me cast a few buffs which feels even more artifcial (dire blessing, devotion of the faithfull...).

 

So while i understand why they made this decision, i have mixed feelings about it.

 

It's much less "artificial" than pre-buffing before an encounter that you as a player know is about to happen, but that the characters would have no knowledge of.

So? If you are disturbed at the thought then don't buff, only if your character knows about an encounter. Or they should take away the ability from everyone in a single player offline game, because you don't agree with it personally?

[Wozzeck]

The difficulty of encounters will obviously get adjusted to the options the player has. So if there is prebuffing, all encounters will be designed with the fact in mind that there is prebuffing. So if you want play the game at the difficulty level that was intended, you just have to prebuff, which I and others (and luckily the game designers too) perceive as an unpleasant activity.

 

Another point: the original complaint was about the hardest difficulty level being too hard without prebuffing. What about just lowering the difficulty?

Edited September 7, 2015 by Wozzeck

[lonelornfr]

 

 

If you can buff your party to the teeth before engaging, the game has to be balanced around that fact (or be a walk in the park).

 

But i do agree that not being able to cast most spells unless a ennemy spotted you is a bit silly and feels artificial.

 

To counter that i often pull the ennemy back long enough to let me cast a few buffs which feels even more artifcial (dire blessing, devotion of the faithfull...).

 

So while i understand why they made this decision, i have mixed feelings about it.

 

It's much less "artificial" than pre-buffing before an encounter that you as a player know is about to happen, but that the characters would have no knowledge of.

So? If you are disturbed at the thought then don't buff, only if your character knows about an encounter. Or they should take away the ability from everyone in a single player offline game, because you don't agree with it personally?

 

 

If i'm prepared to pull back and buff, it only makes sense that i know about an encounter. Usually because i'm scouting ahead, which makes sense when you're assaulting a dungeon.

 

Also you can calm the f. down, i said i had mixed feelings about it, not that they should take away your precious whatever you feel entitled to.

Edited September 7, 2015 by lonelornfr

[lord_wc]

The difficulty of encounters will obviously get adjusted to the options the player has. So if there is prebuffing, all encounters will be designed with the fact in mind that there is prebuffing. So if you want play the game at the difficulty level that was intended, you just have to prebuff, which I and others (and luckily the game designers too) perceive as an unpleasant activity.

 

Another point: the original complaint was about the hardest difficulty level being too hard without prebuffing. What about just lowering the difficulty?

I disagree. I played through this game on every difficulty without resting for stat buffs, eating food or using a single potion or scroll - because I was lazy. Arguably the ability to prebuff before encounters would have less effect than this. I also had single player kill runthroughs. Do you think currently the buffs are so strong in this game that would mean more than having 5 extra party members?

I also think you should turn the question around - the ability to buff (or prebuff) is the integral part of a class - an instument in its repertoire. If the ability to prebuff would be in the game classes should be balanced around it - buffing classes 'paying' for their buffs in some other areas - like they do in other rpgs.

 

 

 

If i'm prepared to pull back and buff, it only makes sense that i know about an encounter. Usually because i'm scouting ahead, which makes sense when you're assaulting a dungeon.

 

Also you can calm the f. down, i said i had mixed feelings about it, not that they should take away your precious whatever you feel entitled to.

 

You are the only one right now throwing a tantrum over a post that wasn't even addressed to you. Go outside for a bit, pick some ants or something until you calm down.

Edited September 7, 2015 by lord_wc

[lonelornfr]

Holy cow, i'm not throwing any tantrum, i only said i had "mixed feelings" about it. This was my only post in this thread. Hell i even said that indeed the game would have to be balanced around pre buffing if Obsidian let us do it.

 

You either need to take an anger management class, or you're taking me for someone else. Or the thought that someone doesnt agree 150% with you is too much to bare ?

 

Wow i'm speechless.

Edited September 7, 2015 by lonelornfr