A query on combat gameplay

[Guest 4ward]

spellcasters don't have protections a la BG2, think of stoneskin, protection vs magic weapons, returning projectiles (afaik?) and such. The decision how to protect my wizard is not an easy one for me. Should i equip him with for example leather armour or should i cast arcane veil, if he's got armour he loses speed and arcane veil reduces damage unlike stoneskin/BG2 where afaik you're safe for a few hits and cannot be interrupted and don't lose speed. Yeah, i know there's the attribute raising concentration but it's still not the same as in BG2. I think if i rememebr right, my wiz was often two-shot by skuldr captainsin eothas temple (playing hard/expert mode) even with leather armour equipped.

 

@archangel, i believe you refer to Cali the Silent? Did him in more or less like the other drakes with my lvl6 party. Sent my wizard, then after initial dialogue cast fleet feet to get away and when Cali and the high priests/champions followed (not all of  them mind you) i did the per-encounters on him and casted that seal from Durance together with that pillow thing directly on the drake, it just took longer than the other drakes, was interesting but it didn't require me to do anything really that different. It just took longer and i needed to make damage longer. There's this kind of challenge and that kind of challenge, meaning everything can be challenging if there's enough enemies that confront you and if they have much hp. Mostly in PoE it's how you lay your preference on who to target and take out first, that's still more of a strategical decision IMO.

Edited November 11, 2015 by 4ward

[Sensuki]

Yeah when I fought Cail the Silent I beat him on the first go without any trouble, but that was in the first patch or something. I imagine it might be a little bit harder now.

Re: Wizards apparently if you want to get amongst it as a Wizard you've got to blow like 4-5 per rest spells, oh so worth it  . Not that you need to though as they're pretty useful party members. As now they're *mostly* ranged damage dealers, and there's not much, if any immunity to damage - that makes them very valuable and effective (but not as fun as they were in the IE games, IMO).

 

That's what you get when you have a lead designer and a couple of forums worth of people that don't like BG2 "Mage duels" though.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Sensuki

[archangel979]

spellcasters don't have protections a la BG2, think of stoneskin, protection vs magic weapons, returning projectiles (afaik?) and such. The decision how to protect my wizard is not an easy one for me. Should i equip him with for example leather armour or should i cast arcane veil, if he's got armour he loses speed and arcane veil reduces damage unlike stoneskin/BG2 where afaik you're safe for a few hits and cannot be interrupted and don't lose speed. Yeah, i know there's the attribute raising concentration but it's still not the same as in BG2. I think if i rememebr right, my wiz was often two-shot by skuldr captainsin eothas temple (playing hard/expert mode) even with leather armour equipped.

 

@archangel, i believe you refer to Cali the Silent? Did him in more or less like the other drakes with my lvl6 party. Sent my wizard, then after initial dialogue cast fleet feet to get away and when Cali and the high priests/champions followed (not all of  them mind you) i did the per-encounters on him and casted that seal from Durance together with that pillow thing directly on the drake, it just took longer than the other drakes, was interesting but it didn't require me to do anything really that different. It just took longer and i needed to make damage longer. There's this kind of challenge and that kind of challenge, meaning everything can be challenging if there's enough enemies that confront you and if they have much hp. Mostly in PoE it's how you lay your preference on who to target and take out first, that's still more of a strategical decision IMO.

I think Cali the Silent is the one in Caed Nua, I am talking about fire area south of Defiance Bay.

Overall the encounter was not that tough but I remember it because I almost lost it in my first try, just like the Lighthouse battle.

Losing battles is something that has not happened to me in PoE as the tactic Sensuki mentions and what I described worked too well.

 

Adra Dragon is only truly hard encounter that I had to do 4 times until I finally beat it.

Only other battle I had to reload was vs DeathKnight and Vampires when I returned to the Castle but only because of stupid mechanics of PoE where even with protection vs Charm you get grazed and Charmed all the time and you cannot cast the spell on the characters that are already affected to at least halve the duration.

 

In comparison, in Bg1 and Bg2 I used to load a save due to losing even when playing it for 20th time. PoE is pathetic in both difficulty and basic mechanics (PotD enemies only getting better base numbers). And BG1 with SCS mod is truly awesome experience where any encounter with spellcasters becomes a fun challenge to overcome.

Edited November 11, 2015 by archangel979

[Sensuki]

Nah Cail the Silent is in "that fire area". I forget the name of it.

Dragon fights in the IE games were SooOOOooOoo much better. You could cheese them but it was fun doing it straight. Very reactive - dispelling their protections, removing fear, confusion and the other afflictions they affected your party with, managing aggro and damage when they wing buffeted away everybody. Great encounters, every one of them.

 

PE dragons are booooring in comparison.

[GreyFox]

Wouldn't have backed this game if I'd realized the lead on it was saying he freaking hates and disagrees with the best parts of the games it was marketed as....
Also 4E ripoff.....just try to guess how much less money they would have made if they had come out and said it'd play like an even worse version of 4E DnD.

 

I honestly don't expect PE2 to do as well as PE and it's not like PE hit it out of the park......boy I hope they have a real one coming with that Pathfinder team up.

[yupper]

One thing with the combat being repetitive is that it's probably more common on the PotD, because the enemies have so much more brute force and resistance, taking certain risks and experimenting with certain tactics and abilities and being lax with preparation and micromanagement is much more punishing.  This isn't really a situation unique to Pillars either, even playing better tactical games like XCOM or Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13, I've found my biggest tactical adjustment to cope with the overwhelming brute force on the highest difficulties, is usually to play in a more cautious, more structured and more repetitive style and while it's more effective tactically, I find it to be significantly less fun than playing on a next difficultly down and taking more risks and experimenting more, so while the tactics may be good from an effectiveness stand point, they aren't good for an enjoying the game standpoint.

I am glad someone brought up JA2....

 

I like this game, mostly for the writing. But the combat system is pretty horrid. I find myself constantly micromanaging party members--but for the wrong reasons. Most of the time, I am micromanaging them to make sure they don't do stupid things, because both the party AI script and path finding in this game are horrible, worse than from what I remember of BG and BG2. When I don't pause every 3 seconds and micromanage my party members, some or all of the following things can happen:

 

- quite often, fighters do not use their knockdown ability in the opening of a battle even though I've set them to aggressive/aggressive. This also has happened with a lot of characters, like priests and interdictions, or barbarians and frenzy;

- some of my melee party members habitually moonwalk around several enemies to attack some random opponent not immediately next to them;

- party member have been known to stand idle for several seconds and literally do nothing while combat is happening;

- pathfinding is horrid, just horrid.

 

I recall that in BG/BG2, there were elaborate setup of party AI combat scripts (although maybe I am thinking of modded BG/BG2, not vanilla...), whereas there are very, very limited options in PE. Of course, some people will say "oh...that's lame, you just chain a series of AI scripts and watch like a spectator as combat unfold...you may as well go play Dragon Age: Origins (where the only characters I ever bothered to micromanage were mages...and really only the offensive caster mages)..." Sure, fine. But if a game's party combat is going to require this level of micromanagement where I am pausing constantly to hand hold many of my party members every step of the way, it might as well be fully turn based, because that is what it is intended to facilitate. The main reasons why some old school JA players were annoyed by Jagged Alliance: Back in Action's "plan and go" system was not because it was a departure from the fully turn based combat of JA and JA2, but because the AI was so bad that it felt like part of the "challenge" of combat in the game was just trying to mitigate the horrid party AI to prevent party members from doing stupid things, rather than..."real" challenge, if that makes any sense....to be frank, I feel much is the same with PE's party combat.

Edited November 13, 2015 by yupper

[Guest 4ward]

 

i'd just like to add that IMO Josh has also the past year mentioned that he wasn't fond of BG2 thieves because they weren't that interesting and fighters were limiting what they could do and players giving proficiency points to weapons they wouldn't know if they later used them. I think a simple retrain like the one that is now in PoE could have worked as well and i for one didn't mind restarting either if i wasn't happy with the spells my sorc took. Also, in subsequent playthroughs the player would be better informed and that wasn't really such an issue. For me, Jaheira is a more interesting char than any fighter (and perhaps even druid) in PoE, and Imoen more interesting than any thief/rogue and mage in PoE. I liked dual-classing/multi-classing, Jaheira could tank pretty good, i think she would reach -11 AC and she could screw up enemies with her insect plague for example.

 

So, PoE not allowing that, IMO lead to it being more of a character build simulation game, where players are in heaven who like to build fighters and giving all sorts of talents and abilities without the need to dual-class. But that comes at the expense of combat gameplay being not as situational/reactional/tactical as specifically BG2 because gameplay systems have to account for the builds – melee system for tanks, fast combat speed and grazes for dps and such. So players building their chars and then proceeding to beat the game with applying similar strategy in combat is enough in PoE to beat the game. The system in the old games was for me much more interesting because while classes were restricted – for example in wearing armour – they made more than up for it with being versatile and the game didn't need to rely on systems to support that.

[Sensuki]

I agree - and the designers (Josh specifically) focus everything on the character building side and not the actual what-you-do-in-combat side.

[Fenixp]

Every single member of my party was able to do -something- in every single encounter in Pillars, yet vast majority of encounters in Baldur's Gate I spend auto-attacking while using one or two abilities.

 

Still, I would like to see a concept similar to dual and multi classing present in Pillars of Eternity and that something like that isn't really present is one of my big complaints. On the other hand I also understand that these systems are hell to balance and properly design, and we're comparing DnD which was in development for over a decade already when first BG came out to system in Pillars which was developed for a few years to my knowledge.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Fenixp

[Sensuki]

BG1 is pretty uneven in terms of usefulness of party members in encounters, and all of the IE games have a bit of that. I think BG1 was a bit too uneven, but in the other games it was better.

That's actually one of the things that I find makes Pillars a bit stale is because everyone is useful all the time, repeating the same useful things all the time, and that gets boring.

One of the really fun things I find about IWD is that I can do encounters with 2-3 characters and save some of my others. A lot of the time it's more optimal to make sure that enemies are targeting the lowest AC character because that means the party will suffer less damage overall, so I'll take my Fighter with the best gear and a couple of supporting characters along to take care of several encounters and then bring my more specialist characters in when needed.

I also split the party across the map a few times - combat was a very dynamic experience.

In Pillars on the odd occasion I did leave characters out of fights because of ranged enemies like Shades etc that would just target the squishiest character and to minimize total damage to the party, just leave that character out of combat and use characters that will take less damage but the concept of combat is super rigid with "encounter" "combat only" and the whole party vs "one encounter", etc. It's a more controlled and less fun/freeform experience.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Sensuki

[tinysalamander]

Why do you write thousands of words on multiple sites about a game you hate, haven't finished and no longer play?

 

Why not? Personally, I enjoy reading them.

[Zenbane]

 

Why do you write thousands of words on multiple sites about a game you hate, haven't finished and no longer play?

 

Why not? Personally, I enjoy reading them.

 

 

Can't you just Bookmark his posts in a "best of Sensuki" folder or something? He says the same thing over and over... and over. That's cool that you enjoy them, but since he has zero new material there really is no need for him to continuously broadcast his monotonous viewpoint.

 

I mean, if you really think about it... all he does is wait a certain amount of time between posts so that his monotony can continue to appear effective. So really, Sensuki's forum activity is just him "rest spamming" in order to use the same forum "combat strategy." Which, ironically, is his main criticism about PoE: being able to rest spam in order to use the same combat techniques over and over... and over.

 

I find it hard to believe that Sensuki really hates doing in-game what he is so dedicated to doing online.

[gogocactus]

 

 

Why do you write thousands of words on multiple sites about a game you hate, haven't finished and no longer play?

Why not? Personally, I enjoy reading them.

Same here. He is one of the few people with an expert grasp of the mechanics of the game, making constructive points about the things he would like to see improved. Moreover, he is totally right about the fact that combat gameplay as it is is monotonous and quickly devolves into using the same strategy over and over again.

 

That said, can we just get back on topic. While I enjoy reading Sensuki 's posts, talking about him gets stale.

Edited November 16, 2015 by gogocactus

[Zenbane]

The mechanics of PoE are not so complex that they require an expert grasp lol

 

And another thing that gets stale is someone typing the same thing 1,001 times.

 

But I can respect that several of you seem to enjoy his posts. I guess I can try to bite my tongue a bit more often.

Edited November 16, 2015 by Zenbane

[anameforobsidian]

 

If the player has a good understanding of the Pillars of Eternity system design and competently builds and equips a full or close to full party of characters, controls their party in combat effectively and makes little to no mistakes, combat in Pillars of Eternity becomes a repetitive exercise where the player performs the same sequence of rote actions throughout almost every combat encounter in the game.

 

This rote sequence entails a pre-encounter setup where the player uses Stealth to scout ahead and detect the location, makeup and line of sight of enemy compositions which allows the player to dictate the exact terms of engagement in the majority of encounters in the game. This is followed by optimally positioning party members for combat, usually in a very similar arrangement of designated tanking characters forward, melee strikers (if applicable) further back and then ranged and support characters in the rear, just inside their range limit. Once characters are in position, the player will initiate their ‘alpha strike’ where the player uses one or more active per-encounter abilities to inflict damage and debuffs on the enemy composition before combat begins.

 

After the pre-encounter setup and alpha strike phases are completed and units have engaged each other in melee combat, the field will stabilize. If the player correctly performs their stealth, initial positioning, alpha strike, opening set of abilities and controls the targeting of enemies, there is little to no chance that the player will lose that encounter, let alone suffer any casualties. The player will then spend the rest of the encounter keeping their advantage by using up the remaining per-encounter abilities of their characters, usually in a very similar order every encounter.

 

Encounters that do require players to break this rote sequence are usually against specific creatures or creature types that have powerful disables, can charm player units or have very high damage special attacks, and instances where the enemy AI targeting clauses for specific types of enemies prioritize weaker party members. Most of these challenges are optimally dealt with by a change in encounter strategy and/or opening actions. The player may alter their equipment (such as changing armor to lower or increase DR to alter enemy targeting priorities), use alternate initial positioning, leave particular characters out of the encounter until certain enemies are dealt with or use a specific character to soak up all initial enemy targeting.

 

Due to the nature of the system design, a player that successfully executes such an encounter strategy will almost never have to vary from this formula and will rarely have to pay much heed to the actions performed by enemies after the opening set of actions taken in combat.

 

Criticisms of this argument:

 

1.  You describe a series of actions that are intrinsically active (stealth and positioning) as rote.  

 

2.  Optimal setup combined with perfect play almost always leads to rote combat.  Doesn't matter if it's a real time or turn-based game.  The only way game designers break up rote combat is by using limited resources, breaking the rules of their own system, or making it multiplayer.  Otherwise optimal strategy will always win the game once it's discovered and executed.

 

3.  Your optimal positioning is far from the only option.  Many fights are best resolved by sneaking your melee dps ahead of the front lines so that they can stun or kill enemy controllers.  Sometimes door tanking is better.  Sometimes running away is better.  Sometimes the important thing is to get the hell away from the exploding elemental.

 

4.  Of course ranged characters stay back.  That's why they're ranged characters.  Complaining that characters do what their designed to do is counter to the purpose of rpgs.

 

5.  Many classes specifically allow you to break engagement and encourage that type of gameplay.  Rogues and barbs are especially adept at zipping in and out of the scrum.

 

6.  If each fight has a makeup that requires custom positioning, then that undermines the idea of rote combat, since scouting and positioning is part of the combat.

 

7.  There are encounters that break up a "sequence" and require you to change tactics.  How does this help your argument?

 

8.  PotD throws several hordes of enemies large enough that the fight never really stabilizes.

 

9.  This argument does not prove that the state of affairs you describe comes from systems design.  It only mentions systems design at the end, and does not describe how system design contributes to the state of affairs you describe.  Even if the rest of the argument was accurate, AI or encounter design could be at fault.

 

10.  It fails to recognize player agency in both builds and gameplay options.  The way you optimally execute encounters plays far differently based on builds.  A party of 6 rogues plays very differently from a party of 6 rangers.

 

11.  You fail to outline alternatives to a self-selected problem.  A system where everyone excels at melee and ranged attacks?  An RNG heavy system that is based more on reacting to randomness than careful gameplay?  A series of onion peeling spell defenses and counterspells while everyone else flails around aimlessly?  A kite and spank game?  Criticizing without suggesting alternatives is fairly useless, especially when the criticisms are generalized enough to apply to most systems.

 

12.  It's nothing new.  You didn't even bother writing a fresh post.  Copying and pasting an old argument without the criticisms of that argument in the place it came from is pretty much spam.  And also indicative of a history of histrionics.

Edited November 16, 2015 by anameforobsidian

[Sensuki]

You describe a series of actions that are intrinsically active (stealth and positioning) as rote.

Active abilities are also active. How does the fact that stealth and positioning are active make them not rote ? You perform them before every encounter because performing them during combat is penalized. 

 

The stealth system combined with the penalties for changing positioning in combat quite drastically changes the gameplay for the worse compared to the Infinity Engine games IMO. Rather than tactically reacting to enemy movement, positioning and targeting in combat you perform a large amount of it before combat begins, which I don't think is very fun.

 

Optimal setup combined with perfect play almost always leads to rote combat.

 

No it doesn't. Not in the sense that it is here. The issue is that the player is performing actions regardless of what the enemy does. In action games, you react to enemy attacks and movement. The Infinity Engine games often require you to react to enemy actions - you drink potions, you dispell, you counter-spell, you move and re-position. You almost never have to do these things in Pillars of Eternity, especially on non-PotD difficulties.

 

In the IE games you also don't spend the majority of combat spamming actives. Pillars adds a lot of 'busywork'. As a high level Kensai in BG2, you might have 9 uses of Kai per day but you might face a hundred encounters, and the player has to decide which encounters are pertinent for it to be used in. Per-encounter abilities here you use *every* encounter and often in the same pattern. There's no thought or cost involved, it's just a mindless increase to player input.

 

Your optimal positioning is far from the only option.  Many fights are best resolved by sneaking your melee dps ahead of the front lines so that they can stun or kill enemy controllers.  Sometimes door tanking is better.  Sometimes running away is better.  Sometimes the important thing is to get the hell away from the exploding elemental.

 

I never stated that there was a one true 'optimal position'. Optimal positioning falls into pre-encounter setup, and while the terrain combined with common sense may dictate where the good positions are, it's still something that you perform before the majority of fights in the game due to the penalties for doing it in combat.

 

I believe that if a player is actually able to realize when they've made a mistake and fix it/need to make a change then they should not be punished for it as it goes against the core thinking process of players in real-time games. Players are required to be actively thinking and determine for themselves if and when and what decisions and actions they need to make and perform - this differs from turn-based where the game dictates the structure of your decision making and actions.

 

The engagement system is a turn-based style solution to a real-time problem. The developers want to punish you for making an active decision - this is bad.

 

Of course ranged characters stay back.  That's why they're ranged characters.  Complaining that characters do what their designed to do is counter to the purpose of rpgs.

 

This was not a complaint. So it was a pointless thing to bring up as a 'criticism'.

 

Many classes specifically allow you to break engagement and encourage that type of gameplay.  Rogues and barbs are especially adept at zipping in and out of the scrum.

 

And the ability to do this costs character advancement points that could be better spent on being more useful more of the time. The Rogue's invisibility is not a good ability because it breaks engagement but because it makes you invisible/untargetable and it cannot be dispelled, unlike the Infinity Engine games.

 

The Barbarian's leap? ability in TWM:P1 is not a good ability because it breaks engagement but because it allows you to clip through other units (I would think). With Engagement disabled these abilities would still be good abilities - they're not really things that you pick for the ability to break engagement, but for their other uses.

 

If each fight has a makeup that requires custom positioning, then that undermines the idea of rote combat, since scouting and positioning is part of the combat.

 

No it doesn't because the combat pre-positioning only occurs because the player is penalized for performing such actions IN combat. 

 

There are encounters that break up a "sequence" and require you to change tactics.  How does this help your argument?

 

Change encounter strategy, and largely consists of out of combat decision making.

 

PotD throws several hordes of enemies large enough that the fight never really stabilizes.

 

More enemies dying means more moving to attack new enemies, or enemies moving to attack you ... however WHEN no units are dying, how much movement is there? Close to zero, I'll bet - because of Melee Engagement, bad pathfinding and Move Recovery Penalty.

 

This argument does not prove that the state of affairs you describe comes from systems design.  It only mentions systems design at the end, and does not describe how system design contributes to the state of affairs you describe.  Even if the rest of the argument was accurate, AI or encounter design could be at fault.

 

This a somewhat valid point, but I do have answers that explain the correlation, I just didn't write them in the OP. My forum posts cover some of it - overabundance of per encounter abilities, the stealth system, engagement and movement recovery penalizing movement and re-positioning in combat, homogeneous system design, lack of dispelling and counter-spelling - a bunch of other things. When/if I have the inclination to write about it I'd like to do a proper post about it sometime.

It fails to recognize player agency in both builds and gameplay options.  The way you optimally execute encounters plays far differently based on builds.  A party of 6 rogues plays very differently from a party of 6 rangers.

This is true, but then this is also true for the Infinity Engine games. My experience is with a PC and the NPC companions. I believe that the game would still likely have the same repetitive nature to it with a gimmick party though.

You fail to outline alternatives to a self-selected problem.  A system where everyone excels at melee and ranged attacks?  An RNG heavy system that is based more on reacting to randomness than careful gameplay?  A series of onion peeling spell defenses and counterspells while everyone else flails around aimlessly?  A kite and spank game?  Criticizing without suggesting alternatives is fairly useless, especially when the criticisms are generalized enough to apply to most systems.

Yes, in the OP I do not provide an alternative solution to any listed problems. 

It's nothing new.  You didn't even bother writing a fresh post.

Actually I did, and while I've been making a lot of the same arguments there is new things in there, especially in my forum posts. Edited November 16, 2015 by Sensuki

[Guest 4ward]

 

well, if i start an MP game in BG2 and create 6 sorcerers i'm pretty sure they play different than if i created 6 thiefs. Enemies restocking and attacking was considered a bug in BG1, now i guess it's a feature which 'stabilizes' battles. And thieves' backstab wasn't that effective in BG2 according to Josh but is in PoE, yet Ketta in temple district of Athkatla backstabbed half of my party nearly to death as she was loaded with potions of invisibility. And that required guessing where she is, when she'd attack, casting detect invisibility and upon her becoming visible changing targets to attack her. Or the guy with the celestial katana rushing in, so i cast charm on him but also for safety sake a hold spell if the first misses i still have the chance of stunning him. So, yeah...

 

Then there's misses in BG2, according to Josh they're punishment to the player,if i always graze/hit like in PoE what incentive do i have to do something else than swinging? Ultimately it comes down to whether you consider misses and the way that saving throws worked and free movement and lasting status effects an opportunity for dynamic and reactional combat or whether you regard this as a punishment and always want to have everything be planned beforehand. Where's the guessing, the risk, the thrill/suspense? There's a vampire in BG2, i just need a final succesfull hit and he's done, yet i miss and the vampire hits and level drains, bam! situation changed. There's a group of enemies in BG2, i decide to use aoe crowd control but two of them save and only one is stunned, completely diferent situation if i manage to stun them all and in PoE i can build a high accuracy caster and at least always graze all of them and screw them up just like that, no surprise. Where's the surprise factor in PoE?

 

Free movement means that during the same encounter i can move my chars a few steps here and there, while another time in the same encounter i move them a few steps differently and suddenly have another situation arising just because i moved a little bit differently this time. And that's not to say that for set encounters in BG2 planning didn't matter, BG2 is a game where careful planning are also important but that alone doesn't resolve battles.

 

Encounter design can make things better, yes, but it's mostly a strategical thing, and only a surprise when you play the game for the first time but it doesn't add to tactics during combat, it doesn't enhance combat replay value. It comes down to whether Josh will also look at the other side of the medal and see misses, saving throws, free movement as a benefit to combat or stands firm on his opinion that they punish the player.

[Fenixp]

Then there's misses in BG2, according to Josh they're punishment to the player,if i always graze/hit like in PoE what incentive do i have to do something else than swinging?

While they might not be a punishment to the player, they're bloody stupid :-P I'm sorry, but for higher level combat, you either build your characters in such a way that they miss/graze as little as possible or you don't build those characters as damage dealers in which case it doesn't really matter anyway. At that point, both misses and grazes just become a statistic you learn to calculate with. As for low-level combat, IE games went along the lines of:

Me: *Miss*

Wolf: *Miss*

*Long staring contest*

Me: *Miss*

Wolf: *Miss*

*Long staring contest*

Me: *Miss*

Wolf: *Miss*

*Long staring contest*

Wolf: *Hit*

Me *Sigh, reload, try again*

 

Truly the kind of reactive high-level strategy I'm looking for in my party-based RPGs :-P

Edited November 16, 2015 by Fenixp

[PIP-Clownboy]

Same here. He is one of the few people with an expert grasp of the mechanics of the game, making constructive points about the things he would like to see improved. Moreover, he is totally right about the fact that combat gameplay as it is is monotonous and quickly devolves into using the same strategy over and over again.

 

By his own admission, Sensuki has said he doesn't play the game and constantly brags how he hasn't even finished Act 3. Plenty has changed since beta; how is his grasp 'expert' when he's reduced to copy/pasting other people's arguments against POE.

 

Also, Sensuki admits that he save scums whenever someone is KO'd which makes his distaste for resting ironic as hell. 

Edited November 22, 2015 by PIP-Clownboy

[tinysalamander]

Also, Sensuki admits that he save scums whenever someone is KO'd which makes his distaste for resting ironic as hell. 

 

What that has to do with distaste of resting?

[PIP-Clownboy]

Because Save Scumming is way more gamey than rest spam. Of course you won't need to rest as much when you're too much of a coward to roll with punches and just reload. 

[Karkarov]

Your OP Sensuki is about what I experienced on Hard difficulty. Except I didn't open with spells but only with my rogue archer that would then run to back line (and suffer terrible combat pathfinding each time). I did open with spells vs some tougher bounty encounters.

 

If I didn't use that, I used "everyone has a firearm as a secondary weapon" and starts combat by one shotting enemy casters.

 

I had three fun encounters in the whole game, Adra Dragon, that mid size Dragon creature south of Defiance Bay (due to my characters being of probably lower level than expected) and the Lighthouse in Defiance bay (due to enemies spawning all around your party and there being so many of them).

 

The fight vs that Dragon-like creature is only one where I used all spells I had and some potions and scrolls.

I will only say this, I would hate to play a game filled with what you call fun encounters if your rule for fun encounter is "I had to use literally everything I had to win and I still had a hard time".

 

I am sorry guys you can't make a real time with pause game only with encounters like that.  If that is the sort of thing you are looking for you need to look at games like X-Com etc that are literally strategy games and that's all they are about.  In Eternity needing everything for every fight is just boring and a time sink, I have to rest after every fight, I have to fight prep before every fight, I have to create a special pulling strategy for every fight.  Even after all that there is also no evidence that you can't simply come up with 1-3 strategies and not get by just repeating those same three strats over and over just like in Baldur's Gate 2: Counter the Mage.  Oh I am sorry I meant "Throne of Bhaal".  My point is making every fight hard to win and demanding doesn't work for the genre and is more likely to push people away than get people on board.

[tinysalamander]

Because Save Scumming is way more gamey than rest spam. Of course you won't need to rest as much when you're too much of a coward to roll with punches and just reload. 

 

Just because people like to do things perfectly does not mean they are cowards, however. Especially since you can't just restart everything on a whim in a pretty large game. Can you say you haven't reload a single time you played for the first time? Bear got many beginners, I believe On later playthroughs it matters less since you already know everything (for some values of “everything”).

[PIP-Clownboy]

 

Because Save Scumming is way more gamey than rest spam. Of course you won't need to rest as much when you're too much of a coward to roll with punches and just reload. 

 

Just because people like to do things perfectly does not mean they are cowards, however. Especially since you can't just restart everything on a whim in a pretty large game. Can you say you haven't reload a single time you played for the first time? Bear got many beginners, I believe On later playthroughs it matters less since you already know everything (for some values of “everything”).

 

 

We aren't talking about playing for the first time or reloading to avoid the game over screen. Sensuki admits that he reloads if his tactics weren't deployed optimally or gets a really bad dice roll/ko'd party member and then goes on to rant about people abusing the resting mechanic which is irony at its finest. 

Edited November 22, 2015 by PIP-Clownboy

[tinysalamander]

We aren't talking about playing for the first time or reloading to avoid the game over screen. Sensuki admits that he reloads if his tactics weren't deployed optimally or gets a really bad dice roll/ko'd party member and then goes on to rant about people abusing the resting mechanic which is irony at its finest.

 

I'm not seeing any, though. I don't think this is going to get anywhere, so I'm stopping here.