Please, never redo White March encounters

[PrimeJunta]

WM encounters are great. 

 

Some of the maps have a few too many though. Galvino's workshop got a bit repetitive, and it wasn't strictly necessary to trip over a group of totally-not-sahuagin every two steps. But overall they were a big improvement over the base campaign. 

 

I.e. please make the encounters more like in WM, only even better. But perhaps cut down on the repetition, after you've fought a similar group of critters two or three times the rest is just redundant.

[Aotrs Commander]

We have a saying in our tabletop games: "the wizard dies first."

 

Essentially meaning that good tactics require prioritising on the enemy that do most damage and can be killed fastest. In a world where Magic Is A Thing, everybody knows that you hit the caster as a priority.

 

So it's good that the monsters in PoE (and preumably PoE2) would/will be going after our fragile party members.

 

(Though, granted, unintelligent creatures probably shouldn't, for flavour rather than game mechanics, but if that has to be sacrificed on the altar i don't mind too much.)

 

And, having now played through the main path of White March 2... I will qualify my previous statement by saying that the ability of enemies (maonk in particular) to apparently completely ignore your front line and apparently teleport right next to Aloth in particular is extremely annoying and I sort of think I see where the OP is coming from.

 

Do monks actually have a teleport ability or something? I've not actually played with one as a class, but they seemed to just... appear behind Eder and Sagani (especially annoying with the former, since I always started with his "pull into engagement" ability) without any kind of travel time. Either that or their speed is ridiculous.

 

While I'm all for intelligent enemy targeting, I'm rather less for "we're going to hit your mages several seconds after combat starts and there's almost literally nothing you can do about it because they don't even have time to cast a spell before they get hit."

 

(The inability to pre-buff before combat doesn't help. In the entire of the game, I only ever used potions once or twice; the only times I remember I might use them, I didn't because I couldn't use them beforehand.)

[Fardragon]

I believe they have a shadowstep kind of ability. But players also get access to Charge and Leap abilities that can take them instantly across the battlefield.

[pi2repsion]

White March encounters were a small step up in tactical challenge from the main game, and they weren't that challenging unless you brought an underleveled party by e.g. going to WM as soon as the zone opened up.

 

So I must disagree with the OP. I found it refreshing to find content that when approached on-level put at least a bit of emphasis on tactical positioning and the use of defensive abilities as well as offensive as opposed to the rest of the game that for the most part was trivial to breeze through focusing solely on offensive abilities while mostly ignoring tactical positioning. WM encounters were a lot more like what I'd hoped to find when I backed Project Eternity in the first place that the main game was.

 

Regarding engagement, it is my fervent hope that the engagement mechanic remains an attack of opportunity style mechanic with minimal glue functionality in PoE2 rather than turning into a magic glue variation. Personal survival should always be a consideration in combat. Glass cannons belong in MMORPGs and the graveyard.

 

Also, I'd love to see more enemies in general in encounters that are supposed to be dangerous such that flanking becomes a real threat and controlling all enemies with a single locational AOE control spells isn't an option, likewise with debuffing. And more enemy abilities rather than giving each enemy 1 or 2 different ones. And so on and so forth.

 

After all, for players who do not like to be challenged tactically or at least not tactically in the way that used to be common in party-based CRPG combat in the 80s and 90s, there is always the option of choosing to play on a lower difficulty level to reduce challenge to something they are comfortable with. The reverse is unfortunately not an option.

Edited February 14, 2017 by pi2repsion

[ThatUndeadLegacy]

I loved White March.