Combat is now mostly a dull chore

[tela2k]

You have a point but only if the game doesn't force you out of your comfort zone.

 

If you can go back to the tarven any time you want, or if you find enough camping supplies everywhere that resting is a non issue, then you're absolutely right.

 

But if the game takes those options from you at certain points, like if you enter a dungeon and you can't go back the way you came and have to find another exit, then it's very different. You have to start thinking about resources management and it becomes a lot more stressful. At least it is the first time around.

 

I get what you mean of course, it makes for that nice feeling of dispair in the vein of Darkest Dungeon and the achievement feels all the sweeter for it. Although I don't think PoE ever forced me into that situation, I guess I was stocked up when I jumped into drake pit. It was mostly just self imposed, still having one or two packs of camping gear, but refusing to rest just for the extra challenge. This is also why earlier in the thread there was an idea about accumulating injuries, that maybe you can only remove with medical supplies / other items / resting on ship. So maybe something like that will be implemented later as an optional feature, if the devs happen to hear about it, like it and can actually implement it.

[Dorftek]

The game needs to be balanced around players having access to Empowered magic and tons of healing and tons of buff every single encounter. Because we do, every single encounter should be tuned with empower in mind. Otherwise it will be too easy. Good and well thought out builds will shine and crappy ones will not, just as it should be in a RPG.

[Taurus]

 

 

Hell the hack 'n slash genre is already a testament to per encounter combat, that not being arbitrarily restricted on your character is much better and more fun gameplay. As well as almost any other game and genre ever made, for that matter.

 

....

 

 

Apparently only the per rest system can be challenging, have you scraping the bottom of the barrel and generally make for some epic stories. Restriction = great gameplay.

 

You guys are just too set in your way, just plain refusing to see the logic of how not only is everything of per rest attainable with per encounter (when the game has actually been balanced) but that it's much less restrictive, fun and just flat out better.

 

Which is unfortunate.

 

 

I cannot disagree more with this post. First of all, hack and slash games rely upon testing the player's skill in a realtime setting. However, realtime with pause is not the same thing. Realtime with pause is designed to test thoughtful tactics and strategy, it is essentially a less tedious way of having turn-based combat. Hack and slash games are about testing quick reflexes and quick thinking. This is a significant thing to misunderstand.

 

Second, restriction can indeed equal great gameplay. If all the pawns on a chessboard could move like a queen, the game would not have the same level of strategic depth and never would have become a timeless classic. Games are *all* about restricting the player. Too much restriction or too little restriction isn't a virtuous characteristic of a game in of itself. Whether restrictions or freedoms work for the game is what matters. Again, this is a significant thing to misunderstand.

 

I completely agree. However, as significant a thing is to misundestarnd, it's also a fine line between what rescrictions would greatly improve gameplay.

 

Remember when PoE was released and there was no "emcumbrance" system? People where shocked.  

 

Now, who would even think about having emcumbrance in PoE1 -2? No one even talks about it. 

 

 

Edited May 18, 2018 by Taurus

[flamesium]

 

 

Hell the hack 'n slash genre is already a testament to per encounter combat, that not being arbitrarily restricted on your character is much better and more fun gameplay. As well as almost any other game and genre ever made, for that matter.

 

....

 

 

Apparently only the per rest system can be challenging, have you scraping the bottom of the barrel and generally make for some epic stories. Restriction = great gameplay.

 

You guys are just too set in your way, just plain refusing to see the logic of how not only is everything of per rest attainable with per encounter (when the game has actually been balanced) but that it's much less restrictive, fun and just flat out better.

 

Which is unfortunate.

 

 

I cannot disagree more with this post. First of all, hack and slash games rely upon testing the player's skill in a realtime setting. However, realtime with pause is not the same thing. Realtime with pause is designed to test thoughtful tactics and strategy, it is essentially a less tedious way of having turn-based combat. Hack and slash games are about testing quick reflexes and quick thinking. This is a significant thing to misunderstand.

 

Second, restriction can indeed equal great gameplay. If all the pawns on a chessboard could move like a queen, the game would not have the same level of strategic depth and never would have become a timeless classic. Games are *all* about restricting the player. Too much restriction or too little restriction isn't a virtuous characteristic of a game in of itself. Whether restrictions or freedoms work for the game is what matters. Again, this is a significant thing to misunderstand.

 

 

Chess is a timeless classic because it puts both players on an even footing at the beginning of each encounter. You don't get to the final of a Chess tournament and find you can't use your Queen because you already used her in an earlier round, nor do you find you have 4 Queens because you chose to never use her in any of the earlier rounds.

-------------------

 

Ultimately this whole discussion 'per encounter' vs 'per rest' discussion boils down to whether you want dungeons to consist of a series of seperate fights which are challenging in their own right, or effectively be one long fight which is challenging when taken as a whole. Both have merit. I do think the latter system becomes completely pointless if you allow the player to leave and get more Rest supplies whenever they want however - that isn't challenging, it's just busy work. The 'challenge' should never come from a player's dread of load screens and a 5 minute hike.

 

Obviously in a true 'per encounter' system (ie. ignoring Empower, which is 'per use' and only serves to further break the 'per encounter' balance) it hardly matters if you can rest anywhere as resting is far less OP than it is in a 'per use' system. The only remaining purposes it serves are to give food buffs -which might as well just be separate and treated like any other consumable- and to remove injuries, and imo the injury system needs a total re-think either way.

 

The only way I can think that injuries can be made meaningful is if you are locked into a dungeon until you 'complete' it or choose to reset the entire thing, which probably causes more problems than it solves. If it's completely trivial to remove injuries (as is the case now) they are pointless. If you can leave a dungeon whenever you want to get an injury healed then you are relying on 'load screen dread' and busy work as the only consequence in the player's decision making, which is horrendous and inexcusable game design. For the injury system to justify its existence, removing injuries needs to have a non-trivial consequence but that consequence can't be load screens and backtracking.

 

Perhaps an alternative to injuries would be to have a 'party morale' system similar to the ship morale system. If a party member gets knocked out in a fight you take a hit to party morale, a bigger hit for multiple party members knocked out in a fight, a smaller boost if you clear a fight with nobody getting knocked out etc. There could be bunch of other ways of affecting it like success and failure in the vignettes. The impact of high or low party morale shouldn't be so high that you want to reload every time someone gets knocked out, but just enough that you are at least trying to play well in every fight to keep it high. Somewhere in the region of a party wide +5/+10 to accuracy and defenses and +1 power level if party morale is maxed out, and the opposite at the low end. The exact impact of it could vary with difficulty level.

[kelticfury]

It makes me wonder if the majority of the people who are not enjoying the battles much are min-maxing powerbuilds or if they are just going with what they like as a concept.

 

I would like to see a level scaling option that doesn't just up under leveled content to match your level. There should be an option to scale encounters to be above your current level, maybe with several options. IE: level + 1, level ++ 1-3, level +++ 3-6. Or something like that. Maybe someone could mod that in now that they have fixed the level scaling code to actually work.

Edited May 18, 2018 by kelticfury

[Purudaya]

Any resting system tied to supplies is going to be problematic because you either have to impose an arbitrary limit on amount (PoE1) which doesn't make sense in a world that allows you to carry around an unlimited stash OR you don't impose a limit and players have so many supplies (PoE2) that resting requires no thought.

 

One option would be to add a difficulty setting that disables resting outside of inns and safe/cleared areas, replaces "knocked out" with "dead," and adds injuries on bloodied or near death.

 

Failing that, just make resting in dangerous places actually dangerous. Baldur's gate had a % chance of being ambushed while resting in a dungeon, which denied you the rest benefit and forced you to fight with an injured party. I've never met an RPG with a resting mechanic that didn't allow for some rest spamming, but the BG series at least occasionally made it feel like a risk.

[Tigranes]

It makes me wonder if the majority of the people who are not enjoying the battles much are min-maxing powerbuilds or if they are just going with what they like as a concept.

 

I would like to see a level scaling option that doesn't just up under leveled content to match your level. There should be an option to scale encounters to be above your current level, maybe with several options. IE: level + 1, level ++ 1-3, level +++ 3-6. Or something like that. Maybe someone could mod that in now that they have fixed the level scaling code to actually work.

 

I read nothing about POE2 rules, didn't play the beta, rolled what I liked, play with 4 party members, POTD is still easy. But this is not ultimately a problem of difficulty, and it's not solved by just giving enemies more HP. (In any case, a major part of the Pillars subgenre & its fans is the ability to powergame and replay with different builds. Nobody has to do it, but it's a big part of the appeal. So we can't really argue that 'if you powergame you can't expect a challenge from the highest difficulty level'.)

 

POE1 certainly had problems. Its camping supplies system wasn't perfect, neither was the per-rest/per-enc mix. But put together, the combination was a certain system of meaningful attrition, scarcity, and tactical challenge. You could choose to cheese and circumvent it, but that's fine, the point is that it was there, and I think that's a fair design principle in a niche CRPG subgenre that is ultimately rooted in D&D.

 

POE2 gets rid of that system almost entirely, and then does not really replace it. While there's nothing inherently wrong with, say, per-encs, now we have a combination of features that wipes away attrition, makes it very difficult to not play in a routine and repetitive way even if you try. The undertuning of POTD difficulty is not the root cause, but amplifies these problems.

Edited May 18, 2018 by Tigranes

[tela2k]

-snip-

 

Perhaps an alternative to injuries would be to have a 'party morale' system similar to the ship morale system. If a party member gets knocked out in a fight you take a hit to party morale, a bigger hit for multiple party members knocked out in a fight, a smaller boost if you clear a fight with nobody getting knocked out etc. There could be bunch of other ways of affecting it like success and failure in the vignettes. The impact of high or low party morale shouldn't be so high that you want to reload every time someone gets knocked out, but just enough that you are at least trying to play well in every fight to keep it high. Somewhere in the region of a party wide +5/+10 to accuracy and defenses and +1 power level if party morale is maxed out, and the opposite at the low end. The exact impact of it could vary with difficulty level.

 

 

You have my curiosity.

 

How do you regain morale if you got your butt totally kicked in a dungeon? Tavern? Game is back to running to tavern and back again. And if you can carry stuff that gives morale (beer!) then again same problem as with injuries and food before. I honestly like this party morale thing more than the injury system, imho they could as well both be implemented cotemporally, but that still leaves the problem of abundance of resources unsolved.

 

Of course you could make it simple, winning battles raises morale and party member being knocked unconscious lowers morale, but that's a pretty punishing system if you get into the bad end of the morale spectrum. Can't win a fight anymore since stats are terrible, so you can't raise morale. A system like that would have to be optional, there is no way they implement that universally.

 

I guess it does the same thing, you mentioned the vignettes, like with the ship when I took it down to 1 it gave me plenty of opportunity to raise morale with scripted interactions. It's actually very difficult to get your crew to mutiny.

[Aristocrat]

Hello,

 

First time posting here for me. I think this discussion is extremely interesting.

 

I think that it shouldn't be centered around Per Rest or Per Encounter though, its a trap because the problem is the game and combat design around one or the other system. I think many people including myself were excited about the new system (no Health, few Per Rest, no more camping supplies...). The big issue here is that Obsidian changed that without changing how the combat works very much. They did half the work with so that we have to say "PoE 1 system was better". But that's not the point. The point is that the new system doesn't provide any challenge. If it did people here wouldn't have regret about the changes.

 

Moreover, when you have a level of difficulty called Path of the Damned, well it's supposed to be very hard and challenging and restrictuve in some ways, god damnit. If the majority of players don't have the time for that or just enjoy the story or want to have fun with abilites without worrying about micro management or ressource management or too many fights, etc : jusst play Normal or Classic and if you want a bit of a challenge go on Veteran / Hard. What we're asking here I think is to make POTD enjoyable for the minority of people playing it. Not to be annoying and mess with all other players enjoyment of the game.

Thats why the discussion can be skewed. It's just that Obsidian didn't deliver a finished product in that way. And balancing is different from changing core mechanincs after release. How can you know as a player what to expect from the devs after realease ? Usually is just bug fixing and balance, not complete overhaul, which to me IS worrying. I find it more natural to realease the game 6 months later as finished and complete.

 

And at last there's something important to nitice here : the game is new in many aspects (technical, graphical, sound, environment, writing) but the gameplay didn't change one bit (or at least not as new game should). all classes are the same, all spells are the same (okay 90% or so), ennemies are the same (again a vast majority), even some companions are the same, combat is the same the way to buils characters are the same. A huge part of the difficulty found in PoE 1 for PoTD was learning how to use everything and more so if you didn't recall BG or all D&D rules. Now you start the game with all this knowledge and the devs didn't bother to put a challenging and rewarding way to progress. You already know almost everything. Sop what's left to debate ? Empower, too OP dual classes, per rest or per encounter.

 

I. E. the issue is the game design, this feelin gof "PoE 1 in vacation in the caribbean seas" spin-off vibe

 

Sorry for the long post ! Cheers everyone !

[flamesium]

I disagree @Tigranes. The absence of difficulty is by far the main reason for why you can currently play in a repetitive way. If / when the game is balanced correctly, on the higher difficulty levels you should not be able to succeed using the same tactics in every fight, unless the composition of the enemy is the same in every encounter which would also be bad design.

 

Tactical variety doesn't have to be forced on the player by attrition, it can (and imo should) come from different encounters requiring the player to choose different tactics to overcome. Each encounter should be a puzzle to be solved in its own right. There should be no one tactic or character build which dominates every fight.

 

The biggest problem with the 'per rest' system is that the difficulty of any given fight will be overly dictated by whether or not you have just rested. The difference in capability between a rested party and an exhausted party is massive, the encounter designer attempts to balance for somewhere in between and the result is a fight which is trivial for a rested party. I'd also argue this approach has its own problems with repetition, as you inevitably spend the majority of a dungeon ignoring half of the tools at your disposal and hoarding them to spam the final encounter with.

[whiskiz]

"Moreover, when you have a level of difficulty called Path of the Damned, well it's supposed to be very hard and challenging and ***restrictive in some ways*** god damnit"

 

Who said a harder difficulty has to be restrictive?

 

If you need to restrict the gameplay in your game, to make it challenging, you're doing it wrong imo. 

 

There is absolutely 0 reason why we can't still have challenging fights, with per encounter. (See Flamesiums post above, for how per encounter can still be challenging and tactical if you need it explained. As well as the downsides and comparisons to per rest.)

 

Does that mean you also have to jack the balance up more than normal to compensate? Well obviously, but that is not hard to do. They're going to have to anyway, with the addition of subclasses and multiclassing.

 

Again i'm waiting to get this until balance/PotD is done, because of the awesome new per encounter system where we actually get to use our characters and not have to auto attack 80% of the game and i don't want to ruin it beforehand - and i'm fully expecting and wanting to *have* to use everything every fight, just to even have a chance at winning. per encounter does not make it easy mode or make you OP, it only does that when it isn't balanced properly (or at all, let's be honest)

 

"The big issue here is that Obsidian changed that without changing how the combat works very much. They did half the work with so that we have to say "PoE 1 system was better". But that's not the point. The point is that the new system doesn't provide any challenge. If it did people here wouldn't have regret about the changes."

 

You even acknowledge it wasn't the new system, (per encounter) that is the problem, but the ****ty excuse of balance you got with it on release.

 

I'm all for extra difficulty, but gameplay restriction is the worst, laziest way to do that. Especially when you can turn back anytime, almost anywhere and spam rest as needed/wanted like you could in PoE 1. It then became just a tedious and pointless mechanic and hard to balance for. Because of that you didn't have to "use your skills wisely" and so it didn't add any "skill" or "strategy" (let's be real here....) and the notion that it's not possible to have challenging fights with per encounter, that only per rest provides challenge is simply ignorant.

 

Again - the mess up here was not the new combat system, it was completely dropping the ball on balance until post-release, to go along with it.

 

Edit: Also - what Flamesium above me said. More very good points that i did touch on, but maybe should have gone into more detail about.

Edited May 20, 2018 by whiskiz

[Multihog]

I disagree @Tigranes. The absence of difficulty is by far the main reason for why you can currently play in a repetitive way. If / when the game is balanced correctly, on the higher difficulty levels you should not be able to succeed using the same tactics in every fight, unless the composition of the enemy is the same in every encounter which would also be bad design.

 

Tactical variety doesn't have to be forced on the player by attrition, it can (and imo should) come from different encounters requiring the player to choose different tactics to overcome. Each encounter should be a puzzle to be solved in its own right. There should be no one tactic or character build which dominates every fight.

 

The biggest problem with the 'per rest' system is that the difficulty of any given fight will be overly dictated by whether or not you have just rested. The difference in capability between a rested party and an exhausted party is massive, the encounter designer attempts to balance for somewhere in between and the result is a fight which is trivial for a rested party. I'd also argue this approach has its own problems with repetition, as you inevitably spend the majority of a dungeon ignoring half of the tools at your disposal and hoarding them to spam the final encounter with.

Good points! I definitely agree that tying everything to attrition, or the amount of camping supplies the player has at his disposal, isn't good either. Another good point you made is that encounter difficulty is by necessity toned down for most fights because it can't operate under the assumption that the party is rested for every battle. 

 

I think that overall, per encounter is a step in the right direction. It removes the element of having to save up your spells constantly. I'm enjoying this newfound freedom in spell casting. I may not be able to nuke as hard, but I can at least nuke at a consistent level without feeling hesitant about it and wondering if I could've used less spells in the previous fight. 

 

I think the lack of difficulty stems from the encounters themselves, not the absence of attrition bogging you down in dungeon crawling—or at least that's how it should be. 

Edited May 18, 2018 by Multihog

[PangaeaACDC]

I've wiped a few times on Normal, and its balance feels really right to me.

 

I've not been party wiped yet, but I've had 2-3 people go down a few times. That's on classic without seeking out red skull areas.

 

Many of the fights do feel a bit pedestrian if I'm honest, but I've also recently come across some pretty challenging ones, where I doubt I would have survived on Veteran. I'm kind of torn on the new combat without health/endurance and more or less removal of per rest abilities. It means I can use the top abilities in each fight, which means they tend to be on the easy side. I have always loved to go through big dungeons trying to conserve the best abilities, and keep going when we are 'redlined', only resting when we are all on our last legs.

 

Combat in POE2 is less chaotic than POE1 though, which is positive. And although there are some negatives to the new combat, it's also kind of nice to be able to use Death Ring and such in each fight (if I want). I've still little to no idea how all the inspirations and such work, so I largely just ignore the whole thing. Probably not a good thing, but we get by fine without caring about that and using empowers (not used any yet, at level 12).

[flamesium]

 

-snip-

 

Perhaps an alternative to injuries would be to have a 'party morale' system similar to the ship morale system. If a party member gets knocked out in a fight you take a hit to party morale, a bigger hit for multiple party members knocked out in a fight, a smaller boost if you clear a fight with nobody getting knocked out etc. There could be bunch of other ways of affecting it like success and failure in the vignettes. The impact of high or low party morale shouldn't be so high that you want to reload every time someone gets knocked out, but just enough that you are at least trying to play well in every fight to keep it high. Somewhere in the region of a party wide +5/+10 to accuracy and defenses and +1 power level if party morale is maxed out, and the opposite at the low end. The exact impact of it could vary with difficulty level.

 

 

You have my curiosity.

 

How do you regain morale if you got your butt totally kicked in a dungeon? Tavern? Game is back to running to tavern and back again. And if you can carry stuff that gives morale (beer!) then again same problem as with injuries and food before. I honestly like this party morale thing more than the injury system, imho they could as well both be implemented cotemporally, but that still leaves the problem of abundance of resources unsolved.

 

Of course you could make it simple, winning battles raises morale and party member being knocked unconscious lowers morale, but that's a pretty punishing system if you get into the bad end of the morale spectrum. Can't win a fight anymore since stats are terrible, so you can't raise morale. A system like that would have to be optional, there is no way they implement that universally.

 

I guess it does the same thing, you mentioned the vignettes, like with the ship when I took it down to 1 it gave me plenty of opportunity to raise morale with scripted interactions. It's actually very difficult to get your crew to mutiny.

 

 

No I would completely remove it from the concept of 'going back to town' / resting / using consumable resources, for the reasons you describe. KOs, triggering traps, failing checks in vignettes etc. would lower it.  Winning fights without any KOs, success in vignettes etc, maybe doing a good deed and refusing the offered coin etc. would raise it. 

 

I don't envisage it being powerful enough at either end of the spectrum to determine alone whether a given fight becomes unwinnable or trivial, just a slight nudge one way or the other (maybe a more serious nudge towards difficult on higher difficulty levels).

 

The intent of the system would be to encourage players to try and play well even during the regular encounters, rather than to massively punish them for failing to do so. I don't think it would take a huge buff in combat terms for most players to feel protective of their high morale rating. Maybe throw in a few bonus party banters which can only trigger when morale is high, something like that.

Edited May 18, 2018 by flamesium

[Tigranes]

I disagree @Tigranes. The absence of difficulty is by far the main reason for why you can currently play in a repetitive way. If / when the game is balanced correctly, on the higher difficulty levels you should not be able to succeed using the same tactics in every fight, unless the composition of the enemy is the same in every encounter which would also be bad design.

 

Tactical variety doesn't have to be forced on the player by attrition, it can (and imo should) come from different encounters requiring the player to choose different tactics to overcome. Each encounter should be a puzzle to be solved in its own right. There should be no one tactic or character build which dominates every fight.

 

The biggest problem with the 'per rest' system is that the difficulty of any given fight will be overly dictated by whether or not you have just rested. The difference in capability between a rested party and an exhausted party is massive, the encounter designer attempts to balance for somewhere in between and the result is a fight which is trivial for a rested party. I'd also argue this approach has its own problems with repetition, as you inevitably spend the majority of a dungeon ignoring half of the tools at your disposal and hoarding them to spam the final encounter with.

 

Encounter difficulty is a big part of it, yes, and I'm all for shoring up the lamentable difficulty we have for POTD at the moment. A properly challenging encounter brings out the best of every system.

 

But this was never about "attrition difficulty vs. encounter difficulty" in my mind. I think it's always important to have a good blend of both. IE games & Pillars were never really about very strict and hardcore attrition anyway - POE1 wasn't either. I simply don't see the benefit of getting rid of the attrition side entirely, apart from pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight and healing up to full health every fight (and you could do that in POE1 anyway, especially with a bit of help from the console).

 

I don't necessarily think per-rest is always the answer, but I think if you're going to make big changes to the system, the onus is on you (Obsidian) to come up with an improved blend of mild attrition & strong encounter difficulty, instead of just dropping the ball on both.

Edited May 18, 2018 by Tigranes

[Siegdarth]

I like the way they handled resting and challenge, despite the lame bug with level scaling.

 

Previously I got to a dungeon with 4 supplies, cleared everything without using most of them. If was too challenging I went back to town for more supplies. In the end was just draining my time, instead of playing I was going back and forth to get more supplies. 
"oh but you have on rest abilities, that can change the pace of the game, that makes the game more tactical" Nope, since you just go back to town for more supplies and refresh the abilities. The only resource you have to take care and really planning is the use of potions and scrolls, and those are really mandatory on PoTD or Dragons in POE1 
In the end, is just an illusion of tactical importance which is easily avoided without any punishment. The same thing goes for "You have a % of chance to fail the test" or "If this companion takes too much damage he will die permanently"  only leads to save scuming or constant reload, even on PoTD or iron man modes.  

The only thing that really bothers me is how 5 characters are still too much, the experience is more balanced with 4 characters in my opinion. I find the game more fun in the early levels because the fights are more slow and paced. On later levels is a cluster**** of spells and abilities that annoys me.

Is feels like going from Dragon Age to Diablo in a few hours.   

[tela2k]

No I would completely remove it from the concept of 'going back to town' / resting / using consumable resources, for the reasons you describe. KOs, triggering traps, failing checks in vignettes etc. would lower it.  Winning fights without any KOs, success in vignettes etc, maybe doing a good deed and refusing the offered coin etc. would raise it. 

 

I don't envisage it being powerful enough at either end of the spectrum to determine alone whether a given fight becomes unwinnable or trivial, just a slight nudge one way or the other (maybe a more serious nudge towards difficult on higher difficulty levels).

 

The intent of the system would be to encourage players to try and play well even during the regular encounters, rather than to massively punish them for failing to do so. I don't think it would take a huge buff in combat terms for most players to feel protective of their high morale rating. Maybe throw in a few bonus party banters which can only trigger when morale is high, something like that.

 

 

This is the kind of system that is either amazing or terrible.

 

Maybe if it's like over 50 morale raises stats and under 50 morale reduces stats, then you also get that sense of achievement from winning fights without dropping people? I mean it could be +1ACC/5 morale or whatever, +-10 ACC at max/min morale. That's a lot of accuracy gained or lost for 5 people. Or 1 all defenses every 10 morale or +RES if you want to make it lore friendly.

 

The downside though is winning that exciting fight with one guy standing would leave a bitter aftertaste. "Congratulations on winning this tough encounter, enjoy your -20 morale." Would have to get to play with this to get a feeling for it. It could probably be abused by clearing packs in small portions, but few systems in a single player game can be made cheese proof. Still think it would be a step forward from the current injury system that does absolutely nothing.

 

It would have to be optional though, since if you suck at the game you might find yourself at constant 1/100 morale and feel like the game hates you. Which isn't really the point of single player RPGs for most people. But I would do a playthrough with this to see how it feels. Obviously the game needs to be difficult for this to have any meaning, right now the +/- system would just be a constant buff.

[Masticator]

 

I've wiped a few times on Normal, and its balance feels really right to me.

 

I've not been party wiped yet, but I've had 2-3 people go down a few times. That's on classic without seeking out red skull areas.

 

Many of the fights do feel a bit pedestrian if I'm honest, but I've also recently come across some pretty challenging ones, where I doubt I would have survived on Veteran. I'm kind of torn on the new combat without health/endurance and more or less removal of per rest abilities. It means I can use the top abilities in each fight, which means they tend to be on the easy side. I have always loved to go through big dungeons trying to conserve the best abilities, and keep going when we are 'redlined', only resting when we are all on our last legs.

 

Combat in POE2 is less chaotic than POE1 though, which is positive. And although there are some negatives to the new combat, it's also kind of nice to be able to use Death Ring and such in each fight (if I want). I've still little to no idea how all the inspirations and such work, so I largely just ignore the whole thing. Probably not a good thing, but we get by fine without caring about that and using empowers (not used any yet, at level 12).

 

 

 

I don't know, POE2 fights can be very chaotic as well. But perhaps less so. POE2 does still have a few fights where enemies have abilities to teleport behind your front lines and wreck havoc on your ranged folks. If you are reading this Osidian, these features are very annoying. What's the point of even having tanks. I can see how POTD players like this sort of things, but for us average players it's too much. So many reloads in POE1, that lighthouse in POE1 in particular with the undead teleporting behind you. Your best hope was to pull some of them an not try to aggro too many. POE2 has a couple fights like this.

 

I also find they tend to fly by so fast that it's often not worth using my abilities. Slow them down a little.

[PangaeaACDC]

Those enemies are a huge challenge and not least annoyance. Especially those who can teleport YOU away and then smash you up while isolated. Came across one of those devils in POE2 as well. Good with variety though, so I don't want them gone -- but they are frustrating.

 

Must be tricky for Obsidian to know where to draw the difficulty line though. Some find POTD too easy, and then I've seen people saying Story mode is too hard. They must be going "WTF?"

[tela2k]

Encounter difficulty is a big part of it, yes, and I'm all for shoring up the lamentable difficulty we have for POTD at the moment. A properly challenging encounter brings out the best of every system.

 

But this was never about "attrition difficulty vs. encounter difficulty" in my mind. I think it's always important to have a good blend of both. IE games & Pillars were never really about very strict and hardcore attrition anyway - POE1 wasn't either. I simply don't see the benefit of getting rid of the attrition side entirely, apart from pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight and healing up to full health every fight (and you could do that in POE1 anyway, especially with a bit of help from the console).

 

I don't necessarily think per-rest is always the answer, but I think if you're going to make big changes to the system, the onus is on you (Obsidian) to come up with an improved blend of mild attrition & strong encounter difficulty, instead of just dropping the ball on both.

 

 

The current system system is just a kind of a strange mismash of per rest and per encounter, like they weren't sure which way to go with it. Per encounter ability usage restricted by limited mana pool, that is however recoverable with per rest empowers, which can also be used to buff your abilities instead! Health regenerates but you get injuries which can only be cured by resting, which costs you absolutely nothing. Actually you can use it to prebuff and gain back all the stuff that is still per rest for some reason! Ummh. Only thing missing is having some cooldowns in the mix, I wonder if we could fit those in too.

 

I liked the old system, but still think the move towards per encounter ability usage was a good one, it's just that the current system is a bit of a mess. Add the encounter difficulty issues on top and it does take some goodwill to believe it will ever work. Personally I think, as I've stated earlier in this thread, that once they get things ironed out, the benefits will outweigh the issues in the end.

Edited May 18, 2018 by tela2k

[Townsendvol]

I am not big on combat in these games, I mean I don't play it for the combat, I play it for the setting and the story.  So most of the time I just play it on story mode.  So combat is obviously no challenge.  Now I will probably go back and play it on a harder difficulty once I get through it one time on Story mode.

 

I know this wasn't the topic but I do enjoy the multi classing and specializations as it helps me create the character I want.  Again not so much for min/max or combat but more for story and immersion. 

 

I understand this is probably different than most of you all and that's ok, to each their own.  I hope they ramp it up for all yall that want that.

[Taurus]

Seens like a consensus that the PER REST formula will not be coming back.

 

So, they now REALLY need to focus on their PER ENCOUNTER, wich, ATM , lacks a lot.

 

Edit: In a way, even PoE 1 was per encounter . You would never go into a bounty fight unprepared for example.

Edited May 18, 2018 by Taurus

[whiskiz]

 

I disagree @Tigranes. The absence of difficulty is by far the main reason for why you can currently play in a repetitive way. If / when the game is balanced correctly, on the higher difficulty levels you should not be able to succeed using the same tactics in every fight, unless the composition of the enemy is the same in every encounter which would also be bad design.

 

Tactical variety doesn't have to be forced on the player by attrition, it can (and imo should) come from different encounters requiring the player to choose different tactics to overcome. Each encounter should be a puzzle to be solved in its own right. There should be no one tactic or character build which dominates every fight.

 

The biggest problem with the 'per rest' system is that the difficulty of any given fight will be overly dictated by whether or not you have just rested. The difference in capability between a rested party and an exhausted party is massive, the encounter designer attempts to balance for somewhere in between and the result is a fight which is trivial for a rested party. I'd also argue this approach has its own problems with repetition, as you inevitably spend the majority of a dungeon ignoring half of the tools at your disposal and hoarding them to spam the final encounter with.

 

Encounter difficulty is a big part of it, yes, and I'm all for shoring up the lamentable difficulty we have for POTD at the moment. A properly challenging encounter brings out the best of every system.

 

But this was never about "attrition difficulty vs. encounter difficulty" in my mind. I think it's always important to have a good blend of both. IE games & Pillars were never really about very strict and hardcore attrition anyway - POE1 wasn't either. I simply don't see the benefit of getting rid of the attrition side entirely, apart from pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight and healing up to full health every fight (and you could do that in POE1 anyway, especially with a bit of help from the console).

 

I don't necessarily think per-rest is always the answer, but I think if you're going to make big changes to the system, the onus is on you (Obsidian) to come up with an improved blend of mild attrition & strong encounter difficulty, instead of just dropping the ball on both.

 

 

"But this was never about "attrition difficulty vs. encounter difficulty" in my mind"

 

This was exactly about attrition vs encounter - per rest vs per encounter. It's not to say we couldn't have both, but it's not needed and definitely not healthy game design, whether a couple of oldschool people like it or not. People enjoy drugs - it doesn't mean they're good for you.

 

"I simply don't see the benefit of getting rid of the attrition side entirely, apart from pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight and healing up to full health every fight"

 

This is unrealstic, exaggerated and just plain inane. As Flamesium said: 

 

"Tactical variety doesn't have to be forced on the player by attrition, it can (and imo should) come from different encounters requiring the player to choose different tactics to overcome. Each encounter should be a puzzle to be solved in its own right. There should be no one tactic or character build which dominates every fight"

 

And with having different offense and defense strengths and weaknesses (reflex, deflection, will and resolve attacks, different physical damage types, different magical damage types, concentration/interruption, cc, different armor types and amounts etc) as well as unique subclass twists and multiclass variety as well as multiple higher difficulty settings - this is the perfect game to have that.

 

So saying "pleasing a subset of players who enjoy casting 3 fireballs every single fight" is again just silly. You're just running out of actual arguments to lend weight to the per rest system. That is because it really is an inferior and archaic system.

 

As for the "healing up to full health every fight" that would be completely fine at higher difficulties with the appropriate balance - where either you need to be able to heal full mid combat just to be able to survive in the end, or you actually don't get the chance to heal full because of increased incoming damage, or healing is no longer that powerful, etc. If you are able to just easy heal full in a fight - again, the balance is the problem not the combat system.

 

The only arguments for per rest so far, is:

 

It adds strategy/skill/challenge - It doesn't, because you could go rest anytime, almost anywhere. All it did was make it harder to account for and so balance, combat.

 

Per encounter is easy/OP - it's clearly the balance that is the issue there and is being worked on post-release.

 

Spamming same skills would become boring -  something you won't be able to do on higher difficulties, with the afore mentioned different defenses/offenses strengths/weaknesses etc, so you can't just "cast 3 fireballs every single fight" - There's a little more to it, including variance.

 

Does this just about sum it up?

Edited May 18, 2018 by whiskiz

[Tigranes]

Hrm. You seem very intent on attacking the per-rest system that I never had any particular interest in defending. So I can see how my posts sound silly from that perspective. Perhaps I've misrepresented myself?

 

All I wanted to say was that I felt IE games & POE1 benefited from the mild mix of attrition mechanisms each of them had, and that it's a great pity POE2 throws most of it out. I can see the rationale behind the argument that strong encounter difficulty compensates overall, and partly agree. But I personally enjoy a mix of the two, especially because almost no RPG ever comes close to offering truly punishing encounter difficulty anyway. I'll leave it there as my two cents.

[whiskiz]

Hrm. You seem very intent on attacking the per-rest system that I never had any particular interest in defending. So I can see how my posts sound silly from that perspective. Perhaps I've misrepresented myself?

 

All I wanted to say was that I felt IE games & POE1 benefited from the mild mix of attrition mechanisms each of them had, and that it's a great pity POE2 throws most of it out. I can see the rationale behind the argument that strong encounter difficulty compensates overall, and partly agree. But I personally enjoy a mix of the two, especially because almost no RPG ever comes close to offering truly punishing encounter difficulty anyway. I'll leave it there as my two cents.

 

That's fair, and true - most RPGs do suck at encounter difficulty, haha, so i can see why some people may not understand just how much better per encounter will be, once it's balanced properly.

 

Hard to know any better when you've never known any better.

 

Fingers crossed they get it right this time.

 

Edit: Also wasn't just addressing you in that post, but everyone who has argued against per encounter and blindly want per rest, because nostalgia and ignorance.

Edited May 18, 2018 by whiskiz