Combat is now mostly a dull chore

[Stephen Unsworth-Mitchell]

There are advantages and disavantages to both system.

 

Good side of per rest and having limitations placed makes you use all as wisely as possible, therefore making you think about and as your having think your more ingrossed more a part of.

 

Good side of per encounter no limits is the freedom it give and not having back track when make mistake.

 

Bad side to per rest and having limitations is having back track and not know what will happen so always unsure what can be used when.

 

Bad side to per encounter and no limits just rest always and throw best at it consently no planning no thought simple onesided encounters, might as well delete lower spells and buffs as no use as gain better.

 

Do we actually have to have one side win and lose out no. As said best system would put option that allows you choose way you like to play and then choose difficulty everyone can be happy everyone wins. No need to fight and claim anyone one side is better then other as the truth is both are right and both can be fun for differnt people.

 

Anyone says can't be done wrong write up 2 scripts one for each system and your choice defines which script game loads.

[ThacoBell]

I never found attrition based gameplay to be fun.

[Nokturnal Lex]

I'd prefer per encounter spells but actually having well balanced and difficult encounters and getting rid of resting entirely. (There's no challenge to resting at all, you're free to rest whenever you want, there's not even random encounters that can attack you while sleeping like there was in Baldur's Gate. Not that those posed much of a challenge to begin with. Limiting resting just incurs a "Wasting Time" penalty to the player and I'd rather not be wasting time.)

Also make buffs last a long time, but nerf them to not be so powerful. Micromanaging potions, food and buffs during combat is just not fun. Where as if you limited the amount of spells every caster has access to and made it so their buffs were always on but not as powerful. For example a +Accuracy spell like Bless that is always on but takes up a spell slot and you can only have 3 1st level spells. Etc. So you don't have to spend the start of combat buffing every.single.fight. Streamline the buffing process so you aren't overpowered but also aren't doing tedious tasks.

Edited May 18, 2018 by Nokturnal Lex

[cokane]

People seem to have missed the initial points in the OP and I encourage some of the folks criticizing per rest and attrition systems to re-read my original post. I made very specific criticisms of what is going on in Deadfire that aren't being rebutted. Instead, some folks are insisting on talking about these systems in a vague, general way.

 

Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

[tdphys]

People seem to have missed the initial points in the OP and I encourage some of the folks criticizing per rest and attrition systems to re-read my original post. I made very specific criticisms of what is going on in Deadfire that aren't being rebutted. Instead, some folks are insisting on talking about these systems in a vague, general way.

 

Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

 

 

Unfortunately, your initial post logically creates instant clash of philosophies...

 

Due to leveling up,   low level fights become cakewalks.  With the current per-encounter design style,

those are meaningless cakewalks ( well made point in your OP)

 

As far as I can see there's only really 2 ways to address this:

       1.  auto level up everything lower to your level.

       2.  have some kind of attrition that makes even low level fights meaningful.

 

These two solutions appeal to incompatible psychologies, hence the discussion degenerating into drawing lines in the sand.  

 

I'd be interested in hearing if anybody else has any other suggestions (asides from "better encounter design" which isn't meaningful)

Edited May 19, 2018 by tdphys

[the streaker]

Was a solution to the "tedium" of resting not already figured out in the old infinity engine games, to an extent? Resting and traveling are dangerous, you can get ambushed, so it's not a simple matter of resting all over the place to recharge all your abilities. The danger posted by resting and traveling could be tweaked to make you think twice about blowing all of your per-rest abilities in a dungeon, exhausting your characters, and then rolling the dice on a lucky uninterrupted rest to bring you back up to full strength. This is a gameplay feature.

 

In PoE 1, it wasn't much of a feature because, like has been already said, resting and traveling carried zero risk.

 

In PoE 2, they decided to remedy this by making resting practically unnecessary? Fair enough, but then you have to balance the fights so that each fight has a very high degree of challenge even assuming the player uses all his abilities. I don't follow OP's reasoning on why this will be tedious. As long as the player doesn't have so many abilities that it becomes tedious to click a million skills a million times.

 

Really, I prefer the rest mechanic but well balanced to include real danger to letting yourself become too weak before resting. But balancing the encounters and limiting the number of abilities is also acceptable.

Edited May 19, 2018 by the streaker

[evilcat]

For some playrs the whole resting system is meaningless chore and time soaker. Being forced to come back to inn/shrine too rest does not change it.

There was complain about trash fight soaking resources untill you had enought per encounter abilities to just crush them.

 

POTD tuning was announced and probably will happen at some point.

There is an idea of Skaen Curses, opposite to Berath  blessing, which could contain all great ideas as optional to improve standard game. No campfire resting. Weaker empower. More HP, harder hitting, more Acc maybe even extra boddies. And there will be achievments for all of them.

[cokane]

 

People seem to have missed the initial points in the OP and I encourage some of the folks criticizing per rest and attrition systems to re-read my original post. I made very specific criticisms of what is going on in Deadfire that aren't being rebutted. Instead, some folks are insisting on talking about these systems in a vague, general way.

 

Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

 

 

Unfortunately, your initial post logically creates instant clash of philosophies...

 

Due to leveling up,   low level fights become cakewalks.  With the current per-encounter design style,

those are meaningless cakewalks ( well made point in your OP)

 

As far as I can see there's only really 2 ways to address this:

       1.  auto level up everything lower to your level.

       2.  have some kind of attrition that makes even low level fights meaningful.

 

These two solutions appeal to incompatible psychologies, hence the discussion degenerating into drawing lines in the sand.  

 

I'd be interested in hearing if anybody else has any other suggestions (asides from "better encounter design" which isn't meaningful)

 

One thing I want to add, is that the original game offered a dungeon/wilderness area a greater variety of challenges. Let's put over-leveling aside for just a second. In the original, designers could create either very very difficult battles that would require using your best abilities in order to overcome a fight, or it could throw multiple, smaller challenges at you that encouraged you to manage your resources over multiple battles. And a wide grey area between these extremes. In Deadfire, because it's so easy to wipe away the effects of every battle, the game is doomed to narrower dungeon and wilderness variety.

 

Now, when we add back in over-leveling to the equation. The original game's attrition systems still have something to offer. Even when you were over-leveled for an area, the game was still chipping away at those long-term resources and you'd usually still be forced to rest. So, instead of a dungeon requiring two rests, if you were over-leveled you could do it with one rest, for a hypothetical example. Obviously, I'm not talking about being extremely over leveled. This actually helped the game's non-linearity, imo. As you could be over leveled but still feel the game's systems pushing back against your over leveled characters.

 

As for people talking about how the previous rest system was tedious or a chore, I guess I'm at a loss for understanding. Were people actually frequently abandoning dungeons in the original to go back to town? I'm genuinely curious. This wasn't my experience. With the exception of Caed Nua (which is designed to be that way) I don't remember frequently pulling out of dungeons to go all the way back to town. Now, I did have the experience of not clearing whole map areas (for example the Dyrford wilderness and its dungeons) in one go, but I think the game was designed to have those areas be visited more than once. And camping outside wasn't tedious at all. You clicked the button, clicked the past the cutscene and boom, it's over in seconds.

 

On the other hand, the same old combat that you know you're going to win and you're casting the same high level spells as you did in the previous dozen fights... those last longer than a few seconds.

[Jaget80]

I think the should have implemented a new machanic "tiredness" and link it to constitution.

It would be really simple: every fight would drain a bit of "tired" pool longer fight would drain more.

Fatigued characters would get penalties and it would scale the longer going without resting.

[zendingo]

While tuning still needs some work, dull is the last word I would use to describe the combat in this game. I love the combat, it is super fun. I just wish there was much much more of it. Battles are too few and far between for what is by far the most fun part of the game for me. Almost every system was greatly improve from the first game. There is still room for more improvement, but they are going in the right direction in my opinion.

[ThacoBell]

Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

Except this is demonstrably un-true. I've been playing crpgs since BG first came out, and I've had to re-load fights because I've wiped a few times on Normal dificulty.

[Purudaya]

The injuries do provide somewhat of an attrition system that encourages rest, it's just that there's no meaningful reason not to just rest immediately after getting injured.

 

You could keep the entire current system intact by just increasing character inventories and restricting stash access to when you're on the ship or buying/selling goods. Would probably solve some problems with excessive generic loot breaking the late game economy as well. Now that the stronghold literally travels with the player, there was no need to keep the 1st game's stash mechanic; it renders any supply-based resting system basically meaningless.

[Katarack21]

My level 13 five-person crew (consisting of myself as a rogue/cipher, plus Eder as a fighter, Pallegina as a paladin, Xoti as a priest, and Fassina as a conjurer) just took down a level 20 ship captain and his level 16 crew.

Now here's the thing; it took me 7 or 8 tries to do this. I had to pull out all the stops, eat through my healing potions, drop four bombs, burn all my per-rest statues, empower everybody once each, etc. It was difficult and complicated as hell, and when I finally pulled it off I felt like I really, truly achieved something.

[cokane]

 

Specifically the bite-sized encounter problem. Right now, any player who takes even a cursory effort to learn the game's systems is *never* going to be challenged by any encounter that isn't maximum difficulty. And without significant changes to something in the game, this is a problem that will remain. This is most of the game's combat encounters! That strikes me as a significant problem.

Except this is demonstrably un-true. I've been playing crpgs since BG first came out, and I've had to re-load fights because I've wiped a few times on Normal dificulty.

 

I mean no offense, but it's not possible that you're having this issue and using the game's systems effectively. The game's difficulty is very low at the moment -- a point that has wide support among not only fans here but also conceded by the designers themselves. Are you casting all your spells in these fights? Are you upgrading gear?

 

I'm playing on veteran, have yet to wipe, and haven't even upgraded my main character's weapon. Most of the fights only require me to attack-move essentially. The few hard seeming fights require nothing more than casting those high level spells then attack-move mop up.

[tdphys]

My level 13 five-person crew (consisting of myself as a rogue/cipher, plus Eder as a fighter, Pallegina as a paladin, Xoti as a priest, and Fassina as a conjurer) just took down a level 20 ship captain and his level 16 crew.

 

Now here's the thing; it took me 7 or 8 tries to do this. I had to pull out all the stops, eat through my healing potions, drop four bombs, burn all my per-rest statues, empower everybody once each, etc. It was difficult and complicated as hell, and when I finally pulled it off I felt like I really, truly achieved something.

 

You had to go hunting for that encounter, and punch above your weight to get to it and enjoy it.   A good portion of the rest of the game is going to be what seems to be trivial combats.  The design challenge is to somehow maintain experience gain and play difficulty at the same rate, so that the player feels that the game stays challenging throughout.    This is obviously a challenge (see pillars 1), and especially for open world style games,  since you can get overlevelled for content that still gives meaningful experience which worsens the problem.      It would be nice if easier quests gave less experience the higher your level became to subvert this.   Overlevelling is probably one of the biggest problems with these games.

 

For what its worth,  I think the per-encounter game play is actually quite nice in deadfire, when you're at an appropriate challenge level.  The combat is easier to read, seems more fluid and responsive, and the pathfinding/movment is much improved..  but I also fall on the attrition loving spectrum,  and deadfire seems to be designed for the single encounter side.

 

So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design.  It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too.   Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce,  or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it.   

 

Maybe in the DLC we'll get a delicious long slog dungeon,  but unless we have someway to restrict resources,  it still won't mean much to us.

 

I'm not motivating the one true way,  just looking for ways to make Deadfire compatible with both playstyles.   Unfortunately,  I'm also waiting for the POTD tuning, so here I am posting on forums instead of sailing the archipelago.

Edited May 19, 2018 by tdphys

[Multihog]

So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design.  It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too.   Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce,  or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it.   

 

You should try Darkest Dungeon if you haven't yet. That game is attrition-heavy, in a good way. Amazing combat too. 

Edited May 19, 2018 by Multihog

[tdphys]

My level 13 five-person crew (consisting of myself as a rogue/cipher, plus Eder as a fighter, Pallegina as a paladin, Xoti as a priest, and Fassina as a conjurer) just took down a level 20 ship captain and his level 16 crew.

 

Now here's the thing; it took me 7 or 8 tries to do this. I had to pull out all the stops, eat through my healing potions, drop four bombs, burn all my per-rest statues, empower everybody once each, etc. It was difficult and complicated as hell, and when I finally pulled it off I felt like I really, truly achieved something.

 

You had to go hunting for that encounter, and punch above your weight to get to it and enjoy it.   A good portion of the rest of the game is going to be what seems to be trivial combats.  The design challenge is to somehow maintain experience gain and play difficulty at the same rate, so that the player feels that the game stays challenging throughout.    This is obviously a challenge (see pillars 1), and especially for open world style games,  since you can get over-levelled for content that still gives meaningful experience which worsens the problem.   For deadfire it's even more of a challenge, since the experience level  doesn't seemed to be tuned to be challenging.   

 

For what its worth,  I think the per-encounter game play is actually quite nice in deadfire, when you're at an appropriate challeng level.  The combat is easier to read, seems more fluid and responsive, and the pathfinding/movment is much improved..  but I also fall on the attrition loving spectrum,  and deadfire seems to be designed for the single encounter side.

 

So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design.  It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too.   Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce,  or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it.   

 

Maybe in the DLC we'll get a delicious long slog dungeon,  but unless we have someway to restrict resources,  it still won't mean much to us.

 

I'm not motivating the one true way,  just looking for ways to make Deadfire compatible with both playstyles.   Unfortunately,  I'm also waiting for t POTD tuning, so here I am posting on forums instead of sailing the archipelago.

 

Edit,  wow , what did I do,  I don't know how I managed to timewarp this forum...

Edited May 19, 2018 by tdphys

[tdphys]

 

So I'm confident subject to tuning, the anti-rest crowd should be satisfied with deadfire's design.  It would still be nice to add game modes to satisfy attrition junkies too.   Like an expert mode that only removes injuries using only a subset of food that's fixed or scarce,  or increased injury chances and decrease exterior resting to remove it.   

 

You should try Darkest Dungeon if you haven't yet. 

 

 

I've looked at it,  but I need spatial puzzles in my combat,  dungeon-crawl stone-soup is my fallback.

[tela2k]

One thing I want to add, is that the original game offered a dungeon/wilderness area a greater variety of challenges. Let's put over-leveling aside for just a second. In the original, designers could create either very very difficult battles that would require using your best abilities in order to overcome a fight, or it could throw multiple, smaller challenges at you that encouraged you to manage your resources over multiple battles. And a wide grey area between these extremes. In Deadfire, because it's so easy to wipe away the effects of every battle, the game is doomed to narrower dungeon and wilderness variety.

 

 

Now, when we add back in over-leveling to the equation. The original game's attrition systems still have something to offer. Even when you were over-leveled for an area, the game was still chipping away at those long-term resources and you'd usually still be forced to rest. So, instead of a dungeon requiring two rests, if you were over-leveled you could do it with one rest, for a hypothetical example. Obviously, I'm not talking about being extremely over leveled. This actually helped the game's non-linearity, imo. As you could be over leveled but still feel the game's systems pushing back against your over leveled characters.

 

As for people talking about how the previous rest system was tedious or a chore, I guess I'm at a loss for understanding. Were people actually frequently abandoning dungeons in the original to go back to town? I'm genuinely curious. This wasn't my experience. With the exception of Caed Nua (which is designed to be that way) I don't remember frequently pulling out of dungeons to go all the way back to town. Now, I did have the experience of not clearing whole map areas (for example the Dyrford wilderness and its dungeons) in one go, but I think the game was designed to have those areas be visited more than once. And camping outside wasn't tedious at all. You clicked the button, clicked the past the cutscene and boom, it's over in seconds.

 

On the other hand, the same old combat that you know you're going to win and you're casting the same high level spells as you did in the previous dozen fights... those last longer than a few seconds.

 

True, the window for the difficulty where you engage with the mechanics or just let the combat scripts steamroll is now much smaller. The difficulty hasn't changed, but the need for personally giving orders is lessened.

 

Deadfire low level fights don't require you to play well at all, true. If the content is easy enough you'll just let the scripts handle it especially with the new improved system. Maybe it wastes a spell but whatever, it's per encounter. That's actually what happened on my first playthrough. But PoE1 low level fights weren't exactly fun either. I feel like you guys are talking about some theoretical idea what attrition could do, not what it actually did in PoE. You used per encounters fight after fight after fight, one or two per rests if it was a bit tougher, and then emptied your tank in a tough fight and rested, because the cost of resting was minimal. The way you take the easy fights in that game is insanely repetetive and boring. And I'm pretty sure that is what people mean when they say the resting system was tedious.

 

The situation hasn't really changed that much. Fights below your level are easy it's just that now you can empty your tank every time and when you enter an area that is way below your level, let the scripts handle it. Of course it's not good having fights, that are so easy you want to let the combat scripts take care of them, but I don't see how to avoid that. Every RPG ever has had trash fights, that's what the power curve does in these games. Having to personally cast the same spells everytime to own those easy fights doesn't really appeal to me either.

 

Per rest abilities, in my opionion, for reasons stated above, was not the solution. For it to work the resting resource needs to be extremely scarce. Really give this some thought, whether you'd honestly enjoy this. Fights need to be lower overall power, you'd do everything in the game in order of difficulty starting from the bottom, never use abilities in a fight unless you absolutely have to, actually combined with doing everything in order of difficulty you probably won't use them a majority of the time. And the punishment, the reason you are doing everything the easisest way possible? Having to run back town to rest and get more camping supplies and suffer the loadign screens in between. Flamesium already pointed this out earlier, that a fear of loading screens just can't be good game design. This is why it never happened in PoE and there where plenty of camping supplies, per encounter abilities and later even spell masteries as per encs to casters.

 

Health/endurance was not the solution. I mean when did you ever rest for health and not abilities?

 

Also someone said the BG style ambush rest was a good solution. Spamming Z and getting xp for a couple of spiders before rest, that was the system.

 

Injuries do nothing at the moment anyhow, but even if food was scarce, you don't get knocked down in low level fights, so it's always only going to affect tough fights. And tdphys's idea of getting accumulating injuries from low level fights is.. dude.. You'd only send in your tank with maximum deflection buffs and hide everyone outside vision range, afraid that the xaurips are gonna ruin your dungeon run by a random injury to your wizard.

 

Empowers go into the same category with injuries, resting isn't restricted.

 

I don't see why it isn't okay to accept that in a game like this fights below your level are always going to be boring trash and the most fun you can get out of them is pulverizing them with a 9th level spell? Even if you don't use your abilities at all enemies aren't going to be able to kill a party probably even two levels above them. You can level scale them sure if you want to, but they'll still have lower penetration and armor rating, because of worse gear, and you'll still crush them, just like you did in late game PoE with the level scaling options turned on. And early game you won't crush the trash anyway, because you're trash yourself. Early game wasn't a problem in PoE1 and it isn't one in Deadfire either.

 

My personal feeling on the matter is that per encounter doesn't exactly fix the problem, but it removes a pointless system that didn't fix it either. I like tough fights. I've only ever played any of these games on the hardest difficulty, because I enjoy the challenge. But I don't enjoy artificial difficulty that just makes the game more tedious.

 

So my questions are:

Can't easy fights just be plain easy without an additional mechanic on top to make them hurt?

If one is needed then what would it be? (Lots of ideas on knockouts earlier in this thread, but again, you don't get knocked out in easy fights.)

[hilfazer]

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.

I want per-rest because "everything per encounter" will have one of the following problems:

 

1. You steamroll non-boss battles and have a fair fight with bosses.

2. You have a fair fight with non-boss battles and get stamrolled by bosses.

3. Boss battles are as easy/difficult as non-boss battles.

 

and i'd rather avoid them.

[cokane]

...

I don't see why it isn't okay to accept that in a game like this fights below your level are always going to be boring trash and the most fun you can get out of them is pulverizing them with a 9th level spell? Even if you don't use your abilities at all enemies aren't going to be able to kill a party probably even two levels above them. You can level scale them sure if you want to, but they'll still have lower penetration and armor rating, because of worse gear, and you'll still crush them, just like you did in late game PoE with the level scaling options turned on. And early game you won't crush the trash anyway, because you're trash yourself. Early game wasn't a problem in PoE1 and it isn't one in Deadfire either.

 

My personal feeling on the matter is that per encounter doesn't exactly fix the problem, but it removes a pointless system that didn't fix it either. I like tough fights. I've only ever played any of these games on the hardest difficulty, because I enjoy the challenge. But I don't enjoy artificial difficulty that just makes the game more tedious.

 

So my questions are:

Can't easy fights just be plain easy without an additional mechanic on top to make them hurt?

If one is needed then what would it be? (Lots of ideas on knockouts earlier in this thread, but again, you don't get knocked out in easy fights.)

 

 

You're still missing an important point. And I wish people would stop talking about over-leveling so much in this thread. It's a red herring.

 

In all these CRPGs, *even if you were at-level for the content*, dungeon and wilderness areas could still offer you a variety of sizes of fights where all of them could still be engaging for the player. Because of Deadfire's extreme focus on per encounter, the kinds of dungeon/wilderness crawling experiences it can offer are going to be less varied. And this limited variety in combat challenges is ultimately going to give this game a shorter shelf life.

Edited May 19, 2018 by cokane

[tela2k]

You're still missing an important point. And I wish people would stop talking about over-leveling so much in this thread. It's a red herring.

 

 

In all these CRPGs, *even if you were at-level for the content*, dungeon and wilderness areas could still offer you a variety of sizes of fights where all of them could still be engaging for the player. Because of Deadfire's extreme focus on per encounter, the kinds of dungeon/wilderness crawling experiences it can offer are going to be less varied. And this limited variety in combat challenges is ultimately going to give this game a shorter shelf life.

 

Just so many opinions, many point of views and people I lose track of who said what.

 

So I think it's this from page 1:

These are also good points. And I'm not ready to totally give up on combat, it could be improved.

 

 

I want to focus on one suggestion you made which gets at the core of what I was originally trying to say: "If they want to, to make every fight difficult enough for you to actually have to use the abilities you have." Making every fight in the game the same difficulty is exactly the design problem that has doomed the game. A monotone combat difficulty doesn't seem like a good recipe for sustained fun in what's supposed to be a long and epic RPG.

 

But it's precisely the *only* way they can now make combat challenging given the decision to remove most of the consequences between combats, such as spell loss, ability loss, health, etc.

 

 

Encounter design between per rest and per encounter:

 

SF = Small Fight, BF = Big Fight

 

Per rest

SF, SF, SF, BF *REST* SF, SF, BF *REST*

 

Per encounter

BF, BF, BF, BF, BF ad infinitum

 

Having smaller fights in per rest is interesting, since you'll auto attack them to death, because you want to save abilities. (sense of difficulty)

Having smaller fights in per encounter isn't interesting, since you'll just drop your biggest spells on them and win. (no sense of difficulty)

 

It of course isn't really binary with only small and big fights, there's every kind of fight in between, and you don't just auto attack everything, also there are going to be small fights in per encounter but as stated above, biggest spell on them, whats the point. I just tried to keep it simple.

 

If this isn't your point then I'm going to need an ELI5.

[Taurus]

Problem is that they did exactly that with per encounter focus. There are still lots of small fights.

 

In fact, there were more “per encounter “ fights in PoE 1 regardless of its limited rest than there are in PoE2.

 

There were a few lvls on Od Nua and maps on White March that would quickly make me use my camp fires. And once those encounters happened, I had to use food and potions and a whole arsenal of spells.

 

That’s how hard it was compared to now.

[cokane]

 

 

...

 

Encounter design between per rest and per encounter:

SF = Small Fight, BF = Big Fight

 

Per rest

SF, SF, SF, BF *REST* SF, SF, BF *REST*

 

Per encounter

BF, BF, BF, BF, BF ad infinitum

 

Having smaller fights in per rest is interesting, since you'll auto attack them to death, because you want to save abilities. (sense of difficulty)

Having smaller fights in per encounter isn't interesting, since you'll just drop your biggest spells on them and win. (no sense of difficulty)

 

It of course isn't really binary with only small and big fights, there's every kind of fight in between, and you don't just auto attack everything, also there are going to be small fights in per encounter but as stated above, biggest spell on them, whats the point. I just tried to keep it simple.

 

If this isn't your point then I'm going to need an ELI5.

My point is that both encounter designs can and did exist in the original and engaged in the player. Only the latter can in Deadfire. That's basically it.

 

Edit addition: As well a whole rich grey area between those extremes existed in the original (especially in White March as Taurus notes). Deadfire's design means only the "BF" extreme can possibly engage the player with combat challenge now.

Edited May 19, 2018 by cokane

[gkathellar]

[obligatory comment about how I've been complaining about trash mobs since the first backer beta]