What's so bad about Torment combat compared to BG?

[SCO]

I constantly read this, but i don't really believe it to be true.

Rather, BG fans are used to extreme munchknism like contingencies, time stop and a triple shielded mage in every encounter and other stuff i forgot.

Torment in contrast had rare mage encounters, lame high level spell cutscenes and one munchkin spell (enva duplication). It's almost exactly the same only there are less enemies and less mages.
Combat is shit in exactly 1 place (and still serves as a endurance test before the boss, not that you can't run thruu them) - in the mordron cube

Is it that you can't die (instead of reload hahah)?

Missing "tactical" spells like web+fireball?

 

[Malakal]

Combat is horrible and often unavoidable. LOL shadows lol Prison lol lower planes.
Spells are horrible and playing mage is boring.
Actually all of the gameplay elements are ratehr weak.

Story is good and characters are good, but those are valued in books not so much in games. Because You have to PLAY the game.

On the other hand BG has excellent tactical combat with many interesting encounters dungeons and spells. Story is so-so but dungeon crawling is god tier. Classic game.

 

[PorkaMorka]

It seems to me they put less effort into the encounter design (which requires a lot of fine tuning), so compared to BG2 it comes off as very dumbed down.

And if you dumb down the infinity engine combat too much you aren't left with much gameplay of substance, combatwise.

 

[Sceptic]

Combat is horrible and often unavoidable. LOL shadows lol Prison lol lower planes.

Didn't fight the shadows (either in Ravel's Maze or in the Fortress). Didn't fight in the lower planes. LOL indeed.

On the other hand BG has excellent tactical combat

No. RTWP is not "excellent tactical combat".

with many interesting encounters

That was probably BG's strongest point.

dungeons

Are you kidding me? BG1?

 

[Malakal]

I fought shadows way before Ravels maze from what I remember. I played mage so no sneaking around. Since there were only three classes they could have at least tried to implement some ways around.
There was also this place with all those mad bandits or something, dont know how its called in english (played polish version) was that avoidable?

By tactical combat I meant actual party tactics. Spell synergies, blocking enemies etc. Of course encounters are rather easy so...

And he wrote BG and that includes BG2 too. Never liked BG1.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Memorable fights in BG2:

The troll battle for the fighters keep.
Firkragg, and most of the dragons in general.
All of the fights with Irenicus
Mindflayer den.
Planar sphere hell area.
The portal you take from some random place in the city to the ambush with all the mages and shit.


Memorable fights in PS:T:
(someone fill in this space)

 

[Zomg]

People overstate how fundamentally bad the combat is in PS:T because the last half or last third of the game has completely fucking atrocious encounter design. Curst prison is indescribably bad and several other places are as bad or nearly so. The combat fundamentals are no more shitty than every other RTw/P abortion that isn't 7.62mm

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Memorable fights in BG2:

The troll battle for the fighters keep.

Really?

 

[DraQ]

I will need to play BG2 properly, but so far, the BG1 and PS:T are pretty much the same shit combat-wise, except in PS:T you have less flexibility, but at least can find some respite in form of story, characters and atmosphere.

 

[Malakal]

Memorable fights in BG2:

The troll battle for the fighters keep.
Firkragg, and most of the dragons in general.
All of the fights with Irenicus
Mindflayer den.

Memorable fights in PS:T:
(someone fill in this space)

Memorable locations/dungeons in BG2:
-planar prison
-planar sphere
-dungeon under the Spellhold
-Underdark but mainly the drow city/mind flayer den
-Sahaugian city
-Umar Hills

Memorable encounters:
-twisted rune
-Kangaxx and his two forms (what a nice suprise for the first time!)
-all dragons indeed
-vampire fights were good too

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Memorable fights in BG2:

The troll battle for the fighters keep.

Really?

Maybe its from the combat difficulty enhancers, but yeah I've always found it interesting. But then I almost always do it nearly first thing after the initial dungeon.

 

[Serious_Business]

Nobody fucking said BG had good combat over Torment, its all the same bullshit what are you talking about this thread is pointless

On the other hand BG has excellent tactical combat with many interesting encounters dungeons and spells. Story is so-so but dungeon crawling is god tier. Classic game.

Oh wait.

Well let me fix that quote then :

I never played any good tactical game in my entire life

 

[oldmanpaco]

Memorable fights in BG2:

The troll battle for the fighters keep.

Really?

Maybe its from the combat difficulty enhancers, but yeah I've always found it interesting. But then I almost always do it nearly first thing after the initial dungeon.

Tactics Torgal(?) FTW.

 

[CrimHead]

oh lol this thread again

 

[themadhatter114]

The only negative of Torment's combat vs. Baldur's Gate's combat that I can think of is that you had to right click everything and always go to a menu instead of having as many options to quickcast spells or just attack something with one click instead of going to a menu. At least that's how I remember it.

 

[mondblut]

Undersigil (or whatever...somewhere underground) encounters: 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms.

Baator encounters: 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos.

(well, maybe that was something else than nupperibos, I forget, but all the same shit anyway.)

Regrets encounters: 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 6 shadows.

Fighting in PST is about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Once you had one encounter in a given location, you had them all.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Fighting in PST is about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Once you had one encounter in a given location, you had them all.

And since you had that whole regeneration power going, it wasn't like you were slowly getting worn down by endless hordes of enemies anyway. PS:T would have been a great game to have nothing but boss fights in, with exactly 0 filler crap.

 

[Black]

Wiz 8 has good dungeon crawling. BGs have boring filler combat filled with EPIC.

Both Torment and BGs have shit combat. And in this case the victor is the one which has the least shit, as in the least combat. And that'd be Torment.
Deal with it.

 

[Mister Arkham]

Undersigil (or whatever...somewhere underground) encounters: 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms.

Baator encounters: 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos.

(well, maybe that was something else than nupperibos, I forget, but all the same shit anyway.)

Regrets encounters: 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 6 shadows.

Fighting in PST is about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Once you had one encounter in a given location, you had them all.

Unfortunately, this is really very accurate. I've always felt that the combat was really tacked on in PST. Like they designed the main areas and the characters and the puzzles and then somebody just went "lol, forgot about fightin' guys! Better put in some straight combat areas and filler monsters!" The game really would work much better if its combat was built around the basis of isolated, highly designed encounters that allowed for a showcasing of the combat skills/spells rather than just endless iterations of them.

To be honest though, this has always kind of been the way with Planescape. For all of the bizarre monsters that TSR had designed for the setting, they always put a much sharper focus on lore, roleplaying, and storeytelling in the sourcebooks. And a lot of people did write and run campaigns set in and around Sigil that were much more character and story driven. The City of Doors just doesn't work in the context of endless combat. It is a dangerous place, but not one that suits itself well to fighting in the streets and brawling your way from point A to point B. It requires a more thoughtful and steady hand from the players and the DM. I think it's probably one of the main reasons that the setting was abandoned when Wizards got their hooks into D&D; it had too much of a stigma as being anti-munchkin.

 

[SCO]

Undersigil (or whatever...somewhere underground) encounters: 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms. 4 worms.

Baator encounters: 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos. 6 nupperibos.

(well, maybe that was something else than nupperibos, I forget, but all the same shit anyway.)

Regrets encounters: 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 3 shadows. 4 shadows. 5 shadows. 6 shadows.

Fighting in PST is about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Once you had one encounter in a given location, you had them all.

In retrospect, this was true, but i never noticed except if i was grinding - in undersigil or Carceri whatever, and in the mordron cube where to solve it i more or less had to fight everything if i didn't want that fucking dialog tree repeated 300 times because it was a maze.

But BG I and II felt the same really. Buff, debuff Go for the mage and ranged fighters kill bombard (when i wasn't soloing where i would backstab - that i could do in torment too).

There was a memorable non boss encounter : the upgraded morodin box fiend if only because the fucker has almost 100% mr.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Buff, debuff Go for the mage and ranged fighters kill bombard

That was pretty much it... the encounters were moderately challenging sometimes, but that's about it, there's nothing that awesome or tactic about BG2's combat. But at least there could be some interesting fights which you can't really say about Torment.

Don't care much since I like the rest enough, but it would've been a better game if it had better encounters.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I think they missed an opportunity by having all the trash mobs in PS:T. If they just had a relatively small number of interesting fights, mostly connected to the story, they'd have had combat that played a fairly similar role to PnP rpgs. Normally in games like BG and BG2 they have to turn the amount of experience/enemy right down due to the sheer number of encounters that you're storming through. Fewer encounters, each difficult (except where story requires otherwise), with greater exp point return would have been a better solution than arbitrarily stowing trash mob barriers between interesting areas.

 

[SCO]

Sigil is a analogue of the public LA areas in VtM:B.

SHITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT Troika is dead and gone.

This fucking genre will never incline again.

 

[DefJam101]

How about Fallout Alliance 8: Torment?

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Fighting in PST is about as fascinating as watching paint dry.

Pretty true. But at least the painting is beautiful.