Pillars of Eternity Beta Discussion [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Sensuki]

This is somewhat fixed in PoE by having recovery time not go down when moving. This does a good job stopping 1 character from solo kiting.

Recovery time does go down when moving, they changed it at my behest as I found sufficient issues with it to get it changed and came up with a solution for ranged characters which they implemented 1-1. Ranged enemy recovery is now slowed by a percentage when moving and the issues with melee were, for instance, enemies could run right past your Fighter after he'd finished an attack and he'd have to run all the way after them, stop and then wait his full fucking recovery time before he could even do anything.

I don't really even think that recovery time needed to be slowed for ranged, but I can easily mod that out myself.

 

[Athelas]

I still don't get what the problem with kiting is. If a ranged unit is running away, it can't attack, so what's the fucking problem?

Have you played the IE games? You can get a permanent headstart on your enemy by attacking with ranged weapons -> running away -> attacking again -> etc. You can pretty much attack while running away. It's a very solid (and cheesy) tactic.

Enlighten me as to how this works when you're against multiple enemies, some of which have ranged weapons?

I thought we were talking about melee enemies, that's what the engagement system is for. Though you can still do what I describe against ranged enemies, you just have to be more careful about timing the attacks at the moment the new round begins which isn't all that difficult.

 

[Hormalakh]

The other thing is that I've tried to utilize some of these "disengage abilities" like the rogue's escape. The problem is that it never works right! It's not intuitive.

It took me a while to figure out, when you activate escape you have to click where you want to escape to.

No I know that - I do that, but the problem with escape is that the engagement mechanic is bugged to all hell, so what happens is that if I try to escape (by using the ability) I can't escape that far away, and then my character stops and the melee engager quickly engages me again. At the very least, escape needs to have a further range.

 

[Hormalakh]

Look if you want solutions to kiting, you can't expect it to be solved with engagement. You just need good stunning/stopping abilities with decent AI that knows who to go for. There have been multiple other solutions used in Real-time games. A mechanic from pathfinder/D&D3.5/D4 (all turn-based games) won't solve a real-time problem.

Here are solutions I have found by looking at strategies employed in other games to get around this very same issue:

Spoiler

In Age of Empires II, projectiles could be avoided by moving units out of range before the projectile landed. This is before the "ballistics" upgrade which makes projectiles ore accurate. Thus, a character (or an enemy) can consider that it is being attacked by a ranged unit and try its best to avoid projectiles while getting within melee range. Ballistics (pistols, heavy crossbows arbalests) would not be as "in-accurate" but would have longer recovery times as they did in AoE2.

Some games utilize a bonus to hit when a melee character is faced against a ranged character (allowing a melee character to easily hit a ranged character when they catch up to them). So for example, if a ranged archer is caught by a melee fighter, the archer could get -10 to Defense, the melee character would get +10 to accuracy.

DoTA2 has what is called "turn rate", which is is the speed at which a unit can turn, measured in radians/sec and normalized between a decimal from 0 - 1. Every unit has a base turn rate, which can be lowered by some abilities. The vast majority of heroes have a turn rate between 0.4 and 0.6. Ranged heroes generally have a lower turn rate to minimize kiting (but not to completely counter it). In this way, melee characters have a chance to catch up to ranged characters and land a few attacks.

Furthermore, in DoTA2 ranged heroes have lower base damage, health, gain less experience for killing mook creatures (creep), have some items give better bonuses to melee heroes, and have longer animation times before an attack is completed (dealing damage) as compared to melee heroes.

League of Legends was not mentioned because they re currently going through an overhaul of how to fix their melee/ranged heroes and have not found a great solution to their problem. As such, more players play ranged heroes than melee ones. I was not able to find enough information to give this a fair explanation.

In Starcraft, melee heroes generally have more health than ranged ones (25-30%). Slower units hit harder than fast ones.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TacticalRockPaperScissors

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?41026-Best-Way-to-Balance-Ranged-and-Melee-Units/page2

At the end of the day, though, if you have 6 ranged heroes against 1 melee hero, unless that melee hero can quickly block one person from moving (using abilities) and catch-up to within range, (and repeating this 6 times) you will always have a kiting problem.

An inherent "ability" like engagement (with bug issues) doesn't solve the problem totally, and can be cheesed to all hell.

 

[Sensuki]

3 Barbarians with normal engagement radius and 1 engagement limit



That's fucking booked if you ask me, almost as good as 6 Fighters!

 

[tuluse]

This is somewhat fixed in PoE by having recovery time not go down when moving. This does a good job stopping 1 character from solo kiting.

Recovery time does go down when moving, they changed it at my behest as I found sufficient issues with it to get it changed and came up with a solution for ranged characters which they implemented 1-1. Ranged enemy recovery is now slowed by a percentage when moving and the issues with melee were, for instance, enemies could run right past your Fighter after he'd finished an attack and he'd have to run all the way after them, stop and then wait his full fucking recovery time before he could even do anything.

I don't really even think that recovery time needed to be slowed for ranged, but I can easily mod that out myself.

It seems to me they could differentiate between following an enemy and moving to an arbitrary spot the player picked.

That might feel arbitrary though, and would still be open to some exploits (want to move away, find an enemy in the direction you want and target them).

 

[Sensuki]

NIPSEN LOL

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/69...n-on-engagement-mechanics/page-2#entry1542834

Great. So it's not just the one crazy guy who don't multipost-spam across five rpg-forums in concert with the PR sprees, then. Who knew.

Anyway, I sure hope Obsidian fires their PR and community guys in a youtube-published hazing, with all the employees being literally thrown into a trash-compactor through a long escape chute at the end of the ceremony. Once this is over and the game is universally panned for being simplistic mush that no one asked for. I mean, I don't want any of them to die, obviously. Just that they'd break their legs and arms a tiny little bit.

 

[Sensuki]

It seems to me they could differentiate between following an enemy and moving to an arbitrary spot the player picked.

That might feel arbitrary though, and would still be open to some exploits (want to move away, find an enemy in the direction you want and target them).

How would that make any difference?

 

[tuluse]

It seems to me they could differentiate between following an enemy and moving to an arbitrary spot the player picked.

That might feel arbitrary though, and would still be open to some exploits (want to move away, find an enemy in the direction you want and target them).

How would that make any difference?

A fighter following another guy around would recharge recovery, but an archer you are moving to kite wouldn't.

 

[Sensuki]

Switch to melee when running, problem solved

What's wrong with the current implementation?

 

[tuluse]

Switch to melee when running, problem solved

What's wrong with the current implementation?

I haven't played it yet.

What "implementation" is there to prevent solo kiting right now?

 

[Seari]

I thought we were talking about melee enemies, that's what the engagement system is for. Though you can still do what I describe against ranged enemies, you just have to be more careful about timing the attacks at the moment the new round begins which isn't all that difficult.

Or you know, give melee enemies CC abilities, instead of implementing this shitty engagement system.

I don't play vanilla BG2 with the retarded AI, so I don't know what "exploits" you're using there. If your party of 6 characters is kiting around a few melee enemies, all the more power to you.

 

[Athelas]

I thought we were talking about melee enemies, that's what the engagement system is for. Though you can still do what I describe against ranged enemies, you just have to be more careful about timing the attacks at the moment the new round begins which isn't all that difficult.

Or you know, give melee enemies CC abilities, instead of implementing this shitty engagement system.

Sure, I agree with that. But that wasn't what we were discussing.

 

[Delterius]

Don't repost this anywhere yet please, if I find it reposted I'll just make it private.

Not Degenerate™?

In all seriousness, after dozens of hours of DA:I I know that whatever comes out of this won't even need the Sensuki Patch to be supremely enjoyable.

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Not Degenerate™?

In all seriousness, after dozens of hours of DA:I I know that whatever comes out of this won't even need the Sensuki Patch to be supremely enjoyable.

So you'll need to be a shit gobbler to find PoE enjoyable? I'm hoping they're aiming a bit higher than that.

 

[Delterius]

Not Degenerate™?

In all seriousness, after dozens of hours of DA:I I know that whatever comes out of this won't even need the Sensuki Patch to be supremely enjoyable.

So you'll need to be a shit gobbler to find PoE enjoyable? I'm hoping they're aiming a bit higher than that.

So do I, hence that first line of mockery.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that in the specific issues of Disengagement Attacks and 'Drawing a Frontline', the only RTwP games that I had any issues with doing what I want to, protecting my mages and managing my melee characters, have been a Josh E. Jesus Production - NwN2 - and the Dragon Age Series, much more so with Dragon Age: Inquisition than with Origins. I hope this says a lot about breaking IE things that weren't broken in the first place to you.

 

[Sensuki]

the only RTwP games that I had any issues with doing what I want to, protecting my mages and managing my melee characters, have been a Josh E. Jesus Production - NwN2 - and the Dragon Age Series.

Same.

 

[Sensuki]

Josh Sawyer on WYSIWYG Loot

Pretty much all critters that are wielding weapons and wearing armor that could be of use to the players should be dropping those items. I know there are enemies in the BB and the game in general that don't drop their gear right now, but they are supposed to be and our area designers are making a pass to ensure that

It is as I feared, they do not have a system for enemies that drops equipped gear and the loot they drop has to be manually set by a Designer. Ouch.

Apparently they do

We do have such a system, but the prefabs still need to be marked to do it. Creatures like beetles and wolves don't get marked that way because they aren't going to drop their critter weapons, just pelts, shells, etc.

They must have to assign the prefab GUIDs to creature scripts in the Unity Inspector

 

[Athelas]

He's lying.

What might be the case is that the enemy bandit will drop a regular battle axe when in actuality he was wielding something like an enchanted battle axe of deadly crits +4. That's why it has to be manually set.

Can't let powerful gear upset the balance.

 

[Sensuki]

A win for skills

The choices related to allocating skill resources were uninteresting and not difficult. In the current system (Skills derived from Talents), I believe the choices have become more difficult, but not fun. It was genuinely an experiment. Overall, people did not have strongly negative reactions to it, but most people did seem to have at least a mildly negative reaction. I.e., it doesn't seem to make the game terrible, but most people think it makes the game worse. I think that's a better indictment of the system than if just a handful of people hated it. We'll be returning to something similar to the original system in the near future, with separate resource pools for Skills and Talents. I still don't think the choice of what to raise at each level is interesting or hard to make, but that's preferable to being frustrating.

 

[Shevek]

There is a Loot script component that gets attached to the creature prefab. It has a flag "Drop Inventory" and another "Drop Equipment". The former drops whatever is in the Inventory component. The latter drops whatever is in their equipped slots (Equipment component). You can also specify a loot list on the Loot component. Really we can use any/all of those fields/flags as we see fit, so it's not too time-consuming to change.

 

[Abu Antar]

I am happy that the skill system will be revamped. Complaining helps.

Spoiler

I don't care if he came to the conclusion on his own and he has most probably not even seen my thread about this subject. I will pretend it was all me.

I am also happy that we will get IE style loot drops from enemies.

Baby steps in the right direction.

 

[Shevek]

It's always tricky to figure out what abilities should be available at a given level. In our ability progression, previous unselected options are not locked out for the player, which does ameliorate some of the problems with forcing a selection between two modals or two passives. I'll take another look at the low levels for classes, but it may mean that at levels 9/11 some classes are getting 1 new option instead of 2 (since some abilities may have been moved down to be offered alongside the existing pairs).

I'm happy we may get to select alternative auras/stances earlier too! That will definately affect build variety.

 

[Delterius]

Something interesting just came to me. PoE is meant to become a franchise. Should that ever be true, will Sawyer or someone else have the need to fuck around further with Combat systems or is this it?

 

[Sensuki]

When I sent off my interview in June this year I asked a question about new mechanics in future installments, it was not answered.

We do know that more complicated spells will be looked into for the expansion, so that's something.