Quickfire Systemic Criticism that contributes to banality of gameplay

[Sensuki]

Personally I think they fucked up their economy by including the stash.

I prefer limited inventories and returning to town to sell gear because your inventory is full. It breaks up the adventuring pace and it means you don't pick up mundane items. In Pillars of Eternity you pick up everything because there's no limit to what you can carry.

But where's the difference to rest anywhere? All you have to do is to not pick up mundane items. I totally don't get it. If you play with unlimited stash and loot everything and then bitch and moan about it, the problem is with you, not with the game offering that option.

Besides, even with picking up all mundane crap you can find, I can't imagine it'll make it significantly easier to purchase too many of the magic items from the various sellers, not at the insane rates they're charging and the pittances you get for selling stuff.

Of course, the itemization is fairly crappy and indeed broken and you can easily afford to craft your own items on the cheap, but that's not really the point here.

I disagree, because Josh Sawyer actually said on the record that they were going to balance the economy around the fact that players could pick everything up. There's also area loot, take all buttons ... they make it as easy as possible for you to just mass collect everything and ground loot never disappears throughout the whole game, but then they're like oh, we're only balancing the game for 'normal' people who don't do many sidequests, which in turn throws it out for pretty much everyone.

Limited inventory slots and ground loot that disappeared after a certain time would force players to pick and choose what they want, would probably prevent everyone picking up every Xaurip Spear in the game.

Even with bottomless bag of holding etc in BG2 with mods, I only pick up magic items, some gems/scrolls and gold.

I'm playing through again on Hard and purposefully not using any extremely light or extremely heavy armor. The claim that the armor system forces a tank/squishy dichotomy is BS. Having a full party of 'middle path' characters slows the fights down a little, but I'm finding it overall a funner and more consistently successful strategy. My casters don't get KO'd as soon as a monster gets past Eder and they have more versatility in terms of touch and short range spells.

Deflection matters more than DR. I actually had most characters in Fine/Exceptional Robe Armor when I played, and Eder and Kana or Pallegina in Fine/Exceptional Plate. Fact of the matter is that stacking Deflection, DR and possibly CON gives you a tank that can tank pretty much forever.

How often are you resting, because after level 4, it was rare that I even needed to use a camping supply. I imagine if you're using middling DRs then you'd probably be resting a bit more than I did due to lower damage output from DPS chars and less protection on your tank chars.

most points I agree, not the one about armor though.
Having armor that only raises AC has always been one of the major downsides of D&D. A lot of other systems have damage reduction for heavy armor with some kind of downside to it, and that is for the best. It is more diverse, fun and, for those who care (me) realistic.
That they didn't handle it very well is another matter. While I don't have any particular issues with the system as it is now (in fact, atm I'm using a wide variety of armors with my chars and doing very well), I can see why it could use improvements in the future. But it is not worse than D&D, no way.

I directly compared the implementation of Pillars of Eternity's Armor System against the Armor System in the Infinity Engine games and how that affects combat feel. I didn't say that use of AC is better than DR, I just pointed out the way that the armor system works helps to create this very polarized situation where you have very tanky tanks and then everyone else who builds for damage/disable. It's not the largest contributing factor, it may even be one of the smaller ones. Shields probably attribute more to the situation than armor does. It probably is an implementation issue yes - for one, they've used percentile increases to damage against integer DR with wildly swingy damage numbers due to the inclusion of grazes and the fact that spells can crit, making that integer DR very important, particularly for mitigating graze damage down to minimum damage.

On it's own, yeah it might offer more character customization and stuff like that but I think it helps to create the dichotomy I talked about in the OP.

I actually think that as long as you are in the appropriate range of ACC vs the enemies DEF, then in combat buffing is nearly essential, and for avoiding alot of charm/petrification.

Is it? I barely cast a single buff the whole game. Why buff yourself when you can debuff enemies instead so that you deal more damage/hostile durations and win faster? I think I cast Blessing maybe once, Armor of Faith once, Circle of Protection once. Didn't use Withdraw. For Durance I mostly stuck to his Holy Radiance/Interdiction and auto-attacks with an Arbalest, using Iconic Projection, Divine Mark, Barbs of Condemnation and whatnot. Didn't even really need to use his spells because I control aggro well enough that pretty much everyone just attacks Eder and my other tank.

To deal with Charm I just send one character forward to a place that I am not going to path by (to avoid disengagement attacks), wait for all the enemies to target him with Charm, if it hit, wait for it to wear off and then come in late with everyone else while the enemies are trying to re-charm the character I sent in. Allowed me to get into position and not be targeted and blow everything up.

 

[AN4RCHID]

Deflection matters more than DR. I actually had most characters in Fine/Exceptional Robe Armor when I played, and Eder and Kana or Pallegina in Fine/Exceptional Plate. Fact of the matter is that stacking Deflection, DR and possibly CON gives you a tank that can tank pretty much forever.

How often are you resting, because after level 4, it was rare that I even needed to use a camping supply. I imagine if you're using middling DRs then you'd probably be resting a bit more than I did due to lower damage output from DPS chars and less protection on your tank chars.

Just finished the Catacombs at level 5 and I rested once after clearing the top floor. I'm definitely taking more damage in average encounters, but OTOH my party has more tolerance for minor fuckups.

 

[Sensuki]

Of course it has relation. They're both combat-focused games where melee and ranged attacks are happening. Real-time or turn-based should have no affect on whether or not Zones of Control exist, the concept is fundamentally the same either way and largely is whether you're playing Chess or American football.

The only real-time games I know that have "zones of control" are Total War, NWN1, NWN2, Blood Bowl RTwP mode and Pillars of Eternity.

Total War is a game where you control groups of units and when melee groups fight, those groups get intertwined. The 'Zone of Control' method works here because if you retreat in melee you could have units in the middle of the enemy units because of how they fight eachother, so it makes sense that if you are 'engaged' by units in melee and try to run you sacrifice a bunch of units for doing it.

AoOs in NWN1 and NWN2 work poorly at best, although at least NWN1 had the walk mode that allowed you to avoid AoOs while moving. No one plays Blood Bowl RTwP mode because it was designed as a turn-based game and they just did an Arcanum and added an RTwP mode. And Pillars of Eternity did it basically because the NWN games did and a bunch of SA goons asked for the mechanic.

No RTS game has a systemic zone of control, and neither did the Infinity Engine games. The combat in these types of games is awesome, and does not require a zone of control because you control the battlefield through positioning, movement and controlling AI targeting.

There is a battle in PilloE where one of the Big Bad's AI is programmed to attack your weakest party member - that's usually your spellcaster. Now, without a Zone of Control this dude could walk right up to your spellcaster and bash their face in. Actually, he kind of already does that, because it's fairly difficult to nail people down even with the Engagement system. But what I'm trying to tell you is that the ZoC protects the mages in a system that does not allow them to pre-cast spells. You can't have a system where your mages have to cast everything in-battle, and then also leave them wholly unprotected while they do it. Zone of Control is the tool you use to protect these mages. In BGII, ZoC didn't exist, but your mages could protect themselves well before a battle ever got started. So the real apples and oranges here isn't the Engagement system, but the ability to cast spells whenever you want. In PilloE, mages are weaklings, in BGII they're walking terminators.

What? Do you know what the Engagement system actually is? It's just two components, and AI targeting clause that tells engaged units to attack eachother and a disengagement attack. If enemies ignore the Engagement targeting clause, like Trolls do, then they'll take damage from disengagement attacks but the Engagement system will not stop them from targeting your weakest character.

In the Infinity Engine games it is super easy to control which enemies attack which characters, you just have to use positioning and sometimes movement/re-positioning. This same tactic can be used in Pillars of Eternity. Archers are often coded to attack low Deflection/DR characters no matter, what, so you simply move your low Deflection/DR character away (if they're ranged and not engaged) and get the archers to switch targets. If they're targeting because of low DR you can wear armor to get them to target different units.

Trolls and units that only target a single character in Pillars of Eternity are easy to deal with because you can kite them, if they're targeting a backline character with low armor or deflection, you can just run them around, they'll never change targets and your characters will do the rest of the job with normal attacks and disengagement attacks, all the while the derp troll isn't attacking you because he's still targeting your other character.

It was very easy to switch aggro in all of the Infinity Engine games through use of forward warrior positioning, or altering positions in battle so that enemies would swap from a character you moved away to a nearby character. There was no zone of control needed at all.

 

[Ninjerk]

There's a troll at the very southernmost end of Magran's fork that I solo killed with a ranger and wolf companion just running him in circles because the wolf had less DR and he could never catch him.

 

[sser]

Of course it has relation. They're both combat-focused games where melee and ranged attacks are happening. Real-time or turn-based should have no affect on whether or not Zones of Control exist, the concept is fundamentally the same either way and largely is whether you're playing Chess or American football.

The only real-time games I know that have "zones of control" are Total War, NWN1, NWN2, Blood Bowl RTwP mode and Pillars of Eternity.

Total War is a game where you control groups of units and when melee groups fight, those groups get intertwined. The 'Zone of Control' method works here because if you retreat in melee you could have units in the middle of the enemy units because of how they fight eachother, so it makes sense that if you are 'engaged' by units in melee and try to run you sacrifice a bunch of units for doing it.

AoOs in NWN1 and NWN2 work poorly at best, although at least NWN1 had the walk mode that allowed you to avoid AoOs while moving. No one plays Blood Bowl RTwP mode because it was designed as a turn-based game and they just did an Arcanum and added an RTwP mode. And Pillars of Eternity did it basically because the NWN games did and a bunch of SA goons asked for the mechanic.

No RTS game has a systemic zone of control, and neither did the Infinity Engine games. The combat in these types of games is awesome, and does not require a zone of control because you control the battlefield through positioning, movement and controlling AI targeting.

I said real-time, not "real time strategy." But the concept is the exact same regardless of how the game operates - even moreso using "real-time with pause" which is a bastardized version of turn-based if you play on non-cuddly difficulty levels. Fast-paced RTS games aren't going to have disengagement/ZOC mechanics put into the code because the physical act of 'retreating' in an RTS game means you're going to be eating damage anyway. The combat-penalty for disengaging needs no simulacrum because the real (heh) consequences are abundantly obvious.

What? Do you know what the Engagement system actually is? It's just two components, and AI targeting clause that tells engaged units to attack eachother and a disengagement attack. If enemies ignore the Engagement targeting clause, like Trolls do, then they'll take damage from disengagement attacks but the Engagement system will not stop them from targeting your weakest character.

No I don't know what it is, I've only been cruising through the game on PotD by blind luck. This whole thread is news to me.

What you speak of is poor AI, not a poor reflection of the system itself.


For example, this is also poor AI:

In the Infinity Engine games it is super easy to control which enemies attack which characters, you just have to use positioning and sometimes movement/re-positioning. This same tactic can be used in Pillars of Eternity. Archers are often coded to attack low Deflection/DR characters no matter, what, so you simply move your low Deflection/DR character away (if they're ranged and not engaged) and get the archers to switch targets. If they're targeting because of low DR you can wear armor to get them to target different units.

It was very easy to switch aggro in all of the Infinity Engine games through use of forward warrior positioning, or altering positions in battle so that enemies would swap from a character you moved away to a nearby character. There was no zone of control needed at all.

You see, it's poor AI because any thinking person would recommit their archers to attacking weaklings the second they reappeared, and recommit bruisers to dispatching mages whenever possible. It's cool you think trotting around reshuffling the AI deck is "strategy" and "positioning", but I find it difficult to find the definition of 'positioning' amongst the description of "Well, I broke the AI chain so they stopped attacking me, even though I'm standing in the exact same location they were attacking me at before."

Theoretically, a Zone of Control system is meant to punish the player for getting into bad position, and reward the player for getting into a good one. Your answer to enemies attacking your squishier members in IE is to, in summary, "move a character away." Wow, that's your penalty for being out of position? This isn't strategy. And it's about as interesting as melee combat in the IE-engine.

 

[Sensuki]

I said real-time, not "real time strategy." But the concept is the exact same regardless of how the game operates - even moreso using "real-time with pause" which is a bastardized version of turn-based if you play on non-cuddly difficulty levels. Fast-paced RTS games aren't going to have disengagement/ZOC mechanics put into the code because the physical act of 'retreating' in an RTS game means you're going to be eating damage anyway. The combat-penalty for disengaging needs no simulacrum because the real (heh) consequences are abundantly obvious.

The Infinity Engine games are not real-time strategy, neither is Aarklash Legacy. Real time with pause is not a bastardization of turn-based, it's real-time that allows you to pause and issue commands to many characters without having to worry about being quick at micro. The difference between real time and turn-based is quite obvious - unit actions do not occur simultaneously in turn-based, which is one of the reasons why AoOs and Overwatch features exist. In real time, unit actions occur at the same time/units can act simultaneously.

What you speak of is poor AI, not a poor reflection of the system itself.

The AI in Pillars of Eternity is worse than the Infinity Engine games, but it has nothing to do with what you quoted. How should enemies act relative to Melee Engagement? Because if they didn't target you they'd suffer disengagement attacks, which means you can abuse the shit out of the system.

For example, this is also poor AI:

In the Infinity Engine games it is super easy to control which enemies attack which characters, you just have to use positioning and sometimes movement/re-positioning. This same tactic can be used in Pillars of Eternity. Archers are often coded to attack low Deflection/DR characters no matter, what, so you simply move your low Deflection/DR character away (if they're ranged and not engaged) and get the archers to switch targets. If they're targeting because of low DR you can wear armor to get them to target different units.

It was very easy to switch aggro in all of the Infinity Engine games through use of forward warrior positioning, or altering positions in battle so that enemies would swap from a character you moved away to a nearby character. There was no zone of control needed at all.

You see, it's poor AI because any thinking person would recommit their archers to attacking weaklings the second they reappeared, and recommit bruisers to dispatching mages whenever possible. It's cool you think trotting around reshuffling the AI deck is "strategy" and "positioning", but I find it difficult to find the definition of 'positioning' amongst the description of "Well, I broke the AI chain so they stopped attacking me, even though I'm standing in the exact same location they were attacking me at before."

Theoretically, a Zone of Control system is meant to punish the player for getting into bad position, and reward the player for getting into a good one. Your answer to enemies attacking your squishier members in IE is to, in summary, "move a character away." Wow, that's your penalty for being out of position? This isn't strategy. And it's about as interesting as melee combat in the IE-engine.

No. The AI in Icewind Dale Heart of Winter is very good. The best of all of the Infinity Engine games. Personally I don't think you have any idea what good AI is. What real-time game do you think has good AI? Your answer will probably be none.

I do not think of games like real life, because they aren't. I played competitive games and one of the reasons why I was really good at the games I focused on is because I thought of things from the perspective of how they worked in the game, not how they worked in real life. These games are not realistic and they are not simulationist. The theory of zone of control isn't even realistic in the first place.

Good and bad positioning and movement actions in real-time games like this should be determined by the outcome of being in that position, you should not automatically be penalized by the system for taking it. Games like this do not need systemic penalties for taking specific movement actions because the outcome of those decisions will occur naturally. The reason AoOs exist in turn-based games is to deal with situations where in a system that movement and non-movement actions use the same resource pool where a unit that spent all of their action points moving, or a unit that moved first loses because they made their move early in the turn order and are at a disadvantage because units that act later in the turn order can react to their movement without consequence, and thus simply move around or away from them in melee without penalty. This is why AoOs and Overwatch features exist, so that units that act early in the turn order can 'react' to enemies that move after them or punish enemies that try and move away from them in melee after they've made their move.

This is the problem, you belong to the crowd that thinks that if you make an initial positioning mistake that there should be some sort of systemic penalty for it, which is a load of shit. This isn't a turn-based game buddy, this is a real-time game where units can act simultaneously, if you make a movement in melee, the penalty for moving is that you are not performing other actions. Part of the reason why the combat in this game is fucking shit is because of the banality of there being one correct way to position your party for every encounter, and that is positioning that avoids suffering disengagement attacks or having to move the least as possible, due to the 50% recovery time penalty. This is banal, and it leads to combat encounters that play out the same every single time.

If you are going for simulationism, people don't fucking stand still in combat, they move about, usually circling eachother to try and get an angle advantage, yet in Pillars of Eternity if you move a single pixel you suffer an automatic disengagement attack that has no animation, is free from recovery time and can play at the same time as another animation, such as attacking a completely different character.

And regarding AI, what exactly do you think would be good AI? Because the AI targeting in IWD:HoW is pretty fucking pristine, one thing that could be improved is ability/spell use.

 

[RK47]

Hear hear. I'm stopping just after Act 2.
I just don't see how it'd get better after the 2nd group of 10 lions ambush me in the plains.

 

[Kiste]

You see, it's poor AI because any thinking person would recommit their archers to attacking weaklings the second they reappeared, and recommit bruisers to dispatching mages whenever possible. It's cool you think trotting around reshuffling the AI deck is "strategy" and "positioning", but I find it difficult to find the definition of 'positioning' amongst the description of "Well, I broke the AI chain so they stopped attacking me, even though I'm standing in the exact same location they were attacking me at before."

Don't bother. I've tried to argue this point (among others) with Sensuki for pages upon pages. He's utterly impervious to reason and completely obessed with his notion that RTwP RPG combat = RTS combat.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...disabled-in-ie-mod-pros-and-cons.98258/page-3
Seriously, don't waste your time. I've tried.

To quote myself:

So you keep "microing" Imoen to fuck up AI targeting and that's your gameplay solution to keeping enemies engaged with the tanks? Are you fucking kidding me?

He's not kidding.

 

[AwesomeButton]

My general sense is that they spent a ton of time dicking around.

The dungeons and encounters aren't very well thought out either, and I think think the cause is the same: No one played through it, saw how the system worked in practice, and built the encounters around it. People spent a ton of time writing dialogue, item descriptions, and side quests and, it seems, jammed them all in.
[...]
- there are a good amount of dungeons, but they're filled with trash mobs (of the same type) just sitting on the edge of the fog of war. The only reason to do most of them is to solve the quest (yes, there's usually only one) and to advance the plot.
- instead of having interesting encounters along the main quest pathline and having more challenging, optional encounters outside of it, they opted to have pretty much the only interesting encounters be optional.

Not so much dicking around as filling the game with content which they didn't have the manpower and time to polish, even after delaying the game twice, but I agree with you in principle. First you have this telltale reply by Josh here:

JS: Because we had a backer beta, we had people giving their impressions and it wasn’t just what they thought from watching something it was actually something that they did. It’s like, ‘I played this and I did this, watch what I did.’ and we’d be like, ‘oh… that’s not good.’ or ‘I didn’t think of that combination’ or ‘…that someone would do it that way.’ That was a great amount of feedback.

Sometimes we’d talk to them on the forums, sometimes it’s best to let them talk amongst themselves. Even just watching conversations between different groups is very informative. There’re a lot of different opinions and foundational reasons for why people want certain things and just watching people bring those up and defend them to each other is worthwhile.

In QA things are usually very structured. The nice thing about fan QA is that they’re going to go and do whatever they want to do, which is unfocused but other times it’s something that we just wouldn’t have found because the structure of how we’re looking at things makes it difficult to see. I’d say it’s very cool that people can have the chance to do that.

My interpretation is that they never had enough QA people at Obsidian to begin with. What they were counting on was using BB players for QA, and post-release - regular paying customers too, which I've always considered unethical. You could remind me that Paradox helped with QA, but they came too late, when QA work was probably already way behind schedule.

Do you remember the much lauded "We'll all stop working and just spend a week playing the game" initiative at Obsidian? Does this sound like normal practice - developers stop development in order to test their own product - or like an emergency measure?

The second telltale bit of info is in this interview with Chris Avellone who besides being a cool guy is a co-owner and co-founder of Obsidian, and where he mentions that Obsidian has been very lucky to have a small internal QA team, which runs contrary to the usual tendency of developers not having QA at all and counting on publishers for QA... In the world of KS titles, you can imagine who the developers will be counting on for QA more and more in the coming years - the same people who dish out the funds for at least starting development will also pay with their time, testing and reporting bugs. I can't say I'm happy about that, but this seems to be the new trend. You have people with an emotional connection to your title so exploit them to the max. Sorry for the rant and for painting Obsidian in negative strokes, but this is what we just witnessed with PoE. The more I play the more convinced I am.

I disagree, because Josh Sawyer actually said on the record that they were going to balance the economy around the fact that players could pick everything up. There's also area loot, take all buttons ... they make it as easy as possible for you to just mass collect everything and ground loot never disappears throughout the whole game, but then they're like oh, we're only balancing the game for 'normal' people who don't do many sidequests, which in turn throws it out for pretty much everyone.

Limited inventory slots and ground loot that disappeared after a certain time would force players to pick and choose what they want, would probably prevent everyone picking up every Xaurip Spear in the game.

Even with bottomless bag of holding etc in BG2 with mods, I only pick up magic items, some gems/scrolls and gold.

I've been over this bullshit stash mechanic so many times on the Obsidian forums and a couple of times here, that I'm getting tired of repeating the same things but "I'm going anyway".
1. In the 1.0 version of the game there was clear evidence that Obsidian had planned more complex functionality for the stash but dropped it - characters had lines like "I can't carry any more!" if their inventory was full and you made them pick something up, which automatically goes to the stash now, once your inventory is full. Apparently the "encumbered" lines were in before the stash was made one-way accessible from everywhere. These character utterances were removed in the first patch or in the hotfix, I'm not sure which.

2. You have this quote from Urquhart:

Josh was trying come in with a very tactical way of players dealing with inventory in which you had sort of a restrictive stash and [restrictions on] how often you could actually get into your larger inventory.

And after he kind of talked to people, and we had very good reasons, sort of gameplay reasons for wanting to do that, a lot of people just sort of talked to him about it and said, "I can get all of what you're saying but it kind of just makes the game less fun to play." And he listened to that, and so that actually changed how that whole system ended up being in the final game.

Apparently Josh tends to give way only on the more inane fan requests for changes to the game, and never to the reasonable ones.
The end result leaves us in a state where:
1. We're showered with generic items which we can enchant but can't even change the name of;
2. Speaking of enchanting, we can enchant items equally well from the Crucible Keep's forgery or from the depths of a dungeon mind you, because it would probably get too difficult for some retard who requested limitless inventory;
3. We have a limitless inventory;
4. Characters have no weight limit (exactly because of limitless inventory this wouldn't have made much sense in most situations);
5. Items do not ever decay if not picked up within a day or two (which is really annoying and immersion breaking);
6. Since characters have no weight limit, the inventory interface's distinction between their inventory grids is completely cosmetic... but wait, not completely. It actually can be important, but for the wrongest reasons you can imagine.

Some people call decision-making on managing inventories and on which items to take/leave out "sperging". I don't know about that, but I'm positive that the UI functionality related to the stash promotes the same kind of "sperging" - the player is encouraged, by way of having this functionality, to go through every area like a vacuum cleaner, then cash in on it.

I barely cast a single buff the whole game. Why buff yourself when you can debuff enemies instead so that you deal more damage/hostile durations and win faster? I think I cast Blessing maybe once, Armor of Faith once, Circle of Protection once. Didn't use Withdraw. For Durance I mostly stuck to his Holy Radiance/Interdiction and auto-attacks with an Arbalest, using Iconic Projection, Divine Mark, Barbs of Condemnation and whatnot. Didn't even really need to use his spells because I control aggro well enough that pretty much everyone just attacks Eder and my other tank.

Playing PoE made up my mind about supporting hard counters. Maybe this is just me, or I'm in the minority, but it's easier for me to know "this effect will not work at all because of some other effect that is currently on", than "this effect will only work at 25% of its usual strength because of some other effect". On a psychological level, I care about my action being completely futile a lot more, enough to make me adapt my tactics, than I care about my action being almost futile. I think the right term for this principle is "loss aversion".

All the percentage modifiers make outcomes of my actions during combat too difficult to predict, because I don't go into all the calculations, and in the end the soft counters system/"percentages-based damage increases vs integer DR", results in me knowing less about how combat will play out than the simpler, "less balanced" system would.

if you make a movement in melee, the penalty for moving is that you are not performing other actions.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand for many people.

 

[Kiste]

if you make a movement in melee, the penalty for moving is that you are not performing other actions.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand for many people.

Because the "penalty" is miniscule compared to the benefit your receive from getting your guy out of harms way or moving into an otherwise advantageous position. Not performing other actions for 1 or maybe 2 seconds is as close to a non-penalty as you can get in a game where actions can take several seconds. This isn't some high-speed, high-APM RTS. I don't know why this is so hard to understand for many people.

 

[Hatred]

Don't bother. I've tried to argue this point (among others) with Sensuki for pages upon pages. He's utterly impervious to reason and completely obessed with his notion that RTwP RPG combat = RTS combat.

You can't seem to get enough. It is fun to read so by all means hang around.

 

[AwesomeButton]

if you make a movement in melee, the penalty for moving is that you are not performing other actions.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand for many people.

Because the "penalty" is miniscule compared to the benefit your receive from getting your guy out of harms way or moving into an otherwise advantageous position. Not performing other actions for 1 or maybe 2 seconds is as close to a non-penalty as you can get in a game where actions take several seconds. This isn't some high-speed, high-APM RTS. I don't know why this is so hard to understand for many people.

I'm optimistically counting on the fact that you know how illogical your argument is, but just for the record - the size of the penalty for moving in itself can be very big or very small, depending on the combat situation. Moving your tank away because he is too low on endurance can alter the whole party's behavior. On the other hand, having your tank killed because he couldn't retreat most often results in a load game screen.

Josh's argumentation of the disengagement attacks had more to do with preventing kiting. "Let's mitigate the fact we don't have much of a targeting AI by locking down characters in combat". I was actually curious about the engagement system and willing to give it a try during the beta. Now I'm convinced it doesn't work well.

 

[Ninjerk]

You see, it's poor AI because any thinking person would recommit their archers to attacking weaklings the second they reappeared, and recommit bruisers to dispatching mages whenever possible. It's cool you think trotting around reshuffling the AI deck is "strategy" and "positioning", but I find it difficult to find the definition of 'positioning' amongst the description of "Well, I broke the AI chain so they stopped attacking me, even though I'm standing in the exact same location they were attacking me at before."

Don't bother. I've tried to argue this point (among others) with Sensuki for pages upon pages. He's utterly impervious to reason and completely obessed with his notion that RTwP RPG combat = RTS combat.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...disabled-in-ie-mod-pros-and-cons.98258/page-3
Seriously, don't waste your time. I've tried.

To quote myself:

So you keep "microing" Imoen to fuck up AI targeting and that's your gameplay solution to keeping enemies engaged with the tanks? Are you fucking kidding me?

He's not kidding.

Coming up with euphemisms for playstyle that you don't like or is too hard for you isn't making an argument.

 

[Kiste]

Coming up with euphemisms for playstyle that you don't like or is too hard for you isn't making an argument.

Wat.

 

[Ninjerk]

Not surprised your dumbfuckery continues.

 

[Kiste]

I'm optimistically counting on the fact that you know how illogical your argument is, but just for the record - the size of the penalty for moving in itself can be very big or very small, depending on the combat situation. Moving your tank away because he is too low on endurance can alter the whole party's behavior. On the other hand, having your tank killed because he couldn't retreat most often results in a load game screen.

I was specfically responding to "the penalty for moving is that you are not performing other actions". PoE is not the kind of game in which an additional second or two delay between two actions can determine the outcome of combat, while positioning certainly can. It's therefor close to a non-penalty. Actually having one of your characters use a spell or an ability to CC the enemy so you can move away is more of an appropriate penalty.

 

[Kiste]

Not surprised your dumbfuckery continues.

Your sentence didn't make a lick of sense, but I am the dumbfuck?

 

[Sensuki]

Kiste is triggered.

 

[Ninjerk]

Not surprised your dumbfuckery continues.

Your sentence didn't make a lick of sense, but I am the dumbfuck?

Do you want to point out the problem or are the mechanics of grammar too difficult for you to wrap your mind around, too?

 

[Kiste]

Not surprised your dumbfuckery continues.

Your sentence didn't make a lick of sense, but I am the dumbfuck?

Do you want to point out the problem or are the mechanics of grammar too difficult for you to wrap your mind around, too?

No, I was was merely trying to make an effort to understand the gibberish you wrote.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I barely cast a single buff the whole game. Why buff yourself when you can debuff enemies instead so that you deal more damage/hostile durations and win faster? I think I cast Blessing maybe once, Armor of Faith once, Circle of Protection once. Didn't use Withdraw. For Durance I mostly stuck to his Holy Radiance/Interdiction and auto-attacks with an Arbalest, using Iconic Projection, Divine Mark, Barbs of Condemnation and whatnot. Didn't even really need to use his spells because I control aggro well enough that pretty much everyone just attacks Eder and my other tank.

Posting this separately as the timer for editing ran out.

That's exactly true. In PoE battles are a blitzkrieg metaphor - damage them more and sooner than they can damage you - unless you have a party with 3 or more tanks. The lack of hard counters rules out the viability of tactics like prolonging the battle until the enemies' buffs wear out, countering their buffs with your buffs, etc., which are things I've done in the IE games.

You can't last in a prolonged battle because in a typical party (with campaign party members) 1) the mid-battle healing is very limited, 2) you don't have the endurance to last without healing, and 3) why would you want your health drained? This only means returning to rest sooner which is a waste of real-life time, which is valuable to a lot of players.

So, to preserve health, the most rational course of action is to drop all the shit you can on the enemies' heads in the first 3 seconds before they lock engagement, and then it's all about taking advantage of the debuffs you've caused, and if they run out, cause new debuffs while DPS-ing engagement-locked enemies. This just described 90% of my experience with combat in the game, and is the reason I can only cite 3 memorable fights, while being halfway through the game and over halfway through towards the XP cap (I'm almost lvl 8).

There are still bright sides though - I find myself prioritizing targets based on how much time there is left before their debuffs run out. The only character who tangibly benefits from debuffs is the rogue though. For any other class, good luck doing percentage arithmetics in your mind in order to figure out what should you cast. In my books this comes across as boring.

 

[Ninjerk]

I barely cast a single buff the whole game. Why buff yourself when you can debuff enemies instead so that you deal more damage/hostile durations and win faster? I think I cast Blessing maybe once, Armor of Faith once, Circle of Protection once. Didn't use Withdraw. For Durance I mostly stuck to his Holy Radiance/Interdiction and auto-attacks with an Arbalest, using Iconic Projection, Divine Mark, Barbs of Condemnation and whatnot. Didn't even really need to use his spells because I control aggro well enough that pretty much everyone just attacks Eder and my other tank.

Posting this separately as the timer for editing ran out.

That's exactly true. In PoE battles are a blitzkrieg metaphor - damage them more and sooner than they can damage you - unless you have a party with 3 or more tanks. The lack of hard counters rules out the viability of tactics like prolonging the battle until the enemies' buffs wear out, countering their buffs with your buffs, etc., which are things I've done in the IE games.

You can't last in a prolonged battle because in a typical party (with campaign party members) 1) the mid-battle healing is very limited, 2) you don't have the endurance to last without healing, and 3) why would you want your health drained? This only means returning to rest sooner which is a waste of real-life time, which is valuable to a lot of players.

So, to preserve health, the most rational course of action is to drop all the shit you can on the enemies' heads in the first 3 seconds before they lock engagement, and then it's all about taking advantage of the debuffs you've caused, and if they run out, cause new debuffs while DPS-ing engagement-locked enemies. This just described 90% of my experience with combat in the game, and is the reason I can only cite 3 memorable fights.

There are still bright sides though - I find myself prioritizing targets based on how much time there is left before their debuffs run out. The only character who tangibly benefits from debuffs is the rogue though. For any other class, good luck doing percentage arithmetics in your mind in order to figure out what should you cast. In my books this comes across as boring.

I think what bothers me the most about the system is that so many of the choices you can make across character builds are minor stat improvements that never really encroach upon the utility of anything. +5 deflection here, +6 accuracy there and I end up thinking maybe a nap would be an exciting alternative.

Most of the games I've played that took place in real-time were far more fun when you could acquire items or abilites that actually changed the way you played the game from moment to moment(and I think this is a point someone may have made on this website in the DotA 2 thread? not sure). I'm also pretty surprised they left stunlocking in the game.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I think what bothers me the most about the system is that so many of the choices you can make across character builds are minor stat improvements that never really encroach upon the utility of anything. +5 deflection here, +6 accuracy there and I end up thinking maybe a nap would be an exciting alternative.

Most of the games I've played that took place in real-time were far more fun when you could acquire items or abilites that actually changed the way you played the game from moment to moment(and I think this is a point someone may have made on this website in the DotA 2 thread? not sure). I'm also pretty surprised they left stunlocking in the game.

I also think the 3% modifiers coming from ability score changes are too fine grained and only give you an illusion of complexity if you are not persistent in your course of building a particular type of character across multiple level-up screens. If you stack a well thought out ability scores with the talents that emphasize on the bonuses coming from your base attributes by level 4-5 your character would have some skill "hypertrophy" which you have built little by little across level ups. ... But even if you succeed in that, there aren't the tough encounters in this game where you would be able to admire your successful build. 90% or more of the encounters seem to be a walkover on Hard. Maybe they are ok on PotD, I haven't tried it yet. Playing on hard though, Josh's vision of "the dumbest build should be able to complete the game" is definitely realized, to the point that you very rarely need to care about the decisions you make during level-up.

My concern is more about the fact that apart from class abilities, the system is in effect classless - you can distribute points in any way you want, wear any armor you want, use any weapon you want with any "class" so what makes a class distinct? The only parameters reminding you of classes being different are somewhat hidden (by comparison with the overt symbols for a class, like a plate armor or a 2H sword, or a bow, etc.) - the deflection and accuracy scores. I don't know, at times when I think about it the whole ruleset seems like a mess that's beyond repair.

 

[tdphys]

I actually think that as long as you are in the appropriate range of ACC vs the enemies DEF, then in combat buffing is nearly essential, and for avoiding alot of charm/petrification.

Is it? I barely cast a single buff the whole game. Why buff yourself when you can debuff enemies instead so that you deal more damage/hostile durations and win faster? I think I cast Blessing maybe once, Armor of Faith once, Circle of Protection once. Didn't use Withdraw. For Durance I mostly stuck to his Holy Radiance/Interdiction and auto-attacks with an Arbalest, using Iconic Projection, Divine Mark, Barbs of Condemnation and whatnot. Didn't even really need to use his spells because I control aggro well enough that pretty much everyone just attacks Eder and my other tank.

To deal with Charm I just send one character forward to a place that I am not going to path by (to avoid disengagement attacks), wait for all the enemies to target him with Charm, if it hit, wait for it to wear off and then come in late with everyone else while the enemies are trying to re-charm the character I sent in. Allowed me to get into position and not be targeted and blow everything up.

I Combat buff simply to raise my ACC. Buffs to ACC and Debuffs to DEF are simply doing the same thing in general, it's all relative. There's one spell that does both and I try and use that when I have a compact group. I hate pale elves... it doesn't seem that prayer against *charm* really does much, especially on my monk with crappy will. So the prayers that boost DEF against things like charm only really work for chars who's defenses are in range for it to be meaningful ... so I guess cheesing the AI for a bunch of charming vs a single char is legit... really most of the "banality" in combat comes down to AI.

I'd like to see an anti charm spell as a single target immunity for a certain amount of time, maybe modified by that char's defense

 

[Sensuki]

Classes are defined by endurance numbers, health multipliers, starting accuracy and defense scores and their abilities on level up. We all know that Josh prefers classless systems so it's no surprise that his class-based system is kinda/sorta similar to classless in a way.

I Combat buff simply to raise my ACC. Buffs to ACC and Debuffs to DEF are simply doing the same thing in general, it's all relative. There's one spell that does both and I try and use that when I have a compact group. I hate pale elves... it doesn't seem that prayer against *charm* really does much, especially on my monk with crappy will. So the prayers that boost DEF against things like charm only really work for chars who's defenses are in range for it to be meaningful ... so I guess cheesing the AI for a bunch of charming vs a single char is legit... really most of the "banality" in combat comes down to AI.

Yeah, Accuracy buffs and defense/DR debuffs are the only things worth casting. The AI isn't great, but it would still be boring to play if it was improved, because of the system design the best thing to do for the AI would be just to have them use the same tactics as the player - pile the shit on damage/debuffs or some shit like that. Problem with that is, the player can use Stealth to set up on every encounter, meaning that the player *always* has the upper hand, and the alpha strike except for encounters that physically move the player for dialogue. I don't think that would make combat more interesting.