Thoughts about encounter design, structure and pacing in Path of the Damned difficulty

[meanwhileInPoland]

Different shapes for mobs that all I did was select all attack through. The zone was a cllusterfuck of undead that you wade into.

i am sure you just selected all your heroes and left clicked on skeleton mage and simply walk-through barrage of magic missiles, fire arrows, traps and than proceeded to bludgeon mage standing in the middle of stinking cloud.

anyway the point was you equating kresselacks tomb/durlags with nashkel mines/firewine. Try harder next time faggot.

 

[Gord]

Diablo and Icewind Dale had fun combat. In Poe, it doesn't matter if it's trolls and oozes, or xaurips, or whatsoever; I went through Od Nua with different parties (took different NPCs along), at different levels (like the game expects you to), and still used the same tactics (send in melee puppets, follow with guns and the occasional confusion spell), because there was no need for anything else, with the exception of 3 levels. Three levels out of 15. That is what makes Pillar's such a repetitive game.

I guess that's personal taste then, because while I got bored much faster by the repetitive combat in IWD (because face it - it's at least as repetitive as PoE's), I didn't get bored in PoE. Probably because the game is more than just combat, while IWD is about combat to a larger extend?
Anyway - I never said that PoE is perfect or couldn't use improvements. But I do consider it a good game (not a great one or instant classic, though) and think that a lot of the critique leveled against it is greatly exaggerated, especially when done in comparison to certain other, similar games.

 

[SJeW]

"B-B-BUT BG1 GNOLL STRONGHOLD WAS SHIT TOO!!!"

Meh, it's warranted when people suddenly keep mentioning BG1 of all games as a positive example of how a game like this should be done...

That's only natural. BG1 is the best Infinity Engine game in terms of mechanics.

 

[Shevek]

Different shapes for mobs that all I did was select all attack through. The zone was a cllusterfuck of undead that you wade into.

i am sure you just selected all your heroes and left clicked on skeleton mage and simply walk-through barrage of magic missiles, fire arrows, traps and than proceeded to bludgeon mage standing in the middle of stinking cloud.

anyway the point was you equating kresselacks tomb/durlags with nashkel mines/firewine. Try harder next time faggot.

I might have baited a bit/did some pulling. Are those the grand tactics you miss?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

The old stuff was good, otherwise people wouldn't have pledged for it...
Anyway, it's not like I'd consider it a bad thing if the game had more intricately designed encounters. But I guess overall I'm okay with the dichotomy of "new systems, oldschool content".

Sure, but the problem is that your position in the debate is that what was good about the old stuff is somehow beyond discussion and that those who find some other aspect of the old stuff good are irrational grogs, and that those who find some other aspect of the old stuff ripe for revision (or at least that that should have been given priority) simply dislike crpg's.

I mean, for instance the system shift from bombast to "low-level number crunching" you admire seems to favor more interesting encounter design if anything, so that the spectacle at least derives from somewhere. Roflstomping your way through xvarts atleast had an amusement factor on a stupid watching-gibs-fly level, while I'm not sure many share your enthusiasm over meticulously managing Eder's health when confronted with the fifth wave of the dreaded ooze-troll alliance.

 

[Infinitron]

The old stuff was good, otherwise people wouldn't have pledged for it...
Anyway, it's not like I'd consider it a bad thing if the game had more intricately designed encounters. But I guess overall I'm okay with the dichotomy of "new systems, oldschool content".

Sure, but the problem is that your position in the debate is that what was good about the old stuff is somehow beyond discussion and that those who find some other aspect of the old stuff good are irrational grogs, and that those who find some other aspect of the old stuff ripe for revision simply dislike crpg's.

I mean, for instance the system shift from bombast to "low-level number crunching" you admire seems to favor more interesting encounter design if anything, so that the spectacle at least derives from somewhere. Roflstomping your way through xvarts atleast had an amusement factor on a stupid watching-gibs-fly level, while I'm not sure many share your enthusiasm over meticulously managing Eder's health when confronted with the fifth wave of the dreaded ooze-troll alliance.

Geez, now you're making me look like some mean censor. Discuss whatever you want, man.

I get what you're saying. There are aspects of PoE that actually make it more suitable for the "stupid watching-gibs-fly" experience, though. The way critical hits are determined by your Accuracy minus enemy defense rather than rolling a natural 20, combined with Accuracy rising at a constant rate on level-up for all classes (unlike AD&D's THAC0) means that lulzy trash mob genocide is more easily facilitated.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Geez, now you're making me look like some mean censor. Discuss whatever you want, man.

Didn't mean it that way; just that your style of arguing (and thread titling) often involves labeling any type of opposition as irrational. A tendency shared by Sawyer coincidentally

Which I care about because I like fostering civilized discussion between my buddies on this lovely forum we call our home.

 

[hell bovine]

Let's look think back to the Xvart Village. Hey its some Xvarts. Select all attack. Hey its more Xvarts. Select all attack. Hey its a bear. Select all attack.

Wow, I really had to change tactics there.

Heys let's go to Ulcaster... Or Firewine... Hmm, what tactics might I use, I wonder.

And that is why the developers of PoE decided that 99% of this game will be designed in the same fashion, making this game one giant xvarts village.

 

[Tigranes]

That's just disgusting.

Looks like De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Yeah if you remove anything remotely interesting from the first level of De´Arnise Keep you will end up with something similar to this.

No, it looks like every single fight in De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Encounter design sucks in POE, as I and everybody else has said a million times. The reason it sucks isn't that a single level that is meant to be populated by trolls and slimes has trolls and slimes in it.

There is no enemy type in POE that occurs "hundreds of times" as might be moaned. How many places do you find trolls, for example? You find about ten in that level above. You find less than ten, I think, in Cilaban Rilag. Then there's a few extra scattered here and there.

Even shadows and skeletons, the ye olde copypasta enemies, are of a decent number spread out over many places. (There's less than 20 shadows in Eothas Temple, and less than 30 undead under the Keep.)

A similar "OMG look at trash mobs" picture can easily be constructed from literally every IE game (including PST), both Fallouts, Arcanum, and so on. And no, not just the Xvart Village: the Gnome Stronghold, the Bandit Village, the Nashkel Mines, the Firewine Bridge, the Werewolf Island, De'Arnise Keep Level 1...

It is also going to be accentuated in Od Nua because the maps are broken up into smaller pieces to complete the stretch goal. Ideally, without the stretch goal / KS business, we could have had it in 5-6 levels. This is basically what it looks like when you cut Firkraag's Dungeon into 8 instead of 2 levels.

The real reason encounter design sucks is (1) the lack of hard immunities and active battlefield-changing abilities by many creatures, making them 'softly' different but not radically different enough from each other; (2) the lack of Wizard Battles; (3) the lack of enemies loaded up with a better selection of abilities.

Part of this could have been mitigated, indeed, if some of those troll/slime encounters above were replaced with, say, adventuring parties. To me, though, it makes a lot of sense that that level contains an ecology of mostly trolls and slimes - they just needed to make those trolls and slimes more interesting to fight. Not that, say, BG1 did that, but that's no excuse in the end.

 

[markec]

That's just disgusting.

Looks like De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Yeah if you remove anything remotely interesting from the first level of De´Arnise Keep you will end up with something similar to this.

No, it looks like every single fight in De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Encounter design sucks in POE, as I and everybody else has said a million times. The reason it sucks isn't that a single level that is meant to be populated by trolls and slimes has trolls and slimes in it.

There is no enemy type in POE that occurs "hundreds of times" as might be moaned. How many places do you find trolls, for example? You find about ten in that level above. You find less than ten, I think, in Cilaban Rilag. Then there's a few extra scattered here and there.

Even shadows and skeletons, the ye olde copypasta enemies, are of a decent number spread out over many places. (There's less than 20 shadows in Eothas Temple, and less than 30 undead under the Keep.)

A similar "OMG look at trash mobs" picture can easily be constructed from literally every IE game (including PST), both Fallouts, Arcanum, and so on. And no, not just the Xvart Village: the Gnome Stronghold, the Bandit Village, the Nashkel Mines, the Firewine Bridge, the Werewolf Island, De'Arnise Keep Level 1...

It is also going to be accentuated in Od Nua because the maps are broken up into smaller pieces to complete the stretch goal. Ideally, without the stretch goal / KS business, we could have had it in 5-6 levels. This is basically what it looks like when you cut Firkraag's Dungeon into 8 instead of 2 levels.

The real reason encounter design sucks is (1) the lack of hard immunities and active battlefield-changing abilities by many creatures, making them 'softly' different but not radically different enough from each other; (2) the lack of Wizard Battles; (3) the lack of enemies loaded up with a better selection of abilities.

Part of this could have been mitigated, indeed, if some of those troll/slime encounters above were replaced with, say, adventuring parties. To me, though, it makes a lot of sense that that level contains an ecology of mostly trolls and slimes - they just needed to make those trolls and slimes more interesting to fight. Not that, say, BG1 did that, but that's no excuse in the end.

I agree what you say but also the problem with those pictured enemy encounters is that they are the same as 99% of encounters in PoE. Its just bunch of enemies put on a pile that charge brainlessly at first sight. You fight one fight in game you pretty much saw every fight beside some boss battles, adding few more on pile at higher difficulty can hardly be called well designed enemy encounter. As said people should not underestimate simple positioning, even in BG1 and IWD1 there were moments where your group would be ambushed, surrounded or outflanked which would make a problem with defending your squishy back line. There is nothing wrong with trash mobs, but you also need something beside them, as you said giving them variety in special abilities would be a great start.

And I love how Infinitron defends PoE by claiming that if people dont like certain element of the game its because they cant grasp how brilliant it is.

 

[Gord]

And I love how Infinitron defends PoE by claiming that if people dont like certain element of the game its because they cant grasp how brilliant it is.

Hardly anyone (not Infinitron, anyway) said it was brilliant. Just not nearly as bad as some make it.

Anyway, I think Tigranes has put it rather well. AI and abilities of most enemies are lacking, which is one of the major issues.
I still think that there are encounters that manage to be interesting despite that, esp. on PotD, but I hope they manage to improve it over time with patches/expansions.

 

[hell bovine]

No, it looks like every single fight in De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Encounter design sucks in POE, as I and everybody else has said a million times. The reason it sucks isn't that a single level that is meant to be populated by trolls and slimes has trolls and slimes in it.

There is no enemy type in POE that occurs "hundreds of times" as might be moaned. How many places do you find trolls, for example? You find about ten in that level above. You find less than ten, I think, in Cilaban Rilag. Then there's a few extra scattered here and there.

Even shadows and skeletons, the ye olde copypasta enemies, are of a decent number spread out over many places. (There's less than 20 shadows in Eothas Temple, and less than 30 undead under the Keep.)

A similar "OMG look at trash mobs" picture can easily be constructed from literally every IE game (including PST), both Fallouts, Arcanum, and so on. And no, not just the Xvart Village: the Gnome Stronghold, the Bandit Village, the Nashkel Mines, the Firewine Bridge, the Werewolf Island, De'Arnise Keep Level 1...

It is also going to be accentuated in Od Nua because the maps are broken up into smaller pieces to complete the stretch goal. Ideally, without the stretch goal / KS business, we could have had it in 5-6 levels. This is basically what it looks like when you cut Firkraag's Dungeon into 8 instead of 2 levels.

The real reason encounter design sucks is (1) the lack of hard immunities and active battlefield-changing abilities by many creatures, making them 'softly' different but not radically different enough from each other; (2) the lack of Wizard Battles; (3) the lack of enemies loaded up with a better selection of abilities.

Part of this could have been mitigated, indeed, if some of those troll/slime encounters above were replaced with, say, adventuring parties. To me, though, it makes a lot of sense that that level contains an ecology of mostly trolls and slimes - they just needed to make those trolls and slimes more interesting to fight. Not that, say, BG1 did that, but that's no excuse in the end.

De'Arnise keep isn't 15 levels of the same, however, and gives you experience from fighting the trolls plus a good weapon. Moreover, there are mods that increase the difficulty and make the fights fun, which just shows that modders working with old games are better than professional game developers. But in Pillar's experience from combat is limited and you can make yourself better weapons (from crafting ingredients that you can buy, from money that is plenty) than that magic blade. That leaves a game which not only has non-remarkable "trash mobs", cbut also lacks the incentive to fight them. And is filled with them.

 

[Tigranes]

markec Yes. The irony is that I was pretty impressed with the variety of monsters; when you look at a completed bestiary there's a lot. The problem is that not enough of them are interestingly designed, and then there aren't enough special encounters. I'd say BG1 for example had even more trashy enemies and trashy encounters (though someone would need to actually count to see how the diversity compares). You could also literally fight hundreds of goblins and skeletons, which doesn't happen in POE. But they made up for that with fights like Bassilus, the corpulent spider 'queen' in Cloakwood I, and so on. The difference between Pearlwood Bluffs and the Sirine/Flesh Troll area in BG1 is instructive: the former was clearly a homage to the latter, but without sirines and flesh trolls it's more like a walk out to your nearest countryside.

I think another major thing that makes combat feel more like a clusterfuck is how abilities are designed and even visualised. When you had a party member entangled or webbed in BG1/2, one look at the screen showed you in no uncertain terms that this is a big deal; same with paralysis. In POE, I'd wager that many players hardly notice that forest lurkers can make them Stuck. One reason is that forest lurkers are one of the few enemy types that never seem to appear with other types, so who cares if a big lumbering melee enemy makes you Stuck? (There's a dex penalty or something, but that's not a qualitative malus.) The visuals are also insufficient, making Stuck look like a minor debuff (or even a buff) which you would never get with Entangle or Web. I think it's far, far easier to just brute force battles in POE while not even becoming unaware of the various status conditions that you're fighting through, (1) because in some cases they really aren't as significant, but (2) much more often, because they visually communicate themselves as transitory and insignificant. O

Of course, the fact that we all have huge familiarity with IE games makes all this even more pronounced. It's also possible to brute force your way through many fights in IE games (though maybe not on Insane - by the way, I love all the whining about POTD when Insane literally just gives enemies double damage) - and so you get people whose favourite spells are Magic Missile, Fireball and whatever other evocation spells they have on hand. What they need to do is build on the existing POE assets, as well as the players' increased familiarity, and start to introduce a lot more enemies and abilities (and their combination in real encounters) that qualitatively transform the battlefield.

 

[Lhynn]

No, it looks like every single fight in De'Arnise Keep, Level 1.

Fights? what are you talking about, you have like 2-3 real fights in keep lvl 1. Are you high? or just being a rabid fanboy?

Encounter design sucks in POE, as I and everybody else has said a million times. The reason it sucks isn't that a single level that is meant to be populated by trolls and slimes has trolls and slimes in it.

Yeah it sucks, but thats not the reason combat in poe sucks, even repetitive combat can be fun if the combat mechanics themselves are good and fun, or the content that leads you to them is engaging. PoE fails at both.

There is no enemy type in POE that occurs "hundreds of times" as might be moaned. How many places do you find trolls, for example? You find about ten in that level above. You find less than ten, I think, in Cilaban Rilag. Then there's a few extra scattered here and there.

I never made it to nua 4 or cilaban rilag but i was already tired of killing trolls. or was it trents? i cant remember, i killed them in the exact same fashion than anything else in the game, for the exact same reasons (they were in the way).

Even shadows and skeletons, the ye olde copypasta enemies, are of a decent number spread out over many places. (There's less than 20 shadows in Eothas Temple, and less than 30 undead under the Keep.)

Copy pasta enemies arent really an issue, they are a bit tasteless but its not the problem with poe. Fighting anything in this game is the same, THAT is the problem. Shadows those fungui things and vampires being the exception.

A similar "OMG look at trash mobs" picture can easily be constructed from literally every IE game (including PST), both Fallouts, Arcanum, and so on. And no, not just the Xvart Village: the Gnome Stronghold, the Bandit Village, the Nashkel Mines, the Firewine Bridge, the Werewolf Island, De'Arnise Keep Level 1...

You really dont seem to remember the keep much, do you?

3. In this room will be a Troll killing a servant, then turning on you.
7. The central room has an assortment of Trolls for you to fight. Depending on your level when you do the quest, there may be ordinary Trolls and Ice Trolls, or Trolls and Spirit Trolls.
8. Here will be an Ice Troll. The chests hold a variety of mundane weapons and minor treasure.
11. Here are the stairs up to Level 2 of the keep. You will also find another Troll about to kill a servant.

All other points in the map are either quest related, or side objectives related. you have the dog stew, the flail, the servants, and (sometimes hidden)loot. That map is probably half the size of CN 4.

It is also going to be accentuated in Od Nua because the maps are broken up into smaller pieces to complete the stretch goal. Ideally, without the stretch goal / KS business, we could have had it in 5-6 levels. This is basically what it looks like when you cut Firkraag's Dungeon into 8 instead of 2 levels.

Yeah if the game had less content it would be of a higher quality i guess. shitty level design is a problem with poe, just one that wouldnt really matter if combat was a joy.

The real reason encounter design sucks is (1) the lack of hard immunities and active battlefield-changing abilities by many creatures, making them 'softly' different but not radically different enough from each other

I agree, but thats on the character system.

(2) the lack of Wizard Battles

Not really, you could have spread useful abilities around different classes and instead of 1v1s youd have 6 v encounter. Wizard battles were fun, but it did feel shitty not being one. you have a game where everyone has superpowers and never really make use of that? thats just both sad.

(3) the lack of enemies loaded up with a better selection of abilities.

True, but again, blame it on the character system.

Part of this could have been mitigated, indeed, if some of those troll/slime encounters above were replaced with, say, adventuring parties. To me, though, it makes a lot of sense that that level contains an ecology of mostly trolls and slimes - they just needed to make those trolls and slimes more interesting to fight. Not that, say, BG1 did that, but that's no excuse in the end.

Well ecology is cool when it both makes sense and is conductive to interesting situations. CN 4 dont sound very interesting, and it dont make much sense either. Why are those two kind of monsters paired up anyway? is there a gameplay reason like their combination making encounters harder?

 

[Tigranes]

Lhynn Given I've played each of BG1/2 & IWD1/2 a dozen times each, and I probably don't have Alzheimer's, I'd like to think I have a good grasp on both POE and IE games and can talk about them fairly, as I"m sure you can too...

"I never made it to nua 4 or cilaban rilag but i was already tired of killing trolls. or was it trents?"

Oh, OK.

 

[Infinitron]

markec Yes. The irony is that I was pretty impressed with the variety of monsters; when you look at a completed bestiary there's a lot. The problem is that not enough of them are interestingly designed, and then there aren't enough special encounters. I'd say BG1 for example had even more trashy enemies and trashy encounters (though someone would need to actually count to see how the diversity compares). You could also literally fight hundreds of goblins and skeletons, which doesn't happen in POE. But they made up for that with fights like Bassilus, the corpulent spider 'queen' in Cloakwood I, and so on. The difference between Pearlwood Bluffs and the Sirine/Flesh Troll area in BG1 is instructive: the former was clearly a homage to the latter, but without sirines and flesh trolls it's more like a walk out to your nearest countryside.

I think another major thing that makes combat feel more like a clusterfuck is how abilities are designed and even visualised. When you had a party member entangled or webbed in BG1/2, one look at the screen showed you in no uncertain terms that this is a big deal; same with paralysis. In POE, I'd wager that many players hardly notice that forest lurkers can make them Stuck. One reason is that forest lurkers are one of the few enemy types that never seem to appear with other types, so who cares if a big lumbering melee enemy makes you Stuck? (There's a dex penalty or something, but that's not a qualitative malus.) The visuals are also insufficient, making Stuck look like a minor debuff (or even a buff) which you would never get with Entangle or Web. I think it's far, far easier to just brute force battles in POE while not even becoming unaware of the various status conditions that you're fighting through, (1) because in some cases they really aren't as significant, but (2) much more often, because they visually communicate themselves as transitory and insignificant. O

Of course, the fact that we all have huge familiarity with IE games makes all this even more pronounced. It's also possible to brute force your way through many fights in IE games (though maybe not on Insane - by the way, I love all the whining about POTD when Insane literally just gives enemies double damage) - and so you get people whose favourite spells are Magic Missile, Fireball and whatever other evocation spells they have on hand. What they need to do is build on the existing POE assets, as well as the players' increased familiarity, and start to introduce a lot more enemies and abilities (and their combination in real encounters) that qualitatively transform the battlefield.

BG1 doesn't have goblins. Or orcs. Always thought that was an interesting choice on BioWare's part. Was it some kind of Ultima-like thing where they decided to avoid stereotypical creatures heavily identified with another IP (in this case, Tolkien)? Or maybe there's some sourcebook somewhere that says goblins and orcs don't exist in that region of the Sword Coast, I dunno.

(I guess you were thinking about kobolds)

Re: status effects, I think being Stuck in PoE can pretty annoying. One of those oozes I was talking about earlier has a habit of sticking you for long durations of over 20 seconds. But, I'm not sure how relevant status effects are to most low-level IE encounters.

 

[Lhynn]

Lhynn Given I've played each of BG1/2 & IWD1/2 a dozen times each, and I probably don't have Alzheimer's, I'd like to think I have a good grasp on both POE and IE games and can talk about them fairly, as I"m sure you can too...

"I never made it to nua 4 or cilaban rilag but i was already tired of killing trolls. or was it trents?"

Oh, OK.

Nice way to dodge the bullet.

 

[Tigranes]

Sorry, kobolds. It would be IWD1/2 for the goblins.

Lhynn There is no bullet to dodge, because you haven't got any. We're talking about encounter design, you just want to say the whole system sucks.

Also, the fact that you haven't played half the game does matter for this topic - e.g. your attempted comparison with De'Arnise is a joke because I could just as easily show Od Nua 4 contains these treasures, how the 'big slime' battle plays out differently than the other ones, etc. But I didn't, because those are not relevant details, and it would be an illogical effort to defend encounter design which should not be defended.

 

[Lhynn]

I have faced all those enemies in the past, i know what they got. Buuuuut go ahead and deny deny deny.

 

[Gord]

Not to derail the "discussion", but did they add some better visual clues for status effects in 1.05 or am I mistaken? Don't remember them from my first playthroug

 

[tdphys]

I'd just like to point out, that at least Pillars has the fast button so you can fly through trash mobs if/when you're overlevelled. That in itself is a godsend. Level 4 of Od Nua was the worst level for reams of trash mobs. I'm at level 13 on POTD and the rest of the dungeon is put together pretty nicely, considering 15 levels of design.

 

[hell bovine]

Sorry, kobolds. It would be IWD1/2 for the goblins.

Lhynn There is no bullet to dodge, because you haven't got any. We're talking about encounter design, you just want to say the whole system sucks.

Also, the fact that you haven't played half the game does matter for this topic - e.g. your attempted comparison with De'Arnise is a joke because I could just as easily show Od Nua 4 contains these treasures, how the 'big slime' battle plays out differently than the other ones, etc. But I didn't, because those are not relevant details, and it would be an illogical effort to defend encounter design which should not be defended.

Well I have finished Od Nua on PotD, and I am curious - how does the slime battle play differently than the others?

 

[markec]

Hardly anyone (not Infinitron, anyway) said it was brilliant. Just not nearly as bad as some make it.

Anyway, I think Tigranes has put it rather well. AI and abilities of most enemies are lacking, which is one of the major issues.
I still think that there are encounters that manage to be interesting despite that, esp. on PotD, but I hope they manage to improve it over time with patches/expansions.

Ok thats matter of opinion, to me encounters are complete and utter shit and i shudder at thought of ever again replaying this game.

markec Yes. The irony is that I was pretty impressed with the variety of monsters; when you look at a completed bestiary there's a lot. The problem is that not enough of them are interestingly designed, and then there aren't enough special encounters. I'd say BG1 for example had even more trashy enemies and trashy encounters (though someone would need to actually count to see how the diversity compares). You could also literally fight hundreds of goblins and skeletons, which doesn't happen in POE. But they made up for that with fights like Bassilus, the corpulent spider 'queen' in Cloakwood I, and so on. The difference between Pearlwood Bluffs and the Sirine/Flesh Troll area in BG1 is instructive: the former was clearly a homage to the latter, but without sirines and flesh trolls it's more like a walk out to your nearest countryside.

I think another major thing that makes combat feel more like a clusterfuck is how abilities are designed and even visualised. When you had a party member entangled or webbed in BG1/2, one look at the screen showed you in no uncertain terms that this is a big deal; same with paralysis. In POE, I'd wager that many players hardly notice that forest lurkers can make them Stuck. One reason is that forest lurkers are one of the few enemy types that never seem to appear with other types, so who cares if a big lumbering melee enemy makes you Stuck? (There's a dex penalty or something, but that's not a qualitative malus.) The visuals are also insufficient, making Stuck look like a minor debuff (or even a buff) which you would never get with Entangle or Web. I think it's far, far easier to just brute force battles in POE while not even becoming unaware of the various status conditions that you're fighting through, (1) because in some cases they really aren't as significant, but (2) much more often, because they visually communicate themselves as transitory and insignificant. O

Of course, the fact that we all have huge familiarity with IE games makes all this even more pronounced. It's also possible to brute force your way through many fights in IE games (though maybe not on Insane - by the way, I love all the whining about POTD when Insane literally just gives enemies double damage) - and so you get people whose favourite spells are Magic Missile, Fireball and whatever other evocation spells they have on hand. What they need to do is build on the existing POE assets, as well as the players' increased familiarity, and start to introduce a lot more enemies and abilities (and their combination in real encounters) that qualitatively transform the battlefield.

As you say it dosnt matter if you have 1000 completely unique enemies placed in game if all of them behave the same and you use same tactic for every fight. In that case you can just make one model for all enemies and make them different color for their difficulty.

Also one the problems with PoE trash mobs is time to bring them down. As pointed there were lots of trash mobs in IE games like in Gnoll fortress in BG1, but what they had in common was that you could destroy them very quickly. There is few things worse then a game made of trash mobs forcing you to spend 10 times longer then usual to get rid of one, and when every single one behaves the same its nothing but painfully chore. As I said even old IE games had some interesting encounters with shittiest of trash mobs, here its just a pile of monsters charging you head on for entirety of game. How can someone find this remotely interesting is beyond me.

 

[Athelas]

Also one the problems with PoE trash mobs is time to bring them down. As pointed there were lots of trash mobs in IE games like in Gnoll fortress in BG1, but what they had in common was that you could destroy them very quickly. There is few things worse then a game made of trash mobs forcing you to spend 10 times longer then usual to get rid of one

Maybe this is a sign that you're not playing as well as you might think.

My experience is that combat encounters are over much too quick.

 

[markec]

Also one the problems with PoE trash mobs is time to bring them down. As pointed there were lots of trash mobs in IE games like in Gnoll fortress in BG1, but what they had in common was that you could destroy them very quickly. There is few things worse then a game made of trash mobs forcing you to spend 10 times longer then usual to get rid of one

Maybe this is a sign that you're not playing as well as you might think.

My experience is that combat encounters are over much too quick.

No its just means they are so boring it feels like eternity to fight one.