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Codex Review RPG Codex Review: Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar

mondblut

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What nobody has mentioned is that combat usually takes far fewer clicks in Grimoire compared to Wizardry - the actions that stay the same do not need to be selected each round.

Unless you found a new pair of sneakers to replace his slippers. This suddenly resets his orders :negative:
 
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RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
Bull-fucking-shit.

Your beloved PoE is the very definition of what David is talking about. Sawyer-style "balance" means EXACTLY that: ensuring failure is not an option. Just take a close look and do the math on PoE and you'll quickly realize that passive leveling trumps everything else. Player agency is kept to a minimum in order to ensure you can't possibly screw up.

PoE wasn't brought up-once in this thread as a positive example, neither was Sawyer's input in that game. Why is everyone in this thread acting as if in the last 10 years only two RPG games were released: PoE and Grimoire. You don't have to look that far. Both Age of Decadence and Underrail are properly balanced games. Sure there are some combos that are stronger but you don't run into totally broken shit by mistake. I'm sure most "balancefags" means something more like Underrail than PoE.

Way to miss the point. I never said anything against proper balance (asymmetrical balance, not DPT/DPS parity). The problem is that the term "balance" has been stretched to the point of becoming meaningless.

As excidium already pointed out, balance is about ensuring that options with the same cost provide COMPARABLE (not the same) benefits, with no clear "winner". That's all. "Balance" has nothing to do with how many monsters you'll find at X (encounter design) or what's inside chest Y (itemization).

With that said, PoE is constantly brought into the discussion because that game is the perfect example of this degenerate notion of "balance" in action. PoE puts "balance" above all else. Whereas in AoD the bow and the crossbow are fundamentally different, in PoE the only difference is whether you prefer to hit hard and slow or weak and fast.

A low STR bow user is a botched build in AoD, whereas in PoE your choice of ranged weapon makes no difference. They are balanced around the same DPS, scale of the same attribute and share the same feats. Regardless of your build, you get a trophy. Such choice, much depth.

The balance obsession becomes comical when you realize that firearms were added to PoE but they had no impact in the world whatsoever. Raedric hold is a standard medieval castle, despite the fact that such castles were rendered obsolete by canons. Firearms are simply another form of hitting harder and even slower.

Proper balance is always desirable, but it is not the top priority on any sane person's list. I have never seen anyone make a big deal about the fact that "blunt" is just a bad "blade" in Oblivion. That's poor balance, but in oblivion's case, that's completely irrelevant, because there are more important WRONG things about that game.

With all that said, I would add that some balance issues here and there are not a big deal within the context of a game that provides enough distinct and fun options. Eg: throwing in fallout, kits in bg2 etc.

But from Felipepepe's review besides the balance and few other things there's nothing in Grimoire that really needs an immediate fix. I'd say that there is some problem if he managed to solo the hardest optional boss in the game despite not knowing how to use the interface and not having an access to the manual simply by abusing instakill mechanic.

You are right about encounters and chests. Encounter design is more of a difficulty problem, not a balance one.

Also, your arguments against PoE are valid, but not really relevant since I doubt that everyone (including) Felipepepe would be happy about applying this way of balancing to Grimoire. PoE is not some holy grail of balance, it's a failure of balance. The problem is not that Sawyer decided to work hard on balancing , this is actually very desirable for every kind of game. The problem is that he based his balance effort on a stupid presupposition: "Every build must be valiable". In RTS games it would mean: every base composition must be valiable. In Chess: every possible opening must be valiable. In Civilization: every placement of the first city must be valiable. Famous Polish traditional game designer once said that games are just a series of choices, without choices there is no game. So by making sure that every choice made during character creation is OK he basically made a game with no way to fail, which is a no-game. This speaks against Sawyer, not against balancing.

As I've said before the game is a series of choices. Balancing the game properly prolongs it's replay-ability by making choices more difficult to make. If, as you've said there are obviously OP and shit choices then after finding them players will just brake the game and be able to breeze through without thinking, unless they want to gimp themselves. The best comparison is FO1 and Age of Decadence. Getting 10 Agility and tagging small arms make the game incredibly easier, so unless you want to play a weak character for some reason there's no reason no to do this. This means that after playing the game a couple of times character creation becomes trivial. Now Age of Decadence have more balanced skills and stats with no obvious choices. Because of that making a character in AoD is still engaging even after beating the game a couple of times. Same principle applies to dungeon crawlers. If there are 5 "warrior-type" classes, each with strengths and weaknesses then making a party will be much more difficult then if there was only one good warrior class. Of course if JE Sawyer got his hands on Age of Decadence or a typical dungeon crawler and made sure that "all combination of skill and stats" and "all party compositions" are equally good, then they'd suck of course.
 

mondblut

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Multiheaded Dick: Casts the "I WILL RAEP YOUR ANUS, YOU HENTAI WHORE!" spell.
Codexian Hero: Spam auto attack because he is too lazy to do much else.
Multiheaded Dick: Hits the codexian butthole and critically hit for 10000 bleeding damage.
Codexian Hero: THIS IS UNFAIR, I DIDN'T DESERVE TO HAVE MY BUTT HURT SO BAD! Where is the balance? After 20 years of evolution on RPGs and this still happen? On Witcher 3 and other advanced RPGs like that, this doesn't happen!

Needs fixing, to be fair:

Codexian Hero: Spam auto attack because he is too lazy to do much else.
Multiheaded Dick: Casts the "I WILL RAEP YOUR A...
LETHAL BLOW!
SIC SEMPER TYRANNUS
MULTIHEADED DICK DIES!
 
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Lurker King

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Proper balance is always desirable, but it is not the top priority on any sane person's list.
“The game must be balanced”. What does that mean?
  1. Every build preference must be equally viable (muscle wizards, etc).
  2. Every proper build must be equally viable throughout the game.
  3. Every skill (or spell) must be supported in every context (no hard counters, etc.).
  4. No build, or combination of skills, should be an unstoppable winning strategy.
  5. The game is consistently challenging.
  6. The game is generic, uninspired and unimaginative.
PoE fails at (5), but is guilty as charged of the remaining alternatives. Underrail satisfies (2) and (3), but fails in the rest. AoD is the same thing, even if takes a bit more time to disobey (5). Now, notice that a failure to observe (3) is in principle inconsistent with (2), it is merely consistent with (5), and intuitively supports (4) and (6). However, BG2 observes (2), and (4), since it follows from a failure to observe (3), it also obviously fails at (5). In fact, you can be a one trick pony for 99% of the game, with the exception of a few encounters. This suggests that despite initial appearances, the relation between these principles is not as obvious as it seems in abstract and their relations must be considered in a context.

It is undeniable that (1) makes the character building hostage of the players whims and ruins gameplay, so scrap that. It is also a given that nobody would intentionally want (6). (2) is implausible if every build must be equally useful outside combat, because the only way to guarantee that every skill must be equally useful is by turning the game world into an egotistical theme park. I also think that (2) is impossible to satisfy in combat because some weapons will be always better than others. In the end, I think that what matters is that every proper build is good enough to beat the game. I don't have a strong opinion about (3), because I think that (5) is the most important thing, even though is an ideal that is hard to achieve. I also think that (4) can be ignored if the winning strategy requires player’s ingenuity, or mastering of the system, and is not the bread and butter of gameplay. If the gameplay is supposed to be based on broken combos, then is a mere exercise of combinations that violates (5).
 
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Tigranes

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Why muddy the waters by starting out with a definition of balance most of which is retarded shit nobody would ever want? Hell, (6) means you're basically saying "why is balance bad? Well, balance is defined as retarded shit. So, obviously it's bad."

In a common sense world before people dived into Sawyer Meme World, balance just means: you try to judiciously curtail the kinds of severely over/underpowered elements that narrow gameplay options and discourage tactical experimentation. Personally, I would argue that some degree of asymmetry, and the availability of particularly powerful combinations when you crack the code of the mechanics, is an essential element of a well balanced game.

That's a definition that obviously supports when balance is done right, but also allows you to argue how POE or any other game didn't do balance right (e.g. excessive balancing that makes gameplay options meaningless because they are all the same). But arguing that making options meaningless or exactly equally useful (i.e. identical) is the purpose of balance writ large is stupid.

If you want to spasm about POE in every single thread in the world then do it by saying how Sawyer is shit at balancing and POE's balancing ruined the game, instead of some weird crusade where anything even remotely resembling balance is the devil's right testicle.
 
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Lurker King

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Why muddy the waters by starting out with a definition of balance most of which is retarded shit nobody would ever want? Hell, (6) means you're basically saying "why is balance bad? Well, balance is defined as retarded shit. So, obviously it's bad."

In a common sense world before people dived into Sawyer Meme World, balance just means: you try to judiciously curtail the kinds of severely over/underpowered elements that narrow gameplay options and discourage tactical experimentation. Personally, I would argue that some degree of asymmetry, and the availability of particularly powerful combinations when you crack the code of the mechanics, is an essential element of a well balanced game.

That's a definition that obviously supports when balance is done right, but also allows you to argue how POE or any other game didn't do balance right (e.g. excessive balancing that makes gameplay options meaningless because they are all the same). But arguing that making options meaningless or exactly equally useful (i.e. identical) is the purpose of balance writ large is stupid.

If you want to spasm about POE in every single thread in the world then do it by saying how Sawyer is shit at balancing and POE's balancing ruined the game, instead of some weird crusade where anything even remotely resembling balance is the devil's right testicle.
Because we talking about a word that gained shitty connotations tanks to Sawyer's spearing, sherlock. It would unwise to ignore one of the negative connotations of the word that is assumed in hundreds of posts, especially if the idea is to clean the waters. This is not just a conceptual problem, it's a historic problem. That's why you need to talk about PoE in a discussion about balance, because that's a tacit assumption involved in the discussion of the problem. Ignoring the expectations and confusions about a concept won't make them magically go away.
 Also, you are assuming that there was a common sense of the word before the discussion about Pillars, but the notion of “trying to judiciously curtail the kinds of severely over/underpowered elements that narrow gameplay options” is obviously generic and uninformative, because people could accept and still disagree about (1)-(5), which is exactly why I made those distinctions in the first place.
 

Invictus

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What Sawyer and all the balance idiocy dont understand is that balance might be "fair" so any idiot can supposedly complete your game... but it also makes it boring as hell.
Sometimes it is fun to make a gimped character and how it goes
Sometimes it is fun to make an overpowered char and solo the damn game
Ultimately part of the fun of a game is learning its systems and the exploiting those to your benefit; sometimes that edge is a bit of meta gaming like going straight to Nuremberg in Darklands to get the best base of operations for the whole game, or making a Bard for Wizardry... but it must always come down to choice for the player.
Hell that is why there are difficulty ratings and encounter rates in Grimoire, you can choose to make the game as easy or as hard as you want because you can decide to play it straight and not use any exploits or go crazy and adjust the difficulty to what you want to have for your gaming experience
 

Tigranes

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It gained "shitty connotations" on the Codex because people who hated POE insisted on posting every thread about how balance destroys everything good in the world and anybody who mentions antyhing that sounds remotely close to it must share Sawyer's philosophy about making everything banal shit boring. Look at Invictus' post that popped up while I was writing this. I agree totally with the things he is against. Most people would. Nobody's really arguing that Grimoire, for example, should be 'balanced' by making everything equally watered down. I don't give a shit about Josh Sawyer, and it's annoying that every time anyone ever talks about balance or overpowered or any word that triggers it devolves into "BALANCE MUST BE DESTROYED". We should talk about what good balance is and what purpose it serves. To that end stuff like (6) is nonsensical and shitposting.

That said, I think it's totally fair of you to raise stuff like (1)-(4) and to argue against them, so let me engage that. I personally think (1)-(4), when applied reasonably, serve the purpose of expanding gameplay options and providing challenge across the board; it's only when they are rigidified as specific dogma that they become ridiculous.

E.g. I do think every build preference expressed by the game (i.e. by giving the game a thief class) should be viable. I don't think it should be "equally viable"; I don't even know how that would be possible, does it mean a thief and a berserker do equal damage per second? Obviously we're looking at a holistic evaluation that says, "I should be just as tempted to pick a thief at character creation as bard, though they are obviously stronger in different situations and have qualitatively different strengths." So no, I don't think it's to Fallout's strength that Gifted used to be such a no-brainer pick. Would I prefer having the likes of Gifted to a dogmatically balanced system where every perk is watered down until they are negligible? Yes, absolutely. But I'd call the latter shitty balance. Balancing doesn't mean 'you are speshul no matter what perk!', it means ensuring every perk has builds and situations in which it is useful, so that an intelligent player can figure out cool new ways to make use of that perk even if it seems useless in another. To do that, you have to 'judiciously curtail severely over/underpowered elements that narrow gameplay options' - i.e. make sure that one perk isn't so strong for every single character that it's a no-brainer, or that one perk isn't so useless that it's never worth picking. My definition is more fluid than something you'll find in a physics textbook because balance is more about this sensitivity to how qualitatively different options compare for the player, rather than any rigid formula saying X must equal Y.

Balancing is about ensuring that the many qualitatively different options a good RPG has (should have) actually present meaningful choices. In order for this to happen, you must have (1) qualitative asymmetries, not simply quantitative ones, so that different choices produce different gameplay; (2) those options should be within a reasonable bandwidth of overall power, so that you aren't defaulting between an always superior option vs an always gimped one. Balancing's purpose is to ensure that meaningful choice is retained, such that sometimes it's worth picking a weapon with less damage, and sometimes a thief will shine where a cleric will not, and not every situation can be solved with the same fireball. We should be insisting on a smart definition of balance and distinguishing it from some shitty dogmatic "every option must be the same" oxymoron.

P.S. This also means that balance is always a secondary value, it's something that adjusts things - it should never be the primary value driving your design. It's always what you do after you cram your game full of interesting options.
 

Fowyr

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I finally found infamous trogs in Loch Titan. Indeed, one 7 power armorplate (for a measly 28 mana) is a thing that needed to not be killed by their spears. :lol:
 

Invictus

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While playing and enjoying Age of Decadence I understood something increidible about that game; for all the "gimped" choices it gives ultimately its "balanced" is achieved by allowing the player to play the game as he sees fit...
If I want to use alchemy to do poisons, fire bombs and speed up my char it is entirely up to me or go for a naked barbarian with dodge and an axe.
Other than Dark Souls I dont remember a game which made me feel less guitly over using every single strategy or advantage to get ahead and the challenge was almost always entiretly up to me. Wanna fight 10 guys in the monastery, take over their group, bluff my way or bid my time until I can use my bomb after the main fighting is done? Yep I can do it depending on what I can get away with and how willing am I to use multiple advantages like alchemy or nets to even up the odds...
Fuck me but isnt that what gaming is all about? Overcoming the odds though some actual thinking rather than clicking the awesome button?
Yeah even my 11 year old cousin can finish Skyrim but the fun doesn't come from challenges that anyone can accomplish but my choosing your own level of challenge and enjoying it ffs

So if Grimoire needs some tuning yeah so what? Part of its mutherfucking CHARM is that this is no focus group tested lowest common denominator bullshit (yeah and it ain't Undertale either) it is gloriously unbalanced; ninjas are better than thieves, Berserkers are better than Fighters and Bards are OP so what?
Anybody arguing differently has been so dumbed down that decline that they are exactly the opposite of what the Codex should be all about
 
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Lurker King

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It gained "shitty connotations" on the Codex because people who hated POE insisted on posting every thread about how balance destroys everything good in the world and anybody who mentions anything that sounds remotely close to it must share Sawyer's philosophy about making everything banal shit boring.
But why would they do such a thing, besides Roguey’s immense trolling powers? Because the guy that was supposed to make a spiritual sucessor of BG2, neutralized the very design principles that made them love BG2 in the first place. Of course, posting internet stuff does not have any conceptual nuance, so it’s understandable that people would the word as a swear word. But it is precisely because of that, that we should distinguish between the different meanings in minute detail so that people can understand why and what they are criticizing, and in which sense there are some meanings associated with it that are important. In fact, I would not be surprised if Swayer himself was caught in confusions due to lack of conceptual rigor.

I don't give a shit about Josh Sawyer, and it's annoying that every time anyone ever talks about balance or overpowered or any word that triggers it devolves into "BALANCE MUST BE DESTROYED". We should talk about what good balance is and what purpose it serves. To that end stuff like (6) is nonsensical and shitposting.

I don't give a shit about SJWs either, but they hijacked the moral discourse and the public perception about key issues that will affect my survival. I could pretend that they don't exist in discussions about these issues, but that would be like talking to myself. While no one would only support watered down gameplay openly, they do so by defending games such as PoE and its expansions. The point though is that we need to talk about this first in order to put this shit to rest. Otherwise, the same repetitive rants will repeat themselves over and over, and we can’t even begin to discuss the topics that are interesting. PoE name is just like BG2 name, or AoDs, or URs, or D:OS for that matter. They are case studies that can be used as a means to a discussion.

I agree with most of your points, but I think (3) can be only followed to a certain degree. For all that talk about PoE, W2 is the worst offender in that regard.

Let me repeat an old post about this subject that was intended to show that is conceptually impossible to implement (3) fully:

One thing that most people ignore about W2 is how much the game is inspired by Sawyer’s philosophy about balance. In this sense, the game can also be considered a test of his ideas. I would say that Sawyer’s philosophy failed miserably. I will repost one thing I said in the past. The idea that shouldn’t be "useless" skills transforms the game world and the setting in a circus, in which every choice of skill must be rewarded. Take W2, for instance. The wasteland is filled with toasters, mines, locks, alarms, etc., because those skills were properly balanced. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. From the fact that one rich individual would lock his strongbox with alarms and bombs, doesn’t follow that every single strongbox, or chest would be locked, with alarms or bombs. So this brilliant design approach implies that a wasteland should be literally filled with high security chests, even if this doesn’t make any sense. The consequence of this approach is that making a believable world is not what the developer should aim for, instead the aim is to reward player’s investment in skills, pander to his ego.

In fact, even if you assume that realism must be ignored for the sake of gameplay, you will face another problem. You are ruining the playthrough of players that didn’t want to invest in those particular skills that are all now required to use all over the place. Don’t want to invest in demolition in W2? Tough luck, because the game is proper balanced, is filled with mines and traps. Don't want to invest in Luck? That is to bad, because you weapon will jam all the time. Please notice that providing palliative solutions like using grenades doesn’t help, because if I don’t want to use the demolition skills all the time, I also don’t want to think about grenades all the time. In fact, I want to throw the grenades over my enemies. What is worse is that if those alternative solutions are easily available, they make any investment in demolition worthless, because now I can just throw grenades and save my skill points for another thing. Which makes the skill uselles, contradicting the assumption of balance that lead us to this in the first place.

Thus, in conclusion: (1) this design approach is motivated by the popamole unjustified assumption that the player should not be able to make poor choices, (2) but paradoxically end up forcing every player to make poor choices, because if all choice is relevant, you are screwed all the time, (3) provide some alternatives to avoid the player to get screwed by balance, but these alternatives don’t make the playthrough any more enjoyable for players who don’t want to use that skills, and make the skills worthless, which ruins balance, (4) throw realism under the bus, one more time. Which makes the genre always captive of the “teenager fiction” syndrome.

What we need is the opposite design approach: (1) make the player suffer if he made a poor choice of skills, (2) make the utility of skills determined by the reality of the game world and the setting, not the other way around, (3) tell the players to fuck off with their egotistical assumptions created by the poor standards of the industry and (4) never abandon realism.

I agree with you that balance is just one of the design principles. I would add realism to the set of principles, but most people would disagree with me.
 

YES!

Hi, I'm Roqua
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This may not be a hardcore rpg site but since at least 03 posting inflammatory crap and insulting members has been standard. It just used to be directed at popamole idiots like you.

I don't think people who insult every other member least long on here.

Well, since you are a weird child what you think doesn't matter.
 

Tigranes

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Re. Lurker King I agree that it's better to have some conceptual rigour; what I've been trying to say is that most people criticising balance have good points to make - but when they start foaming at the mouth about Sawyer they start going off the deep end and it just seems entirely unnecessary. But I should do what I preach and stop going on about that, myself.

It's interesting how (3) - making sure that skills are broadly useful and not just good for very specific moments - sounds like a very sensible thing at the outset, and directly addresses common criticisms about games like Fallout 1/2, and yet it has ended up having really mixed results. Even taking realism out of the equation, I almost wonder if it's not just an inherent problem of how such skills are designed - you pump points into them equally but some are situational and others are not, some are % success and others are black/white. At which point the smart options are to (A) accept that you can't balance this too much and run with it, or (B) come up with another system instead of trying to make every skill equally useful.

Actually, this might be comparable to the problem with Grimoire here. When FP discovers there are 80 different ways to set up your combat routine - whether with Armourplate or Bard or Lethal Blow - to destroy most enemy parties in a single turn, he argues that the abilities and powers are balanced poorly. A blobber grognard replies that blobbers are all about such asymmetries and conquering those asymmetries - you're supposed to find one hit kill enemies that make you work out your own one hit kill solutions. I.e. these games offer a different system by which the game challenges you to experiment with tactical options (by instakilling you otherwise), and the meaningful choices you make to overcome them involve discovering your own combination of superpowers. I'm sympathetic to this idea: even as someone who has played only a few blobbers, this seems to gel well with the very high number of combat encounters and to the rest of the game design that's all about dying, reloading and discovering new solutions.

The question, which I can't answer given my own lack of mondbluttian expertise, is whether things like lethalblowing the final bosses in the first turn without trying still qualifies as the kind of asymmetry that encourages you to git gud and discover tactical setups, or it's the kind of excessive asymmetry that destroys meaningful choice because the obvious win button is in front of you. After all, Cleve agreed for example that Deep Freeze counts as the latter and fixed it. In this sense, it's totally fair of FP to say Grimoire has balance problems: the kind of balance problems where you boost boss resistances so they can't be slept/lethal blowed the first turn without trying, or where Deep Freeze doesn't suddenly do 9000 damage to everybody. The trick is to tone those things down without getting rid of all the ways for the player to set up those 'winning combat routines', because if you do that you destroy the point of the combat system and then the game becomes a long slog of trash fights.
 

Invictus

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Actually, this might be comparable to the problem with Grimoire here. When FP discovers there are 80 different ways to set up your combat routine - whether with Armourplate or Bard or Lethal Blow - to destroy most enemy parties in a single turn, he argues that the abilities and powers are balanced poorly. A blobber grognard replies that blobbers are all about such asymmetries and conquering those asymmetries - you're supposed to find one hit kill enemies that make you work out your own one hit kill solutions. I.e. these games offer a different system by which the game challenges you to experiment with tactical options (by instakilling you otherwise), and the meaningful choices you make to overcome them involve discovering your own combination of superpowers. I'm sympathetic to this idea: even as someone who has played only a few blobbers, this seems to gel well with the very high number of combat encounters and to the rest of the game design that's all about dying, reloading and discovering new solutions.

The question, which I can't answer given my own lack of mondbluttian expertise, is whether things like lethalblowing the final bosses in the first turn without trying still qualifies as the kind of asymmetry that encourages you to git gud and discover tactical setups, or it's the kind of excessive asymmetry that destroys meaningful choice because the obvious win button is in front of you. After all, Cleve agreed for example that Deep Freeze counts as the latter and fixed it. In this sense, it's totally fair of FP to say Grimoire has balance problems: the kind of balance problems where you boost boss resistances so they can't be slept/lethal blowed the first turn without trying, or where Deep Freeze doesn't suddenly do 9000 damage to everybody. The trick is to tone those things down without getting rid of all the ways for the player to set up those 'winning combat routines', because if you do that you destroy the point of the combat system and then the game becomes a long slog of trash fights.
This
Exactly this
Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
Felipepe argues over instakills but fair is fair too, since you can also instakill the game challenges you to come up with a strategy to instakill THEM before they instakill YOU and that pretty much applies to the while CRPG genre
Remeber trying to whack thea damn lich in BG2? That fight was more of a puzzle than a fight and that is what made it fun; coming up witha strategy for each "stage" of the fight according to your playstyle
Sure Grimoire needs some tweaking here and the but the core game gets 95% of what makes it such a joy yo play and by "balancing it" you literally suck half the fun out of it
 
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Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
That would imply that Cleve needs to fix the game, since the initial strategy worked till the end of the game for me.

Sure he's got more to do, but would your playthrough have been the same since he adjusted bards? (I didn't play in the earliest days when they went so OP so quickly)
 

Viata

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Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
That would imply that Cleve needs to fix the game, since the initial strategy worked till the end of the game for me.

Sure he's got more to do, but would your playthrough have been the same since he adjusted bards? (I didn't play in the earliest days when they went so OP so quickly)
Yes. Every char can still play the paralysis harp from inventory, thus there is not even a need for a bard. If anything, I'd remove mage, cleric, metalsmith, bard and warrior, add more berserkers and rangers. Until I find my first harp(savescumming in a chest if it take more than 10 minutes to find one), and done. Put fastest ones to play the harp and kill everyone until my berserkers start doing lethal blow. In fact, I wonder how easy it would to finish if I had a berserker only party in current version(not as easy as the bard one, but I only started spamming deep freeze after having 5 tablets as paralysis was working pretty well all the time). May suffer from diseases for a while, but then it gets easier. Superdemo area was the only part that disease fucked me up because I only cared about it when my berserker was on paralysis and I was unable to recover him. Then it was a just fun after that. I still didn't get cure disease for my Cleric even now, though.
In fact, I think the most important fix Cleve should do is to allow only bard to use instrumental weapons.
 

Invictus

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
That would imply that Cleve needs to fix the game, since the initial strategy worked till the end of the game for me.
Did your sleep lute work on all the endgame enemies and bosses?
Were you casting the same spells from the beginning of the game?
Or did you "play it tough" and never learn to use the UI or use support spells like Armorplate like FP did?
Of course you adjusted your strategy...and yes in any case the gane still needs tweaking but not a massive overhaul like FP ended up painting for the later half of the game
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

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Tigranes, I think that the problem is that cRPGs strive for realism. Developers want to offer a variety of skills that simulate people's actual skills (realism). But some skills need to be less useful than others, because a plausible game world cannot support them all equally (realism). Your point about some skills not being situational is spot on and I would add that they should not affect players that did not invest in these skills. The point is that developers did not think really well about their initial choice of skills and this had enormous repercussions about every design decision that came afterwards.

I think the discussion about Grimoire’s balance should be about whether the game must be evaluated by its own aims, e.g., as a spiritual sucessor of Wizardry with such and such features, or by other general principles we tend to accept for independent reasons. If you take the first assumption as axiomatic, any further discussion is pointless.
 

Viata

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Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
That would imply that Cleve needs to fix the game, since the initial strategy worked till the end of the game for me.
Did your sleep lute work on all the endgame enemies and bosses?
Were you casting the same spells from the beginning of the game?
Or did you "play it tough" and never learn to use the UI or use support spells like Armorplate like FP did?
Of course you adjusted your strategy...and yes in any case the gane still needs tweaking but not a massive overhaul like FP ended up painting for the later half of the game

Nope. I used Paralysis Lute from the moment I took it until the end game. Only made my bard use deep freeze lute after 5 tablets founded and mondblut's comment on how it does 1k damage(only bard could use it, though). I had a hard time looking for that lute.
My mage and cleric keep using the paralysis lute the whole fucking time, I don't even know how powerful my mage spells were since this worked best, it cost 0 MANA.
I could use the UI pretty well, given that you never saw me complain about UI BESIDES that inventory.
I have been using Amorplate and Enchanted Blade since I learned that, that shit was on every fucking time I'm no new player to wizardry games, that is why you don't see me complaining about dragonfly and insta-kill spears trogs. I only learned about dragonfly killing in one hit thanks to codex posters, they would mostly be paralyzed, sleeping or death. No matter which row they were.
 

Invictus

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
2,789
Location
Mexico
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Blobbers are supposed to make you think new strategies and counters to make the game FUN
That would imply that Cleve needs to fix the game, since the initial strategy worked till the end of the game for me.
Did your sleep lute work on all the endgame enemies and bosses?
Were you casting the same spells from the beginning of the game?
Or did you "play it tough" and never learn to use the UI or use support spells like Armorplate like FP did?
Of course you adjusted your strategy...and yes in any case the gane still needs tweaking but not a massive overhaul like FP ended up painting for the later half of the game

Nope. I used Paralysis Lute from the moment I took it until the end game. Only made my bard use deep freeze lute after 5 tablets founded and mondblut's comment on how it does 1k damage(only bard could use it, though). I had a hard time looking for that lute.
My mage and cleric keep using the paralysis lute the whole fucking time, I don't even know how powerful my mage spells were since this worked best, it cost 0 MANA.
I could use the UI pretty well, given that you never saw me complain about UI BESIDES that inventory.
I have been using Amorplate and Enchanted Blade since I learned that, that shit was on every fucking time I'm no new player to wizardry games, that is why you don't see me complaining about dragonfly and insta-kill spears trogs. I only learned about dragonfly killing in one hit thanks to codex posters, they would mostly be paralyzed, sleeping or death. No matter which row they were.
You sir are a true blobber and a gentleman
:excellent:
 
Weasel
Joined
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Messages
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Yes. Every char can still play the paralysis harp from inventory, thus there is not even a need for a bard.
Yep, def hope that's on his list to adjust. Never indulged in that exploit, although I'm still at the stage of continually restarting and trying different shit.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
10,350
The real problem is not that anybody can play instrument from inventory (though that too should be fixed) but that very few enemies seem to have any significant resistance to any of the instruments. So the only difference is do you auto-paralyse one dude a turn, or does your Bard do 2-3 due to extra attacks, or do you get all your characters to paralyse the entire Chinese military in the first turn. If you invested into speed to boot on level ups, and know how lethal blow works, that's 95% of the enemies down the drain.

Another question would be, if someone avoided using bards or instruments or lethal blow weapons or deep freeze, would they actually have the tactical options to play effectively in a way they aren't getting killed all the time? That would be an important criterion to answer, and we won't know until people have played more.
 

Viata

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Messages
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Water Play Catarinense
Another question would be, if someone avoided using bards or instruments or lethal blow weapons or deep freeze, would they actually have the tactical options to play effectively in a way they aren't getting killed all the time? That would be an important criterion to answer, and we won't know until people have played more.
I have been thinking about it. But it's first needed to know which classes are not broken as of now. I only know of Warrior.
 

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