Delterius
Arcane
Yes, you could do that in NWN2. But since the whole thing was kinda wonky it was still hard to pull off.
You posted this in SA/Obsidian Forums?HAHAH just found a way to abuse the shit out of disengagement attacks. Attack enemy with ranged unit and then run that unit back, move a Fighter in to intercept but DO NOT attack the enemy, just move the Fighter close to the enemy and BAM, disengagement attack and THEN attack (no cooldown) :D
Kinda hard to pull off, but you can definitely do it.
Hi, Sensuki. Right now I'm trying to focus most of my efforts internally on bugfixing and getting team feedback. That isn't to say that we're not doing any tuning, but we're in a stage right now where I'm trying to temporarily limit outside input. At a high level, my feedback would be that I don't think it would be good to switch to "natural die roll only" for crits for a few reasons. First, it creates a separate type of resolution for attacks, one based on modified die roll and one based on natural die roll. Second, it means that "true" crits and misses are things that the player achieves purely through random chance instead of by pushing the odds in their favor. That's the AD&D style, but I never thought that resolution model was rewarding because it never happened based on me doing something other than rolling the die.
That said, I could see a scenario where crits occur on higher rolls, e.g. 105+, meaning you need more significant Accuracy advantage to even have a chance of pulling them off. Even so, I don't personally think that the Crit system in place causes serious problems. While +50% damage or duration is not trivial, it's also not insanely powerful. In some cases, the Crit exacerbates what is an extant balance problem like a Paralyzed effect with a base 20s duration, which is nuts. In that case, the base effect needs to be modified.
DT can be harder to balance than DR and DT + DR can be even harder, but DR alone has a lot of problems. First, DR-reliant systems cause a huge inflation of damage values as the DR values start to rise and the characters' HP are also rising. Unless you tightly control DR escalation (a problem in its own right) eventually you wind up with armor absorbing 80%+ of incoming damage on massive hits against characters with enormous amounts of HP. In Fallout and F2, DR was the primary component of high end armor and it led to plinking back and forth until someone was hit with an armor-bypassing x3 crit to completely annihilate the target. With DR, you also eventually "run out of runway" in terms of equipment progression. You have 100 points to play with, that's it. Unless the progression is really tightly constrained (in which case you won't notice much change), you will eventually top out where the equipment can go.
Though it's more difficult to balance DT than DR, it's not incredibly hard and in the BB areas I really haven't done much tuning at all. People have moved around creatures and whatnot but I haven't been trying to create the perfectly balanced area or anything. There's another element that can help alleviate some of the pain of low damage vs. a particular DT type, which is to raise Min Dam Through DT to 20%. It's currently 10%, which is half of what it was in F:NV.
I've talked to QA about Dexterity and they completely disagree with it being a dump stat. Its effects are harder to observe but speed is always valuable.
Armored Grace is not the same as an 18 Dexterity because Armored Grace affects Recovery Time, not base speed. Dexterity actually directly affects base speed, which means in turn it affects Recovery Time because RT is derived from the time to perform an action. Weapon Focus grants the same Accuracy bonus as 20 Per to one class of weapons and has no effect on Reflexes. It also stacks, so I don't really see how that creates a problem.
I could see bonus Accuracy from Per going from +1 to +2 and Dam/Heal from +2 to +3, but from +1 to +3 is enormously influential. An 18 would be +21, greater than what you'd get from an 18 on an attack stat in A/D&D (already too high, IMO).
QA also disagrees with you on Intellect, though we're doubling the AoE effect that it has because it was never actually supposed to be 3%, but 5%. After fooling around a bit, 6% seems a bit better. It has a large influence on AoE. While you could argue that classes don't necessarily need huge AoEs for their attacks/spells, watching them dramatically shrink is actually a real problem that they have to deal with.
Interrupts and Concentration need to be communicated better on equipment/attacks and the character sheets since people still don't really make the connection that the basic offensive component comes from the attack.
I am expecting a reply something along those lines, yep.
His response to you implied that they found the speed improvement valuable.
I hope you're aware that second-guessing his reply and going over his head to talk directly to the QA guys is bordering on the disrespectful
Hi Matt
I PM'd Josh with my thoughts on a few of the systems, one of those thoughts was that I currently think that Dexterity is a bit of a dump stat for most classes. He said that you guys (QA) completely disagree.
I was just interested in knowing what classes you guys are choosing Dexterity on, and for what reasons - mechanical or otherwise
Cheers
Sensuki
The reasons I am a bit concerned about the Attack Resolution system when Accuracy is a bit higher than defense is that damage values on hits can get pretty ridiculous. It might be highly related to imbalanced damage stacking and/or imbalanced monster attacks, but it seems like critical hits get a bit out of control on high damage abilities.
Rogues can stack damage multipliers on top of each other for critical hits of 150-250 with firearm type weapons (Arbalests, Pistols, Arquebuses etc) and some enemies can kill party members with a single crit, even when they are level 8.
I've cheated some party members up to level 12 and I've noticed that the Endurance values cap out at somewhere between ~180-250 for most characters (this was higher under the old attribute system, because now CON gives 20% less Endurance), even with those hit points, characters can still be felled in a couple of hits. A Forest Lurker one-shot KO'd one of my Level 12 Rogues just last night. The Rogue was equipped with Fine Breastplate.
A party of characters that has everyone with an equipped firearm can get extremely nasty as well, pretty much every unit in the game will die from a volley of firearm shots/bolts. There was nothing in the Infinity Engine games that gnarly other than save or die stuff.
Pillars of Eternity (at the moment) is many times more lethal than the Infinity Engine games are, and there are going to be cases where the party will severely outclass enemy defenses, or enemy defenses will seriously outclass party defenses and in these situations, lots of crits together add up and if those crits come from high damage attacks, combat is pretty much over before it started.
That is why I thought that normalizing critical hits would be a good thing, because it would help alleviate the issues where things just start getting silly when crits are happening often and with high damage attacks. Crits with lower damage weapons are absorbed by effective DT (due to being opposed more often), and are thus not as gnarly.
You raised some good points though, so when things are balanced properly (damage values and armor system), it may not be a problem.
I would be interested in hearing what you guys thought about the game's pace and lethality after your internal playthrough.
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The reason I think DT is more problematic than DR is because it (1) inflates the damage ranges of attacks, which kind of feels odd for an IE style game, and (2) I don't think it works very well with percentile increases to damage.
You have done a good job at balancing the weapon styles against eachother against 0 DT. Matt516 did the math and he said that all styles are roughly balanced at ACC-DEF = 0 and 0 DT.
However in realistic scenarios, 1H Single, 1H Fast and Two Weapon Fighting styles are inferior for the purposes of dealing damage pretty much all the time (with a few edge cases).
There are very few melee weapons in the game that are worth using against DT. There's the DT bypassing weapons - Stilettos, Maces, Estocs and the 2H high damage weapons (Morningstars, Quarterstaffs, Pikes ... and Greatswords and Pollaxes which haven't been working properly yet).
When DT is present, anything that attacks faster for the purposes of dealing more damage falls off, because it is opposing DT more often. Stone Beetle Base DT is 15 for instance, when you are attacking with Two 1H normal weapons, you are attacking 50% faster than a two hander, and thus increasing the effective DT by 50%, when dual wielding two 1H normal speed weapons, the Stone Beetle's effective DT vs that enemy would be 22.5
The edge cases I mentioned earlier mostly being when you have DoTs like Deep Wounds, or the Rogue's ability to stack damage multipliers/debuffs (sneak attack + crippling strike followed by sneak attack blinding strike etc - gnarly with Deathblows on).
However against straight DR, all damage is reduced by the same amount. It's less interesting but easier to balance. I'm not sure how or if you intend to tackle the problem of attack speed vs DT but I think it's an issue because it's making a large majority of the weapons in the game pointless to use.
When I mentioned flat DR I certainly didn't mean values going insanely high. I've played some other games that have percentile armor systems that have diminishing returns for every point of armor you have. The more armor you have, the less benefit per point you get as it goes up (Warcraft 3 did this). However yes, it's less interesting and it is in effect raising "Effective Health".
I do think that the issue with DT could (theoretically) be addressed by using integer values for damage increases instead of percentages, as faster weapons get more of a benefit per point when using integer increases, which could help make up for the deficit. I just didn't mention it because I'm not sure if you're interested in trying integer values for anything other than what you already have.
Another way would be to play with the weapon damage ranges so that they are imbalanced against 0 DT, but have a range of efficacy against DT.
Hadn't thought about raising the minimum damage though, When Matt has time, I'll get him to produce a new spreadsheet with the 20% min damage value and see if that would actually work.
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I sent Matt Sheets a message asking what classes they are picking Dexterity on and why. The reason I think it is a dump stat is because the DPS bonus that it grants is worth less per point than Might against DT (due to the same reasons as faster attacking weapons being bad against DT). For each point that I dump Dexterity below 10 and put the extra points into Might, I am gaining DPS against DT because the DPS from Might never gets worse against DT, whereas the DPS benefit from the IAS increase from Dexterity does.
Those extra points can also be put into Perception if ACC-DEF is less than +5 (which is, in the current beta version - pretty much all the time, without buffs from spells), because between -15 and +5, Perception at +1 ACC per point often grants more DPS than Might and Dexterity do, and below -15 it always does.
I like Dexterity on Priests, because they spend a lot of their time in combat casting non-damaging spells, for which the purposes of extra DPS are not needed.
If you're wearing armor, is the -16% benefit from Armored Grace the same as 18 Dexterity in armor? It was my understanding that Recovery Time was always reduced first before the animation speed was even touched. I'll have to check the formula in the source code, I thought they were all additive.
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The reason why I highlighted that Weapon Focus was as good as 20 Perception is that Weapon Focus in D&D gives +1 to attack (at least in 3rd edition), 20 in the primary attribute gives +5 to attack, it seems kind of sad that one Talent can outshine the maximum points in an Attribute. That was more to highlight the fact that Attributes currently don't have enough of an impact on characters due to the new 10 is 0 system.
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My recommendation for +3 ACC per point was in combination with "natural 20" criticals. I agree that it is too much with the current Attack Resolution system. Matt and I were also thinking that under the current system +2 per point and +3% Might/Heal would be better - but that depends on the ACC-DEF situation, we haven't yet made a chart with those values on his DPSCalc Spreadsheet.
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I had a feeling that the Intellect AoE bonus was too small by mistake, because 20 Int gives pretty much nothing in regards to AoE. That would make it a little bit better, certainly.
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Hormalakh did a good mock up with an improved stat sheet in the Inventory with the Interrupt/Concentration values. Personally I think derived stats also need to be shown in the Character Creation screen, so players can actually see, visually, what they get when they increase attributes.
Shannow said:At least publicly you need to seem more conciliatory.
you're exhibiting some of the qualities that have been criticised about Sawyer
My mom never taught me that respect is important regardless of who the person is.
Hi, Sensuki. Right now I'm trying to focus most of my efforts internally on bugfixing and getting team feedback. That isn't to say that we're not doing any tuning, but we're in a stage right now where I'm trying to temporarily limit outside input.
The very same ones that continue to respond to bug feedback from two versions prior.
Hey, I like it. I much rather have people speaking their mind than passive/aggressive bullshit or people falling on their knees before perceived celebrities.I am a person who speaks my mind, and this is afterall, the RPGCodex. I should be allowed to make a joke here or there, hang shit on people for fun and all that stuff. I don't really do that stuff anywhere else because pretty much you're not allowed to. However I guess it's a bit like being a celebrity and then being a dick on twitter - that shit will spread. I'm not a celebrity, but you're probably right.
you're exhibiting some of the qualities that have been criticised about Sawyer
Everyone is a hypocrite in some way, I think that's unavoidable. So you're probably right. I'd like to hear more detail though - what qualities?
Stopped reading right there. You must be a moronic, 13 year old girl. You are unable to actually express what you want to say. And I show far more respect than you deserve by taking the time to reply to you. I hope you appreciate it.My mom never taught me that respect is important regardless of who the person is.
2. If you actually want the other side to move, a diplomatic approach usually is more successful.
As on qualities:
Now this is really just the impression I get. It might be factually "wrong", but if I get it, others might also.
You have a very set vision of where the game should go and very strong opinions on how certain stuff should be implemented. You put so much effort into this that one might consider you a "shadow lead designer". Sawyer is also very set in his vision and is rather slow in moving away from certain decisions, if at all. That is exacerbated by the whole dismissal of other opinions as grognard, etc. You also exhibit the quality as being of the opinion to be always/mostly right and one of a kind. At least that's the impression I get *shrug*