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

[FreeKaner]

Firearms should not be affected by Strength but subsequently get their damage increased. Making them a viable weapon choice for those not investing in weapons or those specialising in defence.

 

[Cross]

What is even the point of having these attributes if their definition and function can change so drastically from patch to patch (it already happened in the first game)? The attributes in D&D mean something because they provide both a mechanical and narrative framework for adventuring: e.g. wizards spend their lives researching magic so their spells require intelligence, priests and druids rely on their faith/deities for their powers so they need wisdom, classes like sorcerers and spirit shamans use magic through spontaneity and intuition so they rely on charisma.

So many things in PoE are vestigial traces from D&D that are nonsensical when robbed of their context.

 

[FreeKaner]

What's wrong with changing attributes to be more sensible and provide better gameplay opportunities in terms of character creation and progression? Attributes in D&D were already vestigial from pnp days where you would roll for them, anything after is simply rationalisation.

 

[Infinitron]

Hah! Maybe he figures this isn't as big a betrayal of his principles anymore because the game has multiclassing and many characters will be multiclassed, hence they'll have access to martial and magic attacks both. In other words, like Tyranny: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...cane-to-realize-it.118881/page-2#post-5355260

 

[Infinitron]

 

[FreeKaner]

I think resolve is fitting name for casting. Higher your resolve, stronger your spells should be, isn't spells tied to that sort of mental capability anyhow? Still, it's all rationalisation in the end.

 

[Parabalus]

All your wildest dreams are coming true

Getting salty now.

Resolve having both deflection, heal and spell damage sounds really overkill. They should remove spell damage from it. Specifically, I think spell damage should not be affected directly by attributes at all if they scale with power source already.

It needs to be affected by some attribute so there is tension when stating a caster char. If you remove it from resolve and mig you have 3 useless attributes for a backline caster, leading to BG2 levels of brainlessness.

Don't like this change too much myself, seems to negatively impact multiclasses and ciphers a lot more than single classes. Don't really see the point of the it.

I think resolve is fitting name for casting. Higher your resolve, stronger your spells should be, isn't spells tied to that sort of mental capability anyhow? Still, it's all rationalisation in the end.

Strength affects gun damage now, so I'd argue that from a rationalisation standpoint STR<MIG (aka "soul power") is miles worse.

 

[Cross]

I can practically feel Josh's self-congratulatory smugness through those tweets.

Can't wait for Deadfire 2.0 when perception will be the attribute to affect duration and AoE of abilities and constitution will affect deflection.

 

[FreeKaner]

I think it was necessary because after removal of concentration resolve became a dump stat for basically all classes and roles.

 

[Infinitron]

I think it was necessary because after removal of concentration resolve became a dump stat for basically all classes and roles.

This is something that people talked about even before the release of the first game, actually. There were folks who said stuff like "But Resolve is only good for melee characters, not ranged characters, so it's still a dump stat!"

At the time, Josh said he didn't care, as long as it was potentially good for all classes: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/97494143726/re-attributes-i-think-you-need-to-clarify-your

But it looks like he's changed his mind about that.

 

[FreeKaner]

I think it's because something fundamental changed with concentration and interruption, resolve being deflection only makes it hard to justify.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Don't get why they even renamed Might to Strength. The new name might lead people to not understand that it affects gun damage as well. It sounds pretty counter intuitive, while Might wasn't as much, although of course it was still bizarre.

 

[Pope Amole II]

It's not like they can't make crossbows & guns exception from that strength rule. They probably won't, but that would've been cool and open up plenty of builds.

Strength might become a bit of a dump stat, though. It already was not that desirable before this change (dex & per provide better multipliers) and with this, lots of characters will easily go straight into STR3 without never thinking twice about it. Especially since all those weapon summoning spells got nerfed and now there's not much appeal to them the first place. Honestly, why would I ever run anything but 3 - 10- 10 - 18 - 18 - 18 wizard?

Also makes paladin tanks & baconer chanters just so much more efficient. Moon godlikes too.

Like really, that change is horrible for the health of the system, but then again, it's not like that really matters.

 

[2house2fly]

What's wrong with changing attributes to be more sensible and provide better gameplay opportunities in terms of character creation and progression? Attributes in D&D were already vestigial from pnp days where you would roll for them, anything after is simply rationalisation.

Now that I think of it, "no bad builds" as a design priority seems designed specifically for a dice roll system where you can end up with any mix of stats. It makes less sense to me that every stat would need to be useful for every character when I am building the character from scratch anyway. Sure, if I rolled a wizard character and he had shit intelligence and high resolve, I will be glad that resolve lets that character still be useful. But if resolve is shit for wizards and good for other classes then why not just not put any points into resolve when I'm building my wizard?

 

[Azarkon]

No bad build could be understood in two ways: every build performs the same, or every build performs better in certain ways, and worse in others. When developers say no bad builds, they almost always want the latter.

 

[Urthor]

So this makes it two games in a row proving that a 6 attribute system was a mistake and 4-5 would have been better

 

[Infinitron]

Now that I think of it, "no bad builds" as a design priority seems designed specifically for a dice roll system where you can end up with any mix of stats. It makes less sense to me that every stat would need to be useful for every character when I am building the character from scratch anyway.

It was for the sake of simplicity (common question while playing D&D RPG: "Wait, does Strength affect the damage of bows too? Like, how hard you pull the bowstring? Not sure...") and elegance ("Why shouldn't I make all of the stats be useful to every class?")

Also for letting you choose whatever stats you want for roleplaying and stat check purposes.

It would also be good for a game that lets you multiclass in the middle of the game (thus potentially gaining abilities that don't fit well with your initial stats), but that's not relevant here.

 

[Sentinel]

it's time to admit that renaming stats was a full retard move.

 

[Iznaliu]

So this makes it two games in a row proving that a 6 attribute system was a mistake and 4-5 would have been better

I would actually go with a system with more attributes, personally; maybe seperate every effect into its own attribute.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Lacrymas]

Eh, MIG was a somewhat dumpy stat in 1, the bonuses to damage and healing were pretty miniscule, only really mattering early-on. That's what happens when every bonus to damage is additive. If it mattered more, changing it to affect only melee fucks over melee-based spellcasting builds like Ciphers, Priests of Skaen, Druids etc, but it kinda doesn't matter much. What matters more is that RES is no longer a dump stat for those kinds of builds, necessitating a more even spread of attributes. Unless you dump both RES and STR depending on what damage bonuses items and other feats give, so this change may make both dumpy as hell.

 

[Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal]

• Health/Endurance - Now just Health

So, the one unique things about Pillows 1 is being removed entirely?

• When a character gets knocked down in a fight, you gain an injury which causes a lose of 25% of your maximum health until you rest (with food). After your 4th injury in a row without rest, your character will die.

So, more like Dragon Age now.

• All per rest abilities have changed to per encounter

Can we just remove rest entirely? Literally the shittiest thing about RTwP.

• Rest - No longer needs camping supplies, players will now use food items to recover from injuries

Or, just have players use food items from their inventory, instead of shitty useless rest.

• Grimoires - Grant Wizards extra spell casts and Wizards can no longer learn spells from Grimoires

What the actual fuck?

• Noise - Each spell/attack/etc.. has a noise level attached to it

Looking forward to this mechanic being completely useless in the actual game.

• Bumping - While pathing near allies, character now step aside for their teammate to walk by

Looking forward to characters getting stuck in sidestep loops.

 

[mortimermcmire]

crossposting myself from somethingawful re: modding if anyone cares!

I just assumed you had to overwrite the same json data files but it will load anything you put in there as long as its formatted correctly. I suspected this was the case but I was more interested in finding what was possible.

What I thought was the case:
-You had to edit the bb_items.gamedatabundle directly and add things to it
-This would be a nightmare if the game updated or you wanted to add more than one thing

What is actually the case:
-You can make a file called mort_is_dumb.gamedatabundle and add in anything you can think of, with properly formatted json, even just a single item or ability etc, and it'll load it into the game.
-You could technically have a self-contained single file that adds tons of items, skills, characters, etc.
-Entries are overwritten by the latest loading file. If you make a new file and copy estoc's data, then change the value to 9999 and save it, all estocs will inherit those stats.
-No overwrite folder is necessary, it's built in.

The good news for modders:
-Your life is going to be a lot easier than I thought
-A modding tool is as simple as a fillable json page

The good news for everyone:
-Mods are going to be very easy to install and uninstall.

The bad news:
-I can't seem to add or change custom strings in the same way. All entries in the data don't have their display names or descriptions in the json, they reference a number which pulls from the localized stringtable depending on what language you choose.
-I can add custom strings by editing the original stringtables but that will get sloppy.
-I also cannot edit original strings in the same way that I can edit the gamedatabundle entries by making a new file and overwriting
-I still don't know if custom assets can be loaded or things can be placed in world by modders.

tl;dr modding is good, I'm dumb and assumed the worst but we're in good shape folks, its very similar to BG modding

 

[Bester]

"Don't you just hate it when your strength affects your bow damage? We'll change that in POE, call it Might"
[years later]
"I found some nice cool solution to a shit ton of problems, we have to rename it back to Strength".

 

[FreeKaner]

We are experiencing the clash between Sawyer's ego, his game design philosophies and his gameplay incentives. The reconciliation of these and the following synthesis will result in the greatest system ever developed.