You could build a Fire Godlike Monk with high Might and Constitution focusing on fire damage and wearing the heaviest armor. Have a Cipher support cast Pain Block and enemies will kill themselves hitting the Monk.
all backer npcs should be murdered in the most painful way for tempting me to read their shit regardless of loot and then smear their blood all over the backer memorials.
A backer posted a story somewhere online about finding the npc he got for backing the game and then murdering him for his hat. So even the backers do this.
Is there a merchant or keep addition that gives me gems? I'm getting to where I want to upgrade my gear to exceptional quality but it's going to require a lot of them.
There's a merchant that shows up at night near the brothel in Ondra's Gift. I forget what triggers the password to buy from him though.
I'm really tempted to just give myself infinite camping supplies. In practice all this system is doing is making me trek back and forth between the inn all the time. Much like the XP system it works better in theory than execution, though neither is that big of an issue. Just the inn thing stands out since even if I'm not hurt need to rest for spells.
"For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men. Not women. Not beasts...this you can trust."
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FreiA French Prometheus UnboundDeadwoodRegistered Userregular
I'm really tempted to just give myself infinite camping supplies. In practice all this system is doing is making me trek back and forth between the inn all the time. Much like the XP system it works better in theory than execution, though neither is that big of an issue. Just the inn thing stands out since even if I'm not hurt need to rest for spells.
A huge part of your tactics and decision making is what spells you're going to apply for that certain fight, what you want to save, etc, and doing so on a limited rest system. It also leads you to utilize your lower level spells that would otherwise become unimportant. If you could just spam max level spells and powerful on-rest abilities and rest after every fight, you may as well just give yourself infinite HP, too, and just select all and click every enemy.
All true, but as I said I'm doing that anyway! Fun of playing a wizard- casting spells. I mean, the infinite rest system worked fine for BG2 didn't it? This one just works better at being explained as above than in practice is all.
Xeddicus on
"For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men. Not women. Not beasts...this you can trust."
I'm really tempted to just give myself infinite camping supplies. In practice all this system is doing is making me trek back and forth between the inn all the time. Much like the XP system it works better in theory than execution, though neither is that big of an issue. Just the inn thing stands out since even if I'm not hurt need to rest for spells.
A huge part of your tactics and decision making is what spells you're going to apply for that certain fight, what you want to save, etc, and doing so on a limited rest system. It also leads you to utilize your lower level spells that would otherwise become unimportant. If you could just spam max level spells and powerful on-rest abilities and rest after every fight, you may as well just give yourself infinite HP, too, and just select all and click every enemy.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
Infinite HP isn't similar since it is entirely possible for a companion to die/get maimed in the course of a fight if you have very strong priestly healing on them, though unlikely, and infinite endurance is very different because individual encounters can still kill you. But there is no point the game forces a "set" of encounters on you in a row where camping supplies and strategic use of spells is absolutely necessary, it's just a preferable alternative to wasting time on loading screens because the game isn't difficult enough that you need to throw out top level spells in every single fight.
EDIT: An odd problem with their design is that by aggressively limiting camping supplies on higher difficulties, they've made it difficult to balance "sets" of encounters where you can't go back to town. If they implemented it, it would either have to be designed for two rests to beat on Hard (with PotD still being the "screw you" difficulty), which would make a set of easier encounters with twice the rests trivial on Normal, or they'd have to design it for four rests on Normal, in which case it would get very dicey on Hard. But since they never implemented sets, part of the "difficulty" of Hard mode is that you have to go through more loading screens, which is lame.
I've played through the full game once, and I've gotten 3 different parties to act 3. I've never had to leave an adventuring area to go get camping supplies on Hard. The only area where you'll want to do that is Old Nua, which has those handy master staircases every few levels.
Infinite rest actually did hurt the BG series, because it made casters ridiculously powerful with no checks on their (theoretically limited but not really) spell lists.
Having played through most of the game and paying to create new level 11 characters, I think too many racial abilities in this game depend on having damage dealt to the character. In practice that's really only useful for monks, who want to be damaged to earn wounds, or possibly tanks...except a good tank is really never going to be that damaged, judging by Eder who isn't even fully optimized.
And many of them are limited to specific situations, like DR against burn and freeze, little perks that aren't really gamechangers...and then you have island aumaua with their extra weapon set which is amazing for anyone who wants to use guns, and wood elves with their Distant Advantage which is useful to practically everybody except tanks.
Also I think godlike should've been given one extra stat point to distribute, considering they can't wear hats, and that all of their racials are about the character taking damage or the enemy already being damaged. They're not OP enough to balance out the loss of the head slot. In practice hats are more useful than having 1 single stat point since there are +2 hats and ones with abilities, but I would say the flexibility of being able to invest it wherever you want from the start of the game would offset the problems with hats (the best ones being rare, dealing with "suppressed" etc.).
DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
Is it viable to dump the priest dude for the paladin chick?
He's the only one of my party members I have so far I don't like. His heals are pretty helpful though. Would the buffs and stuff from Paladin chick be good enough to make up for losing those?
Is it viable to dump the priest dude for the paladin chick?
He's the only one of my party members I have so far I don't like. His heals are pretty helpful though. Would the buffs and stuff from Paladin chick be good enough to make up for losing those?
Well for one thing I've learned to dislike healing in this game because that's actually how you get yourselves killed. Yeah, you can make it through a long combat but if you keep it up too long you're done. So I don't know if Durance is necessary for that reason.
However his utility from all the OTHER spells he can do is amazing. Paladins are pretty underwhelming by comparison to just about every other class. They're too jack-of-all-trades.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
No, I really don't think it would be.
They've left room for you to do this if you absolutely need to, but you normally don't need to, and that's why you don't. If you want to keep your momentum going and have a good experience with the game, then deciding when to use your best spells and how to mete out your resources is an important part of the game. If you want to go back to an inn and rest after every fight... well, yeah, then it's not, but you're also probably not having very much fun.
The game is (ostensibly) balanced so that you have to make some nontrivial decisions about when to use your resources. Of course you can break it if you need or want to, but to say that it would ever be standard to do that I think is disingenuous. You do not always have to play in a mechanically optimal way.
What is the "summoner" class in this game? I see that chanters can summon - do that have better and more variety of summons than wizards have access to? I'm not even sure if there are summon spells for wizards, but I am assuming there are.
Wii U NNID: TJandSam Steam: BrokenBrik
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
Is it viable to dump the priest dude for the paladin chick?
He's the only one of my party members I have so far I don't like. His heals are pretty helpful though. Would the buffs and stuff from Paladin chick be good enough to make up for losing those?
Well for one thing I've learned to dislike healing in this game because that's actually how you get yourselves killed. Yeah, you can make it through a long combat but if you keep it up too long you're done. So I don't know if Durance is necessary for that reason.
However his utility from all the OTHER spells he can do is amazing. Paladins are pretty underwhelming by comparison to just about every other class. They're too jack-of-all-trades.
Darn.
I'll have to play around with it. Maybe I'll make a custom priest, The DR spell is pretty darn useful.
I'm also upset they didn't give us those feathery godlike for character creation. I would totally have played one of them.
When are you supposed to be able to take on the first set of bounties? I have a full party at level 6 and haven't had success on any of them. Granted, I still haven't left Act 1 because I like to do everything as it's available if possible.
I'm also upset they didn't give us those feathery godlike for character creation. I would totally have played one of them.
Weird thing is that the design isn't as bizarre as most godlike, IIRC she has a normal face and even normal hair, the fro is one of the designs you can pick from! It's just that they texture it like feathers.
What's her racial anyway? Never even looked at that. Is she a nature godlike?
I'm also upset they didn't give us those feathery godlike for character creation. I would totally have played one of them.
Weird thing is that the design isn't as bizarre as most godlike, IIRC she has a normal face and even normal hair, the fro is one of the designs you can pick from! It's just that they texture it like feathers.
What's her racial anyway? Never even looked at that. Is she a nature godlike?
it's a whole different type of godlike.
Which is what I was saying I wish they allowed us to make.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited April 2015
Can't Avian Godlike fly or something?
Also, I'm loving this system. I wish I can play this on a tabletop setting, though the amount of calculations would just make combat a chore.
What is the "summoner" class in this game? I see that chanters can summon - do that have better and more variety of summons than wizards have access to? I'm not even sure if there are summon spells for wizards, but I am assuming there are.
Chanters are the summoner class. While none of the phrases are summons, from the invocations you have 2 (of 7) at first level, 2 (of 6) at second level and 2 (of 6) at third level. (That's invocation level not character level)
Wizards can kinda-sorta summon with a couple spells, but not that many. I think the only wizard summons are ones that make a double of the wizard, one of them makes a fistfighting doppelganger that deals shock damage. By contrast, chanters have a few summon choices at every level of chant. Also they can summon every combat (if the combat goes on long enough) whereas classes like wizard are limited by spells per day.
However anyone can be a summoner if you make use of the awesome summoning items you can find throughout the game.
I feel like charm and dominate are as good as summoning, if not even better, because they add units to your team and subtract from the enemy, though only for a short time.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
No, I really don't think it would be.
They've left room for you to do this if you absolutely need to, but you normally don't need to, and that's why you don't. If you want to keep your momentum going and have a good experience with the game, then deciding when to use your best spells and how to mete out your resources is an important part of the game. If you want to go back to an inn and rest after every fight... well, yeah, then it's not, but you're also probably not having very much fun.
The game is (ostensibly) balanced so that you have to make some nontrivial decisions about when to use your resources. Of course you can break it if you need or want to, but to say that it would ever be standard to do that I think is disingenuous. You do not always have to play in a mechanically optimal way.
At present the only check on resting is a nominal fee and boredom. I absolutely believe if you had infinite buff rests without four loading screens, people would hit the rest button as often as they felt like it. Maybe they wouldn't rest a ton because the game is easy anyway and even viewing the vision for two seconds is more time than necessary to beat the next set of beetles up, but that's about it.
I'm not saying you have to play in an optimal way, I just find it strange that the game is partially balanced around being too bored to get more rests. I'd find it interesting if there was some kind of time dependent quest or series of encounters that made resting possible but going back to town infeasible, along with actually difficult encounters, so that limited supplies actually mattered.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
No, I really don't think it would be.
They've left room for you to do this if you absolutely need to, but you normally don't need to, and that's why you don't. If you want to keep your momentum going and have a good experience with the game, then deciding when to use your best spells and how to mete out your resources is an important part of the game. If you want to go back to an inn and rest after every fight... well, yeah, then it's not, but you're also probably not having very much fun.
The game is (ostensibly) balanced so that you have to make some nontrivial decisions about when to use your resources. Of course you can break it if you need or want to, but to say that it would ever be standard to do that I think is disingenuous. You do not always have to play in a mechanically optimal way.
At present the only check on resting is a nominal fee and boredom. I absolutely believe if you had infinite buff rests without four loading screens, people would hit the rest button as often as they felt like it. Maybe they wouldn't rest a ton because the game is easy anyway and even viewing the vision for two seconds is more time than necessary to beat the next set of beetles up, but that's about it.
I'm not saying you have to play in an optimal way, I just find it strange that the game is partially balanced around being too bored to get more rests. I'd find it interesting if there was some kind of time dependent quest or series of encounters that made resting possible but going back to town infeasible, along with actually difficult encounters, so that limited supplies actually mattered.
That is kind of what you're saying though, in a way. You're saying you'd find it more interesting if you couldn't go back and rest every encounter, but you already don't have to do that. You only have to rest as often as you PERSONALLY have to. If you rest more often than that, it's your option. Forcing yourself to continue on without resting is a form of user-defined difficulty, similar to choosing the crappy starting character class in a souls game.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
No, I really don't think it would be.
They've left room for you to do this if you absolutely need to, but you normally don't need to, and that's why you don't. If you want to keep your momentum going and have a good experience with the game, then deciding when to use your best spells and how to mete out your resources is an important part of the game. If you want to go back to an inn and rest after every fight... well, yeah, then it's not, but you're also probably not having very much fun.
The game is (ostensibly) balanced so that you have to make some nontrivial decisions about when to use your resources. Of course you can break it if you need or want to, but to say that it would ever be standard to do that I think is disingenuous. You do not always have to play in a mechanically optimal way.
At present the only check on resting is a nominal fee and boredom. I absolutely believe if you had infinite buff rests without four loading screens, people would hit the rest button as often as they felt like it. Maybe they wouldn't rest a ton because the game is easy anyway and even viewing the vision for two seconds is more time than necessary to beat the next set of beetles up, but that's about it.
I'm not saying you have to play in an optimal way, I just find it strange that the game is partially balanced around being too bored to get more rests. I'd find it interesting if there was some kind of time dependent quest or series of encounters that made resting possible but going back to town infeasible, along with actually difficult encounters, so that limited supplies actually mattered.
That is kind of what you're saying though, in a way. You're saying you'd find it more interesting if you couldn't go back and rest every encounter, but you already don't have to do that. You only have to rest as often as you PERSONALLY have to. If you rest more often than that, it's your option. Forcing yourself to continue on without resting is a form of user-defined difficulty, similar to choosing the crappy starting character class in a souls game.
Saying "you can arbitrarily limit yourself" as a reason for game design decisions seems really lazy. I never went back to rest a ton because the game was generally trivial. The point I am making is simply that their design decisions have made it so that supplies are not limited based on any real resource but player time; even the different camping supply limit on different difficulties simply changes how often you need to go through loading screens to find a shop.
I would rather they take advantage of the supply limit in a way that forces all players to play in a certain way, so they could actually design encounters more tightly and maybe squeeze some real difficulty into the game. Changing the supply limit for higher difficulties could actually have some interesting gameplay effects that required you to ration spell usages (if encounters weren't trivial, anyway) if supplies weren't always a loading screen away. As-is, the decision to limit supplies based on player boredom means that to be difficult, future expansions will either have to be designed around firing off high level spells and resting, or will be trivialized by resting frequently. While yes, you can choose to simply not do the latter, that doesn't make that design choice any better.
EDIT: To explain why I think designing to avoid player tedium as a balancing factor is a good idea, I'll use an example from another game. In Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (square-grid roguelike), there was a spell called Ignite Poison that would, along with hurting poisonous enemies, destroy any poisoned items on the ground and cause a cloud of fire to appear there. You could simply carry around large stacks of poison arrows, throw them on the ground around you, drag monsters to the area, and hit them with an entire screen of fire clouds, hitting a much larger area with higher selectivity than most spells in the game. While pretty much nobody would actually perform such a boring task, the fire cloud effect removed because of the philosophy that boring/tedious play should not be more optimal than fun play. That's why I think the whole "camping supplies" thing is silly; you don't have to spam rests, but at present the optimal play clashes with that, and I think that designing so that optimal play and non-tedious play are one and the same is better in general; the player never feels like they're sacrificing something to speed up the game and you can more tightly design encounters because you don't have to worry about cheese.
For one specific example in PoE, the Endless Paths. The only difference between allowing me to rest endlessly there and allowing me to rest based on supplies is that I have to go through at least six loading screens simply to rest in bed, and an additional two loading screens if I want to buy more camping supplies. The Endless Paths will almost always take more rests to clear than you have camping supplies (maybe on Easy with 6 you could clear the whole thing?), but there's never a point where you couldn't just walk back up and get filled up for the area boss. It combines with how poorly done the Stronghold is in general, but it shows exactly why designing around boredom doesn't add anything to the game, since those dungeons were more of a slog (and then the Adra Dragon) than actually difficult.
Saying "you can arbitrarily limit yourself" as a reason for game design decisions seems really lazy.
It absolutely is not! It seems to me the decision they made was that the game should not be so difficult that it would prevent someone from finishing the game. I think they've balanced the game on the assumption that players will rest a number of times per dungeon equal to the number of camping supplies they can carry. This means that players who are having too hard of a time with it can simply fall back on all their most powerful stuff more often, since few if any encounters are balanced with "the player will throw the kitchen sink at this encounter" in mind.
Most players will not do this, not because they would get bored going back to rest, but because they'd get bored with trivial fights all the time. Having to save resources makes fights harder, and the difficulty setting of the game is only one way in which the game modulates difficulty.
I would rather they take advantage of the supply limit in a way that forces all players to play in a certain way, so they could actually design encounters more tightly and maybe squeeze some real difficulty into the game.
This isn't a game that aims to force players to play in any way pretty much ever, so this seems like it would be an incredibly poor choice. This was never going to be a game that punished you and disallowed you to progress unless you were properly optimized. I haven't played on the higher difficulties but from what I hear it's not as insane as the game would have you believe? Honestly really not sure.
You keep saying that resting is gated by player boredom, but you're missing the point completely. You're not supposed to rest until you need to rest. If you don't need to spend all your resources on a fight, you shouldn't. And until you do, you don't need to rest. The system is exactly as forgiving as you need it to be.
EDIT: To explain why I think designing to avoid player tedium as a balancing factor is a good idea, I'll use an example from another game. In Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (square-grid roguelike), there was a spell called Ignite Poison that would, along with hurting poisonous enemies, destroy any poisoned items on the ground and cause a cloud of fire to appear there. You could simply carry around large stacks of poison arrows, throw them on the ground around you, drag monsters to the area, and hit them with an entire screen of fire clouds, hitting a much larger area with higher selectivity than most spells in the game. While pretty much nobody would actually perform such a boring task, the fire cloud effect removed because of the philosophy that boring/tedious play should not be more optimal than fun play. That's why I think the whole "camping supplies" thing is silly; you don't have to spam rests, but at present the optimal play clashes with that, and I think that designing so that optimal play and non-tedious play are one and the same is better in general; the player never feels like they're sacrificing something to speed up the game and you can more tightly design encounters because you don't have to worry about cheese.
You make a very good point here, and I absolutely agree with you that fun play and optimal play should try to coincide as much as absolutely possible. I had this problem in bloodborne when I was fighting the final boss, since the only way I found I could kill him was by being very passive and poking him with a spear when he opened himself up during his final form. Maybe I'm bad, but all the other bosses encouraged aggression and they were fun, but he was absolutely just the worst, and I hated him. That's another really good example of your point, I think. (also it took forever because my spear was not leveled up)
I just don't see the lack of camping supplies / rest gating as even a remotely good example of this, since this is a case where the delta between optimal and suboptimal play is so small that there's no reason to go through the tedium: there's not enough gain. Like you said, the fights were easy- and you go on to say that you wish there'd been more difficulty built in to the game, but I really just don't think tightly tuned difficulty was in the cards for this one. I think they wanted it to be more accessible than they wanted it to reward skilled players.
What is the "summoner" class in this game? I see that chanters can summon - do that have better and more variety of summons than wizards have access to? I'm not even sure if there are summon spells for wizards, but I am assuming there are.
Chanters are the summoner class. While none of the phrases are summons, from the invocations you have 2 (of 7) at first level, 2 (of 6) at second level and 2 (of 6) at third level. (That's invocation level not character level)
The Phantom summon for first level is terrifically good. All the things that make Phantoms an enormous pain in the ass on the enemy's side, at your fingertips.
I think they wanted it to be more accessible than they wanted it to reward skilled players
This is a game that stated Medium difficulty would be too hard for players who hadn't played a NWN style game in a while. I did, in fact, come into the game expecting some level of difficulty in encounters, and I still wish it would do so. They've also stated they wanted to design it so there was no way to make a "bad" character (a lofty goal), which is evident with how weak talents are compared to the massive number of spells you get for free. They absolutely could have designed the game such that encounters were difficult without making content totally inaccessible; the only reason the supply issue doesn't wind up mattering is simply because they made the game either completely trivial (an incredibly high number of trash encounters) or something you either cheese or petrify (Adra Dragon).
You keep saying that resting is gated by player boredom, but you're missing the point completely. You're not supposed to rest until you need to rest. If you don't need to spend all your resources on a fight, you shouldn't. And until you do, you don't need to rest. The system is exactly as forgiving as you need it to be.
That's exactly what being gated by boredom is! Not using effectively infinite resources because you can get by while spending less resources and less time.
I think they wanted it to be more accessible than they wanted it to reward skilled players
This is a game that stated Medium difficulty would be too hard for players who hadn't played a NWN style game in a while. I did, in fact, come into the game expecting some level of difficulty in encounters, and I still wish it would do so. They've also stated they wanted to design it so there was no way to make a "bad" character (a lofty goal), which is evident with how weak talents are compared to the massive number of spells you get for free. They absolutely could have designed the game such that encounters were difficult without making content totally inaccessible; the only reason the supply issue doesn't wind up mattering is simply because they made the game either completely trivial (an incredibly high number of trash encounters) or something you either cheese or petrify (Adra Dragon).
You keep saying that resting is gated by player boredom, but you're missing the point completely. You're not supposed to rest until you need to rest. If you don't need to spend all your resources on a fight, you shouldn't. And until you do, you don't need to rest. The system is exactly as forgiving as you need it to be.
That's exactly what being gated by boredom is! Not using effectively infinite resources because you can get by while spending less resources and less time.
Well, that's fair I suppose. It's unfortunate that things didn't live up to your expectations, for sure, especially assuming they said the things you quote. (I wasn't following this game for most of its development or the kickstarter so I wouldn't know, my assumptions regarding their decisions are just based on playing)
Though I think that we are thinking about the phrase "gated by boredom" in a fundamentally different way. I don't think that limiting use of a theoretically infinite resource is problematic at all.
To be clear, we're talking about trading in time for a resource that's theoretically limited only by time:
If your city starts making money in Cities: Skylines, you could just turn it on the fastest speed and then leave for work and come back 8 hours later to essentially infinite cash. Would you say that I was arbitrarily limiting myself if I chose not to do that?
If I played final fantasy 7 until the first inn, I could theoretically level my character up high enough to kill the final boss before leaving for the next area, trivializing the rest of the fights in the game. Would you say I was arbitrarily limiting myself if I chose not to do that?
In world of warcraft you don't usually rest between every trash pull in a dungeon (hell you usually don't rest until a boss), but resting between trash pulls allows you to be at full health and mana when you start the next trash pull. Would you say we were arbitrarily limiting ourselves if our group chose to chain pull instead of resting between pulls?
In all three of these cases you are taking time you don't need to take in order to optimize yourself for whatever you're doing next, be that infinite cash, full health and mana, or being grossly overleveled. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the game is poorly designed for expecting you NOT to engage in these patterns.
[edit] ...NOT to engage in these patterns unless you have to. [/edit]
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A backer posted a story somewhere online about finding the npc he got for backing the game and then murdering him for his hat. So even the backers do this.
There's a merchant that shows up at night near the brothel in Ondra's Gift. I forget what triggers the password to buy from him though.
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A huge part of your tactics and decision making is what spells you're going to apply for that certain fight, what you want to save, etc, and doing so on a limited rest system. It also leads you to utilize your lower level spells that would otherwise become unimportant. If you could just spam max level spells and powerful on-rest abilities and rest after every fight, you may as well just give yourself infinite HP, too, and just select all and click every enemy.
The problem is you already can do all that. The only balancing factor on not spamming your highest level abilities in every fight is boredom. There are very, very few situations you are thrown into multiple encounters in a row without a way to exit the map, and most of those involve angering some dudes at the back of an area and fighting through the NPC trash mobs on the way out. If there weren't at least four loading screens between going to a town, resting at an inn for stat boost, buying camping supplies, and returning to your present location, having infinite camping supplies and always having a rest buff would be standard play.
Infinite HP isn't similar since it is entirely possible for a companion to die/get maimed in the course of a fight if you have very strong priestly healing on them, though unlikely, and infinite endurance is very different because individual encounters can still kill you. But there is no point the game forces a "set" of encounters on you in a row where camping supplies and strategic use of spells is absolutely necessary, it's just a preferable alternative to wasting time on loading screens because the game isn't difficult enough that you need to throw out top level spells in every single fight.
EDIT: An odd problem with their design is that by aggressively limiting camping supplies on higher difficulties, they've made it difficult to balance "sets" of encounters where you can't go back to town. If they implemented it, it would either have to be designed for two rests to beat on Hard (with PotD still being the "screw you" difficulty), which would make a set of easier encounters with twice the rests trivial on Normal, or they'd have to design it for four rests on Normal, in which case it would get very dicey on Hard. But since they never implemented sets, part of the "difficulty" of Hard mode is that you have to go through more loading screens, which is lame.
Infinite rest actually did hurt the BG series, because it made casters ridiculously powerful with no checks on their (theoretically limited but not really) spell lists.
And many of them are limited to specific situations, like DR against burn and freeze, little perks that aren't really gamechangers...and then you have island aumaua with their extra weapon set which is amazing for anyone who wants to use guns, and wood elves with their Distant Advantage which is useful to practically everybody except tanks.
Also I think godlike should've been given one extra stat point to distribute, considering they can't wear hats, and that all of their racials are about the character taking damage or the enemy already being damaged. They're not OP enough to balance out the loss of the head slot. In practice hats are more useful than having 1 single stat point since there are +2 hats and ones with abilities, but I would say the flexibility of being able to invest it wherever you want from the start of the game would offset the problems with hats (the best ones being rare, dealing with "suppressed" etc.).
He's the only one of my party members I have so far I don't like. His heals are pretty helpful though. Would the buffs and stuff from Paladin chick be good enough to make up for losing those?
Well for one thing I've learned to dislike healing in this game because that's actually how you get yourselves killed. Yeah, you can make it through a long combat but if you keep it up too long you're done. So I don't know if Durance is necessary for that reason.
However his utility from all the OTHER spells he can do is amazing. Paladins are pretty underwhelming by comparison to just about every other class. They're too jack-of-all-trades.
Wii U NNID: TJandSam Steam: BrokenBrik
No, I really don't think it would be.
They've left room for you to do this if you absolutely need to, but you normally don't need to, and that's why you don't. If you want to keep your momentum going and have a good experience with the game, then deciding when to use your best spells and how to mete out your resources is an important part of the game. If you want to go back to an inn and rest after every fight... well, yeah, then it's not, but you're also probably not having very much fun.
The game is (ostensibly) balanced so that you have to make some nontrivial decisions about when to use your resources. Of course you can break it if you need or want to, but to say that it would ever be standard to do that I think is disingenuous. You do not always have to play in a mechanically optimal way.
Wii U NNID: TJandSam Steam: BrokenBrik
Darn.
I'll have to play around with it. Maybe I'll make a custom priest, The DR spell is pretty darn useful.
I'm also upset they didn't give us those feathery godlike for character creation. I would totally have played one of them.
Wii U NNID: TJandSam Steam: BrokenBrik
If so, on the one hand slightly dissapointed, on the other nice to have an obvious target for benching when I find the next party member.
There is one more big character reveal that you'll get after resting with Aloth later.
Weird thing is that the design isn't as bizarre as most godlike, IIRC she has a normal face and even normal hair, the fro is one of the designs you can pick from! It's just that they texture it like feathers.
What's her racial anyway? Never even looked at that. Is she a nature godlike?
it's a whole different type of godlike.
Which is what I was saying I wish they allowed us to make.
Also, I'm loving this system. I wish I can play this on a tabletop setting, though the amount of calculations would just make combat a chore.
Chanters are the summoner class. While none of the phrases are summons, from the invocations you have 2 (of 7) at first level, 2 (of 6) at second level and 2 (of 6) at third level. (That's invocation level not character level)
However anyone can be a summoner if you make use of the awesome summoning items you can find throughout the game.
I feel like charm and dominate are as good as summoning, if not even better, because they add units to your team and subtract from the enemy, though only for a short time.
--Mark Twain
Sounds like he had a hard day's night.
I'm nowhere near the end of the game, but I've got a feeling it's best to do that fight with a little help from my friends.
But I wanted to let you know, I deeply appreciate the thread title.
PSN: Threeve703
My problem with those item summons is that they're once per rest, and they go away after combat. It's just like "Hello! ...Goodbye."
At present the only check on resting is a nominal fee and boredom. I absolutely believe if you had infinite buff rests without four loading screens, people would hit the rest button as often as they felt like it. Maybe they wouldn't rest a ton because the game is easy anyway and even viewing the vision for two seconds is more time than necessary to beat the next set of beetles up, but that's about it.
I'm not saying you have to play in an optimal way, I just find it strange that the game is partially balanced around being too bored to get more rests. I'd find it interesting if there was some kind of time dependent quest or series of encounters that made resting possible but going back to town infeasible, along with actually difficult encounters, so that limited supplies actually mattered.
That is kind of what you're saying though, in a way. You're saying you'd find it more interesting if you couldn't go back and rest every encounter, but you already don't have to do that. You only have to rest as often as you PERSONALLY have to. If you rest more often than that, it's your option. Forcing yourself to continue on without resting is a form of user-defined difficulty, similar to choosing the crappy starting character class in a souls game.
Saying "you can arbitrarily limit yourself" as a reason for game design decisions seems really lazy. I never went back to rest a ton because the game was generally trivial. The point I am making is simply that their design decisions have made it so that supplies are not limited based on any real resource but player time; even the different camping supply limit on different difficulties simply changes how often you need to go through loading screens to find a shop.
I would rather they take advantage of the supply limit in a way that forces all players to play in a certain way, so they could actually design encounters more tightly and maybe squeeze some real difficulty into the game. Changing the supply limit for higher difficulties could actually have some interesting gameplay effects that required you to ration spell usages (if encounters weren't trivial, anyway) if supplies weren't always a loading screen away. As-is, the decision to limit supplies based on player boredom means that to be difficult, future expansions will either have to be designed around firing off high level spells and resting, or will be trivialized by resting frequently. While yes, you can choose to simply not do the latter, that doesn't make that design choice any better.
EDIT: To explain why I think designing to avoid player tedium as a balancing factor is a good idea, I'll use an example from another game. In Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (square-grid roguelike), there was a spell called Ignite Poison that would, along with hurting poisonous enemies, destroy any poisoned items on the ground and cause a cloud of fire to appear there. You could simply carry around large stacks of poison arrows, throw them on the ground around you, drag monsters to the area, and hit them with an entire screen of fire clouds, hitting a much larger area with higher selectivity than most spells in the game. While pretty much nobody would actually perform such a boring task, the fire cloud effect removed because of the philosophy that boring/tedious play should not be more optimal than fun play. That's why I think the whole "camping supplies" thing is silly; you don't have to spam rests, but at present the optimal play clashes with that, and I think that designing so that optimal play and non-tedious play are one and the same is better in general; the player never feels like they're sacrificing something to speed up the game and you can more tightly design encounters because you don't have to worry about cheese.
For one specific example in PoE, the Endless Paths. The only difference between allowing me to rest endlessly there and allowing me to rest based on supplies is that I have to go through at least six loading screens simply to rest in bed, and an additional two loading screens if I want to buy more camping supplies. The Endless Paths will almost always take more rests to clear than you have camping supplies (maybe on Easy with 6 you could clear the whole thing?), but there's never a point where you couldn't just walk back up and get filled up for the area boss. It combines with how poorly done the Stronghold is in general, but it shows exactly why designing around boredom doesn't add anything to the game, since those dungeons were more of a slog (and then the Adra Dragon) than actually difficult.
It absolutely is not! It seems to me the decision they made was that the game should not be so difficult that it would prevent someone from finishing the game. I think they've balanced the game on the assumption that players will rest a number of times per dungeon equal to the number of camping supplies they can carry. This means that players who are having too hard of a time with it can simply fall back on all their most powerful stuff more often, since few if any encounters are balanced with "the player will throw the kitchen sink at this encounter" in mind.
Most players will not do this, not because they would get bored going back to rest, but because they'd get bored with trivial fights all the time. Having to save resources makes fights harder, and the difficulty setting of the game is only one way in which the game modulates difficulty.
This isn't a game that aims to force players to play in any way pretty much ever, so this seems like it would be an incredibly poor choice. This was never going to be a game that punished you and disallowed you to progress unless you were properly optimized. I haven't played on the higher difficulties but from what I hear it's not as insane as the game would have you believe? Honestly really not sure.
You keep saying that resting is gated by player boredom, but you're missing the point completely. You're not supposed to rest until you need to rest. If you don't need to spend all your resources on a fight, you shouldn't. And until you do, you don't need to rest. The system is exactly as forgiving as you need it to be.
You make a very good point here, and I absolutely agree with you that fun play and optimal play should try to coincide as much as absolutely possible. I had this problem in bloodborne when I was fighting the final boss, since the only way I found I could kill him was by being very passive and poking him with a spear when he opened himself up during his final form. Maybe I'm bad, but all the other bosses encouraged aggression and they were fun, but he was absolutely just the worst, and I hated him. That's another really good example of your point, I think. (also it took forever because my spear was not leveled up)
I just don't see the lack of camping supplies / rest gating as even a remotely good example of this, since this is a case where the delta between optimal and suboptimal play is so small that there's no reason to go through the tedium: there's not enough gain. Like you said, the fights were easy- and you go on to say that you wish there'd been more difficulty built in to the game, but I really just don't think tightly tuned difficulty was in the cards for this one. I think they wanted it to be more accessible than they wanted it to reward skilled players.
The Phantom summon for first level is terrifically good. All the things that make Phantoms an enormous pain in the ass on the enemy's side, at your fingertips.
This is a game that stated Medium difficulty would be too hard for players who hadn't played a NWN style game in a while. I did, in fact, come into the game expecting some level of difficulty in encounters, and I still wish it would do so. They've also stated they wanted to design it so there was no way to make a "bad" character (a lofty goal), which is evident with how weak talents are compared to the massive number of spells you get for free. They absolutely could have designed the game such that encounters were difficult without making content totally inaccessible; the only reason the supply issue doesn't wind up mattering is simply because they made the game either completely trivial (an incredibly high number of trash encounters) or something you either cheese or petrify (Adra Dragon).
That's exactly what being gated by boredom is! Not using effectively infinite resources because you can get by while spending less resources and less time.
Well, that's fair I suppose. It's unfortunate that things didn't live up to your expectations, for sure, especially assuming they said the things you quote. (I wasn't following this game for most of its development or the kickstarter so I wouldn't know, my assumptions regarding their decisions are just based on playing)
Though I think that we are thinking about the phrase "gated by boredom" in a fundamentally different way. I don't think that limiting use of a theoretically infinite resource is problematic at all.
To be clear, we're talking about trading in time for a resource that's theoretically limited only by time:
If your city starts making money in Cities: Skylines, you could just turn it on the fastest speed and then leave for work and come back 8 hours later to essentially infinite cash. Would you say that I was arbitrarily limiting myself if I chose not to do that?
If I played final fantasy 7 until the first inn, I could theoretically level my character up high enough to kill the final boss before leaving for the next area, trivializing the rest of the fights in the game. Would you say I was arbitrarily limiting myself if I chose not to do that?
In world of warcraft you don't usually rest between every trash pull in a dungeon (hell you usually don't rest until a boss), but resting between trash pulls allows you to be at full health and mana when you start the next trash pull. Would you say we were arbitrarily limiting ourselves if our group chose to chain pull instead of resting between pulls?
In all three of these cases you are taking time you don't need to take in order to optimize yourself for whatever you're doing next, be that infinite cash, full health and mana, or being grossly overleveled. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the game is poorly designed for expecting you NOT to engage in these patterns.
[edit] ...NOT to engage in these patterns unless you have to. [/edit]