Pillars of Eternity II - Developer Playthrough

wolfing said:

I still think it's just trying to reinvent the wheel. What's wrong with good ol' Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, etc?

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It is not following the rule of holy balance decided by Sawyer.

wolfing said:

I still think it's just trying to reinvent the wheel. What's wrong with good ol' Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, etc?

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Because certain people find the idea of dump stats offensive, and want every class to be perfectly balanced. ;-) Of course, if you make the 'why re-invent the wheel?' argument you get panned for not wanting 'innovation'. I have this vision in my mind of Mr Sawyer with a giant Excel spreadsheet, frantically trying to reconcile numbers across different classes….

Over balancing can lead to class homogenization. The MMO Dark Age of Camelot was an excellent and obvious example of this. Originally, the game had very unique classes that, taken as a whole of all the available classes fight against each other in large-scale battles, were very well balanced. One vs. one, one class could certainly be weaker than another but stronger than others, too.

Then, EA bought the company. They proceeded to nerf and alter each class so no one player ever felt bad about getting "owned" by another. They certainly did balance each class. They made it so each class was very much like any other and stripped all originality and variety from the game. I quit playing soon after.

I think Sawyer took is quest against dump stats too far.

Full voice acting in PoE2, niceee

Capt. Huggy Face said:

I think Sawyer took is quest against dump stats too far.

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He actually doesn't care about dump stats, he just want each stat to have some use. Resolve and Constitution were dump stats in POE1 unless you made a tank, it's no different in Deadfire. The spell damage split from Might to Resolve was actually attempted because some testers complained Resolve was useless, then reverted because testers complained it nerfed their damage builds too much.

Archangel said:

It is not following the rule of holy balance decided by Sawyer.

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People are critical of that, but having good balance in a RPG provides a wider range of viable characters you can build. In D&D, your Wizard is pretty much stuck being high INT. But what if you want to play a hedge wizard -- not especially smart but still talented at certain forms of magic? I know you could possibly play that via a Sorcerer, but there you're instead stuck playing a high CHA character. Not much of an improvement in terms of design flexibility.

Personally I think HERO/Champions had the best solution for balance -- power-based point buy. Plus it doesn't lead to homogeneous characters.

rjshae said:

In D&D, your Wizard is pretty much stuck being high INT. But what if you want to play a hedge wizard -- not especially smart but still talented at certain forms of magic?

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You are not stuck with hight INT.
You can still play a wizard with lower INT. Of course he has less spell slots, which imho would be totally fine for a hedge wizard. To depict the talent for certain forms of magic you may use feats.

rjshae said:

People are critical of that, but having good balance in a RPG provides a wider range of viable characters you can build. In D&D, your Wizard is pretty much stuck being high INT. But what if you want to play a hedge wizard -- not especially smart but still talented at certain forms of magic? I know you could possibly play that via a Sorcerer, but there you're instead stuck playing a high CHA character. Not much of an improvement in terms of design flexibility.

Personally I think HERO/Champions had the best solution for balance -- power-based point buy. Plus it doesn't lead to homogeneous characters.

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You are mixing apples and oranges. In D&D if you want to play another archetype you don't pick an existing one and change a few stats, you pick another class.
If such class does not exist you sit down with your GM and create a new class for you.

But you certainly don't change how all the stats work and change the design principles from simulation to card games.

I tend to agree with both sides of the argument when it comes to dump stats Vs balance.

The thing I disliked was the constant patching that broke builds and messed things up when I first started playing PoE.

I understand the need for fine tuning but at the end of the day in a single player game balance is up to the player.

In BG you could make things easier for yourself by picking a Ranger/Cleric multi class and cast both clerical and druidic spells or you could play the hard way and choose a Beastmaster Ranger instead and make the game much harder. By experimenting you could even realise the true potential of kits that were universally despised like the Jester for instance.

In any case I won't argue that to strive to achieve some balance is good but too much of it can be extremely stifling and at times that's how I felt about Pillars.

Archangel said:

You are mixing apples and oranges. In D&D if you want to play another archetype you don't pick an existing one and change a few stats, you pick another class.
If such class does not exist you sit down with your GM and create a new class for you.

But you certainly don't change how all the stats work and change the design principles from simulation to card games.

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If you have to modify the RPG to get the character you want, that's not good game design. That's crappy, restrictive, game design.

rjshae said:

If you have to modify the RPG to get the character you want, that's not good game design. That's crappy game design.

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You are right! You go girl! Go tell that mean D&D franchise that what they have been doing for 35+ years is bad and wrong! Go Go