I really liked poe2 and would play a third one.
I really liked that they made powers per-encounter instead of per-rest. Per-rest really doesn’t work well despite DND trying really hard. It especially doesn’t work well without a human steering to prevent things like “you killed everyone in the castle, now go rest for 8 hours before opening the final door to the boss”. Or you can programmatically enforce that, but players don’t like that. Mostly because it sucks to do like an hour of stuff and realize you’re too low on resources to win, and have to reload.
I’d probably prefer the stats to be coarser or more meaningful. It’s hard to get a feel for “3% more damage”. Especially when the base damage is like 5-15.
Eh, I’d much prefer a system of mana. Resource management should be more than a single fight, but vancian casting was always a stupid idea.
How I feel about mana depends largely on how quickly it regenerates. It can be just a reskin of spells-per-day or spells-per-encounter, or it could be something more interesting.
DA:O had unlimited mana potions, which meant essentially you spend a small amount of time to refresh mid fight. Not very deep tactically, but more or less fine.
I don’t think resource management is really a thing most people actually enjoy. Most people don’t like timed missions, so you probably don’t want to use that to prevent people from resting a lot. You don’t want to soft-lock players by letting them blow their resources too soon, so they can’t win the fight but don’t have a way to restore. The dark souls style “you reset at the checkpoint but so do the monsters. Keep trying until you get it right” works for me, but a lot of people hate that.
There are so many ways you could do magic, and it’s a bummer that vancian magic takes up so much space.
DND just isn’t as good and universal as people think it is, but it’s hugely influential anyway.
Side note: DND is balanced around like 6 “medium” encounters per day. You’re supposed to slowly trickle down your resources. Turns out most groups do one encounter per day on average, and then the system doesn’t work very well at all. There’s lot of patches (eg: gritty realism) but the problem remains people don’t seem to want to do that kind of cadence.
The 3% more damage and 3% better defense happens every level, and even though that was toned down from PoE1, it still means that each level scales way harder than 5e, like proficiency bonuses on crack. Per-encounter design is good on paper, but then you can end up weirdly splitting some fights into multiple encounters so you have all of your spells refreshed for a couple of enemies, which is odd in its own way. From the first 5 hours with Avowed so far, I think they found an interesting balance on resting and consumables, which could still stand to be tweaked further but solves some of those per-encounter problems.
I meant how in poe1 and 2 might (the stat) is 3% more damage per point, so it’s hard to feel the difference between might 10 and might 15. Does +15% of 10 damage make a meaningful difference? It’s probably the same as +12%, right, or is there decimal damage too? I guess when multiplied by power levels it’s a bigger deal, but that’s kind of opaque.
Also “like proficiency bonuses on crack” is deeply funny to me as someone who played DND 3e. Base attack bonus every level, skill ranks up every level, oh so many memories and not all of them good.
I still have yet to play a 3e game in video game or tabletop, but yes, I figured PoE got most of its ideas from 3e. Here’s where we get down more to personal preferences, but I really prefer a flatter leveling structure for all sorts of reasons, and even though 3-5% per level doesn’t sound like much, it super is, lol. Like, it makes you get hit significantly less and land hits significantly more, and you get that every level. 5e speaks more to my preferences in that way, though it too isn’t perfect, of course.
PoE2 definitely learned to steer away from those minor bonuses as level up rewards, because it had since been heavily studied what people like and do not like in certain leveling systems and why, and those minor damage upgrades were at the top of the list. Anything combat related during level ups were changed to skills, and I thought the passive bonus selections felt meaningful.
“We got into game making to make games we want, but now we can’t make games we want because of other people”
That’s a weird read on it. It’s more like, “how big could we feasibly make that game when it needs to sell enough copies to keep our people employed?”
If passion is weird, I don’t wanna be normal.
Keep it weird!
I’d buy a copy.
Kickstart it again bitches
(I don’t join Kickstarters)
Humongous. I guess spell check and proofreading are no longer necessary for any level of journalism.
Both spellings are correct.
Edit: Just to clarify. It’s UK / US thing. Humongous are US spellings.
This is merica and we here speak merican, don’t like it, fuck off to whatever shithole coutry you came from.
Hugh Mungus the Homunculus.
