Goblin Squad Member
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Enjoyable video, glad to see limited slots (takes me back to early EQ!, but with more importance on what is really there).
Also glad to hear about the hit points healing after every fight, sounds like a good balance with the injury system, seems like it makes going out without a healer more viable (particularly if playing a bandit role), at least for short periods of time/limited encounters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thanks it's cool to hear about divine spell caster's. What I really want to know is will there be the equivalent of prestige classes that will allow a character to go up in two different spell casting classes such as the Mystic Theurge? Obviously I would expect this to be available on EE or OE but it would be nice to know if further down the track it's an option, so players don't design dual spell casters in vain.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What I really want to know is will there be the equivalent of prestige classes that will allow a character to go up in two different spell casting classes such as the Mystic Theurge?
I highly recommend posting this question in Blogs and Q&A Videos: Submit questions here.
Glad to see you're still around, btw.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Yep, I've been running Kingmaker for about a year now for several of the programmers and rotating guest party members from the other departments. We're about three sessions into module 4 (don't spoil them on what's coming ;) ) . I have my own boxes full of minis in the office that I use for most things, but the Pathfinder minis are useful for a lot of the monsters I don't have (particularly bigger things I don't have a mini for). Sadly, we have a ton of goblin minis, but Kingmaker features mites and kobolds instead, so I didn't get much use out of them :) .
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just wanted to say, love the injury point system, and the idea of healers having to balance HP vs IP against short term and long term needs. ...In some ways, what you have are opposite versions of two things, you have short term and long therm health (HP and IP), and short term and long term mana/energy (Stamina/Power).
I like the symetry.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The injury system sounds good in theory, I wonder how it is working in practice =D
Clerics being up-close-and-dirty is a good thing, touch-based heals are also good. It sounds like combat positioning (tank up front, mages in back) will be more tactical for parties which is also a good thing.
I wonder if there are other ways to deal with injuries apart from clerical spells (heal skill?)
The orison wand-styled system also sounds promising, but can we and how do we recharge them? O_o
Good coverage of some divine casting questions and general cleric abilities.
Thanks GW folks and look forward to the next blog... in 2 weeks >_<
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Goblin Squad Member
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The injury system sounds good in theory, I wonder how it is working in practice =D
Clerics being up-close-and-dirty is a good thing, touch-based heals are also good. It sounds like combat positioning (tank up front, mages in back) will be more tactical for parties which is also a good thing.
I wonder if there are other ways to deal with injuries apart from clerical spells (heal skill?)
The orison wand-styled system also sounds promising, but can we and how do we recharge them? O_o
Good coverage of some divine casting questions and general cleric abilities.
Thanks GW folks and look forward to the next blog... in 2 weeks >_<
I can imagine martial skills that can block or minimize some critical hits within certain time periods, Or abilities that temporarily negate them (thinking barbarian rage maybe).
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Thank you for covering crits! They're biggest wildcard in the combat system IMO.
How does the crit roll actually work?
This is something I forgot to mention in the video that's one of the other cool side effects of going to the injury threshold system rather than modular debuffs: we can now have a bonus to chance to crit and a bonus to magnitude of crit that's much closer to tabletop. That is, swords crit more often while axes and bows crit less often but for more injury when they do crit.
We're still tuning the crit formula for the new injury system, so for now I'll just say that it's rolled independently and has a lot to do with margin of success; the more you exceed the target's defense with your hit roll, the greater your chance to crit (and failing to exceed the target's defense means no crit).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you for covering crits! They're biggest wildcard in the combat system IMO.
How does the crit roll actually work?
This is something I forgot to mention in the video that's one of the other cool side effects of going to the injury threshold system rather than modular debuffs: we can now have a bonus to chance to crit and a bonus to magnitude of crit that's much closer to tabletop. That is, swords crit more often while axes and bows crit less often but for more injury when they do crit.
We're still tuning the crit formula for the new injury system, so for now I'll just say that it's rolled independently and has a lot to do with margin of success; the more you exceed the target's defense with your hit roll, the greater your chance to crit (and failing to exceed the target's defense means no crit).
Interesting twist on the crit!
Is the roll tier based like attack rolls are or do all tiers use the same type of roll?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you for covering crits! They're biggest wildcard in the combat system IMO.
How does the crit roll actually work?
This is something I forgot to mention in the video that's one of the other cool side effects of going to the injury threshold system rather than modular debuffs: we can now have a bonus to chance to crit and a bonus to magnitude of crit that's much closer to tabletop. That is, swords crit more often while axes and bows crit less often but for more injury when they do crit.
We're still tuning the crit formula for the new injury system, so for now I'll just say that it's rolled independently and has a lot to do with margin of success; the more you exceed the target's defense with your hit roll, the greater your chance to crit (and failing to exceed the target's defense means no crit).
So, here's an interesting question - how much will level play into crits. I'm imagining a situation in which a higher level character fighting a bunch of lower level newbies will always be in danger of taking HP damage, however they would be relatively well protected from injuries. Conversly, lower level players might be able to defend themselves against a higher level player, but at the expense of significant injuries, meaning they can't zerg swarm for long stretches of time.
I can also imagine that monsters can be ranked by their injury potential, with bossess quickly stacking up injuries on unprepared groups.
Is this something you've talked about or considered?
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Crits are a standard percentile chance based on size of margin of success and other factors. And we love square roots over here, so they're pretty sharply curved. Together that means that when opponents outclass you, they should be critting much more often, but not so much that every hit is a crit, and you may not crit at all unless you get a really lucky full hit that also meets the small chance of crit.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Crits are a standard percentile chance based on size of margin of success and other factors. And we love square roots over here, so they're pretty sharply curved. Together that means that when opponents outclass you, they should be critting much more often, but not so much that every hit is a crit, and you may not crit at all unless you get a really lucky full hit that also meets the small chance of crit.
Thanks Stephen!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good eye Nightdrifter! I would definitely not characterize that as a "minor detail" the chat features are very important to a PC-interaction based game. I was actually messing around with the idea of asking about it. Good to see others are taking interest as much, if not more so, than I.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you for the video, it's a really cool thing to offer the community. One concern I have is with clerics being medium armor, touch based healers. I kind of have the idea of my character being a "holy caster." More of the stand in the back and cast curses, heals and some long-range DPS while wearing a robe. Will this be at all possible?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Crits are a standard percentile chance based on size of margin of success and other factors. And we love square roots over here, so they're pretty sharply curved. Together that means that when opponents outclass you, they should be critting much more often, but not so much that every hit is a crit, and you may not crit at all unless you get a really lucky full hit that also meets the small chance of crit.
Ran a quick monte carlo based on this (100,000 attack rolls). For each tier I treat the odds of getting a crit as:
constant*sqrt(how far above you rolled)
Horizontal axis is attack skill minus relevant defense skill (reflex, fort, will as appropriate) ignoring the 50 granted for tier. So 0 means equal skill. Positive favors the attacker and negative favors the defender.
Vertical axis gives the odds of getting a crit up to an unknown scale factor. So it's not absolute probabilities, but rather relative probabilities. Each plot is for someone of a given offensive tier against someone of an equal defensive tier. (To deal with different defensive tiers just shift left or right by 50 on the horizontal axis as appropriate.)
Results are surprisingly similar across tiers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the magic users has their spellbook, clerics have their holy symbol, and fighters have their trophy charm. What do rouges have?
See here: By the Time I Lose It, I'm Not Afraid
A Wizard's Spellbook (of course), which contains arcane spells
A Cleric's Holy Symbol, which contains divine spells
A Fighter's Trophy Charm, which contains self-buffing maneuvers
A Rogue's Rogue Kit, which contains poisons and other alchemical and mechanical tricks
An Aristocrat's Banner/Warhorn, which contains party-buffing maneuvers
An Expert's Toolkit, which contains maneuvers that buff or destroy structures
A Commoner's Holdout Weapon, which contains surprising attacks
Edit: Shane Gifford beat me to it.
Edit 2: A rouge might have a powder kit.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you for the video, it's a really cool thing to offer the community. One concern I have is with clerics being medium armor, touch based healers. I kind of have the idea of my character being a "holy caster." More of the stand in the back and cast curses, heals and some long-range DPS while wearing a robe. Will this be at all possible?
Sounds like a WoW Priest instead of the Pathfinder Cleric.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thank you for the video, it's a really cool thing to offer the community. One concern I have is with clerics being medium armor, touch based healers. I kind of have the idea of my character being a "holy caster." More of the stand in the back and cast curses, heals and some long-range DPS while wearing a robe. Will this be at all possible?Sounds like a WoW Priest instead of the Pathfinder Cleric.
Actually there are tons of characters like this in Pathfinder, including many of the Gods and Godesses. Also, if anything, it sounds like a play style that can be found in many games (and yes, WoW would be one them you enlightened soul, you!)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Actually there are tons of characters like this in Pathfinder, including many of the Gods and Godesses. Also, if anything, it sounds like a play style that can be found in many games (and yes, WoW would be one them you enlightened soul, you!)Thank you for the video, it's a really cool thing to offer the community. One concern I have is with clerics being medium armor, touch based healers. I kind of have the idea of my character being a "holy caster." More of the stand in the back and cast curses, heals and some long-range DPS while wearing a robe. Will this be at all possible?Sounds like a WoW Priest instead of the Pathfinder Cleric.
Ya, you probably could do that, but for the life of me I can not remember any ranged healing spells besides the mass versions of the cure spells and/or wish.
A lot of the cleric spells are touch spells, I believe. The low-level ones, at least.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You can wear a robe if you want. Not any benefit to doing that over wearing actual armor though.
As for standing back and being a mage caster type cleric, that is possible in tabletop, and the video blog said that they'll have damage spells as well as healing, so I think it would probably be possible.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There was alot of discussion about Clerics healing and emphasis on them not standing in the back and instead up in the mix healing and bashing things. That's cool.
What I hope is that the GW team doesn't get blinders on cleric spells and focusing on only the healing aspects. I would hope to see many of the offensive cleric spells in the game as well as the "buffs" and "debuffs" and utilities. Bane, Entropic Shield, Obscuring Mists, Dispel Magic, Flame Strike, etc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You can wear a robe if you want. Not any benefit to doing that over wearing actual armor though.If by 'robe' you mean cloth armor (ie. no physical resistance) then there are some benefits since lighter armor can be enchanted to have better energy resistance than heavier armor.
Ah, that's true. I was in my tabletop mentality instead of PfO. In tabletop there's pretty much 0 reason to not have on at least light armor if you have proficiency and don't have to worry about arcane spellcasting. But you make a good point here; perhaps clerics wearing robes will be commonplace, if it turns out that everyone and their mother plays casties.
Then there's also the robe wearing fighter, aka the dervish who specializes in anti-caster measures. Better move speed to chase them down, better resists against magic, better reflex. I think it would be pretty cool to see.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah, the reach spell metamagic feat. It increases a spell's range with a cost of one level per range type (touch, close, medium, long.)
Still can't outcast a wizard, but is closer.
@V'rel, I would assume they won't forget the debuffs. They are an important part of being a cleric.
A very important part.
Cuz if I can't literally blow his socks off, I better be able to cast the curse of flea attraction on his unmentionables.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Still can't outcast a wizard, but is closer.Though that's true, the intent was whether or not it's a feasible thing, not whether it's the best thing.
Under tabletop rules, yes I would say it is feasible. You would have to give up on casting your highest level spells (which might be ranged already) so you could cast at a distance.
For PFO rules, I would assume it would depend on what you are fighting. Fire elementals? Go robe. Dragon? Robe could work. Fighters with non-elementalized weapons? Armor all the way.
However since they did say that healing spells would be touch spells in the video, I would assume that you will have to enter close-ranged combat every so often to heal your friends, or lose your friends.
If you want to stand back and throw curses, wait for Witches to come out. I mean, Patrons are a fair bit like gods, really. Otherwise, just multiclass cleric/wizard or the like.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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One of the things we're trying is to set up Clerics to be ideal midfielders.
You hang in between the Fighter and the Wizard throwing out ranged Orisons and Spells and sometimes walking up to tag the Fighter with a touch buff/heal (keeping him in between you and the enemy). You've got a bunch of good point blank AoE buffs/heals so you can tag the front line and the back row relatively easily if they're not too spread out. If you see someone trying to rush around the Fighter to get to the Wizard, you can move up to try to block, switching to melee weapons or touch effects. With medium armor, you can't tank as well as the Fighter, but you can certainly take toe-to-toe melee damage a lot longer than the Wizard or Rogue. If someone decides to make a concentrated effort to try to take out the healer, you can hold out for a while as the Rogue moves up to assault the targets focused on you.
Will that actually wind up being the way it gets used by skilled groups? It's hard to tell until you guys start trying out tactics, but it should give us an interesting place to start from.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While the focus on touch based heals makes me very happy I have to say the injury system makes me a bit concerned.
From playtesting, does it feel like a innovative system or does it feel like keeping track of twice as many bars?
I'm also concerned because the change from debuffs to a meter seems to streamline the whole process. While streamlining is in itself not a problem IIRC injures where intended to be a long term effect that would have you stop fighting and deal with it. Now it sounds like dealing with an injury is casting a spell that would increase the health meter or casting a spell to decrease the injury meter.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good video. Although one point - you need to work on they audio pick up placement. It was a bit washed out/echoey.
Maybe get get some lapel mics or a more directional mic.
Haven't played PF tabletop, only old school (<2E) D&D and DDO. So I'm not sure how the combat system works in PF.
Although I like the idea if injury points as a resource manage mechanic, I'm not sure if I'm keen for spike damage to be dropped for PvE. The visceral feeling of bit hits are what make combat interesting - both in MMOs and on the tabletop.
That said crits can be harder to balance against power levelling curves.
In PvP you could i) have some mechanic (purely for pvp) like fortification in DDO that stops crits or ii) force people like in Secret World to hybridise and add more HPs to their builds.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Although I like the idea if injury points as a resource manage mechanic, I'm not sure if I'm keen for spike damage to be dropped for PvE. The visceral feeling of bit hits are what make combat interesting - both in MMOs and on the tabletop.
That said crits can be harder to balance against power levelling curves.
In PvP you could i) have some mechanic (purely for pvp) like fortification in DDO that stops crits or ii) force people like in Secret World to hybridise and add more HPs to their builds.
It was stated early on by Ryan (and possibly other devs) that spike damage like crits are not "meaningful" (or some other similar wording) and they were going to work on an alternative system. While we are still early on in the crowdforging part of the game, they will likely try a couple of things to see how they work - the injury system and reduced crit effects are likely experimental (but seem to be workable in theory.) So there is a bit more consideration and reduced-spike-damage-by-design than there may seem =D
While the whole game is a balancing act of juggling goblin balls, we need to actually try some of the systems to provide feedback to the devs on what actually works in practice. That means alpha and EE along with on-going commentary on what we see in the forums and blogs.
At the end of the day, the game needs to be fun (and engaging and enduring and more fun!)
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Goblin Squad Member
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While the whole game is a balancing act of juggling goblin balls,
Quality. Saving that.
...we need to actually try some of the systems to provide feedback to the devs on what actually works in practice. That means alpha and EE along with on-going commentary on what we see in the forums and blogs.
At the end of the day, the game needs to be fun (and engaging and enduring and more fun!)
At least 50% of the game/fun in the last 10% of "development" when play-testing, it seems. *gulp*
=
Thanks for the vlog Stephen and Lee. Different presentations always good in my book. The influence and reference to TT definitely inspires the promise of tactical combat that already exists in the TT, so I hope you guys are finding success with this approach, it seems to resonate with the players of the TT (TT games in general) here already, which is perhaps the most important group of players for PFO??
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Goblin Squad Member
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Really glad you moved the blog to a real blog tool with links to posts (with titles !), archives by date and an RSS feed (hurray ! I can add your blog to my Netvibes page !).
I guess the only thing missing would be a search box, unless you rely on Google for that.
And I have a small question: is it possible to restore the previous links and make them point to the blog articles in the new format ?
I linked several times some of your blog posts in my guild forum posts using the url I found for each article: https://goblinworks.com/blog/index.html/#20140219 was the one for https://goblinworks.com/blog/now-i-understand-the-supernova-scene/ . It would be nice to have these links still functionnal and redirected to their original articles. I might not be the only one who did this, and there might be a number of articles on the web that linked back to your blog posts in that way.
Thanks for the good work !
Moonbird
