Goblin Squad Member
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In no particular order, the following is a list of observations and impressions from day one:
- The tethering mechanism is easily exploitable to solo entire camps of creatures by engaging from max range and then just taking a few steps backwards when you want to disengaged. The mobs reach their tether distance and run back to camp.
- Iron ore (and possibly other base crafting materials) are not dropping from nodes so crafting is impossible.
- Not having any indicator of the source of incoming damage makes it really easy to gank other players before they realize what's going on.
- Character wipe upon logout combined with repeated power outages in my neighborhood (five so far tonight) makes for a frustrating combination.
- Several times early in the evening, my character model simply vanished and movement keys stopped working. The UI was still responsive but I no longer had a character to move.
- At one point, I had somehow been removed from all chat channels. Hard to ask for help on that one. Couldn't even whisper anyone.
- Twice the client thought it was still connected to the server but clearly was not; there were no NPC guards in town, no trainers, no other players, etc.
- Having some devs in game to answer questions that the UI could not yet answer was really helpful (like, "What do I need to do to reach level 2?")
I'm sure there are others but these are the ones that come to mind at 3:30 in the morning.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So who killed you? ;)Not having any indicator of the source of incoming damage makes it really easy to gank other players before they realize what's going on.
I actually like this. Getting jumped SHOULD be a bewildering experience, and the moments of confusion should grant the attacker a moment of advantage.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So who killed you? ;)Not having any indicator of the source of incoming damage makes it really easy to gank other players before they realize what's going on.
In my case it was a female wizard named Gimli. Or was it Gloin? As soon as I spawned for the first time into the game and before I even figured out how to use the few defenses I had.
She apparently had no mana management problems. I was able to fire off my cleric's 'Lance' divine spell once at her but then it wouldn't fire any more. When I respawned I wandered around a bit and then saw her again. So I tried to attack her again, and again I got one 'lance' off on her and had no other offensive move while she cast some sort of beam attack repeatedly, and, since I now had an attacker flag (I assume: there was no apparent signal of this state) the guards attacked me. The guards are fairly evadable but their long swords have twice the reach you expect from the appearance of the swords.
When I respawned the guards resumed attacking me. I had seen quite a bit of the settlement so I decided to explore. I saw no mobs. The game froze when I tried to enter another hex, probably an extended loading sequence. I was already up too late (I had to work today) so I closed the client using the task manager.
Overall the performance of the game was smooth and without flaw. The graphics are still in a primitive state, which is totally something I expected at this early alpha stage. In game chat did not appear to be functional, but it was provided for.
All in all I found the game in a very encouraging state. I just have a bunch of stuff to learn about life in Golarion.
I actually like this. Getting jumped SHOULD be a bewildering experience, and the moments of confusion should grant the attacker a moment of advantage.
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe a highly trained adventurer wouldn't be able to realize he was hit by an arrow or stabbed in the back (the only exception may be spells that inflict debuffs instead of damage)
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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From the streams I've been watching, I suspect the beam attack is their ray of frost which they seem to be able to use very, very often and hits surprisingly hard.
This would be my guess as well. The wizards can burn down a target reather quickly compared to a cleric trying to smash it in the face.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Wurner I think you have the right of it. I did have scant time before I had to sleep, so I figured out very little in my brief visit. The videos Dakcenturi made have been very informative for my session this afternoon. I was hoping my xp would accumulate and my low rep earned in the first session may have worn off??? If not then I'll likely have to start anew anyway.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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For my first impressions it was pretty much along the lines of what I was expecting. Some of the key issues that stood out to me include
- Moving between hexes has a big lag effect which is very noticeable. However the size of the world (even only 8x7 hex) felt really big. I think until their are mounts of some faster means of travel people in the north/south or east/west are going to be pretty seperate from one another.
- As mentioned in the patch notes there aren't any details on how to advance which makes things a little difficult. On top of this when you are training skills there aren't descriptions of what they do which makes it even harder to know if it is something you need or not.
- It is nice to have the ability to drag/drop items onto the character sheet, though I was having issues dropping a shield. I managed to get it on there at some point. Although thinking about it maybe it was part of the invisibility of weapons issue since I think the light shield worked but the heavy shield did not.
- I really liked that the players wearing heavier armor moved at a slower rate than players with light or no armor. However, the wizards just seemed to run amazingly fast! With them already having ranged spells and their fast movement I'm not sure that melee based characters would be able to keep up in a fight.
- The party mechanics were good when they worked. Looking forward to seeing them be a little more reliable (our party just disappeared at one point and it would come back at random sometimes). Also looking forward to having a bigger indicator of party members on the map. Would love to see them on the world map also, not just the minimap.
- People stacking is great fun! Sounds like I missed a good time trying to get onto the mountain but it was late for me.
- Tab targetting and combat work but I see a lot of refinement needed in the future, especially for melee based characters.
- Still getting a hang of the keyboard controls, but as others mentioned would be great to have re-binds!
All in all a great experience for something that I've been waiting on for almost 2 years. Look forward to jumping in again tonight and testing out some more things, specifically around getting skills, maybe some crafting and hopefully some PvP. I will try to be on during their livestream in case they need extra bodies to test things out. Also looking forward to testing goals from the devs :)
As a side note, do we have an ETA for the Alpha forums?
I have saw the stream of MorbisMIA and i have to say that is not bad for be and alpha, for what i have understood they really need to put a keybind to switch hotbars.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Hitting a few of the questions/concerns in the thread that are as intended or known issues due for a fix soon:
Holy Lance has a six second cooldown (largely because it does Holy damage, which almost nothing will have any significant resistance against). If you want to play a ranged cleric, I believe the elemental orisons Fire Bolt, Icicle, and Lightning Arc should be available for you to train currently (once you start leveling them up, you'll eventually want to use an Elemental focus instead of the Battle focus you start with, but they're pretty identical at +0).
Mike wants it to be clear that the lag from changing hexes is probably actually from crossing tile boundaries (i.e., a set of several hexes that load their art at the same time). Unfortunately, it's hard to tell when you're switching tiles, so it feels like a hex border issue. We're working on getting better loading for those.
We plan to have you auto-target your attacker if you have nobody else targeted. But it may be a while before that gets in. We're talking about some solutions for the short term to make it easier to notice when you're getting jumped.
Indications that you have Aggressor and Attacker appear over the minimap on the right as small circular icons.
There may, indeed, be a bunch of weapons that you can get that don't have models yet and may be invisible. (I suspect that the presents I snuck around and gave out didn't have models and I felt bad about that on realizing :) ).
Yeah, party UI and functionality is a flaky in the current build. I think we fixed a lot of that for the next build.
No clue on alpha forums.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One other thought: make it easier to self target. Clerics have a bit of a challenge in getting their heal spells to target themselves. Accidentally healed the NPC that was killing me. Also, it makes the one round defensive buffs kind of difficult to use.
Long term: SWTOR had a fairly nice system where if you used a beneificial option on a hostile, it automatically targeted you with the effect. So, if I in a fight, I could keep my target as my target, and still heal myself.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Do you know if you are planning on changing targeting to make healing during combat a bit easier? Right now you can heal enemies. Not great. Quite a few other games have an Offensive Target and a Defensive Target. When you target an ally, they go to your Defensive Target, and all beneficial attacks go to them.
(4 seconds ninja'd by Alexander!)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Do you know if you are planning on changing targeting to make healing during combat a bit easier? Right now you can heal enemies. Not great. Quite a few other games have an Offensive Target and a Defensive Target. When you target an ally, they go to your Defensive Target, and all beneficial attacks go to them.
NINJA'D!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now to find the Seminary and the orisons vendor... the cleric trainer had a couple of things to train (I don't now recall what they were), but they weren't orisons.
But thank you for the clues and suggestions, Stephen!
<looks at clock suspiciously: did it just jump backwards?>
They tossed a map of Sotter's Hill into the blog post in an edit.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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One other thought: make it easier to self target. Clerics have a bit of a challenge in getting their heal spells to target themselves. Accidentally healed the NPC that was killing me. Also, it makes the one round defensive buffs kind of difficult to use.
Long term: SWTOR had a fairly nice system where if you used a beneificial option on a hostile, it automatically targeted you with the effect. So, if I in a fight, I could keep my target as my target, and still heal myself.
Yes I ran into this a few times last night. Completely agree and the SWTOR would be a great route, although I suppose I could see the potential for being able to heal hostiles too. Your player enemy is fighting some mobs and you sneak up and heal the mobs in order to let them kill your enemy. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Having slept on it a bit, a couple other things stand out:
- The goblin, goblin dog, and ogre models are wonderfully done and really make it feel like I'm in Golarion.
- In other games, when I reach level 2 I might expect the base attack bonus to go up along with Fortitude saves, hit points, etc. I really dig that each of those is reflected in PFO but their relationship to level is somewhat reversed; if I want to reach level 2, I have to increase my BAB, Fort saves, hit points, etc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not actually in the alpha, but noticed a few things about stats from watching others:
*Penalties to reflex for medium and heavy armor appear unchanged since they were first introduced. -10 for medium and -20 for heavy.
*Defenses (ref,fort,will) appear to already include the 50 per defensive tier.
*HP start at 400 as originally stated.
*Physical resistances (no keywords): 0 for cloth, 7 for light, 17 for medium, 27 for heavy. These are slightly changed (as Stephen said would happen). It's too early in the alpha to see how they scale with keywords (this was mentioned as changing as well).
*Other resistances appear uniform (though I expect crafting + enchanting will change this based on comments by Stephen). 2 for cloth, 0 for light, 0 for medium, 7 for heavy are the base values. No info yet on scaling.
*Damage factors have a wide range. I'll be comparing those later.
*Base damage isn't shown, so I can't tell if all weapons have the same base damage or not. The alpha instructions pdf indicates that scaling with keywords is unchanged (5/minor, 20/major).
*Recovery stat wasn't shown. Gol Morbis trained this at one point. Outlined here.
*Crit rating, crit resistance also not shown?
*Stamina appears to have changed quite a bit. What's the relevance of the small bar on the top now? It used to be related to stamina, but now I'm confused as to its purpose with the way that stamina has changed.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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F1 doesn't target yourself?
Yes you can F1 to target self. This was helpful once I figured it out, however it is still a little un-intuitive.
Nightdrifer, if you need certain things done for number crunching, feel free to ask. I'm sure quite a few people wouldn't mind helping you out. If you see me streaming, just shout in my chat or something. Chances are I'll hop to it.
Completely agree, I am happy to take requests from people. I have the Twitch chat overlayed on the game so I usually see when people ask questions or the like. Just remember there is usually a 5-10+ sec delay it seems between what is going on in the video you are watching and what I am actually doing.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Yeah, party UI and functionality is a flaky in the current build. I think we fixed a lot of that for the next build.
Is there a release schedule or anything you all are planning/trying to adhere to just so we can have an idea when we will need to pull down another 1GB+ file?
Also, I would like to say that I am super excited for this. (As anyone can likely tell by my unusually high number of posts) So much so I wish I could jump in with my artists and have them start helping out on models, the UI etc. (Alas they have plenty of work to do on our own project) In either case, I am very much looking forward to the weeks/months ahead as we hammer this out and get it ready for EE!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nightdrifer, if you need certain things done for number crunching, feel free to ask. I'm sure quite a few people wouldn't mind helping you out. If you see me streaming, just shout in my chat or something. Chances are I'll hop to it.
Thanks!
The most useful things I can think of (in terms of stats) are:
*tooltips of the various attacks. Maybe adding screenshots of these to the albums people are compiling?
*changes to the tooltips with new weapons (I think Nihimon may have noticed something along these lines with a damage factor changing?).
*checking your stats before and after each time you train and noting what changes, ie. the experimental way to train.
*full hits. You may notice your attacks do a range of damage. It's possible to determine a lot of information based on the distribution of that damage, but for now it's simpler to just keep track of the largest damage you do (a "full hit") with a given attack. Be aware that enemy resistances will affect this number, so better info would be what the max damage is against a given creature. Even better: max damage against another PC with known stats. With that pvp info it's possible to determine if and how base damage differs between weapons.
*(edit) full hits done to you by creatures.
Of course there are so many non-stat aspects of the game to test as well...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Indications that you have Aggressor and Attacker appear over the minimap on the right as small circular icons.
Any chance we can get the ability to manually bring up the HUD so we can check our Power and Stamina easily?
Is there an indication somewhere that we're sprinting? I've just been looking at how fast I'm moving, and it seems that we stop sprinting if we stop moving.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Long term: SWTOR had a fairly nice system where if you used a beneificial option on a hostile, it automatically targeted you with the effect. So, if I in a fight, I could keep my target as my target, and still heal myself.
Vanguard had a great design for this as well with your Defensive Target option. Would love to see that in PFO, along with the option to automatically select yourself as the Defensive Target if you didn't have one already.
Nightdrifer, if you need certain things done for number crunching, feel free to ask. I'm sure quite a few people wouldn't mind helping you out. If you see me streaming, just shout in my chat or something. Chances are I'll hop to it.
Absolutely! There might be a bit of a time-lag, but you're more than welcome to come on our TS and have us test very specific things for you. PM me for details if you're interested. I'll also try to stay up with the comments on my twitch session, but that might get a little overwhelming sometimes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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*changes to the tooltips with new weapons (I think Nihimon may have noticed something along these lines with a damage factor changing?).
It was actually an entirely different Feat. Switching between Wand and Staff changed which Feats were possible to slot on your action bar.
*full hits. You may notice your attacks do a range of damage. It's possible to determine a lot of information based on the distribution of that damage, but for now it's simpler to just keep track of the largest damage you do (a "full hit") with a given attack. Be aware that enemy resistances will affect this number, so better info would be what the max damage is against a given creature. Even better: max damage against another PC with known stats. With that pvp info it's possible to determine if and how base damage differs between weapons.
I actually had a hard time seeing my damage numbers, and they didn't appear in the chat. I remember they were very large in some of the pre-alpha videos, but I think they're quite a bit too small now if you're at range.
Yeah, party UI and functionality is a flaky in the current build. I think we fixed a lot of that for the next build.Is there a release schedule or anything you all are planning/trying to adhere to just so we can have an idea when we will need to pull down another 1GB+ file?
This blog post details the current schedule on when we will be releasing new builds. Relevant information found under the 'Alpha Test Cadence' and 'Structure of Time' headers.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I actually had a hard time seeing my damage numbers, and they didn't appear in the chat. I remember they were very large in some of the pre-alpha videos, but I think they're quite a bit too small now if you're at range.
Yeah it is a lot easier to see the numbers if you are zoomed in and close to your tagrget (ie Melee). Since we are going to have a character wipe, might be worth going out in the woods, each of us a different class and whacking each other a few times to see what the numbers look like.
I would also like to suggest that it might be worth us naming all of our characters with our forum names so we can recognize each other easier. Just a thought since they are going to get wiped over and over.
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Goblin Squad Member
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*changes to the tooltips with new weapons (I think Nihimon may have noticed something along these lines with a damage factor changing?).It was actually an entirely different Feat. Switching between Wand and Staff changed which Feats were possible to slot on your action bar.
Thanks for the clarification! That makes more sense to me.
Hopefully they add a combat log soon to make it easier to see numbers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For my first impressions it was pretty much along the lines of what I was expecting. Some of the key issues that stood out to me include
I really liked that the players wearing heavier armor moved at a slower rate than players with light or no armor. However, the wizards just seemed to run amazingly fast! With them already having ranged spells and their fast movement I'm not sure that melee based characters would be able to keep up in a fight.
mentioned would be great to have[/list]...
Not in Alpha but suggest trying this: Have your mages run up and fire at the mob, then run back and behind the fighters - who should be in some kind of line to intercept the charging mob. After fighters engage, then mages run around the edges blasting them all.
And if that doesn't work, I will know not to try it myself when the time comes. ;-)
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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For my first impressions it was pretty much along the lines of what I was expecting. Some of the key issues that stood out to me include
I really liked that the players wearing heavier armor moved at a slower rate than players with light or no armor. However, the wizards just seemed to run amazingly fast! With them already having ranged spells and their fast movement I'm not sure that melee based characters would be able to keep up in a fight.
mentioned would be great to have[/list]...Not in Alpha but suggest trying this: Have your mages run up and fire at the mob, then run back and behind the fighters - who should be in some kind of line to intercept the charging mob. After fighters engage, then mages run around the edges blasting them all.
And if that doesn't work, I will know not to try it myself when the time comes. ;-)
They latch onto whoever agros them first so if one of the mages initiates the whole group usually goes for him. Then the cleric can just *try* to run around and whack on them while they are active. You can pull agro of individual mobs it seems but it takes a lot of damage.
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Goblin Squad Member
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They latch onto whoever agros them first so if one of the mages initiates the whole group usually goes for him. Then the cleric can just *try* to run around and whack on them while they are active. You can pull agro of individual mobs it seems but it takes a lot of damage.For my first impressions it was pretty much along the lines of what I
And if that doesn't work, I will know not to try it myself when the time comes. ;-)
Well that explains why all the video I saw had the fighters, clerics and rogues running all over the place and swinging wildly and missing most times and being ignored, while the mages did most of the damage while running for their lives in circles around their teammates.
Can I assume that in the future, with higher levels fighters, there will be some kind of agro feat for them? Something along the lines of a "Hey Idiot! Quit tiring yourself out chasing that guy and come attack me because I can't move very far!" feat?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Can I assume that in the future, with higher levels fighters, there will be some kind of agro feat for them? Something along the lines of a "Hey Idiot! Quit tiring yourself out chasing that guy and come attack me because I can't move very far!" feat?
A taunt? good question. I have mixed feelings about something like that being in the game. It will be interesting to see how GW handles that.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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A taunt? good question. I have mixed feelings about something like that being in the game. It will be interesting to see how GW handles that.
Can I assume that in the future, with higher levels fighters, there will be some kind of agro feat for them? Something along the lines of a "Hey Idiot! Quit tiring yourself out chasing that guy and come attack me because I can't move very far!" feat?
I would imagine that a taunt ability would be necessary at some point, otherwise people will just have to be really calculating about who initiates and how much damage they are doing. We figured this out a little later where I would go in and initiate before the wizards started blasting. Mainly because the earlier fight Dario starting blowing up some bandits and they all ran over and killed him in under a couple of seconds.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A taunt? good question. I have mixed feelings about something like that being in the game. It will be interesting to see how GW handles that.
Can I assume that in the future, with higher levels fighters, there will be some kind of agro feat for them? Something along the lines of a "Hey Idiot! Quit tiring yourself out chasing that guy and come attack me because I can't move very far!" feat?
Here's what Ryan had to say way back:
There's very good argument to be made that the problem with the Trinity is the Tank. And the Tank works because of Hate. Hate was an interesting mechanic, but by metagaming it the Tank became possible, and once the Tank became possible, the Trinity was the only rational outcome.
WoW has gone down a rabbit hole of feedback due to the Tank from which they cannot easily extract themselves. But Pathfinder Online does not have to follow them.
We're going to focus design effort on the Hate mechanic and on other ways that PvE content interacts with players with an eye towards avoiding a feedback loop that would trap us in the Trinity.
RyanD
More good stuff in that thread. I very much hope this is still the way they're looking at it.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Hitting a few of these. No agenda if I miss anyone, just trying to knock out a handful before lunch.
For now, F1 targets you for your heals (and if you're in a party, the other F keys target party members). We'll probably have smarter targeting for beneficial spells eventually (there's design for having to do some kind of override to attack friendlies and being unable to buff/heal hostiles, which should help if all PvE enemies are treated as hostiles).
All resistances on the character sheet include the bonus for activating the first keyword. For example, +2 physical resistance for Light, Medium, and Heavy armors (so the base numbers are 5, 15, and 25). Similarly, I believe everyone should be doing 45 base damage with the +0 starter weapons (40 + 5 for the base keyword).
No taunt mechanic planned or expected for the reasons listed in the Ryan quote Nihimon posted. Fighters get a bunch of ways to crowd control on Opportunity, but the creature AI is largely ignoring crowd control right now. Ultimately, we're looking more at ways for a Fighter to be able to actually interdict opponents from getting past than faking it with taunts.