You break the game, or the game breaks you

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

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Bars wrote:

The bold part might be slightly exaggerated.

5000% more damage was conservative.

Let's say a random pack of small blue skellies do 1000 damage per swing each, damage per swing is what we care for here.

At the same level, a pack of large skellies would do 3000 damage per swing, with no monds, the burrowing act four exploding dogs as much as 4000 damage.

Add mods such as otherwordly, more physical, more crit and you are already looking at a 2000% damage variation, without map mods and auras.

Remember, GGG just introduced the glorious crit+crit damage mod.

Now, say the character is cursed with something relevant like vulnerability, the mobs in question are buffed by extra physical, as well as other filler auras. You're looking at 5000% more damage, without sudoku map mods like 100% more damage as element.

Now, picture a strongbox, generic rare one, with an exile in it. And it spawns the guy with resolute tech and viper strike, buffed by the free auras from the rares in the box.

That's right, he ignores ALL the defenses of a pure evasion char, and nothing but taunts(SOMETIMES), regen&devour totems or mirrors(SOMETIMES) can stop his onslaught.

I'm not crying for the poor eva chars. I'm just saying that the damage variation in the game is ludicrous. There need to be MASSIVE diminishing returns on the buffs mobs get, otherwise the shape of the build diversity graph simply turns into a boring, dull pyramid.

I don't think you understand how percent work.

Suppose you have a map with

100% extra fire

100% extra cold

30% increased damage

380% crit chance + 35% crit multi => 18% more dmg

-15 max

vulnerability

The monster does 100 base damage. 30% inc makes it 130. Extra fire and cold are going to add 52 damage each against 75 res. Vulnerability is going to make the phys part 130*1.29=168. The crit is just 18% more damage on average, so 168*1.18 + 104*1.18 = 320.96 damage. Not 5100 damage, as your "conservative" estimate suggests.

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MatrixFactor wrote:

I don't think you understand how percent work.

Suppose you have a map with

100% extra fire

100% extra cold

30% increased damage

380% crit chance + 35% crit multi => 18% more dmg

-15 max

vulnerability

The monster does 100 base damage. 30% inc makes it 130. Extra fire and cold are going to add 52 damage each against 75 res. Vulnerability is going to make the phys part 130*1.29=168. The crit is just 18% more damage on average, so 168*1.18 + 104*1.18 = 320.96 damage. Not 5100 damage, as your "conservative" estimate suggests.

I'm pretty sure you misunderstood me.

What you listed was an extreme case of a dice rolling dangerously high damage.

But, as I said from the start, everything is added together. So you have a dice for base monster damage (because of the base creature) with an outrageous variation, you have a dice for monster mods with outrageous variation, you have a dice for surprise auras with outrageous variation, and then of course, a dice for map mobs with outrageous variation(which can be controlled), the curse dice can represent as much as 60% more damage taken.

And I'm not even talking about pack sizes here, only the variation in one hit from the same type of enemy, a "blue" monster. And I didn't even mention "union of souls"

I've had a Tora mission boss spawn with union of souls while he auto spawned minions ate them, burrowed into invulnerability, ate more, burrowed some more, all the while keeping a physical damage vortex up, the dps of which was increasing at an insane pace.

So yeah, damage variation, big problem, much doge, wow...

And before you misunderstand me again, 4 sources of crit mods on mobs don't increase their damage by just 100% more.

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

I'm pretty sure you misunderstood me.

What you listed was an extreme case of a dice rolling dangerously high damage.

But, as I said from the start, everything is added together. So you have a dice for base monster damage (because of the base creature) with an outrageous variation, you have a dice for monster mods with outrageous variation, you have a dice for surprise auras with outrageous variation, and then of course, a dice for map mobs with outrageous variation(which can be controlled), the curse dice can represent as much as 60% more damage taken.

And I'm not even talking about pack sizes here, only the variation in one hit from the same type of enemy, a "blue" monster. And I didn't even mention "union of souls"

I've had a Tora mission boss spawn with union of souls while he auto spawned minions ate them, burrowed into invulnerability, ate more, burrowed some more, all the while keeping a physical damage vortex up, the dps of which was increasing at an insane pace.

So yeah, damage variation, big problem, much doge, wow...

And before you misunderstand me again, 4 sources of crit mods on mobs don't increase their damage by just 100% more.

Map mods are controllable, and as players we decide whether we want to run them, and we decide how we approach them. For example I play +dmg +crit maps very slowly compared to easier maps, and I only bother with it on 79+ maps.

Show me the numbers on non map-mod stuff rather than useless anecdotes and hypotheticals.

Also you're seriously suggesting BG2 has a better multiplayer than PoE? There's no way you can hold that position with any evidence-based argument.

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MatrixFactor wrote:

Also you're seriously suggesting BG2 has a better multiplayer than PoE? There's no way you can hold that position with any evidence-based argument.

You can't really have evidence-based arguments about subjective categories. When one says "this game had better PvP" they mean "I liked it better" and that's that.

@MegaDeth666: You're a bit too generous with the zeroes. 5000% dmg increase means that something which hits for 1000 may also hit for 50,000.

Also, the player has information about mob type and damage, auras, map mods, blue/rare pack mods. If you decide it's a good idea to facetank a pack of otherworldly colossal bone walkers with a physical damage aura in a vulnerability map, what can I say...

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Bars wrote:

@MegaDeth666: You're a bit too generous with the zeroes. 5000% dmg increase means that something which hits for 1000 may also hit for 50,000.

Also, the player has information about mob type and damage, auras, map mods, blue/rare pack mods. If you decide it's a good idea to facetank a pack of otherworldly colossal bone walkers with a physical damage aura in a vulnerability map, what can I say...

Oh! I didn't say it was a good idea, just trying to point out the massive damage variation, especially when comparing said pack with random blue skellies / zombies with no meaningful mods.

Sometimes, the player may not have a choice, aside from terminating the application, but to confront packs like that. Sometimes ... however ... the player may not even have enough time to realize just how much damage the mobs are stacking.

I'm not trying to push the idea that other games do this better, I know what the devs tried to achieve: A sense of constant unease because of the potential for a massive difficulty spike at any time. But this spike seems to go up to outrageous, arbitrary levels.

If the game had diminishing returns in place, to reduce the rate at which mods stacked on enemies, this wouldn't really be an issue and GGG's vision would be maintained.

I personally find it very disappointing that effects on mobs don't work quite the same they work on players, consider The Armorsmith's zombies, their chaos damage poison clouds that they release on death, and the fact those stack.

I'm generally againt nerfs too for reasons you state and its diversity killing. I mean everyone is playing totems now it seems like. At least to level. Anyway problem is there will always be something they missed or didn't accunt for that's overpowered an u can break game with so everyine will migrate rather than a diverse selection of game breaking builds if left unmolested. Now they shouldn't be easy to attain or be coupled with low dps say like max block to encourage you to find another way to break game

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Bars wrote:

All classes in BG are broken. Therefore, none are.

ggg prevents me to say what I think of the above statement. (yeah you can't even "flame" statements - the benefit is that I don't need to buy stash tabs from such an oppressive company)

but seriously, I hate it when people talk complete nonsense about Baldur's Gate, not understanding the first thing about how absurd it is to compare a single-player hack & slash to a party-based d&d roleplaying game

d&d classes aren't even SUPPOSED to all be equally strong...

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

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PaperRat wrote:

Kinda curious, do you mean Throne of Bhaal expansion? I did play it, was quite boring in my opinion, what with sloppily thrown together fights with nameless monsters all the time. Watchers Keep was the only interesting thing in it, from what I remember.

ToB adds massive depth to skills, spells and kits, even though the campaign is not very fascinating. However, BG2 also has a near endless library of content mods. Vanilla BG2 is a very small part of the game. ToB expanded on the gameplay depth and the last 15 years of mods expanded on everything.

Then your original statement should've been "Have you even played MODDED BG2 etc. ...". I haven't, the OP didn't specify on that, to the discussion at hand it's irrelevant, cause PoE is not a game with modding scene. Also disagree about ToB (base game, not modded) bringing any kind of depth to character building, from my memory it's mostly "higher damage", "can't resist this stuff now" and so on, I can be wrong, haven't spent nearly as much time with ToB.

Calling vanilla BG2 a 1/3 of the experience is also quite an exaggeration IMO, but I can see that that's your thing, what with "5000% damage increase" nonsense.

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

Your first point auto-negates your second, your argument is invalid. There are scripts and programs capable of outperforming human players for most of the popular card/board games. Poker and chess being no exception.

I would have to correct that. chess, yes, because the game is deterministic and pspace-complete. meaning, they can be solved for small input, which is usually true for chess games that don't last many moves.
all opponents start with same position and all games are won according to a certain condition, and all games can be recorded and stored, and analyzed

a chess program nowadays will beat a grandmaster heftily

there is currently no poker bot that can compete with highest level poker players out there. sure, a poker bot can beat BAD players, even maybe ok players, but not the highest level poker players

poker is a game of concealing information. even if you keep tabs on players history, you cannot completely analyze all of their 100k+ hands. the only times you see their cards is when theres a showdown (and in that case unless theyre all-in in NL game, the worse hand mucks) or on tv-edited footage. poker is not played in the open. you have incomplete knowledge and history of hands is incomplete.

poker thus is NOT deterministic but stochastic. sure, you can design a bot that will always open/call/raise/check/fold in certain situations, but that is a way to lose a lot of money to high-skill players. this bot works fine in low-stakes where theres so many fish playing a certain way (tight/aggressive) will always net you money. but in high stakes your bot will get shat on repeatedly.

so, your statement was incorrect

oh and throne of baal is okay-ish an addon to a random game, but as an expnsion pack to one of the best RPGs of all time, it sucked. hard. it was basically a linear dungeon crawl, which is great in diablo or poe, but NOT fucking ok for a BG2 expansion pack

it did add some mechanics and layed the groundwork for mods down the road, but BG is first and foremost the main campaign single-player role-playing experience, just like in any CRPG worth a damn.

bg2 and poe are hardly comparable in general. too different genres altogether. thats like comparing planescape:torment and poe or vtm:bloodlines and poe.