Class biases in games

That's the problem, dip. It's not a game with hard classes. Know what's the difference between the three initial characters? A "special" move of which the warrior is by far the strongest and the initial unlocked skill or two. Also a couple of attribute points, as in 5 strength more for a warrior in a game where you're expected to have over 500 near the end.

There are also a ton and I do mean a ton of skills that make your post both irrelevant and prattle. The warrior skill tree for example has melee weapon throwing which synergizes with on strike proc weapon skills or enchants.

Your example is shit and so are you. And there are a couple conjurers on the last crypt level in the catacombs beneath Aleroth.

Any fucking game where the mage has 6,000,000 useless abilities and 2 actual direct damage spells where all the over classes are the exact opposite.

You're a faggot and you know it.
I've also played Divine Divinity, several times in fact. Ranged characters are absolutely favored over melee ones.
Now stop acting so autistic and quit derailing.

Who gives a shit about that game, nigger.
The name of the thread is "Class biases in games."
OP said something about that game, and based on what he said, I said it was bad design. After that I'm already talking about "Most games".

You just seem assblasted because someone said something you didn't like about a game you like.

Why are you getting so caught up over the example? Do you just want to talk about DD instead?
Christ, man.

Yeah, how about you go fuck yourself? Wanna fellate over how smart and pretentious you are? At least make sure you pick an example that makes some sense for your OP, faggot.

What's wrong, user? You want a useful spell over "Anal Strength +5% for 45 seconds!"?
Well too bad, have six variants on it :^)
Bethesda is the worst at shit like this.

...

What is your problem, user? I don't think I've ever seen somebody act like this aggressive and hostile for no reason before. You were told to stop sperging and you sperg harder.

Do game designers intentionally do this?

speaking of dumping points

What's the fucking point then?

I saw an interview with an RPG dev before, he explained why this can happen: it's filler. Otherwise there would only be a handful of spells, it's the same reason games have so many useless swords and armor.

Did you come straight from something awful and specifically to this thread just to bait me? If so, I'm honored. Wanna fellate over how smart and pretentious you are? Pick an example that makes sense and don't be a bitch if you're called out as a retard for failing to do so.

That's fucking shitty logic, man.
You don't purposefully waste skill points when you find those weapons lying around. And those weapons may be usefull if you don't find anything else better of their "tier".
Seems just like a dishonest way to make the game seem like it has lots of options whitout it actually being the case.

Whoa there fella how do you expect me to fill this game with content when I've got daily diversity meetings to attend?

Depends. I don't know how many fags sweared at BG2 over there being only one decent katana or next to no +4(+) battleaxes in the game despite you potentially finding that katana or amazing +3 and +2 axes within the hour. Also games where weapon usage is tied with a proficiency perk or whatever.

I hate how "Tank" characters and classes have been wussed down to utter dogshit in modern RPGs.

"Tank" these days is "Melee fighter with 20 percent more hp"

You can thank WoW for that.

...

Most RPG's I've played feel like the exact opposite; like the devs designed it around the melee classes.

Spellcasters have always been easy mode in every RPG's.

Wizard classes are usually the go to class for little shits that pick the game based on hurr durr magick uhhh. Which are the ones that dump money the most.
It pisses me off how there are two trillion spells and effects for different wizard and even rogue classes while I get stuck with shield bash for the whole fucking game and nothing else but buffing up that shield bash and hard as fuck gameplay. Don't even mention how the first companion usually happens to be a warrior so good fucking luck going 1/4 of the game with two warrior.
I usually pick templar or barbarian for the sheer number of options to play with.

...

They should be ultra powerful glass cannons that aren't fun to play. That is the trade off, you're super weak and the game is a bore as a magic user.

Tom motherfucking Chilton.

That's pretty normal for all Diablo-likes. Casters get mad power for free, ranged characters are OK, melee characters require perfect itemization and good tactics to play. If the gap ever closes it's in NG++ when caster progression hits a wall and item progression keeps going.

...

This actually makes sense in-lore. Tech isn't powerful on a 1:1 basis with magic, it's powerful because of the scale of industrial production and population growth. Gill Bates isn't supposed to be able to fight ancient elven archmages, but he can buy 10k rifles to arm a 10k army and demolish a few wizards and their apprentices.

Wouldn't it just be a warrior with high int?

If you're getting in melee range against something that does melee attacks what do you expect to happen? You're going to take more damage - you should - it's what you wanted.

A lot of stretegy RPGs have a general class but they're just big armored dudes. The closest thing that probably counts would be the captain class in Lord of the Rings Online, which is pretty much a melee buff class with a flag carrying pet.

I'm really annoyed that DnD 4e hasn't gotten a good vidya because that is exactly what a Warlord is.

Berserker in BG2 can eat through almost anything. Especially with that 50% resist magic shield.

This shit is how you get garbage like Dex in D&D5e or DOS2.

What's DEX like in 5e, Jesus?

...

In D&D 5e martial classes have no reason not to invest in DEX unless they're a niche polearm build (to chain cheap oppurtunity attacks) or are abusing poorly balanced splatbooks with GWF (ie: Power Attack, -X to hit, +(X*2) Damage) because those builds can't use dex weapons and rely on their one-trick-pony status to carry them through combats. Or they're cheesing weight rules and dropping boulders on people (by exploiting stacking carry weight multipliers to carry literal tons).
For a Fighter, Dex VS Strength isn't even remotely a contest with a normal GM that isn't houseruling the system (and if they're using 5e you can bet they don't give a fuck or are just playing fast and loose anyways).

Strength gets:

Dexterity gets:

Goddamn, is that even english?
I need some fucking sleep.

The Divinity series is awful for this, especially late game.
Original Sin 1 and 2 is a joke with a high level mage. Meanwhile try and roll a close range character without going for a cheese build (which get patched out anyway) and you struggle big time

How the fuck did you stand the writing OP?

I didn't pay much attention to it, that's how.

It's not just older games or computer games. White Knight Chronicles was infamous for how poorly balanced its classes were. Using two handed swords was the fastest, easiest damage in the game, hands down, and since you only needed to spec into the one weapon, this freed the player to take healing skills, making him an invincible fortress of death. Meanwhile, magic users needed to stack 3 buff spells and fire off a maximum tier spell to do half the damage of a single two handed sword hit. Normal enemies were dead before mages even buffed themselves, and bosses were dead before the mage got his second shot off. They couldn't even buff beforehand because the buffs lasted for all of 5-10 seconds. This wouldn't have been such a big issue if the game had been a fully single player experience as it was originally planned, but Sony forced the developer to throw in a Monster Hunter style multiplayer system after losing the series to Nintendo.

RPGs should never be balanced. They should have a ton of options that allows the player to experiment and determine the balance they want. Options as in race/class/skills, not as in enemy HP slider. Having abuseable systems allows the player to learn the game better, then they can try to challenge themselves playing differently.

That was before Monster Hunter had ever appeared on a Nintendo system though.

Are there even any good games to play spellswords in? I love that shit and I'm sick of being punished for it. You'd think having more options would make up for it, but you can never exploit enemy weaknesses properly and the utility spells rarely help.

Magick Archer in Dragon's Dogma is the best I've seen. Followed by Mystic Knight. It works there because they're their own class with their own abilities, but you don't get to enjoy normal casting at the same time.

Fuck off. An unbalanced RPG almost always translates to easy mode build or a frustrating mess.

If you want the player to be able to experiment and explore, you need to make other options viable at the very least for certain scenarios. Mage mode is almost always boring cheese mode.

items fix the stat increase = feat fuckery, and 2h weapons do more damage than bows for the entire game and its not even close. this game is watered down like a 1 dollar margarita special, so nothing you fight has any abilities that do anything to prevent you from walking up to them and hitting them as many times as you can.

honestly 5e is a bad example for your point because they actually fixed it in the only way that makes sense: STR based damage sources do enough in excess of DEX based damage sources to make up for the lack of *any other fucking utility your stat could give you*

inb4 5e fanboi, i actually refuse to play it any more it sucks so hard, it just doesnt suck in the one particular way you said

blaster life is a bad life

a balanced rpg is dnd 4e. every class had the same ability to do the same things in every situation. its like the designers took affirmative action and applied it to the fucking PHB.
some people thought "oh well thats cool, it means im never without something useful to do"

smart people thought "if im never without something useful to do, why try to make myself useful?"

Or hell, go with the AD&D route, have the mage start out as weak and squishy…but as the game progresses you get better and better. What is it with devs thinking that mages has to start out strong?

Oh user, I'm talking about an average wizard, not even looking at specializations. Pound for pound, a caster is going to have more damage, more utility, and more defenses than a raw fighter. They're basically Batman if they have prep time.

Is Pathfinder that shit? Fighters should receive an additional attack die every level, so that a level 4 fighter can deal 4d8 damage per turn against a single target.

...

It's an extension of AD&D 3e, nothing is radically different

Now let me chime in for a sec.
It's not that Pathfinder is shit for martials, but going plain fighter is just downright retarded.

A well done barbarian can be an unstopable damage machine as well.
And then you have the whole meme about orc inquisitors with their "Lul everyone in the party is now raging just because" and "my Intimidate check is +87, fuck you" meme.

...

i member when people said pathfinder was a more balanced version of 3.5

i laughed then, but they were kinda right. if you dont have enough content for some of them to be accidentally good, nobody has anything good.

but now… yeah, what you described is basically something you could do in 3.5,except trade the billions of slots and whatever other bullshit for dual 9s with wizard/ur priest/mystic theurge/whatever

im going to go to 3.5 for this because thats the system i know, but there are genuinely cool things martial classes can do. knight 3/crusader whatever/whatever can get you some sweet lockdown. proc an aoo when anyone enters your threat (use a spiked chain to make it 10', use misc other fuckery to get it to 15 if you want), stop opponents from moving when you land the aoo, threatened area is difficult terrain for them next turn (now they cant just 5 foot step into adjacent, theyre stuck eating aoos that stop them from moving if they try to move), etc.

getting your chances to hit up high enough to make this reliable takes a little effort, but not all that much, 3.5 has enough shit in it where youll do what you want to do.

youre right in that casters > martials every single time forever, but its not like martials dont have any room for optimization IF YOU ARE PLAYING A SYSTEM WITH ENOUGH CONTENT TO ALLOW OPTIMIZATION

Then again, you can just allow Path of War on your games if you really want to have martials on par with casters.

>Not using the Tome of Battle rulebook

...

We don't talk about the **Book of Weaboo Fightan Magic"

Well, I fucked that spoiler.

Too bad that can't happen. A game where you level up your alchemy by creating, buying, and selling potions and potion ingredients in the starting town until you can purchase exotic ingredients to make potions of instant death would be fun and cool.

We should. It's not that bad, I mean, fuck you let casters get away with a lot of shit but the second a martial gets on even footing with a caster (or at least not as useless in Vanilla), oh now you put your foot down.

...

Morrowind lets you do this. You can create potions which give you absurd amounts of intelligence, which in turn lets you create even better potions.

It's a good book, don't get me wrong. But jesus some of the moves are fucking hilarious as shit.
Specially the fucking spellblade (or whatever that meme was called), that was literally just the fighter but better.

Oh, you mean the Warblade?

The thing is that the Tome of Battle introduces pretty much martial-spells. If you're going to buff martial classes don't just make spells but for swords, make more shit like the Frenzied Berserker. I did like the stances and some stuff, but some things in that book can be properly described as "weeaboo fighting magic".

Yeah that meme

I prefer the 3rd party one
d20pfsrd.com/path-of-war/

Baldur's Gate did it better.

JUST BUFF FIGHTER YOU CUNTS

shit is crazy man. and it all just costs gold.

im honestly kinda surprised at how much hate there is for this book. everyone else who defends it says stuff like "the second a martial gets on even footing with a caster" because they're people who dont play casters properly. it doesn't let them get anywhere near on par, it just makes them less total liabilities.

everything that isnt the mechanics is dumb. "martial lore" is the skill to recognize another TOB class standing funny and determine what bonus that gives them, shit like that was terrible fluff wise but mechanically it just made them better pretty much straight up

im a caster player so im ok with it. it never does anything other than let them swing their stick better, so who cares? it was weeaboo, it was fightan magic, but it was _fightan_ magic. it wasnt actual magic because it wasnt actually good. it just let you teleport a little, or do stupid ass counter throws and moved people a little, or replicate whirlwind attack with bonus damage, or let you melt walls with your sword.

I'd almost agree with you if itemization and economics weren't somewhere between mind-bogglingly retarded and non-existant.
Even then, there's so many cop-outs and DM-workload clauses that you can't really argue or debate the rules without someone quoting some might-as-well-be-empty sidebar stating that the rules are shitty and rushed the DM needs to fill in the blanks.

Path of War is damn good, Deadly Agility + Daisho Expertise? Dex Katana for days, man.

Yeah, like give Fighters Weapon Specialization as a feature (used to be a Fighter exclusive feature back in AD&D but thanks to 3rd edition Feats thing, they removed that from the Fighter)

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is about the only one I can think of. Spells have some utility and not just for piling on damage numbers. The melee combat is also pretty well done for its time.

Fighter in 3.X just doesn't work, you're better off outright replacing the class with Warblade or playing a better game.

Or stop time, giving you TWO full attack action (I like Diamond Mind) but PoW spoils me with their level 9's.

Dreamscarred is one of my favorite 3rd party publishers. Both PoW and Psionics are amazing.

On the same note, fuck Frog God

everything except the rules for wearing items was completely forgotten. its probably my biggest problem with the system, which is saying a fucking lot

BUT the rules are clear where they exist: the Gauntlet of Whatever that gives the wearer 23 Strength does, in fact, give that person 23 Strength. Since you start at 18 at the highest, you COULD spend half your life getting stats, or just acquire the item however your DM says you do.

Even if you have to go on a fucking epic adventure for it, whatever, thats what youre playing dnd for right? And the feats let you reroll bad damage rolls, roll additional dice for damage, roll additional dice / reroll hits, all stupid crazy bullshit like that which is worth a whole hell of a lot more than +1 atk/damage when you do the curve math

Nigga it's like the absolute best game to do that sort of shit in.

Good RPG design involves a lack of balance between classes, but enforces it in other ways. Most old-school games use different XP progression tables for classes, as an example. So a Paladin is superior to a Fighter in most regards, but advances at a slower pace. This is of course combined with a very early form of MAD - the Paladin, for instance, needs to worry about Wisdom and Charisma, on top of physical ability. Fighters just need good physical stats.

Hell, just getting into a Paladin is tough. A Fighter? Just need a 9 in Str. Pally? 12 Str, 9 Con, 13 Wis and 17 Cha. Rangers? 13 Str and Dex and 14 in Con and Wis.

i think it's done on purpose and is meant to emulate the D&D experience at the time, where if you rolled a wizard you'd be pathetically weak for like two levels and then would become an unstoppable engine of total ass destruction

you almost have to pick a pally if are lucky enough to roll the stats for it. games with gimped ass paladins piss me off

DD is the only good Diablo-like game out there.

Maybe early on in the campaign when having a Monk to cover your ass isn't necessary, but later during mid-game your squishy Elementalist will start to feel the pressure. PvP? The only reliable Elementalist spell is Shock pretty much. You're going to be a serious drag for your team if you seriously try to go full-blown spellsword in Guild Wars. People will just tell you to go Warrior and specialize in Warrior skills/armor instead.

Not all builds are equal, sure. But you still have a lot more options than most other games. Of course, some of the more interesting builds did get fairly gimped. Like the poor IW Mesmer.

Hey fuck you, it's way better than Divinity original sin or anything new by Larian. For one the humor is way toned down, in the D:OS there's humor everywhere it's fucking annoying.

Oh believe me, I've tried, created and tried out plenty of builds and experimenting for hours in Random Arena matches, just looking for a way to make an awesome melee-focused Elementalist.

My best success is this Elementalist/Assassin build which worked out pretty well for handling most threats in RA. Basically you would use Shock to knock-down your enemy, start a chain with an Off-Hand Falling Spider, then either go with Horns of the Ox for an easy knockdown or Death Blossom for DPS as your Dual Strike. You would then use Moebius Strike to recharge Horns of the Ox and then continue knocking down your enemy (providing he has no allies standing near him of course). You also had room left for Blinding Flash which is pretty awesome considering enemy random teams didn't always contain Monks and it can absolutely wreck enemy Warriors if they had no countermeasures. Then you have Conjure Lightning which synergizes pretty well with the dagger weapons' multiple hits.

Man, I loved the tweaking of loadouts in that game. It's a real shame that late game encounters just degenerated into Tank/Heal/DPS clusterfucks and Nightfall cookie-cutter builds removed any necessity for you to think up of a skillset that works personally well for you.

This is just the fate you chose.

Diablo 1 was a Roguelike. Why are you misrepresenting the genre?

That screenshot is composed like a Shining Force battle.

Weak? When level 1-3 is the best time to use the sleep spell? Wizards may be fragile at this time but they get the sleep spell which shuts down basically anyone they would be fighting at the time.

That assumes that you have the sleep spell, the dumbass DM isn't balancing around the sleep spell and that you can rest freely between each fight.
At lower levels wizards are weak not because of their abilities but because they can only use it once a day or so.

Your DM must be a dick if he's throwing high Will 5HD monsters at you when you're level 1. Luckily, this is where the grease spell comes in handy.

sleep? the full round cast time sleep?

fuck sleep. grease, color spray, obscuring mist, benign transposition are how you run the first 2 levels

3rd you use Glitterdust and Kelgore's Grave Mist. Ez

fpbp

Not only that. Lore wise, tech was a threat to magic because a planted explosive device was more of a threat to a grand wizard than 10 guys in steampowered armored wielding guns.

You could actually main alchemy quite reliably in Age of Decadence as long as you had plenty of dosh to keep buying herbs and reagents

The fact that the game doesn't have on demand healing potions really makes being a mad scientist shine.

Yes, the full round cast time sleep, which knocks out up to 4HD of enemies for a full minute. It got nerfed like crazy by 3.5 but the duration is crazy good for a level 1 spell.

For a support class, there is no better
Just talking in general

how is letting enemies act either 1 or 2 times before losing better than them acting either 0 or 1 times?

D&D 3rd edition had ivory tower design. It means that there were intentionally placed bad skill and feat (aka talent or perk in other RPGs) choices because you are supposed to feel more rewarded for making an optimized build. This is what happens when you sell your tabletop RPG property to a bunch of stupid niggers high off of their successful TCG. Baldur's Gate claimed to be based off of AD&D but it played just like 3rd edition. If it was actually based off of AD&D your party would include like 6 more unclassed NPCs to carry your shit and take damage and your main goal would be to get all the loot while avoiding monsters because XP is based off of the GP value of treasure carried out of the dungeon. Also it would feature traps like poison gas that kills half your party in one fell swoop.

I thought the one in DA:O was enjoyable fun

Back in 3.0, it was great because it wasn't a full round action. In 3.5 it's better for ambushes where you can get a drop on someone.

Mages are good in classic D&D once they level up enough, but 3rd edition was when they truly started to become bullshit because they could just pick spells to learn on level up and they got bonus spells from stats, and finding a familiar was just a thing you did automatically at level 1 instead of a spell you had to cast in the middle of the woods. Also getting your familiar killed no longer risked you dying too. Also classes got the same XP progression so actually getting a mage to the level where they could finally be powerful was no longer an achievement by itself.

...

...

As a Rogue player that hurts me…and that's the first time I see the words "Monk" and "broken" in the same sentence without the word "not" in the middle.

That game has extreme multiclass build fuckery though (just like real 3rd edition), to the point where it hardly makes sense. For instance "dipping" levels into Paladin just to get those dank bonus saving throws is extremely common on any build. Oh yeah and rangers just fucking suck, because fuck them I guess. And you didn't even mention the druid shapeshifting fuckery:
And you get Wizard tier spells like Earthquake, because why the fuck not. NWN is a pretty faithful recreation of all the flaws of that edition. Still fun though.

Monk is only broken because of the point buy stat system allowing you to cater to their MAD, and the extreme amount of magic items the devs threw in the game which are for Monk exclusively. As a result the MAD actually becomes their strength once you obtain the correct magic items. In conventional D&D they almost always suck for those reasons.

Extra attacks per turn catches up in late game in most RPGs.
While you are saving your precious MP for "when you really need it" only for the spell to get resisted and completely negated warriors come in and fucking kill the enemy in a single turn.

That game is so stupidly broken that you could put all your points into critical hit and just fucking kill almost every encounter in the conversation. It's really a game of trial and error as many of the skills are fucking worthless half of the time.

Pathfinder is incredibly shit. The designers claimed to try to fix the problems with 3.5 D&D, but retained all of those problems and made the class balance even more ludicrous. Then they threw their hands in the air and said fuck it and released the hybrid class sourcebook which basically makes the core classes completely obsolete. It's shit simply by virtue of the fact that all of its rules could have been released as a sourcebook for 3.5 and everyone would have ignored it for being uninteresting. The designers are also petty cunts, one of them really hates rogues and nerfed them during the playtest just because someone suggested that rogues might be underpowered just to spite that guy.

"humor"

Skyrim has some incredibly retarded systems.

Some of this shit is fixable at least.

...

A level 5 fighter should equip a bow and have rapid shot and manyshot, letting him shoot 4 attacks doing at least +5 damage each. Also the wizard should not be shooting fireballs, unless he is performing "counterspells" with them where he holds his action to fireball enemy casters when they attempt to cast for impossible concentration checks. Blasting is a bad use of actions for spellcasters in 3.X.

Yeah you can do that in AoD. You might want a few ranks of trading if you want to break the economy, but a high alchemy score will make you rich just from shit you pick from the land.

Alchemy is strong as fuck, but you still need to cover the basics of hitting shit and not getting hit, usually. I dunno, I guess if you equip heavy armors and just use homeostasis potions you might be able to get away with skipping a defense skill by just DRing everything. Nowadays though hammer denting, weapon hardness, aimed strikes to the torso, and a vastly improved critical strike skill make depending on pure armor a less reliable defense.

DAO has OP's problems though. Warriors have it worst while Rogues can be broken with specific strategies and Mages are generally overpowered as shit. I also make a rule of not using Wynne just because she is OP. Morrigan has the worst spec though. Shapeshifters are pretty shit in DAO.

Were you playing an assassin or shit? There are a lot of encounters where you can't just autowin fights with a critical strike skillcheck. Go play the imperial guard questline instead if you need examples.

...

Uhhh, no. Not even close.

The only thing Diablo didn't have compared to a roguelike was permadeath. Diablo is the original "rogue lite" (writing that phrase puts a bad taste in my mouth).

Diablo 2 was the original genre definer for modern ARPGs. DD was a product of publishers telling Larian to copy D1, not D2. Hellgate London was also a product of trying to put D1 styled combat mechanics in a shooter and that fell completely flat compared to later games of the style like borderlands.

walked right in to that one man. or maybe youre a good sport.

I hope you're not implying that Borderlands is a good anything of anything.

The only good thing about Borderlands is the artstyle, which Randy stole from an indie animator.

It's a comparative thing. The whole ARPG-shooter mashup genre is dogshit to me, but I'm just saying mechanically Hellgate London fucked up much more than borderlands did. Hellgate did far too much ARPG to be comfortable as a shooter and Borderlands was a shooter with ARPG mechanics tacked on. And it was clear having more focus on shooters was the superior choice. The entire genre is still dogshit though, the only way to make RPG styled action work is action with proper RPG mechanics and enviro interactions like Dark Messiah.

I like the wildlife designs and some of the characters, but most of the weapon designs are way too garish for my taste.

thats because rogue is just better then warrior in vidya
spells are just better then not casting spells in both turn based and action, and tabletop too

warrior is shit

The only good aRPGs are Diablo 2, Titan Quest, and Grim Dawn

The problem with RPG elements is that the entire point of the stats and dice rolls is to be an abstraction of the abilities of the characters. Which is a bit pointless when you are trying to do an action game, or can get in the way of the game. Dark Messiah, iirc, was more focused on allowing you to unlock different skills.

It also didn't have tile based movement, turn based gameplay, or even remotely complex actions to perform at any time, all of which are essential parts of a roguelike.

…Okay? Are you replying to the right post?

Into what?

Diablo does have tiles. How do you think the maps get generated? Just because you can't see a grid doesn't mean they don't exist. See also Neverwinter Nights.

Grids aren't tiles you stupid fuck. Tile-based means moving one space at a time in a grid, not free movement.

Diablo doesn't have "free" movement though. You really need to pay attention to the movement in that game more closely. The tiles just look smaller due to the isometric camera angle. It's almost like Fallout but with slightly smaller tiles.

Wait, so you are saying that tile based means turn based at the same time? What?

Separate things, but a roguelike also requires turn-based gameplay, yes. If it's not turn-based, it's not a roguelike.

Skyrim has hands down the worst melee combat I've ever seen in a game, and I'm counting the entire series up to that point as comparisons.

Fair enough, I guess. I don't bother to get extremely detailed on what these genre labels mean but Diablo does share quite a few elements. I wish there were more ARPGs with classless magic systems and randomly generated rooms for you to find cool new spells in.

2E was actually the first edition that moved away from GP=XP. Baldur's Gate was based on 2E, not 1E. The only DnD game where GP=XP was the standard by that point was in the Basic Line, which at that point was just the RC. An RC based game would have been infinitely superior, for what it's worth.

That's variable depending on the adventure and who's running the game. Mass party wiping traps are something that was primarily associated with adventures that were designed for tournament use, where the idea was to weed out the shitty groups so a winner could be decided.

Oh, whoops. I unfortunately am too young and only play retroclones like Labyrinth Lord so some of my history knowledge pre-3e sucks. Those traps were pretty common in modules played by regular groups to my knowledge though, or at least they are in LL's Barrowmaze.
Felt pretty good to have called that one correctly.

You can do this in Skyrimjob. By chaining alchemy and enchanting so they buff each other you can make infinetly powerful enchants and potions.

haha, reminds me of Shining Tears and its stupid attribute system - the melee fighters would need STR and CON as usual, but also AGI (to be able to wear decent armor) and INT (to be able to wear decent helm/not to be oneshot by elemental attacks), while the ice mage would only need INT and CON to wear her best equipment. The end result was that the ice mage was the best tank in the game, hands down - huge HP pool, good physical AND elemental defense, and insane AOE damage (so clear huge waves of enemies quicker, thus taking less damage) to boot. She even had a skill that increased physical defense as well.

A wise wizard would memorize haste and cast it on the fighter instead. Now he's dealing fireball-level damage, each round.

Beat that underrated classic with a warrior. Its only hard in the beginning and even then for literally the first dungeon. If you build your guy right (which isnt hard if you just glance at the warrior's assload of passives and stun) you can get op super early and have literally no issue for the entire game, last boss included. But man, that early game. Trip after trip to buy potions until you end up making a profit selling shit and are never poor again even when you buy OP ass charms. Great game tho.

>using asterisks for italics
Found the redditor.

Also what this guy said. Went 2h warrior cuz Im a typical loser type of geek who has a hardon for big ass swords and accidentally picked the most op thing in the game for miles

Quadratic Wizards, Linear Fighters, user.

Bows with a Sharpshooter feat hit extremely hard and now you're using the vastly superior dex as your combat stat. The archery fighting style also gives you a very valuable +2 to hit, which again works wonders with Sharpshooter. Just saying, 5E D&D combat is dex master race, unless you're playing that paladin/warlock combo for oath of devotion and pact of tome to combine sacred weapon with cha-based shillelagh for a cha-based attack with your charisma added as another bonus.

Using asterisks for emphasis is not just a reddit thing, but in this case he really should've used actual italics instead of the asterisks, so it's definitely a newfag thing at least.

More like bad design, honestly.

That implies the warriors start off better, which is rarely ever the case.

And magic doesn't follow the laws of physics it bends physics to it's caster's will, so technology makes it hard for magic and tech to coexist.

It's not just the monk exclusive weapons. It's their insanely high movespeed, insanely high attacks per rounds, some of the best saves in the game, immuinities, good feats, and they can multi-class with all the other broken classes.

I couldn't fucking beat that quest line because even if you put all your points into combat skills when you have to fight the local lord as part of it they send you in there with like five people and one of them tends to sit back and do nothing the whole time and two of them can't actually do enough damage to get past any of the guard's armor. If only I had known that if you want to fight people you need to not take combat skills and just put fucking everything into alchemy because even if you can't get past their armor the fire and upper level poisons will just kill fucking everything except the last asshole in the arena because poison doesn't work on him at all.

Fucking plebs.

...

Wait, OP is purposefully playing like a pudding and wondering why he finds it hard?

I dunno WHAT the fuck crawled up his ass, but he seemed really pissed. He left the thread when people stopped replying, maybe he was a mere master baiter?

Get good, son. You can clear out Teron's final IG fight even with trash stats even if you failed the 6 int check to get a promotion when assaulting the tower, and the promotion means you get better allies in the last fight. In general, any mass combat can be won with nets, bolas, and bombs if you're willing to pay through the nose for a win and even aimed strikes to the legs and arms will turn around combat by crippling enemies' combat performance. It will take a lot of nets and bombs later in the IG questline if you're trying to hold the pass against the Ordu though, and bombs are a somewhat limited supply, although with high alchemy scores you can make extremely heavy-hitting bombs. A single net can also be used to set up aimed strikes at which point you can easily cut him down to size. It's also worth noting that aimed strikes get a bonus or penalty based on your strength for critical strikes to the head, arms, and legs and based on perception for arterial aimed strikes (iirc only daggers, swords, and throwing knives get this option) and torso aimed strikes, unless you are ranged, in which case all aimed strikes use perception score for more crit chance. Another side perk of aimed strikes is that if they hit they will do a minimum of 1 damage, instead of getting DR'd, which is useful for inflicting poison and bleed.

As for poisons, your poison just wasn't strong enough, I reckon. Poison's effect is scaled to the target's constitution score. Every point of con above 6 reduces poison damage by one, and every point of con below 6 increases poison damage taken by one. So a 3 damage poison does nothing against 9 con and a 4 damage poison does nothing against a 10 con guy. If you crit an aimed strike to the torso though, you'll lower his constitution, and there are stronger poisons than just 4 damage. In the Dungeon Rats side-game I've made 10 con builds simply to shrug off all those ugly 4 damage poisons.

Make sure to look at the help screen (question mark on UI) and don't forget to mouse over options in the combat screen to get details on what they do and how they're calculated. If you have an attack selected and mouse over an enemy for a period of time, you will get a full breakdown of the math and your chance of proccing special effects.

Yes, theorycrafting has shown that evocation wizards (while fun for solo play), have maximum potential DPS when buffing others

Diablo 1 was in fact designed as a watered-down graphical roguelike. Diablo 2 loosened the grid, copied games that copied Diablo 1, and made it more action oriented

You sound like a powergaming faggot for even calling something an exploit in a TTRPG; the kind that metagames Tomb of Horrors, fudges his character sheet, bitches about roleplaying and die rolls.

It's not that they're bad or wrong, but it's incredibly common for those types of builds to be outright denied or the tools used to make them prematurely banned, nuetered, or scrutinized, not to mention the kvetching online about them because god forbid the fighter actually do something cool like pop a sharpening oil on his greatsword and cleave the DM's monologuing boss in twain in a single round.
Anecdote: I've had DMs ban GWM (but never Sharpshooter) and Polearm Master/Sentinel or alter them in all 3 5e campaign I've played in.

If I recall, in Pathfinder, you can make a Magus do retarded amounts of nuke-style damage on hit starting from level 3 or 5

Every. Fucking. Time.

that's true if somehow you were playing 4e PCs without fighting against 4e monsters. the whole point of the system is that you always have something useful you could be doing, but not all of your 'useful things' are useful in this particular scenario, because the different enemy types fight very differently.
so, yeah, you could do something against the melee minions near you, or the rogue-type hiding among them, or the caster-type in the back, great. which one do you need to do *right now*?
to be fair 4e wasn't really understood. i agree with the user upthread that it'd be perfect for a turn-based party TRPG.

From what I heard, I think 4E's main problem was excessive homogenization. An overall similarity in mechanics led to all the classes feeling too same-y and reduced interest in playing the game.

To be fair, noobs always cry "omg game is too hard plz nerf enemies or make my abilities stronger." And then once you get good you realize it would actually be horrible if people rebalanced the game the way the noob wanted it. There's a solid basis for saying you should master the game before you give input on balance because otherwise you could easily ruin games.

All of that is on the developer's end and they should know better than to listen to morons.

In cRPG magic works both ways: enemies can fuck you up just as easly. I've always loved it. Magic is supposed to give you an edge over common brutes, but the more you climb up the wizard's tower, the more magical enemies get. Old school lore friendly balancing right there.

the post about dragon age you're replying to is talking about the arcane knight or arcane warrior or whatever it was called class. it was actually pretty cool, and you had to do a questline to unlock the class to multiclass to in that playthrough or to play from the beginning on another playthrough. it was spectacularly broken because it could take the most powerful abilities from warrior and mage classes, and could also wear plate, wield swords, and had some of the most unbelievably powerful class-specific gear in the entire game, if not the most OP gear. it was actually pretty fun which only made it worse when they fucked up every other game in the franchise

I don't need to notice it in older rpgs since it still exists in the newer ones.