I feel like I'm lugging half my stats around in a bag. I'm building my character around available gear. Shouldn't put more than X points in this non-comat ability 'cause I can get +2 from gear and +1 from a trait, etc.

I have multiple bars of just items I swap to. My bartering set, my charisma set, my crafting set, my chest opening lucky charm set, etc. etc.

It's a bit tedious and micro-manage heavy, but I'm certainly not going to drop excessive ability points into things I can get via gear.

And then there's armor/weapons. I need str/dex/int to equip them, so I stat those stats because speed/con/perception will be on plenty of gear but they don't help me actually equip better gear with more stats on them. I can always swap around accessories to get con/per/speed, but I can't equip a set of nice plate armor without X strength, or an amazing bow without X dexterity, etc.


I really wish we just had more stats to build our characters with, and less of it on gear to micromanage/pre-plan our characters around.

That would make the items themselves less interesting though, and I'm sure people would then complain 'Why did you nerf loot?'.

The whole point in a limited resource is that you can't do everything well (unless you cheat). If it makes you feel better, try to limit the amount of loot you carry around perhaps? At the moment I just have some +perception gear around, my mage is actually walking around with two tooth rings all of the time because she has to convince her brutish companion not to do some pretty horrible things. The amount you play the game in a roleplaying or metagaming fashion is entirely up to you.

As for traits, the only ones I disagree with are Vindictive and Heartless, because they're 100% useless on most characters. And I still roleplay the character rather than going for the traits I want, everyone gets their kicks in different ways I suppose.

There are other ways to make items interesting, and TBH putting random stats on items doesn't make them that interesting in the first place. Many of the random combinations just turn things into junk loot anyway.

As for traits, that's a separate issue. I'd rather just pick them as part of character creation and skip gaining them through the dialogue. I would roleplay more freely if my dialogue choices didn't give me somewhat arbitrary boosts to my stats. It'd be nice as an option anyway.

Yeah, I feel the same way. The Elemental Staff was nice, not sure if there is anything else like that around.

With the exception of Heartless, none of the arbitrary stat boosts are that much of a big deal though gameplay-wise. And indeed none of them are required to make the game playable. I see where you're coming from though, maybe a mod? I don't really see the Devs making it an option...

You do understand the damage dealt (non-mage) and armor are largely from gear stats and not from
attributes and talents.

The way I see it, is that the dev wants you to go through the game progressively while offering you the freedom to explore. This is why there is a lv/AP penalty on weapons and an exponential HP curve. I say the dev have thought about it thoroughly and carefully regarding this aspect.

If you have some attributes point for each level and if they do affect the damage output significantly then you can simply heavily invest in one attribute(str/dex/int) and do serious damage even when you have a significant level disadvantage just like in Diablo and co. (let's say lv 5 vs lv 7). Plus the fact that you have 2-4 party members to control, they can compliment each other and survive rather easily, thus you can skip some parts of the game.

We all see from time to time some players come up saying getting stuck at facing higher level enemies which are too difficult to beat and that they might have missed something or some places here and there. That is what the dev wants. They encourage you to explore, explore the world they have created and look for easier enemies/storylines/quests to progress with.

I think my use of words haven't been very accurate. Sorry for my English.

Your English is fine.

Completely not what the OP made the post about however, as far as I can tell s/he is particularly wanting +non-combat skills / per to not be possible stats on items because it leads to him carrying around a large number of items so he can focus primarily on combat stats and just use equipment for everything else.

As regards level scaling, I think the way it is handled is good. I would like it if every enemy post-cyseal was perhaps a level higher however (or simply acted as though they were), that might be a simple difficulty fix. Should be easy enough to mod.

And yes, I'm all for somewhat branching paths and no clear 'I have to go here to have a chance'. The game seems to go much more in that direction at level 12ish

+1 to [ability] items should be limited to one gear slot. Ex: You can get a Crafting belt, but you can't get a Crafting belt and Crafting gloves. Multiples (or any form of +ability on rings) does tend to lead to situations where "hard" character investment in an ability, especially a non-combat ability, tends to be a mistake. The crafted Tooth recipe, although fun and exploitable, is definitely a mistake; my Charisma characters don't even take Politician, because a single hard ability point, or two at most, is all you really need (and there are those on these forums who would argue you don't need it at all).

+Str, +Dex, and +Int should appear on accessories but never on weapons/armour/helmets/shields. +Con, +Spd, and +Per should appear on weapons/armour/helmets/shields but never on accessories.

This isn't to say I'm hugely dissatisfied with the way it is now. Actually, there might be some kind of game design art to letting players get away with things they shouldn't; it might be that always doing the right thing as a dev makes things no fun for the players. But if the goal is making things fair across the board, the recommendations above apply.