[quote=sehnsucht]RNG is fine as long as it's transparent and can be outplayed.
If people keeps missing 99% hit chances shot then the reason is probably one of the following:
1. Tooltip problem. e.g. The enemy has 50% dodge chance/cover bonus/whatever not calculated in the tooltip and your actual chance to hit is only 45%
2. RNG generator is screwed and it has 50% chance to roll a 1 out of 100.
They are bad due to poor implementation, not the problem of RNG itself.
The combat of Baldur's Gate 2 is also RNG, does anyone felt it is unfair? I can't think of a single fight in BG2 where I lost simply because I missed an attack or a spell.
You mentioned Pillars, the system is more deterministic than its predecessor but there are still RNG involved. Can you think of a single fight in the game where you lose because of bad luck?
Does anyone think Bridge players are "just lucky", Bridge has zero tactics and strategy?
I think the RNG is DOS:EE is fine since it can be mitigated. CC chance can reach 100%, Enemy CC resist may be reduced (Divine Light, Disease, Soulsap, etc.) our outplayed by choosing a different one. Hit chance can be buffed or reach 100% against CC-ed enemies. I never have a problem with it compared to games like XCOM.
IMO there should be more RNG in single player games to feel tactical. This is not a competitive game like chess where you face different players and have to keep thinking, learning and adjusting tactics against them. If it is 100% deterministic, once you figure out how to exploit AI, there is no need to think any more. Just repeat the same action again and again and again. It's pretty much braindead.
There should be random ambushes, random buff on enemies, random availability of scrolls/spellbook/items from enemies/merchants to keep the game fresh.
Can't find a spellbook of fireball? Well, you have to try to craft it or live without it. What will you do? Want to instakill that boss by switching lava under his feet? Too bad, he is hovering and ignore ground effects. In these cases RNG forces you to think differently and change strategy/tactics based on what you have at hand and adds replayability. [/quote]
A few points on this:
Baldur's gate 2 had randomness (which definitely did occasionally screw you over), but the optimal builds all heavily mitigated or ignored it. For example, sorcerer builds frequently just went all damage (chain contigency, spell triggers, etc.) because even if enemies saved against them, it would still do half damage. It was inefficient to do builds that relied on instant death or CC mechanics because stronger enemies saved against them more often than not. The combat in BG2, once you knew how it worked, was pretty simple and easy to abuse and I don't think it's a good guideline on what to do by any means.
As far as RNG is concerned, you have to really distinguish between different types of randomness: input vs. output randomness. Randomness that gives you more time to respond and adapt to it is closer to the input side of the spectrum (such as random map generation, random vendor loot, etc.). As you creep towards the output randomness side of the spectrum, you get randomness that is harder to react to, but still gives you enough leeway to adapt around it (random enemy affixes, for example). On the far end of the ouptut randomness spectrum, which is the stuff that you want to avoid, are things like hit % chance or critical % chance. These give very little wiggle room to adapt to the result of an action, and mostly serve to obfuscate feedback and create noisy scenarios. Generally speaking, input randomness is good, and output randomness is bad.
In general I think the OP may be missing the mark as to why he finds the combat unsatisfying. From my experience, the armor system is a good system conceptually, but it has some problems in implementation.
A few of the problems I've noticed that could be addressed:
Front-loading damage is too strong - it's too easy to stack a bunch of AP through either abilities (adrenaline, flesh sacrifice, lone wolf/glass cannon traits, haste, what a rush, plus abilities that effectively give you multiple turns in a row like chameleon cloak and time warp), which allows the player to quickly burn through enemies' armors and chain stun them. Ironically, the initiative system which many people dislike is one of the methods of keeping this from getting even worse.
There are a lot of clearly overtuned abilities - many of the source skills are obviously (at least to me) put there to help out casual players and are very overtuned. This trivializes many encounters for those that don't put self-imposed restrictions on their play (which I'd venture is most players). There are also plenty of overpowered non-source skills. Let's not even get started on lone wolf - people playing with lone wolf might as well be playing an entirely different game.
Positioning is trivialized by the ubiquity of teleports/teleportation skills - if you want a game to be tactically challenging without just becoming a number crunching contest, the best thing you can do is make space matter, since it's much harder to optimize the math for controlling space than it is to calculate optimal damage (which is usually just basic arithmetic). The easy access to so many teleporting skills makes this portion of the game a little too simple and thus it can feel like you're just optimizing your damage and AP most of the time instead of trying to cleverly position your party.
There's not enough reason to use softer CC - this is related to some of the other points here. Because players can frontload damage to evaporate enemy armor, and the soft CCs that work through armor like slow and frozen surfaces are trivialized by the teleport abilities, it becomes a race to eliminate armor and stunlock the AI.
Multiplicative damages get too high - There's just too much damage, and combined with frontloading AP, armor disappears too quickly.
The scaling is too absurd - luckily there's a mod that fixes it, but it really should be standard.
I think focusing on how to fix these problems would allow you to make a more graceful fix to the combat without overhauling the entire thing or introducing unnecessary output randomness to the system. For example, I would reduce the number of ways to increase AP (frankly I'd just dump lone wolf, glass cannon, and time warp, as they cause way more problems than they solve in terms of balancing) so that it's harder to burn through armor. I'd also make it harder to obtain teleporting and teleportation abilities so that combat positioning is more important.
