I loved Divinity OS, and I like 2 a lot, but the new armor system is just so bad that you either run a full party of magic or a full party of physical and it just feels bad. I like running more balanced party comps and the armor system as it is now just punishes doing that far too much.

I pre-ordered, but I only played a bit at launch. Has armor changed at all? Has there been talk of any reworks for the way armor works at all? I've been thinking about starting a new playthrough and the idea of doing an all-physical or all-magic comp takes some of the wind out of my sails.

I know I can run a balanced comp, but if it's not optimal and I know it's not optimal it's going to bother me. I prefer playing games at their highest difficulties and optimizing my play and using all of the tools available to me to overcome the challenge, I don't like imposing handicaps on myself to create my own challenge. I just figured I'd say that now since I saw that "you can beat the game with a balanced comp" response already on the way.

No. Not from Larian anyways. Nothing's changed, nothing has been announced or even talked about. I fully agree though which is why I'm working on a mod to fix that among many other things.

Sadly some people don't get the difference between 'being able to do something' and 'having fun while doing so'. There is so much cheese possibility in this game, that pretty much everything is possible and the second part is always something subjective.

I never liked the new armor system, because it a) the counterdicts the core selling point of D:OS "being able to mix all classes as much as you please" and b) in the end it makes perma-cc even a bigger issue, so opposite of what it should achieve.

The only thing that is currently in the pipes seems to be an overhaul of the inventory-system. Something that is biggly needed though not the biggest issue anyway. So we don't even know if Larian acknowledges the issues with the armor system, so much praise as they get with all those awards. I just know, I won't support a third kickstarter campaign because for me and my friends D:OS2 is a huge letdown in many aspects.

I think OS:2 has a ton of huge improvements. There were only a few notable things that I really didn't like.

1) The new armor system is ass, as was the reason I made this post.
2) Too many new status effects and emphasis on environmental manipulation. The whole battlefield just turns into an absolute mess way too quickly now. Another reason to just run an all mage party aside from the armor issue.
3) Death fog barrels. Delete all of them.

This,the armor system, among others like the weird initiative system, are the two that make DOS2 second to all those true classics in my mind.

Please Larian, if there's an enhanced edition:
=============================
1.Fix the armor system.
2.Make hybrid professions something effective to play(eg battle mage(physical/magic)......)
3.I am sure you can do something to the Wit stat and fix the weird init sequence mechanism and still provide a challenging game.

Love.

Sadly not only the armor system ruins the hybrids, attributes do the same. They got so dumbed down, that they give no longer secondary benefits. Not to mention that leveling attributes in general got pretty pointless. Character progression overall got reworked into a empty shell. Your option at every level ups are: more damage, more damage, more damage, more life, more skills or more damage via crit (thanks to round robin initiative can be pretty much ignored). Also the biggest damage boost you probably get anyway because of the level scaling and not because of the attributes themselves.

And skill trees themselves do not longer encourage investment. Summoner is the only skill tree that offers some great, if you put 10 points into it, all other skill trees are kind of the same fruit in different colors. Also there are those two go always skill trees: warfare because it boost all physical damage best and polymorph because getting extra intelligence helps you best with magic.

The armor system and the civil attributes need a rework. I might be alone in this opinion, but I felt like all the civils with the exception of persuade were completely useless.

Every time I try to come back to this game I delete it from my machine. I also cannot bring myself to enjoy it. I want to because the game has some really good things going for it. It's pretty, has good sound, love the story and the companions.

The driving factor is the armor system. Every time. It doesn't welcome hybrids. Why is the game like this? In the end I'm around level 10 and hating the game for what it is. Why I started with an idea and ended with a carbon copy of what everyone does to beat this game bugs me. And I know how I end up there every time. It's because my idea of class fantasy sucks in this game and for me that's a deal breaker.

One thing that I think would be cool, and could be an answer to the hybrid issue, is the addition of ethereal weapons in the form of a combat stance of sorts like in the original Divinity: Original Sin.

it could work like this: Just as an example, if you hit somebody with a fireball while in this combat stance, your ethereal weapons will mark the target for x amount of turns, and will do x amount of damage to that target based on your pyromancer level, or whatever spell type you used.

They could balance it by requiring the player to beef up magical skills and intelligence in order for these weapons to be effective on any difficulty, and since these weapons would depend on you being in combat and in the stance, you cant enchant them, and Lore wise, they would be weapons from another realm of existence, and you used your magic powers to summon them.

Yes, I fully agree. I've been wanting to play the game again but I can't force myself to do it because not only the armor system, but also the itemization that goes against any sense of RPG I have. The idea of having to make trips to the store every time I level up just makes me wanna hurl.

I wish they made an EE for DOS2 because I really enjoyed the companions aspect of it, it reminded so much of Baldur's Gate II and it was a huge improvement over the first DOS. The rest is a mess, sadly. Even the final fight is terrible, nothing but cheese all around.

For me, the things that require absolute attention are:
* Itemization: remove that RNG crap, and reduce the difference between levels so items don't get obsolete as soon you level up.
* Armor system: either rework it or remove it, because right now it's justa annoying.
* Difficulty: enemies should be harder because they're smarter and more skillful, not because they have a million points of armor stacked for no reason at all.
* Terrain hazzards: the fact that every fight ended covered in fire and I barely cared about it was a total letdown, and a terrible downgrade from the first DOS.
* Stats: they're worthless. Bring back the DOS1 system.
* Skills / Abilities: they're a no brainer. Warfare is mandatory and sometimes a lvl15 character can basically perform just as fine as a lvl1 with some skills, it makes no sense.

Those are the first that come to my mind right now, but there are others, mentioned over and over in the forum, even in a thread I made.

I'll cross my fingers for a enhanced edition. For now, it's back to DOS1.

if they're working on anything i hope it's something that continues the story after the abrupt ending/cliffhanger

i haven't recognized any of the problems described in this thread (maybe where they come from, but they aren't real problems for me) in the game, except maybe for the rng for items and stat bloating late game

I came to this forum to see after all these months if the system progressed in a good way, I see it didn't.

Oh well...

Anyway, thanks for this topic.

(For everybody asking for an EE for D:OS 2, do you think than the EE of the first opus was actually a big improvement in terms of stats/character evolution? I certainly liked it for the possibility of playing with a controller but I remember it for being even more restrictive than the first one and not really managing to "correct" anything)

I disagree.
In my opinion a lot of you are exaggerating by far.

And they can't rework the entire combat system.
Yes it could use some work but many enemy groups have elemental weaknesses and high physical armor where it has uses to have some mages or damage that targets magic armor.

I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one having a big problem with armor system. I bought the game day 1, it's 8 months and I barely played 5 hours. Graphics are very good, music is fantastic, characters are much better than before, and you can just feel the big amount of love that was poured into making this. But whenever I start combat, it drives me nuts.

The new armor system is so wrong on so many levels, it totally kills proper combat strategy - you need to focus on reducing armor to 0 ASAP instead of just optimizing targeting based on position / enemy class etc. And not only that, but the whole concept of throwing a fireball at somebody and doing zero actual damage (because of magical armor) is just... stupid. Same for heavy armored dudes running happily on burning surface and getting zero damage, etc. If the main idea was to nerf possible Crowd Control that mages were able to use, there were many different options to handle that (like saving throws concept from Baldur's Gate 2 for example).

At this point I'm just sad, spending $45 on a game that I really want to play, but being destroyed by main combat mechanic. I have no idea why perfectly fine combat system from D:OS was changed.

If anybody had similar case and thought a workaround for this, please let me know.

It's actually annoying how someone tried something cute in such a huge franchise and majorly ruined the game experience. As if resistances and armor didn't work we needed this sponge in the game that effectively doubles all fights in length and makes the gameplay so braindead boring. As a general statement it seems like fixing what isn't broken must be lucrative. That's the only way I can understand this happening in so many games today.

I also came back for the same reason, looking if something has changed or maybe a change is coming.

/Sigh such a great game overall and so much potential but ruined at least for me by the armor system.

Honestly in that state I dont even care about expansions .

The smartest thing Larian did was NOT change the armor system, even when casuals complained.

The armor system removes RNG, which is good. CC is no longer tied to dice rolls. If CC was still tied to dice rolls, you could beat any encounter in the game by savescumming until you got good CC rolls.

And yet people save scum now for crit chance. Because all the game has now is DPS and scoring the best critical trains guarantees you the best chance of winning.

Nothing has improved. The game has actually regressed. It's very difficult to like this game even with all the positives it has going for it.

I won't knock people who like it by saying they just want something braindead. That's what the game is. And if you really have a problem with that reroll some diversity in your group and see how easy tactician is.

I would take the original design over this every day of the week. RNG is better than this garbage.

I beat Tactician with a diverse party, take your insults elsewhere.



You said you prefer RNG, and that's fine, but Larian was very wise to move away from it. The game is not "garbage" as you claim, nor is it "braindead".

none of the problems people point out with the armor systems strike me as actual problems

if people just don't enjoy the type of combat it encourages then that's perfectly reasonable, but i think everyone complaining about it really needs to understand how subjective their problems with it are

Its better than relying on a percentage to win or loose a fight.
Honestly for me, it is as good as it gets.

I think a long time ago when I still regularly posted here, I once had the idea that Physical and Magical attacks do only 70% of their damage to the same type of armor, and 30% to the opposite type of armor. If one type of armor is 0, the damage passes through to health, inflicting any status effects.

That would require a rework of armor values or damage throughout the game, but it would make mixed parties stronger without killing single-damage-type parties.




If someone is save-scumming for crits on every hit, that's the fault of their own OCD, not the game. There is literally zero reason why any sane person should make fights take 30 times longer by reloading after every non-crit.

It's still save scumming and doing exactly what the complaint was earlier about RNG. This garbage armor system does nothing to fix that problem.

If I had a donut for every 95% chance-to-hit-but-missed that my knight did I'd be a baker. Misses and lack of criticals will ruin you in tactician so let's not pretend like the only difference is 5 minutes. Having the first round go terrible is as good a reason as any to reload the save file.

I don't agree that critical hits and miss chance MUST be completely removed from the game. If you feel the need to reload after every non-critical hit on tactical difficulty, I suggest not playing on Tactical difficulty.

I never really understand the whole save scumming "problem". If you like doing it, do it. If you don't like doing it, don't do it. If you resent "having" to do it, perhaps you need to step back for a bit. Occasionally I'll do it myself when it's a rare chance of obtaining an extremely rare and extremely useful item or advantage, but otherwise it's just that sort of RL "that's the hand you were dealt, deal with it" kind of thing.

What I do object to is when people either say that they have no self-restraint so the game must hold their hand, or that they like to interfere with other people's gameplay so they can't do something they object to on principle. That's too bad and nobody should be expected to accommodate those sort of demands, no matter how loudly they're yelled. Which isn't a comment about anybody in present company, but I have seen both touted as reasons why Something Must Be Done.

I agree that RNG is bad. That's why I was excited about the new armor system because it removed a huge RNG element from the game. I think the new armor system is a step in the right direction, but it's not perfect. I think a well designed class with this armor system is scoundrel. Scoundrel has attacks that deal magical damage based on finesse and apply powerful debuffs/CC to enemies without magic armor, while most of their attacks are still physical based. Scoundrel also has a powerful piercing attack option to strategically switch targets to something that may have high phys armor still, but has had its health and magic armor stripped away to the point of near death. Scoundrel has an option for that. I'd like to see the design philosophy of the scoundrel applied to other schools of magic a bit more. I'd remark on something like pyro's corpse explosion as a good idea, but flawed in execution. It's a pyro school skill that does good physical damage, but scales like ass because it scales with warfare. I'd remark that the way skills scale is also one of the core flaws that needs improvement with OS2.

Scoundrel did get it right in this armor system, and I'd say so did ranger. Ranger has interesting option for crafted arrows vs. no armor targets, has access to piercing damage elemental arrowheads etc. And here exempifies why physical parties are considered generally better. Not just because battering ram/battle stomp are so good and it's easier to set up AoE CC chains on enemies, but also because physical damage is a bit more versatile, consistent and less resisted by enemies. Magical schools need more options to access piercing damage, need not to be so limited in scaling to purely a single school of magic, and could benefit from more effects that are powerful against targets without phys armor. (Geo is the notable exception with earthquake/impale).

For you RNG might be bad, for us RNG makes the fight interesting and less predictable. In a real battle not everything is predictable, a real battle is messy and not like chess. If plan A fails, you have to adapt and use plan B.

If you want a game without RNG, you should remove all RNG: Hit chance, Crit chance and Dodge chance are RNG aswell and can still mean, that an enemie survives instead of dying.

But however, the core issue with the armor system is still, it punishs mixed setups and together with the poor attribute system it ruins the core feature of the first game: cross classing like mixing scoundrel with Aerothurg.

Mixed party setups are still the optimal parties, because enemies usually favor one kind of armor so you need to be flexible.

And characters can deal both kinds of damage. Archers easily deal both because of elemental arrows and traps. Scoundrels just got a huge buff and can strip a ton of magical armor (Gag Order). Summoners can easily deal both kinds of damage. And mages could always cause decent physical damage via Necromancy or by using a shield.

I played through tactician with the enemy scaling mod and the enemy variation mod (adds challenger affixes) and had every enemy at +4 levels above me and my buddy playing on LW. I've played through this game many times as every different build and can say with certainty that all phys comps are significantly better than magic comps especially early in the game. This balance shifts toward late game once you get 3 source skills.

There are enemies with a lot of physical armor, sure, but there are also enemies with a lot of magic armor. There are enemies with magic immunities and stacked resists. Meanwhile there are only a very few select fights where enemies have evasion or immunity to knockdown. Evasion is easily countered by spider legs with web not being blocked by armor, meanwhile magic users have nothing to counter immunities.

Battering ram and battle stomp are also super easy to set up and AoE CC groups of enemies at a time. Necromancer is also absolutely broken in terms of damage output and living on the edge is the best defensive ability in the game by far.

The drawback of warfare is relatively bad source skills. Necromancer has absolutely broken source skills.This said, thunderstorm is absolutely broken as well and so is pycroclastic eruption if you teleport/swap stack enemies next to eachother to all get one shot.

On tactician mode without any difficulty mods anything works because any one character (even non-lw) can solo most encounters.

What I'm really saying is that a balanced party comp is not better. An all physical comp is objectively better. The runner up to an all physical comp is an all aero/hydro comp. Following that is any variation of all magic, because really you can just burn anything down before they really get a chance to act. A balanced comp works fine and I think lends to more interesting game play, so i'm absolutely not saying it's bad, but it's not better than an all magic or all phys comp.

I found having a single aero/hydro with 3 phys goes quite a long way. Allows for easy CC on mobs without magic armor while your phys dps burst down mages and some added support via healing/magic armor restoration/CC removal.

Necromancy/using a shield on a mage is still suboptimal, since you're gonna lack the warfare points. So that's straight up 50%+ multiplicative damage out of the window.

On a sidenote; How do you enable scaling above +1 with the enemy scaling mod?

i'd say this is more of a problem with the way stats work than with how the armor system works

also don't agree with your position on RNG; most games have RNG values that you can either increase or decrease with other variables like crit chance or dodge chance. this is different from making mid-fight strategies rng-based, and there's no need to remove the former just because the latter doesn't exist

either way, it is what it is and there's no reason for Larian to change it. if the first game had more rng with regards to CCing then it catered to people who prefer the rng approach, while the second game caters to people who prefer to keep rng values to a minimum. neither of these things make either of these games better or worse; they just suit people who value different types of combat

as for the hybrid complaint, this is something i agree with and i think stats could do with some change so that different skill combinations become more viable

edit: re: magic comps vs physical comps

from my understanding all physical teams tend to be better because physical resistance is a relatively rare trait on enemies, whereas most enemies have arbitrary resistances to most if not every magic type, if they aren't just flat out immune to one or several (think alice alisceon on tactician with water immunity, i had to use necro spells and healing to kill her with my friend when we ran an all-magic composition because magic is just that inefficient vs some enemies)

RNG of CC effects was adjustable like dodge and crit, so no idea what your point is there. There were ways to debuff your enemies and buff yourself, there were also because of that defensive skills who felt purposefull.


Mixing scoundrel with aerothurg in D:OS1 was great. It gave you tons of CC option, 2 invis and other damage reductions and later on even stun immunity. Mixing scounrdrel with aerothurg is pretty pointless in D:OS2. You main damage is physical, so all magical damage won't help you much in most cases. The synergy potential between scoundrel and aerothurg skills is pretty limited, you have one skill to remove magic armor and one skill that is kind of broken in itself anyway. At least I don't recall much more.

What the armor also kind of killed:
- weapons that have effects of the opposite damage type like petrify on a physical weapon
- element damage on physical weapons
- special arrows with magic damage lost a lot of their usefullness too, even more in full physical team

Honestly in the first game the chances of those effects were often so low, that they were hardly usefull too, though the armor system makes it even worse.

As a general side note: The RNG issue with equipment overall got made much worse thanks to the armor system and of course the poorly implemented attributes.

The magic schools in D:OS 2 have a lot of skills which don't scale with INT and synergize well with physical classes.

My first avatar character in D:OS 2, which I beat the game with, was a Scoundrel/Aerothurge. It worked great. It was a "Position Master" rogue. Teleport and Netherswap were great tools for moving enemies around for better backstabbing. Uncanny Evasion and Evasive Aura were great. Tornado, Vaporize, and Pressure Spike can help manage surfaces.

The game isn't exactly hard to beat in the first place, so that's not really anything to go by.

As for the listed abilities, while it's true that they're useful tools in general, that's exactly what they are. Useful in general. Not much synergy with melee stuff specifically.
Now if we're talking about shocking touch and blinding radiance for example, which both work for melee range only, that's a different story. Except that neither will do anything of worth in 95% of all cases, because either you might as well spend the AP to just kill the enemy, or can't get through the magic armor in the first place.
Does it still somewhat work? Probably. Is there any reason to do it, besides flavorbuilds? Probably not.

Yeah, as Velcas already stated, you just proved my point. You used none of the standard combat skills from aerothurg. I would not call it 'playing an aerothurg' if you only use utility skills. My aerothurg-scoundrel in the first game used skill like the lightning dash or shocking touch regularly, he loved to enlighten the ground after we casted rain and made everywhere water.

Utility skills are the reason, why my rogue had points in most of the skill trees. Because of the low requirements you can give those utility skills to pretty much every char anyway. Damage does not matter for utility.

I don't understand why so many people hate RNG, there's nothing wrong with RNG, it makes the combat more interesting and is responsible for some interesting situations where you need to improvise, and promotes critical thinking when you get bad rolls, but I guess people can't just deal with it and want the game to play exactly how they want and never worry about losing or having to actually use consumables or being forced to retreat from a fight and deal with consequences.
I see some posts here saying that removal of RNG is good, because people savescum. Why do you even care how others play their game? People cheat all the time, so what, unless you're a savescummer yourself, so you have to ruin it for everyone else, because you lack self control.

The current iteration of the armor system just ruins way too many things, which were most likely designed before the armor system was added, such as:

>Traps being completely harmless, just run through them and you'll be fine.
>Same for surfaces, I remember in the first game, moving through fire was a big risk and you had to decide if it's better to stay in place and slowly burn while being an easy target, or move away and eat a lot of damage with each step. Nothing like that in this game, I can't even remember the last time I cared about standing in necrofire.
>A lot of status effects became almost useless, like soft CC and DoTs. By the time you remove enemy armor you can use hard CC and not care about other effects and just nuke your target while it's permastunned.
>Hybrid classes and mixed parties being overall underwhelming.

Aside from these it just makes the entire combat really stale, where you just use the same tactic over and over.

Just look at the modern XCOMs, those games are full of RNG, yet they're still extremely popular and still played by a lot of people regularly.

my point was that these things are comparatively minor to CC rng, and aren't as devastating to in-battle strategy when they don't proc (not scoring a critical hit isn't as big of a deal as not stunning an enemy)


i really do not see what the issue is here. this isn't a part of the game. in DOS2, if you were to mix scoundrel and aerothurge, you'd do so either because you wanted a rogue character who had options vs enemies with low magic armor, or because you wanted to make use of utility skills. with the former, the real problem is that skills are too stat-reliant, and you'd do pathetic damage with magic on a finesse rogue because your intelligence stat would be too low

the thing that can (and should) be changed is the way stats work, not a revamp of the armor system that by and large accomplishes what it's supposed to

i don't understand why you think this is a problem with the armor system instead of, for example, a problem with the aforementioned effects appearing on items that can't make use of them, which is a pretty widespread issue with items in this game. lots of items are randomly assigned stats, effects and skills that devalue said items (for example, a staff that can inflict bleeding or a mage armor item that gives scoundrel), and the obvious solution is to prevent those things from appearing on those items

the posts on this page just further reinforce the subjective nature of this discussion, nothing about the armor system actually needs to change at all

So because there is no RNG in how CC effects are applied, then I assume that for you, every single battle in the game went exactly as planned, with no surprises or unexpected consequences you had to react to at all?

Can you truthfully say that is how the game went for you?

I never said that, don't strawman me.


Yeah, let's just remove features that worked before, instead of fixing the problem. I guess we can also remove traps from the game completely too, as they're completely harmless.
Elemental properties on weapons were always a big part of RPGs, meant to add some other source of damage to your main one, and they usually also enabled some specific builds centered around them and made the itemization overall less boring. I mean isn't it always cool when you find an enchanted weapon that deals some kind of magical damage? Why remove it?

Then don't strawman other people first with statements like this:

a few things

what "features that worked before" are you referring to? before what?

elemental damage on weapons works better in other RPGs with different combat systems. in this game, it's less effective because of how armor works, so it'd probably be better to change how runes affect weapons, if something actually needed to be changed. that being said, i don't know where you got anything about elemental damage in my post, since those can at least mesh (using a 2 handed weapon that does air damage can interact with a wet target, for example). i was talking about stats on weapons, like +1 scoundrel on a piece of intelligence armor, which will almost never be of any use other than for niche hybrid builds

on the subject of traps, i think they just haven't been appropriately tweaked; give them more effects, make them do more damage

Elemental damage on weapons, it was fine in D:OS1, here it doesn't work that well, since the system pigeonholes certain damage dealers to always attack certain enemies and you'll never really make use of that effect, because the enemies just absorb all of that bonus damage. I guess you could say it's useful for helping your mages killing low magic armor enemies once your low physical armor enemies are dead, but really, since that damage also scales with intelligence, the damage is so pitiful it doesn't even matter even if their magic armor is already down.
At least in D:OS1 it was always helpful in some way and it could also be useful against enemies with high physical resist.



Honestly, I'd rather fix the source of the problem instead of fixing all the other things it broke, and it's not only elemental damage on weapons, see my first post.
I don't even think the whole system needs to be scrapped, just changed and better balanced. For example you could make it so that some damage always bypasses the armor, maybe based on the percentage of how much you still have left. Another thing you could do is make soft status effects like shocked or burning to always bypass the armor.


I see. I picked elemental damage since the quote you replied to included it along with two others, and I thought you talked about all of them.

The randomness of effects on items is a different issue, I addressed it more than once. They did not even try to fix it, instead the armor system makes it even worse. Now there are even more pointless effects, that you could get on your weapons and turn good weapon into a hardly decent one.

Also thanks to the broken attributes, taking aerothurg for magic damage would not that effective. You will hardly skill Intelligence, so the damage would be subpar anyway.

And yes, in D:OS2 most fights go the way you expected them to go, even in tactician. Most fights are not fun, they are pure grind, because the stat boost for enemies is pretty insane. If a boss just murders you, if you let him act even once, there is no challenge just a puzzle: How to I neutralize him before he can act. After he got neutralized the fight is pretty much over. Also the only surprises are just skills, that enemies have but you have never seen or heard about. Just like the exploding turtles on the beach. They hardly add challenge and more enforce save scumming. The probably should rename Tactician into Puzzlian.

This mod will fix all the problems you have with combat and some more.
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=645563&page=1

It will release after the enhanced edition is out as the creator wants to make it work with it, he could release a lot of it right now but waiting makes more sense and gives him time to make the mod fully working and test out the combat and search for bugs longer. Expect a late september release.

And I don't agree that tactition is a save scumming. At some points you might die a few times but most normal battles can be won first try if you prepare well enough. If you have a high lore level you already know a lot of effects and especially resistances before they happen. You have to use potions (just look how many there are https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Potions) and other items effectivly. If you don't use potions you should maybe stay away from tact mode. Ontop of that tactication mode forces you to work together with all four party members, in normal mode all four players can go their way and 2-3 of them group up for harder battles and only for bosses you use all 4 characters. In tactician mode you should have all characters together and be creative with your tactics and always bring a decent amount of items and special potions. I give it to you though that some of the bosses were hard to figure out, but dying in one turn just means you didn't invest into the right kind of armor and stats or just didn't use potions.

There is nothing you can 'invest' in Fort Joy. You got nothing at the start and there is not much to gain either, so what exactly should you invest? Even if you know were all those nice 'armors' are lying around and were chests are hidden, your equipment stays subpar for the most time of the act. So this argument is kind of bullshit.