I posted a topic about this a few weeks ago, asking if such a mod was worthwhile, and DOS2's combat/progression is so plagued with issues that I think it is.
While I appreciate them going for something new, some of the choices they made were questionable at best.
The amount of simplifications made to everything was astounding.
I could easily ramble about my issues with DOS2, but here's the document outlining all of the changes I'm to be making.
I've left the first tab as effectively a really long TL;DR.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VPKUJT-Zt5tEMFKi461-37MrpGibI9CshibdpgPybH8/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BGEK8jopLEl46CtMxqOXm8M2zj9uMwXDv_KWitDi7nQ/edit?usp=sharing

I don't expect a release version any time soon, but I figured I'd announce what I'm working on in case anyone else is working on something similar.
Many of the technical things are indeed working ingame, but the vast majority of the work will be the skill overhaul to play nice with the new mechanics, and overhauling all of the encounters to use the new skills/mechanics.

I feel slightly guilty not leaving any picture, so I guess here's one.


P.S. Love you Larian.

Hey! You've put a lot of thought into it, that's neat! Combat was the biggest let-down for me too going into DOS2, mainly because I came right from DOS1 and fell in love with the chaotic experimental sandbox environment where it felt free and fluid to use the environment or approaches to pick off / immobilize enemies. Whereas in DOS2, the short notion is it felt like a number-crunching "the hardest hitting team wins".

Although I feel it's important to mention for you, at least in the current state, editing UI and in proxy, the representation of stats etc in the built-in UI is inaccessible. So for reintroducing old stats you'd have to manage this through some other means than the standard UI.

Definitely keeping an eye on this though :]

Good luck, and happy new year!

Yeah, I'm aware of the technical complications what I'm trying to do here has. I've already got workarounds/plans for most things, and I've found the game is probably more modifiable than you might think if you're willing to override base game files. With the scope of this mod I've already, if unfortunately, made compatibility a non-priority.

Here's another shot, perhaps it will make a lot clearer what I'm doing with attributes here.





Another one showing piercing damage.

Quick video of the tiered status system, still very WIP:

Looks really nice!

Just a bit of a status update.
Most of the groundwork is in, all of the attributes are working, four of the Proficiencies are working (Just haven't made the other three yet), and three of the tiered statuses are fully working and the rest should be relatively easy to implement.
There's been a lot of other work done but most of it is just tedious stuff that needed done (Over 6 pages of addresses from a localization file I've modified for example), but by and large things are going well.
When all of the groundwork in completely I can then move on to adding skills, which I expect to be extremely tedious and take a while, but once that is done the mod could be considered "playable". I'll still need to go through all the encounters for adjustments and make them use the new systems and play through with the mod multiple times to make appropriate adjustments to everything.

Regarding compatibility: Mods that modify charScript files will very likely be incompatible. This is basically unavoidable with the scope of the mod. A lot of mods that add classes will probably still sorta work. Statuses used in the mod that have been swapped to the tiered system will work with the tiered system.
But given the changes to armor and damage they'll have oddities such as anything that does Physical damage will instead be doing Light damage with my mod and anything that requires, for example, Huntsman will find it instead requiring Divine.

Compatibility patches for these kinds of oddities should be exceptionally easy to patch (And I may make a script to generate said patch), but balance will of course be up in the air.

This mod is still getting worked on.
Some progress:
Tiered statuses are fully working, only took a couple hundred thousand lines of code to get all of them in.
Buffs are now also tiered, but the effects don't diminish with strength and can go up to a strength of 16 rather than capping out at 8.
They now effectively act as a buffer/shield against harmful statuses.

I'm not the best artist but I made some of the icons to be used in the mod:




I also fixed initiative.
Excuse the WIPness as usual, but here's a video of that:

Looking good, BlueFeuer!

Tiered statusses sound real fun And don't worry, the icons are looking real good
Looking forward to the next update

Sincerely,
Kevin

This looks very promissing! Looking forward to test this mod!

Indeed, will be following this mod!

Man, I'd love to have the tiered statuses and fixed initiative in gm mode.

I took a short hiatus from this mod, don't know when the next full post will be. The mod is getting worked on now though so don't worry.

Can take some time to respond though;
Was a tiny bit surprised to see a post from Larian considering the fact I'm basically scrapping a lot of the base game's combat mechanics, but I suppose at the same time not too surprised. Glad to hear it in any case.

The mod will most definitely be available in GM mod, can guarentee that one (As my GM intends to use it when it gets finished.. He asks about it every once in a while).
As far as fixed initiative goes, I actually posted a fix to the workshop quite a while ago. Wanted to see how it would do on it's own. In any case it's not up to par where I would like it to be, it's still got a few bugs I'd like to fix, but for now it works and appears to be roughly stable. Here's a link:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1304982884

The bugs on that page and when a character dies on their turn the next turn goes to Larian default order still need to be fixed. No idea when I'll get around to that.

The initiative fix mod and the main mod will probably remain as two separate but compatible mods, as the initiative fix will never be perfect (the top bar is nigh unfixable) and some may prefer to keep the clarity of the built in system.

Dude, I know how you feel. Those of us that have been modding since release (5-6 Months ago?) are feeling it. I had to take a break to do things that actually paid the bills. As fun as it is, it becomes work regardless.

That being said, I have yet to find a group of adventurers to run through my GM mod haha. Maybe I'm unbearable.

GL, HF.

Bit of a smallish update, but I figure I may as well.
There's a lot of WIP stuff on this document, but if someone wants to know where this mod's vision sits and is crazy enough to read through here's an updated document.
I'm not actually sure how much has changed since the last document but I think overall it hasn't changed much.
Mostly things are a lot more concrete now and all of the non-multiclass abilities have been filled out in their entirety.
This is also my working document so if/when I change stuff it'll be seen.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BGEK8jopLEl46CtMxqOXm8M2zj9uMwXDv_KWitDi7nQ/edit?usp=sharing

Man, what can I say... Your ideas and work on this big combat overhaul are stunning !
I can't wait to see this addon in action in my on-going GM campain :)

I have some question if you have some time to share your vision (sorry for my english, I'm not a native speaker).

One of the most disapointing aspect in this game IMO is the maths behind the scene and how the damage are calculated.
You change and maybe solve this issue in a very interesting way with this addon. But Im wondering how you manage to found your equilibrium with the bonus given by the stats. I will try to explain:
if we consider a linear damage/AP for a character, investing in dex allows to acces to a multiplicative damage modifier: 4dex = 1AP leads to a 1/6 = 16.7% more damage every 4 dex => 4.16% more damage / dex (correct me if I'm wrong). In addition more add a lot of flexibility during your turn that cannot be well evaluated.
In the over hand the damage bonus given by might is +10% (additive).
I only compare dex with might but the balance question is the same with the other stats.

We know how powerfull stacking multiplicative damage can be (ex: absurd way of Warfare works in vanilla), how do you control this ?
IMO only crit is legit as a multiplicative source of damage. Hight ground works also as multiplicative in vanilla, because your of your modifications (no easy teleport) I think this we still want to reward good positionning in this game but we cannot prevent players to set up the fight with hight ground and abuse of this source of damage, maybe hight ground could be nerfed as additive damage or reworked ?

The AP bonus given by dex is realy interesting but I'm afraid that addind an other source of multiplicative damage is risky if not controled properly. What is your position on all of this ?

P.S. I really love your work, I think it is what this awesome game deserved, I am willing to help you for ideas / balancing if you think you need some help.
Regards.

Currently the numbers are based on what felt right. I chose 10% more damage 'cause any other number felt wrong in comparison to the other attributes.
Same goes for a lot of other numbers.
I'll see how it plays out ingame, as that's where figuring out what needs changes will truly take fold.
It's not unlikely that encounters throughout the game will be rebalanced around player power level rather than the other way around though.

Crit/Might are multiplicative damages yes, and I don't like the way high ground is applied but I don't have any plans to fix that atm. Currently you can't even get bonus high ground damage and it is instead a static 30%. May be reduced.
Crit is something I wanted to be a multiplicative damage that was relatively powerful, but required investment on your character's part that could otherwise go to something else.
But I think you are misunderstanding Dex. It could be looked at 4% more AP and therefore 4% more damage per point, but if looked at in that way then it's basically a buff to everything you do and that aside if you chain abilities together using your full AP you'd probably be able to get a lot more than a 4% buff. It's not about having more AP, it's about how you use it.
However people decide to balance their Might/Dex and their other attributes is probably alright with me.

All of that aside, the mod I'm trying to make here is to make combat less about killing the enemy and more about surviving the encounter. My current plan is to buff enemy health/durability substantially so players would have difficulty killing enemies. This applies more to the late game when it's pretty easy to one-shot everything on a battlefield with ease.
If I do my job right, hyper-focusing on a damage party will leave you without enough CC to deal with the enemies before they kill you; you shouldn't be able to end a fight within 1 turn. Even 3 turns is a bit too quick for me.
If you want to worry about Damage Per Turn then play vanilla DOS2. It will be important for maybe 1-2 characters, but stunning enemies will be vastly more difficult so making sure your damage characters can actually live is also important. Damage does not equate ability to stun in this.

I am completly agree with you and my comment goes in the same way. I regret that vanilla builds only focus on damage and neglect all the other aspect because its the only way to have viable characters. I looked for intensive and intelligent encounters where CC is difficult and necessary.

IMO your decission goes in the right direction for that. I was just afraid that the stat bonus distribution that you propose create a new meta where stacking 10 AP always prevail no matter the build. I know this is hard to know before testing with the final product.

Either way, I am glad that you still working on this project and my helping offer still stand ;)

If people want to stack 10 AP then I suppose that's their prerogative. I don't even think that's a bad thing if they're level 20 and have the attribute points for that, as you'll probably have the skills to make use of that by then.
But having 10 AP would take 16 attribute points, and if you don't have any points in Strength then moving 4 over would net a 40% damage increase. Or if you don't have any in Aptitude, then with the way Grit/Willpower works all your statuses will probably apply a strength of say, 4, and if the enemies have a Grit/Willpower of 4 then all your statuses will apply a strength of the minimum of 1. That means it would take 8 casts of a knockdown to knockdown a single enemy. Moving, say, 5 points from Dex to Aptitude would increase the strength of your knockdown status by 50% and, increasing it to a total of 6, making it take 4 casts of a knockdown to actually get them down.
So I don't think that maximum AP will actually be all that useful.

But as I said, if people really do want to make the sacrifice for that much AP, then that's their prerogative.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if people have 10 AP by the end of the game, so long as enemies are tough enough to warrant that.

All of this sounds very good. Is there any ETA yet?

Something I would like to see would be a bonus on CC chances the lower the enemy HP and armor is. Basically making it much harder to CC at 100% HP/Armor but if the enemy is already below 50% HP and only has 20% armor you would actually gain a higher chance to proc CCs. I know your mod will work a bit different than just % chances but making stuns or similar things easier woulds till fit in well. I currently run a mod which gives all CC a 80% chance to miss at 100% armor which is reduced by 1% for each 2% armor missing. So a CC used on a 50% armor enemy would have a 55% chance to miss and against a 0% armor enemy a CC spell would just have a 30% chance to miss. It makes it hard to use against "fresh" enemies but you can still get lucky and makes it easier the longer the fight goes on. (but never reaching 100% chance) I like neither having a 100% nor 0% chance for CC to happen. I like when the chance becomes higher if you buildup special maluses on the enemy for a few turns but it should never be a 100% after a few turns.

ETA: Nope!

As far as your thoughts on armor, it is something I have thought about. And the answer is: Maybe.
It'd probably be, the less armor the enemy has the more status strength gets boosted on that enemy. I don't have plans for that presently but I could see that changing in the future if it feels right after testing.

This sounds great! I really would like a system like that (status strength boost of x% for every z% of enemy armor missing). Would make the turns a bit more tactical than they already would be with your mod, too. Especially with long cooldown AOE CC spells - you should never use them if you don't have other spells to follow them up, but they can be devastating for that specific turn if you have enough to combo them. (At least if the 70% of armor regenerates per turn idea from you makes it into the game - maybe decrease the armor regeneration a large notch thoughm, 25% or sth. - and increase the armor a good amount if that system makes it in? Right at the start of a battle would be the best mental and physical stability of a fight realisticly, too. So a 70% regeneration of armor would seem a bit overkill as it basically would give an almost fresh start each turn when it comes to CC reduction. I guess that needs a lot of playtesting though to see what feels right)

1. If there is no good ETA possible, can you give a range of time you want it to be done in? Can we expect it to hit mid/late 2018 or will it be more of a 2019/2020 release?

2. And another question: Will it be compatible with other mods or will everything be changed too much? I really like that you go for the just 10% increase of stats per level because I already use a mod which makes uses that system to allow a legendary weapon to actually be better than a rare one of 1-2 levels higher. Right now even a white weapon can outDPS a legendary one a level later. I want very rare weapons to be useful at least 3 levels if they stay as rare as they are right now. Same goes for money scaling with level which is insane in vanilla. But there are other mods which don't seem to be implemented in your mod already like "MonsterScaling" which levels up monsters to your level if you outlevel them while keeping all higher level enemies at their respective level. It doesn't increase the EXP gain but everything else. (I think the engine automatically gives bonus stats based on level and that's why it works so good without much scripting work done, so I wonder if your mod will be able to do the same with all the new stats you created) Especially with your focus on lategame not being a boring stomp every time - every enemy being leveled to your level if you manage to outlevel them if you do 100% of everything possible would help to further push that "lategame should still be hard" design. This way the casual player can enjoy your mod with just doing the main objectives and a few sidemissions they stumble upon but completionists will still have a challenge in lategame. Difficulty adapting to the player is always a welcome thing in games. And EnemyScaling would do exactly that.

My wife and me won't touch the game anymore until your mod is out. The patchwork mess we created works rather good (enemyscaling, the mentioned armor% mod and a couple of dozen mods ontop of that) but some things just don't work out perfectly due to the number of different mods needed. Your mod already includes half of the changes we wanted to achieve with our frankensteins monster version of the game and hence would highly reduce the number of mods needed to create exactly the experience we want from the game. I'm glad Larian gave us a lot of freedom when it comes to modding and that people like you exist which use the tools given to us to allow players to have a game exactly the way we want it to be. It's already an amazing game, but with the work of modders like you it becomes the almost perfect example of how this genre can be! (high freedom real time co op rpg with deep turn based combat with many options and possible combos - right now all of that works great except for the "deep" and the "many options and combos" parts which even lack behind the first game which was amazing in early game but was missing out on a lot of potential due to the 100% CC mess it became in lategame)

3. And one last question for this already very long post: Your resistance (not armor) system seems to be similar to D:OS 1. Will armor have different % based damage reduction for elements AND physical damage? And will physical damage be split into three categories again like it used to be? I really hate that a lot of the depth of that was lost. My ranger had no chance to kill a skeleton with normal arrows as pierce damage would do almost no harm to them. It made sense because skeletons are hard to hit with a piercing weapon as they are just bones and hence a blunt weapon would be much more effective. It added to the charm of the game that different enemies would be resistant or even weak to specific type of weapons. Right now there are still some enemies with high resistances to fire or other elements so you would need to use different schools of magic against them but when it comes to physical damage it just doesn't matter what kind of weapon you use. Just swing your weapon until something is dead. Switching a weapon before a fight or even midfight is just a waste of time right now which makes me sad. I really like the changes in your documentation on weapons (some pierce more against the real HP, others have grit throws, the damage and crit chances are balanced with lower chance to hit, etc.) but there doesn't seem to be any resistances against specific weapon types planned. Would love to hear your explanation on resistances for your mod ESPECIALLY when it comes to physical damage and if you plan on any resistances for weapon types or at least a flat/% physical damage resistance. (hitting a large pile of rocks with a weapon should for example not be effective and spells should be the way to go there - no matter if it is the start or end of a fight)

Asking the real questions here.
There's a lot of issues I have with how the armor system worked in DOS2.
Main ones being:
It was binary. I don't really have much to say, but this is why the new status system is rather granular.
It linked damage to your ability to crowd control.
That second point is important when fighting enemies of a higher level as that is what makes the level gaps that much more apparent. It was also why damage was way more important than.. Pretty much anything.
This is why the system is far more decoupled from armor than previously.
The moment you did enough damage, the enemy was easily crowd controllable for essentially the rest of the fight. This was the original reason for armor regenerating every turn.

Currently, however, armor is largely used as a way of mitigating damage rather than statuses.
With the scaling being reduced heavily I don't think relinking damage and armor under my system is a bad idea, as long as it's done lightly and keeps players thinking in the abstract, with full armor still only reducing the strength of statuses by say, 50%.
Main issue I would be concerned with about that is clarity. When a status is applied I'll probably set it up so it tells the player exactly what happened, such as -
Burning of strength 2 applied to Enemy. (6 strength - 2 grit, 50% reduced by armor)
But with weird numbers such as, enemy has 30% armor left (or worse yet, 139/417 armor left) something like that can be hard to calculate or think about on the fly.
That's something I really hated about damage linked with statuses. When the numbers got into the thousands and you had resistances to deal with, it was a bit of a nightmare to calculate how much damage needed to be actually done to strip someones armor and knock them down. Checking tooltips for how much damage it's doing now, factoring in their armor, etc. That's something I want to avoid with my mod - I want it to remain incredibly tactical, but I don't want it to get bogged down by numbers.

That ramble aside I do actually like the idea and there's a good chance it'll make it into the mod, or at the very least experimented with. I never liked my current linking of armor to statuses and have thought about removing it, but I like this much better. It will definitely make things harder to make feel right but I think I can do it.

As far as an ETA goes, uh.. Yes. Won't say what you can expect, but I guess you can hope for a mid/late 2018 release. I certainly hope I don't take the next 7 months to get a beta going. Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into.

Mod compatibility.. It will really depend on the mod. Chances are there will have to be a lot of compatibility patches made. Monster scaling relies on scripting and doesn't directly modify the stats of things, so it'd probably be compatible. It would probably only affect damage and health though.
In any case it is something I'll probably end up adding to my mod, just haven't added it to my document.
Anyways, most mods would probably not work with mine. If shown a mod I could probably tell you whether it'd work or not but even simple stuff like free bless would be rendered obsolete, faster run speed will probably be something my mod does, free pet pal will.. Well, pet pal is a druid thing now.

I know where the patchwork of mods comes from, I've been there. That was kinda the origin of this mod. So many issues with the game that I tried to fix with other people's mods until I realized the issues with the game ran deep - It'd basically require an overhaul of base game systems to get it to the point I wanted, and a collection of mods just simply can't do as the authors just can't be coordinated enough.

Piercing/Blunt/Slashing damage is something I definitely miss from DOS1. On paper combining them all into one makes some sense but in practice it's kinda a mess. It definitely removes a lot of potential depth from the game that I would have loved to have added. Unfortunately, however, adding new damage types is impossible without a hefty amount of scripting and even then, you can't deal damage to armor via scripting.
So no, new damage types are not being added.
As you probably know, Earth is being repurposed into Physical so it can deal damage to Magic armor, Physical armor is being removed, and current Physical armor is being repurposed into Light damage as a form of Piercing with a bonus to undead/decaying.
Physical (Earth) resistance is making a return however and it'll basically work like any other resistance, just be a lot rarer as an enchantment and your main source of it will be from likely the armor you wear. Enemies will also have it as makes sense by their enemy type. Bone golems or alike will probably be pretty physically resistant, for example.
With the combination of Physical into Magic armor, that also means having an enchanted weapon is actually a very good thing to have like it was in DOS1. I intend to make enchantments pretty powerful (25-50% of the weapon's total damage being made up of an elemental type, plus runes) so the element on the weapon is pretty much as important as the physical damage on it. I didn't like Physical being the be-all-end-all either.

Just stumbled upon this topic, and I'm instantly in love with your proposed system. Are you looking for any help/testing/feedback with this mod? I have a rudimentary knowledge of the Divinity Engine 2 and I understand the principles of programming well as a programmer myself, and following a busy week of university until Friday 4th of May I would be overjoyed to assist you with this somehow.

Otherwise though, please keep up the good work. I'm very excited to see how this goes, knowing fully well it could take a long time to implement.

I sent you a PM if you're serious. Right now it's a lot of crunch work, implementing abilities.

Thank you a lot for your detailed answer! I'm glad that you actually like the idea and that there's a good chance it'll make it into the mod. And I like that you give us some % based physical defence combined with the earth defence. It makes sense and should make battles against specific enemy types far more interesting. (full mage or full weapon parties won't have much of a chance against specific enemy types - like it should be) It's sad that the different weapon damage types won't make a return but I think at least having the option to get reduced weapon damage is better than what we have right now. I guess you will include an upper limit for those resistances though? Especially physical resistance would be bad to be able to go past 100%. In my opinion even more than 90% is already too much for the player races. I think investing into pyro/hydro/etc. could increase the resistance maximum, too? Not increase the resistance itself - but give you the option to go higher than say 70%. Basically everything could have a 70% (or any other specific number) resistance cap and to get higher than that you need to be trained in that element school. That way getting to 100% resistance needs actual investment and still requires a lot of good gear to get. (you know how to become a fireproof being, but you still need the magic armors and weapons to reach that resistance) Ofc the earth/physical limit still needs to be at maybe 80% max no matter how high you go as it would break the game being able to nullify or get healed by normal attacks.
Btw, I really like that you will incorporate things like faster movement speed and maybe even upscaling enemies into your mod. Pet Pal being a druid thing sounds fine to me tbh. It is not as much of a must have as it used to be in DOS1 anyways.

Aside from those things there are some other mods which I currently use which I wouldn't want to miss out on after using your mod when it comes out are. (I modified some of them slightly but you would have to tweak them to fit to your mod balance anyways) Maybe you would like to implement them in one way or another as all those are ease of life changes and no gamechangers like some of the other mods I use which I won't write down here as there are a) too many to count and b) most of them won't be needed if your mod turns out as good as it sounds right now!:
1. Let there be tooltips - This mod displays tooltips for interactive objects that don’t otherwise get them, even when highlighted. Let's put it this way: "Is that extremely barrel-looking, feeling and tasting object really a barrel? Now you know that it actually is!"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1161362151
2. Autoidentify - If you have loremaster 5 or higher all items added to your inventory are automatically identified without having to do it manually. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1179519817&searchtext=
3. Reduced number bloat - that one looks like it is going to be added into your mod already. Far less damage/hp increase per level, including less money drop and cost increase per level. To balance it out the heal potions (and poison potions for zombies!) need to get % based heal/poison instead of flat heal/poison though. And seriously: who wants numbers in the thousands anyways? Just makes it more complicated to calculate instead of acutally harder. I really like that you think alike in this regard.
4. toggle + long range spirit vision - makes spirit vision much easier to use to talk to ghosts etc. with the range being highly increased and the ability being a toggle

Will there be saving throws against CC btw? Or will it be a simple calculation to work with? I like some randomness in chance of CC and weapon swings missing even if you reach the needed thresholds. Never having a 100% chance for an effect to happen is great as it gives those crazy moments where either you or the enemy gets that 5% chance to not be affected by something even though all other criteria meet the requirements.
All those are minor things and nothing too crazy and might be nice to have already in the mod when you release it instead of people having to do compatible versions. It's great to see that a great modder actually has the same vision for the game as us. It gives us hope that you can fix the deep rooting issues with the combat part of the game and give thousands of players the experience they should have gotton in the first place.

There is currently a 75% resistance cap for everything. Elemental resistances usually have ways of getting that increased, temporarily or otherwise, such as fire resistance cap getting increased by Demon.
Physical Resistance will not be able to be increased past 75% and that'll probably apply to most enemies as well.
I don't think reaching 75% Physical resistance will be terribly easy either, or at least I will try to make it so.

The mods you listed -
All of them would probably be compatible.
Even reduced number bloat, if loaded after mine, would just override my numbers.

Randomness - No. No saving throws. Dodging is a thing but I don't think it's terribly difficult to get your chance to hit up to 100% by either reducing the enemies chance to dodge or your chance to hit. For CC effects the only RNG currently is an edge case involving Aptitude - If you cast a spell with 3 strength and you have 11 points in Aptitude, the strength will be increased by 10% up to 3.3. This translates to a strength of 3 with a 30% chance at a strength of 4.

RNG is something that I get asked about a fair bit but it's something I'm trying to break away from. That's one of the things I think Larian did right.
RNG in DOS1 was typically frustrating more than anything - Missing a 5% saving throw on a critical spell in the battle? In several cases during a DOS1 playthrough that meant the enemy was not CC'd the next turn and OTK'd my entire party, simply leading to a reload and try again. To me, having something with a 95% chance to hit doesn't create uncertainty, but rather takes something that I read as a certainty and has it fail.

I'd actually be more OK with a 50% chance for something to fail than a 5% chance, because the 50% chance you can rely on it to be unreliable. And if you can apply other statuses, potentially guarenteed ones, to make that 50% chance a 100% chance then you can turn the hail mary shots into something guarenteed with a few extra AP.

If people after my mod released still really want RNG such as that then it's going to have to come from another modder as an addon.

As someone who loves the XCOM series (at least the newer ones, the older ones had just way too many characters to control in one turn making fights way too long) I see it as "I can be lucky/unlucky - but the enemy can be lucky/unlucky too". And you plan ahead according to that. But I see your point about major RNG moments and I really like the 30% chance to get the powerlevel one higher instead of having it do nothing or everything - that makes every point into those stats useful instead of having 2 wasted points until you can invest the third one. Basically a minor RNG instead of a major one. I hope you will have more of those minor RNGs. (like the weapons doing x to y damage, spells doing x to y, etc.) Removing major RNG seems fine to me as it CAN be frustrating. But minor RNG is needed to keep you on your toes no matter how well you plan ahead. Or more accurately: it makes you plan ahead with the worst possible outcome in mind. Or makes you think about the best possible outcome (highest damage from the damage range + a crit) if you are in a dire situation you might lose if you don't try to go for that lucky shot. Having to go for a lucky crit and high damage from the damage range of a weapon or spell means you already did something wrong earlier in the battle but at least gives you a chance to recover from that mistake. RNG is not onesided but going for less major RNG seems fine to me as long as you keep the minor RNG.

And I like your approach of going for 50% chance effects which can be boosted to 100% with the investment of some extra AP with another spell. Maybe even make that buff vanish after doing a % based spell? Basically a "make your next spell/skill stronger and double the chance of all it's effects". That way it would work with all kinds of spells to increase the chance from 50% to 100% but it would only work for ONE spell. Else you could just use all the 50% chance spells together with that buff which would be bad. Could even be a source skill and have stacks, effecting the next 2 spells or sth. I dunno, just ideas.

As long as you still include minor RNG or have spells which remove 50% RNG chances from other spells I don't think anyone will need any major RNG. I like your approach of rather going for 50% chances than 95%. I think having damage ranges for weapons and spells and the 30% / 60% chance to get effects one rank higher as you mentioned depending on your skillpoints invested everyone who likes that bit of RNG will be happy. At least I would be. I mean you still got things like critchance. That way you always have a certain baseline damage with the chance of high damage. Crits, blockchance, evade and some minor damage ranges from x to y are all that's needed to give you those "YES" moments in battles when everything works together. A small question: With a 100% chance to hit - will you still be able to evade and block attacks? If yes that would make it very interesting to use debuffs on enemies AND buffs on yourself to get that 100% chance - making a 100% chance an actual INVESTMENT of AP which would be twosided.

Don't mistake what I said on RNG for what's going into the mod. Status effects/spells won't have RNG outside of what I stated in regards to having bonus Aptitude.
Using AP to get stronger effects is certainly a thing in the form of draining willpower, grit, or boosting your own aptitude. But it won't be particularly RNG-driven.

I suppose I don't view RNG the same way most people do. RNG does two things: It presents unknowables that force you to plan for the worst, and it gives a lot of granularity to an otherwise binary system.
The unknowables thing would be fine, if the worst case scenario could be planned around. But in RPG's it often can't and thus forces a reload. It may not happen often but it really does feel like the game is dicking you over.
The granularity would be fine.. If players did spells in batches of 100. In the long term it evens out and the player understands this. But it just feels wrong to me.

Unknowables/unknowns are of course what makes a tactics game interesting - with how hard it'll be to stun enemies, I'm aiming for enemies to fill that void. Without a threat of losing I don't think games are particularly fun.

Dodging however is very much a thing. If you have a 100% chance to hit and you try to hit something with 50% dodge, then you'll hit that particular enemy 50% of the time. If you have 150% chance to hit then you'll always hit it. Hitting an enemy is Chance to Hit - Dodge Chance. So yes, you'll be able to raise your chance to hit and lower their dodge to make you more and more likely to hit the enemy with your weapon, which will be important if using a low chance to hit weapon (battleaxe) or trying to hit a high dodge enemy. Or both.
Dodging and weapons in general could be viewed as a bit of an experiment on my part. Going to see if I can make RNG work as long as there's non-RNG ways to game the system into being 100% successful with what you do, but isn't required. I guess.

Crits are also still a thing, blocking is only going to be on player characters (never enemies) and will essentially act as a bit of a saving throw towards attacks.

Thank you for your response. Yeah, that it is what makes a tactics game interesting in most cases is exactly what I meant. But if the enemies make up for it with uncertainty of their actions it should still be fine. And having crits, hitchance and blockchance should be enough RNG if the enemies can offer a challenge and are a bit unforseeable in their actions, especially considering that spells can crit in D:OS 2.

The "definitive edition" has been announced for early august. I think you might want to stop the production until it releases - everyone who owns the original gets the definitive edition for free so everyone will have the new version. Would be better to build upon it for anything that can't just easily be translated over to the new version. They said the changelog will include several thousand smaller bugfixes and changes including some major ones. Would waste a lot of your time to work on it now and translate it to the new version in two months.

Yes I noticed. Unless they overhaul their scripting language or how character/status/potion/etc data is stored then the vast majority of my work will carry over on a technical standpoint, which is doubtful.
Biggest concern is any design changes they make - Should be interesting at the very least.
It's possible but I doubt the current systems in place are going to receive changes big enough for me to not make my mod. If they make combat not round robin, great. If they reduce the scaling, great. But I don't feel like Dex/Int/Fin are going anywhere and I doubt the armor system will change greatly. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

Biggest hope is that the game will receive updates to moddability, for things such as new damage types or.. Well, any of the countless things we don't have control over but probably should.
Even something simple such as getting who applied a status when it's applied is a painful ordeal. I have a workaround but I know other people do things such as: Check who's turn it is, check when someone's casting abilities, check when they attack, check everything to try to hopefully get who (probably) applied the status.

In any case I'ma keep working on stuff that I believe should translate, or if it doesn't I should still be able to run a script over the files to convert them for differences.

More options and tools for modding would be great. Let's hope for the best, the enhanced edition of D:OS had some surprising changes, too. I doubt they will change anything enough for your mod not to be needed though. Let's hope they don't delay the release so you can get into the parts of your mod which won't translate in august sooner rather than later.

Hi there, just a random dude passing by. I really love what you are doing and it look very promising. I can assure you I'm super pumped for this mod. Good luck with it.

Hi. I am too. Lots of work still to be done.

If it's possible, and if you want to, please send me a list of skill icons you want done (with detailed information on colors and etc). I'm a graphic design student and my vacations just started, and I'd like to give them a try.

Making icons for all the new stuff has actually proven to be one of the more time consuming parts of this mod. Would definitely appreciate help in that area. I sent you a PM.

Hi BlueFeuer, first, I love what you are doing. Second, I stumbled across your Initiative Fix mod on steam and eventually found my way here. I made an account and everything purely to see if you could use a guinea pig to test anything on for this overhaul. I don't have much in the way of knowledge about Divinity's inner workings, but I certainly don't mind testing (and sub sequentially breaking) anything in my own game. I do that already in the vanilla game lol. That being said I've modded games before and I'm quick to pick up this sort of thing with the right amount of help when needed. If you're ok with anything I have just said, shoot me a message and I will hopefully reply in a timely manner. I do not mind breaking my own game for the sake of testing something that could make this broken husk of a combat system. Hope to possibly work with you. ^^

Sent you a PM.
Currently I'm just setting up data for when DOS2DE launches, which won't take much testing to make sure it's working properly.
I intend to do another full vanilla playthrough when DOS2DE does launch to get a feel for where the game stands, and from there I'll begin adjusting things accordingly and tweaking/potentially overhauling encounters to fit within my systems. That's what will take a lot of testing but can't really be worked on beforehand.

Hello BlueFeuer. I had been hoping this definitive edition would have done more to address some of the wonky decisions by the devs on release, but alas, it seems it has not. In any case, I'm very interested in your mod as a person who has never shyed away from going past vanilla in most games. Do you have an expected time for an initial beta now that the definitive edition has come out? I've been looking for a decent overhaul since the release last year and this would seem to be most of the things I've been hoping for in such a thing.

Probably don't expect a release date for a few months. Work on this project has kinda hit the backburner as far as priorities go but I'll find some time coming up to work on it more.

There's a lot this mod is trying to do and a lot of it is incredibly time consuming and tedious to get done.

Especially with some new systems already in place like a talent which makes damaging dots go through armor some more balance shifts are needed for the mod, too. And many features like UI changes for mouse/keyboard from the DE are still coming and not yet out.

not going to lie, epic encounters made CC harder to stack and added a stupid 2 turn out of 6 limit to hard CC which pretty much downright ruined CC completely. I hope thats not what youre going for here. if so please consider splitting the changes into seperate mods where possible. I like the stats changes, I like the INT fix, but if you mess with CC the way epic encounters does...big thumbs down.

Interesting you should mention the two turn limit. I've done a couple playthroughs of DOSEE with Epic Encounters and one of the things I manually disabled pretty quickly was the two turn limit on hard CC.

But making CC harder to apply to enemies; Sorry but that's not really going anywhere. If it's possible to disable all enemies in a fight that makes it impossible for meaningful risk management to occur when paired with the removal of RNG. It's one of the main reasons every fight plays out the same way in the base game and makes enemies all feel similar; the only difference between them is the amount of armor they have.

And as far as splitting the mod up into multiple parts; I don't think that's viable. Many of the changes are dependent on one another. The Status overhaul needs to be paired with the ability overhaul to function, the stats overhaul is dependent on the status overhaul. I could take time to make changes to separate these but that would involve maintaining multiple versions of the same mod.

Just leave it as one big mod. If someone wants to change it they can always tinker with it themselfes - simple changes to already existing mods are rather easy to do after all.

How is progress going btw? With all those stat changes and new encounters I guess you will have to change the enemies themself one by one from the groundup. Especially considering the changes to balance of many spells which would be reverted if you used old values instead. But all the groundwork like icons and new effects/scrips/spells could just be ported over if already done, right?

Oh well, keep us updated if release draws near. Would like to get excited beforehand. After all it's not just the present that's fun but also the time before opening it.

Currently in the first act of a vanilla playthrough. As I said in an earlier post I'd like to do a complete playthrough of the DE to see where things stand.
I actually haven't touched encounters yet; Decided not to after the DE was announced. Didn't want to have to do it twice.
And yeah pretty much everything I've done can be ported over. All the abilities in my mod aren't parented from vanilla abilities; I have my own script to generate the abilities based on parameters I set using an Excel sheet and a generic base to fill in whatever parameters I don't set depending on the ability type. Makes creating/modifying abilities far easier than the laggy and sometimes difficult to read Divinity Engine and also means even stuff in the vanilla game such as Fireball will not be changed by Larian updates as they are completely new entries.

That's a very good news. I'm excited to see what you can pull off. If at some point it you need a beta tester for your mod add me on steam : https://steamcommunity.com/id/youhmani/

I will be glade to help out, even though I know nothing about modding.

I'm actually glad it took longer than expected because larian is pumping out so many hotfixes right now that it will at least take a few more weeks until the final patch arrives. Better to have a mod for the finished game than for a buggy one.

Can we expect a nice christmas present this year or will you need more time to get version 1.0 ready for release?

How well will your mod be compatible with other mods btw? I really want one of the many less stat bloat mods for example. Mods which reduce the levelscaling of things like money, vitality, damage, etc. Will something like that be compatible or will you even include something like that in your mod? Can't wait for the full mod description showing all changes.

Probably don't expect a release until late January at the earliest.

Compatibility is something that's on my mind a lot, but it's simply not going to be terribly friendly with other mods. I'm overriding every skill in the game and changing how many core features function among other things.

Some mods will be compatible though. Less stat bloat mods are pretty simple (only changing a couple variables) and would be compatible, but I'm including my own override as it is. Hard to say what exactly would be compatible or not, generally mods that only add and don't change existing stuff should be fine, more or less.
Skill mods would of course be tuned to the vanilla systems and use vanilla statuses so those probably won't work well without a patch.

Nice to hear from you again! Yeah, I figured mod compatibility would be rather wonky. But you already said that some "must have" stuff like faster movement speed outside of combat will be included in your mod already. And I don't really care for skill or class mods as the vanilla game and your overhaul already have more than enough classes, spells, effects and skills to choose from. I'm very excited to see your hard work starting to come to fruition so my wife and I can finally play through the game after we stopped halfway through because we were just too annoyed by the current combat systems. Finally the "each battle is a puzzle" system will be back!

Btw, if you intend to change around hp/damage/money/etc scaling be careful with the difference is scaling for magic damage. Things like the less bloat mod try to address this making a 5% instead of 7% scaling to magic damage but even then some numbers are just not where they should be. Larian for some reason decided to make just a handful of spells scale different - which you would never notice in the game without changes to global level scaling. And if you touch it in any way I would recommend changing potions and poison potions to be percentage based to up to 40% for the largest one to be balanced with the new HP values. (especially poison - which the author of reduced numbers bloat forgot as he didn't think about zombie healing from poison)

I hope you have a massive list of changes so we can get a "changelog" when you release the mod. (especially things like faster movement speed which are added ontop of your new core mechanics) Wishing you all the best!

Hi BlueFeuer! I checked out your spreadsheet and I think what you're doing here is very exciting! If there is anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Any luck for a progress update? I had this bookmarked for a bit and I've been really looking forward to see this exciting project come to fruition.

I guess I probably should give a progress report.

Hoping to have something to release soon. Ideally, in a month.. Unforeseen issues have been popping up. Like for instance I just spent the last week rewriting ~400 thousand lines of code to work around a limitation I don't think was present in classic. Using a hacky feeling method I ended up fixing that issue and shortening the script to ~13 thousand lines, but due to a separate issue I needed another workaround that ended up extending the script to around 40 thousand lines. With other work that still needs done, lots of abilities still need some additional scripting but I don’t expect that to take long. Still need to redo localization again. Got lots of smallish stuff I simply haven't gotten around to that I generally don't expect to take long. I’m almost done replacing all the placeholder effects throughout my mod but even so I still have a fair amount to do on that front.

Here’s a video of one such effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfv2i-nIWPU

So basically still lots to do but everything is shaping up well. For a while the mod didn’t actually have a lot of work done on it (Maybe 10ish hours a week) but starting ~2 months ago I found the time I needed and have been working on it non-stop for up to 80 hours a week so things are progressing way faster.
For now I’m focusing almost exclusively on getting the base overhaul gameplay ready, but I have plans for what’s to come afterwards.

Anyways, here are some things you should expect from the mod following its release:

A "Specialist" class will be introduced, which does absolutely nothing on it's own. Instead, you'll be able to choose at the start of the game what it does via mutually exclusive talents. Both Crafter and Druid are slated to be moved to this, and I will be introducing more classes to this as time goes on. It's not possible to add new classes directly (Which is why every mod simply uses base game classes), and my mod is no different, with new classes just being renamed old ones. So this is a good middle ground. It'll allow me to add as many classes as I want, and if two classes simply don't make sense to be taken together they will be, by nature, mutually exclusive.
Some classes I intend to add:

Beastmaster; Gain a permanent animal companion (Wolf, Bear, Boar, etc.) to follow you. You'll be able to control it in battle and it will have a small selection of abilities. Putting points into Specialist will give you abilities to buff or assist your companion, and your companion will also gain a few select abilities depending on it's type.

Dragon Disciple; Gain aspects of a dragon as your Specialist goes up, eventually gaining the ability to potentially turn into a dragon under certain conditions and gaining permanent draconic wings.

Necromancer; Separate from Witchcraft. Harvest components from defeated enemies to be able to place bodies of your own on a later battlefield, which are usable for things such as Bone Cage. More importantly, useable in class skills such as Bone Golem, requiring 5 bodies in a small area to summon a powerful amalgamation of Bones.

The Specialist class is also how compatibility with other class mods should be handled, such as Umbra, Vampire, or Constellationist. Naturally compatibility patches will still be 100% necessary, but it should serve to make them feel a lot more integrated, and have less potential for being overpowered.

Also, Crafter will be seeing an overhaul from its current iteration. I’m not happy with how it turned out so it’s undergoing an overhaul and will be released later. For now it’s not going to be included in the mod. As far as what the overhaul will look like:
Instead of simply being limited use abilities, a crafter’s abilities will typically require reagents. Simply place the reagents on the battlefield from your inventory and cast skills on them like a Necromancer on a body. Most machines will typically require scrap metal, and an Oil barrel will probably be worthwhile to carry around.
Skills may include:

Animate Armor; The targeted armor will begin to act on it’s own, gaining the stats of the armor in question. It will also pick up and equip nearby weapons and other armor (Such as leggings, gloves), and gain abilities depending on the type of stuff picked up. It’s unlikely you’ll get what the summon used back when it dies or times out.

Refuel; Target a nearby Oil Barrel to gain a stack of Oil.

Gravity Manipulator; Target any Earth Essence on the battlefield. If you are carrying scrap metal and have a stack of Oil or an Oil Flask, consume them and create a Gravity Manipulator at the Earth Essence’s location.
The Gravity Manipulator will slow down all characters in a ~7 meter radius, with the strength of the slow dependent on the tier of Earth Essence used, with later tiers applying additional statuses. Can be destroyed.

There’s also a lot of smaller stuff I’d very much like to do, to name a few off the top of my head:

Racial abilities. Small changes to abilities based on race - This is more for flavor than anything and shouldn't wildly influence which race you take. But I always disliked how races were handled in the base game. Most races will have a handful of these changes per class. Some examples; Lizards will have a slightly better version of Dragonhide, Undead will have undead versions of Druidic transformations, and Dwarves will have defensive skills in general slightly buffed (Such as Fortify or Stalwart Defense). Other skills will simply have to be discovered ingame.

Uniques. Probably similar to Epic Encounters for DOS1 - Random drops from enemies that could be potentially build-defining and level up with you. I have some ideas such as potentially unique runes but nothing super-solid, definitely something I look forward to creating though.

New and overhauled encounters.
All encounters in the game will of course be changed to fit within my systems. But as of right now you won’t be finding shapeshifting druids to fight. That aside lots of fights will probably get substantial changes to be more engaging.

Overall I’m excited to get this out there and am getting impatient myself. At the end of the day all I really want is for DOS2 to be the tactical masterpiece I know it could have been. I feel like I had more I wanted to say but no idea what it was. Back to work.

I'm glad you got everything figured out and can now wrap up the work for a release version of your mod! You should definitly apply for a job at Larian. You seem to fit in perfectly with those people and I bet you would be a great addition!

I had just remembered to check back in after a few months; how is the project coming along? I imagine it's been quite a lot of work. Do you think there will be a release any time soon?

Oh well, such a massive project can take longer than expected - especially with the new limitations and changes of the definitive edition. You can work around them but it often creates more issues along the way which then have to be ironed out, too.

We are very excited for the mod though. My wife and I will wait until it releases before touching the game again. Hope it arrives soon. ^___^

Hi BlueFeuer, just passing by to see how it's going ! I hope you are doing fine, I too am excited for the release of your mod !

Hi!

I specifically made an account here to ask how is this mod coming along, you haven't posted anything since February. I'm very interested in a mod like this and this seems to be the best overhaul mod I have found for this game so far. Just want to know how is it coming along or are you making it anymore?

Yeah I'm still working on it. Busy with RL stuff off and on. Every time I feel like I get close to a release I realize just how much I have yet to do. Surely one of these times I'll be right about how much is left.
I'll have a release before year's end.

I feel bad for taking so long on this. Apologies.

Oh, don't worry, my intention was not to rush you. Just thought that hearing a little update from you would be good just so we know that the mod is still being worked on. It's completely understandable that such a large mod can take a lot of time to finish. But as long as you eventually deliver a finished product instead of a rushed one, it doesn't matter if it takes the rest of the year to make!

Rejoice! We are not abandoned!

Thank you for the information. A headsup on the progress is all we wanted to hear, we don't mind if it takes longer to finish than expected.

First alpha release available here. I'm not going to say it's good yet but you can see what it's about.
https://discord.gg/5hQsTNw

Now this is a great new years gift !