Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Magic system and mage build

The magic system will be elemental based in the game. But i saw somewhere that mana wasn't going to regenerate except wen sleeping and eating some types of food. But in the end, will a complete mage build be viable ?

Is there going to be perks or some items that will reduce the mana cost or regenerate mana for a more blaster type of character ?

I think there was talk that once you get high enough in levels, there might be a mana regeneration perk.

One reason why there isn't is because of the turn-based combat, it would be too powerful and make the game too easy. After seeing some recent gameplay videos, I think no regeneration makes sense.

I agree with you that mana regen would be strong in a fight. But it depends on the number. 1 mana per turn when spell cost you 40 mana isnt a lot. But mana must stay limited. When I was thinking about mana regen, it was more a "outside combat" mana regen that mages must invest in it. The fighter type would not have this kind of mana regen.

Magic looks really powerful, and if it regenerated out of combat, you could start every fight with full mana. I suppose in-combat regeneration would work for prolonging your usefulness, if it was 1 mana/turn and a spell cost like 7 mana, but then people could try and exploit it by running around. Then again, if they want to waste several minutes of their time running in turn-based instead of resting or getting a potion, maybe that's their own business.

Don't talk about 40 mana spells, I'm getting flashbacks to Beyond Divinity.

Outside of combat regeneration is a tough subject. I hate when games make me stop and wait for mana (and sometimes health) to replenish after combat (ooc regen).

Not sure what an appropriate fix is. If you allow for all mana/health to be replenished after every fight, you devalue the role-playing aspect of the game and make it "easy". Maybe having mages with moderate-level damage abilities that do not cost mana (low-level spells) and leaving the un-replenishable mana abilities for occasional use? I guess you could run into the problem of none of the "cool" abilities being used except for boss fights then.

It is a balancing act, and I'll be interested to see how Larian accomplishes it.

You brought a good point. I was thinking more for a viable mage build type but yeah, if a character heals after each fight, we'll see more glass cannon type than safe gameplay.

But if the mage got reduction in mana price or "free" spell with investing in magic when he level-up, or of it comes with a penalty, this could be better

There's no need to make things complicated. This is not that hard. It’s not Larian’s first time at the rodeo.

They’ve done non-regenerating health and mana before, in Divine Divinity. That was in real-time combat, though. Healing was done through a magic spell or potions (which could be consumed while paused.) Even if you drank potions in real-time, you could bind that to a button and spam it.

I think potions in this game will work fine, especially since they’ll take action points to use, so it’s a trade-off in combat, but relatively free outside of it.

I DD there is 1 skill you can invest in to regenerate Health: Survivor's Instinct .

I like to see in D:OS such a skill as Survivor's Instinct OR finding (via quest or quest reward) a piece of equipment that let regerate you mana and/or health ... or something else, like a perk or a "special item".

Or: a skill like Life Leech or Mana Leech ? Stealing mana of health points from an enemy ?

I like the idea of NO regeneration of MP or HP for D:OS !

No mana regeneration is a decision with some awkward design implications (Larian have to be much more careful how they space monsters around rest points) but I'm mostly happy about it. The one thing I would say is there should be either wands or 0 cost spells that wizards can fall back on when they are conserving their strength.

For people uncomfortable about Wizards not needing any stat other than Intelligence these could have variable to hit and damage based on Perception.

No mana regen worked in Divine Divinty pretty well (although you could get mana regen later on in the game). There were no zero cost spells or wand spells either.
OTOH your mana pool was large enough that you could cast 50+ spells without running out of mana.

TBH, when I was playing DKS, my health regenerates faster than my enemies damage me even on last boss fights. Of course, this does put into equation my equipments. Health regeneration generally destroys the challenge in the game.

A possible exploit that is present on 500k stretch goal mechanic is the "in/out" of battle to/from homestead. You can jug a lot of potions while in your home, so it's possible to exploit it during a boss fight. Unless there Larian implements a good control measure for this, it's going to be exploited much.

The DKS attribute system was the perfect example of how each individual attribute point did almost nothing, but when you pile up several dozen, suddenly all those little fractions of a percent of restoration per second add up to a pretty hefty percentage.

This made a high-INT character have essentially infinite mana, and a high-STR character regenerate quite a bit of health per second. Larian tried to compensate for that by giving the enemies high burst damage, and that was somewhat effective, although it did require turning the difficulty up to Nightmare.

I thought you could retreat to the plane at the end of time but when you wanted to come back, you needed to return to a "checkpoint". This prevented the in/out strategy, particularly against boss. If you can warp at will and return like you never left, there is no challenge if the boss doesnt instakill you, which isn't fun.

Personally, I don't mind if there isn't some mana regen. I just wanted to know if "pure mage" was a viable build and possibly fun. And sure, we have potions which will help.

So, you warped out duri ng a battle and, after warping in, you come back to a different location (IE checkpoint)? Unless the enemies respawn (which probably won't happen because prior games never implement respawning), you only need to worry about the enemy you "flee" away from and the time you spent just going to that place.

But the question is: flee from a battle and come back later .. will the enemies have back there full hitpoints or stay that like when you flee the battle?
In Divine Divinity teleporting away from a dangerous situation and then coming back after a sleep ... he enemies have back full HP.

I hope the same is true for D:OS because otherwise it can become too easy ! No ?

Same, i hope it will at least be like this but i'd prefer that once you're in combat you have to successfully flee before you can teleport away... but even then with two characters you could probably leave one stuck in combat just waiting for the other character to flee, teleport away, have a power nap, heal and restore, grab a load of potions, maybe some scrolls/traps, a can of Redbull and then teleport back to the battle.

Personally i think there needs to be some other level of control to prevent this sort of thing. You could potentially:

*) Once both characters are in combat, both must successfully flee before they can teleport (but this doesn't prevent one character just running to the nearest town and doing the same thing)

*) If both characters are in combat and one leaves... they have to wait till the fight is over. Not much fun in multiplayer!

The problem is that solutions like this seem arbitrary.

Well one thing they could do is that when you hit "flee", both characters have to flee, because when the "flee" flag has been set, all characters in the battle can no longer use their action points for anything except movement.

Yeah that would work!

In the Gamers Dissent video, David said that a round is about 6 seconds long, and said that some spells will indeed take more than one round to cast, so you start casting in one round, but can't do anything else.

If the "retreat to the Homestead at the end of time" thing acts like that it could work - it's a special skill that only works if the "flee" flag is active OR it takes two full rounds to activate, or a combination of both.

What about Necromancy