Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Beta issues

OK, so I bought the beta last night, played it a bit.

Things I'm seeing issues with:

Despite a lot of mentions of this on the boards, for me, the Alt key does not highlight anything.

The movement is really clunky; "run if you move your cursor far enough from your character" does not mesh well with how close the camera is to the characters. Frequently, getting the cursor far enough from the characters to trigger running triggers the edge scrolling. Ugh.

The loot is incredibly random. I screwed up during my first trip through the tutorial dungeon, and had to reload. First time through, there were "rain" scrolls in barrels or crates near the fire floor, there were a couple of crafting books, nearly 200 gold (a couple of piles of 90-some gold), a fireball scroll in a crate near the poison cloud, etc. Second time through, there was no fireball scroll in anything near the poison cloud, which led me to repeating the content a third time, whereupon I found no rain scrolls, no recipe books, around 50 gold total, and no equipment, unless you want to count a paper knife that had less than half the damage of my starting knife, which gave out from durability when opening the door the tutorial suggested bashing through.

I then got to the orc fight, and despite having the guards at my side, promptly got my butt handed to me. With my assassin doing ~5 dmg per hit and missing most of his attacks, and my magic user simply being unable to dish any reasonable damage compared to the orc hit points, or even having an effective means of disabling opponents, I got pasted thoroughly despite repeated attempts.

So, how are people getting into this game?

That's a the beauty of exploration. Mobs in this game have levels. Orcs are level 6 I think, so it's normal that you can't kill them at level 1. So you basically have to make your wait into town and start doing little questing here and there. Then eventually you'll egret to mobs of your levels. It's not perfect but right now in beta map there are mobs of level 4,6,8. So you have to be either well equipped with skills weapons or wait until you level up. Do a lot of exploration, see which mobs are which level before you attack. Open barrels and chests.

The tutorial cave is pretty much just to show you how to move, how to open secret doors and how to loot. They are working to make tutorial better. So in about a month we may have a better Beta me thinks. Remember it is a Beta, which means that game is in bug-fixing and polishing stage right now. So be constructive and submit constructive feedback .

When you explore everything in the starting area you can actually level up to level 2 before getting to the first Orc fight on the beach - this would make it easier. Then, try to stay away and let the guards manage the orc fighters. There is an oil barrel in the middle of a fight - if you still have a fire spell/scroll then try to incinerate it (which creates a burning surface and does pretty damage to all the Orc standing in it).

Huh. I thought I did explore everything in the tutorial cave, but I was still 500 xp shy of hitting level 2. As far as fire goes, nope, no fire spells or scrolls to light the oil barrel on fire. After 3 more tries, I managed to get through the fight with only one character dying, so I used the res scroll I started with. No idea why they'd make that fight so difficult when you're not guaranteed to have anything to manage it with.

Well, it doesn't have to be your first fight, does it? You get a lot of cues handed to you in game that there's things to do in town, and that the orcs are somewhat tough. Several people have pointed this out to you now.

If they didn't put the harder parts *somewhere* - in this case the orcs on the beach - and you finished other stuff first, you'd be getting to the orcs later and saying "Why'd they have to make that fight so easy? This is boring."

That the orcs are too hard isn't so much a design problem as the result of your choice to hare off into the higher level area with low level characters.

Did you explore the rest of the beach, before the bridge with the 2 guards? There is more loot and XP to be had than just in the tutorial dungeon.

Err, from what I saw, you had to get *through* the orcs on the beach to get to the town. If not, then I missed something, absolutely.

There is an orc fight before the town; PeteNewell thought you were referring to a different orc fight.

Wow, my bad. I've gotta start reading better.

There are at least two guaranteed loot chests available on the beach, depending on your choices and exploration before you get to *that* orc fight, plus the contents of the tutorial cave, plus an upgrade to your melee and ranged weapons in a barrel just before the fight.

If you choose to kill the two drunken guards, you will absolutely hit second level before the first group of orcs; if not, then maybe not.

Sounds like you had incredibly bad luck with loot, which is going to happen sometimes in any game with random loot. My apologies for questioning your judgment as well.

Yep, I think it boiled down to absolutely terrible luck with loot. I know the barrel just before the fight you're talking about, and it contained a sword and a staff for me- the sword wasn't even equippable (not enough strength on my assassin), and the staff was actually an upgrade, but my enchanter still didn't seem to be able to do squat to enemies.

I did make the decision not to fight the soldiers, and maybe that was what I missed to get level 2 before that fight, but have them with me or have level 2? I donno.

Oh, and I think the chest may have also contained a bow, but at that point, I still didn't have any arrows. Numerous shafts, but no recipe, and no other obvious arrow components.

You don't have to fight the soldiers to reach level 2. They won't be helping you either way, if that helps.

Bows have an infinite number of arrows. "arrows" are actually one-use items to be used with the bow (like scrolls for magic, and nothing for melee :/)

Actually, this sounds like you've hit the "world not resetting on quickload" bug.

The items you mention [rain / fireball scrolls] are hard set as items (i.e. hand placed as objects) and are not from the RNG loot tables. Loot tables are chests / containers & certain mobs only atm.


So, yeah: you're complaining about a bug, not a feature.

Interesting, though I am 100% certain I didn't use quickload, I reloaded a "normal" save game I created right at the entry of the "tutorial dungeon" each time. So, there may be some further bugs with save/reload.

OK, so this game is really not making me happy. I went through town and did everything I could find/figure out, and ended up just a bit more than halfway through level 3. I picked up the two companions, learned some spells, put out the fire on the ship, got a line on where the staff went, sorted through most of the murder mystery (now I have to find the beach), picked up a number of legion quests, joined the fabulous five, dealt with the vengeance-crazed elf, and looted pretty much everything I could manage. At this point, every quest in my log is pointing outside of town. I also explored the "end of time" and the hall of heroes when that unlocked.

Leaving town, I have found 4 fights I could choose amongst- a single orc on the beach, which I dispatched, then dug up some orc graves for armor, a set of 3 zombies just outside the northwest gate, a huge cadre of zombies in the northern part of the graveyard, and a pretty substantial set of boars, archers and a mage. Oh, and a big set of orcs outside a cave just beyond the single grieving orc.

With my current equipment, spells, and abilities, basically all of these fights are death, aside from the 3 zombies just outside the northwest gate.

Issues:
1. My damage and hit-chances with melee are absolutely crap. Even with giving a 38-72 damage 1-handed club to the warrior companion, I'm seeing her hit chances at 60%, and when she connects, I'm typically seeing 45-ish damage, with 30 absorbed. Also, the "hit chance" displayed appears to be severely bogus. If my hit chance is 50%, I will generally hit with one in four attacks. My assassin is far worse, he's sitting at 48% chance to hit with 3 attacks per round, and I've seen him go 3 rounds without hitting once- so 9 missed attacks in a row. When he connects (with a dagger rated @ 17-28 damage, the best I could purchase), I see him generally hit for 6-9 damage, with 3-5 being absorbed.

2. Combat targeting is stupidly fiddly. I have missed spells and special skills with cooldowns because the enemies are sitting there animating a bob and weave, and found that just when I clicked, they bobbed out of the way. So, not only do I face the RNG's decisions about hit/miss, I've got to be extra careful trying to get my targets right, lest I mis-click and move instead of attacking. God forbid that the accidental movement triggers attacks of opportunity from the baddies, or takes me through more elemental effect ground, or ends up making a spell hit my melee characters. I can start out with bows, but they do piss-all for damage and again, my hit frequency is extremely low.

3. I suspect I chose poorly when I created my characters- enchanter and assassin seem to be vastly underpowered. I have no fire magic (I could've spent a point to add it, but I haven't located any source of fire spells), and the CC effects available to me are pretty poor- I can knock down (if I get the roll) one character with the warrior, but they're up the next round, and deep freeze from the two mages will take one enemy out for ~4 rounds, but the lightning spell never seems to land a stun, poison from the assassin (which usually misses) does not affect the zombies, and that's all the CC I have. Oh, and I can't seem to land the bleed from the assassin either. Finding out that my characters are very very poor in combat is extremely disheartening after spending 3+ hours poking through everything in town. I also don't understand why every single fight outside town is facing enemies level 5 or more, when there's not enough XP in town to get to similar levels.

4. Also on the obnoxious side is that clicking on a character who died in the poison from the zombies intending to rez the character gathers the entire party around them, at which point they immediately start taking continuous damage from the poison (FAR faster than during combat), and all fall over dead before I can convince them to move away. I've also lost my melee characters due to the fact that as soon as combat ends, they start taking terrain damage at an incredibly fast clip, so they fall over dead from the terrain before I can move them out.

In short, combat in the game so far is a mass of frustration. I like the level of interaction with terrain/elements, and the exploration aspect is cool- finding the way into the secret room in esmerelda's basement was cool, but the combat is completely obnoxious- way too many enemies for me to handle in early fights when I simply don't have enough character-building to have tools to deal with it. I'll also note that having a mixture of AoE/ranged AND melee coming at me from the enemies when the enemy melee hits for far more than I do and my healing and crowd control abilities are distinctly limited is incredibly frustrating.

Have you explored the tunnel underneath the graveyard? There are level 2 and level 3 enemies there who can be beaten fairly easily.

A tunnel underneath the graveyard? No, I didn't even find that, despite exploring the graveyard and accidentally triggering a massive zombie fight. That sounds like where I should be going right now, but none of the quests I have pointed me at it.

Try digging up some graves at the graveyard as well. The tunnel is hidden underneath one earth/mud heap which needs to be dug up.



Well, that is the whole idea of exploration^^. In D:OS the NPCs are not going to tell you where you should go next^^.

Ikarius - your points 2. and 4. are definitely annoying, but have been mentioned as game control problems by many others, so hopefully Larian will implement fixes.

As for having trouble with combat in general, D:OS can definitely offer challenges to new players - I'm not being sarcastic, as I experienced a learning curve myself. But I've done a full playthrough of the Cyseal area three times over the past couple months, and can now confirm that at least the beta area gets much easier (almost too easy) if you do the following:

a) pump most attribute points into each party member's "main" (damage/to-hit) stat: STR for melee, DEX for ranged (which I haven't used much), and INT for magic;
b) focus first on the two talents that give you extra stat and ability points, and focus on the abilities that pump your attack damage/reduce your skill costs etc. (the "Way of..." and elemental magic abilities - though apparently these will be overhauled in a coming update);
c) keep your equipment updated - investing a few ability points/wearing rings that boost Blacksmithing will also help you keep your kit in good shape for free;
d) optionally, try a two-member party with both players taking the "Lone Wolf" and "Raistlin" talents at character creation - debatably a little overpowered, but hella fun. With a couple levels and a few good spells/skills, you'll be spamming melee and AOE magic attacks and clearing the battlefield like nobody's business.

Anyway, this is obviously not the only way to play, but it's worked great for me. Since Larian doesn't do level scaling, I've had a lot of fun attempting fights which I at first found overpowering, but which later - with better strategy/leveling etc. - I owned. Hopefully you'll develop your own play style, and find the same satisfaction in overcoming the game's challenges as well. Cheers!