Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Armor needs some drastic changes. Here's my ideas

So, right now, armor is kind of... iffy. You wear armor so that you can avoid status effects for the first 2-3 rounds of combat before you can kill or CC everything on the field. Let's be real here, all battles are quick and strategy-less, due to the way armor works right now, this is just the way it is. Status effects are devastating, and enemies hit so hard and so many times per round that actually trying to allow yourself to take more then a round of attacks from anyone is suicide. After having beaten the content thats released right now, with a variety of character builds, these are my thoughts on how armor should be changed. This is especially important, because I definetly see things like Warfare 2h and pyromancy getting nerf'd to the ground, so to make up for the loss of nuke, we'll need reliable survivability that doesn't involve CC. (Remember, can't CC something through armor, and less damage means less likely to cut through it in time to get off a CC).

1. Armor types. The armor models in this game are...beautiful. Really well done. A bit more on the flashy/ornamental side, but I'm pretty sure Larian put the armor models that are in the game now as palceholders just to show off their designs, and in the full release, armor will look like rusted/torn crap and look steadily better as you get better quality/higher level stuff, but I digress. Right now, you will probably never actually want to wear a full set of armor on a character. Even braccus' set. If you do, you're doing it wrong. We never get to see these beautiful sets, because most people will be wearing a mix of heavy and cloth armor, even on casters. Franekensteining armor in this game looks just awful, especially on lizard characters who look goofy and stupid in mixed armor. Leather is pointless and the movement speed hit is negligible. There needs to be incentive to wear one type over the other, and armor should be tailored to specific class types/roles. This will also help cut down on the really stupid builds you can come up with too, like the Aeromancy/2h using warrior I have that can CC the entire battlefield with blind and stun with near infinite mobility.

2. Plate. Plate should give high amounts of both Physical and Magical armor. A tank, or even just a melee character in general, needs to tank all forms of damage, and will be a character in the frontline who will be wearing plate. To balance this huge increase in power, it should cut a users finesse (you can't be agile in 60-80 pounds of metal, can you?) or you can do it like how DnD does it, and just have a maximum finesse score while wearing plate. (No matter what your finesse is, only the first 8 points will actually affect your statistics if in full plate?) It should hamper casting ability, drastically increasing the AP cost. A talent should be available to cut or even remove this penalty, so that frontline clerics/battlemages are still viable.

3. Leather. Leather should give drastically less physical and magical armor, but still more then cloth. Leather armor, like plate, should also hamper spellcasting ability, but not effect finesse at all.

4. Cloth. Cloth should have no negative effects or penalties to wearing it, but grant a small (almost negligible, or even none?) bonus to physical armor, and a moderate bonus to magical armor.

5. Shields. The 11 magic armor added to shields is nothing. Even at low levels. This number should scale up with the shields level like physical armor does. There also needs, absolutely NEEDS to be a shield skill, or at least add it to the one handed skill (since no one is just going to use a one handed with an empty off hand, there's no point other then aesthetic.) The skill should boost the armor you get from shields, and add a damage reduction the character takes ONLY to armor (both types).

6. Memory. This actually doesn't have to do with armor, but I feel I should put my thoughts on it here anyway. When the inevitable nerf to spellcasting comes, there needs to be something done about memory. Spells do so much damage, that I didn't even bother putting points to intelligence except on my support character. My spellcaster had all their points in memory so that she had so many spells, that combined with warlord, her turns were literally endless. She never didn't have a spell off cooldown, because her entire action bar was filled with spells, I literally had like 15 slots full of spells. When magic or it's damage gets nerf'd (I assume Larian are going to do this, it needs it.) memory needs to have another bonus other then just skill slots. I can't think of anything useful off the top of my head, I'd like to say it should have something affecting cooldown times, or AP cost, but due to how different AP is in this iteration from the first one, reduced AP cost would be stupid good.

It's an interesting idea, and I nearly was going to post that it seemed like a good idea. However, reading it more carefully, I see the issue of restricting spellcasting based on the armor type you have.

That idea has some problems it must overcome.

Restricting spellcasting based on armor type will greatly reduce the viability of hybrid builds. Hybrid builds are pretty much a necessity because this game will have 7 INT-based skill schools, 2 FIN-based skill schools (one melee, one ranged), and 1 STR-based skill school.

Hybrid builds already will have less power than pure casters or fighters because of attribute splitting. Attribute splitting is further increased by the requirement of needing to heavily invest into Memory - otherwise the Hybrid build loses the only benefit of existing - greater skill variety.

So hybrid builds have more variety with less power. If you add on further penalties for spellcasting by wearing armor, then that cripples hybrids even more.

I'm not averse to different armor types having different effects, though I think they should just be bonuses certain armor types give, rather than penalties. And the bonuses shouldn't be so obviously geared toward certain classes. Say, all cloth armor gives some kind of bonus to memory. Useful to all builds, but still kind of thematically caster appropriate. Leather armor could give an initiative bonus, though I think this is already the case to a degree. Again, useful to all builds, but makes sense for rogues and rangers.

Plate armor could probably just stick with having really high armor, no need to add some kind of constitution or resistances bonus on top of that.

The point of this would be you could have warriors wearing cloth armor for the memory bonus so they're more versatile, but obviously a lot squishier, or mages wearing leather armor so they can go first, etc. Obviously there'd have to be tons of tweaking of attribute requirements for items, balancing the bonuses so they're significant enough to encourage non-standard builds and make the choice of what armor type to wear meaningful. At this point in development, I don't expect big changes in the effects of armor types, but it's an interesting discussion.

I don't these changes will have much effect on the issues with CC, though. There needs to be fundamental changes to how armor works, and what happens when armor is broken. It's too much of breaking armor and you pretty much win. My vote is that armor reduces the impact of statuses instead of negating them entirely (e.g., stun reduces Recovery AP by half instead of total stun), and a chance to resist statuses returns. Maybe status resistance chances decreases as vitality is reduced. I think these kind of big changes are probably needed.

The point was to nerf hybrid classes, purely because they're waaay too strong right now. A talent should be made available that lowers or even removes the penalty though, that allows hybrids. But as it is right now, warfare characters using scoundrel moves and mages in full plate with no penalty, things like that are whats breaking the game right now. Sure, there's a lot of other things that are overpowered right now, but this is one step towards cutting down on overpowered builds. Hybrids should be possible, but they should also be an investment. As it is right now, you can be a heavy melee spellslinging, adrenaline using hunter-rogue-warrior-mage-nuker from level 1, and thats stupid.

I think these armor changes are an elegant solution to make tanking more lucrative/viable, and to simultaneously nerf some of the overpowered builds right now.

If hybrids are overpowered right now, is that just because putting 100% of your points into Memory is better than putting them into other attributes?

If that's what you mean, then it seems like the key problem is an imbalance between Power attributes (STR/INT/FIN), Support attributes (CON (defensive support) / WIT (offensive support)), and the Versatility attribute Memory.

I think we all can agree that a build which puts 100% of points into Memory should not be the most powerful build.

Which this would fix too, because for example, the trait that lets you spellcast in armor might require something like 14 int and 14 con, requiring a stat investment, etc. If someone wants to go full memory and just have a skill bar full of spells, then they should be able to do that. But if an enemy so much as breaths on them when they're wearing nothing but cloth armor, they'll keel over. So this game will actually have build diversity rather then "give everyone all the things"

Oh, and I'd probably include Wit as one of the versatility stats too, its so good, it's one of the reasons humans are one of, if not the best races right now, because no build doesn't need more wit.

Leather already has a secondary bonus: dodge.

most leather pieces boost your dodge chance. past that, yes, I agree that because magical armor is at least as important as physical armor in this game, all armor by default should have some magical protection as well as physical.

"I think we all can agree that a build which puts 100% of points into Memory should not be the most powerful build."

in fact, it's near useless as it is. with the way secondary skills drop off with level, you are hugely gimping your character by putting even small amounts of points into memory. frankly, it isn't worth the increased flexibility.

it really IS a case of "jack of all, master of none" hell, not even "proficient" let alone master.

but yes, this is not a topic for armor discussion.

Perhaps instead of simply being an extra "health bar" type buffer between a guaranteed CC or not, armor could instead have a rating that increases based on how much each total (magic and physical separately) comes out to, providing a static damage reduction from magic and physical armor.

Of course, the higher this rating, the higher the chance that a CC with the appropriate check will fail, comparing your armor rating with their caster skill (much like bodybuilding vs. skill stat from D:OS 1)

Then add in specialized roles later, like, for example, stats that govern different classes of armor. Finesse for leather, Strength for Plate and Intelligence for Cloth, so that the bonuses from those respective armor pieces will scale higher along with your stat increases (this also gives split attribute users another use for each stat in their hybrid builds, without making them obsolete, but also limits them depending on the armor they choose).

This would also have the added effect of a shock factor when trying to fight a higher level opponent, it would make sense that your weapon wouldn't be able to even scratch (CC) their far superior armor (much less their skill with it).

EDIT: Hey DragynDance, nice to see you puttin' up some feedback.