Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Latest News Patchnotes v3.0.15.252 - Meet our New Stats System

Was the xp system changed? When playing with a friend previously we tend to split up to accomplish different missions and the xp was shared but now that doesnt seem to happen with the new patch. We noticed this when one of his characters needed 1000 xp to level while i needed 3000.

anyone else notice this?

I've noticed that too, along with the leveling seemingly to be much, much slower, so you can't lockpick any chests except if you have a character with that skill. Same with the pet pal talent. It seems to have gotten a bit slow at least now, though the combat has vastly improved. The crocodiles aren't that bad on classic, me and my friend manage to kill them many times without even losing a single character to death.

Oh, so I guess that means that undead enemies are now no longer immune to poison. That's another fascinating change.


...That is what it means, right? Because surely in a game with RNG loot you wouldn't purposefully delete 25% of the possible wands from fighting enemies which make up the majority of the enemies on the second half of the island, right?

Otherwise, I fail to see how changing earth damage to poison is an improvement.

I guess the reason was, because earth was the ony element with two kinds of damage, but Geomancer only improved poison damage, so not the earth wands? But probably a flawed decision ^^

IMO Geomancer spells should apply earth damage, and everything poison related should be split between Necromancy and Scoundrel.

Then again, I'd rework pretty much every skill school and spells inside of them. Right now there just doesn't feel like there's a sense of progression to it, neither in terms of how impressive the abilities are, nor how powerful they actually are relative to their requirements.

I guess that one incentive to change it from earth to poison damage is immersion and logic. Although not everything in a fantasy world needs to make sense, the idea of 'earth damage' is horrendrously flawed. How does earth damage you? It can't, unless it's either poisonous or through inertia, which essentially translates to physical trauma no different from a club. There is nothing inheirently dangerous about it, unlike fire, cold or electricity.

Agreed.
And I think the change for balance could have been better too. I think Geomancy should add a bonus to poison AND earth damage, as the spells in the school are split 50/50.
As-is the earth damage spells are left out of the damage bonus and become weak compared with the poison spells.
Also the large number of undead encountered are all either immune to or heal from poison, making even the poison part useless a lot of the time.
At least there are weapons the Geomancy skill boosts now, that is in the right direction; and the swap to more poison damage made the Zombie talent more viable as well.

It seems like a loss to me to ditch earth wands entirely. But it's also weird how earth damage isn't improved by the skill. It kind of makes sense, since it'd feel imbalanced if it improved earth and poison damage AND armor restoration, compared to pyrokinetic which just improves fire damage. It already feels like Geomancer is better than fire since it's a 5% poison bonus + restoration, where fire is just damage. Something just feels off here, and I don't know what the solution is. Maybe 3% increase to poison and earth? That does feel like of paltry though.

Maybe it needs some kind of non-damage bonus (+damage is boring anyway). Maybe chance to apply geomancer statuses (slow, poison, petrified, maybe knockdown) through armor (like 5% a point probably). Maybe something like necromancy where you gain physical armor when you deal damage to physical armor? Or gain X armor per turn an enemy has an earth status applied to them by you?

I think Larian needs to spend some effort here to make it more interesting, like they did with the defense skills. I still think all the ability trees could be more interesting.

Appeals to realism are not great as the first argument for something. It's not an inherently bad argument, it's just that everyone has different personal views about which specific parts should be changed for the sake of realism, and which parts should be left alone despite being less realistic.

So I usually try to find a logical argument based on something firmer than realism. In this case, I am unpersuaded that removing earth damage from wands and staves and putting poison damage in its place for the sake of realism is a positive benefit.

My argument against the change is this: because loot you find is very highly based on RNG, so it can be a while between finding good weapons. If you only have poison-based wands/staves, that eliminates your basic attack from your arsenal for a very large number of encounters on this undead-infested island.

(I know this discussion has monopolized the thread, sorry about that. This is of course not the only complaint I have, I've got a long list which I'll post in another thread.)

I don't entirely agree. The Pyrokinetics school only does fire damage, so the 5% per point applies to all damaging spells in the school. Geomancy does 3 things with magnitudes; poison, earth, and physical armor, and as-is only 2/3 of those are affected by points in Geomancy.
I do feel like the 5% on Pyrokinetics could be a touch better though. The weapon skills all get 5% damage and a little something extra per point. E.g. ranged has 5% damage and 1% crit, strictly more of an improvement. Although, this may be like comparing apples and oranges.

I remember using a water bow against the fire dudes in the original sin even though it did less damage than my fire bow it was actually more effective. So if you have to switch weapons to be effective against particular enemies i am all for it. I crafted the bows too so there is always that option.

I suppose I mostly just find the pyrokinetics skilltree boring. I'd say Necromancy and Marksman are the most interesting trees, and ideally they'd all be as cool as those ones, though I do think Marksman increasing skill range as before was even more awesome, though it was definitely overtuned. Ideally, every skill tree would have something that would benefit all classes.

I think it'd be neat if Pyrokinetics increased AOE size of skills by a tiny percent. Aerothurge and Warfare are also both kind of meh. They're useful, sure, but not interesting. Aerothurge could probably boost movement speed, maybe 5% extra damage against magic armor, 5% move speed (though Scoundrel already has that), and Warfare maybe could do something like, on melee hit, increase crit chance by X%. I dunno, I think some more creativity is in order for the skills in general.

A random observation having started to explore the territory on the other side of Fort Joy is that the game's difficulty seems to have ramped up considerably since the earlier alphas: it seems that even at the same level, enemies often have better equipment and a very significantly better array of spells and abilities at their disposal than I seem to have any chance of accumulating, making it sometimes quite challenging even on explorer mode. I'm not really sure I'm entirely comfortable with this direction given that I'm not the most tactically-minded person, and for me, combat quickly stops being a challenge and becomes more of an obstacle to my continued enjoyment of a game. It's not all about the combat.

I don't know if it might be related to something I read about way back, which was to do with play-testing: apparently testers should have a high turnover otherwise they quickly start to learn all the tricks and exploits and will report back that the game is too easy for them, so the difficulty is ramped up and then excludes many players without the benefit of that experience and who may lack innate ability or sheer good fortune to navigate their way through. Not that I'm saying this is happening, I just hope it doesn't become absurdly difficult as was the case with Ego Draconis.

With reference to that last point, I should probably add that Ego Draconis remains one of my favourite games ever and once I had the guidance of a slowly and carefully explained skills walk-through I actually didn't get pwned constantly. So one of my two complaints about it (the other being "but I want more Broken Valley to explore") was "if only it was a bit easier". Then DKS came along which was a bit easier. Awesome.

Have the update been released yet? Because, all I can see are Version 1 : V 2.0.165.341 and Version 2: V 3.0.5.530 but no V 3.0.15.252. Is there something else do I need to do to get the update??

Opt out of the beta to get the latest version.

Already posted feedback on the update in general forums, but I thought I'd say here that I'm in love with the stat changes and changes to the encounters. Put 16 hours into it during the weekend, and I can't wait to see more. Especially looking forward to summons being put back into the game, and getting a taste of the new summoning master tree.

My take on the Earth Damage --> Poison Damage change is as thus:

It's good. Earth Wand + Fire wand was an OP combination as Earth Wands applied oil surface and fire wand would set it on fire. Poison is better, fits in to Geomancer.

Poison is still flammable, literally nothing changed on that front and now if an enemy stands in water/steam, hitting them with a poison wand turns that into poison(also a recent change) as well, which is even stronger.

Well, then it's still OP.