Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Armor - Interesting Idea, Poor Implementation

At first the idea of having separate armors for both physical and magical attacks intrigued me, then as I fought more and more battles, it annoyed me and I soon came to realize that overall armor is an interesting idea, but poorly implemented within DO2.

1) Team Build - Normally in a RPG you would want to build a diverse team, Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Archer, in order to best be able to deal with a wide variety of situations. With armor the way it is now, that is no longer the case. Why? Because if 3 of your teammates are doing physical damage, the mage becomes near useless as it will take multiple spells to bust through an enemies magic armor just to become combat effective, especially since statuses are blocked by armor as well. It would be far better for a team to be made up of 100% physical damage dealers or 100% magical damage dealers, which is just plain silly and completely not how you would want to have played DO1.

2) Statuses - Having armor block 100% of all statuses is ridiculous, especially since everyone and their mother seems to have both armor types. For example, in order for my mage to get a status effect going, it's best to hit an enemy with what ever spell does the most damage, then come in with the spell of the status effect I want. So I cast Fireball, then Winter Blast in order to freeze enemies. FIREBALL then WINTER BLAST... that literally shouldn't work, but thanks to armor it does! Then you've got statuses that shouldn't even be armor dependent, such as Knocked Down. Why would having physical armor prevent knock down? In some cases sure, but not 100% of the time.

3) Broken AI - One would think this topic is out of place when speaking about Armor, but it is not. Sadly the AI knows when it has a shit ton of armor to burn through and it ends up doing things that help it's cause but shouldn't be done in a combat sense, such as drawing multiple attacks of opportunity just to run next to my mage. This shouldn't be a tactic for either AI or Players, it shouldn't be possible to do, but thanks to armor it is. I've seen this multiple times, where an AI character just runs past my melee force drawing 2 attacks of opportunity, what's worse is that those attacks are physical based so my mage still has to blast the foe with multiple spells to hurt them... which is stupid.

4) Armor down, armor up, armor down, armor up - There are far too many ways and it's far too easy to bring someones armor back up after it's been depleted. It becomes an annoying tedium on the battlefield with spells and potions and skills all doing the same damn thing, restoring armor. It draws out the fight and just makes things feel less important/dire, it takes away from the terror/excitement of combat.

When the system was based around health it was terrifying in combat because of the status effects, the magic, the skills! You had to plan accordingly, think tactically, position your people well and come up with ways to counter the enemies abilities/magic. With the current armor system most of that goes out the window, it becomes a slug fest to knock out the enemies armor and then status them to death while your team remains practically invincible. I get that this whole system came about because DO1 had such a status issue (which could be frustrating at times), but that system made for terse, quick, intense combat exchanges. This new system, which handicaps diverse teams, is too extreme in the opposite direction.

I think, if armor has to stay, there should only be 1 type of armor and that armor blocks statuses but is degraded by all types of damage. Or magic armor has charges, each charge stops a status effect but once that is depleted it's done, this would not stop magical attacks from doing damage just status effects (and it wouldn't be set at 1000 charges, more like 2 or 3). Either way armor needs to change.

Well all fights I remember from DOS1 were like this:

1. KNOCKDOWN EVERYTHING
2. Stun what you missed
3. AOE those lil shits down.

Those stunlocks were too real to be honest....

In dos2 i feel like my starting positioning and target priorities are now more important, which makes it fun for me. I also have to implement different tactics for dealing with enemies... And of course, when some meele rushes your mage, it isn´t mages job to 1v1 him, he should gtfo, let warrior take care of it, and then spam support/aoe spells on proper enemies.

Also diversify your party - I have polyscoundrel with me, and it had troubles when there were strugglers with low magic armor, but high physical - it helped immensely to just add one point to aero, one to geo, and pick fossil strike+electric discharge+shocking touch. It has cost me basically nothing, I dont even use int, he is just all finesse, but it has great effect, as he can now finish of stragglers, have ranged attack and can combo with my mage for stun. Do this for everyone, and you are good to go (rangers are great with geo+pyro!)

It was discussed since long, there are different opinions.

1. True, that's a disadvantage hardly to deny. But a mixed group of 2:2 for example could take advantage of the fact that most enemies have the two armors in different numbers. Two magical damage chars could attack the low magical armor melee NPCs while the physical damage companions deal with the magical enemies. Rangers quite often have balanced armors, but lower numbers in each.

2. I like it. It removes a lot of randomness from fights because only with such an armor system you can make reliable CC possible. I don't like that oil ignores armor. It's quite annoying and I shiver from the thought what would happen if more status effects would be similar.

3. I find it cunning that the AI positions it's fighters against low value armor targets. Why should a guy with lots of physical armor fight against your physical melee guy instead of using it to get to the much bigger threat of your ranged? A taunt would come in handy here, unfortunately it is blocked by armor. They should make oil being blocked by armor and the taunt ignoring armor.

4. I like it. It is a tactical play of trying to get the precious armor back. It's like healing but with more diversity.

My only gripe about the armor system is that it makes fights abit of a dps check since most status before armor doesnt matter, which team gets the enemy's armor down first auto wins the match with endless disables.

Yeah, it makes your roles even more important. I take great pleasure when using my scoundrel to jump on sad little mage with 80 physical armor and 200 magical, taking down his phys armor in one combo, and stunning him in the same turn

And the other way around, when my mages teleports their meele two hander warriors into tight clump and pummles them with fireball+impale and such, giving them long lasting damage statuses... yeah, thats fun

Well those disables aren´t all the endless, as you need two statuses to actually truly disable someone (shock+shock) and cooldowns are not exactly short aswell. Only knockdown works this way, BUT knockdown is basically only on battering ram+battlestomp, which is hard to hit if you utilize height advantage of any sort.

And for dps check - well, its not that bad thing, as it solves the problem of CC cheesing your way through game, you simply have to be ready to win that fight

Cripple, pin down, sleep, silence, disarm all are garentee disables once you clear their armor off. Battle stomp and ram are also aoe disables that pretty much wins a fight.

I feel like dps checks kills the diversity of the game. Stuff like retaliation builds arent really viable, or anything that focuses on dots etc, because dots are useless with armor on.

I like the system but yes, they should change some parts like taunting and knockdown. I think it would be better if they made the armor but with a high chance to block the effect but not 100%. And if you decrease the armor you get a higher chance until it is depleted you have 100% hit chance for the effect. So it could be possible to get some cc on the opponent even if he has like 100 magical armor (like 90% resistance).

I remember traps being very terrifying in the original game, but due to the armor system they are significantly neutered, you can just run through it all and bed roll to heal back up.

This also significantly impacts the already terrible itemization/loot system. No matter the rarity equipment will never be better than something the next level up, absurd equipment scaling means that an epic is completely outclassed by a grey one level higher at higher levels due to the better armor and damage. Ironic considering the alleged reason for keeping it in over hand-crafted loot was to stimulate excitement for rare loot drops, when in the end they don't matter.

Also leads to something like the shield throw ability being able to easily outdamage nearly all other attacks and skills due to it scaling based on the armor of the shield. We're talking potentially one cast equalling 4 - 5+ two hander strikes.

Oh hi guys I posted a new topic about the exact same thing, sorry I didn't notice the conversation here!
It's this one: http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=614936#Post614936

I agree this is an important issue for sure

Honestly yeah I do think also there's a problem, and the four points mentionned are indeed annoying.

A lot has been said on tactitian difficulty, but as a somewhat "casual" player (I play classic mode with a bunch of friends), the game does not feel as good as the first did.

All the problems have been listed in the first topic in my opinion. The main problem seems to be the fact that armor is pretty much equal for every mob. I was thinking at first that this armor system could be nice, and would have been if the amount of armor was vastly different from one mob to another. Like mage having a shitload of magic armor, where a warrior would have high defense and small amount of magic armor.

I agree that the CC system in a firt one was kind of a rekt fest, still, here the fights are a bummer, and honestly a little long.

The way I would change it is this :

- The armor does only prevent for a part of the damage, the more the armor, the more prevented, and the less the armor, the more you take full damage.

- Same goes for CC. Exactly what said FadeToBlack. The more the armor, the less likely you are of taking a CC effect, the less you have, the more chances you have.

A simple system could be like this : 100% - (Current Armor / Total Armor)*100% for both damage and CC management.

- Try to have more diversified monster, and avoid to the maximum the same amount for both armor (or very similar amount).

It makes me sad because a lot of topics have been made on this, but I'm pretty sure the system won't drastically change. I agree removing CC is a "good" thing, but I too think the way it is done is not good, and to be honest (again, this is speaking from a "playing with my casual friends" perspective), we'd rather have the first Divinity than this one.

Guys, you are missing the damn point - armor is in the game to REMOVE percentage chance of CC, simply to remove part of RNG. Proposing some superconfusing changes allowing the chance to CC based on armor left is absolutely wrong idea, in that case they could remove armor altogether...

Also, i think that in 90% of the fights, enemies has vastly different armor amounts - mages sometimes have like 20 physical with 100 magical, warriors 150 physical and 40 magical and ranges usually have about 60-60 (same amount on both, but less overall)... Usually just bosses have similar amount of both armors, but even they have some differentiation.

Agreed with @TsunAmik. You have to redistribute the party so that the magic dmg dealers focus on warriors and warriors focus on mages. Sure I'd like armour that is percentage based but this is not bad too. This is a baldur's gate type of armour. There you had AR which influenced the probability to get hit, here you have how much to get hit until you pierce the armour.
Adding percentages to the armour/magic rating would be a bad idea.
Want to knock down a warrior? Destroy his armour first which is heavy and thick -> therefore hard to knock down. Want to knock down a mage wearing robes? Do it in one hit.
Want to shock a mage wearing protective barriers? Sorry, best I can do is damage for 3.
Want to shock a warrior? Sure, why not.
My character is warrior + Lohse Aero/Hydro + Elf scoundrel/necro + Ifan huntsman/pyro.
My warrior focuses mages, Lohse focuses warriors, elf focuses mages and ifan can do both, plus I can make his arrows do magic damage by electrifying the water, so he can focus both warriors and mages even futher.