Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General What with persuasion fail in this game?

Starting at Act 2, it's like half of them are fail by default no matter how high your stat and persuasion stats are.

I can try a Str check
With 60 Str And 7 in Persuasion
And still fail every key moment persuasion.

Is there a hidden +10 persuasion item at level 5 or something that I'm missing?

Must admit I've wondered the same thing. In some situations e.g.



I've resigned myself to just having to take direct action instead; as much as my preferred option is to go for high charisma and get through speech checks it seems it's often doomed to failure.

Can't confirm I played a human custom character and just put all civic points into persuasion and only failed the check in the driftwood arena. It's not always wise to pick your mainstat. I noticed that sometimes the required points are a lot lower in smarter or more appropriate answers even if they roll against another and worse stat.

I usually play as a lizard and most of them still flop unless I respec to 5 persuasion, which I decide to do now just to get a certain quest in Arx to clear with no one dying.

I even tried looking up stat of the other side (since persuasion used to check like Fin vs Wit in EA IIRC ) and sending someone with very high stat and they still flop.

It's like they completely removed of stat comparsion and just make each stat worth a point or something and persuasion worth 5 points and adds them up to check if it's a pass or a fail. Some of the heated arguement just end up having too much into it that even a respec Lizard (+1 pers) can't get it going without some hidden and weak persuasive accessories set.

If the peasants refuse to listen to the charming master race lizard, you know they ain't going to listen to any body.

I find your choice of putting a space between 'any' and 'body' to be both hilarious and wrong. When I fail persuasion checks, they always listen to bodies, specifically to the 'splortch' and 'thud' sounds they tend to make.

Also, I cannot confirm. After my respec from useless stealth into femme fatale persuasion (5 currently), I haven't failed a single persuasion check yet (Driftwood), and none of my attributes are higher than 25. Does game difficulty have an influence on the skill check to beat?

My understanding is that the contraction of the two words into "anybody" is actually a comparatively recent thing, occurring some time in the 19th century.

Sorry if that wasn't apparent -- I really was joking, I could not resist the temptation to pun. *sigh* I guess my friends were right when they said that despite not being a dad, I behave like one sometimes. Apologies.

Don't worry about me, I'm that person who you need to explain a joke to at the best of times. :p

Merriam-Webster says the first occurrence of "anybody" is in the fourteenth century.

And on topic, assuming the example in the OP is an actual thing, have you tried one of the OTHER options? I would not be shocked if certain checks were set up to just always fail for, like, RP reasons or something (i.e. certain kinds of arguments just do not work on a particular character, etc.).

Huh? Not having this issue, seems to succeed just fine in most of the cases when there is a match.

And are those Persuasion checks even worth a damn or they are just fight not fight scenarios?

Seems to me like persuasion is shit.

I was thinking more in terms of when it came into commonplace usage: I have an OED looming behind me which has lots of etymology (actually quite interesting during a bored moment) but which seemed unwilling to commit itself in this case beyond "formerly".

Like I know anything about writing decent English anyway: I only studied it until I was 15.


Some of them are kind of important-ish, depending. The one that was a particular source of frustration was halting an execution. After assorted attempts to use different characters and attribute-boosting potions I eventually gave up with the diplomacy route and just attacked them instead.

Then it is pretty useless if you can just force your will anyway if you fail.

If it works anything like it is in EE... SOME skill checks are better than others depending on the situation.

Using intimidation checks on some people (strength checks now) is often "wrong". If what you are saying is true, then some skill checks autofail if they are the "bad one"

I actually got the execution scene to finally pass yesterday after I stack even more persuasion from some other gears.

There's one scene I failed on Nameless Isle though and a key npc had to die.

It's really ridiculous. Shopping around for +3 persuasion from gears and racial is something I better have at all time starting from Nameless Isle. Even if I flip a mage with some weird stat like 40 mem to go persuade them simply because I didn't wear persuasion gear on every possible body part.

Not really, from an RP perspective I much prefer to use a persuasion check even if I will take the "by any means necessary" approach in certain situations.


I've had a frustrating time with finding loot that has a useful set of attributes, and have spent the past couple of days trawling vendors for that and others without even finding a +1 personality item. I did find a single-hander that boosted my two-handed though, so that made up for it.

For me persuasion works. Sometimes a bit too well, I lack xp from killing some people. If my main fails (quite often), it's time for Ifan who has all points in Persuasion. He's usually successful, now, after a shave, he is even better.

Hmm, run up against another unpersuadable character, one of those in Arx. It seems the first persuasion check fails regardless but the second passes regardless, so I'm not really sure what's the deal with that. I'm stuck at 6 points of persuasion (5 base, which is the max: I did try respeccing my extra point into that but found it won't let me) and to date have only found amulets with +1 persuasion so I can't raise it higher than that unless there's a potion, food, drink or a spell that I've missed.

The outcome isn't terrible with one fail and one succeed but I'm still not happy with it so would like to figure out how to increase it further... unless it's just scripted to fail, which is possible, I guess.

I think some of them require specific persuasion options outside of the stat ones. For example I passed the Garreth farm one with 4 persuasion, by choosing the Hero persuasion option.

what i've surmised is that some checks will never work no matter how high your persuasion is. the thing you want to pay the least attention to is the stat associated with the check; i've failed intelligence checks but succeeded on wits checks with high int mages that i've put at most one extra wits point into. the game seems to put more emphasis on the actual message your character says with each check - does it seem like this would reasonably persuade anyone? if the answer is no, it's unlikely that even high persuasion will do it for you

there definitely seems to be certain persuasion options in each check that absolutely will not succeed no matter how high the stat or your persuasion level is. i always max persuasion in games like this, so when your persuasion is as high as it reasonably can be for where you are in the game and your check is still failing, it's probably indicating that that specific option is impossible