Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Page 1 of 3 1 2 3
Joined: Sep 2015
L
journeyman
OP Offline
journeyman
L
Joined: Sep 2015
Hey guys,

So heaps of reviews are saying the game is amazing (which is it), but the way armour blocks a ton of stuff (mainly cc mages), really annoys me. It makes me feel like I need to focus magic dealing otherwise it's just useless?

I feel that it's harder to have a mixed team, and not in a good way.

Can someone please explain if I'm missing something that makes it good?

Joined: Dec 2016
J
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
J
Joined: Dec 2016
The armor system essentially removes a huge component of RNG in the combat system and shifts it to a more tactical approach on every turn.

As for mixed party, there's advantages and disadvantages. One advantage, obviously, is the ability to ignore one armor type entirely. However, you never have a say in what armor type you want to whittle down. If that one guy has 500 armor and you're full physical, you're going to have to deal with that 500 armor first. A mixed party, however, can split into two and effeciently have the casters take down the front line and the physical damage dealers hit the mages.

Each approach has different tactical value and, in my experience, depends on preference.

I, personally, prefer a mixed party. In addition, there's ways to mitigate the disadvantage of a mixed party. Locust swarm, corrosive touch(if you can manage to get it, recipe currently bugged), touch of decay, shield lob are all excellent ways of dealing physical damage that scales well for a caster. Medusa head, marksman's fang, bull rush are all ways a physical damage dealer can assist the casters and bypass physical armor.


Joined: Apr 2017
J
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
J
Joined: Apr 2017
Nothing is useless...It just depends on how you use it....

As my point of view.
This armour system perform the concept "Breaking" really well.
So I do like the new system than the old one.

And I think if Physical and Magical Armour could exchange in some percentage when one of it is zero, then this concept of "breaking" could be performed better.


And if you think this system makes enemy harder to be taken down, why don't you focus on how this system could also benefit your team?

also there are some effects that could not be blocked by armour, you may try to use it well as a real intelligent mage.

Last edited by July_chang; 29/09/17 01:20 AM.
Joined: May 2015
Z
banned
Offline
banned
Z
Joined: May 2015
Originally Posted by Johnny_Devo
The armor system essentially removes a huge component of RNG in the combat system and shifts it to a more tactical approach on every turn.



AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Joined: Nov 2015
S
member
Offline
member
S
Joined: Nov 2015
Originally Posted by Johnny_Devo
The armor system essentially removes a huge component of RNG in the combat system and shifts it to a more tactical approach on every turn.

As for mixed party, there's advantages and disadvantages. One advantage, obviously, is the ability to ignore one armor type entirely. However, you never have a say in what armor type you want to whittle down. If that one guy has 500 armor and you're full physical, you're going to have to deal with that 500 armor first. A mixed party, however, can split into two and effeciently have the casters take down the front line and the physical damage dealers hit the mages.

Each approach has different tactical value and, in my experience, depends on preference.

I, personally, prefer a mixed party. In addition, there's ways to mitigate the disadvantage of a mixed party. Locust swarm, corrosive touch(if you can manage to get it, recipe currently bugged), touch of decay, shield lob are all excellent ways of dealing physical damage that scales well for a caster. Medusa head, marksman's fang, bull rush are all ways a physical damage dealer can assist the casters and bypass physical armor.



Of course, that comes at the expense of nuking your own front line, who in OS2 are much less likely to have high resists or magic armor than they did in OS1 (where you could get 100% resist fairly easily).

Since magic damage is almost entirely AOE based you end up "wasting" it on high magic armor targets whether you want to or not, and it just so happens that low-magic-armor targets tend to be front liners, meaning they want to be standing right next to you and your own low-magic-armor characters.

Personally I ended up going through the game without any characters dedicated to magic damage, and my second playthrough looks to be about the same. AOE damage just doesn't work so well for breaking armors efficiently, which is the most important thing as once armor is broken you can stop an enemy from ever taking another turn. Also physical hard CC is much easier to apply anyway. Frozen and Stunned both take a two-part combo (must either be shocked/chilled twice or wet), wheras Knockdown works just as well (better, actually) and can be applied safely with non-friendly-fire AOEs in a single hit.

Last edited by Sotanaht; 29/09/17 02:55 AM.
Joined: May 2015
Z
banned
Offline
banned
Z
Joined: May 2015
Originally Posted by Sotanaht
Originally Posted by Johnny_Devo
The armor system essentially removes a huge component of RNG in the combat system and shifts it to a more tactical approach on every turn.

As for mixed party, there's advantages and disadvantages. One advantage, obviously, is the ability to ignore one armor type entirely. However, you never have a say in what armor type you want to whittle down. If that one guy has 500 armor and you're full physical, you're going to have to deal with that 500 armor first. A mixed party, however, can split into two and effeciently have the casters take down the front line and the physical damage dealers hit the mages.

Each approach has different tactical value and, in my experience, depends on preference.

I, personally, prefer a mixed party. In addition, there's ways to mitigate the disadvantage of a mixed party. Locust swarm, corrosive touch(if you can manage to get it, recipe currently bugged), touch of decay, shield lob are all excellent ways of dealing physical damage that scales well for a caster. Medusa head, marksman's fang, bull rush are all ways a physical damage dealer can assist the casters and bypass physical armor.



Of course, that comes at the expense of nuking your own front line, who in OS2 are much less likely to have high resists or magic armor than they did in OS1 (where you could get 100% resist fairly easily).

Since magic damage is almost entirely AOE based you end up "wasting" it on high magic armor targets whether you want to or not, and it just so happens that low-magic-armor targets tend to be front liners, meaning they want to be standing right next to you and your own low-magic-armor characters.

Personally I ended up going through the game without any characters dedicated to magic damage, and my second playthrough looks to be about the same. AOE damage just doesn't work so well for breaking armors efficiently, which is the most important thing as once armor is broken you can stop an enemy from ever taking another turn. Also physical hard CC is much easier to apply anyway. Frozen and Stunned both take a two-part combo (must either be shocked/chilled twice or wet), wheras Knockdown works just as well (better, actually) and can be applied safely with non-friendly-fire AOEs in a single hit.


Yeah they did their best to over nerf mages.

Way to shoot themselves in the foot.

Joined: Dec 2016
J
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
J
Joined: Dec 2016
Originally Posted by Zherot
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA


Excellent contribution to the discussion.

Joined: Sep 2017
K
stranger
Offline
stranger
K
Joined: Sep 2017
[quote=Zherot]
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA [/quote]

There's nothing wrong with what he said... it does remove a large (not all) portion of RNG from combat so that the focus isn't trying to get "20% chance to knockdown" or "50% chance to freeze" on attacks to "is resisted until X armor is broken".

Armor has 2 benefits OP.

The first is it's a debuff guard, and allows you to resist physical debuffs and some less physical ones like poison or decay or disease.
The second is that it's a physical health buffer, and absorbs most physical damage as a guard before you can take actual health damage. Additionally, you can increase total armor/magic armor far more readily than you can regular health, as well as heal yourself while maintaining armor/physical armor.

A practical use of armor would be this:

You get into a fight with a mage, a rogue, and a warrior. The warrior needs to take 2 whole turns to get to you, and you kill the mage after 1 turn and the rogue is still beating on you. The mage remove all your magical armor, and does some health damage as a result, but you still have half your physical armor by the time the warrior gets in range of you.
Since you still have your physical armor, the warrior cannot put any of his debuffs on you while you kill the rogue, and the warrior uses some of his abilities with debuffs trying to drop your armor, putting those abilities on cooldown. So by the time you kill the mage and the rogue, you have no armor or magic armor, but the warrior couldn't cripple you, taunt you, or knock you down while you had armor up.

edit: quoting apparently won't function for me, oh well.

Last edited by Kopenich; 29/09/17 03:25 AM.
Joined: Sep 2016
A
addict
Offline
addict
A
Joined: Sep 2016
The short answer is: there really is none and most people grit their teeth and deal with the new system

The longer answer is: some people hate RNG to the point that they'd prefer a mostly broken and tedious binary system that's full of issues because they hate the classic gaming sense of rolling some dice with modifiers.

Does it make it more 'tactical'? In a sense, yes. Does it makes it more fun? Depends on who you ask. Though I think it's clear what my stance on it is.

The binary system limits party coordination and build effectiveness, makes health a dump stat that means nothing no matter what the number is, and makes most niche builds and tactics and environment stuff mean little to nothing since armor blocks it all anyway. Oh, and it makes the game more like Diablo and Borderlands where loot is king and your actual build matters very little in the end...which also causes mages to lag behind physical damage dealers do to weapon scaling.

In an effort to mitigate the CC = King problem of mages being 'too' good (which is entirely subjective since you could make an unkillable warrior that could one shot anything in the game) in DOS1 they went way too far the other way.

Also, I'm having the sneaking suspisicion that where they originally seemed to have taken ques from D&D for game one, the stat inflation and loot priority and lack of focus on special effects imply inspiration from things like Diablo, Grim Dawn, or Path of Exile.

Joined: Nov 2015
S
member
Offline
member
S
Joined: Nov 2015
Stats and loot had all the same importance in OS1, it just so happened that you could craft most of the best equipment, so finding it was never an issue. That of course lead to the opposite problem where the loot you could find or buy was never anything but trash and it was only the materials you ever cared about.

And it is much more strategic. It's the difference between reloading until something works (either reload the instant it fails or reload when you lose the fight, same difference either way), or finding a proper strategy that doesn't fail. The difference between solving a jigsaw puzzle and forcing the pieces together to call it solved. It has some flaws but the way hard CC is handled isn't one of them.

Also, I found that the AI likes to focus targets with lower HP, so balancing Con has the benefit of making the enemy spread their damage rather than focus one target to death. The exact mechanics of the game's aggro system are beyond me though. There are also ways other than armor to provide immunity to certain CC, including potions and the rested status.

Last edited by Sotanaht; 29/09/17 03:47 AM.
Joined: Aug 2017
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Aug 2017
I don't even give a crap about high armor values though they are helpful. I go glass cannon and stack immunities and on my melee characters too and they have over 20k health. Diner = 30% Dinner heal = 3 AP nearly full instant self heal, a dinner heals my fighters for 6400 health.

If you can't win just by using the environment alone, win by bloating health and CON!

FIGHT stat bloat with stat bloat!

FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE!


In my line of work, it's never a quiet day on the market.
Joined: Apr 2016
Q
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
Q
Joined: Apr 2016
Originally Posted by Littlebob86
Can someone please explain if I'm missing something that makes it good?


There is nothing good about it. It is a terrible system that complete destroys the need for any strategic planning.

This is the case because there is only 1 strategy required:
- max your dps on 1 armor type until it is gone
- chain cc until it is dead

That's it. Anyone who talks about more strategy, or creating the need for a diverse party is an example of someone who has no idea what they are talking about. If you do anything other than the 2 steps above you are gimping yourself.

A physical only focused group destroys this game with ease.
A magic only focused group destroys this game with ease.

To anyone who gets it, the combat is dumbed down so drastically that it is tedious and boring unless you intentionally gimp your party to artificially create a challenge.

DOS1 combat has it's flaws but this system is not a fix in any way shape or form. 100% success for CC was too easy to get in that game. Simple solutions, cap CC chances significantly below 100% and disable save scumming. Now your decisions actually matter. Is it worth spending 2 AP on a cc that may not work? You actually will have to make a decision and weigh the benefits.

Now, we have no decisions needed. They have armor -> Max dps. They have no armor -> CC.

That is the exact opposite of strategy being needed.

Last edited by Qiox; 29/09/17 04:17 AM.
Joined: Sep 2015
L
journeyman
OP Offline
journeyman
L
Joined: Sep 2015
Thanks for all your replies!

I'll be using mods that remove most of the armour system as well as reducing the stat bloat (I hate having 20k health when having 2000 would do the job as well).

I rage quit initially when I set up for an encounter, rain, attacked, lightning the pool, and every one of their melee characters run through the huge pool, and were in amongst my guys..

I much preferred the stat points from dos 1 that increased the percentage to resist. Made you focus on tactics, as well as building your characters better in resisting stuff, rather than just getting the biggest armour..

I dunno.. I've been so hyped for dos 2 and feel really sad about how I'm not loving it as much as the first frown

Joined: Sep 2016
enthusiast
Offline
enthusiast
Joined: Sep 2016
The armor system has sever issues with tuning and implementation.

To be honest, that applies to the entire character progression: it's functional, but it's in no way interesting.

Joined: Jul 2017
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Jul 2017
It's a bit funny to read people complaining about the bad new armor system with the evil removal of randomness fun while at the same time mourning the loss of the good old times of getting 100% resists.

It's a different system and wether you like it or not is personal bias. I could live with the old, I prefer the new one.

Last edited by geala; 29/09/17 07:15 AM.
Joined: Oct 2015
D
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
D
Joined: Oct 2015
Originally Posted by aj0413
The longer answer is: some people hate RNG to the point that they'd prefer a mostly broken and tedious binary system that's full of issues because they hate the classic gaming sense of rolling some dice with modifiers.


The problem with that line of thought is that chanced based or deterministic all-or-nothing aren't the only options.
You could also scale the magnitude of the effect(and that scaling could also be fully deterministic, fully random or random with some kind of scaling base).
An example I've used earlier:

Hard disables always work but duration can be reduced a lot with some kind of armor/stat/resistance system. They could last for <1 turn, by removing some AP from the target and bumping its initiative down(for the next turn if it already finished its move).

An example based on the current armor system, fully deterministic:
- target has totally intact 50 armor, hard CC only has 20% base effectivenes so a 2 turn disable only takes away ~2 action points(from 8) and reduces initiative to 60%
- after doing 30 damage target has 20 armor, effectiveness goes from 20 to 68% so a 2 turn disable works for 1 turn and takes away ~1 action point/reduces initiative to 64% in the second

Other way would be making CON reduce physical effect duration, INT magical, attacker uses WIT to counter those(not fully without an extreme difference)
Randomize the final effect between 50% and 100% of the modified strength to add some variance.
This would also make the currently weak CON/WIT a bit more attractive choices.


Originally Posted by aj0413
Also, I'm having the sneaking suspisicion that where they originally seemed to have taken ques from D&D for game one, the stat inflation and loot priority and lack of focus on special effects imply inspiration from things like Diablo, Grim Dawn, or Path of Exile.


The system reminded me of Diablo 3, too.
That game was designed with online only multiplayer and an auction house in mind, really feels out of place here.

Joined: Jul 2014
B
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
B
Joined: Jul 2014
Originally Posted by Johnny_Devo
The armor system essentially removes a huge component of RNG in the combat system and shifts it to a more tactical approach on every turn.

As for mixed party, there's advantages and disadvantages. One advantage, obviously, is the ability to ignore one armor type entirely. However, you never have a say in what armor type you want to whittle down. If that one guy has 500 armor and you're full physical, you're going to have to deal with that 500 armor first. A mixed party, however, can split into two and effeciently have the casters take down the front line and the physical damage dealers hit the mages.

Each approach has different tactical value and, in my experience, depends on preference.

I, personally, prefer a mixed party. In addition, there's ways to mitigate the disadvantage of a mixed party. Locust swarm, corrosive touch(if you can manage to get it, recipe currently bugged), touch of decay, shield lob are all excellent ways of dealing physical damage that scales well for a caster. Medusa head, marksman's fang, bull rush are all ways a physical damage dealer can assist the casters and bypass physical armor.


This.

Joined: Sep 2016
Q
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
Q
Joined: Sep 2016
Very basic calculation:

hp = vitality
ma = magical armor
pa = physical armor
ma = magical damage
pd = physical damage

Suppose you have a balanced team 1:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 0 pa 1 ma 1 md mage
2 hp 0 pa 1 ma 1 md mage

Against a purely physical team 2:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Assuming simultaneous turns:
In the first turn, team 1 can deal 2 magical damage and 2 physical damage. In the best case, through focus fire it can take down 1 fighter and reduce another fighter's hp to 1.
Team 2 can deal 4 physical damage, it can take down 2 mages. So you end up with:

Team 1:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Team 2:
1 hp 0 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Team 2 is clearly at a advantage.

Of course it is a very simplified model and does not take other factors into account, but it should help explain the problem a bit.

Joined: Sep 2017
Location: united states
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Sep 2017
Location: united states
Originally Posted by Littlebob86
Thanks for all your replies!

I'll be using mods that remove most of the armour system as well as reducing the stat bloat (I hate having 20k health when having 2000 would do the job as well).

I rage quit initially when I set up for an encounter, rain, attacked, lightning the pool, and every one of their melee characters run through the huge pool, and were in amongst my guys..

I much preferred the stat points from dos 1 that increased the percentage to resist. Made you focus on tactics, as well as building your characters better in resisting stuff, rather than just getting the biggest armour..

I dunno.. I've been so hyped for dos 2 and feel really sad about how I'm not loving it as much as the first frown


I think you have gotten some really good feedback in this thread.

I've been pondering the armor system intensively, mostly by the discussion fueled on this forum.

I am just finishing Act 1, so I really have no opinion on the entire game yet. However, from an act 1 perspective only, the new armor system is better for me.

I don't think the armor system is a perfect solution; I can understand the arguments against it. But I think the armor system they created was in response to the lack of difficulty past level 10 in the first game.

By level 10 in DOS1, I had near full resists and the game was too easy. I mean walk into a fight, crowd control, kill everything, fight over.

I am hoping the new armor system is addressing the decreased replay-ability issue that DOS1 had.

Also, as a die hard Diablo fan, I don't see how these two games are that much alike. Fantasy rpg, yes. Outside of that I am just not seeing it. Again, I haven't been past Act 1 yet, so that opinion could change. The stat inflation I am hearing about does sound like diablo to me. I hope that's not true for this game, because I use Diablo to fulfill a different type of gamer in me.

My opinion on the two games:
Diablo - Get powerful, kill as fast as possible, get the best loot, climb the leaderboard, go brain dead and zone out completely

DOS1&2 - Explore, role-play, complete quests, crafting, modding, thinking about combat and skills, immersing myself in a fantasy world away from my responsibilities as an adult

These are just my current opinions of course. They're highly likely to change as I progress in the game and think on it some more. horsey


"Keep distant, My own demons still haunt me too closely. I cannot also bear the burden of yours."
Joined: Jul 2014
B
apprentice
Offline
apprentice
B
Joined: Jul 2014
Originally Posted by qwerty3w
Very basic calculation:

hp = vitality
ma = magical armor
pa = physical armor
ma = magical damage
pd = physical damage

Suppose you have a balanced team 1:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 0 pa 1 ma 1 md mage
2 hp 0 pa 1 ma 1 md mage

Against a purely physical team 2:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Assuming simultaneous turns:
In the first turn, team 1 can deal 2 magical damage and 2 physical damage. In the best case, through focus fire it can take down 1 fighter and reduce another fighter's hp to 1.
Team 2 can deal 4 physical damage, it can take down 2 mages. So you end up with:

Team 1:
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Team 2:
1 hp 0 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter
2 hp 1 pa 0 ma 1 pd fighter

Team 2 is clearly at a advantage.

Of course it is a very simplified model and does not take other factors into account, but it should help explain the problem a bit.

Like you say yourself your example is very simplified. Against a team of enemies with high physical armor and low/no magical armor Team 2 has a harder time than Team 1. Team 1 can CC/kill them quickly, whereas Team 2 needs to attack physical armor first before they can CC/kill.

Team 1 is more flexible, at the cost of taking longer to kill balanced armor enemies.
Team 2 is great against low physical armor, at the cost of taking longer to kill high physical armor / low magical armor enemies.

It's a tradeoff. To get back to the original question, this is the whole concept of the armor system imo. You can choose to do only physical damage or only magical damage with your team, or you can mix your damage types. All these choices have different advantages and disadvantages depending on the enemies you will face throughout the game.

Page 1 of 3 1 2 3

Moderated by  gbnf, Kurnster, Monodon, Stephen_Larian 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5