Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Divinity OS3 and armour

I'll just preface this by saying that I'm really happy for you guys on the commercial and critical success of these games so far. Really great to see games like this on the market (especially console). And even better ti see full, well crafted games with no ridiculous microtransactions and further monitisation so thanks Larian.

But what I'm beating around the Bush for is original sin 3 when it comes and hoping that the armour system in OS2 will not be used again. OS2 is a great game in many ways but I feel the armour system sadly takes away a lot of the fun of combat. Having separate physical and magical armour makes mixed parties a bit of a chore. Some characters feel useless, or like the fight is prolonged. Theres nothing worse than an enemy nearly dead only for it to be your mages turn and he cant finish him off because he still has magic armour on you've hardly dented, or for you to block doorways with fire/poison to funnel the enemy only for them to go ho hum and walk through taking a smidge of magic armour damage (or vice versa if you've got more mages then physical). It makes you not want to use your abilities as you know a lot of the affects wont work on them until their armour has gone. People say it's to balance the CC from the first game but all that's happening now is it's been delayed. Only now its 100% guaranteed to work after shields.

A perfect example of this was fighting the dwarf Mordus I think his name was. We were playing on hard and the fight was just bad. He starts off almost unstoppable. 3 physical wearing his shield down makes our mage useless and he'd never get his magic armour down on his own. He'd been more or less forced into a healer role at this point in the game. Mordus was kicking our butts for most of the fight as we couldn't do anything really apart from try to whittle his physical shield down, we just had to hang on. Then once his shield was down he was a joke. We could just stun lock him forever with trips, arrows etc. All guaranteed. Only he had tons of health on tactician so it took ages to kill him. Just cc and repeat. And that's where we got too as it killed the game for me and my friends. Combat was dull. I'm sure people will say its how you play but you get my point. And I've found a lot of people share this view on the armour system. Which is such a shame as it's an otherwise brilliant game. OS1 was easily my favourite game of the last decade, my friends too but OS2 combat isn't fun.

I only post this as I love the series and want OS3 to be amazing. Perhaps go back to resistances bodybuilding/will power like in OS1. Nerf CC in some other way if people thought it was a problem but as it is now isn't the right solution in my opinion.

This stuff has probably already been raised before but hey ho. Sorry for the complaint guys I actually think you're a great team and should be proud of your work.

Thanks

I'm ok with the armor/magic system (didn't love them but they didn't break the game). What I hated was the near zero impact of stats on ap points; and in general the very limited number of ap points making combat very dry. I think we should be able to either focus on character power (low ap points) or sacrifice power (str/int) for more ap points.
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Also I felt warriors were vastly under-powered. I'm ok with them not doing a huge amount of damage; but they were some what paperish and couldn't really tank well. That (imho) really hurt their usability. In addition mages ability ot use shields which added a huge amount of armor protection seemed to make them somewhat overkill.
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Archers couldn't use shield but did enough damage to make them quite usable (instead of mages being paper damage dealers; archers served that role).
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I'm not the best player - due to lack of patience but i did play the game multiple times on tactical - and the above were my findings. I definitely prefer DOS:1 combat due to greater variety and flexibility in character builds.
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I will note that that I did not experiment with rogue in DOS:2 so I can't comment on them (in DOS:1 I did frequently use one but in DOS:2 i tended to run 2 mages; archer and shield warrior).
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Btw because of the massive over kill (value) of shields in DOS:2 two handed warriors seemed like a no-op (I used one frequently in DOS:1).
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As simplified summary in DOS:2 - shields were overkill - mages shouldn't use them - build flexilibty suffered by the very limited ap points and ability to trade off power for mobility (ap points).

Shields are OP ?

I red quite the contrary...
I never really tried them, except on my mage, but with a shield you loose DPS for more survivability, in a game where dealing damage as fast as you can is more important than tanking.
So yea I know there is a shield bash skill that is super powerfull, but it has cooldown, and I'm not sure it is worth it to make such a character just for one skill.

Anyhow, I'm not trying to say you wrong by saying shield > 2H, quite the contray as someone who only played 2H, I want to know if I was not mistaken and if shield isn't in fact better.

What I fnd weird, is that shields might benefit more from classes like mages, who are really not the traditonnal bearers.
Don't forget the grenades, there is a talent that lower their AP cost if you are playing a one handed character, and 2H are strangely considered one handed for that talent.
So also consider that for 2H, it makes them even better.
But then again, rogues should be the natural users for nades, and they obviously aren't in this game...

I really hope they keep this system. I'm running a 3 Physical 1 Magical tactician game at the moment and it going great, in fact i'd say it works better than having a pure physical or magical, otherwise you're missing out on some good abilities.
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In your "low hp no physical armour" example, it's not a problem if you give your mage necromancer abiilties, they deal physical damage, but scale with intelligence, giving your mages options to help you. corpse explosion, teleport, reactive armour are also mage skills that deal physical damage, corrosive touch affects physical armour. empalment and earthquake have physical based effects, and skills such as venom coating, firebrand and spark master rely on physical weapons to be effective. also shield bounce if you have a shield on a mage. scoundrel has 2 great skills that hurt magic armour, lizards, dwarf, red prince and beast have racial/origin skills that are magical based that'd be useless if played in a full physical party too, as well as elemental arrows, poison coating weapons, and any runes besides physical.
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Shields are great for supports to keep them up and running and the shield toss ability is great too as it only scales off the shield.

I know the feeling of one magical dealer feeling useless in a party. It happened in my first game too when I didn't know what I'm doing most of the time. I thought the same back then too.

But as I played a few more playthroughs, I started really loving the armor system. It made it so that focus fire isn't ALWAYS the best strategy (eg stun 3 enemies instead of killing 1 and stunning 1), took the luck out of fights (there's still crit, but that's as good as it will get; even league of legends still has that), and made weaknesses more apparent. Also, you have the choice between a mixed team that have the best tools for everything you might encounter, or have a focused team that bludgeons the problem away with pure firepower. Adds a certain depths to the game it would otherwise lack, makes replays a LOT more fun, and promotes creative ways to beat tough fights without resorting to cheese.

@Letuce... don't forget the heals+decay combo, which along with the reactive armor is the only way to actually benefit from dumping loads of points into elemental skills while doing physical damage.