Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks The current state of sneaking

TL; DR; I found sneaking to be really powerful due to weird AI behaviour when they can't see any opponents in combat. Also, the sight cones seems not to give you the full picture right now.


I just played through the EA part as a solo hunter with sneaking and while it was really satisfying, it really felt a bit over the top. While it required a bit of trial and error to figure out a few fights, once you knew the mechanics they were dead simple.

Here's the final stats after finishing the EA

Talents:
* Guerilla - Works really well together will Snipe as both gives bonuses to damage while sneaking
* Hothead - as you will never get hit, extra crit + accuracy is gold
* Speedcreeper - lets you maneuver a lot better

Skills (including gear)
* 5 Sneak
* 4 Ranged
* 4 Huntsman
* 1 Warfare - Needed for rage

Important attributes (including gear)
25 Finesse - for extra damage
19 Wits - required to go first in most battles

Snipe - for one-shotting semi-powerful enemies
Tactical Retreat - for mobility, escaping danger and getting up on heights to get the bonus dmg/range
Rage - for one-shotting semi-powerful enemies
Flesh Sacrifice - for one-shotting semi-powerful enemies
First aid - for removing burning etc.

So what made most of this possible was to abuse the ai when they are in a fight with no visible enemy. Most of the fights looked something like this:
* Get into position using sneaking and/or tactical retreat, ideally above them if possible. Also aim to be outside their aggro range.
* Use flesh sacrifice, rage, sneak, snipe. By the end of my playthrough I could do about 600 crits with a bow with 40 max dmg.
* Hopefully you should be first in the initiative order, or far away enough for them not to reach you. You can sometimes use static/knockdown arrows to compensate for enemies having higher initiative.
* If they reach you, depending on their number, use tactical retreat, just run away from them, or if they have attack of opportunity, just run around behind their back and sneak. Most of the time they will have no idea where you went and just forfeit their turns.
* When it is your turn and you're in a safe spot, move into firing range (will get easier with height advantage and huntsman as well as higher sneak and speedcreeper), fire a shot or two, move back, sneak again.
* Rince and repeat previous step.

Exceptions to the above, things to watch out for, possible bugs and things that annoyed me:
* Some enemies seems to see more than their cones would suggest. During your turn you can use them to see where you can sneak, but during their turns, as long as you are within line of sight they will see you. Examples are the big turtle on the beach and i think 2 of the npcs in the final encounter. Either use the height to your advantage or hide behind rocks in between your shots.
* Some enemies seems to lack sight cones all together, e.g. silent monks and meat golems. Those you can basically stand right in front of and fire/sneak at.
* Watch out for blinding radiance. It has a really long radius and will reveal you for anyone to jump at you. Hide behind corners and count the number of turns between usage (iirc it will get cast every 5 turns).
* In some fights, if you could stay hidden from everyone but your target and have enough range you can kill off npcs one at a time without starting the fight. An example of this is during the quest when helping Gareth. After killing the first batch of enemies the normal way I could pick out targets one at a time in the yard outside.
* One of the most annoying things was when an npc forced upon me (hi Gareth) pushed me out of sneaking. Same goes for npcs outside of combat moving around with no restrictions and could cancel my sneaking at any time when they decide to look the other way all of a sudden.
* During one encounter when they couldn't see me they actually went looking for me. I really enjoyed that. It might've happened out of combat when I accidentally fired on the chair one was sitting on.

What I'd like to see fixed:
* I think the most important part to make sneaking less broken is that if an npc doesn't know where any target is, make them go searching for you if they "know" someone should be around. If they just took an arrow to their belly, someone must've fired it and they should be able to figure out somewhat where it came from. I saw something like it once and it should be used more frequently imo, at least for sentient beings.
* Make friendly npcs not expose you.
* Not sure what would be feasible, but have npcs not in combat not expose you as easily, whether it be pausing their movement, or having them run away from fights or whatever.
* Not sure if the enemies seeing more than their sight cones is a bug or intended, but at least I found it confusing.

Couldn't Sneak be abused in a similar way in D:OS 1 to solo the game?

I'm not saying tweaks to Sneak might not be needed, BUT this might be a case of "If you want to spend 4 times as long / 40 minutes to solo kill your way through every encounter - more power to you."

Won't doing the same strategy over and over again - especially one which involves the enemy never being able to hit you - just spoil your own experience and make you burn out on the game fast?

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Friendly NPC's don't know that you are friendly. You could be trying to rob them blind (which you usually are.)

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I've actually had cases where enemies see maybe a little less than their sight cone. In that encounter with the skeletal pirates just below Lucian's shrine, I've had my Rogue hang back, and later try to edge her past the sneak cones filling all the walkable space. Even though she apparently was right on the edge in places and even briefly stepped over a cone, she wasn't detected.

I rather like this, sniping being my preferred approach to combat in most games. Admittedly as I'm not so good at party-based strategy.

I loved the rather overpowered sneak-based sniping in an early D:OS pre-release but sadly it was nerfed shortly afterwards. D: Although I can't claim it was entirely unreasonable to do so.

Mmmm, I noticed the same thing when I made a solo rogue. It did occur to me that sniping is technically the easier method to abuse but daggers give bigger DPS with back stab and scoundrel crit mult+ and one handed for damage+ and accuracy+ .... the movement+ from scoundrel and speedcreeper also helps alot.

Though I wonder if the bonus from elevation would make up the difference. If we were able to level up more, I'd say 5 sneaking, 5 scoundrel, 5 ranged, 5 huntsman would be the better stance.....that way you could have all the crit mult+ and high crit chance and safety of bow.