Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback First Impresions of A.I 2.0 Patch

My first post on the patch is based on roughly 5 hours of playing. This has actually been the first iteration of DOS2 that I literately had no fun whatsoever playing, and its not the A.I alone that caused this frustration, but the changes to progression. Normally i'd wait till after I finished a playthrough before giving my thoughts, but I had such a horrible time playing this time around that I felt I needed to post this now. Before I get into whats made this experience miserable for me i'll start with things I liked.

Things I liked:

New animations, mosquito swarm's in particular, are really great to look at. I liked that there was a bit more difference between the different children and elves. Making poison wands and staffs no longer contaminate all vulnerable surfaces is a nice change. Being able to customize companions starting build is nice, even though I would prefer having much more control over their starting abilities attributes, and gear, its still a welcomed addition. I like that casting animations are sped up a bit, and I feel like that makes combat flow a bit more naturally.

Things I hated:

Surfaces staying indefinitely:
I can't count the amount of time i've wasted tripping over ice I couldn't remove because all my surface changing abilities were on cool down or I didn't have access to any yet. Trying to loot corpses covered in static I couldn't remove was maddening. I think the new perseverance stat is interesting, but because I'm struggling to really do anything now that I'm at level four, I can't really test it out.

Skill Books:

Skill books cost WAY, WAY, WAY too much. In the previous patch there was a very nice progression to getting skills, and building a character. If i managed my money intelligently I could have the skill books I needed to fit my playstyle, and smart use of these skills could make up for lack of armor and weapons. Here not only am i woefully under geared to fight anything, but i'm also under funded to buy skill books. Where before I could get around 1-3 skills for each character per level up if i was managing money correctly on previous patches, but in this one i'm lucky if i can even get 1 for any character on level up because of how insanely scarce everything is.

A.I:

The new A.I is smarter in alot of instance but in quite a few its even dumber than it ever was. I had one instance where it healed one of my team mates that was close to death for no reason. During the Saltwater croc fight the crocs kept wasting turns casting fossil strike even though they where out of range because i had them blocked off using an electric blood surface.

When the A.I isn't being just plain dumb its two shotting 2+ members of my party with a single character turn 1 because I can't buy the skill books or gear I need to keep that from happening, because the prices on skill books, and decent gear are so outrageous. The A.I has better stats than you do, better gear than you, more armor than you, has more and better skills than you do, and out numbers you constantly, and its infuriating.

Skills:

I haven't had the chance to try many of them out, because I can't afford many of them due to how overly scarce all resources seem to be, but I'm not a fan of the reduced size of the aoe on skills like fossil strike. I've had multiple occasions where I couldn't get the slow to go off, even though the A.I was clearly in the oil, but the slow didn't go into effect because of how small the aoe radius is.

Inversely, Hailstrike's aoe radius is too big, and often hurts or cc's my team more than it does the A.I, and its a pain to use in general because of its 3 ap cost. Not a fan of how dots don't also do damage on the turn cast anymore. It could be just me but there was something satisfying when a mosquito swarm finally chewed through a targets armor and you got to see those wonderful red numbers appear below the gray.

I might be crazy, but it looks like dialogue choices are missing, because I remember having a lot more options for what I wanted to say. I hope this isn't the case because streamlined dialogue was one of my major issues with DOS EE.

Please don't make make attributes mandatory for equipping gear. Its a bad idea for several reasons. It disincentivizes hybrid builds, which was a huge issue I had with DOS1 and DOS EE. I never wanted to start branching out until late, late game if I even bothered, because if I split stats I would end up under geared. Making stats mandatory for gear also contradicts the armor system that DOS2 implements, which promotes mixing and matching gear to fit your personal playstyle. If you wanted a mage clad in heavy armor at the cost of virtually any magical protection you could do that, and I felt DOS2 was a far more interesting and fun experience because of it.

Loot:
I have gotten barley any gear...which i'd be fine with if the amount of money I got let me buy skills and gear, but it hasn't. The good gear which you need to survive is sold on the vendors, and is also absurdly priced, so you have to pick between getting slightly better gear, or skills, but if pick skills you can't survive any fight because the second the A.I gets a turn on any of the lvl4 fights or above they tend to wipe half or 3/4ths of your team.

To summarize my thoughts I pretty much hated this patch. If the changes to the A.I, graphical performance improvements, and better animations were the only thing added, and progression was left unchanged I would have probably have loved this patch. As it stands this iteration of the game isn't so much difficult as it is just outright unfair with what it expects you to be able to deal with. Tactician in DOS EE was a fair challenge, DOS2's previous patch was a fair challenge despite the A.I not being as competent , but A.I 2.0 is anything but fair to the player.

I decided to create an account after playing through DOSEE, and becoming and fan and Playing DOS2, so this is my first time posting.

I have to say from the previous patch to this one, there are some very nice changes, but I have say you are pretty much spot on with how I felt about the changes thus far, with only little exception.

Class Choices:
Let me start off with this.
If I do not play a select type of CC and quick damage builds, I am are going to have a rough go of things in this version of the game. Some class pre-build makeup's such as Cleric and Fighter (adn BattleMage) for example, feel very solid, while others, such as Ranger or Knight feel like they just get hammered in the beginning sequences. I have only played these choices so far, so I can't get too in detail.

My current group is (loosely based on the previous default classes), BattleMage, Fighter, Enchanter, Rogue. I stopped playing the hunter once I realized the damage and skills sets were finally and expectedly reduced in power. Ricochet... wow, not so much anymore. That's fine.

I want to say that this is just after about 5+ hours myself, I find myself unable to progress passed the Arena battle or Gruffs ruffians because of lack of character strength. I really did not feel my choices of class or dialog mattered before, now I feel it does.

The Ai is very effective in targeting either the weakest, or the most vulnerable or in some cases...just choose to focus down one player. Without more chances to build in power... this may be hard to get past with my current makeup amd choices

Let me be fully transparent here and say.. I don't feel the AI strength is an issue, but the beginning quest and options available area are...

Gear:
It almost feels, after a couple quick jogs through, that the item variety and RNG has not just improved, but left open the possible chance of really nice equipment. This makes me happy, but again.. not enough options to build in the starting area, greatly reduced my chances to progress because I simply cannot do enough to pose a threat to my captors.

Game Progression:
I basically could not buy anything (other than normal gear), but then again... I am imprisoned. I don't feel like I should have been able too gear out my character before trying to break out anyways. Perhaps fighting out of the prison is no longer going to be the best path out, but that option feels like it is entirely off the table now. While I wanted desperately to tell Gruff to go F himself, I feel like Sting-tail is in for a rude awakening on my next try.

I am basically being forced to be a jerk, to get out of the prison. I guess I am ok with that, but it hurts immersion a bit.

Quests:
It still feels like some quests are having trouble ending. For example, finding the ladies daughter (whom may have perished) does not seem to every say "Completed". Same with the log entries for a number of other occurrences that happen in Fort Joy... perhaps I just have not found them yet and I am wrong, but to me, this may be the missing link of power and lack of things to do.


More later.

Played about 6 hours in the new patch. It's definitely harder, but so far, it seems less like the enemies are smarter, and more like they just deal a lot more damage. I've had party members go from full health/armor to dead in one hit. I've had fights end before I even got a turn.

The skyrocketed price of gear from NPCs doesn't help toward that end, since shopping is basically now "Is this really the only thing I'll ever need to buy? Because it's all I will ever be able to afford." I haven't bought anything yet, because now it's far more important of a decision and I haven't found anything that was a significant enough of a boost to warrant a purchase. Even that legendary cleaver couldn't entice me after I found a level 3 green that was almost as good (they really nerfed the hell out of that thing).

Right now, the sole deciding factor on whether or not I upgrade a piece of armor is how much physical/magic armor it has, because stats are meaningless if you're dead before you get a turn (although I guess defense is supposed to be the main point of armor).

I will say, though, that the AI does seem a bit smarter. I saw them using Tactical Retreat to get closer to my party rather than use it to teleport away and then walk back towards me. I still see them walk away, then turn around and walk right back, though, so, not a dramatic improvement (although I think that might be a pathing issue rather than an AI issue).

I'm also seeing enemies cheat. An enemy warrior hit my warrior with crippling blow from quite a range. After CCing that enemy, my warrior eventually recovered, and it took 2 AP of walking to get close enough to that enemy to use crippling blow on it. On the topic of crippling blow, what happened to the AOE reticle for it? It's not there anymore.

In closing, I like that the AI has been improved, but I really don't think enemies need to be dealing ~100 damage per hit or cheating.

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Suggestions for resolving the pricing issue:

1. Fix the Bartering bug. It still says it reduces prices by 10%, and it still reduces them by less than 4.5% instead. It seems like a much more significant bug now. It seems like it would be easy to fix. Are you guys intentionally ignoring it?

2. Reduce gear prices, and also reduce the sell prices of junk items to 0. So, candles, crates, vases, baskets, and such would have no resale value, and thus I wouldn't feel like I'd have to collect them all just to be able to afford one piece of armor (because there'd be no point collecting them). Picking up all that stuff and vendoring it is not fun. So, remove it as an option, and reduce the prices to accommodate the loss of income.

Some things I forgot to mention in my initial post. I had a few more bugs and glitches appear this time around. The bug where if you are moving a character before combat starts and it eats through your ap seems to be fixed, but is replaced with a more annoying bug where sometimes you completely lose control of a character and you have to reload in order to do anything with them (move, attack, ect.).

Thought i'd also reiterate that aside from a few questionable decisions the A.I tends to make, like healing your own party, wasting ap on moves that aren't going to hit, and occasional pathing issues the a.i is definitely more intelligent and competent. They use their ap alot more wisely on any given turn, are more wary of surfaces, and will use things like tactical retreat or phoenix dive to get around them. I probably would be having fun, but unlike previous patches I don't feel like I'm ever given what I need to survive any of these encounters. It feels like the game wants you kill npcs like Griff for their skill books and gear, but unless they drop everything they have (which they haven't done since DOS1) its not worth it.

It could be because the A.I has access to alot more Armor then the player, but they seem to be incredibly happy setting their team mates on fire or damaging them as long as you get hurt with them.

Sugestions:

Cut prices on skill books down from 500-850+ down to 120-350 based on tier, and reduce gear prices by about a 3rd. If you want vendor gear to be what we use 90% of the time we shouldn't have to choose between skills or gear. That said in the previous patch I did use vendor gear for most of my adventure, but I didn't start using vendor gear till I had left the prison, which I felt made sense. The Magisters shouldn't be letting prisoners arm themselves to the teeth, but they wouldn't notice them learning new spells and abilities that would give them a fighting chance. Also even when I started buying vendor gear more often I still had enough money with proper management to get some skills too.

Increase the aoe radius of skills that were reduced a bit, they don't need to be as large as they were before, but they shouldn't be as small as they are now (except hail strike cause its honestly kind of terrible).

Make ice and static surfaces end after 5 or 6 turns instead of lasting until you change them, so that they aren't a constant nuisance when trying to loot corpses after battle. I like the idea of trying to make DOS2 a bit closer to DOS1 (where you could change surfaces ahead of time to make fights in your favor if you knew they were coming) in theory, but I'm not fond of the execution in this patch.

Just came to the realization my playthrough is actually unwinnable, which is something thats probably going to kil my mood for playing for a while till a new patch that fixes progression to be less punishing and strict occurs. I can't escape Fort Joy, my party is not powerful enough, skill or gear wise, to win any of the level 4 encounters, no one in the party is good enough at sneaking to sneak into the sewers, and I think Han may have been killed because the boat and the guards are no longer there to give me a non combat avenue of escape, and even if I did escape i'd probably get bodied by the enemies in the swamp because I don't have what I need to survive.

I had the same issue with characters getting stuck during combat that was mentioned by Damashi. In one battle I had two characters get stuck, leaving me with only two to use in the rest of the battle. The stuck characters won't move and there toolbar is greyed out, this continued after the battle was finished. I found a work around the first time it happened Loshe and the Red Prince were stuck, after the battle (which I was lucky to win) I traded a ring to the stuck character and equipped it, this did mange to unstick them. The next time it happened it was Sebille, I sent her the ring during the combat session and equipped it successfully returning her to the battle.

I have to concur, after many hours of playing, with the rest of the people here.

With the resources available (especially in terms of gear), playing through the game is not enjoyable at this point. Levels 1 through 3, the player essentially cannot upgrade from the prisoner gowns to anything higher, and the weapons stay at 8-10 damage while AI will consistently deal out 15-30 damage at Level 2-3 encounters.

Even the previously great Snipe (which wasn't overpowered, mind, but just a very useful battle initiator) now seems useless. 12-13 Damage from stealth against foes with 50+ PA is useless - hell, it's barely better than basic damage. Also no Tactical Retreat purchasable from Butter hurts, as well as the doubled book prices. Thieving was nerfed as well, apparently. I suppose it's great that we can't attack the Magisters anymore, though. Now they really are scary.

The combat AI is clearly better. However, random people (like Butter) still complain about trying to lockpick chests when near them, and these chests specifically have nothing to do with those characters. I legit took a chest, carried it all the way from turtle beach, opened it near her - she scolds my characters for doing it. Makes no sense. Laser scanning AI with thievery interrogations are also totally nonsensical. The AI choices there are horrible imo, unlike combat AI which now behaves quite smartly. Which, unfortunately, makes the fights way too stacked in the computer's favor. 10 damage against 60 PA, when you have 40 health and they hit for half of that with base attacks... not winnable. Not even with cheese tactics, tried and tested.

I did notice the AI healing one of my characters once, and at the start of combat. Character's at full health, and the enemy's first move is to walk up and cast regeneration on him. I'm like "OK... thanks?"

I've encountered new bugs as well. For instance, the "Take all" keyboard shortcut no longer closes empty containers. I now have to click the GUI X in order to close them. That makes looting take a lot longer. I also ran into an issue a few times where one or more of my party members just stopped walking, and refused to do so until I manually selected them, separated them from the party, and moved them individually (after which they'd return to party movement). Twice I saw Ifh-ban-whatever stop animating, and instead would teleport short distances like the Slenderman (but at least he kept up with the party, so it didn't really bother me).

Also, I've noticed that whenever I enter tactical camera mode, it zooms in, regardless of my current or previous zoom level. That's pretty annoying, as I have to manually zoom back out each time.

I had Sebille just unable to take her turn for the duration of an entire encounter. :l
She would just stop and stick there and I could do nothing but skip her turn completely.

I have to agree with everything the OP said. This AI update is one thing, we need smarter AI in our games. But you can't have an intelligent AI that ALSO is designed around a dumb AI. Most games tend yo give the AI overbuffed stats or skills to compensate for them being dumb. This update KEPT the overbuffed NPC's with a vast repertoire of effective skills, metric crap tons of armor and damage stats, and then made them smarter to boot.

And to make matters worse, the update also took away many of the avenues for the player to compete with the OP NPC's. Getting comparable gear is impossible, getting necessary skills to compete is impossible, and just leveling up in general is very hard.

I played for about 4 hours last night, and it was just bashing my head against a brick wall the entire time.

I have tried setting up counters, like putting pools on the ground to electrify, or buffing my party, but anything that takes more than the first round to do, guarantees a loss, because you won't get a round two with most of your charaters.

So true. And ground effects don't work anyway - remember that MA most NPCs have? Yeah, it's usually so high that you don't even have enough damage to break it down on the first round. Even if you do a concentrated salvo on one NPC, it might BARELY break their MA. On ONE NPC.

Before, a way to compete with the NPCs was for example to use Snipe on ranged guys from stealth to initiate, then CC the melee guards with mages and clean up. Now it's not possible because EVERYONE has sky-high armour ratings, and player has no way to whittle them down quickly enough. Couple this with an inability to progress past Level 2-3 due to impossible encounters.

One-handed strikes should STILL made to only cost 1AP. 2AP for an extremely weak 1-handed strike is useless and Sucker Punch does not make up for that lack of damage.

Oh, and I also noticed that Necromancers can no longer pick Shackles of Pain. It wasn't an OP skill. Is this Larian's version of "just how difficult can we make this Alpha"? xD

Well, at least the Magisters are finally the scary, invincible force they were supposed to be. I'll be banging my head against the wall (e.g playing this game) for some more, see if I can crack some encounters.

I forgot that the take all function wasn't working when a container is empty. I meant to put that in my initial post, but I was so overwhelmed with how many things I didn't like about this patch it slipped my mind.

I don't know if this is an issue because of the patch or if it was like that before too, but after switching out Sebille for Ifan i couldn't spend a single point anywhere.
There was the UI hint for the LVL-up that suddenly vanished, when she asked me what she should specify in.
It's kind of frustrating to have a character made unplayable from the get-go, because the game just dumps the skill- and attribute points into nothingness (I would have been fine with auto-levels...).

Also holding down the mouse button for walking doesn't seem to work as intended.
It's either painstakingly slow or just flips the f out when there is something in the general area of the cursor.

Apart from that I got the feeling that the game became somewhat easier (didn't even come close to death with a single char vs. the crocs, which is a first for me, usually it was somewhat of an uphill battle, praying to RNGesus).
But I only played a few encounters, so that's probably wrong.
The sort inventory button is a godsend though!
Now I just hope for more options in the character costumization and I have nothing to complain about (probably).

I would really love to continue testing the game and providing feedback, but right now that is not going to happen, at least on Normal mode.

Has anyone tested out explorer mode? Does it feel like the old Normal mode now?

I needed to create an account for this... Just to clarify for Larian that not everybody feels that the only viable option to make any kind of progress is to bang ones head against a wall.

It is still not challenging (yet, atleast). I am only level 5 (still hopefull that something will take me by surprise).

Sure, skills and items are not by any means easy to come by. But we are prisoners breaking free, not billionaires taking a stroll through a shopping mall. Epic weapons should not be easy to come by this early on. Anyways, this is not an issue. Just pick up everything you find and push bartering on one of your characters. Ta-da!

Personally I feel that both enemies damage and health-pool is a bit low. Id like a bit more insanity. I actually want to bang my head against a wall, to be honest.

Ive only suffered one lethal blow and it was when my group entered the arena because of stupid misplacement of characters. Otherwise its been quite dull.

I do agree that certain surfaces can be viewed as rather stupid, this should be looked into.

I might just need Tactical mode to cheer up.

//ZigurdRock

Tactical Mode would probably do all of those things, Damien. Increased HP, PA and MA. Demonspawn Magisters from Hell. And so on.

I played a lot of arena last night, and it has only reinforced my belief that the campaign is unfair with what it expects the player to be able to deal with. In the arena I never had instances where I lost over half my team turn one, and couldn't defend myself in any way. I had access to the skills I wanted, and while I never lost to the A.I it still put up a fair fight.

The Dos2 campaign, in its current state, punishes creativity as only certain play styles and builds can really breeze through it, and in some causes certain play styles can make the campaign outright unwinable. When I died in a fight in the last patch I felt it was my fault. I could think about what went wrong, and avoid making the same mistakes next attempt, and usually I'd succeed the next time. It was always a fun time, so much so I did 4 playthroughs of that iteration of the game because I loved it so much.

In A.I 2.0 none of my deaths feel likes its my fault, all of it feels like the odds are stacked against me, and there is nothing I can do about it because it of how I built my characters up to that point.

This patch highlights one of DOS1 and DOSEE's major faults where the game starts really hard, but gets rapidly easier as you progress, which is an issue the last patch didn't have. Last patch the first few fights were pretty hard, but it didn't get widely easier after that it was a consistent difficulty throughout the campaign, despite that you could build your characters in a myriad of ways, because the game gave you that freedom with fairer prices on gear and books. This patch doesn't have that consistency.

You are a prisoners , but this isn't supposed to be a punishment. The magisters don't care how heavily armed you are as evidenced by Griffs gang, and the heavily armed and equipped lizard in the cave. The only thing they care about is making sure prisoners stay in fort joy until they can be brought in to be "cured". You aren't there because you are a criminal, or are a danger to society on a personal level, but because you have access to source.

I still feel like that if I died, it was my fault. For example, in the Houndmaster fight, I left my mages too exposed and as a result lost that encounter. Next time I bunched up my tanks and it went much better. I think encounters are still winnable. It's just much harder.

Fights are definitely still winnable, and fights are definitely harder, but at the cost of player flexibility. The way I built my characters made the campaign unwinnable. It doesn't matter how many times I retry a fight if my characters physically can't win with the skills they have. I know if I had built them differently to deal with the advantages the A.I has in mind I could have made it through the campaign, but that requires 5 hours worth of foresight which I feel is unreasonable to expect from the player.