Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Surface type

Does anyone bother about it in this second game? I'm asking this because i just completed the "On the Ropes" quest. Standing in a complete hell for about 6 or 7 turnes confirms for me that the glorious surface interaction system from first game was completely dumbed down because of such low damage, magic armor, that prevents any debuff that could raise damage, and of the fact that almost every enemy got some blink so they just laugh at your attempts to harm them with that. I'm playing on tactician and i dont bother at all about avoiding surfaces so why my enemies should? Lol, they doesn't in fact... It's almost useless and harmless now.
Any thoughts?

It's an issue I pretty much raised from the beginning of EA. The armor system makes enviromental effects hardly a bother. As long as you have enough armor, you don't care at all if there is fire or electrified blood. In the first, there was always a chance to be effected, but now there isn't. That is also the main reason why water/air are much weaker now.

The only good about surface is now oil because it penetrates and blowing stuff up with fire & earth.

I can remember that in DOS1 it was quite possible to get 80-100% resistances to fire, ice, electricity, and earth simultaneously, simply by buffing your equipment with elemental essences (or rubies). Also a lot of stuff gave immunities to the CC conditions. So, you could basically ignore all surfaces and enemies that deal spell damage (except poison and tenebrium).

The popular opinion (at least in this forum) that the armor system sucks, seems completely wrong to me. Maybe that has to do with "The Anchoring Effect". I played the game before getting to this forum and I think it is awesome. In our group it leads to actually strategizing like asking our mage to focus an enemy with low magic armor. Maybe that is trivial, but I like it.

The thing about surfaces is that they deal little damage if you are only standing in them. I think that is good, otherwise I would have died so many times. However walking through surfaces is dealing a huge amount of damage. It's just that everything and everybody has a teleport, so it doesn't happen very often. (Heck, even the lv3 alligators in Fort Joy had a teleport...)

So yes, mobility is a bit too much. Another thing is cursed which gets out of hand. I guess 90% of my encounters end with everything covered in necrofire. That is because it cannot be overwritten and is easily created. I would like to see some changes to that.

You basically encapsulated most of my thoughts as well. To reiterate, surfaces do plenty damage if you are walking around, but mobility kind of negates it a lot of the time. Also there are curses all the damn time. I'm playing through with magic party now and I'll try use bless and source vampirism more, seeing as how the latter was always blocked by magic armor with my physical party.

Also in my experience so far, if you have a magic party, surfaces are quite a big deal in spreading debuffs! It's easy to get their magic armor down and from there to poison, shock, burn, etc, helps a lot with the damage.

In short, if you play physical party surfaces are just an inconvenience, but not really. If you play magic party it becomes much bigger part of the game.

Just try the most imbalanced surface in the game--web. After that, enjoy. You will be able to stack several surface debuffs ;D.

I use all surfaces from levels 1 to 4.
After that, I only use flamable surfaces (poison/oil) to add DPS during the explosion but not for the fire surface it creates.
The armor system of DOS 2 transformed a great mechanic (the surfaces) into something barely relevant.

On a side note, I agree with everything posted so far, but I wanted to say that cursed, necrofire and such surfaces gets too common too soon and are pretty annoying, at least for me.

That is due almost entirely to the fact that Bless costs a Source point, making it wildly uneconomical when facing enemies who can curse at will for free.

You are talking about late game of the first game. We are talking about the fact in DOS2 the armor gives this effect already in the early game. Already in Act 1 I hardly cared about surfaced and in late game if you have thousands of armor surface are probably even more irrelevant.



This just shows, that you can't compare those two games, because you have not played the first.

In the first you had to stratigize too. Mages were weak at body building and physical resistance and but high magic resistance and Willpower. And warriors were the opposite. But if you focused the same guy with a physical and a magical attacker, they did not get 30-70% more HP just because of that fact.

Agreed. Web is to broken, that I actually had an encounter in Arx that I had to reload, because I was perma-cc'ed by spiders with no option to move.

But yes, the armor system currently has way more negative than positive consequences for the game.

LOL I remember that! I had really good healing in my party so the fight just took me a while to complete. Really frustrating though.

Silly they there is no real way to counter being webbed...

But I did... I also talked about it. In my opinion neither system is bad. In DOS1 it just felt like wasted points in resistances, since it took the same points for the schools (which open up cool spells).



I think if you burn it you can move again (at least a friend told me so). So the counter is to have a candle in your backpack and 1 AP to drop it.

It still takes the same points for skill trees and defence and offence...

Ignition does counter webs, but the trick would be still having that memorized so late in the game. But any other fire source should do as well.

My party had 3 characters using Spider Legs(or whatever that Polymorph spell is called) in addition to all 4 having teleport and 3 using nether swap. Most of the fighting in my game(especially the last third) ended up in all the enemies in one same tight spot, perma webbed, and with a lot of AoE raining on top of them. The Adramalikh fight was largely trivialized because of that. There was one case of a semi-boss fight at the Nameless Isle, where one of those Black Ring Destroyers(or whatever they're called) had a reflect projectile aura, but very little magic armour as well. So I charmed him and proceeded doing the same. Also, the Spider Legs spell makes you hasted when you walk on web, so it is a counter to web. In addition, very few mobs use it.

Having finished the game now, I can say that almost every fight I had ended in the area being covered in cursed flames. I only had one Pyromancer, Lohse, who also used necromancy and geomancy. Oil and poison surfaces were only used for the explosion-damage, and helped spread more fire. Electrified water, which was my go-to-surface in the first Game, was almost never used by enemies or me and, at those times, was quickly "overwritten" by fire.

Together with enemies' abundant use of teleport-abilities, as well as the armor system, this caused me to almost completly neglect this beloved mechanic of the first game. Here, it's just something that happens, not something I actively tried to achieve.

Yea, I think it's an issue that necrofire lasts for the whole combat, no matter the time. Furthermore is can overwrite everything and cannot be removed at all (except for Bless which sucks, since 1 turn later everything burns again).

Can cursed ice be overwritten by fire? That never came up in my game sessions. Poison and oil are the most common thing I tend to use, and well these burn really good.

Apart from cursed fire and cursed oil (soon to be fire), I actually can't remember ever seeing another cursed surface type.

I've seen cursed ice (especialy in ship wreckers cave rfom big voidwokens) poison here and there, cursed smoke from black ring dudes on nameless isle. But i can understand that you didn't notice ) they have such little impact so i don't care of it at all.

One of the reasons I use armor based status mod. It at least gives you a chance of something happening when standing in an electrified pool of water.