Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding Stats Editing how Magic/Physical Armor and health work

(First of sorry if this is in the wrong forum)

I recently started work on a complete overhaul mod for Divinity because while I really love the game there was a few things that I thought could have been better.

One of those things is how the game "forces" you to bias around one type of damage in your party to achieve max effectivness.

Thats why the Overhaul was supposed to focus around a new kind of damage model: instead of dividing the defenses in Magical and Physical Armor, I wanted magic armor to act as a kind of "Overshield" that is easy to regenerate via abilities and protects from most status effects while physical armor blocks damage more effective but allows more debuffs to be put on you.

But for the love of my live I cant figure out how to get ALL (or rather most) kinds of damage to act this way:
Dealing damage to the "Shield" first, then to Armor and then to Health. I only manage to get it to effect one of them or both of them at the same time which is not my intend.

Does anyone have an Idea how to deal with this?

The way the different types of damage interact with the different types of armour is hard-coded.

One way to work around this is to mod all (or most) statuses to be blocked by Magical armour, mod all skills to apply a status that does Corrosive damage on application, but is blocked by magical armour and a status that does the desired 'final' type of damage but is blocked by physical armour, and have all skills do Magic damage.
This way, when a skill impacts:
- If the target has Magical Armour, that armour soaks up the default Magic damage.
- If that breaks the Magical Armour, this will allow your Corrosive status to pass, which does damage to the physical armour. Otherwise, that status is blocked and physical armour remains.
- If that breaks the Physical armour, the secondary damage status also passes, which, in turn, does e.g. Fire damage or Physical or whatever else you want the skill's final damage type to be.

Mhhh... yeah, that would be a nice workaround. Well, nice as in doable.
This will require all weapons to be modded too, right? As in "does magic damage"?

Kinda sad that it is hard-coded, but I guess that is understandable.

This will make it extremly hard to have different attacks deal different damage based on the defense they hit.
For example Aero more effective against shields, fire more effective against armor etc. But that could be worked around with Lightning spells applicating suffocating and fire dealing more Corrosive etc.

This would also pretty much ruin magical resistances (because corrosive damage is the thing that damages armor).

Is it possible to have a status take an instant effect instead of staying minimum one round? (possibly, havent checked much in that direction yet)

Also, off topic, what are chaos and shadow damage supposed to be?

Shadow damage is a holdover from D:OS1. It's not actually used in D:OS2 and may not be supported everywhere.
A weapon or skill with "chaos" damage randomly selects a damage type from Water, Air, Earth, Poison, Fire and Physical (see Chaos Bolt for example).

Yes, it is possible for a status to take instant effect, at least for DAMAGE and HEAL-type statuses. It's what the DamageEvent or HealEvent entry is for.