Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga Whats the deal with Damian?

First of: i like the game so far and i was a huge fan of Divine Divinity before that, so this is no blind rage talk, but a feeling that creeps in that just dampens my motivation to get to the end. (and maybe an improvement to the Devs for the next games)


How the Hell am i supposed to take Damian Seriously??
he shows up ever 30 minutes or so to monologe in an act that reminds me a bit of a middle-school theatre play that he is tired of me gathering strength and that he now will proceed to Kill me, instead of just F***ing stabbing me or Zapping me with magic already he just truns around and leaves 2 - 4 guys of i kind that im slaugthering all day long in the same room effectively saying: "i leave you to your death now mr. Bond" i just dont feel threatened by someone who acts so absurdly stupid that he comes across less threatening than a james-Bond-villan and on top of that looks like that guy from the awful Dungeons & Dragons movie (who didnt get any s*** done either)

and how can i be motivated to keep with that till the end?

Divine Divinity did it better in that they indeed killed the hero who then got revived by Zandalor, so if we have already established that zandalor can do this, then why dont have Damian kill me at our first encounter get me revived by Zandalor and then dont have this bunch of stupid Damian pop ups ( the loading screeens telling me to run away from him are the icying on top of the cake telling me to run away from Damian even if he just dissappears everytime without even the possibility of a dialoge)

Damian needs the player character alive to get to the Hall of Echoes;

Well that explains A LOT
havent read the spoiler since i have yet to get to that point but i trust theres a plot twist incoming.
thanks for that (no irony here)

still feel that it could have been delivered a bit better tough

okay i have finished now the main game and i have to say

this isnt really a good explanation

i hope the expansion will resolve things a bit better :­/
altough i have to add at least they kinda foreshadowed that whole thing with Ygerna so that it didnt come across like something the writers pulled out of their ***es (like some other Dei ex Machinas we have seen in the past from other writers)

I'll skip the spoiler tags, since anyone wanting to avoid spoilers would have stopped reading this topic by now.

Damian thought the player was intent on destroying Ygerna, but allowing that plan to proceed was still his best option to get to the Hall of Echoes. His plan would have been to wait until the path was open, stop the player and resurrect Ygerna himself. Obviously his follow through on that was too late.

Enough people disliked the ending of D2:ED (especially before FoV was announced) when it was 'you were fooled, Damian is stronger and now you are imprisoned', imagine the reception of 'you probably put at least 40 hours into this, but Damian killed you, he is now invincible, the end'.

well if he would want the plan to advance why did he bother sending his lackey after me after i Defeated Amdusias and met Patriach at all, possibly risking that the dragon knight would be killed off? (he doesnt appear to me as undecided wether to let me live or kill me)
So he shows up at those events out of thin air (telling me he monitored my advance closely.
But then if he wanted me to reach the Hall of Echoes but stop me from getting to Ygerna (and in his opinion Destroy her soul) why DIDNT he show up at the hall of echoes?
Did he stop monitoring me after i defeated Ba'al?
how if he was following my progress could he miss me getting into the hall of echos?
if there was a perfect Time for him to show up and put himself into the play to stop me and ressurect Ygerna it would be the instant i opened the hall of echoes, not any other encounter, he would appear try to kill me and take all the things he needs to enter the hall and ressurect Ygerna. but at this time i hadnt seen him in like 12 ingame hours, after i killed every Flying fortess with every man inside and no sign of him anywhere , why would he risk giving the dragon knight the chance to Destroy Ygernas soul with NO sign of resistance?

At first i didnt even realize it was the ending since by playing the Developers Cut, it just continued with the expansion right away.
Thats why i think the ending was a bit too sudden and the fact they just halfway through cut out riverwood and put a flying fortress there, the large area of the map that shows a 3rd valley (where aleroth is located in), the hall of Champions inaccessible and Aleroth squeezed in as a really tiny linear subquest and not a town to explore (actually there was no real town to explore at all) leads me to belive they ran out of money/time/memory space/whatever and had to cut a few corners and publish the game. i wouldnt go as far to say it was a bad ending, a good executed sad ending or bittersweet ending can leave a much bigger impact on the audience (romeo and juliet dont exactly have a happy ending either still its world famous) than any happy ending. (not wanting to start this dicsussion here but Mass effect 3 ending shows you how NOT to do a "sad" ending and a deus ex machina). there is such a compulsive need for a happy end in stories but a happy ending is not necessary, so thats not my problem, the "plotholes" and irrational behaviour of the "Main Viallan" are my problems

and again im not saying i dont like the game, i have to say i played through it in 3-4 days and it was one of those game i just couldnt put away and it kept me playing untill i was finished and i had an enjoyable time

PS: sorry if i am repeating myself a bit or have grammar/spelling errors since english isnt my native language.

The answer to 'why didn't Damian...' is 'because it is a game'.
As logical as Damian showing up and killing you may have been, that would not have made a good ending for the game. You would not reasonably have been able to kill Damian (you being a relatively newly hatched dragon knight and him essentially the incarnation of a god), so at best Zandalor would have had to show up with backup to stall him long enough for you to get to the Hall of Echoes. Which would have just brought up the question of why Damian didn't bring his own backup, etc.

The rational behaviour for the main villain in most games would be to send out their strongest minions when they hear about a chosen one who is destined to defeat them. What they do, however, is send out weak minions first, and then gradually send out stronger and stronger minions.

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There was originally going to be a Broken Valley type area around Aleroth in FoV, but it got cut due to lack of resources (it would have delayed the release by the better part of a year). They decided the game overall needed more of a human hub of activity than more wilderness to explore or fly around, so that was what they focused on.

im not saying he has to kill the Dragon knight but TRY to stop him, after all he trys to "murder" Damians Beloved. and well yes, it is a game after all, but in the end i think i could have been made better
(i know thats easy to say as someone who doesnt actually have to develop/write a game but anyways)
dont let Damain show up personally after Amdusias / patriach but send his minions without him actually beeing there, we have established that teleporting isnt to hard for skilled mages, and the increasing strenght of the minions can easily be handwaved by general gameplay balancing ( we have armored boars stronger than deamons from hell after all so thats not a problem) but instead have him show up before the Hall of Echos, and have a kinda bossfight there, it doesnt even have to end with a victory for the dragon knight or even an even fight, actually a fight were Damian is superior would increase the Image of Supreme power he has been given but just the Dragon knight getting the opportunity to slip into the hall of dead and doing his thing-> no changes to the actual story, more belivable Villan.

The whole motivation of "taking revenge for the dead lover, and trying to bring her back" seems very unbelivable if he doesnt even bother to show up to protect her from harm, and since its a story driven RPG beliveable chractes, most improtant hero and villan are the most important things to me to make it work.
(the combat that consists of downright silly melee animations and tons of getting stunlocked cant be the driving part :P )


as a completely unrelated note:

Yes, Damian certainly could have tried to stop the dragon knight, I just don't see a huge difference between not having an attempt and coming up with a way for Damian to fail.

There was certainly room for a little more polish, if Larian had had the time and resources. The thing about the ending that stuck out more for me was in Ygerna's memory, when you are talking to the Divine and Zandalor and trying to stop the execution, you basically jump straight to a violent resolution. Even if it led to the exact same fight, there could have been an option to try to reason with them, and convince them they were simply Ygerna's memories (at which point they could stop behaving as Ygerna remembered them, and start acting as an extension of her will). The right dialog options might even have allowed the player to realize it was Ygerna guiding them to that point, rather than Talana. Of course, as you said, thinking of this stuff after playing the game is easier than when trying to finish it with a ton of stuff left to do and things being cut, etc.


I rarely had a problem with the time healing potions take to work. You can use a healing and rejuvenation potion one after the other, as well as the healing spell. The instant potion healing in Divine Divinity could make any fight trivial with enough restoration potions (checking my stats without equipment at the end of the game, I went and regought the Demon of Lies; it took 106 minor restoration potions and a couple minutes, but I killed him barehanded, with no armour).

The couple times with my ranger that I ran into a problem with Stun Arrows (not investing in Intelligence at all) I solved with a change of strategy on one case, and an Intelligence / armour potion before a fight and a couple healing potions during the fight. Other than that I didn't have a problem getting stunned. It wasn't an issue with my warrior character, either, though that was in the original release of D2:ED.

In theory, Larian possibly could have had a sequence where Damian show up to try and stop you, but the objective would be to run away and enter the portal. Damian wouldn't be able to follow you without the protective amulet.

The problem with that idea is that NOT fighting the big boss-like enemy is counter-intuitive, even with voice-overs from "Talana" telling you seriously run, and having Damian be invincible and able to do huge damage to you. I suppose they wouldn't want the player to blow all their potions on a fight they can't win.

i kinda have to agree with Stabbey here, it really feels weird having a "big bad" who you NEVER fight at all. i guess you could have damain casting a sort of barrier over the entrance so it wouldnt be easy to run straight past him to the gate. and since its the finale of the story you can have zandalor or rhode or Zixzax or someone like that show up to help you reach the portal. and Damain doesnt have to be invincible either so you waste all your potions, just make the fight reasonably hard, and when you beat him trigger a cutscene where he draws his strenght to overwhelm you and you just make into the hall of echoes.( that technique is not uncommon) i think that definately would improve the sense of having a climax of the story.




the problem with the stunlocking i had mainly in a few flying fortresses, and maybe a few caves when there were like 5 rangers that would stun you with arrows, a few warriors (and sometimes mages) that would charge you and knock you down and a load of spellcasters that would knock you down with their magic missiles (or whatever that spell, was called that hits you multiple times that you cannot dodge) or polymorph me and after retransformation beeing stunned.
there were times i lost against 7 guys that were 4-5 level below me beacause i got constatnly stunned, and other times i would take out whole flying fortresses alone without any problems, mainly after my HP regen was so strong.( and the annyoing healing spells of them wouldnt help either :­/ it was really frustating to beat on an enemy with a tiny bit of health all the time beacause he healed as fast as you would damage him) affter i switched my tactics to hit and run takedowns of single enemys with the charge ability / thousand strikes and when i dropped to half health ( which didnt happen too often considering the additional rank 13 life leech skill) i just jumped around for about 10-15 seconds untill i had full health again, 1 rank in mana leech was also enough to never run out of mana in a fight...
also it was really hard to pick out priority targets like healers due to them all looking diffrent and same at the same time, you coudlnt identify enemies by their equipment or looks, sometimes summoners had double swords and another time they had a bow, rangers and archers were practically identical(as did followingly some of the summoners and healers), the difference between skeleton mages and fireskeleton wizards is still unclear to me and i even met a few black ring mages that had the skins of Demons...
so yeah combat was a bit of a mess but still sometimes chellanging and fun


PS: i really enjoy having a genuine discussion here with you guys

Damian does look like Damodar, I'm surprised I never made that connection myself.