Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta social skills usefulness?

Barter - I doubt it's useful. U usually find enough items to sell, plus the items u find on monsters are usually better.

Charm/Intimidate/Reason - I doubt it's useful. I got 100% effectiveness by putting 1 point in reason and selecting reason all the time. First of all it seems you need only one skill, plus you need a very low skilllevel to be effective. I didn't try the 0 points options, but I wouldn't be surprised if they would work as well.

Charisma - Not sure what this does, but seems useless? Or does this actually help with quests?

Leadership - Looks useful, but not sure what it does, what will be boosted.

Lucky charm - seems very useful, when I played Might and Magic Heroes 6 I know Luck is one of the most important skills to be had, I don't know how high the effect is. For now it seems good to put this on your main character (warrior) and put leadership on your secondary character (wizard).

Another skill I want to talk about is from survivor tree.

Lockpicking - Doesn't seem usefull in alpha, I never encountered a chest where it said: 'you need higher skill lockpicking'. Maybe my lockpicking skill was always high enough?, did someone find a chest he needed higher lockpicking for?

Barter does change the price of items you sell/buy from vendors. Small change but probably it will be balanced better later.

As to others - I can't really say - seems like I have really bad luck and am not getting good drops, not finding items in barrels/chests/etc.

I had to actually level up Lockpicking to be able to open some doors. Probably will change with updates.

I'm expecting balancing and updates along the way.

Also repair is nor working - but that's warrior skill.

I couldn't open a number of doors until I had Lockpicking 3. Before that (1-2 points) it failed every time (and I went at it for almost ten minutes in one case), with that (3 points) it succeeded with the first attempt.

I'm not sure whether the rank of the social skills matters for NPCs at this point (but since it's an alpha, most things probably don't have a high/complex success requirement, since the first priority is to ensure that things work at all). They were used when my characters argued with one another over a decision they were faced with, but I don't know how much of an impact they had on who won the debate.

Well, since I play mostly by myself, I will always agree on my companion, thus I don't need these social skills haha.

My Problem is, I like to put points in social skills but I think now I don't have enougth points for the figthing skills...
Lookpicking, sneaking, pickpocking are nice skills, (I won't to know, what peole have in there chests) but so maybe the next Monster kills me!

Maybe there must be an extra Counter for fighting and nonfigthing skills... ore maybe in some chest are skillpointbooks.

I have to agree that there's little incentive to invest in Social skills at the expense of ones more practical in combat. This game is not Fallout and you can't talk your way out of any combat areas that I've seen in the alpha.

Can these skills be tested against in conversations or through scripts? Perhaps this was the intention and hasn't been gotten too yet.

I think it would be nice to show level requirements within dialogs. For example u need intimidate lvl 3 to let the big troll show u the grave. But the next strange thing is that some NPC's don't want to talk to henchmen, so u never want your henchmen to have any of those skills.

I'm not sure if the requirements are a simple "you need X Intimidate to succeed, no less", or if it's a "you need X intimidate to have a 100% chance to succeed. Less will reduce your chance to succeed a lot."

The idea of being told exactly what you need up front to succeed does not appeal to me. How would someone know? Also, that discourages roleplaying and trying to figure out the right response, and makes it into a numbers game.

Oh!

We know from the UI that magical items will eventually need to be Identified, right? Have the Barter skill also work as Identify as well! It makes sense, knowing how to appraise the value of things means you know how much they’re worth.

I could really do without "Identify Item". It doesn't do anything to enhance gameplay or serve any particularly useful purpose, and the only reason it exists in games at all is that Gygax wrote it in as part of a dumb frat joke reference in early versions of D&D.

Divine Divinity made clever use of it in a couple places: One where a questgier asks you to go bring back a specific magical axe from a certain dungeon, and there were FOUR identical axes there.


Another case was an cursed item that drained your stamina when it was in your inventory, but if you hadn't identified it, you wouldn't know what was going on.


In any case, I'm not going to dispute that Identify is usually just a gold sink (really, it basically functions like a tax on the sale of magic items). It's apparently going to be in, though, so why not give the Barter skill something else to do to make it more appealing?

v143 update: Suddenly, now that things cost so much more (especially spellbooks), Barter is actually a lot more useful. You get 10% better value per point when selling. It doesn't seem to do anything when BUYING items, though.

How can I repair something? THe repair button (also the identify) in trademenu not working.

THe Prices are high yes!!! But you cant give points to barter, repair and so on... all points are need for figthing. Its hard to share Points between figthing and nonfigthing skills. There should be points for both "lines"

BTW: Is there a max Level for the Points? Seems Level 5 is max.
5+4+3+2+1 =15 means 15 points needed for one feature.

Will there be sometimes potions ore bookss for permanent dex, int, Speed...?

Repair isn't currently implemented - and apart for one instance [pulling a dodgy lever] you'll never require it, ablation on materials just isn't high enough.

I have actually put some points into Barter in v143, because even though it doesn't currently lower buying costs, selling things will give you extra gold - and you need extra gold to afford skillbooks.

No idea about permanent potions.

I wish to interject here for a couple of things:

1. I definitely believe the social checks are toned down drastically for the current alpha just to allow for testing and making sure it all works.

2. "Identify Item" definitely works if done right. Gygax's frat joke became a great tool in the right DM's hands for building anticipation and suspense. And I already know the skill that needs to be used for just such a thing. Loremaster.

My bowgirl used her bow very offen. She is my best killer! So her bow goes fast down!

I have some extra thoughts, maybe it's good to put 1 point in every social skill at the very start. Because you will automatically gain some points, for example being bold gives you +1 reason. Suppose you gain 2 points by these things, but need 3. Now you need to spend 3 skillpoints. Whereas you only need to spend 1 skillpoint, if you started with it.

Btw I tried all the options on the troll.