Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Opinions and pseudo-random thoughts

Seeing as all the actual issues I've found / had with the game have already been mentioned around, I figured the only things I had left to add are some opinions of mine. So here's a thread about opinions. They are just that: thoughts and insights and other rambles we've had while playing the game and sketchbook ideas if we have any.

First off, the repairing mechanic. The way it's implemented now mean that your skill in repairing has to match how degraded the item is. Now, while a near-broken item might be harder to fix that a minor scratch on said item, I don't think EVERY item should go through the whole range of 1 to 5.
Instead I propose a quality-based system of determining the required skill to repair said item. Basically, mark each type of item based on what it's made of. So, a branch would not need more than a level 1 to repair, maybe level 2 if at 0 durability, but a tenebrium item would require level 4 to repair if it is but scratched.

Second is a minor desire of mine: I'd like to see each item's level in its description. Naturally, this should only apply to items that can be equipped and maaaybe foodstuffs.

Thirdly, I feel that skills that logically make use of a weapon (even more so if they cost durability of implied weapon) should have their damage done based on a % of said weapon. I.e. If my ranger uses barrage, it should deal damage based on how strong the bow he/she/it is using is.

Fourth...ly, I have never not tried a non Raistlin - Lone Wolf as base character. They just seem too attractive to me to go for the hassle of getting companions to make tactics all that much more messy. An archer, a wizard of all schools and some summons to take the brunt is all I need insofar as how the game is so far balanced. Now, this is clearly a personal opinion, as this setup really tickles my own personal fancy.


Those are my main thoughts on the game as it stands now. But I'd like to add one of the things that I would really love to see in an RPG: fully customizable crafting and enchanting.
What do I mean by fully customizable crafting and enchanting? I mean allowing a character with the proper skills, ingredients, resources and, of course, amount of gold, to create items that are built exactly as they want them.
To start with, nothing too complicated. Any equipment item of normal (or even higher) quality can work as a base, so the real meat lies in customizable enchanting.
And my personal vision of customizable enchanting as it would tie into Original Sin goes like this: take your base item, add one magical property of your choosing at an expense of resources and requiring a skill level in both blacksmithing and crafting proportional to how enchanted it already is. From here on, requirements in skill and resources spent increase as one adds more and more magical properties to the item. An item of a more magically-inclined material might scale the required resources more slowly, as it can withstand multiple enchantments with greater ease. Naturally, as an item keeps getting upgraded, it will eventually be regarded as a magical, rare and then unique item.
All in all a fairly simple system, although at minimum it would require its own interface.
This is all fine and all, but that item I spent so much time, effort, love and resources on to custom-build in the mid-game is now near-useless late-game! To this I suggest that items be upgradable in level. Obviously, the more heavily enchanted it is, the more difficult and expensive upgrading the base item should be.
Because yes, I want to be able to make a level 20 stick-with-nails of legendary status with some 5-6 enchantments that stands up to the late-game equipment.


That ends my wall-o-text. Remember, that none of these are requests, just ideas I wanted to throw out there. Feel free to expand on anything you find interesting in here.

One worry I'm starting to have is that there may just be too much damn stuff in the container loot table. There is just so much stuff - a lot of it crafting items - that the chances of finding any particular item are low, and because there’s no respawning, there are only so many opportunities you'll get to find things. You might only find some things a handful of times all game. Maybe I’m just imagining it and there will be some vendors later on who sell crafting stuff, plants & mushrooms, potion bottles, scraps of stuff in bulk.




That's an idea which does make sense logically, but that's not enough for me to jump onboard. It could be troublesome depending on how it's implemented. It's not hard to pick up a bunch of magic/rare items. If you can't repair those, then your choices are either to make sure someone focuses on keeping Repair up to date (at the expense of other abilities), or wear normal items and use magic ones for emergencies only.




I'm pretty sure they do. Change your equipment and see how the damage numbers in the tooltips change.




That's your personal preference talking.

I can't imagine ever giving a Raistlin on a frontline fighter, it just makes them too weak, and Companions are both too useful and (later on) too interesting for me to use the exact same Raistin-Lone wolf all the time, ever.




That sounds like a brand new system which is complicated and potentially hard to balance. It is unlikely to make it into the release version.

@EinTroll
I loved your part on creating item. I wish I will be able to mod a system where the player will start with some kind of artefact item blueprint (or need to get it through quests...), and increase its powers, so this trusted item would become an old companion of many figths, with powers you would give it at a moment, in exchange of whatever. And it would become part of your legend. Anyways ,hopefully the editor will allow us to do that. We will see.

I had this worry ages ago. Well, maybe some part of the world will have dedicated gathering spots for crafters. However, crafting is only a minor feature of the game. All proposals to make looting maybe more relevant have fallen into oblivion it seems, and gathering is mostly still a matter of opening crates.

I'm going to treat this as a general feedback thread.


1. There is nothing at (x:67, y:84). Not even some plants or mushrooms. The areas adjacent to it are also pretty much empty. That area might be a good spot for a buried treasure chest, or better yet, a treasure chest which triggers an ambush when you go to open it.


2. Even with the changes to the gate guards, some people have been making complaints about it being difficult to find out the way to go which doesn't lead to your death. That was already a thing... and I've now discovered that you've upped the north cliffs undead ambush from level 4 to level 5, and the same with the NW Burial Mound encounter. (However, the NW Burial Mound encounter is actually a lot easier than it was when they were level 4, because of the environmental rain offering some protection from burning.) My point is that you have reduced the number of level 3/4 enemies a bunch more. You can't actually reach level 5 without killing level 5 enemies or questing. Maybe that's the intent. I'll have to see how it works once I see the rest of the revamped XP areas.


3. "I have a feeling that was the right lever!"
UGGGGHHHH NO

NO

okay you guys know how you go on and on about the skyrim quest markers and how they suck

Well "I have a feeling that was the right lever!" IS a (*$%ING QUEST MARKER. It's literal hand-holding - it's a walkthrough of the puzzle. On the scale of puzzle design blunders, that is the equivalent of a war crime. No. Bad.


4. While I do like the music of the Divinity series a lot, I would prefer to hear the actual new songs composed specifically for Original Sin more than the older ones.


5. While yes, it was hard to come by arrowshafts in the last build, I think you've probably gone overboard in terms of arrow shafts and arrowheads found in loot in the current build.


6. While the global chat is an interesting idea, and fun in the beta, it really can't be in the final version in its current form. If the game is as successful as you want it to be, one global chat window will fill up with tons and tons of messages at once, making it near-impossible to follow any conversations.

Additionally, one reason Larian has given for not releasing all the content in the beta is to avoid having spoilers leak everywhere. The global chat, full of players at different stages of game completion will be accidentally bombarded with spoilers from players at different stages with good intentions answering questions. I just don't think global chat will be a good thing in the final release. If you want it to be used for players looking to set up games, a lobby system would be better.


EDIT:

7. Skills

Cure Wounds
I made a Knight to test out how the spell scaling worked for his Cure Wounds skill. While having that spell scale by level is technically an improvement over what it was, it is still not really worth using. As far as I know, it does not remove any status effects, and it also doesn't heal much. One hit from one enemy matches the heal, and then once you add in additional hits from the first enemy, plus hits from other enemies, and you still have a skill that's not worth using. It won't save your life, it won't remove any status effects.

Either have it remove one or two status effects (in which case you're using it for that and not the healing), or change it to be a much larger heal with a huge cooldown, so it can act as an emergency heal, but one that you can only use once a fight.


Ricochet
Can this do up to 5 hits? That seems maybe a bit too much.


Some other skills have surprisingly low AP costs, like Divine Light and Hide in Shadows.

Ugh, that reminds me of The Old Republics "Fleet Chat"... worst social interaction ever.

Yeah, food is really powerful, much more so than the super-expensive potions. That's okay, as long as it has the AP cost to match, and potions are much cheaper.

If I have the choice to spend 3 AP for a 52 HP potion which costs 240 gold to replace, or 3 AP for a +1 CON, 100 HP potato which costs 24 gold to replace (or less), well duh...

Food should cost 6 AP to consume.

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I beat the huge orc fight outside the Black Cove at level 5.9 without anyone dying. I approached from the right, and while it was tricky and I missed a bunch, my Cleric + Wayfarer + Fighter + Enchanter combination pulled it off. The Giant Orc wasn't actually much of a factor, but at least he didn't slaughter his own men.

I approached from the right side, and the giant orc went around the bottom. One Blitzbolt from Jahan, and a few attacks from the Wolf Summon - much improved, by the way - did a lot more damage to it than I was expecting. It was taken down pretty easily.

One orc fighter on the left side didn't engage until Madora moved close to the rangers. Still some grouping issues.

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Somewhere I might have said that Wildfire apparently no longer grants warm, but that was my mistake, the area was raining, so the warm was cancelled out.

I like that Blitzbolt's chance to stun is increased when the enemy is wet. Nice touch.

Headvice's chance to blind is quite low. I see now why the chances to inflict status effects are so high usually - otherwise they wouldn't go off, just as Headvice's status rarely goes off.

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Do enemies use Wolf Summons and Blood Wasp summons? If enemies use those, and those summons did Earth-type damage when attacking instead of normal type, Earth Resistance would probably be more useful.

As it is, without the enemies having spells like "Skipping Stone" (Ricochet, but with a rock), "Stalagmite" (single-target damage spell), and "Duststorm" (AoE damage, possible chance to blind or slow?), Earth Resistance seems like junk if all it helps against is just Boulderdash (and maybe Earthquake) as enemy Earth damage spells.

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Burning Immunity spellbook - please let the water/air spellbook seller sell this. Even if it's expensive, even if it requires Water 3. Please sell this spell in Cyseal.

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I'd recommend mention of the mystery graveyard tunnel in Robert's journal and confession dialogue (indicating that Roberts filled in the hole) as an additional hint to the player that it's there.

Or, you know, don't offer such big rewards (not until they got crafted into a finished product anyway).

That is a crafted potato. It's what you get from taking a potato and dropping it into a pot, or hitting it with a hammer and then dropping it into a pot. The only material cost is the potato.

I don't know how much crafting skill it takes, I didn't try EDIT: I confirmed that it's a Crafting 0 item. Crafting or not, the AP cost and gold cost are completely out of whack when compared to potions.

And a potato costs 45 gold, not 24, but my point stands.

The Joined-by-Fire-Twins can do upwards of 250 damage a hit, not counting the "burning" tick they do on top. They can hit you twice for over 500 damage. I feel that may be excessive. Yes, when I have 600 HP or so, normal enemies take a while to wear me down, but it's a little hard to deal with that much damage from two hits.

The XP/levels are still out of whack and need improvement:
I reached level 5, killed the Lighthouse Horror, then the grieving orc, and took on the giant orc and his crew at the entrance to Black Cove. Mid that fight I reached level 6. I found the Black Cove waypoint, and left without going farther.

I did the fight just outside the tunnel (skipping the other level 5 fight in the woods), and went to Evelyn's lair, ignoring Dietmar, the generic thugs and the demons. I fought the orcs inside and reached level 7. I got caught sneaking through the anemic cultists and fought them, fought Evelyn, and then went to the fire zone. Evelyn only summoned one zombie.

I killed the enemies wandering around there and reached level 8 before the fire boss. The charred-bone idol didn't summon in any more enemies. I have not done the black cove, or any of the rest of east Cyseal, not the villa/trap house area, the southeast woods, the graveyard. I am already level 8, and I have only been questing a little, mostly the main quest. In the last build the final boss was level 8 (as was the baron of bones, and the black cove bosses). Now unless the final boss is now tougher (which from what I've read he's the same level), I think I'm on pace to out-level the final boss even with the mandatory encounters I have left.

I think enemies provide too much XP.