Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Game Balance : Melee is terrible

Hello all,

I've been playing the campaign, release version for about 15-20 hours cooperatively with my friend. He created a mage based character and I created a melee-based tank, with a focus on damage mitigation.

Although things did seem pretty balanced initially, the usefulness of my melee character has steadily dropped off as we finished the first section of the game, and my character is now basically a spectator now that we have moved on to Silverglen. This is a bit frustrating because of the significant time investment and lack of ability to reset skill points or remake any part of my character whatsoever, so I'm going to explain for the benefit of those who have not yet begun their journey so they might avoid wasting their time, in bullet point form.

- Intelligence as a stat improves skills from every single school of magic, of which there are many. If you need to pick up something from another school of magic it is very easy to switch and pick it up, no problem.

- Strength as a stat improves only man-at-arms abilities and nothing else. Every point spent in strength is a death sentence in terms of your character's ability to branch out and choose other skills.

- Magic abilities have 100% hit chance, and damage is rarely reduced by enemy resistances.

- Melee attacks, even from abilities, have a hit chance, which is extremely hard to keep even above 80%, unless you spend all your points in strength (see above). Melee attack damage is further reduced by enemy armor, which enemies have a LOT of on hard mode.

- Man-at-arms skills have extremely long cooldowns. The basic heal has a 15(!) turn cooldown, the only mobility skill has an appallingly long cooldown as well. Even the (terrible) whirlwind ability has a 6(!!!) turn cooldown. It also has a chance to actually miss every target and has an extremely high AP cost and is one of the only multi-target abilities you will ever get.

- Most magic skills have an extremely low cooldown. You could permanently stunlock enemies if you wanted by spamming lightning based skills, repeatedly summon elementals to tank as soon as they are killed, etc. Because there are no resources like mana in the game, having access to multiple schools of magic (see above) means you can always use powerful abilities every turn.

- Melee characters also have to contend with field hazards that mages do not. As anyone who plays this game knows the battlefield quickly becomes a raging inferno or toxic death cloud if you have a mage in your party, and often even if you don't. These hazards are not lightly damaging, they are _extremely_ damaging and even with strong defenses you will mostly be sitting in the sidelines because you are unable to move in to attack.

- Mages aren't _really_ less durable than melee characters, even if you went sword and board and wear heavy armor. The best tanking abilities in the game are the summon and shield spells which are available in all schools of magic for mages, with extremely low cooldowns. You will also get great mobility and healing spells again with low cooldowns. As melee there are 0 abilities in the game that actually affect agro, so you won't even be drawing enemies to you as a form of utility.

- Speaking of defenses, heavy armor doesn't mitigate magic or elemental damage, which is probably over 50% of the damage in the game. Additionally, wearing heavy armor reduces your AP recovery and incurs movement penalties, further exacerbating the above problems.

In summary, don't bother. Really. Don't. If I sound a little annoyed I really am. I didn't think that starting this game there would be only one way to play but apparently that is currently the case, and I need to throw my 20 hours out the window and start over. Even if I was okay with losing the time, I mean come on, part of the fun of a game like this is the variety; the choices, the customization. If there's only one way to play successfully that really diminishes the fun.

No its not, and from speaking with many other people it seems that rangers are king.

At level 15, my 2 hander can do about 400 damage a hit. None of my magic spells do that in a single attack, although they are often AOE or have other useful properties.

Once tenebrium weapons are unlocked, I imagine the scaling will become pretty insane.

400 damage to what? One target? Who cares? A mage could crowd-control 4 targets, deal 500 damage to 5 other targets, each, and then lastly teleport out of harm's way in the one turn it took you to swing (and probably miss) that 400 damage.

Additionally, your anecdotal evidence is not how you reason an argument. You should pick one of my points and actually explain how it is incorrect. You'll notice every one of my points is specific, factual, and falsifiable, so which ones are wrong?

Yeah I love my Ranger. I think I have a Magic arrow for just about everything (I feel like the Green Arrow). Course I have a mage and a warrior henchman also. Together with my Cleric (the other PC) I think I'm doing ok.

Well that's fine, certainly rangers won't suffer from some of the problems I listed above, but my main point for this thread wasn't that mages are OP, it was that melee is terrible, and is currently a pointless waste of time.

Warriors in this game are about damage mitigation and control. Not damage output. With the man-at-arms tree you can get a MASSIVE boost to resistances that are available at all times.... and are dependent on your man-at-arms. One thing to keep in mind is that you can buy (I believe) Man-at-arms improving items... like +1 Man-at-arms.

That +1 man at arms gets you bonus hitpoints, +10% resistance, and bonus armor if you take the right talents.

The only issue I have with the OP is that strength also determines what armor you can wear. Beyond that melee is broken. It's an AP thing. The amount of AP it costs to move close enough to hit and then swing is crazy. The Only way to remain useful is to pump up Speed which of course makes you Very Very weak as you will of course have much less HP and will do less damage.

I can think of many solutions however I am not the Dev so what's the point.

I have all that stuff, and the point I am making is that I will still take tons of damage that a mage could just avoid through shields, crowd-control, range, mobility spells, and summoned minions (which ACTUALLY have agro generation, unlike your melee character).

It's not that a melee character can't do anything, it's that anything a melee character COULD do, a mage could do better.

Sounds like someone needs to buy a Book of the Nine Swords.

Thank you, someone else who has actually tried melee on hard for longer than 5 minutes and understands. There are a ton of drawbacks to being melee, and none of the benefits justify them. Consider the following massive theoretical changes:

- Battering Ram : CD is reduced by 1 turn for each target hit, damage scales with strength instead of knockdown.
- Whirlwind : CD reduced from 6 turns to 1 turn.

Even if you did those things, which are massive, MASSIVE changes, melee would STILL suck. That's the point I'm making.

@Parlance I have to agree with everything you said.

There are way too many drawbacks for playing as a melee instead of a caster, especially for a rogue-oriented character.
Not to mention playing as a caster also means each character gets an additional summoned unit to fight in combat for you, you don't have to spend turns walking to get to your enemies and you save turns from melee opponents trying to reach you which is huge.

Also a caster can be much more versatile because intelligence boosts all schools of magics, so you only need to invest into one attribute, meanwhile if you want to go hybrid with your melee/ranger character you need to spend points into intelligence leaving you weaker in your main area.

I think Larian devs had too much fun with the spells and the enviromental combinations that they forgot about balancing with melee.
I find that the only reason someone would go for melee is to artificially inrease difficulty. So much for diversity.

I don't understand the problem.

It's not that we have to play with only ONE character.

A good party build will have at least one tank and one caster anyway. And a tank/fighter is pretty important in a group and puts out most damage easily if properly skilled and supported. So no, I disagree with the one who said that having a melee fighter on your group would increase difficulty. I think the opposite is true: you should have one good melee fighter in your party.

But if you think that playing with four casters is more fun just do so. Why not? The game embraces freedom...

noobas

Or, role-playing. Just saying.

*GASP* Who would have thought that! That's why I did it.

In general the versatility of ranged characters is a bonus in pretty much any setting. Even in something like Defender's Quest (the tower defense RPG) I focus on ranged units.

I'm surprised no one mentioned how Friendly Fire is a non-issue with a team-comp of all ranged characters. That's the chief reason in NWN2, and Dragon Age: Origins I made sure I had a party of ranged characters.

I don't think friendly fire is a big issue in D:OS. Only few spells have area effects anyway and you can in most cases position your melee fighter pretty well to avoid friendly fire.

Glad someone got that.



Perhaps, haven't really played much with melee (never been my style).

Maybe the problem is co-op again. The game is of course different if you only play one/two characters in co-op or if you control the whole party in SP. I only played SP so far.

Ye ok I agree "Or, role playing".
But I was merely talking from a balance/effectiveness point of view.