Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General WtS nerf was good but talents still need balancing

Backstab and Guerilla are both too important to Scoundrel damage output. I'd recommend removing Backstab entirely and just make daggers do extra damage when attacking from a flank.

As for Marksman, Quickdraw is the one I think should be made standard. Almost no respectable Marksman build would go without it, so it reduces your freedom in talent choice.

Neither Mage or Warrior have talents as necessary for their damage. Bully is the closest thing for warriors, but it applies to Scoundrel and Marksmen as well.

Then there's the long list of total dud talents:

http://divinity.gamepedia.com/Talents - if you're unfamiliar with some of them.

All skilled up: 2 is not enough considering we get near 50 ability points from leveling, but only 7 talents.

- Also consider swapping the terms skills and abilities. Right now it's just confusing and this talent is a great example. Abilities should be the actual...abilities on our bars. Skills are how adept we are with different types of abilities.

Anaconda: Just not enough damage boost to what's already a lackluster weapon options - 2h is just outright better currently

Arrow Recovery: Pathetic. 20% is nothing, and arrows are easy enough to come by. If anything, this should be @ 100% for people who want to skip the crafting micromanagement that comes with playing Marksman.

Know it All/Bigger and Better: Attributes are more limited than abilities, but this is still of questionable value when we've got more dramatic boosts to choose from.

Courageous: This is pure awful, you can get a trait that makes it entirely obsolete without getting the downside, and fear isn't common enough to worry that much about it either.

Demon/Ice King: The situational and low % proc benefits are dramatically outweighed by the permanent downsides.

Elemental Affinity/Elemental Ranger: Way too situational.

Escapist: Why be better at fighting when you can be better at running away? Well...probably because you can already easily escape most battles without this talent. Complete waste.

Five-Star Diner: Food for the most part isn't worth using currently.

Light Stepper: Almost no reason to get this over Bigger and Better to get an actual point in Perception. Just not good at all.

Morning Person: This talent pretty much depends on you failing dramatically, which you're more likely to do with one less good talent(when you've taken this one, for example)

My Precious: I can't think of a redeeming quality to this, utterly useless.

Packmule: See above.

Politician: Losing an attribute for a gain to an ability is pretty awful considering how many of each you get(way more abilities than attributes). And charisma isn't even a very worthwhile ability.

Scientist: Well, it's better than the above, but still bad for the same reason that abilties are too abundant to justify spending talents on.

Sidestep/Sidewinder: Just not substantial enough defensive talents.

Stench: This relies on your failure to use smart positioning and/or control skills.

Walk it Off: Positive buffs are a big deal while you can build up resistances to most negative effects or avoid them. One turn less of absorb elements, fortify, wildfire, etc. etc. makes this talent kind of a net negative.

What a Rush: Far too situational and dependent on you being low health which you generally want to avoid or amend quickly. This'd be better if you simply got extra AP from taking damage.

Ability Points aren't really as abundant as you're indicating. Especially not early in the game where talents like All Skilled Up/Scientist are meant to be applied.

You have 49 ability points or 51 with All Skilled Up. If you wanted three max rank skills (Which would be a pure specialist build) you are left with either 4 or 6 points remaining. Presumably you want at least one level four skill with two max skills which leaves you with 9 or 11 skill points remaining; this means that All Skilled Up is either a 50% or 22% increase in your available flex points. Similar with Scientist in that it opens up more flex points for diversity or the potential for some splash + an additional 3 point skill.

Anaconda is worth functionally 6 ability points in that it can give you a 10% damage bonus on an already capped weapon type. There are two handed blunt weapons they are just extraordinarily rare because of how powerful they are.

Know it All/Bigger and Better are perfectly balanced. Those are some of the strongest talents in the game. This feels like an attempt to create overpowered talents here.

Courageous is an interesting case. Should you really consider traits when balancing talents; that's an implication that everyone is expected to roleplay a specific way for ingame benefits. Perhaps give it a little bump like Immunity to Fear and +1 initiative.

Elemental Affinity is very powerful. You are underrating it entirely and it's not situational so much as dependent on your tactical playstyle. It's just not a low level talent at all. More of a capper. Same with Elemental Ranger. Are you just not using a field creating mage/ranger? If you cover the battlefield with elemental effects rather than avoiding them out of fear of chip damage then these talents have different valuations. Don't assume your valuation based on your tactical plans is a global valuation.

Light Stepper gives 2 points of perception for the purposes of trap finding. Of course your valuation of -one- stat point is already skewed based on your prior evaluation so it makes sense why you wouldn't value two points for a specific application (It's also possible you don't value the ability to find traps highly at all)

What a Rush is much better than you're giving it credit for. If your team has overall high initiative than most often you will begin turns at low health. It's the reverse of some of the other talents: This is only bad if your team is already poorly constructed. It gets better the higher your team initiative becomes.

You also forgot Weatherproof which is extraordinarily situational and minor in effect. Compared to the air capper talent of Lightning Rod the remaining mage capper talents are very weak.

I'll grant I'm using lone wolf, so I have more abilities to play with. However, more characters = toss non-combat stuff on your hirelings which frees up a lot of points.

I don't see why you need to max three abilities with most characters, pure mages being the one exception.

Scientist at least has the redeeming quality of being a base boost to skills which means it saves more total skill points if you're going for blacksmith/crafting on a character. All skilled up is just a bad choice.

Anaconda would be alright if there were more 2h blunt weapons around I suppose, but there aren't, plus blunt = less blood for leech users. It's a stretch to say it's worth 6 ability points, yes if you're maxing a weapon skill it is, but there's no need to pump weapon skills to max currently.

Know it All/Bigger and Better might be well balanced if there weren't as many standout-talents, although I think 2 attributes would be a more reasonable trade-off.

Elemental Affinity requires you to play around the talent too much for it to be worth it. My tactical playstyle doesn't involve sitting in/moving into fields that make me susceptible to all kinds of unpleasant effects. Elemental Ranger is slightly better since you want enemies in fields.

Light Stepper isn't even = to 1 attribute. You don't get the main benefit perception gives which is the starting AP. Trap finding is also not a very big part of the game or necessity, one extra point of perception towards trap finding will make very little difference relative to an actually good talent.

What a Rush is only good if you're taking more damage than you should be IMO.

Weatherproof I wasn't sure exactly how it worked, it does sound pretty bad though.

i think its a misconception to think you need 5 in skills. you do not need above a 3 in most cases, really.

increasing your skill levels does not affect damage or do anything for you except allow you to use high level skills without an AP penalty. There are very few high level skills worth using in this game.

there a few exceptions where a 4 would be nice, but even less where you would want a 5. the only reason to get a 5 would be to get an overpowered talent.

mages are somewhat of an exception with their level 19 spells, but these dont come to the very end of the game and mages can ignore things like armor and weapon skills. even then, its the end of the game by the time they can be learned. i am sure you can get through the last 10% without those spells.

with that in mind i think talents that require 5 points in a skill should be quite powerful, because there is little other reason to bother putting that many points in.

i dont think nerfing WtS was the best way to go. I think they should have buffed the other options so people wanted to make 5 point characters. Making the 5 point talents weaker just means hybrids with 3 in everything rule the day.


that said, sneak and invisibility are the two most powerful tools in the game. with 14 int and glass cannon mages can end every turn with invisibility and completely avoid enemies fighting back. sneak can also do the same thing for less AP, but requires positioning to be effective.

you can make 2 lone wolf sneaks or mages with glass cannon to make sure they have high AP and after level 8 you basically become immortal. cast a spell or two, then cast invisibility to end the turn. repeat on next character. enemies will consistently skip their turns and just stand there and let you kill them.

considering that is a completely viable playstyle, i think you should be allowed to feel powerful if you go with a stand-and-fight playstyle.

Scientist is worth a varying amount of ability points; it adds 1 to your current ability level, and going from Repair 4 to Repair 5 costs 5 points, so if you buy Repair 4 and Crafting 4 with actual points, the extra boost from Scientist is (at that point) worth 10 ability points, as it will take you to Repair / Crafting 5.

Only useful if you intend to actually buy Repair and/or Crafting up to a highish level, but the more you invest the more points it becomes worth overall.

The same goes for Politician; if you buy Charisma 3, the bonus 2 from Politician are worth 9 points, for the downside of losing 1 attribute point.

Situational, yes (definitely don't get them at all if you don't intend to invest further in those abilities for that character), but in certain cases it can look like a solid use for a talent slot or 2, freeing up to 19 ability points to use elsewhere

My Scoundrel at mid game has 28 action points per turn ( two LW&GC and he's the main damage dealer) and in big fights I need a second weapon when the main one goes broken into the inventory. After every battle I have to repair the weapon and it's boring or should not invested so many in CON and Speed!?
I never had to repair any equipment at my first playtrough with four men party (ranger, fighter and two wizards), just replaced them with next level ones.
It could be a good talent for lazy people if not bugged.