Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General How skills should have been done.

One of my bigger gripes about the game is the skill system and how the combat and social skills are intermingled. This leads to a situation where to be good at social skills you have to sacrifice combat ability. Considering you cannot advance in the game without defeating the enemies, but you can advance being socially inept, it leads to the outcome of mostly ignoring non-combat skills. This also leads to being forced to carry around untold amounts of gear with a bonus to said non-combat skills to fudge it when needed.

This is just a poor design from the players stand-point. It just does not feel fun having to worry about stat gear in your bag. swapping it out every couple minutes is not exciting at all either.

The combat and non-combat skills should be on separate tables.

When you level up you should gain separate skill points to spend on each table.

For instance on level up you gain 1/2/3 combat skill points and 1/2/3 non-combat skill points.

Then a character can still be fully functional in combat while having a social specialty as well. Are they a talker, a thief, or a crafter? It adds a dynamic to the character design where you get to feel the character performs a secondary role.

Then the items with bonuses to non-combat skills could be removed and it would resolve much of the save-scumming the game requires.

Anyhow, I have taken to using a save editor just so i can toss my guys social and crafting skills so i dont need to carry around excessive amounts of skill gear. I just do not find that dynamic of the game interesting or fun.

I cannot imagine many people out there actually enjoy the save-scumming to get perfect bonus gear for non-combat abilities or having to constantly swap things around.



i like the game, but this is one of those things that is just broken.

if you dont think so just look at the sheer number of people who plant a henchman in sanctuary just for crafting purposes. this directly points out how many people dislike being forced to use their skill points on non-combat abilities or having to carry tons of extra skill gear.

That's actually great design imo. Tough decisions and trade-offs. That's the way it should be and I defintely don't want them to change that.

And tbh you don't need that much combat ability to be able to complete the game and win every encounter...

Not in this game it isn't. The game is far more heavily combat based and most dialogues amount to very little.

You can also skip/save scum any rock paper scissor thing.

There some pretty clear things you should never put your ability points into. I'd say -

- Charisma
- Pickpocketing
- Lockpicking
- Barter
- Blacksmithing
- All non-tenebrium weapon abilities

All of these can be handled via gear/traits or are simply completely pointless/handled better by other means.


Lucky Charm and Crafting have significant enough combat bonuses to get a few points in. (5 crafting creates great gear, while Lucky Charm gives offense rating)

Yeah - do I persuade that demon with arrow, or do I persuade him with magic, or do I persuade him with a two handed ax?

Hmmm tough decisions.
C'mon wake up.
Remove the rose-tinted glasses.
This game is 75% combat and Cyseal conversation heavy options are not even present in most 'area end bosses.'

All you get is 'mwa-hahaha Imma kill you' speech with no chance to convince them to let you go or back off.

The only viable diplomacy for me is Barrel Diplomacy

You get XP from using your Charisma to win arguments.
XP is a limited resource in this game, so passing up on any XP opportunity is not min/max.
Therefore, if you aren't winning at least some of arguments, you are doing it wrong. (You really want to win all the ones where the enemy stays around after; you don't necessarily want to win the ones where they leave afterwards, because then you can't kill them anymore.)

So then you counter with, "I don't need to be good at Charisma, I can just savescum the arguments." It is true that you can. However, you can also be mediocre in combat and savescum the fights, so it's not a comparative advantage. When you can savescum everything, it's about building a well-rounded set of characters.

Social skills in this game are actually good. You are mistaken.

Charisma will hardly give you a substantial amount of bonus XP. And you can win enough of them with no points in charisma or basic +1 charisma items. Charisma is not going to be the difference between level 19 and 20 or 20 and 21.

I think skill design is pretty good as it is now

Gotta get those EXP with smelly panties on.

'Social skills in this game are actually good. You are mistaken.'

No. I don't think it's good at all.
It's just a skill to give bonus that is used in less than 25% of the game. Compare that single point to any school of magic that lets you summon a pet, fireball a ground, give 50% damage over 3 turns. All your diplomacy did is 'increase chances of you winning arguments.' on non-integral quests/options.

I don't mind failing all the Charisma checks all the time by just hitting space bar. Because I have no desire to play that mini-game.

If you talk about Barter, Crafting, Lucky Find even - those have even better practical application than Charisma.

Lucky find adds offense. Crafting helps the whole party. Barter gives more gold to spend. Charisma - helps you win at random games.

And the Tooth rings.

Look, I believe getting the Charisma-related XP is important. I pump Charisma on at least one of my characters to make this happen (and to help with Bartering, since each point of Charisma and/or Reputation is worth about 1/8 of a point in Bartering). However, I do not normally pump this with ability points, or at least not much -- I normally put one hard point in Charisma and leave it at that. That point, +2 from the Tooth Rings, +1 from Panties, and +1 from Considerate trait gets you to 5, which is enough to somewhat reliably win any Charisma challenge you come across without taking off a Bartering amulet (if absolutely necessary, break out the tooth amulet).

So I'm not saying to dump a lot of points into Charisma, or to get Politician or anything like that. I'm just saying not to neglect it in terms of itemization. And for what it's worth, if a spell ability like Aerotheurge also had jewelery pieces which could let you hit 5 with only one hard point in the skill, it would be pretty stupid to put a lot of hard points in Aerotheurge as well; it's the items, not the utility, which dictate the lack of hard points in Charisma.

Most weapon skills are unimportant. You will end up using the Tenebrium skill and your characters will do plenty of damage without these skills.
Armor Specialization is unimportant because it does not keep up with enemy damage.
Shield Specialization is unimportant because tanks are not necessary in this game.
Barter is unimportant because you will be swimming in gold halfway into Act I.
Charisma is unimportant, because it only takes +2 from Traits/Gear to start with 5 dots in Rock/Paper/Scissors. Nothing short of 10 dots will make any difference to how many games you need to win.
Blacksmith, Crafting, and Loremaster are unimportant because you can have a henchman do all that.
Lockpicking is unimportant because you can break everything in under a second.
Pickpocketing is unimportant because there is almost nothing important to pickpocket that cannot be solved another way, and you do not need the money.

Not necessary is not the same thing as not useful. While I do think shields are relatively important for "mono" Str builds, I think Shield Specialization is an invaluable tool for Str/Int hybrid builds; in other words, shields are for Clerics. This has a lot to do with how hybrids have trouble adding Constitution.This assumes you're not powergaming the hell out of Teller of Tales starting at a very low level. If you aren't, then you're right. If you are, then it's really hard to spend that amount on books every level and not go broke.It doesn't always work this way. There are even NPCs where you don't get a chance to play RPS at all unless you meet a minimum Charisma score.This assumes your time isn't valuable, because swapping people out at the Hall every time you craft makes crafting even more of a tedium. If you want to save time, you don't segment things off like that. With +Crafting and +Blacksmithing items, the ability point investment is meager anyway (2 hard points in each for 6 ability points total, assuming Scientist talent; less if Pragmatic trait).

Shields can also be useful on mage characters who want to boost their elemental resistances up higher, such as a mage who likes to fireball himself or cast storm frequently. But you don't actually need to put a single point into Shield Specialization to make it through the game just fine.Buying more than one set of books was supposed to be removed in the previous patch. It was not, so you may want to plan for it to be removed in the next patch.It works that way in an overwhelming majority of cases, so unless you are specifically hunting fringe cases or they introduce more in the future, you may not even notice the difference.I just tried it, it takes less time to swap out to a fully crafting ready henchman and hand him the latest crafting supplies than it does to change into your crafting gear and be handed the latest crafting supplies. It's also less RNG reliant, and can be accomplished earlier in the game.

Not to mention whatever time you save killing enemies faster and/or not having to replay fights.

Um, no. Just no. Changing your gear is literally rightclicking on an item (in a backpack, with the backpack on the skillbar, because that's how you use the UI properly) and then clicking Equip. Versus loading screens going to the End of Time. If you actually tried it, you tried it wrong.

That's more clicks than hiring a henchman you've got set up to craft. And you should already be in the Hall of Heroes, because that is where the Anvil and Whetstone are. If you are ONLY talking about things that can be crafted while wandering around in the world, then you may have a point.

Except you are still killing things slower and losing more time overall.