Hard difficulty reduces your max HP by 40% (compared to Normal) and makes it harder to hit enemies. Glass Cannon reduces your Max HP by 50% and gives you 2x as many AP.
Together they make the player squishier, but also let you dish out more damage in your turns. So theoretically combat should take fewer turns.
Yeah, Flurry is hilarious and a little strange. You rise up into the air, like some kind of praying angel, and your enemy just EXPLODES. Which is absolutely awesome, impressive, and has nothing to do with a flurry of blows
But it is a lot like what the player does when he has not 100% hit chance. ;-) You do not want to miss a single hit on flurry, because you normally invest quite a lot of ap into getting max damage out of the skill. Oath, Rage, even sneaking with Guerilla might work to get the best out of this high cooldown ability.
Well, I for one agree with you BugMeNot. I too really dislike the turn based combat. But I'm afraid that opinion isn't going to win us very many friends around here.
Anyway, I've been experimenting with a few mods trying to improve the combat. Ideally, I'd like to implement real time combat (but I've a horrible suspicion that it's just not possible without re-writing a whole heap of code that's just way beyond my capabilities).
However, your wish to lower the HP of the Hero's and Enemies can very easily be done with a mod. I believe removing the annoying cast times of spells can also be easily achieved. Action points are another easy one to manipulate.
Also, I've just discovered an entry in the Data.txt file 'NPC Max Combat Turn Time' which I intend to experiment with. At the moment its default value is set to 20, so I'm going to try lowering that number to see what happens.
Unfortunately, all this experimenting takes time. So it might be a little while before any useful combat mods are available.
But I'd be very interested to hear what else you (or others) think could improve the combat.
Imo, turn based combat is great when it's hard - when you actually have to develop a tactic. I don't see the point of playing a turn-based game if all you do is grind through it.
Hmm... ok... Is it just my impression or do most of the people who think "combats are fine / exciting" have rather physical-heavy (str/dex) parties while the ones who think "combat is boring / slow" have rather magic-heavy (int) parties?
I mean, I already had the suspicioun that mages might have a rather too high survivability and too low DPS in endgame (I thought it would be the opposite and took 2 mages specificly because I wanted to have fast but hard/dangerous combats and in early game it seemed to work out exactly like that )... but how extreme is the difference?
Well, I for one agree with you BugMeNot. I too really dislike the turn based combat. But I'm afraid that opinion isn't going to win us very many friends around here.
Nothing wrong with disliking turn based combat. But then you're trying to play a wrong game here.
Hmm... ok... Is it just my impression or do most of the people who think "combats are fine / exciting" have rather physical-heavy (str/dex) parties while the ones who think "combat is boring / slow" have rather magic-heavy (int) parties?
I mean, I already had the suspicioun that mages might have a rather too high survivability and too low DPS in endgame (I thought it would be the opposite and took 2 mages specificly because I wanted to have fast but hard/dangerous combats and in early game it seemed to work out exactly like that )... but how extreme is the difference?
I finished the game with 1 pure marksman (dex = 20), 1 wayfarer (marks + geo), Madora was pure dps (kinda ridiculous that she could 1 shot with flurry), Jahan was a complete mixed bag with spells in everything (heavy damage spells + support spells).
My combats were quick usually took around 5-10 turns on hard difficulty. The combat feels slow early one but once you get good gear later on in the game it becomes easier. Also, I had 4 resistances beyond 100% for 3 of my characters.
I plan to do another playthrough with warrior and mage (fire + air). Jahan is going to be mixed bag again!
Hmm... ok... Is it just my impression or do most of the people who think "combats are fine / exciting" have rather physical-heavy (str/dex) parties while the ones who think "combat is boring / slow" have rather magic-heavy (int) parties?
I mean, I already had the suspicioun that mages might have a rather too high survivability and too low DPS in endgame (I thought it would be the opposite and took 2 mages specificly because I wanted to have fast but hard/dangerous combats and in early game it seemed to work out exactly like that )... but how extreme is the difference?
If your party is mage heavy, than yeah, this might be the reason. Resistances of some enemies become very high across the board and you need to either significant reduce them or have a significant source of physical damage for your mages. Teleport helps, but is still a spell with some cooldown, summons are nice, but do very little damage, etc
So the game becomes sometimes rather slow if your mages are the main source of damage in your group. Similar can be said about piercing damage and all the skeletons at the beginning of the game. Dex based characters look super-weak because of this, while they actually do immense amounts of damage once that -75% damage penalty becomes uncommon on enemies.
Well, I for one agree with you BugMeNot. I too really dislike the turn based combat. But I'm afraid that opinion isn't going to win us very many friends around here.
Nothing wrong with disliking turn based combat. But then you're trying to play a wrong game here.
You do have a point. To be honest, I always knew I wasn't going to like turn based combat. But this game is moddable!
So my hope is that modders can eventually tweak the combat to make it suit all types of players (those who love turn based and those of us who prefer real time).
Because apart from the combat, I really like the rest of the game. I just wish the combat was more like the first 'Divine Divinity' game.
You do have a point. To be honest, I always knew I wasn't going to like turn based combat. But this game is moddable!
So my hope is that modders can eventually tweak the combat to make it suit all types of players (those who love turn based and those of us who prefer real time).
Because apart from the combat, I really like the rest of the game. I just wish the combat was more like the first 'Divine Divinity' game.
Right if you don't care for TB combat you should have a real problem with this game, for most it would be one of the first buying decisions for D:OS.
If you don't like it then you want possibly an even easier Easy, make combat fast and fairly trivial. Or perhaps you want it to be a challenge but faster, then you'd want heavy damage/low hp on both sides. And possibility something like cheatengine (search that on Youtube) to speed up Fighting 2x - 3x to make the moves go faster. I do 2x fwiw.
I do owe (in a loose sense) Gyson a guide on how to modify difficulties, I do plan on having that done today. All the notes are in the Mods section already to do it, this would just be another round up of possibly scattered data into one post to go step by step through doing this.
For me it is the deep turn based combat that is the star of this game. If it was real time this would just have yet any other shallow ARPG. Different games for different. I am just happy that DOS is turn based. There isn't a lot of those anymore.
I think what you are seeing that video is the AI code running/thinking. It is proably taking a while because it is unclear what to do.
I don't think so, because sometimes I reload and the turn passes quickly.
There is nothing the AI can do except skip a turn, since I am invisible.
Not even one of the most powerful chess computers (Rybka) on the deepest lines takes that long to think, let alone with the powerful processors available today.
For me it is the deep turn based combat that is the star of this game. If it was real time this would just have yet any other shallow ARPG. Different games for different. I am just happy that DOS is turn based. There isn't a lot of those anymore.
i enjoy turn-based games very much, but the system in this game is rather poor to be honest. shadowrun returns did a better job with their 2/3 AP, or actions, per round system.
there are just way too many balancing problems with the combat and various ap costs on abilities then varying ap per character build.
for instance a glass cannon rogue can back-stab some 8+ times in a row while a non-glass cannon mage can cast 1 single spell. if you want to be powerful the system really pigeon-holes you into certain talents and attribute set-ups.
at least with shadowrun returns you could play how you wanted without feeling like you were making some major sacrifice to ability. at most a big aoe spell, or grenade, might use 2 ap instead of 1. the simplicity of it made it much more balanced.
that is not even getting into the ridiculousness that is lone wolf + glass cannon + sneak/invis. using 2 mages with that set-up i killed the ice king and he literally never even tried to fight back. he is supposed to be one of the harder bosses in the game and he just stood there and took it because i ended every turn with invisibility. if you use environmental effects on any melee type enemy they will never cross over them either, they will just stand there and let you kill them... the enemy AI is just really bad.
)... but how extreme is the difference?
