Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Advice for Keeping the Challenge High Throughout

Hello and thanks for reading.

Challenge = fun. If there's one thing I've learned in many years of gaming, it's that (bugs and crippling issues aside) getting the balance right between frustratingly hard and mind-numbingly easy has the greatest influence on whether you're having a good time or not.

In Divinity:OS, After several restarts, I arrived at a party composition I was happy with and managed to progress to the Luculla Forest/Silverglen area beyond Cyseal. Sadly, the game is now just too easy.

In the early game, combat was tense. The threat of at least one character dying was real, and I sometimes had to resort to potions, scrolls and other resources beyond native skills for victory. My tactical decisions mattered.

In other words, it was great.

Now, a "hard" battle is when my characters take damage at all. I have ample potions and scrolls at the ready, but they're never needed. My two very competent casters (plus a ranger) can eliminate most foes from range...my melee character barely gets involved.

In other words, it's dull.

And, to be clear, I didn't really "theorycraft" or "min/max" my characters. I did put thought into their creation and effectiveness, but I didn't take game-breaking talents like Glass Cannon or Leech, etc.

But whatever I did to avoid being overpowered, it wasn't enough.

So, please help. While I'm not looking forward to it (Cyseal...again), I'm prepared to restart if it means keeping the challenge high. I do have a few stipulations that I'm hoping can be accommodated, however:

- I want to play with a full four-character party.
- While I don't mind avoiding overpowered talents, I don't want to have to take gimping ones.
- I'd like a party with access to the full range of schools (so, no all-melee-and-no-magic parties, etc.).

What I am perfectly happy with are hybrid character builds that spread my abilities out and need a fair number of points (fighter-wizard, cleric and so on).

Thanks for your time and input.

- Geezer

I just finished my fist playthrough on hard with two lone wolf characters and I understand your problem perfectly. In fact, in the late game I had more trouble puzzling out what the game wanted me to do with a given situation than winning the battles along the way.
To be truly honest I'm looking forward to the update package with the new difficulty setting above hard to start my next walkthrough at. Hopefully that will be a bit more challenging.
Unfortunately I'm a compulsive min-maxer so I have no real suggestions regarding character builds other than gimping them. I will monitor this thread though, hopefully you get some good ideas.

What about the Source Difficulty mod? I think I may give that a try since it sounds like it would allow you to play as you like while still providing challenge instead of achieving difficult through self-imposed restrictions.

My only concern is that it's current to the latest version of D:OS.

Just a related yet unrelated question.

I'm a modder, but I haven't played the full game, so I've never been past about level 9 on my characters.

What makes it too easy?
-Not enough monsters per fight?
-Monsters die before getting in range?
-Would more ranged monsters be harder?
-Would monsters a few levels above the character party help?

I could potentially make some fixes to your issues for my own mod later on.

Multiple problems make it too easy in the mid- and later game. To me, it generally boils down to the party getting progressively stronger than the foes, who don't come close to keeping up. And it's not like their AI improves so they fight smarter either.

Here's a few dynamics that occur:
- Mages have far more spells and, provided you build them halfway intelligently, the spells are more effective and are able to be re-used much more frequently. So, locking down the enemy with crowd control is easily achievable. Healing means the team is never in jeopardy. Summons are potent, durable and can distract multiple foes. And so on.

- Keeping the enemy at range offers a huge advantage. With crowd control and a bit of planning, it's easy to hold back the enemy, whose ranged abilities, if they have them at all, usually pale in comparison to the party's.

- Magical arrows, potions and other resources (e.g., food) are effectively unlimited. There's no countdown timer on these, so you can just spam them with impunity. But it never or almost never comes to that.

- Enemy initiative seems consistently poor, so your party almost always goes first. This lets you set the tempo of the battle and puts them on the defensive from the start.

- With min/max "theorycrafting," the system can easily be abused. Warriors can achieve extraordinary damage mitigation, for example. This is of course true of nearly all games that offer the level of flexibility D:OS does.

Given all this, simply upping enemy hit points or number would hardly be ideal, though it would make things tougher, to be sure. Ideally, you'd have countdown timers on abilities that would limit, say, the number of heals a character has access to in a single encounter. Summons would be weaker without being ineffective. And, of courses, enemies would be smarter in target selection and general tactics.

But this is almost certainly asking for a different game.

- Geezer

The current beta patch has made some adjustments to enemy initiative, and an upcoming patch (no ETA) will have balancing adjustments to some skills/abilities/talents and a harder difficulty mode, with changes to enemies (composition and tactics).

Thank you for the suggestions!

As for Burgee's question, I'd like to add this to Geezer's list:

I had a general problem with "enemy intelligence" throughout the game, but maybe this is asking too much. I'm thinking of giving them either loremaster-type skills or a type of short-term memory that helps them with evaluating and deciding what their next action should be. Like they should stop casting fire spells at my character if they notice I have a high fire resistance and try something else instead. Maybe not an enemy wolf but the more intelligent villains.

As a related problem it's way too easy to develop immunities to virtually everything. Maybe the elemental resistance modifiers should be limitied in some form.

Just giving the enemies Loremaster isn't going to do anything, the programmers will actually have to write improved AI code.

That's right, it isn't. This is why I said this was probably too much to implement for this game. It doesn't even have to be loremaster itself, only an improved AI intelligence on how to select actions.

This effect of the game "suddenly" becoming too easy is caused by one fundamental mechanic.
None of the things you mention would affect that fundamental feature so those would not be an actual solution, but more of a quick fix, that would eventually get subverted too.
There are already many enemies with levels higher then party can realistically be at that point.

I dont think any mod can fix it. I think its one of the hardcoded things. Its a job for devs, if they decide it would be a correct thing to do.

I guess we will see by the next patch, or maybe another Dev Line show - if they are going to do another one. I believe i am not the only one who sees that fault.

-

just to be crystal clear, i have no desire to appear on DevLine at all (i leave that to fashionable hipsters like MicoSleva), but it would be nice if they did another one so we could get a bit of a heads up and hear some general talk on how the things are going.

so there is to be an intermediate patch (the one currently beta-tested) prior to the rebalancing/hard mode one?
apologies if asking the obvious, was under a different impression apparently, so thought i'd ask

Yes, there will be a patch before the large balancing / harder difficulty mode update (which will have a couple fixes and changes in addition to what is in the beta).

Thank you

I agree with the notion of playing Source Difficulty. I found the original 'hard' to be not so hard once I realized the game's mechanics. Now, the game feels like a notable challenge on Source Hard. Nevermind that this mod contradicts some of the patch's changes, the mod will get patched soon with the revisions anyway. I feel like I gain more than I lose with this mod.