Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Talents and design thereof

I think they were called talents lulz. Pet Pal, Lone Wolf, Leech etc.

Anyway - There was a very peculiar flaw with the talents in D:OS, it was also a flaw in Pillars of Eternity. Once you get the 3-4 ones which are useful you start wondering which of them is the least useless. This was also exacerbated by the fact that nothing trumped pure level gains in terms of power (same with PoE, funny enough) for which I felt the talents would be a perfect remedy if they weren't so bad. I really can't go into any more detail right now because It's been a very long time since I've played D:OS (waiting for the EE) and my memory is kinda fuzzy. I remember this particular thing though because it struck me as somewhat bad design. I feel like they should be more like the feats in D&D which were somewhat more balanced and thought-out. They gave you plenty of customization which I think the talents in D:OS lack. They don't really customize the character, they just make them better at what they usually do, which I think is a wrong turn. It just relegates you to pick the ones which help you with that (mostly +damage and +AP) and forget about anything else. Most of them were filled with random, very situational effects which are on the useless side. Thoughts? Disagreements? Suggestions?

I thought there were a lot of cool talents that customized your character a lot, actually. Some of them were boring, maybe more than 50% of them even, but a lot of them were serious gamechangers: Glass Cannon, Zombie, Lone Wolf, Quickdraw, and even Pet Pal are massive, and things like Leech, Five Star Diner, Bully, Elemental Affinity, and Walk it Off were neat, both for roleplaying value and changing playstyles, though balance wasn't always right (some OP, some UP). Some talents are extremely class-specific, like Back Stabber and Opportunist or talents with high requirements, which is fine, but a lot could be used by any class. If they reworked around half of the current talents and added 10-20 more, we'd be in a really solid place with talents I think. Not sure what they've done with talents for the EE.

I do kind of agree that talents should usually be tradeoffs so it's not necessarily a no-brainer to get something like Quickdraw. I mean, it'd be cool if it reduced AP cost of ranged weapons by one, but it lowered your crit chance or something. So if you wanted to go for deadly power shots, it's not necessarily the best talent.

I would also love it if talents had a visual effect on your character, but that's a lot of work, especially if they add more talents.

Finally, I hope they rebalanced the demon which you can trade talents for, since there's virtually no reason to get the All Skilled Up talent and some others when you can get 10 ability points for a talent instead.

My biggest complaint about the Talents in D:OS was that there were just too darn few of them. This was especially notable for magic-users who often ran out of useful Talents at the halfway point of the game.

From what I hear, unfortunately, the EE has not added many more (and what new ones do exist may just be for grenades and wands), they've just "rebalanced" what was there. What that means, I don't know.




Some of them, though, were game-changers in ways you might not care for. Glass Cannon is great if you can consistently keep the weak characters out of danger, but if your playstyle does not revolve around shutting the enemy completely down, it's dangerous. Zombie is another iffy trait, because poison damage is not great on enemies, and healing spells tend to be pretty good on players. Lone Wolf obviously has some disadvantages as well.

Leech had the very odd trait of your own blood, leaving your own body, can heal yourself, and if an ally inflicted bleeding on you, it was an full heal. Five Star Diner is garbage because doubled food healing is even worse garbage than healing potions (which were also garbage). Elemental Affinity was a neat concept, but extremely situational since most of the surfaces were things you didn't want to stand in.

For me, Walk It Off was bad because of the reduced effectiveness of buffs. Having a "trade-off" for Walk It Off killed any benefit or interest in getting that Talent.




Backstabber is one of those things which has been with the game so long that people never really stopped to think about it. It's literally required if you want to use daggers, because otherwise their damage output is negligible. But making it a Talent basically means Rogues get one less choice about what Talents to take.




Sometimes Talents having Trade-offs is fine, and makes sense, but not ALL the time. There are a bunch of Talents whose usefulness is killed because of having a downside, and I can't imagine how much worse the Talent situation would be in D:OS if they all had a downside.

Walk It Off was bad entirely because of the penalty to buff duration. Demon and Ice King were not great Talents in the first place, but the downside made them less than worthless.

They're gamechangers which you may or may not want. And also, I was mostly pointing to those talents as interesting concepts, if not necessarily balanced right. I like tradeoffs, but I agree they're hard to pull off, and not all talents should be tradeoffs. A lot of the tradeoff talents just don't offer very much for a big downside. Demon and Ice King are probably the worst offenders, but Walk it Off is definitely on the weak side too.

What if Walk It Off was how it is now, but it also gave you a 20-30% movement bonus while you were debuffed (and maybe buffed too?) To simulate you "walking stuff off." Maybe even a 1-2 AP (or speed) bonus while debufffed? Obviously not very helpful when stunned or hard CCed, but soft CC like curses could be beneficial in a certain way.

Here's another tradeoff idea for a talent incompatible with Far Out Man (so mages have a bit more choice, though they still need a few more talents):

Personal Mage: You have -5m range on your spells and scrolls, but they deal 25% more damage.

Numbers could use tweaking, but the general idea is to make a talent for spellswords or aggressive close-range mages in mind.

On Backstabber, I'm mixed with it being a talent. Admittedly, rogues don't have much leeway for talents, with Backstaber, Guerilla, Speedcreeper pretty much required, and Bully and maybe the Scoundrel talents as other obvious choices, but I do imagine backstabbing does take a certain amount of talent. I could see it going either way.

I dunno, because as you pointed out, there's still a lot of hard CC which movement and AP wouldn't help with. Personally, I'd still have to prefer just removing the downside because I see no reason for it to exist on that Talent.

My philosophy is that Talents don't always need a downside - sometimes the downside is as simple as "taking this Talent means one fewer point you can spend on something else". When you only get 2 starting + 5 later points all game, having to pick between a lot of good choices can be just as hard as having to pick which of the least bad ones you want.




Nice concept, but it would have to be adjusted so that it only applies to (damage) spells with a default range of 10 m or more, because as written, that would mean touch-range spells would have 0 m range.

I just feel like if Walk It Off didn't have the downside that it affects buffs too, it'd be pretty much a no-brainer for a lot of classes unless lots of talents are mega-buffed to compete. Having 1 less round on debuffs is pretty significant, especially if you have high willpower and bodybuilding.

How 'bout you receive 20-30% more healing while debuffed? That'd be useful while hard and soft CCed, since it would affect heals from teammates while stunned and also benefit potions (assuming they get buffed to be worthwhile) or other self-heals while cursed or muted.





Good point. Does Far Out Man affect touch-range spells? Also, maybe it could improve spells in some other way that doesn't increase their damage. Rewording/reworking it, maybe something like, spells have a max range of 5-10m, but they cost 1 AP less or have increased damage by X%. Reduced AP might be too good though.

Far Out Man does effect touch range spells. A range penalty could be percentage based, rather than a specific distance, or have a minimum range it will drop to.

Yes, the problem was and is, lots/most of the talents were quite useless.

That's where I hope the new skill tree system will kick in. That these are meta abilities across the board of all the skills and abilities, and substitute the talents completely with their similar mechanic.

So for example a necromancer like character, that hoards witchcraft books (to speak in D:OS terms), would dip into "summoner" and "alchemist" to gain traits like "skillful summoner" that allow him/her 2 undead at once with a spell like "raise dead" and "brew/improved poisons" to create the tortured corpses for his vile rituals, etc. .

I'm not talking about game-changers like Glass Cannon, Lone Wolf or even Pet Pal, they are fine and thought-out. Most others are the problem, the downsides they have are just a symptom. This happens because most of them either modify things that are nonsensical (like zombie), useless (like diner) or too situational. The useful ones are +damage and +AP. Not all of them should be game-changers, but I shouldn't have to blankly stare at them and pick out the one which is the least awful. At one point I did't even pick any because the ones that were left were just so inconsequential as to not be worth the downsides. If we had a MASSIVE list of talents like the feats in D&D this wouldn't be a problem, but I don't think this is feasible. Glass Cannon is fine, if hugely overpowered and can use a tweaking of numbers. Diner is useless because food is useless etc. I suggest the talents don't have any +damage, they are just too lucrative and are a no-brainer. It's even easier to balance the mobs, because you aren't balancing them with the lack of talents for +damage in mind and having them be pathetically easy for characters who do have them. There are almost no +damage feats in D&D which works great. Though they do have activated skills, which wouldn't be a bad idea for talents as well. If you want them to all be passive bonuses, then just refrain from straight +damage and +AP. Just balance them in such a way as to not have the final result be boring talents with no use that nobody picks up.

Agreed that the quantity of talents was a little underwhelming in DOS1. I seem to remember that was in discussion during the beta and for the most part we assumed what we were given was only a sampleof things to come. It was a bit disheartening discovering it was the real deal when the game launched.
Don't get me wrong though, I understand it's hard to balance talents. But since so many of them had no chance to ever find a place in any builds like Five Stars Dinner or Demon, the choice ultimately boiled down to a select few. Rogues had to take a few talents to reach a status where they could be actual "rogues", understand fast-running, stealthy backstabbers, leaving not that much place for experimentation. On the other hand, a warrior quickly ran out of mandatory things to take and ended up taking the less less-useful.

One thing I found a missed opportunity was fun talents, or out-of-combat game tweaker talents, like Pet Pal. Something that you would feel compelled to take just because it seems to open a brand new way of seeing the game and interacting with it.
Some time ago, I suggested a skilltree based on the "Wild Mage" from BG2, and while suggesting skilltrees is probably a bad idea at this point ( and already was when I made the suggestion actually ), I feel it may just be entirely translated to a single talent :

- Clumsy ( or something less pejorative like Experimenter or whatever ) : Each time you cast a spell or use an ability, there is X% chance of getting an unexpected result...For the better or the worse.

In BG2 the outcome was picked at random in a table. Maybe two tables could be done for magic and physical so that the talent would benefit any playstyle - fumbled spell / entirely different spell is cast / spell is far more powerful than intended vs tripped on a root / very precise aim / Strong blow that knockdown the target, etc

Something that would add a bit of work to the writing team, albeit a very linear work, is a talent akin to the Malkav clan in Vampires : it's a kind of mind read / eight sense, that gives you veery enigmatic clues about the true agenda of people you encounter. In Vampires Bloodlines, it was a voice whispering in your head, barely audible. Downside of the clan is they also speak in a very specific manner, apparently not making any sense. The greatest thing about Bloodlines is that everything you said previously ( and was very weird ) made sense with a Malkavian, once you get to the heart of things.
Obviously, the whispering clues part is something that can probably be done at the expense of way less work that trying to re-write every dialogues in the game. And with little to no voice over in the game, maybe it could be visual : texts quickly fading around the character you engage dialogue with.

- Source Crazed : Your exposure to the source makes you see and hear things normal people don't. Are these things real? Are they a figment of the truth behind all, or just the hallucinations of a disturbed mind gone crazy : yours ?

These are inspired by other games, true, but they reflect ideas that could be made as talents that'd bring either enhanced replayability to the game, or just a fun first run.
I may think of a few, more original ones [if I ever stop being interrupted every 5 minutes or so !!].

There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other games, all art takes inspiration from those that came before it. That's how it works actually :p Malkavian characters have their Cobweb which isn't prophetic per se, they just use their combined experience and non-arcane insight to predict events and have uncanny understanding of a given situation. This comes subconsciously though and most of the time doesn't make sense (to them). VTMB is one of my favorite games and, while unfinished, is one of the best RPGs to date. I don't know whether the Source can drive you mad. I don't know much about it to be honest, it was mostly healing magic in DivDiv, but I don't remember what they said about it in the other Divinity games. If it's like the Force, where it can be used as plot insulation for anything, then go ahead ;d If there's some specific description of what the Source is and does then it won't work.

I think we need a better understanding of what talents are supposed to be. They are so different from one another that I don't see what the initial idea has been. Pet Pal is a nice example, it's ridiculously different than everything else (in a good way). Are they supposed to customize your character? If so, then in what way? Are they supposed to increase your power? All those +damage talents seem to suggest this. Are they for convenience sake? I really could go on. They are so over the place that I can't find or follow the initial logic.

I think the logic is, for the most part, just give the character a little (or big) niche. Of course, things like All Skilled Up (giving you ability points) isn't really a niche or special skill, but I guess you could argue that character is just slightly more talented in general than other characters. Obviously they're supposed to increase your power in various ways, even Pet Pal which nets you certain rewards and hints. I don't really mind them being all over the place, but I mind that a lot of them are worthless and/or boring, and some are way too good (Glass Cannon and Bully are both ridiculous).

I would say they are quite different from the kind of feats in NWN, which tended to be small little changes or abilities that added up. They're much more like 5th edition DnD feats, which are big, unique and relatively rare. They really have a significant impact on your character. I almost wouldn't mind if they buffed a lot of the talents in D:OS a lot, and then actually reduced the number of talents you received to 5, maybe, so they'd be exciting and more impactful, though it's nice getting one every 3 levels or so instead of every 5 or 6 levels. But they should probably just stick with having 7 talents and just rebalancing them and adding more.

Part of the problem is that with 4 characters, if you want no overlap in talent choice, that's 28 talents. I'm not sure if there are even 28 talents in total.

@Dr Koin:

Random effect things are always fun, though it might be easier to tie it to alchemy or something instead of every spell or ability. So maybe like "Experimenter" or "Strange Metabolism" could give you a random effect every time you drank a potion.

Source-Crazed sounds cool too, but another task for writers who are already loaded with the origin stories. Maybe could be something more visual, like in Fallout NV, where you'd find random, bizarre scenes, and occasionally unique loot.

Here's some other ideas for talents, existing or otherwise:

Re-Enchanter/Treasure Hunter (Lucky Charm 1 or 2 required): You can reroll the stats on an item. It's value is halved. (Only problem is this basically is a workaround to to savescumming for loot, so don't know how I'd deal with that.) Maybe instead it could just let you change one stat or something, but that might be hard to implement.

Pack Mule rework: Increased carry weight + once per combat, you can use an item in your inventory (equipping something, a potion or scroll) for no AP. In D:OS EE, I'd make it reduce the cost of using inventory items in general by 1 AP, but since AP cost is vastly reduced in D:OS2, I think this kind of rework makes more sense.

Phoenix: +75% fire resist and max fire resist, -50% cold resist. Basically Zombie but for fire and ice. Might be too good though.

Inquiring Customer (Barter 3-4 required): Stores carry 5-6 more magical, rare, or legendary items.

Bloodthirsty (credit to Stabbey for this one, if I recall correctly): Gain 1 AP and a 30-50% movement bonus on a kill. Maybe some kind of downside like -20% movement speed otherwise because that's pretty strong. Also maybe can only proc once per round. Or maybe the AP and movement bonus only carries over to the next round.

I'm A Snowflake: For every unique item you have equipped, you gain 1 reputation (or more or less depending on reputation's usefulness in D:OS 2).

Personal Mage (Incompatible with Far Out Man): Spells have a max range of 5-10m, but deal 20-25% more damage and maybe have a slightly shorter cooldown (so it's also helpful for non-combat spells. I only recommend that if intelligence's effect on cooldowns is massively reduced).

Malicious Witch (Witchcraft 3): Your (witchcraft only, maybe?) debuffs last 1 more round and are 20% more likely to apply, but your spell (probably witchcraft only, again) buffs last 1 fewer rounds. (Basically Walk It Off for Witches. Since Witchcraft has only 2 buffs I believe and a bunch of debuffs, it's a bit better of a trade off than Walk It Off, though Oath of Desecration and Absorb the Elements are two of the best buffs in the game. They need serious nerfs anyway.)

Invigorating Healer (Hydrosophist 2, maybe): Your healing spells also increase the recipients movement speed by 20-30%.

Hippocratic Oath (Incompatible with Malicious Witch): Your healing spells are 30% more effective (and maybe your buffs last 1 round longer), but you deal 30% less damage.

Slow Metabolism (Incompatible with Walk It Off): Buffs and Debuffs both last 1 round longer for you. (Probably also useless like WIO, but could be fun for some people.)

I think a fundamental change to the core of talents is needed tbh. Your suggestions aren't bad, but they don't address one of the main issues. They need a unifying theme to make them useful and thought-out. Having a hodge-podge of ideas randomly thrown into the talents because they couldn't find another place to put them in isn't a very elegant nor sustainable solution. Pet Pal could've easily been an early quest for example. They need something concrete and grounded to make them work.

I really don't see a problem with them fundamentally. Mostly they're just poorly balanced and there's too few of them. They give your character cool little perks is all. I'm not sure what kind of theme you're thinking of that wouldn't homogenize them. I actually found the NWN feats pretty boring to be honest because they mostly felt pretty samey. They're much more similar to Fallout Perks, which are almost exactly the same, a hodgepodge of benefits that don't really fit anywhere else.

I do think some talents, like Zombie or Pet Pal, are a bit weird to gain partway through the game without so much as a peep from anyone (well, Pet Pal does give you a lot of peeps from animals, but none of your party members are like, "holy crap, you're talking to a rat?!"), but most of them are okay. That's simply a limit of the writing/scripting. Maybe they'll make talents more significant for RP purposes in D:OS 2 (I do think they're interested in doing that.) Maybe even certain talents like Pet Pal could be earned through quests or other actions, like they do in Fallout, which makes for extremely satisfying quest rewards. But most can stay in a talent list fine. Maybe if they added a lot more, they would need to sort them in a different way, but there's not too many to go through for now.

I suppose, I guess. The perks in Fallout weren't exactly random, though, at least not in the same way it was in D:OS. The first Fallout had 53 perks, but only 3-4 were straight up damage and it was a very specific kind of damage (thrown weapons or hand-to-hand/melee i.e. the very unusual damage type for the setting). They also didn't have needless downsides to them. Some of them were really powerful, like Cult of Personality. Their unifying theme in this case would be "RP" and sometimes "Convenience", maybe even "non-combat" with a few exceptions. That's what I'm talking about.

The feats in D&D (and by extension NWN) didn't exist in a vacuum like in D:OS and Fallout. They were used to not only boost your power, but also unlock the prestige classes which were HUGE game changers. Yeah, you had the no-brainer ones like Weapon Specialization and Weapon Focus, but the root of D&D is in table top gaming and that is a bit different than a video game.

I agree that we should look more towards fallout than to DnD.

Both fallout and D:OS were designed as computer games from the start (not PnP) and both have a similar combat system.

EDIT:
One more thing:
Both fallout and D:OS have a somewhat consistent game world, but they do not take themselves 100% serious.

I suppose we just have different views on the matter. I was more thinking Fallout 3/NV perks, many of which affect combat with damage or accuracy or skill bonuses. They had about the same ratio of combat to RP benefits as D:OS did. There's little common theme among F3 perks either. I thought many D:OS talents were more interesting than F3 perks overall, though F3 had a lot more perks than D:OS had talents.

Feats in NWN were also one of the main ways many classes gained abilities, particularly warriors, where in D:OS, all classes learn abilities through skill books. So feats were more important in that regard than talents for defining classes. Even the name "feat" implies various active maneuvers, magical or physical, whereas "talents" more broadly suggests a passive trait. Of course, that's getting nitty gritty on semantics, but it's what I read into the terms.

You can't compare the feats in F3 with D:OS, they are completely different genres, while the first and second Fallout and D:OS aren't :p Besides, F3 is a lot more mainstream-ized and has more in common with TES past Morrowind than with turn-based RPGs. I do see your point, though, but you have to take into account balancing. Like I've mentioned, it's much easier to balance the mobs without having to worry about +damage talents. I.e. They are forced to balance the mobs around NOT having the talents, because they are a choice. Which leaves the characters who DO have them completely overpowered compared to the mobs. That runs contrary to the tactical nature of most TB RPGs. The +damage talents in F1 and 2 made otherwise unusable damage types viable. This could translate into D:OS like this: "You can use ranger abilities with thrown weapons" or "Your unarmed attacks now deal comparable damage to everything else". Without being thought-out and having a coherent theme you run into constant balancing problems because you simply can't balance for every single idea that you think up and throw in there. Balance is important to me, because I like challenge in the games I play (that's one of the main reasons I play games) and RPGs are very conducive to challenge (even if that's on the hardest difficulty, but having difficulty options is nice in general) For me, being overpowered is not fun or engaging, if I wanted that I can just use a cheat engine. I don't think I'm alone in my gaming habits :p Besides, having more RP talents opens the world that much more.

One example could be Borderlands The PreSequel, too. Even if Borderlands is neither a RPG nor a turn-based game, Gearbox chose for TPS to go further down the "one point wonder" as they call it. These are talents which you can only receive one point but change some aspects of the gameplay with the character you're playing, like melee overrides ( melee attacks become something else, or maybe gain a forward dash capacity ).

Obviously the point here is that these talents don't just add +damage, they bring new possibilities to the game and are completely optional.
And anyway, we are too focused on pure combat improving talents. It sure is necessary to have some, but most of the game will be spent running around and talking to people, so it's kind of sad to get these shiny talents that will only be useful half of the time or less

What kind of "unifying theme" do you think that all Talents should have, Lacrymas? I don't know what you mean when you say that. What do you think the fundamental principles that should be followed when designing Talents? What should they be allowed to modify? What should they NOT be allowed to modify?