Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Sneak useless?

Hi, I've made a rouge build only to realize that my 5 points in sneak is almost useless. At the cost 5 points it is much more effecient and versatile to just backstab twice or use another skill, and it deals the same amount of damage even with the talent.

Yes, you can start a fight by backstabbing, but it is much better to rain AOE crowd control down instead. Am I missing something or is this way completely useless? If it costed 3 ap, it would be a viable route. I am so frustrated that I have to play for 20 hours or more for the respec to open up as I actually think I've planned ahead with my build (I'm in the last part of cyseal).

Edit: Used the cheat engine to fix my build

Sneaking is definitively no more about damage.
You can still use it to hide and replace yourself in a fight, but it's not worth the cost damage wise.
It is also usefull if you like to steal everything etc... , but the scoundrel invisibility spell is enough for that.

So yeah, 1 point in sneaking for my rogue, just in case, but not more.
Sneak/Guerilla/Backstap combo was fun but completely broken in DOS, so they nerf it to the ground.
I hope it'll be "buffed" a bit, so that assassin-rogue may be viable again, without being a no-brainer.

Sneak is only good for pickpocketing really. I use the rogue's stealth ability if I ever need to steal anything or pick locks while there are people around.

Yeah, it just isn't viable in a lone wolf build where every point counts.

I understand the nerf, but it should have some balance to it also. Sneaking costs 5 AP both at sneak 1 and sneak 5, there should be some return on the invested skillpoints.

Sounds like sneak got overnerfed. 3 AP cost for 5 points sounds like a good compromise. After a certain point, reduced NPC view cones has diminishing returns.

To be honest, I don't think Sneak+Guerrilla deserved the nerf in the first place. Sure it was an extra 50% damage, but it's far from the only 50% damage you can get. For the cost of 1 talent, 15 skill points (or gear equivalent), 1 extra AP per attack, and maneuvering in battle to avoid sight cones, that was a 50% well earned.

If they had nerfed all the other damage boosts and made that kind of high damage very hard to come by I could understand the nerf. As it is, I can still use bully, power stance, and rage (works for rangers too!), knockdown my enemy and crit for 1500. I just finished my tactition mode playthrough and the only boss that even managed to take its turn past act 1 was Leandra and only because I was forced to wait out her Void Aura. All three of those modifiers are cheaper than Guerrilla ever was.

I think sneak+guerrilla was kind of excessive, but I agree that those other abilities are excessive too. Plus oath of desecration (if they can stack). Is it still a 50% damage boost? Wiki doesn't have the exact amount. I don't think power stance is that bad. It's only 20% and at least has a tangible downside of a lower hit rate (though if the enemy is cc'd, that's moot.) Rage and bully definitely were mysteriously untouched (actually, rage seems like it might've even been buffed. Didn't it negate all armor before, instead of just 20? A single high level piece of gear must still have 20+ armor, no?

What if bully decreased your base damage by 10-15% and still gave you +50% on crippled/KD/slowed targets? That'd give you a net gain of 35-40% against cc'd opponents (still a pretty generous modifier) and make you a bit weaker against direct targets. It kind of makes sense thematically, too, since bullies often don't like a fair fight.

I think rage should reduce armor more (unless -20 armor is more significant than I realize), give less of a hit penalty, but reduce the damage bonus to 30% or so. Maybe even rage could give you a chance to miss cc'd targets since you're just swinging as hard as you can, you might even miss someone right standing still. I honestly think the whole cc'd enemies are auto-hit thing is a tad problematic. On the one hand, it's annoying to miss a stunned or knocked-down enemy (though I think for a ranged attack it actually makes sense it might be hard to hit someone knocked down). But balance-wise, it just makes cc instant death for enemies if you focus fire.

Very few games give +50% damage modifiers on abilities, nevermind multiple stackable ones with relatively low AP costs.

Oath of desecration is 40%, it also costs 3 AP. Power stance is pretty minor (only 20%) but it costs 0 AP. They all stack multiplicitively if I'm not mistaken. At release, power stance increased the AP cost of attacks by 1, which it no longer does.

20 armor is actually fairly significant because of the way armor is calculated. About the first 80% of your armor doesn't do a thing except get you up to level. Imagine you had 100 total armor and that resulted in 50% damage reduction. At 80 armor, that damage reduction might well be down to 1%, and it will stay 1% all the way down to 0. It's a really strange system they have and I don't know the exact calculations, but it means that a small increase or decrease in armor can mean a fairly substantial difference in effectiveness, which is necessary for things like iron hide or armor specialist to do anything at all.

Not that it matters if you have 0 armor when your enemy is knocked down or dead.

Anyway, they all needed adjustments and I won't say just where it would have been "right". It is however NOT right where it is now. They nerfed an entire mechanic to uselessness, but left the core problem in the form of other abilities. If they had no plans to actually fix the problem it would have been far better had they left sneak completely untouched. As it is we have one fewer mechanics to play with and the game isn't any closer to being not-broken.

I thought bully was changed to only work with targets that were knocked down? Does it work on other status effects?

It's hard to tell for sure, but I generally prefer to knockdown anyway for obvious reasons.

Well the new wiki says it still works with crippled/KD/slowed, but that could be wrong. It's still a huge damage increase even if it's just KD, which is a pretty common effect. I think it should work with crippled/KD/slowdown but decrease your base damage.



Well the wiki (again, could be wrong) says the armor formula is:

Proportion Blocked = Armor Rating / ((4.5 * (1 + Attacker Level)) + Armor Rating)

Now, a lot of this depends on what the average armor you have at a given level, but this to me makes 20 armor seem not very significant at a higher level, where I assume you have 60+ armor, no?

Let's say you have 60 armor at level 12. That gives us 60 / 58.5 + 60, or 60/119 (rounded up), for almost 50% damage reduction. With rage, that becomes 40 / 58.5 + 40, for 40/98.5, for 40% damage reduction. That's not trivial, but it's not that much. Now, maybe I have the armor numbers wrong, but the only way I can see -20 armor making a really significant difference is at low levels or if you have low armor at a high level (most likely for a ranger, though I don't even know if the ability should work for ranged weapons at all anyway, or at least it should to a smaller degree). The biggest problem (besides the enormous damage boost) is probably that it doesn't scale at all.

Your experience seems to suggest this formula is wrong if you find a loss of 20 drops your resist from 50% to near 0%. You're sure small amounts of armor can make such a huge difference? If so, it really seems like the formula must be completely different.

Level 20, armor rating: 299, reduction vs same level: 59%
Level 20, armor rating: 246, reduction vs same level: 31%
Level 20, armor rating: 206, reduction vs same level: 7%
Level 20, armor rating: 202, reduction vs same level: 4%
Level 20, armor rating: 198, reduction vs same level: 1%

Level 11, armor rating: 168, reduction vs same level: 38%
Level 11, armor rating: 140, reduction vs same level: 22%
Level 11, armor rating: 136, reduction vs same level: 20%
Level 11, armor rating: 119, reduction vs same level: 9%
Level 11, armor rating: 115, reduction vs same level: 6%
Level 11, armor rating: 108, reduction vs same level: 1%

Everything down to 1 armor rating stays at 1%, dropping to 0 only when you hit 0 rating. I may have exaggerated a little in my example, buy my point is that the majority of your armor rating is used simply to reach the level minimum where you get more than 1% reduction.

The armor formula from the wiki is wrong.

I think buffs stack additively (I tested a little bit already).