Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Idea : Degrees of CC

I personally feel the new the armor / CC system is interesting, but has its flaws. I've also seen quite a few others who aren't sold on the idea.

As far as I can tell, the main point of the change was to remove the randomness from combat. The issue is that CC is still extremely strong - you just have to focus a little bit of hp down first, and then it's even better than in DOS1. It also forces the devs to just grant CC immunity to certain enemies (such as the worm in the final battle) in order to keep fights non-trivial.

In order to keep the main benefit (lack of RNG), but make CC more balanced, I propose a new system :

Degrees of CC. CC must be applied gradually, with increasing effects at each level.

For example, currently hitting an enemy with a stun spell (no magic armor), will stun them, preventing them from moving for ~2 turns. Under the new system, what would happen is

First application: Dazed! - 2 AP, -25% magic damage.
Second application: Shocked! - 4 AP, -1 AP recovery, -50% magic damage.
Third application: Stunned! Misses 2 turns.

Normal rules of cc interaction would still apply - each CC effect would include gradually increasing levels of the elemental bonus / malus associated with the existing cc for each element. If a hard CC is applied, all other CC effects would be removed (just as being frozen currently makes you immune to stunned).

This does several things : It makes it take longer and be more difficult to apply 'hard' cc. It allows the enemy to react to cc effects. It allows for more interesting effects than just total loss of turns. It allows different types of CC to be more effective in different situations. In particular, single shot - AP allows a dangerous enemy to be delayed, without being fully removed from the fight for several turns.

There are also quite a few more options with such a system. Here are a few different effects that could work:

Varying length of chain (2 to 4 applications to 'hard' cc)
Decrease magic/physical/other damage output
Decrease accuracy, crit chance
Decrease movespeed, initiative
Decrease healing received / given
Remove flat AP, reduce AP recovery
Increase AP costs
Prevent source gain / Prevent source use
Increase height penalties / reduce bonuses
Degrees of immunity - a boss may be immune to hard CC, but still vulnerable to weaker effects

With the addition of magic/physical armor the CC system is yes -- very binary. I agree that attacking a characters AP can be the middle ground. I would like to see a change like this happen.

I see where you are coming from, in DOS1 we had saving throws much like pen and paper where they could just shrug off hard CC left it open to RNG. Now in DOS2 we have that RNG removed but you have to either widdle down their defense or target a different hard CC against their weak defense. (Knockdown for no phys armor, Freeze for no Mag armor). We have more reliable CC now but we do have to be smarter about it.

I am not positive that making you have to repeat hard cc 2-3 times just to actually stun them is a good solution. Many of these spells have decent cooldowns. As for consumables I definitely can see having to use 2 of them being a worthwhile change because my hunter with a quiver that would make green arrow jealous can counter just about anything. First frost arrow chills/slows them second one freezes. First knockdown hobbles second one knocks down etc..

I do agree though that there is too much hard CC and some of these encounters are designed based on you completely locking down certain enemies. I think a good compromise would be a tuning pass where some of these hard CCs are changed to soft CCs with the debuffs you mentioned. And that the actual hard CC be made fewer and more expensive on both AP and memory slots.

How about you just increase the amount of phys/mag armor, make it so people actually consider consumables, and possibly give other ways (such as a defensive option) to regenerate phys/mag armor?

Why do you have to introduce a completely new mechanic to balance something that already has a check against it?

So I'm guessing that in order to accommodate those "cumulative attack" bonuses, cooldowns will be reduced to 0 or 1 turns. Because otherwise the status effects wear off before the cooldown does.

This idea seems a bit complicated to add in on top of other mechanics you have to deal with, like teleporting enemies and rapid changes to the surfaces around the battlefield.

Increasing the amount of physical/magical armor doesn't really change the OP underlying issue with the mechanic; however, introducing more skills like fortify or as you said -- consumables does could be a solution.

There's a big difference in CC happening within the first round and CC happening by the fourth round or so. Resource consumption rates and ability cool-downs become much more weighty whereas before CC happens within the first round and the penalties for exhausting those resources are never felt as the combat ends.

It also gives time to both sides of the conflict to use consumables or use spells like Frost Armor reactively, so there is counter-play to what's going on in the field. This is probably what will happen beyond the first chapter anyways.

So I think that by increasing armor or making it more readily available you'll end up changing the meta.

I think the common thing we are trying to communicate is that in an engagement once Armor is exhausted from damage in combat it needs to still be made relevant.

Wraith obviously isn't as it is introducing a whole new system that deals with CC when armor is exhausted. So no, it is arguing something completely different and the root of that is due to the encounters not having enough armor as well as the players not having enough of it. Then again it's just the first chapter.

Armor will become relevant when there is a chance to react to it being depleted; right now there is no reaction because the damage is way too high in comparison. Spells like frost armor, at this current juncture, should be used ahead of time rather than in reaction to something. Most people aren't stacking 400 magic or physical armor.

Once it has become exhausted it is relevant because it's about potential; potential to regain 600 shielding, potential for whatever else meaning that CC has to happen immediately or relatively soon. The problem is that encounters aren't tuned that way and players aren't feeling that urgency because there simply isn't enough of it around at chapter 1.

The availability of hard CC and how easy it is to chain CC targets should be looked at; I just completed the final encounter with three other friends in co-op and the four of us playing were able to tackle it in one go without any difficulty what-so-ever.

We chain CC'd Alexander so he was unable to act the entire fight, and each other enemy wasn't a problem to CC and then kill, either. When the void creature showed up we had already dealt with every other enemy, and it alone didn't put out enough damage or CC to threaten us at all.

I'm not sure how this could be addressed, however... The removal of strong CC options would currently make the game way too difficult, as it currently feels like locking down specific targets is necessary to survive an encounter. For most of our fights we didn't choose to chain CC enemies because we wanted to cheat the game out of a fair fight, but rather it felt as though if we didn't abuse our CC we would die within the round (that witch with the purging wand says hello). It creates this odd split where an encounter is either too difficult without CC or too easy with CC.

Something that may be worth more thought would be how soft CCs like Cripple and Blind can only be applied when the target is also vulnerable to hard CCs. From my experience, hard CC is much more desirable than soft CC; the only circumstance in which I would take cripple over knockdown is when the target in question is immune to knockdown. Additionally, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a status effect like cripple since players are unable to see AP thresholds and costs for NPC actions. This can lead to it feeling a lot less impactful than it actually is.

Ok here is an interesting idea.

What about if CC moves had a lesser CC for armored versus unarmored?

You're talking about surviving the encounter which means damage intake is too high; so either adjust the damage down on all sides or increase the availability of armor.

I've been ignoring CC since things die way ahead of then, Alexander included (easy as fuck to one shot without exploits).

This could be one way of solving the issue, yes.

Lower damage means fights take longer, which means more rounds of activity. This means cooldowns on abilities are more impactful and CC uptime would be effectively lower.

However it's hard to judge damage values as of yet. I get the feeling magic armor and physical armor values end up making the majority of characters' effective HP pool (based upon vitality/armor abilities and the gear you find). It could just be that CC becomes ineffective as armor values inflate beyond what can reasonably be punched through in one round.

However, it doesn't address how the current armor and CC system is binary in nature.

The 3 or 4 length cc chains was just an example. 2 might be more feasible in general. I am just thinking back to DOS, where you usually had to chill before freeze, and warm before burn.

The central issue is that cc is almost MORE effective than in DOS1, considering how easy it is to blast through one type of armor. This could be fixed by just increasing armor, but its a very tight balancing act - too much armor, and cc becomes useless compared to just killing their hp after armor is gone. I would rather see a more interesting approach.



Actually, I think this idea might be simpler and still accomplish much of the same thing. Either make more types of soft cc that can affect enemies through armor, or make cc effects weaker through armor but still penetrate. Either way, I would like to see some option to control enemies throughout the entire fight, and some counterplay against cc once armor is depleted.