Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback On the subject of nerfing things...

I've seen quite a few comments about this, both for and against. I have to say I'm very much against: although a number of skills do (or increasingly did) offer a significant advantage, I'm not really sure that pounding everything down until it's all totally flat is really the best approach. I find it's not very interesting and removes a lot of the significance of making certain choices both during CC as well as character development.

I think there's an argument to be made for ensuring that potentially overpowered skills are well-distributed, but I'm not really a fan of getting rid of them completely as it can make for a bland playing experience; even if I find it very frustrating when I find myself on the receiving end of that sort of thing (speaking as someone who generally plays Divinity games on easy, by way of disclosure).

So yeah: sometimes there needs to be adjustments made, but I'd rather those adjustments didn't just involve the smoothing away of anything that added a bit of character or interest. I don't know if this is one of those "but that's not how D&D does things" but I don't think D&D or anything that isn't Divinity should have the last word on what Divinity does.

If things aren't nerfed, the only way to keep the game challenging is to overbuff the enemies. The current stage is an example where enemies are now just using Source Spell on you in an attempt to perma deal way too much damage and just CC you to death with a cheap shot.

One thing Divinity suffers from at the moment, is how easy it is to cheat the game by permaccing whoever is tough while also killing a certain key target right away with some initiate, teleport and bow+knife.

Certain stuffs do need to be buffed but the most powerful option should not be treated as the baseline. When everything becomes too powerful, the game overall strat turn into "Which side can cheese the other more" and it ruins those who try to be creative with their build.

Like, currently, you can do Haste -> Sneak +Snipe at the start of the fight and with some initate, shoot 2 more crossbow arrows with Adrenaline at the start (and in total, pretty much instakill anything that isn't a boss if no miss). They counter this by forcing ambush instead where you can't preposition properly. You counter this by using quick load so you can position first before triggering the fight. There's no real valid strat here because it's a cheese vs cheese. If you don't counter how the game cheese you, that Chain Lightning will just rekt your own team.

I guess it depends on one's approach. I'm probably slightly making a case against my own argument here in that I like my RPGs to be an adventure rather than something that I have to carefully plan: I don't want to play it like a card game where I can sneak a sly look at my opponent's hand. Some battles really feel like I have to do that as they're kind of impossible otherwise; well, unless I learn the intricacies of which abilities to cast beforehand (though I can't be too dismissive as sneak & snipe was my favourite approach in early releases of D:OS... until it was nerfed and the party sniper was forced to break cover).

Anyway, I think that at the moment, some battles do feel that they can only be won by player contrivance vs. AI contrivance rather than just wading in and having a good scrap. Perhaps it depends on one's background: I wouldn't last five seconds in a strategy game. Then again, I barely last five seconds of unplanned mêlée in a real-time RPG, so my "strategy" (such as it is) is to run away screaming and to then sneak back with a bow.

But I guess that's getting off the point. I remember un-nerfing weapons (at least as I saw it) in FO3, and giving long arms about quadruple the power of the base game. Awesome when I was dealing with annoying bullet sponges, less awesome when the Talon Co guys came after me and could pwn me with just two shots. But I much preferred it that way.

Perhaps what we need is a even easier mode then exploration. But I think exploration mode is enough.

Unfortunately some people are left behind as a game gets tougher, but in this case I really do not want the game to get easier.

Some encounters are already unfair with a "Ha ha! you had to know this was coming in advance to win!" aspect to them (The Frog Encounter for example...)

Adding broken moves that are overpowered to the mix really doesn't help things.

I see your point, vometia.

While some tuning is necessary to achieve a nice balance, there's also a significant risk of tuning down anything that's fun and gratifying to use on the verge of extreme dullness in a (often questionable) struggle to achieve some sort of challenge.

I should probably stress that I come from the very different angle than you on the topic, since I genuinely don't like when RPGs are a "comfortable stroll through the scenery", I find them way more engaging when there's struggle to progress and planning is required to win the crucial battles.

Otherwise the feeling I get is one of dealing with the "skinner box" in which I'm just watching colored bars filling and numbers growing and reading some (rarely exciting) side story just for added flavor.

Also, while enjoying the occasional curb-stomping battle can be fun, fights stop being enjoyable to me in the very moment they start to feel mundane activities with no risk involved.

That doesn't mean I like solutions like "bullet-sponge enemies" or the feeling that my characters are hitting walls with blunt weapons. Using a special skill at the right moment *should* feel risolutive and occasionally change the tide of the battle even significantly.

I think that's what I view the difficulty slider as being for: though it is something that's hard to get right as it should do a lot more than just be a blend between the player's and AI's hitting power (which, to be fair, it often is).

For me, I do genuinely enjoy the bits of the game where I get to explore, interact, trade and stuff and though the combat is an essential component, for me it's not the main purpose of playing. But for plenty of people it is, so I wouldn't want to deny them that either.

But I think from both perspectives, there should be an interesting mix of steady, reliable skills, some not so good ones and some really way out ones to make things interesting; and I don't think that the latter should be hammered down just to stop some people using them to the point where they could almost be classed as exploits. I figure there's other ways of keeping it challenging without flattening everything down to the same level, which I think carries a big risk of that dullness you mention.

And yeah, bullet sponges. D: I mentioned elsewhere that one of the changes I made to FO3 was to vastly increase the power of the long arms: which had the dual effect of making battles with high-level creatures less of a chore, but also meant if I was on the receiving end I could be taken out with just a shot or two, so it paid to be a lot more careful. Even though I'm generally difficulty-averse, that made things quite a bit more interesting.

agreed. instead of nerfing stuff down, other things should be buffed.

Underpowered and overpowered abilities both lead to a bland environment. Their existence means that players will feel inclined to pick abilities because of their power level being out of line, rather than how they actually want to play.
When there are several viable actions, players have a richer set of choices.

This requires appropriately balancing abilities. If a few key abilities are outliers, it doesn't make sense to change the 80% of abilities that are at a consistent power level. You nerf the 10% that are too strong, and buff the 10% that no one ever uses.

This balancing produces more "character" and "interest", not less. There's no interest in picking a skill and realizing its too weak to be a good choice, and likewise it's not particularly interesting where all characters pick the same few overpowered abilities every time either.

That depends on the player. A fully informed choice of potential actions and outcomes may be available to a very experienced player but I dare say they'd be the minority; but I'm not sure that's even relevant, as every ability having much the same outcome doesn't really lend itself to either character or player progression IMHO.

Of course a lot of it is still dependent on specific effects and circumstances, but I still think that being over-zealous about equalising everything risks making choices and consequences rather dull. Although some players will abuse stand-out abilities to the point that they could almost be considered exploits, I'm left feeling that the cost of addressing that particular issue may be too high when looking at players in general.

Talking of over-equalising, I'm somewhat reminded of a current rant about the CD "loudness war" where the EQ of everything is ramped up to the point where all finesse, fidelity and interest is lost. That may or may not be a good analogy, but I couldn't help but think of it.

I remember a similar issue years ago with the Warhammer Online beta.
It was a common complaint:

"Congratulations, Mythic. You classes are all very balanced... because every single one of them play in the same freaking way".

EDIT: just marginally related, but it's also part of the reason I've always been very dismissive of people who cry that "armor restrictions by class isn't realistic".

Yeah, you know what's the downside of removing the restriction for "realism"? That if you don't have any sort of class restriction (OR strong downside to use a certain type of armor over the other according to your role) you get and "end game" where your entire party is dressed with the same heavy armor... Because there's no reason not to, if that's the best available, and it's boring as hell.

Mostly true, but it should also be considered that abilities don't need to be "all equally good", simply because you can use other solutions (i.e. longer cooldowns) as equalizers.

I'm reminded of when I got to a similar point playing vanilla Oblivion: looting expensive ebony armour from every two-bit bandit to sell at a loss to merchants to accumulate gold to spend on... what? I already had several sets of daedric armour and the best weapons that money couldn't even buy and eventually found myself thinking "what's the point?"

At which point I loaded up a bunch of overhaul mods which nicely unbalanced everything meaning that I'd usually find rubbish bottom-of-the-range armour and other junk that could only be sold for pennies, which means that getting anything decent was either sheer luck (which was quite rare) or I really had to work at it. Suddenly it felt more worthwhile.

From that point of view, I wouldn't mind the arguably over-powered abilities being rare and expensive. It would make things more interesting.

I am reminded of a Final Fantasy Tactics mod that balanced all the classes, made poaching worthwhile, and even balanced the moves within those classes.

It made the game 10x more amazing! because suddenly instead of trying as hard as you could to unlock "Da only good classes" you could go at it with anyone. It was very fun.

---

Yes Overbalancing is bad (Overbalancing is when a game is made more bland for the sake of balance)... But you forget that balance allows strategies to form that don't necessarily rely on one dominant strategy.

Having used Hail Strike... It is still an amazing skill that does more damage then any non-source (and a few source) ability in the game AND creates a floor that can CC even enemies that still have armor.

It just doesn't have its super freeze ability anymore.

balancing is also about difficulty levels. How you can say that an encounter is difficult? There might be a spell which wipe out enemy in no time. Also this spell might be a staff of magus for example. Actualy, the process Larians redo all the skills doesnt have a sense. DOS1 has some balance, flaws were known. It is better to polish a system than start from scratch. I am absolutlly sure that new skill/spell system will be hardly inablanaced at least 6 month after release. So If you like unexpected spells results and suprise then you will get it.

Loudnes war is old story. I see loudness war like all wanted the max spell, all wanted source level spell, so everyone use max dB. Missing dynamic. When all is maxed, how you can know it is not a minimum ? Good example of wrong balancing.

This is largely why most of the abilities we currently have should be altered.
Right now the game feels entirely too "bombastic" and it gets tiresome in the long run.

There's no sense of progres when you unlock new abilities, because many of the basic ones are not only very powerful visually, but also functionally.
Then there's skills like Ignite or Contaminate, that have such ridiculous AoE that their power will often end up working against you.

That is very good description of loudness war.
DOS1 has some crazy spells. but now almost everything is crazy.

I thing that good start for a balancy / gameplay tuning would be remove 80% the AOE on skils and also floor elements. Learn from loudness war results - Add dynamic.

Remember that the system is very classless - if some spells are definitely stronger than others you will simply pick those. Dunno if I took this discussion too literal.