Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Initial thoughts after my first playthrough

After finishing the EA version of the game I decided I'd put together a list of observations I've made as well as general feedback. I played on classic difficulty and I familiar with the original game.

Some of these might be bugs, and some of them might be upcoming features that simply haven't been implemented yet. None the less I am going to include as much as I can remember in case the developers can use it in any way.

-[s]Earth[/s] Poison wands and staves are in a really weird spot due to poison's new ability to turn some surfaces into ooze/poison. Since characters tend to bleed all over the place during combat and a fair amount of abilities create various liquid surfaces you more or less have an on-demand poison field available during every turn. Unfortunately this was more to my own disadvantage rather than advantage since attacking with poison weapons usually would result in my own melee characters suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a poison field.

-To add to what I said above, I think that characters really bleed too much. After a single turn a simple skirmish has usually left a puddle of blood that easily is exploited by characters with lightning or poison based abilities. I came across an ability called [i]Blood sucker[/i] that consumes blood surfaces. At first I thought this would be the solution to my problem, but the area that it cleans up is absolutely tiny. Either increase the ability's AoE or reduce the amount of blood that characters leave behind when attacked. Alternatively make the amount of blood scale with the amount of damage that was inflicted.

[b]-Migo / The murderous gheist:[/b]
-I ran into Migo when I still was level 1 because I was exploring my surroundings before I started actively trying to complete quests. I ended up having to flee from combat since I couldn't beat him at that level. I tried talking to Magister Yarrow after I'd escaped but there wasn't an option to tell her that I'd found Migo. Perhaps this could be added?
-I ended up having to kill Migo later since he was hostile as soon as I entered the area due to me not having a yarrow flower with me earlier. I equipped the ring he dropped and apparently the game didn't register that I was carrying it with me when I was talking to the magister. I had to unequip it before I was given the option to show the ring to the magister. Is this an oversight or is it just a limitation that can't be changed?

-I'd really like if there was a confirmation box when you level up your stats. D:OS1 had one and at first I ended up dumping some points into a stat I didn't want because I wanted to see how much of a difference it'd make if I had placed the points in that specific stat.

-Sometimes enemies would attack me with attacks of opportunity when I walked directly into them. At others times they'd attack my rogue when it walked around them despite it never trying to leave the enemy's melee distance.

-It feels like there are very, very few useful weapons to be found. I understand that because of plot reasons you shouldn't have access to a plethora of equipment right from the beginning, but please add more weapon/armour variety. I ended up using the same few weapons and armour pieces throughout most of the island because I never found anything better. The equipment left behind by enemies was always of lower quality than the weapons/armour pieces I already had and the 'good' equipment found in containers/crates somehow ended up almost always being shields.
I must admit that I am [b]not[/b] a fan of the new physical/magical armour system. If you have a lot of armour you are pretty much impervious to almost all kinds of CC and become a steam roller able to completely ignore key combat elements like stuns, status and terrain effects. Since enemies seemingly always outnumber and out-armour the player's party I often spend the first couple of turns just eating multiple kinds of CC on top of eachother since the enemies had way more initiative than me. As I previously mentioned I very rarely came across useful equipment which often resulted in my armour being broken in a single turn. I understand this adds some minor tactical elements through abilities like frost shield and fortify, but ultimately this feels like a massive step down from D:OS1's system where you actually had to sacrifice potential damage in favour of CC-resistance through the ability system.
It seems like the AI hasn't fully adapted to this sytem either. Whenever I fought ranger enemies they often used their one-time use special arrows and grenades on me on the first turn when my armour was still up, completely wasting their own consumable and turn.

[b]-Inventory management[/b]
-Please add a way to sort the items in your inventory. The category buttons aren't enough and a lot of items don't fit under any of the listed categories. D:OS1 had a 'sort by most recent added' feature that I'd like to see implemented.
-Whenever I reloaded a save the game would check the 'show party inventory' button. Probably a bug and definitely annoying.
-Please add a toggle option that ensures objects such as grenades and arrows aren't automatically placed on my ability bar once I pick them up. It quickly clutters the bar and it's really annoying to have to manually remove the objects from the bar.

-Please add a way to filter completed quests. Alternatively make a separate list with completed quests like in D:OS1.

-Crossbows seem really weak compared to original bows. They have higher base damage and cost one more AP to use like in the prequel, but since you have and gain a lot less AP in D:OS I find that the additional one AP doesn't justify the additional damage. My ranger character originally used a crossbow but was almost always limited to one attack per turn. When I switched out the crossbow with a bow I could either attack twice per turn or attack once [b]and[/b] use an ability. Unfortunately I can't think of any solutions aside here aside from increasing crossbows' damage further.

-Enemy archers and mages seem way too eager to keep their high ground advantage. Some times I had enemy mages/archers refusing to move away from their initial starting point, often resulting in them simply skipping their turn because there wasn't anything they could attack.

-[b]Please add a way to speed up enemy animations and/or turns.[/b] Watching a zombie walk for twenty seconds is not particularly interesting and having to wait for up to several minutes before I get to do anything at all is not fun at all. If the full game has another large scale battle like The battle of Hunter's Edge in D:OS1 I sure know when I get to go on a toilet break. :hahaha:

-The voidwoken deep dweller (level 6 miniboss with a couple of skeleton ads) is a huge and sudden difficulty spike harder than Bishop Alexander and the Void drillworm. The encounter seems slightly over the top due to the rampant skill spam coming from all sides. Since my party pretty much groups up in a tiny box upon entering combat I found myself getting spammed with aoes and lightning abilities almost right away.
The first time I ran into that particular fight I came from the northern entrance and had already teleported my party up to the statue next to the deep dweller. This was an incredibly bad position for me to be in and I ended up having to flee combat. This triggered the post-fight dialogue between my party members where they discuss what the deep dweller said. I feel like this particular dialogue shouldn't be available until after it has been killed.

-Unless I have missed something the only way to get the 'Bless' ability is to interact with the statue I mentioned in the above comment. This also only gives the ability to your 'main' character which I feel is a bit weird since your three other party members supposedly also are godwoken. I hope the full game has ways for multiple characters to obtain the spell due to how useful it is.

-Neutral NPCs really overreact to having items stolen from them. I like the fact that the merchants actually notice something is missing from their inventory, but I feel like they start searching the immediate area way too quickly. Also, how do NPCs know my items are stolen from someone in a completely different area? The fact that they are willing to fight to the death over insipid sub-10 coin items also seems completely over the top.

-Finally I am not overly fond of racial traits giving certain stat / trait bonuses. I understand that ultimately the difference is incredibly minor and probably completely irrelevant, but at the same time I can't help but feel that this encourages certain races to be played as certain classes/roles.

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This was all that I could think of right now. I hope it can be of use. I'll make sure to add more if I remember something that I didn't already include.