Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback No Matter What, Keep Zombie as a Talent

Why? It doesn't break the game and I play the game exclusively with it on all my characters. I like to RP with it. It has shaped my combat encounters since the day I received the game. Is it bad? Sort of. It means you have to rely on your geomancer party members to flood each and every encounter with glorious, delicious poison fields. Mix in Blood Rain and Blood Sucker and you have a viable playthrough WITHOUT a single health potion, with each player having a distinctive role in addition to the two poison spells. But it is also amazingly fun to turn everything a sickly shade of green and cackle as your enemies run in terror of your swamp. (swamp witch metallica reference, anyone?)

As one complaint, however... Skeletons and the future undead race should NOT be healed by poison. They need a different "talent" that is unique to them. The fleshy zombie NPCs and the players with the talent make sense both thematically and in the lore:
+ If you are a ZOMBIE, you have poison instead of BLOOD in your veins, and thus drop fields of POISON when you are struck, not BLOOD. This is why healing spells and potions HARM you: These sources of healing ACTIVELY remove poison when used. This is why it harms the Zombies. THIS MAKES SENSE AND SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED OR REMOVED.
+ Skeletons have no veins, and therefore should NOT benefit from poison. Have them be immune to it, but not HEAL from it.

I honestly agree that it should be kept as a talent, but I'm not sure things should change for skeletons / the undead race.

wish there was an upvote button idea makes to much sense.

Personally changing it to be something only for the Undead makes sense AND makes the undead origin more special as far as the framing is concerned.

Having people just chose to be "Undead except not really" when there are actual undead around takes away from that.

Yes, that does make sense in terms of context. I don't think you'll get a lot of objections to the idea that Zombie makes sense as an Undead Talent. Larian doesn't seem terribly concerned with "makes sense" or "consistency" though.

However, the issue has little to do with whether the Talent makes sense. The important factor is that in terms of gameplay, it is a terrible idea for many reasons. The largest one is that 1 of the 6 Companions are Undead. The others are not. They have completely opposed methods of healing. Say goodbye to Healing Ritual and Bless as sources of healing, that will hurt the Undead party member. Regular party members will have to work around mass fields of water and blood turned into poison from Contaminate, and waste memory picking up Poison Bolt to heal the Zombie.


The Zombie Talent is a crippling disadvantage. You lose 90% of the sources of healing in exchange for getting a terrible heals from poison benefit. Except that to heal from poison fields you need to walk around in them wasting all your AP, and then an enemy just blows them up, costing you all the health anyway.


The entire party will have to adapt their playstyle to accompdate the Zombie. That is too much of a burden. It will sap the fun from playing. Fun over realism is always the important thing to remember. Larian should not kill fun for the Undead Race for the sake of a misguided sense of realism.

I am not talking in terms of "Should the undead have the Zombie trait" but whether it should be unique to them and stay removed. Which I agree, keep it removed.

As for "The Zombie Trait is annoying as fudge" I agree! They should endevour to ensure that while the undead are more of a challenge that playing them isn't a drag.

that and not all undead have the zombie trait in the game.

Zombie absolutely should not be the undead racial, but would be okay if it was an optional talent that only the undead could choose.

AOE skills should check if a character is a zombie, so a healing ricochet automatically avoids them, and maybe something like contaminate would actually effect your zombie allies. And vampiric skills like blood bubble and mosquito swarm should still work. And if poison also helped regenerate your armor (at least a little bit), that would make it way better too. Between all those, zombie would be a lot more functional, while still requiring some dedication to make it work (which is okay I think, given it's a big change.)

Oh, okay, I misunderstood. As long as Zombie doesn't become the Undead Racial skill, I don't especially care what happens to it, although some people do like to make 4-zombie parties, which would be difficult to do in single-player if it was restricted to Undead-only.




If you are a Zombie, does magic armor still block Poisoned status? If so, the Zombie trait could change it so that poison bypasses magic armor. This prevents it from damaging magic armor and allows surfaces to more easily apply poisoned status.

In D:OS 1 you can in theory steam roll through the game with 4 zombies and the npc would not care one second that you are undead.

I would be fine with the removal of the zombie talent,simply because it is one of the strongest talents in the game.

On the flip side however,I think it would be fun if both custom undead and origin undead would get a source skill which permanently adds the zombie talent to your target,but can not be cast on characters who already have this talent.



Yes it does,which is why Rain/Rain of Blood + Contamination is the best aoe healing combo in the game - it's available from lvl 1 and at level 4 you can go Global Cooling+Contamination to remove all fire surfaces and cast an aoe heal with a really big radious + by level 4 all your party members are zombies, so we can consider the dificulty of the game lowered considerably within a 4 zombie team.

Zombie's actually super weak since you have to move through poison to hal, magic armor blocks the poisoned status, and normal helaing destroys you.

It's sub par at best and altogether weak at worst, and its removal would just punch roleplay in the face.

You can just hit your allies with magical poison dart for direct heal+aoe on top of the afore mentioned combo + it barely counts as a punch to roleplay because in both D:OS 1 & 2, npc's don't react to you having that talent.
Also fights vs poison are a joke when you have the zombie talent.

Well, what about that talent visibly changes you? Do you walk -oddly? Moan about wanting to eat brains? Smell of corpse-rot? The talent certainly doesn't say you do, so there's nothing for NPCs to react to.

And yes, it makes SOME fights easier, but it's obviously going to make a lot of other stuff harder. Such as healing - those poison darts heal way less than the restoration spell, for example.

But it still affects roleplay. You have to worry about healing surfaces such as bless or especially holyfire, you have to worry about, if you want to heal in town, leaving behind poison that will injure others and cause hostilities. Yadda yadda.

That's the ENTIRE point, though. The roleplay. DOS2 is all about immersing yourself in the world and making a character you have fun with. For some, that means playing the Red Prince or Sebbi. For others, that means making a stupid build that makes the game challenging in a different way.

And, for the record, Poison Bolt on a mage will heal more than any restoration skill BECAUSE the poison debuff ignores magical armor if you take the zombie talent. You get a truckload of frontal healing and a healing tick for 3 turns.

There is poisoned food in the game. You can also craft it.

In combat advantages of Zombie talent outweigh the out of combat disadvantages you mentioned.

For me if Zombie does become a racial for the undead (something I am fine with,by the way) then we should get a source skill that adds the talent to a non-undead character,because,if I am not mistaken, undeath is a magical disease which can be spread in the universe of this game as well.

It's not a disease. Either you just come back on your own, you are brought back by a necromancer, or you're a 'chosen'.

I will give you this. This is why I think you should only be able to pick Zombie at the creation screen. You can have your custom character's backstory be WHATEVER you want it to. If I want to pretend I have 4 players that are a family of undead, that SHOULD be an option.

I do agree simply "CHOOSING" Zombie past the creation screen makes no sense. It should only be acquired through special events if not chosen at the very beginning.

Why couldn't that special event be the origin skill of the undead race? The way zombie works now...it make's no sense how you make a family of 4 undead. Without Larian expanding how undeath works,most go to stereotypes promoted by WoW and Walking Dead,where you need some necromancer to use his own version of revive or undeath is a curse/disease that you curse.

An origin skill that costs source points is the best initiator in my opinion,because Zombie (as seen in D:OS 1 and as hinted by the outcries of the comunity) is that good of a talent and acess to it should be restricted. A couple of weeks back I saw someone post here that the game is soloable on explorer with a wand dual wielding zombie high wits and int mage,with memory as the only dump stat, should I ever find that post, I will throw the link here and let the community debate if maybe it is for the best that zombie becomes the racial for undead.

Listen, wasting source points to give people a talent that generally sucks isn't worth it, especially since EVERY OTHER source skill has combat use. What good is turning your friends into zombies int he MIDDLE of combat? It's not.

Zombie should just be a talent, plain and simple. In part because much like Demon, it's not literal. It isn't actual undeath, it's just an elemental switcharoo.

Saying it shouldn't be selectable past level 1, or that you shouldn't be able to be it, or that it should be of all things given by an origin source skill are as ridiculous as saying the same things for Frost King and Demon.

I'm not saying the ability that gives zombie shouldn't have some use in combat as well...but Zombie is better than Frost King and Demon because the latter 2 aren't an elemental switcharoo and can trivialize fights vs users of poison and there is also global cooling + rain to remove explosive areas and burning.