Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Tactician mode is both too easy and too hard

I've seen a lot of posts on this forum either saying that Tactician mode is so hard that you can only be successful in it by exploiting the AI. Or that Tactician mode is way too easy, and they just faceroll through the game. I've realized that both of these perspectives can be true, which seems kind of impossible. But it's not, and here's why...

In DOS2, as with most RPGs, much of the outcome of any fight is decided BEFORE the fight even begins. Yes, your tactics in the fight matter, but what matters more is your level, your builds, your gear, your positioning before the fight starts etc...

So you are going to have some people playing Tactician with suboptimal builds, poor gear, maybe under-leveled. And yeah, for them Tactician will seem way too hard. It may even seem like you have to cheat just to survive.

Then you're going to have people who have the absolute optimal build. Have robbed everyone blind so they have tons of money for skills and good gear, and know exactly which fights to do in which order. And for them, tactician mode is going to seem easy.

End of the day, this is an RPG. People are going to have vastly different play experiences. You can't expect the challenge of the game to be the same regardless of how you play it.

Personally, I think tactician is fine so far. As I go on, maybe it will feel too easy, but we'll see.

Act 3 is really where the game combat shine IMO and bloated stat no longer hard carry you all the time because the game is now compressing your gears and levels to even out the playing field. If you avoid pressing the retreat button, the overwhelming amount of enemies along with some fight having actual condition really make it a challenge to complete.

I just completed a level 20 boss fight and it was ridiculous. I had to chain evasive aura and use source vampirism only for the boss to go "fkit" and mass explode corpse when he's the only one left. The enemies also have Perseverance especially bosses so you can't just drop a knock down arrow on them every turn because some of them will regain so much armor if you don't crit with that knock down arrow, it won't work.

Exactly. To me the solution that would benefit all seems to just make cheese strats impossible in order to fix tactician mode and make classic mode a bit harder, since most people seems to find both tactician way too hard and classic way too easy at the same time.

The main issue is that cheese shouldn't be possible, that also makes it too easy for some who have the mindset to always use the optimal strategy even if its cheese, and it makes it so people who should much rather play classic mode instead keep going further into their tactician save whilst relying on cheese to survive. Both groups of people would probably prefer if there wasn't any options to cheese/glitch combat situations.

They only way to annihilate cheese would be, to make the game turn based all the time. Of course in reality it is, but outside of combat turns are so speed up, that you have free movement. This free movement is the core source for most of the cheese.

Other solution would be: If you enter a fight, you can transitioned into a 'battle arena' scene, which makes it impossible to prepare the fight heavily with tons of explosive barrels or whatever.

The cheese are only good in Act 1. Act 2 and Act 3 has no need for cheese especially Act 3, enemies are the one cheesing you. Most of the fight will take you to a new area and just go "We fight now".

I think larian has done a stunning job with the balance. Fights take me a long time to think about, and I spend a lot of time between fights trying to optimise my levels, armour etc.

Couldnt ask for much more than that really.

IMO, the major reason I find Act 1 and ACt 2 so have such a range of difficulty is because of how free-roam heavy those two acts are.

Act 1 expect you to roam around to get gear and be strong.
Act 2 expect you to roam around to level up nd get stronger.

The moment I got to Act 3, the difficulty felt just right because you barely level up now (Act 1 is like, 1 to 8, Act 2 is 9 to 18, Act 3 it 19-21.

With such a low level range to cover, they manage to make a map that has a forced flow everyone follows to clear the content based on their experience with Act 1 and 2. Because of that, the difficulty went from "Too easy" or "Too hard" to "GODDAMNIT!" nearly every fight.

Which makes you wonder why Larian went for such a stupid increase in stat in their system, and didn't had a slower power growth which would have given this feeling from the get-go and avoided the whole problem of balance, especially in the early game.

Scaling or stat from gears, what the game is really missing is, imo, more fights where you are at a serious disadvantage and fights with criterion that must be fulfilled.

Act 3 fights has a bunch of those and actually provides some challenge.

Act 2 is just "Run around and shoot a bunch of bosses". The game doesn't even want you to be creative in some fight.

**Spoiler**

Like on your journey to master Source and you meet Hannag. If you walk through her barrage of portal magic, you instantly die.

Using that knowledge, I decided to fight the magister by teleporting their tanks into the barrage zone and what happened? Hannag committed suicide and triggered the other fight instead. Like, WHY?!

The only time I felt like I was at a disadvantage was in the Dwarven cave. I actually enjoyed trying to fight 4 void woken at once and had to do everything I could to chain CC them at the same time or my skills will all be on CD and they will get up and emweb me in 1 turn.

The map itself was also designed to be alot of fun if you try to do it in one go without teleporting out of the place and regroup.

Really need more of that in Act 2.