Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Physical/Magical Armour Dmg reduction/thresholds

I know it's been discussed a lot, but let me just put another topic in there with my own thoughts;

I really like the consistency of the armour system and its interaction with crowd control. In DOS1 I never liked the randomness of the CC there, so it's a huge improvement for me reagarding that. However, there are some flaws with the armour system as-is.

With a mix of physical/magical damage, it's often useless to spend AP on hitting an enemy if it's at full magical armour and your ranger friend/character will kill it with a single arrow anyway in his turn, even though the enemy might only have a fraction of its vitality remaining. It also makes healing and lifestealing effects a lot less useful as they only start being useful the moment you are susceptible to CC. Piercing attacks are only useful if the damage type you are not primarily targeting yourself has been depleted and you still want to deal damage to it, otherwise you would have been better off just doing your primary damage type as it likely deals more damage anyway. And finally, multi-type damage attacks, like poisoned weapons and similar. More often than not the enemy is dead long before the poison effect gets anywhere close to chewing through even the lowest of magical armour.

To help with all of these issues I think one solution is to have magical and physical armour absorb 50% of the damage, the rest going straight to your vitality. In addition to that, effects which are prevented by an armour type now affect someone at 50% armour rather than 0%. Alternatively, you could have a variety of thresholds for different effects, like 75% for smaller effects like bleeding and burning, or 25% for bigger ones like Dominate Mind.

This change would make healing in general more useful, armour gain and restoration more effective to prevent CC, but you of course still take damage even with high armour. It makes multi-type damage like poisoned daggers always have an effect, even if mitigated somewhat. It also helps groups of multi-damage type characters as they all at least damage the enemies' health.

TL;DR: Physical/Magical Armour absorbs 50% damage, remaining 50% goes to vitality. Crowd Control effects are prevented until at 50% of physical/magical armour rather than 0% as it is now.

"I really like the consistency of the armour system and its interaction with crowd control. In DOS1 I never liked the randomness of the CC there, so it's a huge improvement for me reagarding that."
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U have randomnes of the CC in DoS:2 too, cos of dodge, random dmg, crits etc.

For exemple u have dmg 55-65, enemy have 60 armor left

how do u think what is ur chances to transform him in to chicken on this round?
50%/50% after hiting his armor first? no, cos of dodge/accuracy and crits.

same if u want to hit wet enemy w/o mag.armor with ur air dmg weapon - u could miss.

or u could miss with knokdown warfare abilities

Yes, there's randomness. But it's not a 30% random effect no matter what, you can game it. If the enemy has 60 health left and your ability with the CC does 54-64 there's a 50% chance that you won't break his armour, so you might want to do something else to break it first. You can take the risk, but it's not a 50/50 no matter what. Critical hits are the same thing, let's say you have a 30% chance to get a critical hit, and you know you only break the armour with a crit? That means you know you're taking a big risk trying it. Dodge? Again, same thing, you can see your odds of hitting the enemy and can manage risks accordingly.

In D:OS1? It's always random, can't play around it happening, can't expect it to happen for or against you. It's always random even the first turn of combat. In D:OS2 you have a lot of control over what's going on and risks are those you take, not inherent of the abilities themselves.

I like your idea, but would like to discuss the CC starting at 50% part, as I think your suggestion would be fine without this part as armour already means nothing from the mid-game onward for yourself and for everyone except bosses. It breaks from 1-2 attacks, as the armour stats doesn't seem to scale as much as our health does (My 2h guy for example had 11k health and 2.5k armour at level 20, it would absorb 1-2 hits). Just lower the armour on the early game enemies, and armour would mean something for the whole game.

Instead I would just make any soft CC, CC that doesn't completely make you lose control of your character (so everything except freezes/stuns/charms/knock-down), not being stopped by armour. All the soft CC like silence, slows/cripples, disarm, etc. feel pretty useless at the moment, as you could just completely shut them down as well.

It might require some enemy updates as a lot of them just run around doing nothing when they can't use their main attacks. A mage often doesn't even bother trying to AA for example. And they don't seem to be really using defensive buffs to remove debuffs.

anyway i dont like "all or nothing" cc system

i want, as i said, random CC, but with understanding of its randomnes

In Terms of CC armors are combined (mag and phys dmg will reduse enemy chance to resist CC)
The less total armor (x%) u have the more ur chances(100-x%) to receive CC.

In Terms of Dmg they are splited
The more broken ur armor(x%) the more dmg(100-x%) goes directly to ur HP.

Agreed on the soft-CC/debuffs.. to an extent. I think it's best to have 0/25/50/75% thresholds for a variety of different debuffs. Decaying for example is a really nasty debuff when healing matters more(as it would with this changed system I'd image), even though you don't lose control of your character. Silence I must note is almost as bad as turning into a chicken for a spellcaster. I think the thresholds are required for any effect that isn't solely a damaging effect that limits options(Ie: Bleeding, burning, poisoned)m and even those I think are better with thresholds.

I don't like the scaling in the game as you go up in levels, the numbers inflate extremely fast which both hinders exploration (Great example being Bloodmoon Isle) and makes many items meaningless way to fast. (Braccus' armour set being one example). So I think that requires a complete revamp regardless.



1. So if I understand this correctly you want the odds of CC/debuffs to increase conversely to the enemies' armour total? So 100% armour = 0% chance 0% armour = 100% chance?

2. But you also want to add both armour totals together and see how much % is left for that calculation?

3. And then you also want damage to vitality to be calculated based on remaining armour, so taking 99% of the damage to vitality and 1% to armour at 1% armour?

I don't mind 1, might work best in combination with thresholds of my suggestion so Burning for example goes from 0% at 100% magical armour, to quickly rise to 100% at 75% magical armour.

I do not like 2 for combining the armour types together to determine the % here, not intuitive or easy to read on any UI.

And 3 adds needless complexity which only makes it easier to get through the first chunk of armour, and harder to get through what remains. Which with how CC would work how you imagine it will be harder to get to guaranteed CC because the last chunks of armour will still be there while you flail on their armour.

"I do not like 2 for combining the armour types together to determine the % here, not intuitive or easy to read on any UI."

if we combine 2 armors in terms of CC then we dont need 4 phys or 4 mag dd party to be effective

Clssic party - rogue archer tank and mage
3 of them are physical, and they can easely break phys armor
Lone mage cant do the same

But if we will combine armors - so even dmg of ur lone Mage will help ur party with decreasing enemy chances of receiving a CC. And ur mage can even use CC, cos phys armor is broken by 3 party members and he have a good chances for CC vs total armor left

UI will show "resisted by armor". Its not hard to understand cos every part of gear have 2 numbers of armors on it
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"Which with how CC would work how you imagine it will be harder to get to guaranteed CC because the last chunks of armour will still be there while you flail on their armour."

U could ROUND some numbers if u want
But look at base accuracy - 95% not 100%
Same with armor left.
Even without ROUND(x) with fully broken armor u still have some parts of armor that protecting u from 1% of dmg and decreasing CC chances by 1%
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"And 3 adds needless complexity which only makes it easier to get through the first chunk of armour, and harder to get through what remains."

U cant be 100% imune before ur armor is not 0
Its Nonsence.
Dmg absorbtion in this system is like Phys Resist %.
Broken armor - low phys resist
New shinny armor - high phys resist

P.S. check my post "Armor and CC IDEA"

One of the things that helps a 3 physical/1 magical or 1 physical/3 magic party is multiple enemies with a big armour pool of one type, but low or none in the other. This is a part of encounter design which can be used to balance this to an extent.

The way you want to solve this actually means you need a party of all damage types and effectively can't have a full magical or physical party, as all CC is blocked by the other damage type. It's not solving the problem, it's putting it in another place. You would also need to actually merge Physical/magical Armour entirely, at which points it would solve the issue of mixed groups.

Another idea would be to keep the armour types, but have magical armour get damage reduction to magic damage, and physical armour reduction to physical damage, but unlike now, when the magic armour is all gone, the damage goes to physical armour instead of vitality, the magic damage would deal full damage to the physical armour and not be reduced like it was against the magical armour.

Having a huge number of variables like with the 100-0% armour absorption with anything not absorbed going to vitality makes it a lot harder to see at a glance how much damage you will do to both vitality and armour, slowing down the game. I don't think you need a variable system like that, and can achieve the same effect much more smoothly by always splitting it 50/50 armour/vitality.

So taking some of your ideas and merging it with my own, spitballing some numbers just for clarity.

1. Physical Armour gives 50% damage reduction to physical attacks, Magical Armour gives 50% damage reduction to magical attacks. They absorb 50% of the reduced damage, the remaining 50% going to vitality. When one armour type is destroyed completely, damage then goes to the other armour type, but will not be reduced and so do more damage.
2. Debuffs(CC among them) have different thresholds, like 0% armour for stronger debuffs or 50% armour for smaller ones. Armour is combined for calculating whether the threshold is reached, with the armour type that's being targeted (magic for Dominate Mind for example) counting double. So 2*Targeted Armour(+Other Armour). So someone with 100/200 Magical armour and 100/100 physical armour has 300/500, or a 40% chance to be affected by the Dominate Mind, or 80% chance to be affected by a smaller debuff like Burning. (50% threshold being reached counting as 0% chance to resist, with 20% chance to resist at 60%, 10% at 55% etc.)
The same Dominate Mind against someone with 200/200 Magical armour and 0/100 physical armour would have a (2*200/200(+0/100) 20% chance to go through, as he'd have 400/500. This way, magical armour protects against magical attacks and debuffs, and physical against physical attacks and debuffs without being unrelated.

Now, this was mostly done because I thought it was an interesting idea to combine it all, I do think it's fairly complicated but not overly so. Numbers are obviously rough just to give an idea. But I think a 40%/80% threshold for big/small effects would work best like this, with vitality being reduced relative to the armour people have in the game right now, to make vitality meaningful and have the chance to die from vitality damage before armour is gone.

Curious what people think about this, at least.

Seems unlogical
I dont want to merge armors (only in terms of CC probability)
I dont want to keeep in mind all thresholds
I want to see my DMG Numbers(not halfed or so on)
I want to see a tooltip with current CC chance (or not.... anyway i see armor bar so i know what is my chances for CC. if its halfed then its like 50%)
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"Having a huge number of variables like with the 100-0% armour absorption with anything not absorbed going to vitality makes it a lot harder to see at a glance how much damage you will do to both vitality and armour, slowing down the game."

U still doing the same - dealing same dmg to summ of vitality and armor. it wouldnt slow game in any way

The proposal I had does not merge armours, it gives each their own strength and making it weak to the other. Physical armour counts double to resist physical, and takes less damage from physical. Vice versa for magical. It's only "merged" in the sense of how CC works, and that damage will go to the other armour type first rather than give the full brunt to vitality damage after one is gone. If you don't, you keep the awkward anti-synergy of physical/magic.

You don't need to keep in mind thresholds any more than in your suggestion if all you want to do is look at the % chance you have to succeed. The thresholds are purely there to calculate the % chance certain debuffs have to work. In your suggestion, you also have a threshold, but it's just always 0% and you keep the problem of multi-type parties in terms of damage and CC for pure parties.

Instead of halving damage dealt to its respective armour type, you could double physical damage dealt when physical armour is gone instead, same with magical damage when magic armour is gone. Just need to double all the armour and vitality numbers. The reason I added the damage reduction is because damage goes to the other armour type after the main one is eaten, and the reason I did that is because of the merged CC calculation, which I did because it does help with mixed damage parties.

"I want to see a tooltip with current CC chance (or not.... anyway i see armor bar so i know what is my chances for CC. if its halfed then its like 50%)"

You can have that, obviously. About the armour bar though.. with merged armour for CC calculation that wouln't work at a glance. At all.

"with merged armour for CC calculation that wouln't work at a glance. At all."

will be the same with merged.

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50% dmg reduction by default armor is bad idea, cos many ppl want to see full dmg numbers. And why 50%? who said what armor should absorb always 50% even if its almost broken

"Numbers are obviously rough just to give an idea."

Hope Larians read forums, and will deside something.

Most we can do is talk about it and offer suggestions and explain why we think things. So even though we disagree, good to talk about it.

I am one of the "pro-armor" guys here, exactly because of OP reason stated that it largely eliminated infuriating CC and effects RNG of the first game, where you simply were screwed over by the chance all over and over again as a rule.

And yes, there is still plenty RNG remaining with crits and such, but at least it's not the kind of RNG where your healthy and strong dude gets disabled by some shitty ability with small CC chance or inverse happening where you try to CC something and it just does not stick even multiple attempts all pure game of chance.


I do agree though that a guy with a sliver vitality remaining absorbing whole fireball or goddamn 2 hander crashing on his head just because he still has armor of that type is silly and it makes mixed parties suffer somewhat, so I also thought about that part of the damage always going to vitality.

I do think what they need to do next game is exactly that. 2 armor types and armor interaction with effects unchanged, but good part of the incoming damage going to vitality always and vitality boosted too to compensate, while armors lowered a fair bit.

I do still think that CC and effects should only be applied if respective armor is broken, though regardless.

Even last plate of fully broken armor can save u from CC? ))
Funny to imagine that warrior)))

And if armor is gone - u are in army... u are in DoS 1 now