Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback How can Sneak and Guerrilla become useful again?

I think that in general most people can agree that Sneaking in combat is not useful at a cost of 4 AP, and that the Guerrilla Talent is therefore - at best - only useful for sneaking and opening a fight with it.

This is a tricky issue, as if Sneak were to be too powerful, it could make combat too easy in places. I'm not going to pretend that I have the answers. The ideas I have might be just ridiculously overpowered and untenable.

Skills we also need to consider when making changes to Sneak are Moral Blow, Assassinate, Chameleon Cloak, Blessed Smoked Cloud, and maybe even Flurry and All In.

Let's have a conversation and try and get some different ideas about ways to make Sneak (especially Sneak in combat) and the Guerrilla Talent as things which are viable.


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Here's the radical change I have come up with at the moment:

Why not just go all-in on the current philosophy, which basically has Sneaking in combat as non-existent, and Guerrilla as only useful as an opening salvo? Key points:

- Sneaking during combat is completely disabled. It's not a matter of needing a lot of AP. If you are in combat, you just flat out can't hit the button, regardless of sight lines.

- Guerrilla Talent damage while sneaking increased from +40% to +100%. It doubles the damage from normal attacks, and ONLY normal attacks, it does NOT apply to any skills. Because you can't sneak in combat, this cements Guerrilla as ONLY being useful to open combat. Obviously this should only apply once per combat to prevent using this to open, then fleeing and returning to repeat it. But I am not sure whether fleeing and returning counts as a new combat, it could be a problem if it does.

- Assassinate already doesn't stack with Guerrilla or Invisibility (according to the wiki), so that goes with my recommended change to boost Assassinate's regular damage to be +50% greater than a normal attack to make it match the cost/AP.


I did have another idea, but I discarded it as being pretty lousy and useless.

So basically, I don't really have any good ideas. How about you?

I personally think sneak should be disabled in combat completely, although I've been abusing it in my own solo runs.

First reason, is the combination of sneak and rain/contamination, the player gets to sneak while the enemies treat the player as if he is invisible and unable to locate the player, and die in poison zone eventually, I was able to beat the Dallis encounter at level 3 using this method and I didn't like the fact that I could do it.

Second reason, is that you can freely stall for cooldowns in sneak, you can kill an enemy on high ground, out of enemies' sight range, sneak, wait for all cds to be back up, go in again. I think, having only chameleon cloak as invis and stall method is a sweet spot, anything more is simply overkill.

As for guerrilla, can really just treat it like rest of the 10 bad talents that were never properly balanced, and assassinate as a combat opener, or make it so assassinate deals bonus damage when out of sight range of enemies, regardless of whether sneaking or not, and tune the bonus damage numbers as well the cd of the skill.

Both of those skills break Sneaking and have a short range, so clearly you're talking about NPC's and not enemies. The fix you want should be to the AI and coding of surface ownership. Although that might have been the case at one time and changed back because it unintentionally produced a lot of unwanted NPC hostility.

Additionally, it seems like exploiting that method to kill NPC's is a tedious, slow, boring way to play. That's punishment enough, and so I do not think it needs to be changed.




This is another tedious method, so again, I don't care and I don't think it needs to be changed. If someone wants to sabotage their own experience by doing this, they should feel free to go ahead.

Thank you for the example. Nerfing that is exactly, EXACTLY the kind of punishment which would hurt a lot of normal players just to stop a few compulsive cheesers. I am therefore not a fan of that approach.

No one is forcing you to cheese the game using Rain + Contaminate to kill peaceful NPC's, no one is forcing you to use Sneak to wait for cooldowns to expire. If you do not want to use those, then do not use them.




I kinda think that the 10 bad Talents should be properly balanced.

I'm not a big fan of Skills which are only useful as combat openers and are bad after the fight begins, which is why I consider Assassinate in its current state as bad and in need of change.




Hmmm... can you define what you mean by "out of sight range" of enemies? Do you just mean "outside the range of the vision cones for sneaking, or, as I suspect, do you mean "from the next county over, so far away that the enemy can't actually reach you without spending 8+ AP to move"?

Because if it is the latter, see my previous response about disliking skills which are not practical to use after combat starts.

But the original topic is to make combat stealth *useful* again, right? So we should *not* commit to the current philosophy, right?

I've stated my idea in another topic a while ago. I can't dig it back up now, so I'll just try to come up with an idea again here. My philosophy here is to totally redo this whole thing. Also, for now I'm just going to ignore the potential work that would have to go into AI/coding to actually implement the idea. I'm just going to let my "fantasy" go wild here.

New Rogue skill: Stealth. Could be tier 1 or 2 (up for debate). Costs 1 or 2 AP (up for debate). Requires at least x points in Scoundrel. This x should probably be high in order to prevent "so my whole team just like go stealth and backstab every one on the other team all day". Always succeeds when you're not in any enemy's sight. If you're in enemy vision, either you cannot enter stealth, or, your chance of successfully enter stealth depends on Scoundrel level (or Sneaking level - considering how Sneaking is not very useful at the moment in my opinion).

Cooldown? 2 turns? 3 turns? Or available every turn? Up for debate. This is easily adjusted depending on how OP this is going to be. Duration? 2 turns? Infinite (or until getting undone)? Up for debate.

That's a start. Next, how can you be "detected"? If any enemy's vision cone hits you, there could be some sort of comparison between their Wits/Perception against your Sneaking level to decide whether they will flush you out of stealth or not. Certain enemies, like dragons, or exceptionally perceptive enemies, will always be able to undo your stealth. Any offensive action will remove stealth, of course. Defensive actions won't.

Next, damage bonus. 100%? 150%? Probably depends on weapon types - daggers receive highest bonus, then it goes down from there, with 1H swords, 2H swords. Something like that. This will be on top of the usual critical bonus from Scoundrel. Or, we could just restrict this "backstab" thing to daggers like vanilla game. Otherwise we would probably have to rework the whole damage scale of every weapon type. By restricting it to daggers we'd only have to tone down dagger damage. Or, what we can do is to tone down the critical bonus from Scoundrel to compensate for this. Doing this also discourages the "everyone puts a bunch of points into Scoundrel no matter what class they are just to get huge critical damage". This makes Scoundrel more meant to be for an actual rogue character.

Now what kind of effects will remove Stealth, depends on how strict you want it to be. I don't think Wet should remove Stealth. But Burning should. Just taking one tick of damage probably shouldn't. AOE knockdown? Maybe not. OR, again, depends on your Sneaking level. We can make all these into a "DC check" kind of thing, instead of just making it either yeah or nay. Makes the whole mechanic deeper, and Sneaking more meaningful.

When you hit shift you can see the range the enemy can see if you normally go into stealth, that's what I meant by sight range.

And I'm talking about enemies, not friendly npcs, here is an album from my solo guide in general section, shows how I killed radeka by sneaking in combat.

https://imgur.com/a/HDPaO

This kind of strategy should not be allowed, you may say "just don't use it if you don't want to", but that's not the point of tactician difficulty. Tactician is meant to be HARD, and cheese like this should not be allowed, there are always lower difficulty for players who desire a more story driven experience. Tactician should be a difficulty where players actually have to think about positioning, efficient use of every action point, not simple brute force or cheese.

Nerfing this does not hurt normal players because they don't sneak in combat like you said anyway. And my point is that Tactician difficulty should live up to it's name, should be an accomplishment, not some mediocre difficulty people can easily cheese through.

Well, Larian should either commit to allowing Stealth in combat, or completely disallowing it. The half-assed approach just fails at both.

Some things point to Larian wanting Stealth to be an option, but they've made Sneak so weak that it's not actually a VIABLE option.




Interesting idea, although I don't really have any idea how I would balance that either.

I suppose I should post the other idea I had, the one which tries to make Sneak a viable option in combat. I abandoned it once I realized my numbers were bad, though.

The first thing to do is to reduce the AP cost of Sneak from 4 AP to 2 AP. This allows you to move away or to perform an action before Sneaking. I believe that it has to be 2 AP, 3 AP would still be too restrictive, 1 AP not restrictive enough.

The second part was to boost Guerrilla's damage modifier. Originally that was to go up only 10% to a total of +50%, and it would also allow you to Sneak at normal speed.

The third part, the really far-out, radical idea, was to remove the reduction in movement penalty from Sneak and instead add +5% damage per point to normal attacks made while Sneaking. This would stack with Guerrilla, so with Guerrilla and Sneak 2, you would get a bonus of +60% damage.

But I realized that I hadn't been thinking about the numbers correctly, as even Sneak 5 + Guerrilla would still give a bonus of 1.75x for the cost of 4 AP. It would be less than just using two normal attacks, and it would take until level 18 to get that high with natural points..

So I tossed the idea out.





Hmmm... that sounds like an okay-ish way to give Assassinate bonus damage. Could be something like distance from target increases damage by some amount per meter.

I'll have to try out a ranger in combat and see how that affects their sightlines before I decide.




What kind of nerf did you have in mind for that? It still seems like that combo is more about Contaminate being considered non-hostile.

My nerf suggestion would be either make it you can't sneak in combat at all, so enemies would detect the player eventually before they die to poison, or make it so contaminate only spread a limited amount of area covered, instead of going a mile away.

This first one is probably easier.

I'd rather discuss how "stealth" can be broken (by that I mean being undone) first. With how it is broken by nearly everything in combat, and outright negated by NPC vision, I don't really feel like discussing damage boost and all that. If you can't consistently and reliably maintain stealth, there isn't a whole lot of point in discussing things that are only meaningful when you have to be in stealth in the first place. Even with all the AP cost and damage tweaks, the whole thing would still be finicky at best. From my experience, the higher difficulty you're on, the more important "reliability" gets.

Reliability of Sneak is code and AI - that's something Larian will have to handle on their own, I can't really touch that part.

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Okay... so I'll start fresh, assuming that Stealth is something intended to be used in combat.

Attack + Attack = 4 AP.
Attack + Attack = 1.0x damage + 1.0x damage. = 2.0x damage.

I like the idea of moving Sneak to 2 AP - not too cheap, not too expensive. For the Guerrilla Talent to be worth using, it has to be a bit better than attacking normally.

Sneak + Attack = 4 AP.
Sneak + Attack > 2.0x damage.
So therefore, Guerrilla will need to be increased from 1.4x damage to at least 2.1 or 2.15x damage. That is the minimum modifier it will need to be better than not attacking twice normally.

It should also be changed to not work with Skills*, only normal attacks. Possibly it COULD work with special arrows and grenades, or maybe not. It depends.

* With possible exceptions for Assassinate and Mortal Blow, although Assassinate supposedly doesn't work with Guerrilla anyway.


There is an alternative change to Guerrilla, though. Instead change Guerrilla so that it ONLY works when the character is not in combat. And still you'd probably want to boost the damage substantially just because it's so situational.

User conclusion could then be it sucks to not use it, making it the same as disallowing it.

That's exactly what we have right now. That's the status quo. That's what I'm trying to solicit ideas on how to change with this thread.

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The problem Larian is having is that it's incredibly difficult to make an AI which can deal with a character who enters Sneak. With the AI too smart, Sneak becomes useless. Too dumb (the current problem) and the AI can't handle Sneaking characters, making it ripe for exploitation.

They do not WANT to disallow Sneaking in combat, but the way it is currently set up is to technically allow Sneak, but restricted and underpowered so much that it's not practical to use. They are trying to have it both ways.

Skills like Assassinate and Mortal Blow (or rather ONLY those two skills), and the talent Guerrilla, suggest that it is intentional to use Sneak for damage in combat.

But the exorbitant cost of Sneak at 4 AP completely undermines actually using Sneak. Assassinate would cost 7 AP to do 1.725x regular damage, but 2 regular attacks would cost 4 AP to do 2.0x regular damage. Guerrilla is even worse - 1.4x regular attack damage at a cost of 6 AP, when you can spend 6 AP to do 3.0x regular damage without it.

Even using Sneak for purely defensive purposes is sabotaged by the 4 AP cost. You can't get very far using only the Pawn to find a place to hide, nor does it do a lot of good since at 4 AP you can't heal or cast an armor boosting spell and still Sneak.


Larian doesn't want to forbid using Sneak in combat, but they only have three choices:

• Completely ignore the issue, leaving Sneak as useless, Guerrilla as nearly useless, and Assassinate as underpowered and broken because it requires using the useless Sneak,
• a radical revamp of how AI behaves which will take a lot of time and effort and still probably won't actually work right, or
• disable Sneak in combat and re-balance the associated skills and Talents based on that.

It's a lot of work to implement solid combat stealth. I've played Baldur's Gate a lot, and have messed with the codes too, so I have an idea what it's like if you want AI to use and counter stealth in a reasonably smart manner.

So I suppose we could just start with the popular "2 AP sneak". By default, you need Sneaking rank 5 to completely negate movement speed penalty, and I think that's alright. Then Guerilla deals 250% damage? These could certainly be starting changes - not too radical, and sounds reasonable to me.

What does Guerilla mean? Guerilla is warfare, where you launch small surprise attacks on you enemies, so he can hardly prepare and you get the advantage. So for me the purpose of Guerilla was always only something, which boost your first strike on the enemie and not something that buff infamous exploits like: sneak - attack - sneak - attack - seak

Just standing behind the enemie and being able to 'disappear' is just ridiculous unlogical as a concept.

In D:OS1 as a aero-rogue you had two stealth skills, that was all I needed. I never needed sneak and in late game I even hardly ever needed stealth either. But now I think there is only one stealth skill left and also combining stuff like aero and rogue gets kind of killed by the armor-system anyway.

D:OS has taught me many things, one of which is: never take things too literally. What you really care about is what it does. Heck, in this particular game, even after reading what it does, you should still take it with a grain of salt.


Yet that is exactly how stealth typically works: as long as you're out of sight, you can "enter shadow" - whatever the heck that means. The convention is: that is a special trick only a rogue can do.

The first is probably more because of the fact, that the devs hardly grasp all the consquences that follow their decisions.

I don't know all the P&P-games rule and how they changed over the years, but I guess. Standing half a meter behind an enemie will hardly count as being out of sight with a decent GameMaster, even more to just get another 'surprise' attack. Or at least you will have to make an extremely difficult dice roll, while in this game you don't need to roll anyway. Sneaking is like the armor system and CC, either it works or it does not.

To refer to an old P&P-joke: To backstabb with a ballista just because the rules did not disallow it.

Yeah, those changes seem to make sense to me. I suggested boosting Guerrilla to 210-215% base damage as the bare minimum to make it useful, but taking it up to 250% would probably be fine.

On the other hand, I'm also okay with Guerrilla being changed to explicitly only work for the first attack from outside of sneak, but it would still need a substantial damage boost to make it worth spending one of 5 Talent points for something which is so restricted in its use AND requires a lot of planning (and usually, reloading) to use properly.

However, I don't really think "it's not realistic to sneak when standing behind someone" is a great argument in this game where every third person on the street has super-powered "do anything magic". The realism ship sailed out and sank long ago. Gameplay balance is more important than strict realism.

And even the dumbest zombie knows all your weaknesses, so very true.

But sneaking itself breaks the balance in combat, aslong AI can't handle it.

Anyway I'm not against Guerilla stronger, combination with snipe or Source skills would automatically make it broken, if they could be combined probably.

Tbh, if we can adjust AI to take into account player stealth, that would be great. But if not, that's still ok. AI doesn't *have* to react to stealth in any specific manner, as long as we can keep stealth viable and rewarding without being broken. You know, as long as it "feels good" to do it.

Just for reference, in the Baldur's Gate games, backstab multiplier goes up to 500% for a normal rogue, and 700% for an Assassin. And they are not even turn-based. I mean, you can apply invisibility and instantly auto-attack in a fraction of a second which is faster than doing 2 auto-attacks. "Sneak + attack" is both faster and stronger than "attack + attack". But of course, in those games everyone and their dog have some counter-stealth capability especially during late game. What I'm trying to say is, there *should* be a clear-cut spike in your damage output when attacking from stealth. That's how it's supposed to work. At least in D:OS sneak/attack is only stronger, not faster, than attack/attack (we can make it so, I mean).

EDIT: I probably should have mentioned the 3000% multiplier in Skyrim... but then I probably shouldn't because Skyrim is... well, Skyrim.

I never really played Baldurs Gate I think. I once tried, but it did not work on my Laptop at the time properly, because it was to old and not optimized enough or something like that, so I stopped.

But anyway in Baldurs Gate it is class speciality, not everyone can do it and its compensates the otherwise low damage output of those rogue classes?

Anyway we must wary to not mix stuff up. Sneaking is hiding and not stealth. In D:OS stealth more about not getting attacked, but sneaking did quite the same making stealth kind of pointless. Even with a cost of 4 AP you probably can misuse it to solo fights. Glass-cannon, Lonewolf, all those give me some AP skills, deal tons of burst damage, go into sneaking, wait until all cooldowns are down, deal again ton of burst damage and go back into hiding, rince and repeat.