Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Speculative. Almost Entirely for Fun. Armour.

Get a load of that. I can't remember what it was that got me thinking about it, but there I was drinking coffee in the morning and going through Original Sin 2 combat out of all things.

So, we are all familiar with the armour system by now.

What if instead of armour as a number that protects you from CC until it runs out, it was a number of status protection points that a character can take before he receives the status attached to an attack. You do get all the various physical/magical/cc resistances, but in addition you also get this number and still receive damage based on resistances, but do not get cc'd until the points run out. Certain specializations, weapons, armours, shields, items, perks and talents give you more of these points or reduce them. For instance, a shield oriented character without opportunist can withstand more hits than a shield oriented character with opportunist perk, who in turn can withstand more hits than a two handed oriented character, all the way down to a two handed character with opportunist, who can withstand the least out of all. Daggers will have high damage reduction bypass, high crit but will not deplete status protection points and will have low/mid AP usage. One handed swords will have low status protection point depletion, low damage reduction, high crit, medium AP usage. One handed axes will have medium status protection point depletion, low crit, medium to high damage reduction bypass and medium AP usage. And so on and so forth for all the weapons. Magic status protection points could work the same way. Your basic wand and staff attack can get a boost, but will not deplete status protection points, while there could be all sorts of spells that are set on the spectrum of AP usage, damage reduction penetration, status protection point depletion, applied statuses and pure damage. Mixed magic and physical damage can be scarce, not scaling very well, but with the added advantage of being able to knock both physical and magical status protection points. Could be 10 to 15 points, going as low as 5 or as high as 20; some weapons/skills being able to knock 5/6 others 3/4, ect. Also, I think more numerical AP are needed to represent actions for the game, as it will allow for greater variety/ balancing.

Just a wacky idea that came by for a round of coffee. Enjoy.

I think, we already had similar suggestion regarding a rework of the armour system, though not with influence of through skill trees. We have huge discussions regarding this topic buried somewhere in this forum.

But devs will hardly react to it anyway.

At this point I am more having fun than expecting any dev to reply to this. OS2 systems are way too simplified and tells the story of where their priorities were when they were developing. While I know a lot of people liked the game, personally, I would prefer a more complex system of interaction. Not saying it will or that it should happen. There are games out there already that provide that.

Because most people don't want to me write about those issues anymore.

Unfortunately I believe posting these issues is a pointless exercise. There isn't much a chance Larian will fix them except with an Enhanced Edition, as save game compatibility is a pretty important thing.
I do fully, 100% agree though which is why I'm developing an extensive overhaul for combat and character progression (can be found in Projects in Progress). I'll probably post another update in the next few days on it with my progress.

Overall DOS2 has been relatively disappointing to me compared to DOS1, but just know that work is being done to fix these issues.

As far as your idea for the armor system, Yasen, if I'm understanding it correctly (Not to be harsh, but paragraphs/periods/commas go a long way, so I may not be..) it was actually one of the first systems I had thought about when thinking of a better way to handle statuses. I dismissed it pretty quickly as it felt relatively unintuitive and has most of the same issues the current armor system has.

The armor system is a mistake. Larian missed the point why players using CC and debuff in the first place.

If players can kill certain monsters easily, then there is no need to use any debuff of CC skills. CC and debuff are used as an alternative to weaken the enemies when it is impossible to eliminate the threat as fast as possible. By tying the ability of debuff and CC with the ability of doing damage, there is no choices in tactics and character builds, high damage output trumps everything.

Armor needs to go away and replaced by something better. A system where the ability of CC and debuff is not dictated by damage output

No, not at all, man.

I did type it all in a bit of a hurry, so it is my bad if it is coming across as cryptic.

Ultimately, having some sort of protection against statuses is not that much of an unintuitive gimmick. In turn based combat statuses have a much larger impact compared to real time. That makes balancing in turn based a lot more finicky and difficult to nail, in my opinion. For these reasons I think a more complex system is needed.

I remember reading a post about a modder who wanted to do a very huge overhaul on OS2 combat. Perchance, it was you ? I really don't remember who it was, but my apologies if it was you. I don't want you to think I am trying to rip a page from your book. I am not a modder anyways.

But ultimately, this is a half-serious post.

Way I see it, they don't want you to not post. They were just getting a bit tired with you repeating yourself.

But anyways. The cat is out of the bag. OS2 is a bite too large for Larian to chew.

It is pretty hard to not repeat yourself, because people again and again make topics about the same topics and Larian might do something with their patches, but the core flaws of the game are remaining untouched.

Optics and voiced gameplay are nice, but honestly I did not want DOS2 for either of those. I wanted it for its combat, the most important thing in a game that mainly is about combat and it totally fails there in my eyes. At least for anyone who is less casual.

No, I hear you man. I agree that a lot of resources were allocated to things that do not bring forward challenge.

On the bright side, I've learned to have fun when somebody posts an angry thread on steam saying stuff like: 'Alice Aliscon is so imba. I lost my for honour run because of her.' When pretty much herself and a few other exceptions are just about the only truly exciting stuff around.