Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Larian Studios , please read.

First of all, I want to say that I have now become a Larian fan for life!
Divinity Original Sin 2 is truly an amazing game!
So far I've racked up close to 200 hours playing on multiple saves, I have got into modding it quite a bit, and every few days I look up news and read what people are saying about it..

I've read countless articles, opinions, forum posts, etc, and the biggest complaint I keep seeing consistently has to do with the armor system. Dont get me wrong not everyone dislikes it, but on the other hand there are those that would like to see the whole system scrapped, and I have seen a few mods that do just that by various means.. Now I have thought about this for quite a while, and personally, I really do like the armor system.. but, and I mean no disrespect, I do think where it suffers is the implementation of the system. Please hear me out...

The main reason why there are those that want to see the armor system deleted, is the fact that it creates an allurement to make your entire party do either physical or magical damage as to be as efficient as possible in breaking through your enemies armor so that you may then damage their vitality. It is for this simple reason that many feel that their creativity is severely hindered in creating the party they truly want, so they blame the armor system.. I'm getting to my point now, please stick with me..

What I propose, is a slight change to the system that can radically effect the enjoyment of the game for many and what I feel really makes the most sense. I know the games already out, and as good as it is, (seriously one of the best games I've ever played!), nothing in this world is perfect, and... if its too much work, maybe consider it when creating... your next game?

OK HERE IT IS, the one simple change that can make the armor system awesome is to...
MAKE THE ARMOR STACK

MAGIC ARMOR > PHYSICAL ARMOR > VITALITY > DEATH

When looking at it from a common sense perspective, whether you have physical armor or magic armor, either way you should be protected from harm. Just like the base game, when all armor is depleted you should take instant damage from any hit that connects, so this stays the same. After your base Vitality your first layer of defense should then be Physical Armor.. its easier to obtain .. on top of your Physical Armor should then by your Magic Armor any and all buffs to help keep you alive and keep your Vitality and Physical Armor from being destroyed. Not to say that every enemy you come across needs to have both types of armor, but if they do, this is the way it should be layered imo.

Ill admit a few additional things would have to be altered such as, for example, Shields Up, should only restore Physical Armor to not make it too OP, all Magic and Physical Armor skills would need to be adjusted a bit probably, and overall... Vitality, Physical Armor and Magic Armor stats would all need to be lowered a bit to compensate for having to destroy both types of armor instead of just one. Maybe there could even be skills that can pierce through magic armor to destroy physical armor as to not leave your physical attackers useless when magic armor is still up..

Any opinions on this are welcome.. maybe I left something out? Maybe my idea sucks? Let me know what you all think.. especially you, Larian Studios

I apologize for the long winded post but I do very much appreciate your time and any and all of your (respectful) opinions!

~Sir Atomos~

Further explanation,(Your Questions Answered):


I would imagine statuses would still be applied the same way they do now.. though with small modifications to what gets blocked.. magic negated statuses for the most part would stay the same maybe even bumping up a few of the normally blocked by physical statuses to the magic level, and maybe a few more statuses that maybe cannot be blocked at all..


Well the idea is to create an environment in which a split party is viable.. although it also needs to be versatile in respect to one character, one damage type, players. I apologize, as I guess I did need to get a little more in depth with my explanation as I omitted a few of the finer details in getting my point across.. but, it makes sense to me that Magic should actually damage Physical armor and Physical attacks should damage Magic armor, although at about half the damage rate, maybe less.. There could be more magic buffs to weapons made available, making your weapon do Magic Damage for an amount of turns for example.. or as I stated already.. maybe making certain skills pierce through armor types altogether..

Edited by Sir Atomos (Yesterday at 09:49 AM)
Edit Reason: Added questions I was asked to a previously empty post I tried to delete..:)

Well... I get the meaning--that's important.

I pretty much think that the armour system simplifies the way the game plays far too much. In addition, you have the skewed and quite limited character creation and progression. Any change to something more complex is welcomed, to be honest.

Like your idea--having a sort of Protoss shield on top of your regular armour? Why not? What about statuses, though? How are those gonna get applied?

But at this point-and I've said that before-they're better off just doing patches on OS2 and focus big time on the next big project. OS2 also has lore and story issues, where the game not only conflicts with other games from the Divinity franchise, the previous Original Sin game, but also leaves quite a few questions when observing it on its own.

Furthermore, the great multiplayer aspect, unfortunately, attracts far too many 'zmog, I liek big crits;I do dmg!' type of people...but that is more a product of the already mentioned issues.

Cheers...if you want to play online sometime, gimme a shout.

This kind of sounds more, like it would make the issue even worse. What exactly happens when physical damge hits magical armor or the other way around?

My suggestions would be still, combine both kinds of armor. If you carry mainly heavy armor pieces your armor is more vulnerable to magical damage, if you carry mainly light armor the armor is more vulnerable to physical damage. If you carry mainly leather, none is more effective, but the armor amount in total is less high. Or the 'type' gets defined by the body part of the armor.

I would imagine statuses would still be applied the same way they do now.. though with small modifications to what gets blocked.. magic negated statuses for the most part would stay the same maybe even bumping up a few of the normally blocked by physical statuses to the magic level, and maybe a few more statuses that maybe cannot be blocked at all..


Well the idea is to create an environment in which a split party is viable.. although it also needs to be versatile in respect to one character, one damage type partys. I apologize, as I guess I did need to get a little more in depth with my explanation as I omitted a few of the finer details in getting my point across.. but, it makes sense to me that Magic should actually damage Physical armor and Physical attacks should damage Magic armor, although at about half the damage rate, maybe less.. There could be more magic buffs to weapons made available, making your weapon do Magic Damage for an amount of turns for example.. or as I stated already.. maybe making certain skills pierce through armor types altogether..

There is a lot of things that could be done to add to this idea honestly.. I will admit I don't have everything figured out at the moment and would have to leave some of the details to Larian, it is their game of course lol

The armor system took some getting used to for me as well, but now, after having played a few hundred hours, I grew quite fond of it. To me the distiction between physical and magic armor adds more depth to the combat system, just as the terrain interaction capabilities, the teleport skills, the elemental interactions, etc. It plays its part in combat not becoming mindless bashing, which is certainly the case in many other RPGs. Well, at least not in the first half of the game, anyway.

So on the contrary, I'd say the armor system is a nice unique idea, and it makes you think during combat. Which to me is outright positive.

I totally agree with you! As I said, I personally really do like the armor system, even as it is. I'm only saying that many people do not feel the same way.. All over the internet I find people bashing it, (that is not what I'm here to do at all).. and as it seems to be everyones biggest complaint.. I'm only suggesting that it be altered a bit to keep from everyone feeling like they have to make a completely physical damage or completely magic damage party to be efficient..

I think the reason why so many players opposed it at first was the fact that it was different from the previous games.

However, on the effectiveness of party composition: no, it should rather mean that you need a mixed party to be the most efficient given that most opponents have either huge physical or huge magic armor but apart from bosses seldom both. So you'd have to focus on different opponents with your physical and magical characters.
The reason why an all physical party would trump this though is due to magic resistances (from mid-game on opponents will regularly have 20-40% resistance to each element unless they're completely immune to it).

An all magic dealing party is definitely the weakest of all compositions in the current game. However, it offers a special challenge

How exactly was the combat system in D:OS2 mindless bashing? Enemies had magical and phyiscal resistances, they had high willpower or high body building, they had immunities and of course stuff like dodge and block. In D:OS1 you had to examine enemies, now I most of the time don't even bother, because physical damage has hardly anything to care about anyway.

Now, going physical turns into mindless bashing, just take down enemie physical armor and then you can perma-cc them at ease. Every battle as sooner or later a doom zone, a zone were you group all those enemies without physical armor and have them knocked down every turn, in our case by either the warrior or the rogue. They don't even need to deal damage, because CC is pretty much garantued as long they have no chance of dodging. Our only high damage character is our archer, warrior and even the rogue don't even get close to her damage output.

And playing magical just does not feel any kind of satisfying anymore. Playing full magical is not a challenge, it is more a chore or selfpunishment.

I do believe he was actually stating the opposite..

Indeed

I see, though for me and my friend the armor system turned the combat more into mindless bashing, even more compared to the first.

Yeah I don't like the system you've proposed... I understand that it isn't perfect and nice thinking to attempt to find a solution but I don't think it is the way to go.

First of all, how the system is designed is that they do not want to rely on "luck" ...or "dice throwing" like D&D. If they would go this way, then a new system could take place. In the mean time, since they don't rely on luck (beside Critical Chance which might be the only value...and damage which is rarely significant), they have to rely on concrete data.
Either you have one armor for everything, although it defies different build and game play style... by allowing magic armor and physical armor, they can offer different combat strategy... enemies with more of a kind and less of the other which give you option to focus on one or the other...etc

After all the biggest problem is the CCed effect which everybody loves or hates...because as soon as something is CCed, the AI is almost out of combat. For a player if your team is built properly, you would have counter CC effect. The problem is when you cannot play any character who would have the counter effect before the character that is being CCed...
Argument could be made to push a CCed character at the end of that round to allow other teammate to remove the effect....which I've proposed a while back....but it could also mean that the said character could end up playing almost twice in a row...being last and first of the next round...

Maybe It would be nice that some CC effect simply make character lose AP instead of being unusable... lose 2 AP for 2 rounds might be better than lose one turn... even though you can find similarities in those movement impairing effect...

So by removing as much as possible luck from combat and allowing more of a "chessboard" type of play where everything is defined, you have to live with the downside that comes with it...

After all, finding the proper way to CC and the proper enemy to apply it to, many times end up being the reason you win or lose a fight...

The core issue is, not everyone wants a 'chessboard'. Some people prefer the risk, to have uncertainties. Without those combat is just to predictable. Hardly any situation where you have to adapt. But this will always be a matter of opinion.

The current armor system counterdicts the core feature of the game: cross classing. Therefore would be my solution, fuse armor to one layer of armor. If the body armor is heavy, you are vulnerable to magic, if it is light you are more vulnerable to physical, if it is leather, armor will be slightly lower but you will have no vulnerabilities. Because with current system you can't focus a target with everyone without having to grind through two different layers of armor and without having elemental effects as pretty wasted of physical damage sources. Though there are many other suggestions to fix this issue, so my suggestion is only one of many.


Regarding intiative: Just scrap it completely, it is already screwed by the round-robin system anyway. Just keep the round-robin system and let the players decide in which order they want their characters to act. Pretty common in turnbased games any and you don't need this joke of initiative system.

I think that idea just changes the meta from "4 Physical attackers are always the best" to "2/2 Physical/Magical attackers are always the best". It does not change the issue of one composition to rule them all, it only changes what composition is the ideal one.

It is actually worse than the current system. In the current system, 2/2 is completely viable, even if it isn't the optimum. In your system, now ONLY 2/2 is viable - 4/0 or 0/4 is now useless because there's still a layer of armor you'll NEVER be able to penetrate.

By the way, stacking both armor types would not in any way be a "slight" change. You're now increasing effective enemy health by a large amount. A HUGE amount, which completely changes the combat balance of the entire game.

Even if you do "magical does half damage to other types", that's still not enough to fix the problem of stacking armor.

I did at one point have a suggestion which was that attacks do 70% of their damage type to that type of armor, and 30% to the other type of armor. I feel that 70% is the sweet spot between only doing minor damage to the opposite armor, and not doing enough damage to the same type of armor.

Example: a 100 P.damage hit from a mace on a target with 300/200 P/M armor would leave the enemy with 230/170 P/M armor.
A follow-up 100 M.Damage lighting bolt on that enemy (0 air resistance) would leave that enemy with 200/100 P/M armor.




Um, that's how armor already works. Heavy armor (STR) gives you lots of physical but little magical, light (INT) gives lots of magical and little physical, medium/leather (FIN) gives some of both, but less than either of the other types.

I'm talking about only one 'amor bar' not two, that is the difference.

You want only one armor bar, but to keep the differentiation between physical and magical damage? How would you give feedback to the player about relative effectiveness of different damage types?

The new system is fine as it is. Leave it alone.
In the first game willpower and body building was terrible, reliying on a percentage to win or loose a fight isnt good for a strategy Rpg. Not to mention, the way you got rid of certain effects was ridiculous.
People say that 2/2 compositions are unviable, and ill have to disagre with that statement.If you go 2/2 the best idea during a fight is to distribute dmg depending on the amount of armor each enemy have rather than focusing on the weakest of the bunch, there are plenty of fight where enemies will have a ton of physicall armor and magic armor. Not to mention there are a ton of spells that deal piercing dmg, spells that destroy magic armor that scale on finese, summoning skils that dont scale on atributtes and necromancy skills that deal physicall dmg that scale on intelegence,and that is without mentioning elemental granades and arrows that you can buy and craft.

They could make it so armor doesn't completely blocks a damage. Like, in a sense an armor is supposed to reduce the damage you take, like "toughness". They can make it so if you have magical armor, you lose a small amount of HP from magic damage while also depletes armor, but you take a lot more health damage from physical or something of that nature.

Maybe some for CC, if you have armor, you take like...a "pre" CC status, like "shocked" is for stun. So cold for frozen, "fragile" for knockdowns, and stuff like that. So you have armor, get a "pre" CC status, then you have to get hit by that same CC effect to actually knock you down. Maybe if the second hit doesnt break armor either, it can have a reduce duration, so 2 -> 1 turn.

We are not saying they are unplayable, we are saying they are underwhelming. At least in the first half of the game physical easily outdamage magical damage, because magic damage mainly depends on level and early on the damage per level is low. Later on it might change because of Source skills, but many of them seem to be by definition kind of gamebreaking by themselves. My friend and I never got that far, because fights were already to boring an repetative, so that he lost interest in playing.


How to show what kind of affinity their Armor-bar has? Pretty simple, just change color of the armor bar accordingly. There are already two colors for magical and physical armor, so you would just need a third color for the 'neutral' state.