Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Suggestions for game improvements / harder difficu

First I'll start with a bug report:

If you are in multiplayer and listen to another player in dialogue during a 'ready check' between a load screen (typically acts), and you don't stop listening ot them before the load screen begins, you are forever stuck listening and can't cancel it - forcing you to reload a save.

AI improvements

1. Pathing is.. bad. AI will sometimes take a few steps before attacking a target they're right next to in melee, essentially just wasting AP for no reason at all. This is especially problematic when combined with...

2. Opportunity attacks. AI triggers opportunity attacks constantly and usually for no reason, sometimes even killing themselves as a result. They also will run around pointless with ruptured tendons on.

3. Attacking barrels. It's neat that they think to do it... but they often do it very pointlessly. If you wanted to abuse AI you could just drop water barrels next to yourself in each fight and they would waste AP breaking water barrels for no effect at all.

4. Avoiding hazardous terrain. If you throw oil down in a choke, the AI will often opt to just stand behind it going "Argh!" while you slowly murder them. AI really needs better decision making. They'll sometimes run through fire, but very rarely will they run through ice or oil.

5. Chameleon cloak. Enemies just end their turn without moving as soon as every enemy is invisible. To combat this maybe have them seek better positons on high ground, maybe give them more buffs like clear minded and haste, and definitely have them 'delay' their turn before ending it. I'd not suggest enemies using AoE to break stealth since it seems unfair for AI to do that since, well.. they know where you are. However, I think 'rain' is an exception since it's such a large AoE that I believe AI should use it to break stealth.

Ability balance

I won't be too long winded about this. Most abilities feel relatively balanced until you get to source abilities when the game becomes completely trivial. Necromancer may be the most remarked on for giant AoE auto win fights, but Aero thunderstorm is also autowin among some other source abilities. You then source vamp the corpses afterward and it really costs you nothing. When players can have 3 source (reliably) at the start of every fight they engage in, I really don't think source abilities should be as powerful as they are... or enemies in the later half of act 2 and all of act 3 should be balanced accordingly to account for the fact that every single fight they'll have to deal with giant AoE source abilities.

Item balance

Glowing idol of rebirth. Get rid of this item, please! Or make it so that it can't be recharged. Or make it so that when you come back to life it's only with 20% HP. Or make it so that crafting an ashen idol w/ a res scroll costs more than 1 AP. I know some people will say 'just don't use it if you think it's broken'... but I, and many others, like to use to tools available to us to their fullest potential to overcome great challenges. If players are asked to created their own challenges by intentinally gimping themselves and not using all of their tools, the satisfaction of overcoming those challenges is lost.

Harder Difficulty

I know some people think classic is hard, and some people think tactician is easy. I think tactician is well balanced until source is unlocked. I've played enough and learned the game well enough to trivialize it and breeze through no problem, without much AI abuse (but still a little, to be fair), but it's a well tuned mode. The second half of act 2 and act 3 all feel like a breeze when you can use 3 source points every fight, though. Anyway, I'd love to see a new ability mode that really challenges even the best of players who breeze through tactician.

The first think I would do is remove the 'flee combat' button. To run from combat, I believe you should actually have to space yourself far enough until combat drops. It's really not very far at all you have to get to achieve this, so it would be a welcome change. The 'flee combat' button lets you flee way too easily from any fight, that's not even to mention 'escapist'.

The second think I would do is give more enemies physical resist. Some have it, but very few do. All physical parties (aside from the very few evasion aura enemies which are easy to play around with things like teleport, glitter dust, spider legs, worm tremor and a few other abilities that remove dodge) there isn't any drawback at all to stacking physical. Meanwhile most enemies in the game have siginificant magic resist and many have immunities or will heal from certain elements. I'd like to see more tanky enemies have actualy physical resistances to encourage a more versatile party and as a result a more strategic approach to dealing with enemy compositions.

I also believe more enemies should have resiliance. It becomes common on boss type enemies later in the game, but I think on a 'death wish' difficulty level, most enemies should have it.... maybe even all. CC chaining enemies to death is just too easy. Act 3 gives enemies a ton of health... but it doesn't matter when they can't ever act.

These are just a few ideas I've had. Thanks for taking the time to read them. If you have anything to add in the way of making the game harder or what you would like to see in a new difficulty mode, please share!

P.S. I'd like to add that I adore divinity OS (both 1 and 2). Great job to everyone at larian, keep up the good work!

there's no reason to make things harder for everyone just because a handful of us find things too easy

if people want to use glowing idol, let them. i don't understand this part of your post:



this is markedly false. people make up their own challenges in gaming all the time (speedruns for example), and succeeding at these things is no less satisfying than any other achievement in video games. personally, i don't use glowing idol of rebirth and i don't use morning person either, mainly because i try not to die at all but also because they make a game i've beaten many times on its hardest difficulty a little too easy for my taste. however, none of this means the game needs to be changed

i do, however, support the idea of an even harder difficulty being added, and i think this forum is full of good ideas (many of which are outlined in your post) that could result in a really good extra challenging game mode. restricting certain things (glowing idol for example), adding more enemies, giving enemies access to more skills, etc. are all ways that could make already tough fights even tougher

tl;dr, i think your suggestions are good, but i don't agree with removing or nerfing things from the base game for the sake of difficulty. lots of people consider games like these a huge challenge, and removing the things that could give them the edge because some of us think they're too strong is ultimately unfair. on the other hand, removing or changing these things in an extra hard difficulty would work towards satisfying the players who find the game too easy, while not affecting players who find the game challenging as it is

I didn't suggest making tactician harder. I suggested adding in a new difficulty mode, just like they did with Divinity OS EE before this.

As far as challenge is conccerned, I just don't agree with you. Yes, some people can create their own benchmarks of challenge and it may work for them, but it doesn't for me. I won't speak for everyone, but I'm sure i'm not alone in feeling this way. If a shooter is too easy and people tell me "well just use knives or pistols to make it harder", that leaves me not feeling very good about the difficulty. I don't feel like i'm being genuinely challenged. I want the game to provide me with that. I want to use every tool available to win, as opposed to limiting myself to less tools to create an artifical challenge for myself.

because it wasn't clear enough - none of my suggestions were in regard to changing tactician mode. they're suggestions geared toward a new mode. (granted, the AI should be made better across all modes in terms of not killing themselves with opportunity attacks and such)

ah, sorry for misunderstanding

then yes, i like the ideas outlined in the OP. i think there are a lot of ways to increase difficulty that weren't explored much beyond bloating the vitality and armor values of enemies. a few extra skills, but not much else

I agree, we need a harder difficulty. Especially for the later acts.

Yes the first ACT is pretty tough on tactician, but once your squad is well equipped and midway into ACTII you can pretty much beat anything without fearing for your like like you do at the beginning of the game.

Its pretty easy to exploit the game mechanics once understood well, one because the AI is not that smart.

So, there needs to be another difficulty level that is pushed upwards a fair bit.

Thanks guys.

Larian was never that good at balancing. The first game had the same issue, that the late game got less and less challenging, probably because some skills are so game breaking strong, that you can't really balance the game. (Not to mention all the possibilities to cheese the fights)


You put 90% dodge aura on enemie to make combat more challenging, players teleports aura guy far away and the whole challenge is gone.


The first part of Act 1 is only so difficult, because AI has high stats and skills advantage.

Some boss-level enemies should be flat-out immune to hard cc's - or at least most of them. Perma-knocking down a dragon? C'mon. I charmed the *entire* enemy team in the end-game fight. Err... You'd think stuff like charm grenades or mind-maggot grenades shouldn't work on someone like Lucian (he's like, what, a demigod?).

The point of source abilities is to make you feel good, having godlike powers. So I can understand why they're so strong. But yes, they're too strong. I remembered testing out Thunderstorm and other 3- 4-source-point AoE abilities (playing on Tactician), and the first thing that came to my mind was I'd probably want to *avoid* using them.

In general, there are too many tools that are just too effective. They are powerful AND work all the time. One thing that limits our ability to nerf things, is that the only "resistance" in the game is resistance to flat damage. There's no such thing as "resistance to charm" or "resistance to being knocked down", or resistance to certain category of status effects. Imagine the Will/Fortitude/Reflex save system, or oldschool AD&D saving throw system. A challenging enemy in most cases means it's very hard to affect it with hostile effects. In DOS2 system, either stuff don't work (because of armor), or they work on EVERYONE, EVERY TIME.

So what can be done? I'm sure many have pointed out and discuss all this during the past year, but now that we're expecting the arrival of the Definitive Edition, I'm speaking my mind, not really because I hope the ideas would actually be implemented, but just for the sake of discussion.

- Nerfs. Duh. Seriously though, a lot of things could use a nerf. Maybe not a direct nerf, per se, but at least reduce their effectiveness by adjusting specific encounters so that they don't work, or at least not work on everyone.

- Giving enemies access to those powerful tools that you have. Given the context of the game, you'd think enemies should be the ones more likely to spam mind-maggot grenades, rather than your party. Many enemies can use source, so I don't see why they can't have access to some source abilities other than just Curse all day. You can buy skill books from store, why can't everyone else? Honestly, I would find it refreshing to see someone throw Thunderstorm or Closed Circuit at my party, rather than the other way around all game. One thing that made games like Baldur's Gate hard but fun, is that enemies have access to pretty much all the powerful spells/abilities, like you do. So a late game fight would be a high-level ability fest, which I find a lot more exciting than just enemies being on the receiving end all the time. This will likely make your party die a whole lot more, but hey, I had a wagon-full of Resurrection scrolls by the end of the game, which I ended up never using or even sellling.

- Not hesitating to let enemies "follow their own rules". This includes natural immunities to various stuff (hard cc's come to mind). If they are monsters, that's just their nature - sounds fine to me. Even in the case of the regular source hunters, they belong to an organization specially trained to combat source users, it would make sense if they have their own special techniques to train their members to be immune or at least highly resistant to harmful effects. So if I see an elite-level source hunter with natural immunity to charm, that sounds fine to me. Or special offensive abilities players don't have access to. Why not? This element does exist in the game, yes, like the natural aura some enemies have, but this is not nearly enough. Too trivial, even. We're agreed that these are easy to go around by just teleporting the enemies to that corner over there, or better yet, by charming them, so your party can enjoy the aura. What I'm talking about is hard cc's, which is the real problem. I'd like to see more enemies with resistance/immunity to hard cc's.

Anyway, considering the amount of useful/powerful tools that players have access to, the devs could definitely push it much further in terms of "making the game harder". So I'd definitely love to see one of two higher difficulty levels.

I'd much rather see enemies get buffed than players get nerfed. Increasing the challenge is always better than nerfing the tools that people have fun with and are used to. I *like* feeling like a god when I press thunderstorm and watch everyone get zapped. It's a really cool animation and I feel powerful. I don't want that to trivialize every fight, though, which it currently does. I want enemies to have powerful tools to combat me instead of just being lambs to the slaughter.

I think it would make sense to have enemies that are immune to hard CC, but could still suffer soft-CC sorts of debuffs like chilled, shocked and slowed. It might benefit the gameplay to add a few more debuffs that replace hard CC effects for enemies immune to them. IE: when you use battle stomp on an enemy immune to knockdown, instead of just saying 'immune' and doing nothing, they can be affected by an 'unsteady' debuff that slows their movement and reduces their accuracy slightly. Just an example ofc.

Hard CC is generally just not a fun mechanic in any game. The general rule, I think, is for any hard CC to have a short duration, not be spammable, and should hard to chain together. Divinity has most on short durations, but they're very much spammable and easy to chain together. I'd love to see 'perserverance' become a more powerful stat and I'd like to see enemies get significantly higher levels of it than they currently do. At a certain level of perserverance I'd like to see it offer one turn of immunity to hard CC upon proccing. IE: get up from knock down, you are now affected by the 'perservering' buff for one turn which makes you immune to all hard CC. Chain stunning is now gone, fights now become more challenging and feel less like one-sided snowballs.

I've also had a change of mind about chameleon cloak. If a player uses chameleon cloak, enemies should AoE the spot where the player was last spotted casting chameleon cloak imo. If the player moves at all, the AI should roll to randomly AoE areas in the area around where the player went invisible.

At first I thought that might feel a bit unfair, but if the AI is just randomly taking chance rolls, I think it's plenty fair. That's exactly what any human opponent would do.

I can understand why there are certain "strategies" that AI never goes for, or doesn't go too hard for. Things like "spamming mind maggots grenades", or spamming stealth/backstab, or mass hard cc's, etc. Chances are if AI abuses such moves, players will never have any chance to win, and it simply leads to unnecessary frustration (watching your entire party getting perma cc'ed to death without ever getting a turn).

Generally, I wish the combat had made used of more mechanics like inherent resistances to things, you know, the entire middle ground between "always works" and "flat-out doesn't". As well as counter-effects, on a more specific level. I wish to see other long-term protections against hostile effects. Something like "Indomitable" that grants immunity to being knocked-down, maybe for 2 or 3 turns. Sounds fair enough, I think. Or "Fearless", granting immunity to fear. The nice thing about these specific counters, is that if they exist, we have more freedom in giving enemies access to cc's, allowing them to use them more frequently. On the other hand, I find it completely agreeable to grant these specific immunities to elite/boss level enemies as permanent buff. And no they CANNOT be canceled out by the next affliction. To me, the fact that Clear-Minded is canceled out by the next mind affliction just doesn't make sense. As it is right now, armor counters everything. But once it's down, anything goes. I find it rather linear, and simplistic.

It would be nice if AI has decent reaction to stealth, but combat stealth has never been "a thing", so it wasn't much of a problem if AI simply forgets about someone who uses Chameleon Cloak. It was just never a big deal. Unless your entire party can use Chameleon Cloak, then we *might* have a problem. I might try this once the new edition is out.

There is now a skill, that will give you 'blessed smoke' cheaper than bless and smoke would be. As long as you reenter 'blessed smoke cloud' after fighting you are invis. So combat stealth got far to much of a thing, because your whole team can hide in such a cloud.

Also the boss fights kind of show the core issue with CC. In Tactician many bosses have so insane damage, if you don't get to CC them in turn one, they will upright murder your team one by one. At least in the early have of the game with bosses like Kniles or the deep dweller.


P. S.: If AI would use skills like 'Rain' it would be even more usefull against stealth, though that could make those skills completely useless.