Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General A discussion about armor and CC

I've been binging OS 2 again with some friends and have played numerous builds on tactician. The end result is the same - Act 1 provides a bit of a challenge, but act 2 becomes a breeze pretty quickly. Having played the first original sin a lot, I began reflecting on the changes to armor and specifically the way CC works between both games and what I like and don't like about it.

First, for those of you who didn't play the first OS, all CC and status effects had a random chance to be applied. There was no physical/magical armor. This made fights a lot more chaotic and less predictable, but it also made them more frustrating because you couldn't reliably be strategic. Think more in the vein of XCOM, but with 50% or less shots all the time. Didn't feel great.

At first I was really excited about the new armor system in OS 2. It entirely removed frustrating RNG, but brought with it its own set of problems. Those problems being that CC became WAY too powerful when it could be reliably applied. There also came the issue of magic/physical party compositions feeling awkward. They aren't bad, but they feel bad when you aren't very knowledgeable or experienced with the game yet. Because I'm now of the opinion that these comps are fine, especially with things like magic damage with effects blocked by physical, or the ability to alter your damage type with elemental arrowheads, crafting arrows, or using piercing damage... I think it's just another layer of strategy that I've come to appreciate.

Here's what I think needs to happen in a potential enhanced edition or divinity 3 - remove hard CC almost entirely. I like the new armor system a lot, I'd prefer to keep it, but I'd change certain effects. I'll give some examples.

Knockdown is no longer a condition. Instead, skills that caused knockdown now cause 'dazed'. Dazed reduces movement -25%, hit chance -25%, vision -50%, wits -5 (scales), and dodging -50%.

Stunned is no longer a condition. Instead, skills that cause stun now cause 'electrified'. -2 AP recovery, -2 start AP, Dodging -50%, earth resisistance +30% and air resistance -30%. Cannot recover magic armor.

Frozen remains a condition by name, but instead reduces movement speed -75%, dodging -75%, 30% increase fire resistance, 30% decreased water resistance, -20% decreased air resistance and all damage dealt is decreased by 35%.

and i'd probably just remove chicken form entirely (don't kill me)

Apply the same sort of logic to conditions like terrified, charmed and petrified. Instead of essentially being 'you are stunned, skip your turn', they each can provide a very powerful debuff but allows characters to engage in some sort of counter play instead of being removed from the equation entirely.

The idea is that you can still reliably apply powerful CC effects, but CC chaining doesn't make the fight a terribly one sided slaughter. (especially since enemies don't deploy CC chaining tactics). Hell, even thunderstorm alone trivializes every single fight on tactician. You cast it in a huge AoE and it instantly stuns any unit that isn't a boss or some mages... and it keeps them stunned for 3 turns.

At the end of the day something I've learned not just in divinity, but in many other games, is that hard CC must be handled with great care. Ideally it's sparse and it doesn't last long. It never feels fun to be removed from play or to have your turns skipped. Divinity OS didn't feel quite as bad in terms of CC because you couldn't reliably land CC and there were generally less hard CC abilities in the game. OS 2 introduced a lot of hard CC and fights are over the moment the enemies have their armor stripped. Health bars are almost meaningless.

I'd say that the new armor system was succesful, it's just that hard CC is too abundant and could be revisited. The values/conditions I used are just examples. I'm not a game designer, so take them as just that - examples.

What do you guys think about hard CC and the armor system in OS 2?

There were so many topics about this topic since start of EA, I will just quote myself:

The armor system is hot garbage. My opinion is no different. It won't be a year from now either.

How exactly does it suck?

1. It doesn't solve the problem of CC chains at all. In fact it makes it worse.
2. It forces a particular approach to the game by making you pile on the same type of damage.
3. It forces you to pile on the same target.
4. It makes it so going up 1 or 2 levels above you is almost always death.
5. It makes tactician REALLY suck. Not in fun ways. More like I don't have another weekend to reroll A1-4.
6. It makes a lot of builds pointless. Want to go retribution? Have fun when your enemy is a sponge.
7. I could go on but what's the point?

A better system would have been to add a tolerance meter that increases the chance of CC effects the lower it is but never 100% and never 0%. Base chance to land CC on a target at full tolerance would be 25%. Then as tolerance is reduced CC chance goes up. To 75% at 0 tolerance. Tolerance would be reduced by damage and would apply after resistances. A character with 75% physical resistance would mitigate 75 of 100 damage and that 25 damage would be applied to health. Whatever percentage of it's health that hit was would also be removed from tolerance. Then once tolerance is gone CC has a 75% chance to succeed.

That system would have fixed the problem intended to be fixed. It would not punish someone for playing hybrids and wouldn't make tactician so boring.

I remember there was a mod for the first game, that prevented enemies from getting cc'd multiple turns in a row.
Aside from that, I feel like the best way to do this would just reduce the amount of ways to apply hard cc as already suggested. Or at least add multiple steps to it, like you currently have with shocked into stunned. As well as reduce damage on abilities that inflict CC, so you have to decide between damage and CC.
As for making it RNG based again, I'd rather not bet my Honour Mode game on chance.

Agreed, I really don't like the RNG based CC in a strategy game. I do like chilled -> frozen and shocked -> stunned progression and casters have always felt a bit more challenging to get good CC chains on, or at least forced you to use consumables in a clever way. Physical comps are insanely easy to just battering ram/battle stomp/chicken claw CC chain everything to death. Granted, it's not very hard with magic comps either. I like the progression based CC a lot, but CC chaining is a problem because hard CC that makes the enemy do nothing but skip their turn is a problem when it can be constantly reapplied. The way I see it the answer lies in a balance of the following

1) Applying CC is more difficult, but still not RNG based. This may mean an additional stage from shocked to stunned and soforth.

2) Enemies become resistant to hard CC after being affected by it once, perhaps granting them a round of immunity to stunned/frozen/knockdown. Perhaps ties this in with the perserverance skill to make it more appealing?