Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Late to the DOS2 party, 30hrs in now.

To preface this. I've just finished my first co-op run through of D:OS1 with a friend and it was an absolute blast, probably the most fun I've had in a game in a long long time, though it took a very extended amount of time to finish due to our schedule differences.

I'm rather late to D:OS2 and have only just started my own playthrough in the last month, and while I've been enjoying the improved characters, writing, and more concise dialogue, the gameplay itself has been truly suffering.

In D:OS1, my friend and I went wizard plus ranger while rotating out companions based on our needs, and battles were always dynamic and interesting with all the abilities and spells we had. We could stage an ambush and make enemies run through a gauntlet of fire, we could set up an ice field to give them the slip, we could make it rain and taze all of them, we could even set up an ice prison, teleport enemies inside, and charm them to make them cagefight each other. It was absolutely hilarious with all the combat options we had, and it made battles equally interesting and challenging when the AI turned the tables on us by using those spells forcing us to think on our feet to adapt to the new unpredictable situations where half our party is unexpectedly incapacitated or even hostile towards us.

D:OS2 on the other hand has been completely sterile. With the addition of magic and physical armor that prevent any and all statuses, the combat in the first half of any battle has been completely reduced to a 1980's style hack and slash arcade game. And afterwards? Sure there's lots of statuses you could apply after their armor is gone, but why would you want to use the vast majority of them when you can stun them permanently? The last half of every battle is just beating dead horses that can't fight back. All the interesting mechanics and options have been completely neutered. Sure, I could attempt to play the game the way I did D:OS1, but then that leads to substantially more difficult fights with the increased difficulty in D:OS2, because the AI abuses the new system like no tomorrow. The way combat works now, it forces you to play a very specific style, regardless of how tedious or uninteresting it is, or you'll be heavily handicapping yourself. The entirety of combat in the game has been reduced to hack and slash their armor, stun, hack and slash until they die, and if you dare stray from the formula, you're punished for it.

I can't for the life of me understand how a sequel from the exact same developer released mere years after the original could have fallen so far from their previous masterpiece. D:OS1 is one of the only RPGs to truly implement a combat system where battlefield conditions could be manipulated and become an integral part of combat, yet D:OS2 throws all those mechanics out the window and makes them useless.

Let me take a step back for a moment to give a background on my perspective. I've actually played the aforementioned 1980's hack and slash arcade games, and am admittedly old enough that those were the flagship games at the time I played them. I've since dabbled in every genre and especially enjoyed RPGs, from Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Diablo, NWN, TES, if there's an RPG of any prominence, I've probably played it, and I've completely enjoyed all of them. Also as a completionist, I tend to progress slowly as I stop to read most things I find and absorb as much of the game world as possible. And that brings me back to my current situation, 30 hours in, struggling to force myself to go any further, and having to make a hard decision. For the first time in my life, I'm going to use Cheat Engine in an RPG. That's how utterly abysmal the combat system is. It's so mindless and uninteresting, I just want to completely blow through it and bypass it altogether, because as much as I love the story and characters, I absolutely loathe the combat system. Is the combat more in depth than a 1980's hack and slash? Obviously. But to regress this far and this hard after D:OS1, it's shocking. I have never been so disappointed in an RPG in my entire life and it's truly saddening.

To append my opening post, imagine if the D:OS2 combat system were transplanted to something like Fallout. You have all the options you did in Fallout with targeting, but the game now makes enemies always shoot you in the arm and cripple you, a death sentence. The only viable solution? You always have to shoot the enemy in the arm first to cripple them instead. After you cripple them, they're just walking targets. All combat is reduced to an arm shooting contest, and this then repeats for the entire game and you are not allowed to change the formula. Fun and freedom as it were, is a punishable offense.

That's the long and short of it. You could try out some of the mods on nexusmods. There's at least one, if I'm not mistaken, that changes the armor system to a "resistance-based" one, more or less.

Sadly, that is what we feel since the Early Access and what I am trying to point out. It is also why we stopped playing halfway through, because most fights kind of went the same way. My friend does not like mods, so they are not really an option.

It sounds like you are only using basic attacks or staff of magus until all enemy armor is gone. It's actually better to use more powerful attacks at first to get enemy armor down, because the cooldowns will have expired by the time the armor is gone and you can use them again. Only using basic attacks until armor is gone just makes the fights drag on for much longer.

I realize that won't solve all your issues with the combat system, and it does have many, but it would make the fights less boring if you don't hold back on skills until armor is gone.

If you use skill or attack does not make a huge difference. The first half is always grinding down armor, second half is keeping them in perma cc, byplacing them into, what I call: the 'valley of doom'.

In our setup we mainly had an archer grinding down the armor and we had a multiclass scoundrel and a warrior applying knockdown each turn with Battlestomp or Battering Ram.

Many damaging skills can hit multiple targets. A basic attack or Staff of Magus hits only one enemy at a time. If you take that into account, there's definitely going to be a difference.

are we playing the same video game

It's meant in the meaning of: you still have to grind the armor down first.

Though standard attacks from our archer outdamaged many skills as far as I remember.

Of course you need to get the armor down first. My point was that using skills is probably a faster way to get the most armor destroyed the quickest than normal attacks, taking into account many skills hitting more than one target, and single-target skills usually dealing 100% of regular damage or more.




Most Huntsman skills do at least 100% of ranged damage. Ricochet does 90% of basic damage to 1-3 targets, which is more than 100% on one target. Barrage does 60% * 3, which is more than 100% on one target. The other notable exception is Arrow Spray, which fires 16 arrows at 0.4x damage per arrow.

If you meant compared to every skill in the game. I'm not going to go through the entire list of skills.

Basically i agree with the combat being good and bad at the same time.
I've enjoyed most of the gameplay in Dos2 but when i am able to execute a dragon with my lvl 8 party
in act 1 perma CC i do find it " Kinda " sad. but maybe that's just me ?

Maybe its also a tad odd, that its not chance based instead of value based.
I really dont like that i do a knockdown skill like earthquake and he still has 1 piece of armor left, meaning nothing will happen. So the post is truthfull in my opinion.

There's a total counter to the OP's argument and the reason why it was changed. The best answer is, the mods are super simple to install and you have choices to totally alter this back to being more like DOS1.