Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Combat in Alpha

I'm having trouble exploring the game because I keep dying in every combat. After I reach the city and talk to the wizard and the captain who's in charge of solving the murder, I ventured out of town.

Every combat I've gotten in, I've died. I know combat is still not balanced, but I'm wondering how's everyone dealing with this. I'm running a fighter and a mage.

Only time I had trouble with the same combo is when I ran into mobs that were over my level.

Which direction did you go? The northern section is full of low level enemies that should be appropriate to fight, north east has level 5 enemies. I haven't ventured too far to the south or east yet.

Right now, I'm finding the combat too easy.

I went west and ran into a group of orcs who one shotted me. I couldn't go east because it was blocked(?). Haven't tried north yet.

Those orcs are a pretty high level for the start. However, if you do get to a level to take them on do not try to go into the cave past them. Every time I try to go in the cave I get a black screen of death.

If those orcs aren't going to get rebalanced it seems like there needs to be some warning that they are so high level. I don't know if I'm missing some interface element that warns of this, I think that's probably the best solution but if so it's probably worthy of a tutorial pop-up.

Rack: I'm not at all like you. I love not knowing if an enemy is high-level or not. Also, this game has a runaway-button, so unless they one-shot you, at least you have the chance of surviving. Else, it's the ye olde reload that needs to be done.

They did one-shot me, so I was taken back to the last time I saved which since it's an alpha was relatively recently. I'm not a fan of that kind of design though because it creates the impetus

"I'm entering a new area, I should save my game"

which immediately wrecks my suspension of disbelief. Worse still it punishes me for getting immersed in the game and forgetting to save.

I'm curious what it is about not knowing how powerful enemies are that you enjoy? Is it the randomly being one-shotted for exploring, or is it that when you start a combat encounter you don't know if you should stand your ground and fight, whether you need to expend additional resources or whether you may be forced to run? If it's the latter then how would you feel about a system that let you know roughly how powerful enemies were? Something like a 3 tier system, "Trivial", "Potentially challenging", "Run now and don't look back!"

Beyond that if it's not part of the interface it would be nice if there was some other way of knowing how powerful the enemies were. I'd just easily taken apart the orcs in the scripted encounter with no difficulties at all, it looked like this was an appropriate challenge for my characters. Someone should probably have said "Stand back you mad fool, you may be a Source Hunter but these orcs are not like the weaklings you fought at the beach."

Rack: You make a valid case for some kind of warning system, to be sure!

I think, I love the surprise and challenge of it all (like when I played BG1 the first time, and was just annihilated by those pesky ankhegs in some random field).

Saving often doesn't break immersion much for me, but floating bars indicating hps/health do, not to mention info on level, strength damage, etc.

Still, a system that indicates the power of an enemy could be working for me if it was like story-based - like having your companion whisper: "Those orcs look awfully menacing!" "That magical sword will shred us, stay away from it.", etc.

Essentially, if you do delve into the game, you could get clues that there are particularly strong orcs ahead, for instance. I think Divine Divinity had this in the starting town. But ideally I'd like to think of every encounter as potentially über-deadly and our very last.

There is a system that tells you the level of enemies. It's right next to their name. You have to have a high enough intelligence to see it though, are you leading with your low intelligence fighter as your character selected?

I believe there was a trait that provided this information as well.

@Indira Funny you mention some sort of ingame indication, since DOS actually has this. Before you encounter the group of orcs on the beach, the character have a conversation about the size of the footprints and how they will probably belong to someting very powerfull.

Take a few points in Loremaster and you if you have the charater with Loremaster active you will know who your enemy is. You cant expect from a lv 1 warrior to know everything about lv3 skeletons.

To the combat:

It's far to easy if you are on the same lv as enemys this can be the casual mode but not the normal mode. Range combat is cool, but mulltishot is too strong and splitting arrow doesnt hit one enemy. Whats bothering me is that you need the same amount of action points for a skill and with a "normal" crossbowattack

The bestcombat is with the mage. It's pure fun but not very challenging. Everything dies after 1 Fireball when you have pyromancer an 10+4 points in Firemage.

My Problem is, I must use only "range figthers" to survive.
I start over with an bow-woman and warrior but this was a hard selection.

The way to the City is possible, but I which, there was some sort oft automatic healing without potions and spells.

When starting without wizzard its not simple to use all your potions... if you dont know what is after the next Corner!
So a maybe slow rescurection maybe nice.

The bigger problem is the enemies hit all figthers which want to use sword... The only way I figure out is to use the ice elemental near the enemies and stay back and use spells or bow with the characters.

Maybe the best way to start ist ranger + wizard... I dont like range figths... but seems it is nessesary in this game. The warrior are to weak

It takes a while to collect the money to buy healing books for all Charakters and 3 range Shooting spellbooks but without this I can't survive.

The combat is difficult to be sure. It took me at least three attempts at the starter undead house encounter before I could clear it without deaths. But it is quite possible to do it with melee fighters, it just takes a lot of caution.

The difficulty level is so high because of complaints it was too low earlier.

I agree that getting the resources to upgrade your skills and equipment is a bit frustrating and takes a long time to do.

If you speak to the Orc who has the "burying my brother" quest, you'll note two things:

1) He's level 6
2) He has a dialogue if you threaten him to "...call my friends from down the beach".

It's pretty clear that if you're having difficulty killing him solo, you'll have issues with the later orcs. I found this refreshing, tbh: you'll go west once, get spanked, then leave that area until much later (for me, it was until I'd reached the watcher stones).

You know, like a proper RPG, not a linear hall of rooms with scaled enemies. Level scaled enemies = ruined Oblivion / Skyrim.

~

What was more disappointing was that there was no quest attached (you'd think the town would want the orc invasion force beaten), especially when you find the parchment

This part I think needs some attention.

Maybe I wait for the "easy" Option in the reddy game!

I like to put points in repair, alchemie, lockpic, lore and other non figthing things... so there are not enougt Points for figthing.

A automatic figth buttom would be great. Or an "kill them all" cheatbutton... so I can put all Points in other interesting things.

I love to have magical super wappons and clothings. Super things to found somewhere in hidden chests. The enemies should commid suizide if the see my party members.
The good mode in Divinity II is a great thing! (I need it only in the last part, but I like it, to Replay the game in this mode to try out some things.)

Don't forget also that turn based combat requires a completely different strategy to normal real time combat.

I'm playing a fighter/mage combo at the moment and I have only died twice. When I accidentally annoyed the orc on the beach, but he did warn me, and the guards right at the start. The reason I died with the guards is because at the time I didn't realise that weapons use AP to attack and if you're standing right next to the guards when combat starts then they can get 3 hits on you each, because they don't have to move. If you're playing as a fighter then you have to try and do things like position yourself so that their fighters will have to spend their AP moving towards you and then you get full attacks on them the next round.

I totally agree with X-tasy that "You cant expect from a lv 1 warrior to know everything about lv3 skeletons." and nor should you be able to. If you have the skills in loremaster then as mentioned the level of the enemy appears below their health bar so you can see if you should be attacking them or not.

I think you could make an argument for having a high enough Perception skill doing the same thing as it would make sense that a Ranger or Rogue would have a high perception, but no points in Loremaster. Both of them rely on the ability to identify their opponents strengths and weaknesses as they are not designed to stand toe to toe in combat, whereas Fighters (especially at a low level) are there for two reasons hit and block.

Each to their own as the saying goes, but I'm afraid I can't agree with any of this. I don't see the point of playing a game if you are essentially going to cheat your way through it. There is no suspense to the game and you are not playing it as it was intended to be played. Possibly you could have a mode unlocked once you complete the game so you could use it on a second play through, but otherwise I think it should be left harder rather than easier.

Games, especially RPGs, are supposed to be hard at the start.