Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The Intelligence stat

Referencing my previous offer on how stats should work, I would like to point out that what mine does is avoid single-stat-dumping like a mage going all out in Int. Any relatively balanced character is going to need at least a few points in speed and constitution unless they want to be very inflexible (say the ultimate glass-cannon mage, etc).

The real choice that mine offers that I think is still not present in the current stat incarnation is this: imagine you had a warrior. To make it viable in Larian's current incarnation, stack Con. Just stack it. Maybe some strength, but anything but strength and con is almost madness. It doesn't matter what you want to do.

Now in mine, a warrior has a lot more viable options. Strength gives him some HP, so he could dump into strength and become a bit of a physical glass cannon. He could do Strength Con and Speed (probably with some dex too) balanced to get a good, consistent-over-time in battle warrior, or he could stack Speed and Con in order to be defensive and good at controlling positions and cover your less-tanky members better. Even further, he could do something interesting like increasing speed, dex, and strength evenly and go for a critical build.

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What I'm trying to show here is that we need to split apart needed features of every type of character into different stats to allow a diversity of build options and make stat-dumping even, if not a bit worse, than some thought and moderation.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a post on the first page here I made about what I think stats should be (roughly. I'm sure if requested for explicit calculations of what the stats give numerically I could create the system, but that's a significant amount of work for something possibly coming to naught).

Edit: Upon some further thought it might be better if AP per turn were consistent and AP was balanced directly, where skills instead had a stat barrier over an AP barrier (like Larian's barrier for high level magic is currently an AP barrier according to the recent video).

There really are multiple ways to tackle it. We would have to make each stat have something else desirable in this case (that is, speed, con, and int), to account for a removal of AP altering attributes. Perhaps speed giving a chance for a double attack, int giving perception score bonuses, and con giving dot resistance? Those are just kind of out of my ass on the fly, so I'm not really convicted to them.