Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Game is to hard!

Yeah, some skeletons appear out of the group, but since those are lvl 3, they generally aren't fights that need avoiding unless you immediately run out of the city without doing any quests at all (which would be silly).

I encounter the same "issue"

It depend of your group. I mean, I have an enchanter, and for the moment I have the only attack spell : using my staff. I have a low level staff (the one from the begining) and I make 2-4 damages.

Hopefully I have a ranger, but it's frustrating that the ranger do all the job

You have in town 2 characters (a warrior and an enchanter) for completing your group ; I don't take the enchantor this BIPPPPP had attack spell and not me

But I want to keep this group even if it's hard (it makes me think about the way to win with this team)

If it can give you hope, I try with 2 teams (cleric and the archer which do magic I don't remember class name ; and ranger and enchanter) ; honnestly, some battle were easy with one group and hard with another.

If you want easy way , take a good tank with a fire caster. But maybe after it will be hard too

I have to agree that the game currently seems to hard. i play with a group of ranger and shadowblade. The ranger has one skill that seems a bit overpowered. all the other skills (ranger & shadowblade) seem underpowered.
What i find especially frustrating is that the game forces me follow a certain path by how the enemy levels are spread out.

So far it seems, as soon as i go somewhere or do something the game designer hasn't thought of or did not mean for me to go or do, i will die. i find this very limiting.

As long as monsters have fixed levels (rather than levels which scale to the player character's level), that really can't change. You have the freedom to go anywhere, but survival isn't guaranteed. There are just going to be directions/areas that are more dangerous than others.

I prefer when encounters scale to the player character's level (mainly because I hate, hate, hate out-leveling content), but that can create a whole different set of challenges for both the players and designers.

The game is wildly imbalanced, and difficulty is purely based on what you start out as.
If you make a wizard + tank you will faceroll the entire game.
If you make a str fighter + crit rogue, things might not go as well.

There are plenty of options to go at lvl 6. Probably a bit guided at the start to learn, but after that it opens up.

So I don't quite agree. Maybe once mage AI is fixed it will be harder though.

Which actually means i don't have the freedom to go anywhere. Or in other words, i can go somewhere else than the predfined path until i enounter the first enemy npcs.
Having areas with different enemy levels seems ok to me per se, but the problem with dos in its current state seems that the number of "paths" with enemies at the same level is very limited and thus the player has almost no options in where to go imo.

That's the cost of having exploration.

You could also do the Oblivion way, and make exploration so boring, since everything's the damn bloody same.
I prefer option #1

i think its a simple matter of balancing the level-up speed with the npc-level distribution. Reducing the level-up speed enables to have more areas with the same npc level strength. Another option would be a simple difficulty setting. Simple in the way that all it needs to effect is the player characters hitpoints.

I'm really pleased most RPG devs these days are avoiding (Oblivion-style) level-scaling. Beyond making no sense whatsoever (the entire world changes because the player leveled up), it's incredibly boring to have the exact same challenge level throughout a game. Made Oblivion completely unplayable for me - so thanks Larian!

Wow, I'm surprised at the reactions to level scaling, particularly as the lack of level scaling has completely killed so many MMOs for me.

I gave up Bioware's SWTOR MMO because you couldn't even do half of the content in that game without completely out-leveing the content as I progressed through my character's story - and that's really frustrating for a completionist type of gamer. I spent most of my time fighting MOBs that were so far below my level that there was absolutely no challenge or fun to be had in fighting them.

I started losing interest in Skyrim after I started one and two-shotting everything, including dragons. Again, due to a lack of level scaling.

On the other hand, I actually started playing Diablo 3 again because (among many other needed changes), monsters in that game now scale to the players level - meaning it's impossible to out-level the content and just mow through everything. Not having to worry about leveling faster than the content around me is a dream come true.

You can still have challenges ranging from easy to nearly impossible with level scaling. What you don't have is content becoming obsolete because you out-level it.

I'm enjoying the difficulty

I think the key is to avoid a situation where every single encounter in the game is going to be pretty much at your same level. Otherwise, for me at least, the fun of actually seeing your character(s) develop and be able to take on encounters that were previously impossible - i.e. the core of the CRPG experience, IMO: character growth - doesn't exist, because every encounter becomes bland. Hard level caps - as usually implemented, at least, where your character growth maxes only about 2/3 of the way through a game - also kill that sense of fun.

That said, you also don't want to have a super-god character one-shotting everything in the world during the last half of the game - the other extreme. You just want to have something challenging available somewhere in the world at any time, no matter your level - but Oblivion-style bandits in glass armor? Yeah, pass.

The way to handle that is to scale monsters up to the player's level, but not down. Thus, a group of bandits that were impossible earlier in your career eventually become doable, but never trivial. I hate trivial.

Ah, so you mean scale the enemies up to the player's level only the first time the player encounters them, but no further? I could almost tolerate that - it still wouldn't be ideal IMO, but it would be better than "the rats in the starting dungeon now become level 500 just because your character is near the end of the game"-type garbage.

...but I still prefer the D:OS "no level scaling" system myself - at least as they've implemented it in the beta area.

That's how Fallout 3 and Skyrim do it, I believe. They scale to your approximate level range the first time you enter a sector, and stay that way.

But it's not happening in D:OS this late into development, so forget it.

Yeah, I was thinking that about Skyrim, Stabbey. But I personally am very happy to forget it - I like the system already in place. Level scaling (and hard level caps) should be killed with fire. (Rant over)

Look there is no perfect answer. Everyone has their ideals for what is right or wrong. Hell, Borderlands was a terrific game but eventually you would get to a point where some missions were available and they were basically in the way. Unless you were a completionist (blush) there was no reason to go through them as the rewards and challenges were nearly non-existent. The way this game is moving forward I am more than happy with a higher difficulty. It only allows me to learn. I get to replay things. I get to be in the game longer, learn its intricacies, feel immersed.

Keep things going the way they are IMO.

It is too late in development, but it is something that can be introduced post-launch.

I do feel like the developers are setting themselves up for a lot of headaches with fixed levels. For example, let's say Divinity does well enough to justify an expansion that allows players to continue adventuring with their old characters, going as far as pulling information from your old save file (games have done this in the past).

What level range does the expansion adventure start at? Is it aimed at Divinity : OS players that have completed every quest available in the original story? Or is it aimed at the players who focused only on the main storyline and skipped all the sidequests? What about the fellow who obtained a really high level by killing almost every NPC in the game?

Level scaling makes that challenge easy to address. Without it.. it's easier to make everyone start off with new characters.

That's not even touching on user generated modules.