Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Repairing / Progression

I get that you want a lot of things to be hidden and vague, and to engage the player to explore the world and read the lore, but it's a bit extreme at the moment.

The crafting system should honestly be made a LOT more clear, and updated with an actual interface like you would see in most RPGs, and then have more advanced, rare, powerful, etc. items be made throughout lore.

Speaking of crafting, this relates to something i posted in another thread:

Repair seems to be designed as nothing more than a dump for ability points, since you quickly run out of useful places to put them. Level 5 repair is pretty much a necessity, so it is not an option.

I honestly think we should have an entirely new ability category called Trades.

Repairing should be changed into Blacksmithing for metal weapons and equipment, and level 1 Blacksmithing automatically comes with the ability to repair metal to 100% with a repair hammer. Increasing blacksmithing increases the weapons and armor you can create.

Crafting can be used for material/wooden/animalhide armor and weapons such as staves, bows, crossbows, etc, as well as repairing them with a Needle (material) or Knife (Wood).

Jewelling can be used for creating rings and amulets, as well as repairing them with a Chisel (or whatever).

Enchanting can be used to enchant the items made from the other trades with various attributes, as well as Scrolls, Books and Potions, and can convert an plain weapon/staff into an elemental one. Enchant could potentially give access to a spell that allows you to repair enchanted items.

Things like how to make scrolls and potions could also still be learned through lore items, which can then be stored in a recipe book, but conventional gear crafting should be made more readily available. You'd likely have to do a lot of smoothing with the progression on this, but the game really does need its progression looked at anyway.

About the progression, currently getting lucky with some vendors and chests will net you gear that gives you +1 in abilites and stats, and because of how hard stats scale in this game getting a few of these tends to overpower your character. There are also a ton of skills available at low ranks which floods your characters skill bars (which are arbitrarily limited to 3 despite being able to hot-swap them in battle by pressing "K"??) and makes ranged characters especially overpowered when buffed with Wildfire.

Everything seems to cap out too quickly, and the list of talents (which is much smaller than it seems) has very obvious choices and not many tough decisions once you've reached "higher" levels (I am currently level 16).

I'm not sure if there are any more shops in the beta for skill books better than the cyseal ones, but currently the amount of gold you can rack up by being a high level and picking up all white weapons and armor and selling them is pretty crazy. You can afford to slap level 1 of every element onto all of your characters and buy tons of skills for all of them to spam constantly, including Wildfire which is ridiculous. At my current level, i have enough gold that it is essentially infinite.

There are some serious balance issues with the game, and everything capping out so quickly makes me a bit concerned for the overall size of the game unless the stat caps (appears to be 15 base) are only temporary to prevent players from stacking one stat too high. Not sure why they would arbitrarily limit stats when you can already get blatantly overpowered with no effort though. It's also really easy to get +5 into any ability that you have gear for, and they don't overcap to 6, despite offering to accept the ability points to them.

Another issue with +Stat/Ability weapons, and the mass amount of AP and spells you can have, is that it completely obsoletes the use of Magus Staff and negates your need to ever upgrade beyond a staff that gives +Whatever you need. Speaking of which, that gear is even more overpowered because you can equip it to learn whatever you want, then unequip it to swap over to +Stat gear.

Ehm, lvl 16? How?
I don't really think the current included content is made to be lvl 16.

Which can easily explain some of the issues you experience.

A lot of these issues were happening well before 16, them coming up was what allowed me to get enough power to farm hard mobs constantly, which then resulted in crazy EXP gain. Another thing which is a bit of an exploit, especially since it only took a couple hours to reach level 16.

It would also only take me a couple more hours to hit level 20, which makes me concerned if the level cap of the final game is going to be 20.

"farm hard mobs constantly"
How? Seeing how mobs aren't supposed to respawn and you should have a finite amount, not much to farm. Apparently though, something went wrong there.

You can kill the mobs resurrected in the fire area over and over.
I just started a new run now, and had the same thing happen: Wildfire gives pretty much infinite AP with lone wolf + raistlin, just get +1 in all elements at the start and then 2 witchcraft on btoh characters, learn resurrect on both, GG. Tons of offensive spells at 1/2 to elements, and you will usually find a specialist's staff pretty fast.

It's also best to sell all of your gear for more magic, including the weapon of your tank until you have enough +str gear to give your tank a good weapon, or if the tank can equip something with +abilities.

Also, the amount of EXP required to level barely goes up, so unless this game is REALLY light on the combat, i really can't see how the level cap being 20 will end up in very many areas to actually fight in.

Also, hybrid is 100% completely obsolete outside of Con/Str because of lowered AP costs from stats. 17 int is -6AP cost.

I'll be very surprised if Larian doesn't fix that little lava-idol-resurrected-skeleton-EXP bug/exploit soon, thanks to Xendran's mad abuse (check out his screenshots in another thread). So no more level 20 characters in Cyseal. Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us man.

But seriously, as long as the alleged hard level cap at 20 (and if this does actually exist: why, Larian? why?...; you don't seem to be the type of developer to take such a cheap way out of implementing a properly balanced game) isn't something completionist players will always reach before the endgame, I'd tolerate it. Otherwise, hard level caps usually kill the potential for further party development, and make completing any additional optional content (for EXP, anyway) kind of pointless.

The issues still stand regardless... they happen at low levels too. And getting rid of repair and adding the new category of abilities isn't a bad idea, i really think they should consider raising the level cap to 35 or maybe even as high as 50 for completing the entire released game. We could have that more expanded abilities system, perhaps cap abilities at 10 to allow smoother progression, more talents to allow different tough decisions to be made, and a higher stat cap that gives smoother bonuses rather than the craziness we have now. More changes to make hybrids viable (such as skills that require two different abilities. Way of Ranger + Way of Warrior = Throw Weapon) would also be nice.

The game has a potential but if they want to make it seriously tactically challenging they have to add a massive amount of new options, skills and ways to play, otherwise it's going to be pretty one-tone throughout. I understand it's a beta and I'm not complaining that these things aren't here yet, just that they should be looked at.

The level cap is actually a soft level cap, meaning you won't be able to advance because there's not enough XP in the world to continue past a certain point.

Yes, these are the things that I was suggesting for the developers to improve within the crafting system and the main features of the game. It's also very clear that many users suggests that repairing need to be changed as it's only downgrading the items and not upgrading it. Though I might have a solution.

They really need to make their features more understandable\usable for the players to use regularly. I also still haven't done any crafting as I don't need it, it's not even needed in game or it's not telling the player any indication of crafting. Yes they should add a new ability category and call it “Trades”. Also yes, remove repairing and put in blacksmithing and make the feature more useful and enjoyable for the players to use regularly and put their points in.

So thank you for Xendran, I might find out how they should balance the “Crafting System and Repairing System” it should have been broken in parts:

Trades:

- Blacksmithing: Ore, Bars, Fragments (Metal Types) – Repair Hammer, Pick Axe, Anvil, Furnace

- Crafting: Wood, Wood bits, Hides, Cloth, (Leather and Wood Types) – Knife, Wood cutter, Needle, Crafting Table

- Brewing & Enchanting: Ingredients, scrolls, elements, runes (If there is in game or Tenebrium) – Flask, Brewing Stand, Enchantment table

- Chef: Food, Water, Spice – Cooking Pot, Pan, Stone Oven

- Loremaster (The system is fine but they need to make a shortcut key or an easy placement to identify your items in the inventory.

Let’s talk about the minerals and equipment for each one of the trade Skills:

Blacksmith

Minerals:

Ore - I’m not sure how many kind of ore’s there will be in the game but the better the ore’s the better stats for weapons and armor it will increase. You are required to use a pick axe as same like the feature of the shovel. They already added ores but they need to be implanted in caves walls to use the axe on, instead of carrying a giant ore in your pocket it will also defiantly add allot more immersive to the environment in game like the shovels digging pile of sands. The pick axe can be used for cave walls or rocks, so players don’t get overwhelmed by traveling when there is pick axing to do as well.

Bars – They are made from Ores from the furnace which can be used to improve the stats of your weapons and armor or creating new items by using the Anvil. It will only increase the stats of defense, damage and durability. You only can upgrade your armor & weapons once to make the gameplay balance (Will talk more about that soon).

Fragments - They can be used to repair the durability of your weapons and armor, once you used a pick axe on ores from cave walls or rocks you will also be receiving fragments of it. Remember the better the ores (fragments) it will certainty increase how much durability it will be repaired. You can add the fragments to the repair hammer together to repair a weapon or armor (that is not broken fully). Repair Hammer without fragments must wait for the item to be broken to get repaired (Will talk allot more about it on balancing paragraph).

Equipment:

Repair Hammer (Inventory) – It can be used when your metal armor and weapons are fully broken. You also can add fragments to the hammer to not wait for your item to be broken. There will also be a penalty when your item is broken it will lose its durability (better than the repair skill that is implanted on the beta).

Pick Axe (Inventory) – They are used to pick out any kind of ores from cave walls or giant rocks around the map which the player will be getting ores and fragments of it. It will be needed an animation like the shovel. No skills are required to use the Pick Axe.

Anvil (Ground) – Once you’re in an Anvil you can place one of any metal weapons or armor and upto three bars on the slot bars for armor - durability, movement, armor rating. The weapons are damage, critical damage and durability) together to forge the items together to see an increase of stats of the item. They can invest into 1-3 options with the bars in one of those areas. I already can picture it on my head of the “Anvil UI” should be like.

Anvil image on the UI – One slot for the weapon or amour will be on the base, than on top of it there will be three slots for the bars to upgrade the “Sharpness (weapons damage) or Quality (Armor ratings), Movement (armor) or Critical chance (Sword) and Durability. Yes you also can upgrade the shield too by blocking, durability and movement.

Furnace (Ground) – Easy you can simply add the ores to the furnace to make the bars.

Crafting

Minerals:

Wood – They only added wood from wood piles around the town, though maybe they should also add logs or breakable trees around the maps which you must you a wood cutter or an axe. Wood can be used for crafting the main base of the bows, crossbows, wooden shields, empty cups and so on. Maybe also add different kind of woods for certain differ type of bows to improve them in crafting.

Wooden bits – Alright you can use the wooden bits to repair hammer to repair the durability of the bow, crossbow, or any wooden weapon such as the staff. Wood ashes can be collected from chopping down wood with the wood cutter or axe from “breakable trees or logs around the map”

Hides – Can be found from different wild animals around the map, I think they should add wildlife animals to the world, as far I know you only can get hides from wolves. They also removed the deer in the BETA, so probably maybe they can add spawnable friendly animals like rabbits, squirrels, or any fantasy animals “Larian” can come up with around the maps. Also the better the hides from animals the better it can increase the leather armor stats. You also need a knife animation same as the feature of the shovels. This will defiantly bring a high immersive to the world and the game allot.

Cloth – Can be looted from clothes around the map leather and can be tarred down to strings or ropes (depends of cloth) with the “Crafting Table”. Cloths also can be made into leather armor if they are not making the world with wildlife animals. Strings will produce the final crafting for the bow.

Equipment’s:

Knife (Inventory) – Getting Hide from animals. Needs an animations for collecting hide from animals. Though when killing a wolf from BETA they drop the hide instantly which is fine but make sure there are different kind of hides from each animal.

Wood Cutter or Axe (Inventory) – They already add wood in wood piles but they also should add logs or breakable trees around the map, this will also bring more gameplay and immersive for them to do while travelling. Using the wood cutter or axe also must have an animation like the shovel feature. No skills required for using Axe.

Needle (Inventory) – Can be used to repair the durability of your leather armor when it’s completely damage. You also can use the strings on the needle to repair the durability of your item before it’s completely damaged.

Crafting Table or Hands (Ground & Hands) – You can use it to upgrade your leather armor, wooden weapons, (Upgrade only once as I said the game need to be balanced, will talk about that in my balancing paragraph) arrows, wooden furniture’s, you can make allot, I really don’t know much many items you can make in this game yet.

Brewing & Enchanting

Really not sure on this one as there are allot of possibilities you can do with ingredients and there have been not enough information from the developers about Tenebrium, though I hope all I’m suggesting gave them an idea how this should be balanced and bring allot of immersive to the game

Minerals:

Ingredients – Yes they are all the ingredients you can find in the game to craft different kind of potions. I don’t need to go further in depth with this as there are allot I mean allot of ingredients to craft potions. You can use the flask to add the ingredients in (simple ones up to 2-3 inside).

Scrolls – These empty blank scrolls can be looted from mostly in book cases and more can be made with sheet of paper.

Elements substance – As far I know the developers added the attack on ground feature for melee weapons, so where can we get elemental substance? As far I know you only can these elemental ingredients Air, Water, Fire, Ice from demons. Maybe you can craft elementals substance with the ingredients?

Runes (Tenebrium) – What are Tenebrium? Is it a substance that can be used on a weapon like a rune? If it is an enchanting table is required.

Equipment’s:

Flask [Inventory) – You can use up to three ingredients within the flask for hand-held brewing.

Brewing Stand (Inventory) – You can use up to 5 or more ingredients together (Like I said I really don’t know much about the current crafting system in BETA as I only know is a drag and drop which is not immersive or helpful at all for players to understand).

Enchantment table (Ground) – You can make weapons and armors to be enchantable or add new effects from brewing ingredients such as bleeding damage, leech, poison (permanent) etc. You also can craft the weapons to use elemental damage such as fire damage, Ice and so on. You also can make scrolls and spells.

Chef

Maybe it should not be within the trade skills or should not use any skills for cooking.
Yes it’s funny but there are allot of food in the game that you can craft, I know that the developers were putting more effort on crafting food but I really don’t much know how it can help the gameplay but here are my thoughts. (Again Larian might have an idea on how to balance this with the other “Trade Skills” as I still have no clue what food can help us with there was not enough information from the developers about it or its completely not needed in the game)

Minerals:

Food – There are allot of food like tomato, flour, apple, pumpkin, meat, etc that you find allot of around the game. The better food you produce the better the HP you will receive than health potions. You also can pick up meat animals after the hide is been taken out from the animal.

Water – I only think you can have water for food, no other water substance such as oil, vinegar etc. You can collect water from rivers or ponds (Though you can use other water spells which not might be needed in game).

Spice – I think there was some spices in the game, I am not too sure.

Equipment’s:

Cooking pot – You can store hot food on such as, potatoes or food that can be made into a soup.

Pan – Meat, eggs, pancakes

Stone Oven – Pizza, Cake,

Like I said I can’t think of any suggestions to improve how or what equipment’s will be best for chef or what effects it can do, maybe they can give you hastes, more AP, give certain abilities for a short amount of time in battle. I will let someone suggestion or if the developers are planning to do something with it.

Now onto the Skills:

Blacksmithing Skills:

Level 1 – You are able to repair broken normal weapons and armor [Repair Hammer Required]
Level 2 – You are able to use the fragments to repair normal weapons and armor
Level 3 - Able to upgrade normal armor and weapons with basic bars or ores [Furnace and Anvil required]
Level 4 – You are able to use higher quality ores and bars to upgrade magic weapons and magic armor.
Level 5 – You are able to upgrade a “Tenebrium” weapon and repair it. [Master at blacksmithing increase 5% when upgrading metal amour and weapons]



Crafting Skills:

Level 1 – You can craft hand-able items and sew completely damaged leather amour [Needle Required]
Level 2 – You can now craft more and use strings and glue to repair damaged leather clothes and repair wooden weapons and wooden items.
Level 3 – You can now use the Crafting Table to upgrade your leather armor with hides or wooden weapons (low quality of woods), wooden items, furniture and other crafting items you can make on the table.
Level 4 – You are able to use higher quality of wood and hides to upgrade leather amour, wooden weapons and furniture.
Level 5 - [If Tenebrium weapons can be bows, staff and crossbows as well they can be repaired] Master at Crafting increase 5% of stats when crafting leather amour, wooden weapons and wooden items.

Brewing & Enchanting Skills:

Level 1 – You can brew hand-held ingredients together [Flask Required]
Level 2 – You can use the blank scrolls and make basic spells
Level 3 – Advanced brewing on ingredients and on blank scrolls. [Brewing Stand Required]
Level 4 – Enhancement table Unlocked, Weapons and Armor can be enchanted.
Level 5 – Tenebrium weapons can be Enchanted [Master at Brewing & Enchanting Skills increase %5 of stats when brewing potions and enchanting weapons and amour]

Chef Skills:

Level 1 – ?
Level 2 - ?
Level 3 - ?
Level 4 - ?
Level 5 - ?

As I said I really don’t know any suggestions how we can approve the “cooking system” though these are the suggestions that must implanted and hopefully they have an idea.

Balancing:

I think I may will get these questions:

Upgrading items will make them OP for certain levels of areas in the game?

Why only upgrade once, why not keep upgrading the weapon?

Why not just use the repair hammer just to repair the item instantly without the Fragments?


Alright here is my solution for question one and two.

In twitch “Larian” has confirmed that you will able to get different visuals of weapons and you will certainly get a newer (tier) class weapon within every three of four levels which means better weapons and amour in stats.

(Let’s just make up some bars up with low quality to high quality)

Level 1-4 tier weapon and armor (repair fragments too) - 2% increase in copper, %4 in Iron, %7 in silver and %11 in gold

Level 4-8 tier weapons and armor (repair fragments too) - %4 increase in copper, %6 in iron, %9 in Sliver and %13 in gold

(Remember you can only upgrade in three different stats (Damage, Durability, Armor rating) on one slot each not three times)

The percentage isn’t much but it’s just an idea for players not use the same weapons and armor by upgrading and upgrading, when only one upgrade is allowed as you will be getting a better weapon from the next tier and much more improvement in upgrading as the monsters will get tougher each tier.

The fragments (Wooden Bits also) makes allot sense as you don’t want to keep spamming the repair hammer or glue to repair your items with no work involve or no penalty. Without the fragments (wooden bits) you can’t repair it until it’s fully broken. When the item is completely damaged the durability will be halved. Where you can get fragments and wooden bits? from caves walls, breakable trees, logs, rocks or merchants. How can I use the fragments\wooden bits into the glue or Hammer, they should add an right click option on it and say “Repair with copper, gold, silver fragments” as same with the glue of different types of wood.

The game right now is very easy as there are allot of weapons that are over 80 damage and does not need a level requirement for example you can find the “Scimitar” in the beginning of the game that has almost up to 80 damage and only need an warrior that has 8 Strength, when they should also add “LEVEL REQUIREMENTS” as that sword mange to kill level 1-3 enemy’s in two-three shots. So to make this suggestion work if they add the “LEVEL REUIREMENTS” back.

Suggestions (100% more immersive)

- Make Ores implants to wall caves, rocks for the player to start collecting ores with an pick axe

- Make breakable trees or logs for player to collect wood with an Axe or Wood Cutter

- Random hostile animals (respawanable) for players to collect hides

- Indications of weapons and amour at badly damage rate or visuals of damage levels of the amour and weapons

- Weapons should have visuals effects when they have elemental damage (Must have) as most of the time I forget my weapon does elemental damage that heals the enemy.



Conclusion

This feedback will defiantly help allot to give an idea for the “crafting system” to be broken down for each category. Why? Not many users are using that feature as it feels it’s completely missing. There are over 100 items to craft there are over 200 combinations to completely go every item to craft and dragging each other. It should be broken down to “Trades” (Blacksmith, Brewing, Crafting and Enchanting) for certain skills to make the “crafting system” more user friendly, useful for the player to actually feel “these skills are worth to put on. The current system must change.

- Tex (Going to sleep now just figured all this out today, probably some errors here in there but hopefully many of you will understand)

Thanks Swen and Larian Studious!

Texoru:

Aside from "beta = no additional features", which your idea breaks about 5 times over, separating crafting into 5 categories would be annoying with the current level of ability points you get. It's stingy enough as it is.

And how does this actually address any of the issues i've brought up though? There only being enough exp to reach level 20 in the world means that if enemies give as much EXP as they do currently (without even exp increasing as you raise level) then there are only a few hours of combat in the entire game. So either something is up with beta level progression, something is up with the new content that makes us level a lot more slowly, or the game is *very* light on combat, because the EXP required to level barely increases per level.

Unless the 20-cap is for beta, but im not sure there's enough content in game to hit that without grinding.


EDIT: No new features for beta... hm..
I get that, but crafting and repairing do need overhauls becuase they are implemented very poorly right now. Crafting was a good idea that tried to be 2hardcore, and repair was just a bad idea in the first place. I hope they have a giant number of skills hidden from us that have tactical uses too, because currently as a mage game consists of spamming wildfire + damage spells and making enemies walk over burning ground.

I was at level 2, sold all of my items and equipped gear except weapons for spell books, then headed up to Sparkmaster at level 2. Killed everything along the way to the cave, killed sparkmaster. Just because Int bonus + Midnight Oil is so crazy with Wildfire.

Beta = no new features

However didn't Larian say in a video that they are keeping their feature list secret ? So there may or may not be new features we haven't seen?

I brought up that very same point earlier, that with three other maps, that's an average level spread of 3 levels per map, which seems extremely low.

But who knows, since the level cap is soft, the final level may end up being a lot closer to 30 (which could be a problem if the enemies top off at about level 20).

Even if so the generally OP-ness of spells and wildfire should be adressed.

Honestly, they could do some major revamping of the progression and skill system, with a smooth progression up to a higher level, again 35-50 range works well. It would benefit the game greatly and give them a lot more freedom, and you can still have levels scale in power enough that each one feels like it has a meaningful impact, especially if we get more talents in the game that are unique and difficult to choose between.

Actually, level 40-50ish seems nearly perfect.
You could add quite a few more skills in the game, with higher tier spells having higher cooldown and AP cost, and doubling the base stat caps to 30 could let you then alternate stat bonuses between -AP Cost and -Cooldown reduction.

Also, having skills that scale with two different stats is the perfect way to allow hybridding as it lets them benefit from the same -ap and -cooldown.

Things like Shield Bash requiring both STR and CON, or elemental attacks that use STR/INT or DEX/INT. Skills like Flurry would be STR/DEX.

Things like Rage, Inspiration, etc. should also have Leadership requirements on them,

Some examples:

==STR/CON=
Shield Bash
Attack the enemy with your shield

Defensive Stance
Decreases damage, increases defence.
Increases defence further based on remaining AP.

Bloodlust
Your attacks restore HP for X turns


==STR/INT==
Lightning Strike
Attack the enemy with added lightning damage

Earth Strike
Attack the enemy with added earth damage

Fire Strike
Attack the enemy with added fire damage

Ice Strike
Attack the enemy with added ice damage

Chain Lightning
Attack an enemy with added lightning damage that chains to up to 3 targets

Flametongue
Attack the enemy with fire damage from a distance

Glacier
Strike the ground, sending out a wall of ice

Rock Slam
Cover your weapon in rock and overhead strike the enemy, with a very high chance to knock them down
Deals additional earth damage


==STR/DEX==
Flurry

Throw
Throws your weapon at the enemy.
Requires 1 Telekinesis

Quick Strike
Dash up to an enemy and strike them with your weapon for fewer AP than normal


==DEX/INT==
Warp Backstab
Teleport behind an enemy and perform a critical backstab
Prerequisite: Teleport