Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Fixing resistances, along with 1h+shield

Problems:

Resistances are too easy to raise to 100+
One Hander + Shield is an almost useless option

Solutions:

* Reduce/remove resistances from plate armor
* Put resistances on shields
* Shields block projectile spells/ranged when facing the caster
* Add 2h and 1h+shield requiring Man-at-Arms skills.


This splits the warrior up a bit, you can be tanky but now you'll have to sacrifice the insane 2h damage to achieve that. Also, a layer of depth is added to tactical combat as the shield must face enemies to be fully effective. And with skills being split between 2h and 1h+shield, the damage can be scaled better rather than making 2h way better for every damage skill since they cost the same AP regardless of weapon.


It'd be a good start to toning down Man-at-Arms while improving combat I think, anyway.

My (limited) experience with a warrior upto level 16 or so... the shield is INVALUABLE when you want to use the character as a big fat target.

I have 66% shields on the character (and the shield is lvl 12)... The character in question was designed to absorb a huge amount of punishment... and they're quite capable of doing just that.

Which frees up her partner to unleash hell at her leisure.

The Rubies make things even worse. Imo the resistances of the players should just be limited to 75-90% depending on the difficulty with the wizards fire-/earth-/... shield spells (and maybe some unique items like the winter amulet) as the only possibility to rise them above that value.
Atm getting healed from all the caster bosses, surfaces and your fireballs is just stupid.

Lol, shield isn't useless, it is actually overpowered. When you have 100+ resistances, physical attacks are only way to kill you. And if you don't have leech + comeback kid, nearly 100% chance to block is perfect way to prevent that.

the thing is people should not be immortal.

even if these things did not exist, its fairly easy to exploit the invisibility and sneak mechanics to completely avoid enemy retaliation. if you end each turn invis or sneaked they just stand there and let you kill them.

however, this is not what i consider good gameplay. if my characters become immortal through resists/shields or exploiting an invisibility tactic then i am just going through the motions. there is no challenge or sense of accomplishment.

resists and block should be capped off at a reasonable level so you still take some amount of damage and if the entire team is invis/sneak then enemies should use AOE effects randomly to see if they can hit you.

things like that would at least keep some amount of involvement in the combat.

as it stands by mid levels with some decent planning combat devolves into a derp-fest of shooting fish in a barrel using dynamite.

I agree with the game being too easy.

But it is also about freedom. You have the freedom to make a character immortal, but you aren't forced to. You aren't being forced to use sneak or invisibility, and if you do you aren't forced to use them every turn. You aren't forced to use the best items available. But for people that want to make godlike characters (and I'm sure there are many), they should be free to do so if they wish. I'm intentionally avoiding the air invisibility skills because I know from my coop game how broken they are and it just detracts a lot of enjoyment from the game for me, personally.

This isn't to say I wouldn't rather have the game create the challenges itself, which I would, but for now at least, setting your own restrictions will likely result in a more favourable experience. I think a better handling of the difficulty level system would be ideal, with groupings of or perhaps dynamic difficulty sliders for player health, enemy health, player hit chance, enemy hit chance, reduction to player elemental resists, increases to enemy elemental resists, and increases to enemy wp/ bb. Seems like a solid mod if these things are actually global variables.

I definitely agree with splitting MaA into two different skill branches. At least with dex you have both marksman and scoundrel. Also, rebalancing of skills would be ideal.

For example, has anyone ever used the MaA bleeding skill? 2H autoattack is just superior 99% of the time. With 1H maybe that isn't the case, however.

Just about everything has been described by someone as over or under powered. Seems to me that this is evidence that things are okayish. Not perfect but good enough.



That would result in a lot of encounters needing to be redesigned or altering the system so that the player and enemies do not go by the same rules.

In order: yes, no. Therefore...In order: yes, no, no, maybe.