Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Help me make the game a bit harder

I'm looking for suggestions on how to make the game more challenging. I'm doing a first play through on hard mode, and while it started out being quite difficult, it's certainly getting easier because I have become over leveled. Unfortunately once I hit level 6 or 7, I have managed to always be 1 level above the enemies. I have just finished Cyseal and began the forest at level 10.

The obvious first thing for me to do now is to skip a lot of the side quests. I love doing all the side quests, but I value a fun challenge above all else so I'm going to have to skip some of them so I can avoid the game throwing too much exp at me.

What are some other things I should avoid to keep things interesting? Any completely overpowered tactics or spells that I could do without? I could tone down shopping in some way to put a limit on resources. I could stop buying gear at shops and not craft weapons. Thoughts on invisibility potions? Thoughts and suggestions on these kinds of things are what I am looking for.

Well, you could wait for the enhanced edition to come out (free for you since you own D:OS), which will include a harder difficulty and a great deal of rebalancing so you don't have to gimp yourself to get a challenge.

But if you're going to play this version anyway, I'd avoid the magic shields, crafting in general (maybe still craft and use potions if you want), charm, summons, and any cheesy tactics that feel like they're only effective because they're taking advantage of the AI.

That is helpful, thank you. I considered waiting for the enhanced edition but decided I will finish the game because I'm having a lot of fun with it despite it not giving me the challenge I crave.

I am going to start by getting rid of charm because that has turned lost battles into victories all on it's own. I will get rid of magic shields as well. I'm going to hold off on summons for now because they are badass but if I see they are trivializing combat then I will get rid of them as well. I don't craft much at all so that's not really an issue.

play it blindfold

Also left handed only using your pinky finger after drinking copious amounts of alcohol

Play the game without saving, and disable auto saves. Once you die or want to quit, gotta start all over from the beginning.

Larians, would you make online auto save to any action/result and introduce mode defined above like IronMan.

At E3, Larian said that the new hardest difficulty was called "Honor", which has all the enemy changes, puzzle changes, improved AI (and everything else) from "Tactical", but you have only one save, and that deletes itself if both Source Hunters die.

hm, puzzles changed sounds rewarding. but i dont need the harder fights. guess you cant have it all at once