Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Is Lockpicking Worth it Now?

Lockpicking was pretty much useless before, but are there more situations where lockpicking is required to open certain chests or doors? Or can you still just bash everything open or find a key laying around 99% of the time? I was working on a mod for the original game that added a few indestructible, unlockable chests with good loot throughout the game -- would something like that still be useful in the EE? (Once the editor is released, of course).

Slow internet so I haven't got a chance to download the EE. Also just wondering so I don't waste ability points on lockpicking when I get around to playing.

While we're at it, is pickpocketing still pretty useless? Are there things you can only pickpocket, or are there targets with stuff worth pickpocketing? Not necessarily looking for specific examples, but just a general assessment of whether the points are worth it even remotely.

I found a decent number of lockpicking chests near the beginning of the game, but very few later on that didn't have a key. However, Bashing chests and doors now is pretty terribly inefficient. You CAN do it but it's going to take a couple minutes of just straight bashing. Lockpicking gear has been enough for me, no points invested.

As for pickpocketing, its usefulness in quests and story is pretty much nil. I think there are a couple of alternate quest solutions that use it, but nothing mandatory or even particularly interesting. Pickpocketing could be a pretty big money earner, and with merchants restocking regularly and selling the best stuff, money is pretty valuable. In my testing, pickpocking is reliable (no save scumming necessary), and allows you to steal based on the base value (not merchant markup) of items up to between 2000 and 3000 per target. That can earn you some 6000+ cost items for free from every merchant. I'm not however sure when or even if the steal value resets, meaning it could be a 1-time thing per target.

It would probably be most efficient to simply respec your character for pickpocketing. With respec only costing 1000 gold and NOT unlearning any skills like it did at release, taking a "pickpocket spec" and then visting every major merchant could earn you a LOT of gold or free items.

IMO No its not. I have only encountered 2 doors that didn't have a key somewhere nearby, and there are a few doors that SHOULD be pickable but for "Story" reasons were given a lockpick level of 99... so yeah, its s totally useless skill now.

I feel the same about pick pocketing and "stealing" in general.. the first time I played I went crazy opening every crate looting all the things.. stealing anything that wasn't nailed down.. and it just wastes time. Seriously, you dont NEED any of those things.. plus.. and heres the kicker, if you wait until you are higher level to go around looting all the barrels and crates, there are BETTER ITEMS IN THEM THEN.. yeah, GO FIGURE. You are better off putting those points in bartering to max it as early as possible and then just "trading" for the things you need rather then trying to steal all the things..

Sneaking is good for setting up clean enemy ambush's assuming you don't use the "strategy" of picking your battlefield.. IE. setting up your ambush then using an archer to"pull" the group of enemies to where you want them.. which I highly recommend.. make them chase you to a choke point :p.

Bartering isn't really worth the points. It doesn't actually change the buy/sale price by 10% per level as advertised. It actually changes the buy/sell penalty by an amount. Doesn't appear to even by 10% either.

For instance, an elemental essence buys for 550 gold (intedimensional trader with 100 attitude) at 0 bartering. At 5 bartering, that price is down to 425. At 7 (the max I can get with gear) it goes down to 375. It's a pretty consistant 25g less per level. In 7 ranks the price has decreased 33%, no where close to the advertised 70.

Selling the item is less consistent. it's 114 at 0, 119 at 1, 125 at 2, 147 at 5, 156 at 6, and 167 at 7. I can't really make any sense out of the progression, but at 7 ranks it's increased by 46% and not the 70% advertised.

If you have to sell a LOT of junk, maxing out bartering can help. My recommendation again is to use the respec Demon when you have an inventory full and then go visit every shop in the world for selling and buying. Don't let it stop you from buying the stuff you see when you see it though.


As for pickpocketing again, it seems to be a one-time deal for each NPC, so just wait till hunters edge and then go pickpocket every shopkeeper in the game for either a stack of gold or whatever item looks useful. Gold is more efficient than selling back items, but if it's something you want to buy anyway it's better to pickpocket that than gold.

Bartering works like this:


Base Price
then
Adjusted By "Attitude" [0 Attitude = +100% price, 100 Attitude = +0% price]
then
Adjusted By Bartering [0 Bartering = +50% Price, 5 Bartering = +0% Price]

Example:

100 Gold Item, +50% for a 50 Attitude = 150 Gold Item
Adjusted by Bartering 2 = 180 Gold Item

The "Benefit" kicks in at Bartering 5 and Attitude 100, at which point you can sell for the exact same price you can buy, meaning NO markup.

Thats why I said you are better off not bothering with ANY of the "Dirty Deeds" skill and simply maxing barter ASAP, as in the long run you will make more money from barter then you ever would from pick pocketing.

But that's wrong, as my testing above shows. With 5 Bartering the Fire Essence is bought for 425 gold and sold for 147 gold. That's a LOOOONG way off from "buying and selling at the same price. Even if I could get bartering skill up to 10 (which is impossible, as only neck and boots can roll +bartering), it STILL wouldn't meet in the middle. And yes, that was being tested on an attitude 100 merchant.

I personally haven't tested, but thats not how its supposed to work, if true, then its definitely a bug.

I'll go test it out now.

EDIT: So yeah.. its bugged apparently, that or they decided to seriously nerf bartering.

I was able to get a "Blitz Bolt" skill bolt for as cheap as 192 Gold at 100 Attitude and 5 Bartering.. but then when I went to sell it, it only sold for 66 Gold. Which, is exactly 1/3 the vendor price.. which shouldn't be. It "Should" be the vendor price..

Also, selling it at 0 bartering was 52 Gold

So yeah, I am inclined to think that this is either a bug, or they intentionally nerfed bartering selling prices.. which if they did then I have to agree, bartering is suddenly a lot less useful.

Hmm, well, figured as much that lockpicking is still not very useful. Might follow through with the mod to add chests that can only be lockpicked (once the editor is out.) Then again, you really only have to invest 2 points into lockpicking since you can get 2 bonuses from gear and 1 from the right trait. I'll probably also make those bonuses extremely rare and only appear on divine loot (I assume those bonuses still show up on basic magic items? Always annoyed me that basic items could provide such a significant effect.)

Good to hear pickpocketing might be a bit more useful since gold is harder to come by. How about lucky charm? Any more useful? I'd rather like to see the treasure tables they draw from if anyone knows how to do that. Involves unpacking the game files and looking in the stats folder. Might also be a "templates" folder in the game folder already with the stats folder.

So.. yeah, after more "math" trying to figure out whats going on with bartering, I eventually just gave up. Clearly the description is just out and out wrong or its bugged..

I was able to "edit" my bartering up to 10, and at 10 Bartering, still for that same skill book:
Purchase Price = 136
Sale Price = 92

The "Price isn't going down or up by 10% per level beyond 5.. so I'm guessing that like "Ranged Accuracy" there is a hidden "Trade Penalty" on objects and that all bartering is doing is adjusting that trade penalty by a certain amount.

Still... having bartering is better then NOT having it... and it least it has some effect, unlike lockpicking, which again is what this thread is about.. and has no use.

Gold isn't really hard to come by, it's just a lot more useful. All of the best gear, with the exception of non-ranged weapons, can be bought from merchants. In fact, with merchants restocking every hour and carrying several Divine level items at a time, you are much more likely to find an upgrade shopping than from random loot.

If your diligent though, it's not impossible to accumulate hundreds of thousands of gold, more than enough to buy everything you want.

Well I'm glad they gave merchants better items, but it can also be disappointing when all your best gear is bought. Definitely a hard balance to make merchants have good items, but not to overshadow boss loot as well. I'm also not so sure whether merchants ought to restock every hour. Could be a big a factor in making them overly useful for loot because they conceivably have an endless supply of whatever you want, if you're patient enough. Even if you just check a merchant, go do a couple quests for an hour, come back and if there's several new divine items, that seems pretty excessively generous.

Also, it seems unfortunate you can't really save up for an item if it's just going to get refreshed later. I assume the whole stock is randomized every hour (except maybe what you sold them?). I might prefer something like merchants gain five or six items every time you level up, a couple of those being divine, max, and they slowly phase out older items that are 4 or 5 levels below your level. It's not the greatest thing to have merchants depend on you leveling up, but I think it's a better way to abstract time passing than real time when nothing else in the game really depends on the flow of real time. Are merchants really selling and buying loot that much?

The original release was almost exactly like you described, and caused problems where there were very strictly limited supplies of absolutely everything. Remember that DivOS has no respawning enemies with the exception of enemies that spawn during a fight, which don't usually drop anything or grant exp.

It was a system that practically required savescumming. Want a particular spell? Gotta savescum the merchant till he has it. Want even half-decent loot? Savescum known good chests until they have something useful.

Lockpicking is useless, not because it's not required for some chests (it never should be), but precisely because the keys are never far away. Lockpicking could be useful for traps though?

Pickpocketing is completely useless, and even if you want to try it for the fun, you can test it with pickpocketing gear and the pickpocketing trait (pump up to 3). It's a time loss on citizens, and you can't do it on merchands when you need it the most. Once you can do it (if you ever can, I didn't even test actually, I just noticed I coudn't seal Cyseal merchands, it said I didn't have enough experience, so I have to outlevel them?) you can buy whatever you lack anyway.

Bartering is mostly useless because, again, you can go up to 3 with trait/gear, and it doesn't have the impact advertised anyway as said here.

Luck Charm is useless because you can more than max it out with crafting and the trait. 2 daggers and 1 chest piece at crafting 5, 2 rabbit rings and one rabbit belt at crafting 2, and find/buy boots with lucky charm on it. 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + the trait = 7 lucky charm. Starting level 8, you can find shields with 2 lucky charm on them, for a total of 8. I don't even know if lucky charm is good to have past 5.
Anyway, in retrospective lucky charm even maxed out never gave me anything oustanding with the exception of a few ruby cristals (so rare because it competes with all the junk loot anyway). It's mostly a goldmaking ability that would require a lot of swapping (a little bit time sink, but typically you do some swap on the exploration character with perception gear aswell so why not throw in lucky charm) and absolutely 0 point in it.

Loremaster is kinda useful, but you only need 2 out of combat (you can examine mobs from far away), rings and necklace helps you reach 5. And this bonus is so common that you probably can have it even on your fighting gear on your loremaster character so you never have to swap gear in and out of combat.

Furtivity is useless except one point for rangers so they can pick the guerilla talent and snipe (one time only per fight usually, preferably as opening, in case of oneshot the mobs don't even notice). This can be abused if you explore Hunter Edge before doing any combat. And Crossbows crits are very helpful in that regard.

Crafting/Blacksmithing is the king. It's a money making ability (just craft stuff with low cost composants like logs), it can significantly improve gear and significantly improve a character (a specific elemental resist can be pumped up on 5 pieces of equipment, 6 with shield, typically from 50% total (lvl 5-6? if you want to spend that much gold at that level) to 100% (without counting the shield). It can give 1 2 (or 3 on item lvl 22) secondary bonus STR or DEX if a man at arms or a scoundrel/ranger want to use hybrid abilities (which usually need between 8 9 or 10, or 3 4 or 5 bonuses in total) with tormented souls (double that on dualwielders). It can add elemental damage (and tenebrium) on weapons, on top of improving their base damage. And even at low level it allows you to bootstrap STR/DEX/INT, charisma, lucky charm and loremaster (keep/buy bones/skulls, teeth, rabbit paws, tusks and stardust herb, worse is having to buy pixie dust as is).


About the fact that merchants restock every hour (I thought it was at level up? Could it be both?),
it is indeed to deter savescumming. But it seems a little buggy and frankly, exploitable (I have a hunch you can influence it by keeping specific actions like dialogs and RPS minigame available in case you don't like your loot/merchant, and reload + activate one of them to perform a "reset" and get different items/loot).
As for the merchants loot quality difference between both version, my memory is a bit fuzzy because there were only three tiers then (blue green orange) and there's 5 now. But I admit that some bosses drops can be disappointing (especially since, due to the high disparity between bonuses' nature, a legendary weapon can be less interesting than a blue one same level).
Some bosses drop unique loot, which is a good feeling usually. One unique loot that I thought was sick is the sword of holy flame (lvl 13), but I read it's a random loot.
BTW I think that spellbooks are fixed (not random ever). And the only unique book I found was turtle stance (do not respec if you have it and like to use this ability).

In the original, I felt like merchants almost never had anything good. I saw maybe 5-10 legendaries. 1-2 divine items (at higher levels, at least) per level per merchant would get you more like 40-50 divine items if you start seeing divine items at level 10 and there's 3 merchants that can potentially sell them. If merchants now really sell several divine items, you must have a pick of 100+ divine items from merchants alone. This is bad because it dilutes the experience of divine items and makes them feel less powerful if merchants are selling tons of them. Especially if it's still relatively easy to get a lot of gold, if not necessarily quite as easy as it was before.

Lots of games have a limited supply of loot. You should be able to find good loot and have a pick of items, but if you can get pretty much any items you want through merchants, it's harder to balance the game and the loot experience is weaker.



I disagree: I think there should be chests, maybe even doors, that can only be lockpicked. In an effort to make everything accessible by all characters, abilities like lockpicking can become useless except as a minor convenience. Probably the best way to go about adding things that can only be lockpicked would be to add a quest that you can only find if you have lockpicking (say, an NPC asks you to unlock something for him) that leads you to buried treasure that has to be unlocked. People without lockpicking wouldn't be running into chests that they can do nothing with if they can't lockpick, unless they just happened to dig in some random spot. Some of these chests should be buried behind hard boss fights, so lockpicking would in a sense provide an extra reward for killing bosses

The rest of your post mostly highlights the fact that ability bonuses on loot are way too excessive. Trait bonuses also reduce the need to invest in points. That you can get 8 points in lucky charm without investing a single point is absurd (though it is pretty inconvenient to don all your luck gear just to open some barrels.) I think Larian has made a lot of these abilities useless because they're so easy to acquire. If you had to actually invest 15 ability points to get 5 points in lucky charm, maybe finding a single +1 lucky charm on an awesome piece of loot, it'd be fair for lucky charm to give a small chance for divine items or even pull from a pool of unique items.

You are talking about big design changes, so I don't follow. Chest can be broken, buried treasures can be digged with good perception.

I know the game can check your lockpicking ability and offer you a special dialog option, because the Queen Spider does a charisma check. But that is the only instance I can think of.

Additionally, and adressing

aswell,

even if bonus loot were less excessive, those abilities would remain subpar by design.
Lucky Charm is a money-making ability: I have not seen any blue or green item proc from it (I might be wrong or particulary unlucky, but lucky charm proc alot, and junk loot most of the time, extremely rarely rubies/tormented soul and essences, but that's just money because souls and essences can be bought plentiful). Bartering and Pickpocketing are money-saving abilities (maybe you can steal quest items to NPC, I haven't tried, but I doubt it).
And Crafting/Blacksmithing, on top of being gear-improving abilities, are money-making abilities aswell and way better at it.



I think it's even 9 starting some level where crafted daggers give 2 lucky charm. 11 with karma. But, again, I don't know if going above 5 has any impact, and it's not that interesting anyway even at 5 (no gear).

By design, you can swap gear. By design, there are non-combat stats and combats stats that share the same resource: ability points.
I agree with you that there are too much non-combat stats on gear, even though I think it's pretty minor in the current state of the game. I agree with you when you say it should be made rarer, but I'd go even further: non-existent. That or make them not compete with combat stats and create a new resource for them ("out of combat ability points"). In place of the traits for instance.

I see you often discuss game design, what do you think of
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=573949
?

Well I'll tell you what I thought of it. I thought you were someone who wanted a completely different game with those "suggestions". Especially traits. I guess I'll post the rest over there, but I basically think you are nuts.

You are missing charisma effect.

I know about 4 quest items which could be pick-pocketed. I think there is more. Also know about few interesting keys in certain pockets.

Chrest, I like people who has an opinon, even they are wrong.

Three things.

1. If you think I'm nuts, don't reply.
2. I asked Baardvak, not you.

3. Traits are not a game defining trait of divinity original sin. Removing them would virtually change nothing as far as gameplay is involved, and would give the option to remove their dialogs (or not, not important) aswell, since they are amongst the less well written of the game. I assume you picked this example as the "worst" offender, but it's actually not?

To be honest, I can't quite say I love your ideas either. Maybe a slight XP nerf would be okay if people are routinely getting overleveled, but I don't quite get your idea to merge all these abilities. I'm ambivalent about traits, or rather, them affecting gameplay. I kind of like it, kind of don't. I'd be fine with it if your traits had a greater effect on dialog options and NPC reactions and the like, but I do think game bonuses from traits definitely incentivize acting in a certain way for different characters.

I dislike how some traits are useless for certain characters, like pragmatic, which isn't very useful if someone else is a dedicated crafter. Romantic grants you lucky charm, which at least gives you a bit more crit chance. So, what, you're only pragmatic if you're a dedicated crafter, otherwise you're a romantic? Seems weird to me. And I have to agree that the trait dialogs can be pretty vapid (though they may be better in the EE than they were in the original game.)



I agree the abilities would still mostly be bad without loot bonuses (and, in fact, an even greater waste of points). Which is why I'd boost the efficacy of various skills like lucky charm and lockpicking if I were to remove them from loot bonuses. Actually not very hard to do, and you don't even need the mod tools to fix it right now if all the stat information is stored in text files as it was in the original game. Only adding chests that require lockpicking would require the editor.

And non-combat skills appearing on loot is another issue, too. Equipping a different suit of armor for when you craft or when you pickpocket is so gamey and annoying. I think it'd work better if there was a loot slot (bauble, or something) for items that only gave bonuses to non-combat skills, and these items would be extremely rare (like, 3-4 found in a game). Maybe these items would even just have a passive bonus when in the inventory, so there'd be no need to switch the items at all if you happened to get, say, a lockpicking bauble and a pickpocketing bauble that you wanted to equip on your rogue.

Traits do incentivize you "acting" a certain way (picking up dialog options that are otherwise inconsequential to the world). That the heartless bonus is useful only to backstabbers, and not mages, doesn't incentivize at all to make a heartless mage or warrior.
The crux of the disagreement is simply defining what roleplay is.

I think that if I set up my characters as having specific personalities right at the beginning of the game, having to change their "personnalities" to get the best bonus is harming the RP process.
In other words, the game incentivize you to pick personalities that match the best bonuses for their class. That's anti-RP in my book.

I have no qualm about my suggestions, I know there's different ways to adress the minor game's problems.
But if you are starting to envision a system where non-combat skill can be enhanced through a special gearslot that is non competing with combat stats, it is a slippery slope to my system ^^ (which is basically a non-competing point system for those non-combat abilities).