Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Tactician Mode - Balance Discussion.

I'm thinking that if you have the possibility to add talents (that are easy to implement), you can add talent that revert some changes the difficulty mod would add, so players can pick and choose their flavor (with a note that it should be avoided).

If you nerf CC chances and buff damages for mage spell, you can make a talent that revert it.
If you somehow change the maximum invocation number, you can make a talent that revert it.

If you change leadership to alter NPC defenses (and give them various level of leadership), keep in mind it then alter player defenses: you would make an immunity to charm for players aswell. Solution could be to make a specific buff for NPCs. You could also have a look at Charm's cooldown, as minor tweak.

About decaying touch, I was thinking you shouldn't nerf it because I thought the decaying touch was a smart move against ennemies that heal themselves with potions (I'm thinking about Grutidla, the orc leader in hunter egde). But it's maybe too OP, so you modification is maybe needed aswell.

The pyromaniac suggestion is good.

I don't see how you could buff backstab damage by a flat percentage (backstab is just an assured critical strike I believe). But you could add +% critical damage for daggers (like the two hands talent and bow/crossbow).

Guerilla trigerring from Invis/ShadowWalk makes a sense. Rogue playstyle would be more focused about sudden damage burst. So hide, bank up AP then burst.
I see rogue as a "Single target damage burst specialist". The new skill Adrenalin goes exactly this way.

Adding a plain bonus to back-stab doenst promote damage bursting. More over it would literally lock Guerilla+Backstab. Not very good for building options/freedom. Its better make Guerilla interesting for archers or other non backstab builds too. Just imagine an Executioner class - two handed melee in power stance, shadow walk and guerilla talent. Youk :-]


Suggestion:
I say, make Guerilla trigger from from Invis/ShadowWalk /Sneak. For balance tweak, get noticed that 2 Scoundrel's status related skills have 150% dmg. IMHO That is not correct. So nerf these Scoundrel's 2 attacks skill(s) a bit. Minus 15%? That way general damage would be similar but bursting promoted.

Make a character invisible working on the battlefield also makes other classes more viable. Like tank who soaks the damage (taunt enemy) when rogue is preparing.

The answer is choice. Option to build. Option to learn and unlearn a spell depends the oponent or team-mates skills. Bring trade off to choice. I am happy that previous flat 5 level skill bonus - know all skills is away.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
***********************************************
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Regarding Tactician mode. The over-leveling issue might be solved by a :
"System of Fixed encounter XP gain".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
lets have an encounter for normal mode, 3 enemy - > it gives 300XP. Then make it hard for tactitian so 5 enemyes. Here it comes. XP per enemy is re-counted to achieve same sum (300) as for normal. eg. Tactical difficulty gives less XP for head, but same for the encounter. This system could be programmed as a standard so no need to manually check every single encounter, rather apply system.

No, I'm referring more to the fact that there aren't even enough Novice water spells in the game to allow you to fill out the maximum 6 skill slots which you can learn. Not really any choice there when you have 5 spells to choose from to fill out 6 slots. One should probably be moved down from Adept to Novice.




I don't see any justification for a nerf like that. Guerrilla is supposed to be more the Rogue's thing. Those 150% damage skills have significant cooldowns anyway. You can't do them every turn.




I don't think Decaying Touch needs a nerf. It's a short range debuff spell with a short duration which only does something if A) the AI randomly picks that target to heal and not anyone else, or B) If you choose to burn one of your own healing spells on them, leaving them unavailable for yourself.

And if the fight is already easy enough that burning a healing spell to knock out a single enemy makes it easy enough to not be able to need the spell on yourself, then the problem is with something else, not Decaying Touch.

Sure you cant, that is the point. Guerilla triggered by Invis/ShadowWalk/Sneak has similar cooldown. (given by those precursors) That is the guerila is not every round flat bonus but BURST damage .

Hide --> bank up AP --> Get to position --> BURST.
That is Guerilla.

I don't think it's a great idea to nerf skills NOT on their own merits, because the skill itself is too good, but because they might be a bit more powerful when combined with a Talent. What if that Rogue doesn't take Guerrilla? That's a valid playstyle isn't it?

(And does Lacerate's damage even stack with Backstab? I heard that some skills do and some do not.)

Hmm, maby you would rather balance a skill by skill. That doesnt work.

Maby you have missed an issue of Decaing touch + Healing spells, which is (unwanted?) way how to get irresistible damage for few AP.

Issue is that builds are about combination of skills and talents.

Therefore talent My precious is useless to all. There is no skill to boost. Talent elemental affinity is best for mages becouse of skills. If the elemental affinity says -4AP on elemental spell due to ground type - that is obvious combination of talent and skills which needs to be nerfed.

If we want to change guerilla talent which is most usefull for rogue-like clasess then it is wise to check realated skills and combination and balance. Guerilla need to be done a way to be available to more builds rather then locked to backstab dagger-man. At the same time it should not make Scoundrel OP due to skills combination.

Talents boost and skills must be considered in combination. That is same like bug touch spells with range 5meters do to Far-out-man talent. Touch spells need range of dagger, no matter what. Spellcaster need to touch the target to make it work. Touch spells are touch and should be balanced as a group where trade-off is - better damage(status chance) but close to enemy. That is the great example of mistake combination of talent boost and skills.

Sorry for cutting up your post, but I wanted to reply to various parts together.



I suppose you're right. But I still do not agree with a pre-emptive nerf to the skills without any testing to see if that combination actually is overpowered.




What's wrong with irresistible damage?

An enemy just hit my Inquisitor with "Remorse" which does irresistible damage to me each time I use a skill.




Spells are magic, not made out of normal matter. By definition, magic breaks the rules of physics. I see absolutely zero things wrong at all with Far Out Man working with Touch-range spells.

If you mean "Far Out Man should not exist in the game at all", then say that. But to say that "Spell A is okay to work with Far Out Man because its range is 3.1 meters, but Spell B should not work with Far Out Man because its range is 3.0 meters" just doesn't make sense.

It is most assuredly incorrect to say that "Far Out Man" working with Touch-range spells is a bug or mistake. It was a Design Decision. Not only was it not patched in the EE, but a new preset class with Touch-range spells and Far Out Man was actually added to the EE. You might not agree with that design decision, but that does not make it a bug or mistake.

I think the main issue is pairing Decaying Touch with First Aid against bosses, which drains 10% of the enemy's health. 3 AP for 10% health is pretty decent, especially if you had two characters with First Aid though with a 4 turn cooldown it's probably not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. But I think thematically Decaying Touch could at least boost poison resist by 30-50% or something, to sort of make it the poor-man's zombie.

Anyway, here's my current vision for the mod which I'll start as soon as I finish downloading the EE, but won't be able to finish until the editor comes out.


1. Implement monster level scaling up to player level. Already have the code for this and everything. Note that when you upscale a creature, it does boost its stats, possibly in unexpected ways, so it could potentially make some fights actually harder if you waited for a level 5 enemy to become a level 15 enemy, though probably not too much. Upscaled creatures don't have changed experience rewards though (in the original, at least), which is fine.

2. Remove various skill bonuses from loot all unique, crafted, and random loot: lucky charm, lockpicking, sneak, pickpocket, barter, charisma, leadership, loremaster, crafting, blacksmithing. Traits and talents will still give bonuses, but otherwise you'll have to invest some serious points to gain the benefits.

3. To make getting these abilities worth it, I'll add various rewards and skills to the more situational abilities:

Lucky Charm: tweak treasure tables so you have a decent chance to find extra loot, some of it even divine with high lucky charm. May also add some unique items only to be found through LC.

New skills (honestly these are mostly fun, slightly random things. They give a chance for a multiple effects for a chance that nothing will happen. I'd like to make the abilities something that will change what you do based on the results you get, so I'm not sure about their current effects. Will scale based on level if that's possible) :

LC 1: Chromatic Orb: 40% to apply warm, wet, chilled, burning, poisoned, oiled. 5m area effect, 8m range.

LC 3: Bless of the Dice: 20% to apply haste, winged feet, endure elements, and/or rage. Won't scale. 5 AP, 4 CD. 8m range, single target

LC 5: Curse of the Dice: 50% chance to apply crawling infestation, 50% to apply Cursed, 50% to apply Decaying Touch, 50% to apply shackles of pain.


Lockpicking: 7-9 lockpickable chests placed throughout the game with unique good loot, mostly geared towards rogues

Not sure how many enemies are immune to pickpocketing, but here are some ideas anyway.

Pickpocket 1: gain a token of pain that causes an enemy with it in their inventory to take 25% more damage.

Pickpocket 3: gain a token that reduces enemy willpower, leadership (if enemies have this) and bodybuilding by 2 when its in their inventory.

Pickpocket 5: when the enemy with this in their inventory dies, rogue becomes invisible and hasted for 1 round.

Charisma 3 or 4 may grant you a charm ability, not sure how charisma is in general. Do you gain lots of rewards from charisma?

Not sure how to improve barter. It'd be cool to make merchants have extra items based on your barter, but that might be difficult. I might add a single new merchant in Cyseal that has better gear, including some uniques, based on your barter level.

A cool loremaster skill would be to exaggerate the attributes of an enemy, to reduce the resists they are weak to and strengthen the ones they are strong in. Sounds hard to program though. Might just give loremaster some kind of "mark target" ability that reduces their resits in general.

Sneak 3-4: might grant you another kind of invisible spell. Otherwise will make sneak 3 and 5 reduce AP cost of sneaking by 1 and and 2 respectively, if I can.

I think crafting and blacksmithing are pretty powerful as is, to be honest, but maybe could grant blacksmithing a sunder armor ability or something.

Leadership: A pretty strong ability as is, but might have leadership 4 grant you some kind of inspire ability.

4. I'll look into adding more willpower, bodybuilding and vitality to certain enemies.

5. Will look into balancing certain spells and talents, but can't say exactly what yet. Probably will increase Rapture AP cost to 8, might even make it a 1 round charm, max. Will see if I can make Guerilla affect invisibility too. Remove cooldown from Staff of Magus. Might add certain novice abilities to high level staves, though I dislike making them just stat sticks.

Thoughts on the new abilities/tweaks?

You can't use pickpocket in combat at all. I also tried it on an (always-hostile) enemy out of combat, using invisibility, and while the Pickpocket option did appear in the menu, it didn't do anything (yes I was also Sneaking). So your pickpocketing options might not even be possible.

Pickpocketing may only work on NPC's who are by default non-hostile and can change to hostile later. It may not work on always-hostile monsters (the majority of enemies.)

***

My zany idea for improving Charisma is simply to merge Leadership with it.

Removing all bonuses to abilities from equipment might have a lot more far-reaching balance ramifications than you think. I guess you'll find out later.

Coming back to the "overleveling" due to additional monsters granting XP... that's why one DOESN'T use combat-XP as D:OS does.
Pillars of Eternity tried to use monster variety as difficulty too, and it kinda works since it doesn't give XP per kill. On the other hand some people whined about it, then they added "bestiary XP" and since you fill those quicker on higher difficulties... well... good systems ruined by crappy gamers.

The same would be true here.
The BAD sollution would be to add scaling (hell no).
The GOOD sollution would be to simply use objective XP, not combat XP. Then you can alter an encounter per difficulty all you want, and don't have to worry about any of it at all, whatever the composition everyone gets the same reward.

The XP gain per encounter is given for Normal difficulty. So, the game progress is set that you hit certain level at certain key scene. for example 9 level braxus rex, 20 at final battle.
So, when you add/subtract difficulty by adding/removing enemies you need to keep XP per encounter the same to prevent brake the progress of leveling.

Let say you meet 3 opponents at normal to get 300XP.
Same encounter for Tactical has 5 opponents, but you still get 300xp per encounter.

Correct. Receiving XP at the skull crashing moment is rewarding. Receiving the xp for a kill is mandatory. There need to be a system beehind a scene which re-calculates XP per head for different difficulty to achieve the same sum xp of the encounter.

No, it's not.
It is, infact, quite deterimental to good game design, balancing and options of players. As D:OS has also demonstrated in a variety of instances.

You might disagre, but masses of Pillars of Ethernity users agree.
Do you belive that DOS has a very different audience?
They are the same people :-]

Lame about pickpocketing. Wasn't sure if it was possible or not. Seems like a needles limitation. They'll probably remove it in D:OS 2 anyway with how they enjoy reverse pickpocketing poison health potions and whatnot. Might have to just give some NPCs good stuff to pickpocket, but I'd love to give combat abilities for pickpocket. Might just have to make pickpocket give you abilities that do my suggestions instead of having it work through the pickpocket window.

It definitely is a big change to remove ability bonuses from equipment. With fewer bonuses available to loot, you might tend to actually get better combat loot overall and find more +attribute gear. Crafting, at least early on, will be a little less useful for gaining a bunch of Whether that will be counterbalanced by needing to invest a lot more ability points into skills is questionable. Without improve the weaker abilities, I definitely think removing ability bonuses would make the game a lot harder, and in a way, a lot more railroaded into forcing you to pick combat abilities. So all abilities need to be good for this change to be a net positive of actually diversifying options while still making the game harder.

I'm curious if you see other major factors that I'm not considering that removing abilities will create, or if you just think it's hard to predict what kind of subtle effects it will have, mostly late game.

As for level scaling, it's the easiest, most elegant solution from a modder's perspective. Encounter/Goal XP is a good idea too, but I don't think it really fundamentally solves the issue that people who do a lot of side-content are going to get overleveled. You either force people to do side content, which even in tactician mode, I don't know if that's the best idea, or you let side content make people really overpowered. Scaling, at the cost of immersion, and a bit of irksomeness that enemies in the first zone will still provide challenge even at level 20 (though really, you're still going to decimate them with all your powerful skills at that point), lets people choose to do side content or not and they still get a balanced experience.

"But doing side content should be rewarding!" I think the best way to deal with this is to let side content give you special loot, new abilities, and just more fun stuff to play with. Doing side content should make you more powerful, but a level advantage over your opponents is just too big of a bonus with how level differentials work in D:OS. Maybe instead of scaling, level differentials could give a minimal bonus or malus, but that's not something that's easy to mod. Higher level enemies should have more abilities and better tactics, not just better stats.

I must be a baddie. Playing in honor mode (15th restart, sniffles) and I can't get overlevelled quite as easily as everyone else here is making it out to be.

I did play Original Sin to completion and did another playthrough and stopped. I'm not a total hardcore completionist but I do typically go for as much as possible.

It has been a very long time since I have played though, so perhaps I'm missing a lot of the optional guys. I am somewhat reading a walkthrough to help guide me through areas so I don't miss things and to help me remember what traits I can get (boy these are critical). The game only auto-saves if a character dies or hits a checkpoint, not for picking skills or winning/losing the rock paper scissors game. I haven't save scummed to win those things, but only to test to see what certain abilities do if I leveled them up.

I'm clearing as much as possible to avoid any surprises with the new tactician/honor mode and any combo kills on my primaries (which ends the game permanently on honor mode).

I'm mostly neck and neck with the enemy at about level 12 right now. I believe I only need to run the secret tunnel to Boreas's treasure room and/or clear that place with the immaculates. Not sure how the original poster got to level 15 already unless the XP growth is that fast.

Honestly, I think the problem is you guys are abusing a lot of mechanics that we already know of. Clever min/maxing with crafting is a surefire way to get very powerful and optimal gear very early especially if you know that the only drawback was requiring a lot of mainstat (strength) to equip it. Also crafting small jewelries early on for the stat buffs etc.

Knowing how to abuse bully for high damage bursts and such. Perhaps doing kiting techniques by using the pyramids to draw enemies out.

Not everyone is going to know the best skills to use without save scumming or reading about it. Considering how expensive the books are and how few skills you can use at a time, you can't just pick willy nilly. I suppose if you do a lot of stealing, sure. I usually just rob Evelyn's place though to get me started with a few spells.

But what if you didn't do any of that? It isn't outright obvious on how to min/max those things. Not everyone is expected to do that. I like to overanalyze but is it really such a great game design to make it so only one path is viable?

As a disclaimer, I did not play the beta after the original sin release that seems to eventually have evolved into this current incarnation of enhanced.

I found a lot of nifty things that they have done in tactician / honor mode though.

- Bosses can destroy summon quite quickly with their built in Destroy Summon skill (I forgot if this was in the original, but this helps beat the mass summon trick. I suppose you could have a really weird party where you give 4 people 4 summons. Not sure how the enemy reacts to that but summons typically do so little damage and that style of play in Original sin really bored me)
- A handful of enemies have elemental or physical immunities or require you to kill a specific unit to disable this.
- Some enemies have very strong anti-melee capabilities
- Some enemies have a very obvious elemental weakness

Feels like the enemies you face punishes teams that don't mix up melee / magic / range. If you do too much crowd control, you won't have enough damage when they get out of the crowd control.

I like how as I progress through the game, my different classes get power spikes. The mage was doing the most with wands, then my archer, now my melee are doing the most.

You could play Tactician if you don't enjoy having to restart so much. It's the same settings as Honor mode except without the save restrictions.

Yes, same target group.
But the opponents only existed pre-release. Quite loudly. Basically fear of any change (even if for the better). After release? No one talks about that, actually people say you get too much XP. Why you get too much XP? Since they added half-assed appeasement stuff for the rabid fear-crowd. Stupid stupid stuff that gave you more XP than you should get. If they didn't, it would pretty much be perfect.

And that's what I want for D:OS2. It also allows things like these Tactical mode do; making difficulty more than just %damage/%HP that difficulties are in all other RPG's, aside from PoE or D:OS Tactical Mode.

That wasn't my issue or complain, I was only setting skill expectation and to demonstrate a different style of play since save/reloading is mostly out of the question. My question is how is someone hitting level 15 by the time they reach Boreas. I'm clearing the game somewhat thoroughly and I am still level 12 and I just got the forcefield scroll (which I believe disables boreas' castle wall and leads to him or close to him). The crux of this thread is it is too easy to over level on tactician. I'm clearing the game in honor and there is no overleveling going on yet.

So I'm curious what I'm missing. It seems like someone is jumping ahead to fight some other mobs to power level up. I could be wrong though. Maybe people are min-maxing the charisma/rock paper scissor game but there is no way that is going to account for that big of a gap. I didn't take the most XP path for the prisoners but again, that can't possibly account for a 3 level difference.

I'm intentionally avoiding the tunnels with traps despite having high perception. I had one character try to take some item and she got permanently petrified with no cooldowns. I wasn't going to go out of my way to get the 'cure' spells to it since she'd probably just get re-petrified (honestly this is another problem, where you are re-checked multiple times for a saving throw but I'll leave that for another day). This part is where I re-loaded since I only have one game and can't risk losing a character permanently or sacrificing points and money for a skill I won't use later.

I'm playing most of the game off of memory but re-checking this link to help guide me.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/672174-divinity-original-sin/faqs/70607?page=2

Do you see any steps where the guide misses a big chunk of XP? I'm playing the game off of memory and where the game is telling me to go (it's done a MUCH better job telling you where to go now).

Larian needs to find a way to make CCs and spells in general backfire, or at least create vulnerabilities for the caster. They could then also ditch the cooldown system, or tone it down at least.