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

Now, let it first be said that I highly, highly, highly doubt that most, if any, of the suggestions presented by me, or anybody else, in this thread will ever make it into the real game. However, the Source Hunter Difficulty Mod for Original-Original Sin was a great success, and still is, and I believe it to be safe to assume that Enhanced Edition is going to recieve a similar mod and this thread could therefore be seen as more of a discussion forum for what people would want for such a mod, than for actual balance suggestions for Tactician Mode.

Now that that has been said; I'm very dissapointed with Tactician Mode and I find it to be quite a bit easier than expected. Me being the kind of gamer who wants to have my back against the wall throughout the entire game and who considers easy to be boring. And Tactician Mode does indeed have that very problem; it's easy.

Or rather, it gets easy. Yes, the first three encounters of the game are harsh, not to say very harsh, and gives of a false impression of what to expect from the mode. But the very second you're done collecting quests in Cyseal, have done some basic crafting and gotten your hands on a selection of the more useful Novice skills. You're more than capable of handling you're own. The initial balance is decent though, although bosses are a joke (why am I killing the Lighthouse boss in less than three rounds?), but you quickly become overleved and by the time you get to Boreas the game has gotten, pardon the pun; BOREas.

I believe this is down to a handful of fundemental problems with Tactician mode. Problems that could, in theory, easiliy be fixed. Keep the word "theory" in mind here; balance is hard. Although Original Sin seems to be afraid of being too hard, which is a ludicrous notion in a challenge mode.

1: Overleveling.

A short story; I was faffing about with my team of guys in the early stages of the game, having just been severly dissapointed by the Lighthouse Boss, who used to be rather challenging in the original game on Hard, and how easily I beat him.

In my state of nigh-fatal frustration I accidentally headed to the Orc-Beach, rather than then Boar-Zombie-Forest-Thing. A zone 1-2 levels above me, something which I hadn't noticed at the time. And I actually started to feel challenged, possibly a bit too much so as I was legitimately struggling. Eventually it dawned on me that I was fighting level 7 crabs with a level 5 party and I realized that I was having fun [i]because[/i] I, for once, wasn't overleved.

Later on, when I was doing Boreas, I wondered how the game had gotten so... droll, all of a sudden. Until I looked at Boreas' level, that is. He was level 12, my part - 15.

Fact is that level differences mean [i]a lot[/i] in Original Sin and that the game, for some obscene reason, doesn't assume that you're going to be doing all of the optional content. Despite, y'know, being on Tactician Mode. And as such it it very easy to become overleved and therefore gain an unfair advantage, which in turn makes the game easier, which in turn is counterintuitive to a game-mode which aims to be Difficult.

In other words; leveling feels punishing, rather than rewarding. As it makes the game easier and in turn; less fun.

I therefore strongly suggest upping enemy levels, so that they actually match those of the player, provided they do the optional content. Yes, it removes the optional status from optional content.

But you were going to do it all anyway. It's Tactician Mode. You already know where to do up the quests and how to do them, if your here.

2: Crowd Control is too reliable.

I believe this one is fairly obvious and don't require that much explanation. There is little reward to be found in getting a +5% to Charm/Stun/whatever, if the enemies don't ever resist your Crowd Control abilities, ever. Which, as it just so happens, is currently the case.

You can throw small armies at me and I'll let out a bored yawn, as I proceed to Freeze and Knock Down the entirety of them. Crowd Control becomes downright overpowered, if it always connects.

I therefore suggest giving all enemies boosts to their Bodybuilding and Willpower scores, so that they float around the 40%'ish chance, depending on the enemy, of couse, to be CCed.

Likewise I suggest making more enemies immune to individual debuffs. Partially to promote Loremaster and partially to make things into less of a "derp-stunfest".

3: Bosses are strangely easier than normal encounters.

How come that bosses don't feel like bosses? Could it be their severly gimped health-pools? The fact that they're hardly anymore resistant to CC than their minions? Or maybe it's both?

It's both, by the way.

Their damage and abilities seem to be fine. Although it's hard to tell, as they tend to spend the entire fight with their face smack-dap in the ground. Unable to retaliate as they get quickly and swiftly torn to pieces.

I therefore suggest upping their health totals by a very, very, very considerable amount. The players are preparing all of their gear, skills and consumables to fight off these guys and the game should anticipate them to throw everything they've got at the bosses.

I likewise suggest making them much, much, much more resistant to CC. CCing a boss should be possible, yes; but it shouldn't be reliable, by any stretch of the imagination.

4: Grenades, Scrolls and Arrows. Oh' my!

3AP for a Water Balloon is perfectly fine. 3AP for a Firestorm Grenade is a bit silly. 3AP for a Frost Grenade is downright bonkers. 3 AP for a Love Grenade just breaks anything that resembles balance.

I'd personally love to see grenades, scrolls and arrows having their AP-costs adjusted a bit. Yes, I get that they're consumables and all that. But the thing is, that it has been proven time and time again that it is easy to produce high amounts of consumables. The fact that people treat Arrows and Grenades as a secondary school of magic, rather than as consumables, should make it perfectly evident that the game should do so aswell.

Yes, upping the AP-cost for a Frost Grenade from 3 to 6 doesn't keep it from being one of the most powerful forms of CC in the game. But it keeps people from abusing it, and other consumables, to high heaven.

5: Some skills, CC ones in particular, are kind of ridiculous.

Who in the name of Prince Charles' left testicle thought that Bitter Cold needed to outright Freeze its target? The spell was already incredibly powerful to begin with. Situational, yes, but a main-stay of the Aerothurge nevertheless.

Who thought that Blitz-Bolt should have a 70% base(!) chance to Stun its target? Or that Ice Shard should mimic Bitter Cold and become an instantaneous Freeze effect?

One thing is that these changes have removed some of what makes the combat in Original Sin as much fun as it is; comboing skills. Another is that Ice Shards new status as CC makes it too powerful to be a Novice skill, leaving Hydrosophists with 5/6 Novice spells at best and without a source of Water Damage at worst. An entirely third thing is that it gives spellcasters too many options for CC and that the baseline 70-100% effectiveness of these options makes it too easy to simply freeze and stun your way throughout pretty much the entire game.

Not mentioning Rapture, by the way. Because clearly the most powerful CC skill in the game should be a 4CD adept skill for 4AP.

I'd suggest, strongly, to look at the current list of skills and simply asking oneself; "Is Invulnerability [i]really[/i] good enough to be a Master level skill, in a world where Rapture exists, and why in the world did we change Frost Shard and Bitter Cold; ultimately leaving Hydrosophists with only 5 Novice skills and making the Wet and Chilled debuffs significantly less interesting?".

TL;DR: Where are the modding tools, gawddammid.

Also, I left out talents and skills on purpose. Although there are a number of considerable issues there too. Pinpoint for instance being a Scoundrel 1 talent, which makes it too easy to get, considering how powerful it is, and how simply making it a Scoundrel 2-3 talent instead would go a very, very long way to promote Rogues.

Also, also: I'm harsh because I love.

I will always be sad this game doesn't include an option to level-sync content up to your party's level. Even being a single level above your opponents makes such a noticeable difference in the difficulty of an encounter. Given the choice I would always prefer to remove that difference.

I asked for it even when D:OS was still in development, but people would always throw Elder Scrolls: Oblivion out there as an example of why level scaling designs should be avoided like the plague. Regardless, I would at least like having the option to enable syncing. Hopefully for D:OS 2, because I'm also finding Tactician Mode to be too easy, and it is largely due to level differences.

I'm an advocate of "tactician is hard" essentially because I've been pushing for a dual Lone Wolf team since the beginning. Obviously, having only a 2men group is *hard*. You can't use as many crowd control and wheneven one knockdown arrow lend on either of your source Hunters, you're toast because the next one will probably be a Freeze on your second character. And you can't really always have Avatar of Frost / Tempest on.

What is disappointing to me is that LW was (is?) an alternate playstyle in Classic DOS/other difficulty modes, but it just greatly raises the difficulty in Tactician and doesn't leave you a lot of options as far as builds are concerned. I reckon it may even out later, I must confess I haven't left Cyseal yet but nearing it. Each encounter still is a hard fight that requires a lot of concentration and tactics and may be ruined by a grumpy RNG leading to a reload every so often, if not multiple reloads each time.

Now, it's true I am biased by Classic DOS. Most of the things I knew and was going for aren't viable anymore. Most of the things I learned to avoid are now perfectly viable. So my adjusting curve is tough, very tough. =)

I mostly agree, but I should point out that spells across the board are almost entirely focused on CC to the extent that Damage is a distant memory. Until you get meteor storm and hail attack, a mage's damage is completely in the toilet and since you can get your CC from a ranger for generally less AP while keeping up the damage potential, mages are basically worthless until the end of the game.

The other problem is that low chance doesn't make the fights more tactical, it makes them more random. You either need options that can MAKE your CCs reliable, without being too overpowered themselves, or else the CCs should just be incidental bonus effects on some other kind of attack that you would be using even without the CC. Playing around with wet/cold and adding similar effects for knockdown/charm (charm could be HP based) would be one way to make CC more tactical instead of random.

As for the nutjob suggesting level scaling; the MAIN problem with level scaling is that enemies are always two steps behind the player and you can NEVER find a challenge. With unscaled, players have the opportunity to go into an area early if they've been finding the game easy, which they cannot do in a scaled game. Of course, it's a fairly moot point if there is no overleveled area you can reasonably get to, but scaling only makes it worse.

Another vote for enemies scaling up to your level as an option. It's actually some pretty simple code. And many of your other stat suggestions could be implemented already if the stat text files are in the same place as they were in the original game. Would be a bit tedious to test, but it should be possible.

@Sotanaht: To address your point, monsters should only scale up, not down. Then you could kill a bunch of enemies a couple levels above you but other enemies would at least be the same level as you.

Another solution would be to make level differential bonuses penalties a lot less significant. An enemy shouldn't be a pushover just because they're 1 level below you, but that's mostly the case. But I think that'd be harder or impossible to fix with a mod.

I also tend to agree that reducing cc chances mostly randomizes combat instead of actually adding more tactical options. Of course, there will almost always be some random elements in an RPG, but not sure if cc should be fundamentally governed by the dice. I like the idea of basing efficacy of cc on character health, and by efficacy, I mean more the degree to which someone is cc'd. There are too many hard cc effects that basically fate something to death. I'd like more effects like cripple, which severely limits an enemy or player, but they still have some options. Something like various degrees of frozen, where the character is maybe partly frozen (just their legs, maybe), or have to spend more AP to attack (but non-offensive abilities might still cost the same.) I think those ideas are far beyond the scope of a mod, though, so reduced application chance is probably the best bet for now.

I'm probably going to work on a balance mod mostly addressing loot and subpar skills like lucky charm and lockpicking, but I might add some of these suggestions if no one else works on a balance/difficulty mod. Hopefully they'll let us activate more than one mod at a time once they get the editor going, but I don't have too much hope.

Interesting post.

1. I'm running two sets of characters, so I'm not yet far enough to be overleveled. I agree that it's not likely level changes will make it into the EE as it's a big balance change. One simple way to avoid overlevelling in Tactical in D:OS 2 might be that extra enemies simply do not give XP. That does have the drawback of being unsatisfying.

A better way would be to adjust the XP of each encounter in Tactical to give the same amount as normal. Basically, take a bit of the XP from all of the regular monsters and make that what the new enemies provide.


2. Do enemies farther along gain higher resistances to status effects? That was the case in vanilla D:OS, so I would assume that would also be the case in the EE.


3. I think another difference maker in boss encounters often comes down to having several party members and only one boss. You can get to take 4 actions for each one the boss takes.


4. Interesting idea for adjusting the AP costs of grenades. That's something that deserves more looking into. Right now I'm making a Grenadier character who will try and attack with mostly grenades.


5. Yeah, I'm not sure why Bitter Cold needed to be buffed, and it is silly that there are 5 Novice water skills when you can learn a maximum of 6 and 7 Adept water skills when you can learn a maximum of 4.


I'm not sure I agree with your suggestion to make Pinpoint a Scoundrel 2 Talent, never mind Scoundrel 3, since it's basically mandatory if you plan to use Grenades.

I don't see how boosting the Scoundrel level would promote the use of Rogues. If a player wants to use a Rogue, they will, all increasing the requirement of Pinpoint will do is reduce the options available for other characters. I don't think Rogues need special promotion.

@Baardvark
If you want to address the subpar skills, I would suggest looking into giving them a combat use in addition to their non-combat use. Lucky charm technically increases hit rate (though the amount is negligible), but I would give it a bonus crit chance, thinking 2% per level.

Other skills I've had ideas for, though they might be hard to mod, loremaster could be tied into the "examine" function, giving you detailed information on a monsters HP, resists, bodybuilding/willpower and more at higher levels. Charisma could affect charm, giving it back a more reliable chance to work after you've nerfed it, or it could even cause a random chance to charm when attacked. I'm sure you can come up with something for the others if you try hard enough.

@stabby
1. There aren't enough extra enemies in Tactician to overlevel in the long run. I think many of them might already not grant XP. My final level against the void dragon was 20 after killing everything I could find. The void dragon is also level 20.

2. Absolutely yes. For instance, the demons in the phantom forest were taking an average of 4 attempts each to CC, despite my success chances exceeding 140%. Whether they increase resistance fast or soon enough is another matter

3. that, and if you can CC the boss, it's over. They also don't have enough HP and would die in a single round, for instance, my void dragon kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diubhknjBPo

4. I never even found grenades that useful. The good ones (eg freeze, charm) are expensive and very limited to make, costing frost essence or pixie dust+rare containers respectively. That plus the requirement of a talent to even hit your target reliably, they never really stack up against arrows. Technically they do more AoE damage than spells (except "rain" spells), but that just tells me spells are in desperate need of damage buffs.

5. mages need buffs somewhere. A cost 2 CC is probably the only thing keeping them afloat, compared to the cost 4 CC+Damage ranger with no cooldown. I'd rather see mages turn into AoE damagers than CCers though.

...

Ehem. To the poster with reading comprehension issues (I kid), this "nutjob" would like to point out that he specifically said "I will always be sad this game doesn't include an option to level-sync content up to your party's level.". I did not say level-sync content down to your party's level, I said level-sync up to it - which completely removes your concern about not being able to go into certain areas early to find higher level opponents.

I tend to choose my words fairly carefully for a reason, although it doesn't do much good if people just skim over them before tossing an insult my way. :P

Them comments. All them comments. Just ignore the wall of text if you want to. I'm mostly just writing it because I'm one of those people who like to respond to everybody, when I'm the OP. Going to refrain from quoting as, for some reason, they won't show up as quotes. Curious that.

@Gyson.

Scaling may very well be the way to go. Scaling up that is, of course. One could naturally make the argument that level scaling is immersion breaking. But so is being overleveled and roflstomping all that the game can throw at you. And if I have to make a choice betweem two evils, then it's going to be the one that's not going to cause tedium.

I don't really know if active leveling scaling is possible. Seeing how I don't believe it's in the game code itself. But the alternative would be to simple skim through a handful of let's plays and see what level people are at the various encounters, and level the enemies acordingly. While keeping the XP-gain the same. It would be the slower approach, however.

@Dr Koin.

But not hard enough. ;D

I personally don't mind the changes to Lone Wolf, that much. But that's mostly because I've always liked party interactions and inventory management. It does annoy me a wee' bit though that they decided to change Lone Wolf into a seperate difficulty, rather than an alternative playstyle; like Zombie. Mostly because it seems a bit cheap to me that they threw an optional restriction at people who want actual difficulty, rather than making Tactician as mean as they could.

Then again. They did a wonderful job with Tactician, all things considered, and we, the community, can use it as a stepping stone for modding... once the tools arrive.

@Sotanath.

As far as I am concerned a tactical decision is one that requires one to chose between various options and predict and adapt to the outcome of said choice. When CC is always going to stick it is always going to be the better option and as such you won't have any meaningful decisions to make. Increasing enemy resistances to hard CC does, indeed, increases the tactical approach of the game. And it does so for the very reasons you yourself point out.

Because it creates a world in which you actively want to apply Wet and Chilled to your enemies in order to CC them. Thereby changing the question from being one of "what kind of CC do I want to use?", to being one of "do I want to risk CCing that enemy now and potentially wasting my AP, or should I set it up better first? Maybe it would be better to just try and deal some damage and avoid the risk of wasting my turn, hmm.".

Now natually it dosen't have to be a large increase. But it should be sufficiently high that you want to set up your CC, rather than just spamming it, and that it makes you glad to gain a +5% chance to CC the target from your stats.

As for other ways to set up CC, I've personally always found it a bit queer that being covered in oil doesn't make you more likely to be knocked down. And your idea of Charisma increasing Charm efficiency works brilliantly, although it may be a bit too hard to code. I don't know, haven't seen the new editor yet.

Then again, the problem is hard CC (Frozen, Knock Down, Stun and Charm), and hard CC only. And upping Willpower and Bodybuilding does hurt the "good" kinds of CC, the ones that don't mean insta-death. Might be a better idea to add a monster only skill which improves their resistances to hard CC specifically, and only improves it significantly enough to make set-ups desirable.

As for your suggestions as to how to make the "bleh" abilities (Lockpicking, Lucky Charm, Charisma, etc) I think your ideas are awesome. Maybe causing Loremaster to increase your critical strike multiplier by 2-4% per rank would make sense. After all, you know where to hit them where it hurts and it would go wonderfully with Lucky Charm in a world where it increases crit chance by 1-2% per rank.

Lockpicking is easy to fix though. Just make most non-plot chests unbreakable and throw away the key. ;D

+1 for some awesome ideas.

@Baardvark

You can have a +2 for thinking about making said mod. Source Hunter Difficulty was the shit in Original-Original Sin and it deserves a cousin. Hopefully this thread is of some help. ;)

Hopefully Larian are going to be cool about multiple mods.

@Stabbey.

What really grinds my gears about Ice Shard and Bitter cold is that the change to flat-out freeze has hurt the combo aspect a fair bit. Yes, mages fall a bit behind, mostly because Geomancer no longer has easy access to Ooze fields. But buffing Bitter Cold to high heaven and messing up the Hydrosophist Novice spell-list seems like a very lazy solution to the that problem, from Larian's side. Especially as it still leaves Pyrokinitec and Geomancer in a state of "bleh".

If the issue is that people are afraid that they won't have enough Wet/Chilled targets for Frost Shard and Bitter Cold, in a world where they simply Chill their targets. One could always change Slow Current and Cleansing Water to cause Wet to the target (and maybe have Purifying Fire cause Warm, because flavor). Might feel weird to soft CC in order to hard CC, or cleans debuffs in order to hard CC. But flexibility and comboing is fun.

Although I do like how Geomancer is more about Earth damage, rather than Poison now.

Grenades were added to the game in order to give Rogues and Warriors some flexibility, something which they were sorely lacking in Original-Original Sin. The problem being that the Pinpoint talent is quite possibly THE most powerful talent in the game, especially when combined with Slingshot, and it's just a bit too easy for non-Rogues to get their hands on.

A Ranger with Pinpoint is basically as broken as you can get as of now, whereas a Rogue without it is... well, kind of subpar. The key thing about increasing it to Scoundrel 2 being that the Adept Rogue skills are rather poor for non-Rogues. Thusly it would make grenades a "Rogue-thing", just as arrows are a Ranger thing.

It was mostly just a throw-away comment though. ;)

Come to think of it. It has always struck me as odd that Perception doesn't increase Critical Strike Damage. Seeing how it's promoted as a Rogue/Ranger stat, despite having no use for rogue at all.

-

Jeebus. That toke forever!

Also, the Void Dragon clearly needs the single most massive buff in the history of history and ever. How much health does it have? 4000? Pfft! It's the last boss for crying out loud. Everything you've got in your bags is going to be thrown at it.

250000 is more like it!

There is no kill like overkill!

I disagree about pinpoint. Pinpoint is the talent required to make Grenades somewhat viable, but as far as being overpowered? Not really.

Like I said, grenades just aren't all that impressive. The crafting resources to make them are extremely limited, even if you have infinite money. The CCing grenades require essences to make, which are relatively expensive and only sold in very small quantities. The damage grenades require semi-common, but limited (not sold/refreshed) resources, namely empty bottles and nails.

Cost aside, their effects aren't that impressive either. The damage grenades are decent for AoE damage, but still not nearly as good as direct attacks. The CC grenades all have a 50% cc chance or less, and against enemies with any amount of resistence it's extremely likely they won't do anything at all. Compare to arrows with a 100% chance and spells with a 150% chance, it's usually not worth using a grenade, especially after the cost.

I managed to end my last game with over 300 knockdown arrows, 200 stun arrows, 100 charm arrows, and I was selling poison cloud arrows to vendors. I doubt I could have spared even 30 earth essences to make knockdown grenades the entire game.


As for the void dragon, it had 3516hp. I wouldn't go quite that far, as I understand it has some powerful attacks and summons a lot of minions, and you have to protect astarte or lose. It does need enough HP to survive at least 2 rounds of your absolute best, and it should be outright immune to all hard CCs. Slow is fine, but no freeze etc.

In fact, nearly all single-target focused bosses should be hard-CC immune. If you can trivialize the fight with a single spell and a lucky roll, it needs to be changed. That doesn't mean that EVERY boss should be immune, there are plenty that have enough minions that the boss itself is the least of your worry, but something like Boreas, the Trife, and the Void Dragon definitely.

The comment about pinpoint was mostly one of the off-handed variety. As this thread is aimed at figuring out what the problems are with tactician mode, and how to fix them. Talents and whatnot seem to be more of general class-balance discussion.

I have been thinking about it for a while and I tend to agree that my thinking about Pinpoint may have been wrong. Mostly because making it a Scoundrel 2 talent would prevent warriors from picking it up, and that'd be a shame as splashing Man-at-Arms on Rogues, and Scouldrel on Rogues, is a lot of fun and the talent has pretty much singlehandedly created an archtype that didn't exist prior to Enhanced Edition.

Something that would go a long way to make Rogues able to keep up with the rest of the party, would be to look at the Guerilla talent and the Sneaking skill and tweaking them so that they're both playable again and more beneficial to the Rogue, than to the Ranger. An idea from the top of my head would be to have Sneaking decrease the cost of Sneaking to 4AP at rank 3 and 3AP at rank 5. Add in a change to Guerilla which allows it to trigger off Invisibility AND increases the damage boost to 100% for Backstabs, rather than 50% for normal attacks.

But that's less Tactician-Mode and more general class balance nonsense.

I do still believe that grenades and arrows, or rather the overpowered ones (Frost Grenade, Love Grenade, Charming Arrow, Static Cloud Arrow) could do with having their AP costs improved. Arrows in particular as currently Archers outshine Spellcasters in just about every single aspect of the game. The fact that grenades and arrows may be semi-rare, or hard to craft, shouldn't be taken as much into consideration. Only getting 30 Frost Grenades in a playthrough still means that you have 30 goes at a very powerful source of CC (50% Frozen + icy flooring for knockdown).

But the way I see it that's of lesser concern, seeing how I believe we've stumbled upon the crux of the issue when it comes to Tactician Mode. The big three of which would be:

- There's too much XP to go around and you become overleveled too easily.
- Hard CC is too reliable.
- Bosses are a joke.

The XP thing is relatively easily fixed. Although it's going to require some serious maths.

Hard CC being too reliable could, yet again, be relatively easily fixed by creating a monster-only ability (let's call it Resillience) which increases their resistances towards Charm, Knock-Down, Frozen and Stunned. And then adding a 50% weakness to Knock-Down to the Oiled debuff (because you're slippery, see?), and possibly reducing Frost Shard and Bitter Cold to Chill-status, rather than Frozen, and then adding Wet to Slow Current to encourage setting up hard CC. Charm being a bit harder to find a flavorful fix for, although I love the idea of making it dependent on Charisma.

Another idea would be to let Leadership 6 give all under ones command immunity to Charm and then give a select number of enemies the appropriate ability level. Thereby both making Initiative more important and nerfing Charm at the same time, while also giving people a strategic choice between killing the enemy leader - or dealing with their Archers/Spellcasters. Just an idea, of course.

I very, very much agree that bosses need to be immune to hard CC, with select exceptions of course (Baron of Bone/Evelyn, etc). And that they need a considerable boost to their vitality scores. Killing a boss in 2-3 rounds is just a bit sad.

Also, a number of bosses should probally be highly resistant to Decaying Touch. As being able to remove 10% of their health instantly with First Aid is a bit broken.

EDIT: Am I, by the way, the only one who thinks that the change to the Armour-Lowered status, from a 50% decrease to a 100% one, is a bit silly?

EDITEDIT: Just remembered that Petrify is on the hard CC list too. Just noting it down for wholeness sake.

I don't believe XP is an issue - the game is meant to be played as the player chooses. Not focused on users with a 100% completion rate.

So its just enough XP to manage the game without having to do side quests. The more work you do the more rewarded you get.

First of all; this thread is reserved for Tactician mode exclusively. Being overleveled in Classic and Explorer mode isn't an issue, because these modes aren't meant to be hard in any way, shape or form. Just clarifying, as you didn't specify any game modes.

Secondly; as stated in the opening post, I highly doubt that *any* of the proposed changes present within this thread will make it into the game. This thread is aimed more at sharing ideas for a general difficulty mod than anything else. As such there's no need to worry that anything said here is going to affect the game that you, for some reason, find to be perfectly balanced.

You think the game is fine as-is? Good for you. Doesn't quite cut it for quite a few people, but good for you nonetheless.

The point of tactician mode, and the reason why people play it, is to provide the player with a challenge. Being one level above the enemy team provides you with a massive advantage. Which is turn makes the game easier and therefore less challenging. The logic, by the way, being that being bored isn't fun and when people play on the hard difficulty (no matter the game) they are actively looking for a challenge. And as such making things easier makes them boring.

Being overleveled isn't a reward, as it makes what *should* have been difficult easy; it's a punishment for doing optional content, as it actively makes the game less fun.

Optional content that you're going to be doing anyway, I might add. Partially to see what changes have been made to the various game modes, partially to experience all the content and partially to do all the optional bosses.

The game assumes that people aren't going to do the optional content *on Tactician*. Which is a categorically, and demonstrably, wrong assumption. As is evident by the fact that you can't find a single video of a Boreas-kill in which Boreas isn't massively overleveled, for instance. Heck, the game mode assumes that you've played through the game once. So of course you're going to do it, because you already know how and where.

Seriously, try asking somebody when and why they stopped playing (on Tactician mode, I might add) and the vast majority will tell you that they stopped somewhere in Lucculla Forest, because the game got too easy.

Now, naturally there are several solutions to this. One would be to adjust enemy stats, so that you actually need the edge that being overleveled provides you with. Another would be to have enemy levels scale up, so that you never run the risk, and it is most definitely a risk, of being overleveled. And the third would be to reduce XP-gain across the board, so the player would have to do optional content (which they're going to do anyway) in order to level at a steady pace.

The latter two options are by far the easier ones to pull off and as such they're the ones being discussed. Or rather; agreed upon. Hence why the hot topic, if you will, is more in relation to bosses and CC.

I never made it past the pirates caves on "normal" before I started over on "tactician" mode, so maybe I'm not the best judge on how hard it gets in later stages... but...

From the best I can tell, the game isn't actually any harder on Tactician mode.. yeah, I have noticed a few fights with a few extra enemies, but otherwise it feels basically the same.

I "CC" the enemies and mow them down all the while wondering why I have melee in my party, since another bow user would probably be better.. 2 bows 2 casters = win.

If Fallout 4 weren't coming out tomorrow I'd be tempted to start over yet again and try a lonewolf tactician mode, as that might actually make things harder..

Great topic.

Most suggestions around the comboing aspect of CC is really great and exciting.
Especially since landing a cc would cost more AP, you could buff a little the damage of mage spells.

For charm, I like both suggestions.
The leadership thing is great (I haven't noticed yet if some enemies are leaders in some encounters actually, it's a good idea if there are already) but the problem with that one is that the leader 6 NPC would make the perfect Charm target (and give your party leadership 6). Making the Charm even more OP actually.
I tend to think it's probably better to go the Charisma route and nerf the Charm spell to 50% like all others. After all, when charm lands, it is the most potent CC.

In the decaying touch / doctor combo, I don't think decaying touch has to be nerf. Doctor should work like Cure Wounds (or the hydrosophists spells), and cure according to player level and DEX (making the heal less potent for hybrids).
Note that if you find this combo OP, then you should consider making bosses resistant to the diseased status. And make the spell "Mass Disease" enter combat (probably any spell that alters ground nearby ennemies should engage the caster). Disease remove 3 CST, which removes 30% when enemies have 10 CST. It has consistently been my opener.

Also, maybe restrict the maximum number of invocations of the group to 1.

The level-upscaling solution is the best I can think of (in elegance, design and man-hours).

The boulder dash spell could create poison ooze instead of oil. Removing the stun was enough. Or the Oil spell could be changed into Ooze pound. Or...

Let's not forget that the previously OP spell Blind is maybe currently bugged. Giving a -30% hit debuff and a spell-range debuff could be ok.

Can't wait to see modding tools ^^

I'm kinda bummed at the lack of Larians input into all these threads with some really constructive comments that should be considered

I started playing this game again when enhanced edition was released, although I didn't go further than dying in the lighthouse in the original version. The hard difficulty was indeed hard and I went to play something else and totally forgot the game, until now. This time I had decided to man up and face the challenges on the new tactician mode since it seemed very exciting, and I truly it was, for 10 levels. The challenge effectively ended right after that.

The first 10 levels felt amazing, I had to focus and give 100% to all fights, think how to use my spells, grenades, scrolls. I felt the monsters around me always had the upper hand, but then by some miracle I still survived at the end, this was totally thrilling experience and I loved it. After killing Braccus Rex I quickly noticed I wasn't using any of my scrolls, grenades or even potions anymore, I was just simply "saving them for a rainy day" which never came. I was hoping more challenging groups to appear, but after I got a hold on one or two master level skills I noticed my group was totally dominating every single group and boss there was. I realised game went from hard to very easy quite fast and it was like that to the end.

I really hoped I could have felt the thrilling experience from 10-20 aswell. Honestly I was expecting things to get even harder as the game progressed. Alas, I was disappointed!

That is perfect description of unbalanced original edition. But now we have enhanced edition you know? Everything is polished, balanced, bug free. Also the final battle is epic. We have grenades, wands, dual wands.

I want to stick another pair of magic wands to my nose too.

Where are dual grenades?
I want MOAR.

@Littlebob86: I don't blame Larian employees for not wanting to talk about the game in their off-hours, because they probably wouldn't get paid to write forum posts. Supposedly they do read at least some forum posts occasionally. They're probably well aware of most of the suggestions in this thread anyway, but as the OP said, this is mostly ideas for a mod anyway.

@Karvapallo: Well, that's not so different from the original game then. It's a mix of getting used to the systems, gaining more options and the issues in this thread. And something people have yet to mention: limited AI. Something that may or may not be moddable, and extremely hard to get right even in theory.

For example, a way to nerf charm would be to make enemies avoid attacking their charmed allies (unless that's the case already). But should enemies run right past their charmed allies and eat attacks of opportunities? Would it sometimes actually be more advantageous for them to put their ally out of their misery if they have less than 5% health and could be charmed for the next 3 turns? Should they try to stun or freeze them without dealing that much damage instead?

Implementing all these decisions is a whole other matter. Would be easiest to just make charmed enemies a non-target.

How about something like enemies healing players with the zombie talent, both avoiding hitting them with poison attacks, and actively casting heal spells on zombie targets? How do they prioritize healing their allies over damaging a player zombie? And should they know this from the get-go (much easier), or learn it from seeing a player get healed by poison? Someone suggested a while back that an enemy's capacity to know the players' strengths and weaknesses should depend on the enemy's loremaster, which I think would be absolutely brilliant. Most bosses and smart enemies could have relatively high loremaster, but others (like headless skeletons) would have none.

Then there's the question of whether (and how) enemies should communicate behavior to their allies. Should smart enemies be able to tell their dumber allies that the player is a zombie and to stop freaking hitting him with poison? Basing group behavior on leadership (the skill) would be pretty awesome. Kill the leader(s) and enemies start making more mistakes, perhaps even start running away. This would have the benefit that skills that reduce an enemy's leadership or loremaster skills could actually change their behavior on the fly, which is a far more exciting prospect than just affecting their stats. Or an enemy with lower health (or cc'd) would take a malus to leadership (hard to lead when you have an arrow in the knee).

All that is probably too ambitious for a mod, but basic stuff might be possible. What low-hanging AI blunders are still happening in the EE? Do enemies still constantly trigger opportunity attacks and make random movements? In general, do enemies seem to make decent decisions, or is it still kind of a mess?

Wall of text incomming!
- again.

@Chrest

I believe that everybody agrees that a potential difficulty mod should have an emphasis on comboing effects together. Personally I think it's by far one of, the not THE, more of aspects of the game. So you and I are of one mind there.

The way I see it it'd be far easier to "just" go down the Leadership route and making the "Leaders" immune to Charm. Seems to be far easier coding-wise and has the added benefits of nerfing Fear (another hard CC) and making Initiative scores matter more, as currently you don't really care that much about Initiative. Then again, that's just my opinion and "Leadershipping" wouldn't solve the issue of Charisma being useless. An added bonus being that Leadership 6 gives all the enemies +1 to Bodybuilding and Willpower, which makes skills like Drain Willpower and Divine Light far, far more potent.

I completely forgot about the brokenness that is Mass Disease, and I don't think it'd be difficult to force it, or other combat-setup skills, to initiate combat, in order to avoid abuse. Good call. I also believe you're very much spot-on when it comes to changing First Aid into a hard heal; rather than a percentage-based one. It allows Decaying Touch to remain an option (healing bosses to death, oh' joy!) without it being broken.

The change to Boulder Bash seems very reasonable too. Although it's a slight buff to Zombie parties, but alternate playstyles shouldn't be the main-focus of this project anyway. Besides, it's a change which makes Midnight Oil interesting and unique again. Not to mention good because of the Oiled debuff most likely being the one which gets the -50% Knock-Down resistance clause.

I suspect that one of the near-future patches is going to fix Blind and while Blind is most certainly an issue, being a borderline hard CC effect and all, I don't think it deserves quite the same treatment as the other hard CCs. But some kind of treatment it does need, indeed.

@Karvapallo

I think it'd be an idea to increase enemy vitality and Willpower/Bodybuilding in acordance to how far you are into the game. Currently all enemies recieve a blunt +20% health boost on Tactician. Which is fine in the pre-Braccus content, but it quickly becomes nill. Maybe increasing the bonus health by an additional 20% (at least!) after each major boss would be an idea? That way the later part of the game could, possibly, become less of a "Flurry and Meteor Shower all the things!"-kind of afair?

Just thinking out loud, though.

It is dissapointing though, that Tactician mode dosen't take things like character progression, Master Skills, crafting/blacksmiting and so on, into consideration and just blatantly assumes that you're planning to auto-attack everything from level 1-20.

@gGeo

That picture sums things up pretty neatly.

@Bardvaark

I think that AI-tweaking is waaay out of the scope of this project. We're a bunch of happy-amateurs who happen to be dissapointed with the current balance of the game. Not a professional game developing studio. Although it all depends on what we can and cannot do with the editor, once it comes out.

The AI is indeed a bit more sophisticated nowadays, but it's still silly. A good example being that pretty much no enemies have the Pinpoint talent, but they still insist on grenading everything around them. I remember a skeleton pirate, who was standing in a doorway and who spend his entire turn first hurling an Oil Flask directly into the doorway, and then proceeded to Firestorm Grenade himself.

Although that's easily fixed by giving them Pinpoint, but the point still stands; the AI is thick. As in really, really thick.

---

Something a bit unrelated, that I've been thinking of, is the current state of Wizards and how they do it the early game damage-wise, and how to fix it. Now, naturally changing Boulder Bash into creating Ooze, rather than oil, and making Oiled the "Knock-Down setup" is a big step in the right direction. But it still leaves Pyrokinetic as the least interesting school of magic, unless playing in a Zombie-party, in which case it's the shit. A potential and fairly elegant solution could be to simply add a talent to the game, along the lines of:

Pyromaniac: Novice and Adept Pyrokinetic skills deal 50% additional damage to Burning targets.

It'd go a long way to making Pyrokinetic more playable and it has the added benefit of being easy to code and promoting the whole comboing-thing. Just throwing it out as a quick suggestion, before I forget it.

A similar talent could, by the way, easily be added to Hydrosophist which increases healing done to Wet targets. To promote Mass Heal, just a little bit. And make you want to consider getting your own guys Wet. But that's more of a novelty thing, really.

Rogues could, likewise, become a lot more playable if the Guerilla talent was given a bit of a tweak. Causing it to give a passive +25-50% damage to backstabs aswell as the +50% for sneaking. Allow it to trigger on Invisibility and Rogues would be (gasp!) bordering on decent again.

Although this is more general balance suggestions and... yeah, I'm pretty much just writing them down here, so that I don't forget them.

Another issue, balance-wise, would be summons. But I reckon taking a page out of the Source Difficulty mods' book and giving them -2 Str, -2 Con and the Stench talent, should be a sufficient nerf to prevent people from using them as meat shields and more as support for flanking.