Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Too many environmental effects

I agree, I love the environmental effects and think it adds a lot to the battles. But god damn, I can't even move my characters around without using abilities. Every damn spell makes some kind of huge zone of death or impassibility. Id say lower the area of effect from most spells, and just use a few key ones that have a larger area specifically for the purpose of blocking off areas of the field. And/or give environmental effects like a 3 turn duration

I also quite enjoy this aspect!

Tornado might actually be the answer...

As it stands, I'm convinced that the best strategy is going to involve having a party of 4 Mages, for reasons already discussed. Environmental effects and CC are currently very OP, particularly against melee classes who end up in the thick of it, and usually have to move through it before they can do anything.

I should probably try this in the arena. (I'm coming for you, Swen!)


This assumes that the environmental effect does not include a CC effect, and you're not already trapped in a stun-lock.

I disagree. Mages are very good in offense, but they lack in defense. They are killed very quickly without any highly-armored tank protecting them. Also archers have the best variability and flexibility.

The best party is imo one that consists of one tank, one archer and two mages. Pretty much the same like it was in DOS1.

I do agree though that the scope of many environmental (surface) spells should be more limited and cover less space.

Defence is worthless when you're trapped in a stun-lock.

So is offense.

I agree.

I just started playing and it was by far the most noticeable change compared to the first game, and not for the better. I hardly ever see regular attacks anymore there are so many magic attacks and area effects in the game. I have no idea how a bunch of the new effects like necrofire are even triggered - they just randomly explode from enemies and decimate my characters or enemies.

Please please please tone this nonsense down Larian! Magic becomes mundane and annoying when it's used too much. Instead of making every battle more strategic, it just starts to feel the same.

It's really easy to wipe yourself out by using magic even for veterans of the first game.



Yes. Pop Quiz: Which of the following enemy encounters does NOT have an enemy fire an Earth Damage boulder which spews armor-bypassing, Slow-status-causing oil in a large radius?

(a) Void-Touched Turtles
(b) Saltwater Crocodiles
(c) Prisoner Arena Fight
(d) Magister Houndmaster
(e) This is a trick question...


The correct answer is (e). They ALL have such an attack. Because the Slow from Oil bypasses armor, that means the players have to try to focus-down the oil-using caster before they get a chance to attack or else they'll be at a substantial disadvantage, needing to use their reduced AP and movement to escape the flammable oil, giving the enemy free turns.

If a voidwoken dies, he leaves behing this deceasing stuff (not sure the correct name at the moment). It is highly flammable like poison and if put ablaze it creates necrofire instead of normal fire.

Not sure what is your big deal with oil. Sure, is surpasses protecting, but the slow will never be the reason to lose. Thanks to magic armor, electric and burning surfaces are less of a threat than in D:OS 1. If you have enough magic armor, you can walk through them with out any care. In D:OS 1 you always needed to avoid them, if you weren't immune. If your team isn't grouped up, oil will often only affect one or two of your members and there are skill to counter it anyway like Haste. The big problem about the crocodiles was never the oil, it was the teleport, the heavy bite attack and the chance of getting feared, with hardly any magic armor to be protected of fear.

Fighting the salamanders my friend and I even trolled each other an teleported our characters in front of those beasts, and still won the fight with ease. Also because some times enemies just run away instead of attacking, out of no obvious reason. AI feels even more flawed after the latest patch.

Also neither A nor B have any kind of fire attack for themselves, C for sure has and D not sure.

My main issue at the moment is: Magic attack themselves feel so weak, that withling down all the magic armor is pretty hard, if you have only one real mage in team and without poison-fire-explosions.

The reason I like these comments is because they show a complete misunderstanding of the first game... because the first game definitely had this as well. In fact it was WAAAY worse with skills like Firefly whose only job is to create fire land.

Why didn't it matter as much? Because you could CC or utterly destroy enemies in seconds (typically through environmental damage) long before they ever even graced your presence. Now you have to actually use those attacks closer to home. The whole Electricity and blood was in the first game as well, but I bet you didn't even notice.

To admit though this game gives enemies waaaaay more actual combat ability then the first game... Though the reason why is obvious: Because they still have to get through your armor.

No really, that is why... In the first game an archer with a single special arrow was already absolutely deadly because the entire game was a "First hit" war... It really didn't need any other attacks.

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Anyhow to me the problem isn't "Too many environmental effects" so much that there is too little environmental manipulation for a game that feels like it dialed it up to 11.

You can mitigate it through magic armor but outside of that the Warrior's best option is too valuable to use on the environment.

Then there is Bless, which is a good option to admit, especially against undead.

You're right, it's not so much about the difficulty. My main problem is that it's tedious facing that exact same identical enemy tactic in so many of the fights.

Every one of those fights I listed was an early game fight, where you're not likely to have much magic armor at all. This game doesn't have formation options to spread out your team, so avoiding being grouped together is largely dependent on terrain and initiative.



A and B don't have fire, but if the houndmaster's oil raduis hits the torches around, that's instant fire. All the oil spreading much makes starting out as a Pyromancer (or using any fire-based attack, really) a foolish idea.

The environment has become very much like american cars (as seen on film and television):

The smallest bump in the road and everything explodes in a huge fireball.

p.s.
I saw a film where an elevator crashed down the shaft and when it hit the bottom it exploded in a fireball as well.
I'm never buying an american car and will never use the elevators in America.

I'm reminded of The Simpsons where Bart's skateboard plummeted into a ravine. And, of course, exploded in a fireball when it hit the bottom.

You can fit a petrol engine to a skateboard if you want to.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-det...rd-gas-power-skateboard_60559435620.html

That would probably explode if you fell into a ravine and you were smokin'

The normal narrative would involve a flaming wheel rolling away of course...

I have no sense of balance and it would certainly kill me, but I need one.

Hahaha hit the nail on the head (and it exploded).

That is exactly what it feels like in every battle.

Regardless of who would win, offense or defense, the problem itself is stun-lock.

Stun-lock is something every game should strive to remove if it exists. It's not fun for anyone besides those who enjoy having a 'win button' in their games. There aren't enough people who want zero challenge while playing to produce a game that specifically lacks challenge.

As I see it, the current stun-lock problem is two-fold:

Armor vs. Effects
For one, you have an all-or-nothing effect system. Either your Phys/Magic armor is up and nothing lands, or it's down and you're locked. No in-between. Magic armor is particularly bad because of how much worse magical effects are. At least when you're fighting physical-heavy targets, most of them have to get close to you.

The only chance you can hope to have is a shield. While that does make the shield a powerful tool, it isn't necessarily a forgiving system when you have a "yes or no" question on defense.

(P.S. I'm not advocating a shield nerf...)

Damage + Effects
Another problem is your effect on the base damage type. For added damage effects, it's not game-breaking. Things like Burning, Bleeding, Poison, etc can add to the difficulty of a fight without ruining it.

However, when your effect is a stun/knockdown/fear (air damage is the worst offender), you remove the chance of continuing combat once the first effect lands. For instance, when I co-op with another physical class, we find the biggest, heaviest guy in the fight, reduce his armor to zero, and then keep him knocked down until he's dead.

That's no way to play...honestly. Sure it makes the fight so much easier for us, but it isn't fun. That's the strategy we use constantly now. Just keep them on the ground.

Solutions?
Armor. Players need more magic armor early on. Especially heavy armor. You have to remember, melee and heavy armor targets are not meant to be weak against magic because 'magic'...they're given heavy armor because 9 times out of 10 they've got to close the distance with a target that's already putting damage on them.

I understand the resistances will eventually lead to the smaller amounts becoming more effective, but early on it's just too low.

Weighted Effects. Effects are not all equal. We should at least be able to see that setting a target 'burning' once per round is a lot less powerful than setting 'stunned' or 'blinded' once per round.

Effects cannot exist equally across the board on all damage types. Control effects should be much more limited.

Damage or Effect. Not only should effects not be treated equal among themselves, they should also be a determining factor on how much damage a skill does. As a general rule, the higher the damage on a skill/spell, the lesser (if at all) the effect should be. For example, a two-round AoE stun spell shouldn't be a high-damage Chain Lighting that can be used every two rounds.

Personally, I think anything that takes more than 1 turn to recover from should be a very low-damage (if any) technique with a longer cooldown than simply +1 turn from the duration of the technique.

Redscope - Your code is fine, new users posts aren't allowed to have code for the first few posts in case of spammers. Raze or another mod can enable that for your account early.