Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Durability: yay or nay? Neither says me: new idea

Yep, I mean IMHO.

Fixed it for you to make it more forum appropriate.

Well, as obvious as it is: it helps for those reading the forum, the developers included, to have simple restatements that boil everything down to a sentence :P I like a restatement of the focus every once in a while in a discussion to keep things in focus.

EDIT: I do find it interesting that in a thread advocating to a change of use to make durability work differently and be more specific in context we still invariably get people espousing the idea of "remove it or add to it" ....

Synopsis:

1) Remove it

2) Durability is always 100%, until you enter battle, where it can be 'damaged' during combat (but after battle, it regenerates back to 100% automatically)

Regarding point 2, the idea is that all skills have a % chance to damage a random piece of equipment in the following order:

1) Low tier skills can damage a random armour piece by 15-25% and a weapon by 1-5%
2) Mid tier skills can damage a random armour piece by 25-40% and a weapon by 5-15%
3) High tier skills can damage a random armour piece by 40%-60% and a weapon by 15%-30%
4) some skills have a % chance to completely obliterate a smaller piece of equipment like a helm or leg gear, or do a significant 50% damage to bigger items like chest armour

Once 'damaged', the weapon/armour triggers a timer, like a frozen or electrocuted status triggers a timer, after which point the weapon will be restored (the timer is high - 4-5 rounds).

Personally, this is the best alternative that I can come up with, that to me adds some strategy, some randomness, some tension, without turning durability into something you have to tediously babysit outside of combat situations.

And to make this lore-compatible:

Not that I think this really matters, but magical armour/weapons could have a 'lore' that states their magical properties allow them to regenerate over time

Isn't there already the new Acid debuff? My first thought when I saw it was "DAMN I'm gonna loose my equipment". After reading I was more like "Meh". Maybe they could change it to damage durability, along with other stuff as well

To me durability is really just a pointless annoyance. It doesn't add anything to the game in terms of fun, it's just busywork. The reason why I brought up BG2 is that this game didn't need durability to be fun. Nobody missed durability there because it wasn't at the core of the experience.

There's an old video game design mantra: if a mechanic is neither at the core of the experience nor really great in itselft, don't use it. Just ditch it.

Focus is king. And Larian should focus on the fun mechanics and the core stuff. Durability is just a tagged on mechanics without much sense beyond "but realism" and without any real enhancement to the fun mechanics in this game IMHO.

I think the hammer repair should be a skill like 'blacksmith' instead of giving it for granted as long as a character has a hammer in her inventory. Cause at the moment, there is no real downside for durability as you can simply repair everything if there is a hammer in the party (by the way, on that matter, could it be possible to have a 'repair all' button somewhere? cause it's quite cumbersome to go through each piece one by one).

It would be quite more challenging if the degradation of an item was coming with a slight chance for it to break down any moment. Like let's say you have an item with a durability of 60. When it gets to 50, there is 1% chance it breaks on each use, then when it's 40, 2% and so on.
The quality of the equipment could even be used to decide what the percentage is each stage. For instance, a low quality item would have 3% more chance to break at each stage while a good quality item only 1%. A bit more unpredictibility on that matter would be more fun in my opinion.

Considering all the "improvement ideas" I read as major additional annoyances in combat (ehm, that's not how improvement works guys)... I also heavily vote for "kill it with fire".

I don't see anything worthwhile coming out of durability without a LOT of testing, tweaking and trying. Taking massive amounts of time. And generally risking an extremely high probability of still reaching the "it's better left out of the game" conclusion anyway.

I've never enjoyed the mechanic *unless* it has tactical implications, like needing to break armor or shields to hurt a heavy armor user, or sundering their weapon as a debuff. All of those things are currently served in other ways in the game. That said, I don't think I'm a fan of the current armor system, and if it transitioned to a more literal combat durability system where some weapons like hammers had anti armor capabilities, where things like swords were better suited to lightly armored opponents, I wouldn't mind at all.

But as far as just a simple resource sink, like needing to "fill your equipment up with gas" to keep using it? No, I don't think anyone has ever really enjoyed that.

I can't think of a single game that was made better by durability, the devs for nioh tried it recently and a swarm of feedback after the alpha convinced them to remove it entirely.

It feels pretty weird when it's absent from a game for some reason, but I agree that it never really seems to add anything other than irritation. And that's from somebody who actually likes stuff like food and sleep requirements.

That's why I think repair should be a skill and should have a slight chance to fail meaning the weapon or armor could be damaged beyond repair in the process. So the repair management would be more meaningful in the sense you might want to wait until your armor is really damaged before attempting to repair it so it doesn't feel so bad if you fail and break it utterly.

As well, and I don't know if it is in the game but a damaged weapon or armor should have less efficiency.

There could be as well some ways to transform equipment into other equipment, like let's say reforge a sword into two daggers.

I'm usually against item durability as a rule, but it was handled well enough in DOS1 that it wasn't really a nuisance. I always have a character that has some of the repair skill, repair hammers are easy to find, it doesn't decay rapidly unless you bash your weapon against furniture or run around in environmental hazards, & you can do it during combat for minimal AP, so it was fairly balanced & served a purpose. I don't think anything much needs to be done w/ that system.

There ARE definitely things the team could better spend their time on then durability - specifically trying something complex to make it better.

I vote remove it,
you could try - if you have a repair hammer at hand then your inventory auto repairs or doesnt lose durability (because you take care of your weapons).
but even so, removing it or leaving it as is is fine.

Spending time on making it better really isn't worth the investment.

That's an incredibly annoying idea which would only piss people off for absolutely zero positive gain.

I actually like this idea, why not pair it up with armor?
When your armor is gone your armor literaly breaks in combat, your sword literaly breaks too.

I like that, maybe also ahve a normal durability but realy thats mostly so breaking down doors has some form of limitation.

I love how the idea to make it less-annoying and less-micromanaging is making it more annoying and more micromanaging...

How is it that so many people like durability?

It's imo one of the most annoying and tiresome mechanics ever designed for games and RPGs, especially party-based tactical ones.

Just think of any good/great party-based tactical RPG you know and ask yourself

a) whether a durability mechanic was at the core of the experience
b) whether you missed a durability mechanic if there wasn't one
c) whether an existing durability mechanic significantly enhanced the fun
d) whether an existing durability mechanic was primarly annoying and just busy-work

Be honest.

Personally, I can't think of any RPG in which mechanics a, b, or c (alone or in combination) would apply. But d indeed applied a lot of times, sadly...

So Larian, for the love of God, just ditch the durability mechanic competely. Your game could only benefit. More time and focus for the really important and really fun elements.

I think we should remove durability.
Divinity2 did not have it and I did not miss it.
In DD and D:OS1 it was just annoying to repair items before selling them to get better prizes.

The most annoying thing is repair skill in a game where skills are improved by using them. In The Elder Scrolls you have the desire to repair everything after every fight just to raise your repair skill.

Maybe Larian could add in code so that each time you save the game there's a 0.25% chance that it will format your hard drive. That sure would make the choice whether to save meaningful and exciting!