Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Zombie perk - am I missing something?

Lol, suit yourself for misrepresenting your problem.
If your friend keeps poisoning himself and do not alter his behavior when he notices it is killing him he is either trolling you or he is borderline retarded.

Your friend not understanding the concept of poison is nothing Larian can change with coding.

Have him pick zombie as well and then you both can heal from poison. Or teach your friend what he fails to learn, or play with someone who wont troll you.

Oh, my bad. I thought I made it clear that he was a different person. Let me fix that-

Wait a darn minute. I constantly refer to the necromancer as "he", and myself as me! Well, I guess that's not clear enough, let me-

Oh wait, I mentioned him being in another party. Hmmm, well, maybe-

No, wait, I mentioned that he killed my companion. Oh, silly me, you must have just assumed I was talking about myself in third person again.

Or... Or just maybe... You failed to pick up on basic context clues?

Ah, sorry. That's something that requires average intelligence. My sincerest apologies for assuming your capabilities.

Doesn't earth ability add poison to all earth spells? Wouldn't that offset the lack of straight posion skills? There's also grenades. If you're the tank than it's kind of mandatory you take Zombie in your situation to avoid all the poison your team puts down without your input. Either that or make it a point to avoid bless and use fire from distance to ignite poison and close in.

There's no good way to make up lack of team coordination except to fall in line with the other persons tactics or gear yourself to defend against them.

And I'd say a straight melee with zombie would be strong if you have a Magee casting poison around in the back. Then you can stack resistances so your find while damaging enemies and burning up magic armor with fire to soften them up for CC from magic and mags damage.

EDIT: A mags having zombie and a tank missing it is asking for tactical issues and zombie really shines much better at higher levels when you can focus on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses better

Yeah, but my problem is that I really, really really don't want to take zombie, as I view it as severely underpowered. As for geomancy, no, it does not add poison damage to earth spells, and if it does, it's so minor that it wouldn't be enough to total a net heal. Also, are there poison grenades? If there are, I'm not aware.

As for straight melee zombie idea with caster in the back, it sounds good on paper, but at the moment there is only Deadly Spores (a source skill, and three memory), Contamination and Magical Poison Dart. So, at level 7, you have about 100 points of healing on a 4 turn cooldown for 4 AP, I believe? It also does damage, but many enemies in the second half of Act I are poison immune, with all the undead around. That, and again, it's incredibly vulnerable to fire, and blessing is straight out, which you could do with any other surfaces you put down, if they were not a zombie.

Take, for example, this combination: Rain, Electric Discharge, Armor of Frost. It causes an AoE stun on the water puddle plus two specified targets, and if your tank was in it, Armor of Frost cleanses the stun. If he was not in it, you can bless it instead of casting Armor of Frost, causing the water to no longer be electrified and to heal instead, while still leaving the stunned enemies stunned. The zombie alternative just seems so weak in this comparison. As for stacking resistances, the highest I have seen anyone get by the end of act I is 50% using the Demon talent and fire resist gear. But the gear is so few and far between, that even that takes decent RNG. But, like I said earlier, I'm willing to give it a try anyways.

Yeah, I think it adds like +1 per level of poison damage. Obviously you'd have to really stack it. And yes, I've used more than a good few poison grenades in my solo rogue play through. I might have just been RNG lucky though.

I feel like Act 1 is just too early to really judge zombie since it requires building around it and gearing up your party around it to make use of it. It's just a highly specialized party composition and tactics to make it shine.

I wouldn't be surprised though if the people you're working with just want to zombie to be immune in second part to all the poison while gaining tactical advantage in part 1. Your kind of stuck between two rocks. There's no good way to deal with your situation except to gear up multiple characters with zombie and outfit them all with all the poison methods you can. Not ideal I know. Technically if everyone in your party had zombie you could still do what you said but with poison/blood pools the only difference is change out bless with contaminate. Against non zombies that's a bonus of stunning and poisoning enemies. And while they're stunffend you can move back and set them on fire before repeating the event with another character and then hitting them more fire. Theyll be stunned -> poisoned -> burned/exploded and then you repeat if you want with another character not on cool down. Also any additional all posion skills or grenades or wand/staff attacks with cause explosion while they're burning. There's also the fact that you can ignite poison by dropping a candle.

Also, doesn't being poisoned from food heal you? Or poisoned potions? I know of a poisoned potato.

The poison damage seems to only apply to poison skills, it seems, but I'll keep testing out abilities. And you're probably right, it most likely is more useful past act I. The gear demand is very high to equip a character like this, so it should be easier to build once we get into an act with lots more loot dropping. As for poisoned food and potions, yes! They do! But, I have not found any poison potions besides crafted ones. And poisoned food is rare. Where is said poisoned potato?

Also, I looked it up, and you're right, Contaminate only costs one. I thought it cost 2. But still, the contaminate combo would probably result in the tank running into the poison, hitting something, and then being blown sky high by a fire spell/fire wand/ flaming enemy the next turn, but I'll try a zombie run without any fire at all, and both rain and blood rain, and see how it goes. I'm starting the run right now, in fact! So we'll see.

I wouldn't have the fighter move in after the piosioning. I'd have him positioned nearby first and then moving away before setting fire to everything. That'll let you poison + burn + get a hit in. Could also try a mate and archer combo instead or multiple mages. That way you don't have to worry about coordinating.

Found the poisoned food by Butter but pretty sure I've seen more poisoned items and stuff around.

Edit: again, the above assumes a zombie fighter. It's just too hard to coordinate what your trying with a z movie mags and non zombie tank

Believe you me, I am well aware. But while the poison/fire would do lots of damage, what do you reccomend I do if I want to heal someone? If I'm using my poison offensively (which, I think, is the best way to use it), then what do I do when someone gets low?

That's where poisoned food, potions, and grenades would work best. Also you'd hopefully have multiple characters speccdd with poison skills. The archer would have both the skills and special arrows. Another mags. A fighter with a few skills and items. Basically have enough poison going around the field that it's a near constant presence in combat or you always have the option to bring more to bear. Scrolls would help.

Zombie is meant to combine offensive and defensive. You could also lay down some poison. Retreat a distance and force the enemy to walk through it toward you.

Ideally, you'd be poisoned for a few turns while your poison skills cool down and thus healing, there's poison leftover somewhere on the field after the fire, you leave the poison alone so it's a constant, or you plan plan fall back options. After each cxlmbat you're gonna have to slowly heal yo using skills. Tedious but workable.

Long and short of it is that it's workable and strong even, but it's situational, requires lots of pre planning, gear and items, must coordinate team efforts, and requires high level strategy to maximize. I always found it too much work to build around myself but I might try it I guess this time around

Edit: basically everyone in the party is gonna need to cross specialize for some poison and have zombie. This of course is much easier to build for at higher levels where multi classing is easier....crafting system for the consumables would also help alot

Yea sorry for over estimating you mate. I didn't just want to assume you were unable to figure out that if someone in the party takes zombie they are going to haveto act accordingly, and that the people who dont have it will haveto play another way.

Clearly it was silly of me to assume you or any people you play with would understand a basic gaming concept like "don't stand in the fire" (or in this case the poison).

But there might be a solution for you. Have you tried playing explorer mode? Perhaps that game mode would be more lenient to your playstyle?

So the zombie run is going well, and your tips are helping out! We got contamination and poison dart on everyone, so it turns out that we have enough chip healing to do some work if me and my friends all pitch in on healing. It requires us to stack up and stick together, though, which is a huge pain, and fire is absolutely as devastating as I feared. The fire slugs wasted us. Like, it wasn't even funny. Also, I have yet to find any poison grenades or arrowheads, though I've been checking all the chests and vendors. I have a feeling this will get nightmarishly hard once we start running into things with fire in the second half of the act, so I am still very skeptical at this point. I'm specifically thinking of decaying pyromancers, archers with fire arrows, and the mage in the last boss fight. At best, this is going to be hell. Just beat Kniles, by the way.

Glad to help But yeah that's the obvious trade off. Zombie works well against humans and stuff, but fire enemies and those immune will be an issue. I recommend spreading out more. Don't worry too much on always healing. Stack up lots of magic armor.

It's a specialized talent -> really big weaknesses and some overpowered situational utility

Yeah, this tradeoff is just too huge. Taking this talent basically forces your whole party to build around you, it would seem. Just one zombie means no healing ritual, and that the healer must have rain. I have both rain and blood rain, and I'm needing to spam both to keep my friends alive. They are needing the healing really badly, as most people usually do, so they keep bunching up to heal, and there's not much I can do about it. We all know it's bad, but it feels like it's the only way to get reasonable healing done during the fight. I have yet to fight a single enemy that uses poison, and I only know of one currently in the game right now (necromancers that summon an ooze). There's plenty of poison out of combat, sure, but it's not exactly a threat, and Bless still renders it a healing agent, so I wouldn't say that zombie has provided me any benefit so far. I'm tempted to call it here, because I'm the only one in my party with rain and blood rain, and it's looking like that's not going to change. I'm sure this could be done solo, with a full party of people, but god damn is it tedious multiplayer. Hell, I'm pretty sure this would be tedious if I had full control. Should I keep going? Or is an hour or two of playing this monstrosity enough to form a fair opinion of it, do you think?

Edit: I thought of another. Migo. But we haven't needed to fight him.

I hear your complaints and they're all valid. Heck, it's what I never did zombie runs. It's restrictive and makes multiplayer a pain unless everyone knows exactly what they're doing and communicates.

I'm single player it's much more tedious than without it but it's also much more visibly powerful as you have full control.

Also, Act 1 really isnt the best place for it probably

That all said, i wouldn't really recommend multiplayer with it unless good planning and communication with knowledgeable players was going on. I haven't used it myself but I also haven't seen anything make it look appealing either. Then again i thought the same in D:OS but was proven wrong with mid-late game builds.

Also, without everyone using rain + blood your gonna have many issues it's kinda necessary

I wouldn't say two hours is a comprehensive opinion but certainly an informed one. lol you can feel free to stop torturing yourself over it I'd say and let loose with your feedback. Maybe the earth skill should give more poison and add it to all earth offensive skills? More crafted skills that add poison?

Yeah, totally! More poison spells would be a huge plus. The dream would be a poison spell that converted fire to poison, or a super-rain spell that put out all fires in a huge area, or... just something to counter or deal the omnipresent threat of fire. Even temporarily. Really, that's all it needs. Two rain spells just isn't enough. To draw a comparison, a normal build feels like driving a car. You're powerful, you're unstoppable, and every so often you have to drive through a wall (boss), but most cars are able to keep going. Zombie feels like I'm riding a goddamn polar bear. It feels cool, and it's certainly the definition of a gimmick, and there's more things that I feel like I could do than while in a car. For example, I find myself walking around walls, instead of dealing with them. But every so often, my bear decides some passerby on the sidewalk looks tasty, and decides to eat them (friendly fire on NPC's), and then, even worse, some people are police officers (have fire) and just go full Harambe on my bear when they see him. But for the most part, it's cool riding a bear.

Lol. You're analogy is spot on. I'm sure fire avatar/shield will be in the game in some form, though, to mitigate fire worries :P

Uuuuungh, these would be amazing. If they put one of these in, just one, I will take back everything I've ever said about zombie. But you know what I'd really like to see? Zombies bleeding poison. Like other zombies in the game. That would give them essentially a better leech, for sure, but the fact that you are hurt from healing would, I believe, balance that out. That, and the fact that poison is still a liability and could explode, especially if you're already burning. What do you think? Would this be a reasonable change?

Mmmm, it'd certainly be powerful. I can't help but feel though that the reason they didn't do it before, in either game, must be something other than them never considering it though. Seems to obvious.

They might've just considered it too powerful honestly. Consider a knight with zombie. In melee range, hitting him heals him + poison the enemy + let's him hit back + sets up for combos using posion cloud or pool blood makes. Make him fire resistant and then you have a walking poison barrel basically that lets you explode everyone else around him and posion enemeies. Seems like it could be easily abused -> not that that's bad since I imagine to fully exploit it would be end game stuff to make you 100+ fire resistant

Fair fair. You're probably right. Thanks for responding, by the way! Talking with you has been a blast, man.

Okay. I just beat the game with zombie necro guy, as a zombie, with a full zombie party. We got attacked with poison exactly one time the whole game, by the gheist in the end fight. We were unable to use bless, as it was lethal, we were unable to heal after coming in contact with fire, we were just generally having a hard time restoring HP. During the last fight, as I feared, the magister mage just pew pew'd our poison until it was fire, and made it impossible to heal. So we did the last fight without healing at all. It was hell. This talent is by far, utterly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, at this current point in time, the most useless talent out there. Escapist has more value. In fact, if you put in a talent called "skateboarding", that gave your character the ability to do a kickflip, it would be a more plausible talent than Zombie would. It was literally a liability the whole game, every single fight that we needed healing on. We skipped Radeka, and that was it. We fought all the other optional bosses, and did all the other content. So I can safely say that there is nowhere on the map where Zombie confers any sort of tactical or strategic advantage. It is a waste of a talent point that could be spent on Warlord, or The Pawn, or Far Out Man, or Picture of Health, or even something with situational use like Comeback Kid. If anyone has anything good to say about it, speak up now, or forever hold your peace.