Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Balance solution for warfare without nerfs?

So, this game has mostly disappointing me because of how abysmally, disappointingly, and absolutely useless shields are. The only reason to use them, is preference. They don't give enough survivability or versatility to outweigh the severe hit to damage output. After all, if you just slap on a dual wield or a 2h, you'll often kill the enemy before they have a chance to attack outright anyway. On the complete opposite of the spectrum, 2 handers are ridiculously good right now. Possibly only outweighed by the stock adrenaline/pawn/stealth huntsman. So, I think I've come up with some possible solutions to balance these two issues, without just slapping 2handers around with the nerfbat until no one plays them anymore.

1. Changes to warfare itself: The passive +3% damage to physical armor per point is fairly useless. It's vastly superior to just put points into your weapon skill of choice. So I think it should do something like add +3% to your damage per level, for every opponent in melee range of you instead. This will make tanks able to put out decent damage, and make it worth the risk for 2handers to dive into the enemy line.

2. Changes to 2handers: Instead of nerfing the damage, I think that all 2handed weapons should come with the negative traits that reduce movement speed(up to half?) and causing all damage you receive to be increased by an amount. (10-25%?). Large weapons are heavy and unwieldy, you wouldn't be able to lift them to block, or even set your stance to shrug off a blow most of the time, and this should be reflected by making you less defensible, as a trade off for the huge damage output. A literal glass cannon. You'll have to rely on movement abilities, positioning, and team mates in order to get in and deliver that massive payload of damage. Failure of calculation will have severe consequences.

3. Changes to shields: I think that a new skill tree should be added to combat skills, called something along the lines of "Guardian" or "Armsman" or what have you. The passive effect is that per point, it will increase how much phys and magic armor shields grant. It unlocks skills that can only be used when you have a shield equipped. See, for giving up all the damage a shield user should not only have more survivability, but should be able to control the battlefield. My suggestions for good shield based skills are along the lines of:

Hunker- (buff self) Restore the full amount of phys and magic armor granted only by your shield. Survivability for your frontliner, plain and simple.

Shield charge- (attack skill) Charge straight ahead, enemies are pushed forward with you (or to the side?). No knockdown, it shouldn't just be a "better bullrush". Allows your frontliner to reposition, both him/herself, and enemies.

Get behind me!- (buff other) Grant an ally bonus movement speed, the ability to ignore attacks of opportunity, and if they spend their entire turn moving without using any damaging skills, then they have (70%?) increased chance to dodge until their next turn. Support or squishy caster in a bad spot? Get them out of there.

Shieldwall- (buff self) Character counts as being three times wider, and can perform attacks of opportunity even without the trait. This prevents enemies from trying to move around them easily, and blocks projectiles from passing through as well.


What do you guys think? Would this balance warfare, and make it more of a risk/reward, and develop more creative roles and versatility, or is it not enough of a nerf for 2h, and too much for shields?

1. Interesting, but making it +3% per level, per opponent could quickly spiral into hugely unbalanced territory. Combat abilities go up to 15, so maxed it would be +45% for one enemy, +135% for three enemies. It would also be difficult to manage balance when you could have a bonus of between +0% and +145% depending on your Warfare and the number of enemies around.

2. A long time ago, I suggested that a possible nerf for heavy weapons would be lowered movement, but that suggestion was unpopular because having to use up all your AP to move and being unable to attack much was un-fun.

3. There was a vote on new skill trees, one included the Guardian tree for defense-oriented warriors. It lost both votes.

For warfare, I actually felt that was fair though, because it was points you wouldn't be putting elsewhere. So you miss out on the accuracy and crit severity, schools and stuff. But, I'd probably have a better idea if I knew what the max level was going to be, I mean for a character total.

As for the reduced movement speed from 2handers, that makes me lol. People are complaining how OP movement skills like pheonix dive and bull rush is, you can't have both OP movement skills and nearly free movement. Anyway, thats why I feel using a 2hander should be about tactics and calculation. High risk/reward. Just nerfing it's damage into the ground will make everyone go back to adrenaline spamming backstab rogues and snipe huntsman.

And a defensive tree is probably the only thing that will make shields usable. I think it lost not because people don't want it, I think it lost because no one wants to use shields. The most played types of characters in the game are, from most to least, adrenaline stealth sniping archers, adrenaline/rage dual wield backstabbing rogues, and then 2handed warriors. Asking a lot of people if they would use shields, even if they were good, will mostly get you a response along the lines of "No, thats boring and slow." People just want to kill stuff quickly and see huge numbers. :/ It doesn't matter how viable something is, as long as the playstyle they like is. So people voted for the other trees, because they wanted it more.

With Warlord, Rage and Glass Cannon there are just too many effects that reward a high damage output on your warrior.
Also the battlefields are typically so open that a tanky char can't really bind the opposing team enough.

I'd prefer deflect and parry counter skills when one-handing with shield. Deflect would be an activated skill that would hamper your damage, but allow you to block most physical attacks (with a low chance of returning shot arrows back to the attacker, with magical shields doing the same, but for projectile magic attacks) except when you're shot or struck from behind. Parry would be a passive skill that activates when attacked from the front (180 degree radius) with a melee weapon, parrying the enemy's attack and knocking them down for 1 turn.

Also, sure two-handed weapons are supposed to be heavy and unwieldy, but the class wielding them TRAIN with these weapons so it shouldn't actually affect soldiers and knights negatively at all. That, and people with points in 2-handed weapons.

Oh yeah, I forgot about warlord. Warlord is also pretty OP, and probably will get nerf'd, tbh. But if it doesn't, then yeah, warfare should get a diferent bonus then the extra damage for every opponent in melee. As for blacktail, lol. Spoken like someone who's never tried to carry or swing something like that.

It has been suggested elsewhere by me and others that sword-and-board warriors ought to have only a 1AP cost for basic attacks. This would certainly balance twohanders with onehanders, even if you don't buff shields.

And you're telling me you have the experience of an actual swordsman who's trained all his life with two-handed swords? Wow, you must be attracting all the ladies then.

You fail to consider height, weight, musculature, genetics, diet and training. As someone who regularly trains in the gym, I know for a fact that slowly increasing weight and maintaining exercise with said object (taking care that you're not overexerting, which is detrimental for muscle growth) allows people to be able to carry heavier objects as training progresses. Of course there's a limit as to how many kgs each person can carry even taking into account core strength, but the limit varies heavily on the person's height, weight, musculature, genetics, diet and training. The same applies to swinging swords and other weapons. The vikings and the barbarian berserkers swung their swords and axes without a problem. There's Musashibo Benkei too, who swung large two-handed weapons with ease, killing actual fully-geared samurai with a single swipe.

And even if you decide to conveniently leave all this out, there's still the fact that you wouldn't exactly know how physically strong a fictional character (not just regarding humans in the game, but elves, dwarves, lizards and whatnot too) really is because they don't actually exist for you to observe and record.

But hey, go ahead and be an asshole.

Let's keep it polite, chaps.

I've also slightly lost track of who's saying what about two-handers but for the record I have one here (well, a hand-and-a-half to be pedantic) and even as someone who's neither particularly tall nor strong nor has any clue with a sword it actually feels quite handy and well-balanced. It weighs just shy of 3 lbs which is admittedly towards the light end but even a big hefty one wouldn't weigh more than a couple of kg or so. They're not especially big fearsome weapons, at least provided you're not on the receiving end.

Not to mention, weapons aren't made to be unwieldy. OF COURSE they'd be very much wieldy and very much deadly, whether they be twohanders or onehanders... a bit of an inane criticism.

The old iron bastard swords weighed 35 pounds. a really big 2h great sword would weigh over 90.

they were made to bash people with armor around. a 3lb (what's it made out of, aluminum??) bastard sword isn't going to do much for you against armor.

just saying. medieval combat with great swords was not a lengthy affair. the idea was to knock your opponent down and then seek a weak spot.

In fact, that gets me thinking... you know how 2h staffs have the magus skill that has a 1 turn cooldown? why not make 2h sword skills have an extra turn cooldown. so if a skill using a 1h weapon would normally take 3 turns on cooldown, using it with a 2h would take 4.

kinda "stamina recovery" for the extra weight.

That is misinformation. At most medieval greatswords weighed around 40 pounds, maybe more for especially large ones. Side swords and other types of blades meant for one-handed use were more like 2-3 lbs, because as said below it won't really be useful if you cross a certain weight limit. In addition to this they were weighted in such a manner that they seemed to weigh even less in your hand. So, the center of balance is placed to an optimal place - for example for swords it's usually closer to the guard of the sword than the center of the blade, this allows for great maneuverability.

I hope you understand that it'd be idiotic to create weapons that weigh 90 pounds. Almost nobody would be able to wield them effectively.

Not sure if serious. My swords are made of steel. Just the ordinary stuff. Those in my collection all weigh between 2 and 4 lbs. It's not physically possible for them to weigh 90, not even if they were made of tungsten or uranium. By way of comparison, a typical machine gun (let's say a Bren, at 4' long about the length of a typical medium-large sword) which is a much more substantial and fairly solid piece of metal ("take a lump of steel and mill away any bits that don't look like a machine gun", as someone described its manufacturing process) weighs 20 lbs. I also have one of those behind me. I would consider it essentially impossible to swing at someone with any hope of hitting them considering the enormous amount of inertia.

ISTR actual martial arts practitioners suggesting that the cut-off point between something being usable and just being an ornament is about 6-7 lbs.