Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Armor Rework: Major & Minor Statuses

Though the armor system is a step in the right direction, I think most people agree it needs some kind of significant change. The main issue is armor is too binary. Either you are 100% protected or 100% vulnerable.

This creates the issue where many skills feel useless until later into the battle, where they then are really powerful and you can stunlock enemies to death. There's sort of a dynamic where you can choose to use certain skills earlier just for the damage, or wait later for the status, but I think this just feels lame currently, like you're wasting your skills if you use them earlier, so early combat is mostly regular attacks to break down armor. I think it'd be more rewarding if skills always could apply some kind of status to enemies or players, even if armored.

I propose the following system:

All skills and items which apply negative statuses have a minor effect and a major effect. Just think of the relationship between Frozen and Chilled, where if you apply frozen to an enemy with magic armor, then they are chilled.

Thus, if a character has the appropriate armor, then the minor effect of a skill is applied to them instead of fully resisted as is now. No armor, and the major effect is applied.

A new defense ability, Resolve: Each point gives you a 5% chance to downgrade a status from major to minor, or minor to nothing. While 5% may seem small, since so many statuses will be thrown at you, its value will add up greatly over time.


For example:

If you have magic armor and you get a razzle dazzle (blinding) grenade thrown at you, then you become teary-eyed instead (or perhaps myopic ), which reduces the range of all your attacks and abilities by 33%, down to a minimum of 5-7m (that is, it won't reduce the range of melee skills).

Or if you battering ram an enemy with physical armor, then they are staggered instead of knocked down, reducing their defense and accuracy some.

I imagine these minor statuses to be about a third as potent as major statuses. They won't be totally debilitating like major statuses, but they'll still be something to consider, especially if you get several of them. Obviously, these statuses preclude each other -- you can't be blind and teary-eyed, just like you can't be frozen and chilled at the same.

So here's my list ideas for Major – Minor statuses (obviously subject to lots of balance changes):

Knockdown – Staggered: reduced hit and dodge chance by 15-20%, and AOE attacks go slightly off of your intended target, like throwing grenades in D:OSEE without the Pinpoint talent, though maybe not quite that inaccurate

Crippled – Hobbled: -33% movespeed

Bleeding – Scratched: create extra blood when hit (imo, only if standard blood amount created per hit is reduced some)

Poisoned – Woozy/Nauseous: -15% poison resist.

Muted – Tongue-tied: spells cost 1 more AP, or maybe it just reduces your intelligence by 3-5 or something.

Charmed – Impulsive: Spend 1 or 2 AP moving randomly, attacking a nearby enemy or buffing yourself or an ally.

Stunned – Crackling: -15% air resistance, -15% water resistance, walking in water causes air damage

Shackles of Pain – Shackles of Discomfort: enemy only takes 33% of the damage that you take.

Decaying Touch – Sickly: Healing is 50% less effective

Infected – Feverish: -10% all resists, -2 Con

Terrified – Afraid: reduced primary stats depending how close you are to the target that feared you. Perhaps even something like you take small amounts of magic armor damage if you walk towards the target that feared you. Or you just spend 1 AP per turn running away from the character if you're within 10m of them.

Sleeping – Groggy, -33% move speed, -3 to primary attributes, disappears on taking damage.


Now, I understand this is a bunch of work and would throw a wrench in current balance and is really unlikely to happen. But it's still fun to imagine what this would be like.

I also think this could lead to a bit of status overwhelm. If you have 3-4 minor effects and a couple buffs, things could get a bit to calculate. But I think there could be ways to deal with this, like skills that let you purge minor effects. And so long as enemies don't have too many skills at their disposal, I don't think you'd be wracking up more than 3 minor effects on a character unless you were standing in stun puddles and getting hit by explosions and stuff.

Hopefully this offers some food for thought.

I agree that the current armour system is anything but unfinished since you're either impervious or completely vulnerable and defenseless.

But as you said yourself, I hardly think that essentially doubling the amount of status effects is the best solution. If we should try to find a middleground I think it would be possible to use mos of the existing status effects and just have them applied to enemies under the condition that their armour bar is below a certain threshold. For example, if a character is hit by a knockdown skill and their armour bar is above 66% nothing happens, but if it's below they get slowed or weakened for a single turn. 'Physical' crowd control skills like knocked down, crippled and weak could result in the target having lowered their initiative, AP, slowed (-50% move speed) or something else for a single turn. Magical skills would be a bit trickier since their effects tend to be more unique and you'd have to come up with something that could cover all of the elemental weaknesses.

I realise this isn't a very good solution as it probably would conflict with the existing system that applies the skill effect if the ability deals enough damage to 'break through' the armour and it ultimately doesn't solve the fact that players are likely to end up auto attacking or using weak abilities to chip through the armour so that they can unload their 'big' abilities later on.

Perhaps another solution could be to have abilities apply their respective effects provided that they deal enough damage. For instance if an ability deals more damage than a certain percentage of the character's maximum (could be anything, 10%, 25%, 33%...) the armour is ignored and the skill effect is still applied. That way players don't have to either save their important abilities until the last turn of combat or 'waste it' by throwing it away in the first turn.

Ultimately I'd prefer it if we just went back to the original game's willpower/bodybuilding stats system, but since it doesn't seem that's going to happen I guess we have to think up a solution to the current armour system's problem. It is in no way finished and ready for release.

I agree it seems like a lot to just double the negative statuses. But there's also a simplicity and consistency to just making every status have a minor effect and a major effect, based on whether you have any amount of armor or no armor after the damage of a skill has been applied. Basing certain statuses on some arbitrary percentage of armor will feel weird and nitpicky. "Does this skill do enough damage to go below 50% or 66% of the character's total armor? Lemme get the calculator out..." Or "Let's see, does this skill deal 25% of the character's armor?" Given Larian simplified the AP amounts, I think they want to avoid number calculations as much as they can.

I personally like the armor system quite a bit as a starting point. It's certainly leagues better than the old armor system, which used some obscure algorithm to generate an unintuitive reduction in damage. And the fact that you pretty much wanted to start a fight with as much CC as possible led to a cookie-cutter strategy. But now the cookie-cutter strategy just feels like the reverse, where you buff/auto-attack mostly at the beginning, and then CC enemies with armor down.

So yeah, I don't think there's a simple solution. But maybe Larian or someone will prove me wrong with some little tweak.

I'm not sure that the calculation based on armor remaining would actually be a bad thing. Maybe there really should be one of those obscure algorithms should actually be reintroduced such that a character's armor (physical or magical depending) provides different amounts of % protection from CC type attacks. Just give the player feedback on the likelihood like there is for hitting with a physical attack. Factoring in the related attribute, skill, and possibly level, of the attacker against the armor value of the attacked, give an actual saving throw percentage for success. Obviously, if armor is 0, it becomes 100%, or maybe 95%. Really, using the term "saving throw" without doing something like this makes no sense anyway.

Most likely, any changes to how saves are handled are unlikely, but how the game is now definitely creates a different dynamic for this game, that's for sure.

It'd be pretty cool, if they don't modify this, if they made skills that specifically do status effects damage some of the armor points. That would make some of these skills less completely useless if they don't do any damage in the first place.

I mean, it's not a bad idea for a band-aid if nothing else is planned. In fact, you could make nearly all skills that apply statuses deal some physical/magic armor. Basically, all skills could be like chloroform, where sometimes it's a good idea just to use it for the magic armor damage so a teammate might be able to deal enough magic damage range to cc them with magic. But I still think we need a more fundamental change.



A suggestion that I've heard a few times. To me, it basically eliminates the whole point of armor. I sort of like how 100% resist chances make combat a little less random and more tactical. In D:OSEE, it felt so often like a battle was won or lost based on whether your charm or stun applied. Obviously I'm still even suggesting a kind of saving throw with Resolve, but at least you get a minor status if, say, charm fails, and minor effects being resisted wouldn't feel like that big of a deal. It just takes a bit of the sting out of saving throw system.

I have another idea:

What about giving each status from a spell a certain armor value that needs to be achieved in order for the status to be successfully applied? Right now this value is 0 but imagine if it were different for each status.

Example: Casting ability X which cause stun has a armour value of 15. If the armor of the enemy is higher than 15 it will fail but if it is lower than 15 it will succeed. This way you dont have to bring the armor down to 0 and the more powerful the spell/ability it is, the higher the armour value.

Unfortunately this is to some extend already the case. If an enemy has 48 armour and you hit them for 49 damage with an ability that has a stun the stun effect is also applied. This means you already can get away with using stronger abilities when the enemy has low armour. It also means that there (at least to me) is little to no reason to use high damaging abilities with long cooldowns when the enemy is fully armoured because you're going to miss out on the additional benefits such as crowd control or status effects the skill might apply.

If abilities were to ignore armour values below a certain static threshold the threshhold would probably have to scale with characters levels in order to prevent becoming useless late game. Larian would also have to keep in mind that enemies generally tend to have more armour than player characters which could result in an unwanted side effect where enemies have an even easier time disabling the player(s).



I really like the idea of status effect abilities dealing additional armour damage when the effect itself gets absorbed by the armour. I feel like this actually has the potential to put the player in a situation where they are going to have to consider if they want to use an ability immediately in order to get rid of the enemy's armour faster but have the ability (and thus the status effects) on cooldown when the enemy's armour is broken.