Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback First Impresions of A.I 2.0 Patch

My first post on the patch is based on roughly 5 hours of playing. This has actually been the first iteration of DOS2 that I literately had no fun whatsoever playing, and its not the A.I alone that caused this frustration, but the changes to progression. Normally i'd wait till after I finished a playthrough before giving my thoughts, but I had such a horrible time playing this time around that I felt I needed to post this now. Before I get into whats made this experience miserable for me i'll start with things I liked.

Things I liked:

New animations, mosquito swarm's in particular, are really great to look at. I liked that there was a bit more difference between the different children and elves. Making poison wands and staffs no longer contaminate all vulnerable surfaces is a nice change. Being able to customize companions starting build is nice, even though I would prefer having much more control over their starting abilities attributes, and gear, its still a welcomed addition. I like that casting animations are sped up a bit, and I feel like that makes combat flow a bit more naturally.

Things I hated:

Surfaces staying indefinitely:
I can't count the amount of time i've wasted tripping over ice I couldn't remove because all my surface changing abilities were on cool down or I didn't have access to any yet. Trying to loot corpses covered in static I couldn't remove was maddening. I think the new perseverance stat is interesting, but because I'm struggling to really do anything now that I'm at level four, I can't really test it out.

Skill Books:

Skill books cost WAY, WAY, WAY too much. In the previous patch there was a very nice progression to getting skills, and building a character. If i managed my money intelligently I could have the skill books I needed to fit my playstyle, and smart use of these skills could make up for lack of armor and weapons. Here not only am i woefully under geared to fight anything, but i'm also under funded to buy skill books. Where before I could get around 1-3 skills for each character per level up if i was managing money correctly on previous patches, but in this one i'm lucky if i can even get 1 for any character on level up because of how insanely scarce everything is.

A.I:

The new A.I is smarter in alot of instance but in quite a few its even dumber than it ever was. I had one instance where it healed one of my team mates that was close to death for no reason. During the Saltwater croc fight the crocs kept wasting turns casting fossil strike even though they where out of range because i had them blocked off using an electric blood surface.

When the A.I isn't being just plain dumb its two shotting 2+ members of my party with a single character turn 1 because I can't buy the skill books or gear I need to keep that from happening, because the prices on skill books, and decent gear are so outrageous. The A.I has better stats than you do, better gear than you, more armor than you, has more and better skills than you do, and out numbers you constantly, and its infuriating.

Skills:

I haven't had the chance to try many of them out, because I can't afford many of them due to how overly scarce all resources seem to be, but I'm not a fan of the reduced size of the aoe on skills like fossil strike. I've had multiple occasions where I couldn't get the slow to go off, even though the A.I was clearly in the oil, but the slow didn't go into effect because of how small the aoe radius is.

Inversely, Hailstrike's aoe radius is too big, and often hurts or cc's my team more than it does the A.I, and its a pain to use in general because of its 3 ap cost. Not a fan of how dots don't also do damage on the turn cast anymore. It could be just me but there was something satisfying when a mosquito swarm finally chewed through a targets armor and you got to see those wonderful red numbers appear below the gray.

I might be crazy, but it looks like dialogue choices are missing, because I remember having a lot more options for what I wanted to say. I hope this isn't the case because streamlined dialogue was one of my major issues with DOS EE.

Please don't make make attributes mandatory for equipping gear. Its a bad idea for several reasons. It disincentivizes hybrid builds, which was a huge issue I had with DOS1 and DOS EE. I never wanted to start branching out until late, late game if I even bothered, because if I split stats I would end up under geared. Making stats mandatory for gear also contradicts the armor system that DOS2 implements, which promotes mixing and matching gear to fit your personal playstyle. If you wanted a mage clad in heavy armor at the cost of virtually any magical protection you could do that, and I felt DOS2 was a far more interesting and fun experience because of it.

Loot:
I have gotten barley any gear...which i'd be fine with if the amount of money I got let me buy skills and gear, but it hasn't. The good gear which you need to survive is sold on the vendors, and is also absurdly priced, so you have to pick between getting slightly better gear, or skills, but if pick skills you can't survive any fight because the second the A.I gets a turn on any of the lvl4 fights or above they tend to wipe half or 3/4ths of your team.

To summarize my thoughts I pretty much hated this patch. If the changes to the A.I, graphical performance improvements, and better animations were the only thing added, and progression was left unchanged I would have probably have loved this patch. As it stands this iteration of the game isn't so much difficult as it is just outright unfair with what it expects you to be able to deal with. Tactician in DOS EE was a fair challenge, DOS2's previous patch was a fair challenge despite the A.I not being as competent , but A.I 2.0 is anything but fair to the player.