Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Not right

In my battles so far the enemy has 4 guys go before I even have 1. Basically I'm toast before I get going. Is this something to be corrected or is it just me?

You need to put points in wits to get higher initiative. 13 wits is enough to go first for most of the level 4 encounters.

Thanks.

Most enemies in the game has 12-13 wits/initiative point. Go above that and you start first. This is later increased to 17-20 as you go through the game.

Get 15 Wits at first on either your Ranger or Thief. This is recommended as in one of the quest chain, you will get to enter a secret tomb with a bunch of soul jar. A character with at least 15 wits will notice that one of the statues in the soul jar room to the side (climb the ladder) has a scratch mark giving you one of the best warrior pant in the current state of the game.

If you have a Ranger, you'll want Wits on it anyways since Ranged Weapon combat ability increase critical chance and make Rage ability worthless for a ranger character.
Same goes for Savage Sortilege casters.

Also, use Burn my Eyes ability if you know you are going to go into a fight. It grants a massive amount of Wits that also scale on level making anyone with Burn my Eyes first on the turn. It can even make one of your character play twice in a row. If you have for example a Warrior who has 10 Wits and is playing in last, apply Burn my Eyes on him on the first round and He'll get to play last on the first round and first on the second round, effectively giving him 2 turns in a row.

The most common mistake people make is to put all point into Strength, Finesse or Intelligence. Wits, Constitution and Memory are also important.

In other words, there's no practical way to keep your initiative ahead of the enemy. Let's say you can reach level 7 in the alpha, and let's say you start out with 10 Wit. You'll need to dedicate all 10 points from 5 out of 6 total level-ups in Wits just to keep it at 20, leaving you with 2 for the rest. That seems like a pretty lopsided investment.

There's no reason to throw 2 points into Str/Finesse/Int every level. You either invest to go first or go last and learn how to make learn how to position to minimize the damage from slower action. Only a few fight will really punish you for being slow with maximum damage like the Witch Redaka fight (who always teleport to the same spot first) or "Wrong Soul Jar" fight with Cryo mage completely destroying you if you group in the middle.

3 Points from Blood rose (Do the Arena quest before drinking your first one and don't die. Very easy to accomplish especially on ranged char.)

3 points (or was it 4) from character creation

and 1/1 Finesse/Ranger build with some Initiative gear that usually come with Finesse from NPCs. One of the shop reset from either leveling or playing for an hour will likely create a good initiative gear for you to buy if you visit the shop once in a while.

This is how you build a "fast" character and still deal huge damage. I was able to go first in pretty much every fight in the game except for maybe the last one in the AI 2.0. Can't recall about Dallis but my initiative was insanely high while still investing in tons of damage.

On the other hand, slower characters we consider to be "Powerhouse" or "Healer" never get a single point in Wit for the sake of best performance.

Powerhouse want to hit the hardest they can and join the fight last to wipe the whole team. 2H build is a good example of a char you can just go 100% Str with so your combo can kill 3-4 enemies at all level all the time.

Healer should never be fast because the slower they go, the more they can heal especially with Healing Ritual unless you jump into a group of 5 to get 100-0 before the healer gets to act.

IF you want to act in the middle, buff yourself with something like "Burn-my-eyes" since that gives like 5-7 wits so you don't have to invest in stat.

It's not 17-20 for everything though, very few monsters have that much Wits. With 15-16 Wits, you usually start first or second in a fight on even the last fight and otherwise, it's 1 or 2 monsters before you and they won't manage to do much.

Plus, you mustn't forget all the stats you get from gear.
With 14 total points to spend + 2 from racial, 5 points in Wits for at least 2 characters to prepare the field for the 2 slower party members is more than enough.
You still have 11 points to spend wherever you wish and you can't forget the fact that gear also gives you stats. Even if you spend like 3 or 4 points into memory, you still have 7-8 points for your main stat. And a tank doesn't need more than the bare minimum to wield his weapon in a main stat, leaving the rest for his Consitution.

My tank had like +4 or +5 in Constitution from gear alone at the end of Act 1. Add to it Encourage from a human and Burn my Eyes from a Pyrokinetic and you'll have so much stats you won't know what to do with it. He was walking around with nearly 30 Constitution and 20 Wits while still having plenty to both Strength and Intelligence since he was Hydrosophist, Aerotheurge and Warfare. My cleric tank that would just as soon stomp you to the ground as heal you.

My 2 handed warrior had 10 Wits and everything poured into Strength and a bit of Constitution. He was a walking death machine but always started last. Which was to his advantage since it meant the rest of his team would prepare the field for him and he could just crush everything once they got teleported in a tight pack for him to cleave them and crush everything with Warlord talent.

Honestly, I'm quite happy with the current stats system. Each stats feels meaningful (Constitution could probably use a bump). Usually, in other games, you just stack everything into one attribute, which makes for pretty boring character progression.

It's not that the other attributes have no impact but especially with the protection system initiative simply has TOO MUCH of an impact mostly deciding about win or loss. No other attribute is even nearly that important.
With the amount of points you need to spend in wits one could also increase it's ed about 20%-30%. Not nearly as useful as starting first is right now.
An imbalance that should be countered at least a bit.

I never had a problem with enemies starting with a full round before me. I even sent my tank alone in a fight and had all enemies bash on him since he was last in turn and he was still standing without a single CC on him.

There wouldn't be a point to taking any Wits if you had the choice between 5% damage and 1% critical chance, unless you already were at a point in your main stat where 5% damage is worth less than 1% crit because of damage being additive, but that would only happen at well over 110 in your main stat unless you have very high crit damage like a two handed warrior (Which doesn't care about Wits because of the Rage spell)

It wouldn't be balanced if you had to spend all of your points in one stats. If Wits didn't grant initiative like it does right now, you would spend everything you have on Strength, Finesse or Intelligence. Right now, you have to balance your stats. You can still afford having a full on Strength with 0 extra Wits warrior, you don't need all characters to have points in Wits.

Wits right now is perfect.
It's used by classes that benefit the most from starting first like Ranger, Savage Sortilege Casters, offensive supports and Rogues.
Slow classes spend their point in Constitution and main stats like tanks, "powerhouses" (Like the other poster called em) and defensive supports.

While I do agree that Wit is broken, it seems like we balance the game too much around first 7 levels. This is only Act 1 so we don't get to see that much of a difference from investment yet.

Look at it this way, if I invest Wit into my 2H Red Prince and try to make him capable of going first, with a 1:1 build to have highest initiative while still dealing damage, at level 7, I have already lost 35% that is a MULTIPLICATIVE. Now imagine it at level 15 or even higher. The bonus gets bigger and bigger especially with better weapon.

Then you add in Talent and so on, the gap becomes bigger and bigger that if they continue to inflate enemy stat, unless you invest into a power house build, you won't be able to burst high enough to make full use of that Adrenaline/Rage combo
.
Something like 2 (stat) *1.5 (crit) *1.2 (talent) and 1.5*1.5*1.2 is already a 25% damage loss. When you start dealing 100 damage per strike, that's 25 damage gone which is very much game changing.

But of course, if the game actually becomes a PvP fest then they will need to introduce a "Team Initiative and alternating turns between team" for real but I really really doubt this game will ever become a competitive PvP game without mods.

If we're gonna buff stats for now, buff Con first. Make it give less Vitality but offer a portion of Physical and Magical armour or even an actual damage reduction (like 0.25% damage reduced per Con point above 10). Right now, simply knowing the AI and how to position already makes it easily winnable every fights in the game with no one dying even with 0 con invested on every one. Even if you have 5 more health per point, it doesn't matter if you are CC'd and the enemy get to hit you twice or even use Pain Shackle.

Totally agree on that, which is why I don't really get that Larian holds back the other schools for example. It influences it a lot. Bending the outcome.
But what I'm trying to bring up is simply the fact, that said system has the flaw of having this potential. And as far as the past showed, once established s.t. won't change, no matter how much problems is causes.

As for you calculations:
Hmm... the bonus doesn't seem to be multiplicative to me but additive. +30% from STR and +30% from 2H for example result in the same damage as +60% from STR alone.
And even then, going first means having always n+1 rounds of combat. So in the worst case it's all or nothing, but even in round 2 it's still worth +100% damage, +50% potential damage in round 3, and so on...

@snap
Nobody said that it should be removed or that only one attribute benefeits each build. Au contraire!
It's about putting the advantage it offers into relation.

As Ellezard stated in another Thread that COULD be done making each round less meaningful by increasing life/armor. Sadly this also prolongs fights, that are already quite prolonged thanks to being turnbased at all. So it's risky too, just somewhere else.
Another probable solution COULD be, to delay really powerful effects like thunderstorm grenades to explode one round later after being thrown and that way give the chance to decide what to do. This sadly somewhat collides with the really low movement AP-cost in DOS2...
The next idea some other people discussed could be "softer" CC effects instead of extremes like freeze/stun/knockdown etc.
So it would AT LEAST even out one aspect.
You know... any port in a storm.

Going first doesn't help much with melee char if they can't get in range. This is why I never want my powerhouse to have high wits because even if they can move, unless characters like Lohse spends time repositioning everything just to get them into the 2H Red Prince range, it's a waste of AP for the 100-0 Rage combo. By learning how the AI works, it's way more effective to wait for their melee to get close to you (abusing their wits) and then reposition the range into that melee to have more targets in a world of hurt.

And it's actually multiplicative.

Warfare: The bonus is weird and will require some explanation how it really works. This talent is based off the final damage of what you do and scale with crits as well. This is multiplicative. It will grant you bonus as long as your initial hit does not break the enemy armor and the bonus will never be high enough to hit the enemy health directly.

Let's say you deal 50 damage and have level 4 warfare (+40%). If your enemy has a lot of armor, you will deal 70 damage on that hit, dealing 50 first followed by another line of 20 from Warfare for a total of 70. If you crit for 100 damage, that extra damage becomes 40 for a total of 140 physical armor damage.

However, take note that the 2nd line of damage WILL NOT appear if you break the armor or the bonus breaks the armor.

If your opponent has 75 armor and you deal 50 + 20, it will show 50 and 20 from hitting, two seperate lines of damage.

If you deal something like 60 + 24, it will only show up as 60 yet still destroy the enemy armor (warfare bonus damage line does not show in this case and it is bumped up to 7)

And if you use the crit number of 100 damage, warfare bonus will not be active at all because you already destroy the armor.

Easiest target to check this is either hitting your shield teammate or Zaleskar if you want to use abilities to confirm this.

2H Talent : 2H offers both weapon damage bonus and crit bonus. Kinda easy to tell it's multiplicative already just because of the crit bonus, further strengtening how strong your initial blow already is from getting tons of crit.

Elf Racial : +20% damage is multiplicative.

2x Snipe and high ground Bonus: Multiplicative.

So when you build that power house char, you have to consider how strong the bonus becomes as you level up. When you have like 10 points in 2H, the crit bonus jumps from a base of 1.5x to 2.0x or even higher if you have at least 1 point in scourge for adrenaline/walk-in-shadow. Simply getting 2 damage per Str might seem low now but just looking at a 2x crit bonus, that's a 4 damage loss per point when Rage is on. When you hit 3x in a single turn (Crip, Whirl, Battering), that's 12 damage loss per level.

If your character has to take 2 turns to kill something compaed to only 1 turn, you are already losing the AP efficiency factor especially considering how buffs current work like RAge not really disappearing right away after you get to play your turn again and you can still use it one more time. Also, skills have cool down so even if you act alot, you can only normal attack.

With multiplicative factor in skills like Criplling, One single super strong str-build blow will end up dealing enough to efficienly kill targets compared to 1 crippling + 1 attack from the Str-Wit build. When you add in the AoE, you can see how high the number goes up especially if you take Warlord instead of The Pawn.

Except that you can build a character with 0 extra Wits.

If Wits is too strong, then what about Strength, Finesse and Intelligence which gets a lot more point allocation than Wits, Memory or Constitution because they are simply better?
Those 3 stats are actually forced on you or you can't even wear armor or weapon later on.
You can play the game without putting a single point into Wits.

The real reason Wit is so broken is because enemies squishies are broken. If you can gib the mages (and archer) before they get to act, the combat becomes wayyyyyyy easier because the Melee AI are still poor and that melee are only ridiculous if you go 2H build and abuse Teleport.

Like when we build characters, mages are the weakest because of how physical-magical armor work that only 1 mage is not sufficient so you have to trade the super easy physical damage for another mage if you want to go magical.

But enemy has like 2-3 mages in the team nearly every big fight with later some of them even throwing source spell around. With how majority of the CC in the game are magic-related, some random ambush without prepositioning abuse and low wit build will just result in a group CC to helpless deaths.

This is the problem. Not Wits.

I had a level 3 enemy cast Mortal Blow on me.
Larian clearly stated that enemies skills and abilities weren't balanced yet around the AI 2.0 and that the vast majority of them are going to see their spell list gutted because of it.

Also, the fact that enemies have a hella lot more ranged on their attacks than we do is what make them able to actually kill people so fast. Because they don't even have to move to start attacking. It's also why melee enemies feel so weak.

When it comes to throwing grenades, enemies should be influenced by their stats.

Hopefully "enemy gets 100% hit on every target everytime they throw a grenade" will be a thing of the past. Would like to see them throw too far or too near sometimes.