Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback CC/Armor/General Balancing

It's not that it's easy, it's just not satisfying.

Despite all the hype about surfaces, there's actually very little clever stuff you can do and with how easy it is to generate your own surfaces using them in clever ways is completely devalued.

No small part of this is also that chaining CC reigns supreme and a general lack of viable alternatives to magical surface abuse.

Eh, I mean, it does make things easy and that translates to not being satisfying. So one begets the other. The comment on surfaces & CC reigning supreme is also true.

I beat the Alpha after the patch SOLO with an Elven Huntsman/Rogue and now I just left Fort Joy at lvl 4 SOLO Dwarven Warrior/Necro/Hydro (and so far it has felt easier than my first run).

Every problem becomes easy once you understand how to solve it. In DOS1, without magic armor, CC spam = GG. Didn't get lucky with a roll? get used to saving mid-combat and reloading...Until Honor Mode comes out, everything will be easy. And then, once you are able to learn every winning strategy in Tactician, you know a priori it can be applied to Honor Mode. Then it's a matter of execution.

If CC reigns supreme, which it does, what do we do? Get rid of CC? Sure. I would still enjoy the game, but I don't think it would be significantly more or less enjoyable than with CC.

The hype around surfaces/elements is well-founded – it’s innovative, it’s different. It’s entertaining. It just needs more investment, and I like where they’re going with the recent ideas around summoning: the totems and the creature that both take on elemental properties. This is great – where else do you see this happening?

I read too many posts focusing on the clichés of the genre when it comes to battles. The mindset appears to be Baldur’s Gate and the like. I played Pillars of Eternity and have forgotten the entire experience, because the battles are the same old business that’s been done a million times before.

It takes more balls and ingenuity to turn the genre its head and walk the path no one else has walked, because you’ve a massive challenge on your hands – the fine line between being so innovative you alienate to the point of commercial death and being so formulaic that you’re just another copycat squeezing the masses for dimes you know they’ve already surrendered for ‘what works’.

The problem with CC is that it’s too powerful and too readily available at present: aka, it's boring because the player knows it's nukes versus swords when they've got it equipped – a distinctly unfair advantage. I even think if CC skills/spells were simply grouped together it would solve the problem without drastically altering the formula. Ie – once you cast one CC spell (say pyro-based), the other (CC based skills) also go into cooldown.

It’s a tad bland and heavy-handed, but I’m trying to suggest something that doesn’t rock the boat too much. I’m hoping the modding tools will be powerful enough to allow for more experimental and drastic solutions outside of the commercial experience.

Either way, it’ll likely be the only game I play this year, thanks to the chasm it’s created between itself and other games in the same genre. So I'll be hyping up the surfaces and elements till the cows come home, no matter what...

The problem with that view is that a player had to actively go out their way to save scum and break/cheese the system; which was fine cause that was their choice and if they wanted to go through the headache of save scumming and, in my opinion, lessen the experience with it than that was their choice.

Here though? It's right up front and in our faces. It's built into the main combat system. You can't miss it. You can't pretend it's not there. You can't even not use it since that's how the AI does combat, so you have to cheese to an extent to retaliate on higher difficulties.

I understand what you mean. Honestly the main source of my confusion right now is what exactly constitutes as cheese/game breaking. For example, just a few minutes ago I just defeated Alexandar with the solo dwarf I mentioned above at lvl 7. In my previous run with with my solo ranger/rogue, I had initiated the battle by pulling Alexandar out into the open where the Shriekers were. At the time I didn't realize that because I hadn't spoken to Exeter about having the purging wand I would have about 6 NPCs as backup. The fight became much easier this way having so many NPCs to tank for me. Now, with my solo dwarf, I told Exeter I had the wand and they all left on the boat, so I was left to fight alone. After a couple of failed attempts at isolating the Markswoman on the westernmost side and taking down her physical armor to CC chaining her directly, I thought that if I go invis and block both ladders leading up to this area with Barrels then none of the other enemies would come up. This actually happened, so I was able to defeat her and then teleport the Gheist up, and repeat. I actually went into sneak and waited for the voidworm to do his magic, then I killed the Gheist 1v1 and after that it was me vs. Alexandar and another Markswoman. I applied the same concept on the eastern side of the map and managed to get Alexandar 1v1. At this point he has full life and armor.

This build was made to be flexible so that in a 1v1 I can target Physical or Magic armor depending on of which the enemy has less. Alexandar happens to have about the same Physical and Magical, so I went for my nuke combo. In sneak, I waited for all my cooldowns and switched to my Staff. Using Hail Strike + Chloroform + Staff + Adrenaline + Invis + Wait 3 turns + Chloroform + Decaying Touch + Restoration + Teleport + Sneak he was dead.

Is that cheesing? It actually took thought and strategic thinking from level 1 to get to this point. This was even more enjoyable than my other run, and it took about the same time (13 hours). The whole time I had no idea if it would work, if I would get stuck in any place, etc. At each step I had to find a solution, and it was different. In some battles "cheesing" wasn't necessary and the approach was more direct.

Look, with CC and AI the way it currently stands, if I roll a party of 4 there is just no need to "cheese" in the way I have. In fact there is very little need to think at all. Maybe the *real* cheese is in the ridiculous power of certain combinations of skills, in particular exploiting Invis and Adrenaline to nuke and restore cooldowns, Cloak and dagger to flee out of dangerous situations, leave combat (without using flee mechanic, even). Also, Decaying touch + Restoration is just out of this world.

To be honest, I've had more fun playing this Alpha 3 times over than I had playing DOS1. Thinking about how to strategically take down armor to initiate CC chain, and also avoiding enemy CC chain is actually fun for me, much more fun than rolling through battles with a party of 4.

Yes, it is, because you are exploiting the fact, that the AI can't handle such things liked blocked pathways. Same goes in my eyes for placing tons of explosive barrels around the AI, because in reality no enemy would not react to barrels appearing around him out of nowhere. It's one of the issues I have with sneaking, it's to broken and makes to much cheese possible.

But a solo run is kind of a cheese run from the start, because soloing is not much of the meant way to play the game.

So if you want to 'cheese' it is up to you anyway, same goes for people who save scum all the time. The problem is, when people cheese around and then say: The game is to easy, make it harder. All those who don't want to cheese or don't know how to cheese would suffer from it. ^^

Cheese is mostly just exploiting AI that literally does not respond to basic, dumb tactics. While I don't care if other people cheese, I find the tactics break immersion a lot, even just knowing I could place boxes around an enemy and they would be helpless. I like to feel like the AI will always have some kind of at least semi-intelligent response to anything I do.

I feel like, wouldn't it be more fun if you had to solo the game without cheesy tactics (although, there will always be some level of cheese you'll need to exploit probably)? Properly designed One Man Army will enable that presumably, while hopefully be even harder and more strategic than a cheese run. While it's fun to see how weak of a party can make it through the game, at a certain point the game is a joke if you can solo it with no One Man Army at all.

The game doesn't need to be airtight, no funny, exploity business whatsoever. In fact, it simply won't be with the all the complexity it has. But they should plug up the most obvious cheese for immersion's sake.

For being soloable they need to change One man army for sure. Vitality bonus is pretty much useless. You would need armor bonus, because as soon you got cc't, vitality does not matter at all anymore.

I feel a separate ‘cheese thread’ wouldn’t hurt. What have you done to fool the AI so completely it hasn’t a chance? It would be impressive to see it react plausibly to the kind of slyness only a person is capable of, but it’s possibly asking for too much in all cases. The prison-of-barrels/wall-of-barrels situation should be addressed though, as it's a common and obvious exploit.

I don’t remember a party-based experience being as trivial as suggested, however. I haven’t played the game with the new AI, but the impression I’m getting is that it’s cleverer than it needs to be, rather the other way around...

Either way, ‘man-made cheese’, for lack of a better definition, is a complex and distracting topic, with multiple layers. CC is the big remaining issue, in my opinion, as it’s intended to be a core tactic, and therefore finely tuned and balanced. If it was resolved with some imagination, I could live with the other cheese tactics mentioned. If anything, CC is a cheesier tactic than any of the contrivances with barrels etc.

Even if there were just more ways to counter it. Elemental-based counters, as I’m all for developing the elemental feature over others. Maybe certain CC is negated completely on ‘opposing’ surfaces or by ‘opposing’ elemental spells. Even something physical like a knockdown should have a counter (I’m set on fire, so it ‘wakes me back up’, or whatever). I realise there are specific skills geared towards countering certain types of CC already, but they're too specialist - it should be possible to counter/nullify CC with an imaginative approach as well, as that's far more satisfying.

In DOS1 there were chances that enemies would resist, but they same could go for you: There was the possibily to build yourself, so you are more likely to withstand CC. Also in DOS1 cooldowns got shorter, so you were able to try it more often, because you were able to get also per AP per turn.

Now it is just: Do you have enough armour or not? There was more risk but also more reward if you prepared them correctly. Now there is no real risk, it's just a puzzling game wich forces your whole team to either focus on physical or magical damage. Wich will most likely make all go for physical, because physical hits harder and is easier to attain (weapon related and no enemie resistances). Also there will be six skills of magical type, but only one supports extra damage to magic armor so far, while there is only one STR-skill set. Other physicals are also only two.


Being knocked down and being knocked out are different, fire won't wakre you up, if you are knocked down. But what is clearly missing is a skill like helping hand. I think there is at the moment nothing to help someone of back on their feet.


The main issue with the smarter AI is: They have still their old stats and skills: tons of armor and CC. Therefore in the early fights is pretty likely, that they just steam roll you in the first two rounds if you did not take extreme precautions, because you don't have enough cc yourself and they will just CC your whole fricking team.

I guess the reason why I bring up the "cheese" in this thread is because I think the CC system is only broken if the AI is perfected. It's strange, actually, I tried using that barrel tactic against the dogs by Kniles, and one of the dogs actually attacked one of the barrels to clear the doorway. Unless the dog accidentally hit the barrel trying to aim its crossbow at me, then I think they have already tried to address this issue, but I am not certain, since Bishop Alexandar fell for it in the final battle.

I really want to get at the core concepts here as concisely as possible, this is an attempt:

(1) Is using the flee mechanic cheese? Is using tactical retreat or cloak and dagger or invisibility/sneak cheese?

If not, given any group of enemies, if I can isolate a 1v1 and get a kill without getting CCd, there exist multiple viable builds that can consistently achieve victory without cheesing (so far from personal experience I know exactly 2, but both require having points in Thievery and 1 point into Scoundrel).

(2) If it is possible to solo Act 1 without cheesing, then not soloing Act 1 is trivial.

If not, then your non-solo build/tactics need modification.

(3) In my opinion, if the answer to (1) is no and (2) applies, then CC system doesn't need to change. I honestly don't feeeeeeel like I "cheesed" too horribly. It was actually enjoyable to find the exact order of which enemy to aggro, from which position, etc. It's not like you just go in and win the battle the first time. It's still a challenge.

Right now I am going to make a full mage build without putting points into thievery or scoundrel. If I can solo Act 1 with that build, I honestly don't think the CC system is broken. It's just very chess-like. If you let your guard down thinking you can steamroll a group of enemies instead of re-positioning and reinforcing your defense to avoid getting CC chained, you're basically allowing yourself to be check-mated. In chess it doesn't matter if you have more pieces or if all your pieces are surrounding the enemy king when you leave yourself exposed to a major, game-ending, vulnerability.

I probably haven't given this enough thought but here are some ideas:

1) If you are CCd, instead of your turn getting skipped you have the option of using an ability "Sourcerer's Resilience" which rids you of CC for that turn but leaves you with 1AP for the next 2 turns. This way you have the opportunity to flee, use a potion, etc, at the cost of having 1 AP on your next turn.

To make it more interesting, maybe this skill has a % chance to fail based on a formula that takes other factors into account:

Examples:
1) Harder to get up if you have been knocked down on oil or ice.
2) Harder to break frozen if there are no warm surfaces nearby.
3) Harder to break petrify if not standing on acid.
4) Easier to break stunned if under the effect of an unrelated magic buff (ie: blessed, magic armor, encouraged, rage)

Maybe putting points into Perseverance would also affect (2) and (3), for Leadership (1) and (4), and then Pain Reflection could add a chance to inflict the status on the enemy.

It kind of sounds, like you would add a RNG-system to a system that got introduced to have less RNG.

I would just want the old system back honestly. They made far to many changes at once in my eyes.


Regarding the other stuff:
1) If you run into a fight, kill one or two enemies and flee. It sounds pretty cheesy for me. We always only used flee to escape and accidently triggered fight. If we started a fight and we failed or died to often, we would reload and start it new using a different approach. If you just hit and run you kind of deny yourself the real challenge. (Also backtracking can take ton of time, even more without pyramids.)

2) Soloing will always use cheesy tactics, just because of the pure amount of enemies. Otherwise as you said, going in with a team of four would just be boring. (If you solo Hit and run is probably less cheesy and just necessary. To cheese means to abuse game mechanics to get yourself a unfair advantage, solo is about giving yourself an unfair disadvantage, so I guess, they partwise cancel each other out.)

I hadn’t played the game since the initial release, so I fired it up recently to see how things were going. I’ve many opinions on the current state – very good overall, btw – so I’m just going to touch on the more important ones first, in the knowledge that few will want to read a post of this length to the final paragraph.

Some bugs I encountered (that I can remember)

1) During the early stages of levelling up, I was granted an extra attribute point to spend after I’d exhausted all other points (this occurred several times on random characters)
2) The flight skill for the polymorph only works for one battle: casting it during another battle fails to give you the flight option itself – it’s solved by reloading
3) The totems often failed to fire (it almost seemed as though their ‘turn’ would be skipped entirely at times)
4) Seems to be many instances of the enemy AI ‘losing it’, and just wandering about aimlessly during battle as though somehow concussed – consistent enough to be a notable problem

CC - My Major Gripe

With so much polish being applied to the various cogs of the game, it’s even easier than before to spot the one rusty dud that’s not doing its job.

This is a game, which implies you derive your satisfaction from actually playing it. CC prevents you from playing the game, because you can’t do anything with CC’d characters. I’m now leaning more towards the other comments I’ve read on the subject that suggest turning it into something that cripples your characters to various degrees but still allows them to act in some limited form.

A CC’d character should be permitted one last roll of the dice, in other words. I think the effects should remain devastating, but not to the point of loss of control. I’m thinking along the lines of severely impaired attack damage, spell damage, movement speed, movement capacity, elemental resistance (and so on), but still the ability to do SOMETHING, however minor, that might require some grey matter.

It’s clearly the most cack-handed mechanic in the game at the moment. I hope to god they address it, as it was pretty damn bad for me during my play through.

The Economy

This seems near-perfect, if possibly too perfect/streamlined. It could potentially use some roughing up, as it seemed as though diligent looting gave me just enough to always be in a position to buy something better. A minor criticism, but it’s much-improved over the last miserly experience I had with it.

The Hannibal Lecter Elves

No joke – I found the cannibalistic feature of the elves sickening and gratuitous. It doesn’t appear to play any intelligent role in the narrative surrounding them, and smacks of trying too hard to turn an old cliché on its head: the blandly stoic elves that appear in every other fantasy as boring perfection – beautiful, ‘cultured’, the height of civilised civilisation etc. It’s poor taste to have to go around picking up bloodied body parts for consumption – really sick stuff. Can this mechanic of eating the essence of others not take some less repellent form? Maybe soul fragments or something? It’s seriously wrong to go around picking up body parts in a game that doesn’t apply any meaningful or though-provoking narrative to the activity. You can do much better than this.

The Art

I really liked the new animations and spell effects: flashy without being garish about it. Leaping into the air with the wings never gets old, and it seems like some outstanding effort is going into the art in general – the Braccus statue on the beach, for example, and the sheer variety of armour and enemy variation. There’s very little sense of visual fatigue.

The AI

Apart from the random concussion bug mentioned above, I feel this is the biggest improvement overall. There’s bound to be bugs and shortcomings with something this complex, so I’m sure they’ll be ironed out in time. The enemy seems much more devious now, and puts up a very nice challenge. Looking forward to more developments here.

Levelling

Far too difficult in the early stages, without presenting a fair challenge. Level 1-3 is a chore, because you’re generally fighting enemies of a higher level and having to desperately scrounge for gear and spells just so you can actually present a strategy, rather than just hoping to get lucky during the next onslaught. There needs to be more immediate access to the tools that allow you to strategise – normal weapons and armour, a few more skills. The characters are too impoverished early on: this may make sense in narrative terms, but it’s a bore gameplaywise to have to wait until level 3 before you can start to think strategically about encounters.

Custom Party Characters

Brilliant idea, but too limited as is. There needs to be more options for tailoring the custom classes you ‘pick’ for your party, allowing you to at least specify the schools the wizard specialises in etc.

Shields

A quick note to say they’re awesome now, and really add strategic depth with the armour regenerating abilities – keep it up!

Summoning school

Really like the totems, but the incarnate is far too weak and underwhelming at the moment. Need to be able to level him up a lot faster. Also don’t like the idea of having to cast so many spells on it to buff it up.

Polymorph

The physical armour regen spell is way too powerful. Needs to less armour restored, I’d say – 50% less at least. The bull spell, as noted elsewhere, is too similar to other abilities and is not all that interesting. The wings spell, however, is perfect, and visually spectacular. May be too powerful for certain classes, but was just right for my shield and sword dude.

I assume that this is not just a case of you putting an Ability point into Polymorph? Each point spent on Polymorph gives you one free Attribute point.

It seems that the biggest problem so far is how CC is handled that makes the combat hard to enjoy. Even the complaints about RNG is CC related.

Currently with the Armor and and Magic Armor system we have in place turns the game into a resource system where you break a threshold health kinda like ME2/3 and then you chain CC relevant to the armor you break. This encourages a team and playstyle where its more effective to stack one damage type, chain CC, and ignore the other half of damage.

People also disliked the system we had in D:OS EE because combat felt like it was too focused on chain CCing and if you missed a CC then the fight was practically over. People disliked that a fight was more or less determined by a dice roll and how game deciding CC was.

So what do we need to fix CC?

In my opinion we need to first separate CC by severity:

1) Hard CC that causes loss of control of character which has the most impact in combat.
This includes: Charm, Knocked Down, Frozen, Stunned, Petrified, Transformed, Sleep, and others that I missed.

2) Soft CC that provide breathing room, generally has a spell that can dispel it, and/or still allow actions.
This includes: Blinded, Slowed, Crippled, Marked, Chilled, Infected, Shackle of Pain, and others.

3)DoTs that is more focused on keeping consistent damage to whittle down opponents and reduce the effectiveness of single heals.
This includes: Burning, Poison, and Bleeding.

Secondly we need to find a way to implement a system that allows all CC to be relevant and balanced by their severity. So hard CC should occur less often then soft CC and the same for soft CC to DoTs.

My Suggestion:

We change the functionality of Armor and Magic Armor in three different way.

1) Armor and Magic Armor is not a threshold health that is affected by damage but instead a resource that is only affected by CC. So each CC has a numerical value that affects Armor or Magic Armor dependent on their damage type. For example Crippling Blow will have two values, one for health and one for Armor. We will make DoTs unique in their functionality in that they will shred Armor and Magic Armor more effectively but cannot damage health until they are gone and soft CC will deal more damage to health but reduced chance of happening.

2)Armor and Magic Armor is affected by each type of CC differently. We will introduce some RNG because I believe RNG is not inherently bad but is often implemented poorly, adds complexity to decision making, and make combat less scripted. DoTs will activate in 3 different ways. At 100%-50% Armor they will have a normal chance of being activated(say like 30%-50%), 49%-1% increased chance, and at 0% it will always activate. soft CC will activate in 2 different way. 100%-50% it will have a reduced rate of happening(10%-30%) and at 49% and lower it will have a normal chance of being activated. Hard CC is only activated in one way and that is at 0% Armor or Magic Armor.

3)When Armor and Magic Armor reaches zero and a character is hard CCed, Armor or Magic Armor is immediately replenished to full depending on the type of cc used. This should prevent chain CCing of hard CC to 1-3 on one person and even less on multiple enemies.

With this type of system in place it should reduce the amount of hard CC and increase the usage of other CC by giving all CC a functionality in that all of them reduce Armor and Magic Armor with their normal effect. It also encourages both magical and physical sources of damage because you can target both Armor and Magic Armor to chain CC a physical effect and then a magical effect.

There are a lot of problems that I can foresee in implementing this system. Values of health, damage, Armor, and Magic Armor will have to be changed because it will not be a easy fit. Programming this system will most likely take a large amount of time and depending on their budget may not be feasible. Lastly it may still lead to chaining a different type of CC like DoTs becoming more important or soft CC.

Also change the name of Armor and Magic Armor to Bodybuilding and Willpower to somewhat connect to the previous game and reflect its functionality better.

The main difference between Mass Effect and DOS2 armor system would be:
Mass Effect has different kind of armor depending on enemie type. Some have Armor, some have Tech-Shield, some have Bionic shield with forces you to adapt regarding your enemies. Also enemies are more numerous and variied I guess, and its much harder to group CC all at once.

In DOS2 all have the same kind of armor, because if they would not have it, it would be to easy to just take them out. Regarding armor the classlessness of DOS is kind of the problem, because it is easy to take CC from different classes to adapt to everything will in ME you are restricted to your class and those of your teammates.

It still think the old system was kind of better for the classlessness of DOS. In DOS1 you could learn mage CC as a warrior, but if you lacked the needed stats, it would be oft just a waste of time. Same went for buffs, who did not have guranteed success without proper stats.


@ Chratis:
So, you are suggesting a cross between old system and new system? Attacks will always hit vitality, but likeliness for CC depends on how well you wittled down their Bodybuild/Willpower? Sounds at least more interesting than the current system.

@Kalrakh

A cross between the old and new system would be a simple way to put it yes.

Attacks will always hit vitality and the likelihood for soft CC and DoTs will increase as bodybuilding/willpower goes down, but hard CC will never affect you unless you have zero of the relevant type. And after you are hard CCed you will gain all your bodybuilding or willpower back depending on the type of status effect.

Agree with you on Wits.

I'm playing a wizard and i'm putting my points in Wits for the simple fact that it is better to play first than having a bigger bonus and playing last...

Would like the AI to threat the summoned creature as a player, so the creature can aggro the AI like in other games....because that's the point of it. So far, my experience is they are targeting the spell caster and don't give a damn about the creature that was summoned.