Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Act 1 spells/environment too powerful

I know this is early access, and thus this Act 1 might not be representative of what will actually be in it, but currently it seems that the environmental effects and power of them is crazy.

When going back to DOS 1 it becomes clear it's probably less to do with the environment itself, and more the spells available (and also just amount of oil every where in DOS 2).

Look at the novice level spells in DOS 1. http://divinityoriginalsin.wiki.fextralife.com/Skills.

• Close Proximity, single target spells (with CC chance)
• Some ranged single target (mix of damage and/or CC)
• Limited aoe spells (firefly, boulder bash, immolation, battering ram, etc.)
• Buffs / Debuffs (single target)
• Summons
• Limited environment creating spells (rain, boulder bash, firefly, etc.)

Some of these spells require/penalty you if you only have 1 point into the skill as well. These spells required you to actually play and position differently, other than a ranger you needed to be close to enemies to use spells, along with the lack of aoe made grouping up (both you and enemies) less of an issue early, but using the environment was much more important (rivers, poison, etc.)

Meanwhile in DOS 2

• Very few melee range spells
• Many aoe spells, a lot of which create significant amount of environment
• Many mobility spells/teleporting spells

Along with this, the new Armor and CC system actually makes environmental effects (aside from extra damage) not as important. In DOS 1 it was very significant to use "transition" states like Wet, Cold, Warm, etc. in order to secure a stun, freeze, burn, etc. In DOS 2 if magic armor = 0, you get the stun, freeze, etc regardless of what you did before. There is a large loss of strategy and planning to put the environment and such in your favor, now it's just nuke armor down, throw CC down, win. Previously it was do damage and set up debuffs/states (wet, lower resistances, etc.), exploit the advantage you set up to CC, pick off the weakened enemies (and usually prioritize enemies properly, so they don't set up an advantage against you).

I agree completely, I think CC is terribly done in this game. Getting CCed once basically means the end of the fight. The fights in this game are not enjoyable, it is just one frustrating experience after the next, and becomes just a "well do we have enough armor to win this fight?"

What? DOS1 is completely easymode if you just put 1 geomancer on every character and oil/fire the entire planet every fight - partly because it also causes line of sight issues. In fact the best characters you can make in that game are a result of putting just 1 or 2 points into each spell school. There wasn't much of a reason to spend 7 extra skill points to go up to level 4 and get a master skill plus a few adepts when you could get 13 more novice + 4 more adept skills at the same cost. The only real exception is Rain of Arrows, but that's fine because special arrows is almost the same as having 1-2 points into every skill tree anyways.

It's also really easy to group enemies in DOS1 as it is in DOS2. It's just called walking back at the start of a fight and making them chase you and converge to a point, and then using Teleportation to control things even further. Bottleneck points always exist.

Some definite rose colored glasses going on: DOS1 is beatable with pretty much just oil+fire spam for 95% of the fights in the game. By the time it stops being super effective your team is getting like 17 AP per turn and some of your characters should be pushing like 65% block and 80-120% all resist, making them completely invincible.

Getting CCed in DOS2 isn't even that bad when again, with very few points, you can effectively remove and then further prevent any/all CCs that can happen to you. There are also a LOT more heal spells in this game. In fact the healing is pretty fucking insane in this game. You can throw virtually any surface underneath your characters and then bless it. Hell you can even heal a LOT just from doing damage. There's also AOE heals, heal over times (that remove some debuffs), persistent area heals (that also remove statuses), percent heals (that also remove statuses). Armor buffs not only refills your armor, it also increases your maximum armor, and removes debuffs, and makes you immune to debuffs for a time.

Getting CCed once and losing a fight is based on poor team building. Wear a shield, have points in Leadership or Perseverance, use frost armor/fortify/heals on characters, skip 'lolWits must attack with big sword hope I win fast ideas' and build a proper team. You either won't get CCed in the first place or it won't matter because you can remove it with another character. This just happens when people build for Wits and then wonder why their team is a one trick pony - they either win in the first round or they quickly lose thereafter. It's not very hard to make a team that is actually invincible in this game

The only problem are the first levels, because your equipment sucks and you don't have many skills. Enemies can CC your whole team in one round, if you did not make hardcore positioning before the fight between level 1 and 5. Afterwards it gets kind of boring.

Very good points. I think that they probably have gone too far towards making everything flashy and exciting. But that doesn't really work in any medium, you can't give all the flashy overpowered stuff at the start or else you have to spend the rest of the game in a crazy cycle trying to top the previous flashy overpowered stuff.

I agree that for DOS 1 there was a lot more of indirect control (smoke and such).

I do think a bit of this is hard to judge given early access Act 1.

- We don't know if this is truly what will be in Act 1, some spells might not be available, but need to be tested.

- Things might balance out a lot more given more options, the whole cursed/blessed mechanic, etc. Early game isn't representative of the whole game.