Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback New Skills Are Broken

I have not tried much of the summoning skills but I have extensively used poly (I play solo not with companions).

Wings: Honestly I find this to be the least useful of all of the skills. I am not entirely sure why everyone is making a fuss about it. I hardly used it actually. I used the "movement" abilities from the other trees far more often. I pretty much only used Wings for running away.

Chameleon: Extremely good skill. Hopefully in the main game they give the rogue tree an earlier invis and chameleon comes later in poly.

Chicken: decent spell, fun to mess around with. I honestly didn't find it that overpowered.

Tentacle: Very solid awesome skill. Loved it. Made less use of it later on.

Skin Graph: This skill is ridiculous. At first glance I thought it was garbage but after messing around with it is has the potential to be completely broken. As demonstrated:

Elf rogue: first turn ---> Flesh sacrifice, Adrenaline, Burn My Eyes, Haste --->Vault(backlash), Sawtooth Knife, Throwing Knife(at this point whoever you targeted is pretty much insta gibbed or really close to it)--->Chameleon

Turn two: wait.

Turn 3: Skin Graph----> repeat turn 1 minus Burn My eyes---->Chameleon---> Walk in Shadows out and run away at mock jesus speed.

wait for cooldowns and repeat until everyone is eating carpet.

The only thing you must be wary of is not having a condition like Bleeding or Burning which will break your Invis. In your sequence, the melee attack can result in a burning/poison splash if your enemy bleeds fire or poison (ie. fire slugs, zombies). Now imagine this same mechanic with sneak+snipe as a ranger....it's ridiculously broken. Either the invis skills should be nerfed or there should only be one. Also, to be honest, I think sneaking in general is broken. The AI needs to be able to go on "alert mode" and run around to break your sneak somehow. I ran build without invis spells and realized you don't even need them. The AI just doesn't begin to look for you.

Also, in regards to Chicken, my opinion is that although Chicken itself is not broken, the fact that it's in the same kit as Chameleon and Skin Graft is plain absurd. The whole kit is broken. Also the extra attribute points for Poly are insanely useful if you're making a hybrid and need extra Memory.

Invisibility breaks if you take damage or attack. Combat-sneak fails if an enemy glances in your direction.

I'm open to nerfs if you have a suggestion for how to nerf them without making them useless to the point where it might as well be deleted from the game?

I have been thinking about this passively for a few days, but I am not sure if my ideas are any good. I was thinking about starting a separate thread for this but since you have asked me here I will answer here.


Conjecture: given 4AP, 0 invis spells, and 0 points into sneaking (0 cone reduction) I can ALWAYS find a way position myself outside of every vision cone and have the 1AP required to enter sneak.

Facts:

1)The AI will not move to "look" for me. As a consequence, I can wait as long as I need to refresh my cooldowns and take as much time as I need to reposition myself. However:

2)The AI will cast buffs/heals on damaged allies. But, if my net solo damage is greater than their net healing on the lowest total armor+vitality enemy, I can always focus down a single enemy with this strategy.

Conclusion:

Fact (2) is not enough to mitigate the power of Sneak.

Let's look at a worst case scenarios.

The least sneaky character:

1) No points into Sneaking (normal cones)
2) No points into Scoundrel (no invis, no Cloak and Dagger)
3) No points into Huntsman (thus no Duck Duck Goose, no Tactical Retreat)
4) No points into Polymorph (no invis).

The character least likely to escape melee combat:

5) No point in Escapist
6) No Teleport
7) No Netherswap
8) Slowed (-1AP)

Optional difficulty bonus:

9) Not allowed to use Flee mechanic.
10) Blinded.

For now let's consider a situation where (1)-(8) apply. In particular, suppose you are completely surrounded by enemies. A good concrete example might be the Voidwoken that attack you in waves on the way to the Seeker Camp. In this situation, even if you are able to do enough damage in one turn to end the battle, you would not survive because the Voidwoken will explode on death and kill you. The only option is to escape, but you only have 3AP. Suppose you can survive as many attacks of opportunity (realistically 1-2) as needed. Depending on your movement modifiers, 2AP can probably get you PRETTY FAR. Since the enemies surrounding you are facing you, only the ones that attack you on your way out will shift their vision cones, but the enemies attack you the instant you enter their area of opportunity, not after you have walked out of the area, so these enemies will still mostly be facing in the direction of your initial position, or at most perpendicular to your trajectory.

I cannot tell you how many times I have managed to enter sneak DIRECTLY BEHIND an enemy with only 3AP.

Now that we have somewhat of a picture painted, I'll list my recommendations, which are mostly not really nerfs to sneak but buffs to AI.

1) You cannot enter sneak if you are within a 1-1.5m radius of an enemy. (Maybe different radii for different enemies i.e. zombie is dumber than human).

I am not very comfortable with this nerf, but it might be the easiest solution to implement. However, it won't make any difference if you have Cloak or Retreat, because you only need 1AP for those to get anywhere you want. You are really in trouble if you are Blinded, however.

Long story short: Not just a cone, but a cone+circle.

2) Enemies rotate to face you as you move.

This means you would need to move about 13-15m from your current position. This is impossible (I think) with 3AP. Therefore, you would NEED to reject at least one of conditions (1)-(4). (Wow!!! I have to invest points to play sneaky??? -_-)

3) Enemies look for you. "Where'd he go!??!"

In the same exact haphazard, panicked way NPCs do when they notice they've been pickpocketed. At least this way there's a chance they'll break your sneak. At least this way it's a challenge to exploit the environment as much as possible to discover an optimal positioning contingency.

For now, I have nothing more to contribute.

Regarding the actual Invis skills, in my humble opinion, I think one or all of these nerfs would be fair:

1) Impossible to go into invis while Flanked.
2) Impossible to go into invis within Touch radius.

This way you have to do SOMETHING to get yourself into the right position before engaging in the massive cheese of waiting for your cooldowns.

Hmm....

First I have absolutely zero idea what you are talking about with cheese and cooldowns. If you are hiding somewhere not attacking because you are waiting for your cooldowns to end, YOU ARE NOT CONTRIBUTING TO THE FIGHT. You are leaving your team down a person, making success less likely.


Sounds to me like you've founds some kind of edge case where someone can be boring and exploit a game at the cost of making it completely unfun for THEMSELVES. Whoop-de-do. That, to me, does not seem like it is a problem which needs fixing when the cost of fixing it means that using sneak or invisibility in a normal way is not allowed.

***

1) You cannot enter sneak if you are within a 1-1.5m radius of an enemy. (Maybe different radii for different enemies i.e. zombie is dumber than human).

Well, given that basic attacks cost 2 AP, Sneak costs 1 AP, you get 4 AP per turn and moving will cost you 1 AP or more to reach an enemy, That means a Rogue would need to start 5 or so meters nearby an enemy, outside of any sight lines, the enemy can not move and MAYBE the Rogue can move to just outside of the circle with 1 AP, Sneak with 1 AP, move into the circle with 0 AP (assuming there's a free fraction of a move left), and attack once, after which they are out of AP and will take a beating.

The Guerrilla talent, already awful, is reduced to being useful ONLY for Snipe archers and will need to be deleted completely.


2) Enemies rotate to face you as you move.

You have now completely eliminated backstabbing from happening AT ALL except for Vault, which doesn't even require the Back-Stabber Talent.


3) Enemies look for you. "Where'd he go!??!"

This is the best solution of the three, but only if not combined with anything else. It also does have the similar issue of the others in that if the enemy starts looking around for you, it means that you are essentially forbidden from sneaking at the end of your turn.

Because once again, 2 AP to attack, 1 AP to Sneak, which leaves 1 AP for moving, and you have to spend that either to reach your target or to leave, but you can't do both. How many combat encounters have cover which is within the 5 meter distance you can cover with 1 AP but an enemy standing right beside you cannot when they are actively looking for you?




You mean, the situations in which a squishy melee-range character MOST DESPERATELY needs to escape from enemies who usually have "Attack of Opportunity"?


Your ideas boil down to "I think Rogues should be completely useless. Delete Sneak and Invisibility from combat completely".

Everything I have written is for 100% solo in mind. As it stands, this first Act with a party of 4 is a complete steamroll. I think a monkey could randomly roll all 4 characters and you'd still beat the Act. I can't say anything about the rest of the game because it's not there.



I'm not sure what you mean by edge case. What I have described you can do in literally every battle. You have inspired a different idea, which I will get to later.



There is a difference between "not being able to enter sneak" and "breaking sneak".



This is absolutely true. Not a good idea.



If you ARE a rogue, then at the very least you have Cloak and Dagger. That's 1AP to go anywhere. What's the problem? 2AP to attack 1AP to flee 1AP to sneak. In this case you can flee so far that if the AI looks for you chances are if you chose correctly you'll be able to stay in sneak.



I'm not sure if your conclusion is correct. What I tried to illustrate is that if even in the WORST case where I am the least roguelike thing imaginable I can STILL sneak out then there's something wrong with that mechanic.

Here is a new idea, tell me what you think:

Cooldowns don't tick while in sneak/invis.

This way, boring (smart) people cannot exploit (use basic game mechanics that are there at your disposal) this mechanic.

For sneak all you would have to do is make it so the enemy was alerted to your exact position and would move there. That way if you didn't want to get caught you would have to do a lot of maneuvering.

Or better in my opinion; enemy "awareness" increases per round where like within 3 rounds it is almost impossible to not be seen if you were sneaking and then once it hits its max it goes back to normal within 2 turns and then pulses back out again. Or something of the sort.

For invisibility they could give it a use cap per combat iteration and make it unaffected by skin graph or similar skills.

Or they could give it a proximity effectiveness.
Such as ---> can not use within x distance of an enemy(make it something small like 1m) or it wont work. That way your use of invis is tied to your movement abilities and requires you more AP investment to pull off.

Sometimes I forget to reply to posts.



It is an alpha, difficulty is going to go up and down. Also only normal difficulty is available. However, in the end, the game is likely to be balanced around being challenging for a party of 4 characters. Given that there is no level or encounter scaling, finding a difficulty level which is challenging for 1 characters and still challenging for 4 characters is likely to be nearly impossible.

Exploiting of mechanics for solo runs might be the only way to do the game solo. Of course the One Man Army Talent is not available right now.







I am aware of that. Moving costs AP, and so you would need to be within a specific range of the enemy to afford the AP cost, given that you start with a fixed 4 AP.



I haven't checked in this patch, but I think that Cloak and Dagger has a cooldown longer than 1 turn. I am quite sure that enemies will take more than one backstab each to kill.

I have a Rogue in my party and I will test for the possibilities of running away and sneaking, and seeing how that affects damage output.





I ignored your example for being a hypothetical based on a lot of assumptions.




I said elsewhere, but for the record in this thread, that will also punish players who are playing legitimately, not only those trying to cheese and exploit the game. For that reason, I dislike the idea.

I have to admit when I think about it... Wings seems like a PERFECT skill for the whole "Source Skill Split" aspect we talked about earlier.

You know the one... Where you can use all source skills as normal skills... but you can also charge them into their more powerful version?

So the Wings have their normal "Hover above the ground, 1ap single teleport" and then they have their unlimited teleport version.

Though given Scoundrels don't have their winged shoes yet (then again that is a 0ap skill which I hope remains 0ap)

I haven't had a lot of time playing the game, so I've only gotten a bit of time recently. I've only fought a couple battles with the summoner, but I think you might be using the totems wrong, and some other people are using Dimensional bolt wrong. The totems are very fragile. Dimensional Bolt is a random surface which could have unwanted effects if you place it in the wrong spot and get the wrong result.

The way I'm using DB is to place it on a blank spot out of the way, not under an enemy or on an existing surface. That way I won't accidentally heal a zombie with poison, or a fire elemental with fire, and I won't trigger a huge explosion by placing DB onto oil/poison and accidentally lighting it up. I am using DB as a tool to make a surface, not as an attack.

Similarly, I also put the totems off to the sides, where they can shoot at the enemy, but the enemy can't really hit both the totem and me. If I'm putting the totems in a spot where a charge can take out multiple ones and hit me, I'm doing something wrong.

Got around to playing the latest patch, and along the lines of Stabbey, totems feel decent if you position them right. They deal more damage than my regular attacks, and it only takes a couple of them to whittle just enough armor off of enemies to get CC on them. At least, up to level 4 (mostly taking on fights a level underleveled, as well).

I don't even find it necessary to spawn them in elements most of the time. So I personally do use the dimensional bolt as an attack most of the time, but I'm careful about what potential elemental reactions could happen. If there's a chance to explode or stun my team, then I tend not to risk it. But if the enemy is in the open, the chance for oil alone for the slow makes it a decent enough attack (I seem to find oil more common than other elements, but maybe that's just random).

Polymorph feels alright, but I really gotta say I dislike how there's just 4 skills to play with at the beginning for each skill tree. Makes it a bit slow going for any sort of pure class. That should change as more skills are released, I hope. Should be at least 6 starter skills for each tree.

Unrelated, but man the economy is whack compared to what it was before. Just weird how barrels have a 100 gold sitting in them randomly. Also, I'm really not a fan of the new skillbook icons. They look like worse quality, even if they maybe fit the aesthetic slightly better.

I like playing as a Summoner. I find it most effective when paired with Elf, because you can use their racial to summon blood before any fight (and the pools won't disappear). The blood totems do the most damage and have the most health (about 50% more health). I didn't find much use for Dimensional Bolt; it wasn't very strong and the randomness wasn't helpful, but the Infusion spells were deceptively strong. The armor bonus gets huge and they have a hidden 15% damage buff each. At level 8 my Incarnate has 144 Physical and Magic Armor when Infused, and these can be refreshed for 1 AP each every 3 rounds.

Before a fight I would cut myself for a blood pool, summon the blood incarnate, buff it with the 2 infusion spells, and summon 2 blood totems. Then you can manually have the Blood Incarnate run in and initiate the fight. Usually the totems are far enough back they aren't in danger and get several hits off.
Casting all of this had the benefit of the summon being off-cooldown by the time the fight started. This means I could immediately resummon the incarnate if it died quickly.

The Summoner points increase the amount of shielding your incarnates and totems receive from all sources (as well as more damage), so the Summoner can focus on adding shields to the Incarnate to make it remarkably tanky, and CC resistant.
Early in the game an Elf can eat body parts to learn Fortify and Frost Armor, which saves a couple more points for investing into Summoning. Because the Incarnate becomes so durable, it can get up close to several enemies and nets numerous Opportunity attacks.

I just finished a solo run with a build like this, and it worked really well. I would also strongly recommend Pawn for a summoner. It's very helpful to generate distance between yourself and your summons, which reduces your vulnerability to AoE. This also encourages enemies to hit the Summons and leave the Summoner alone.

I focused my stats into Finesse and used a bow to spend extra AP. Because the blood summons do physical damage, using a bow prevented me from working on 2 separate sources of armor; all of the damage was physical. Even if no blood is available, the Wood Totems can be reliably summoned for Physical, and they STILL do more damage than the elemental forms. This also has added benefit of allowing the Incarnate to Knockdown enemies with its charge, which won't happen for Magic damage variants.

Alternatively, stacking Intellect will increase the potency of armor buffing spells like Fortify and Frost Armor, which has synergy with the bonus received armor on Summons. Intelligence does not increase armor gained from these skills.

I feel like the Summons which attack Magic Armor could really use a damage boost. They are probably weaker due to their potential to add statuses to enemies, but I found that they had so much trouble getting through armor that I rarely got the statuses applied in a timely fashion, not to mention summoning them in safe positions isn't as practical as a Physical damage totem. Then there's the inconvenience that enemies are often immune to the elements near them.

Of the Polymorph skills, the most notable is Skin Graft. Being able to reset all CDs can net a lot of extra action points for an Elf with Adrenaline. You can't double-stack Adrenaline on the same turn (gotta wait for the debuff to wear off) but you can use it again much sooner. For the summoner build, this allows getting 2 totems down in the same turn, in addition to resetting all of your buffs and utility.
Although I don't recommend it, Glass Cannon has huge synergy with this skill setup as the max AP increase from both the Blood Elf Racial and Adrenaline means you'll continue to net extra AP on the turns afterwards (it completely negates the drawback of Adrenaline, but enemies will make you a very high priority and their CC will likely negate any benefits).

I really enjoyed reading through this, so thanks for sharing your experience here. I started solo run to test the summoner and poly skills, but took a very different approach, mainly investing 3 points into poly to put the extra attribute points into memory (also rolled Mnemonic and All Skilled Up), and so far putting 1 point into scoundrel, warrior, hydro, necro and summonner. My idea was to have access to as much CC and healing as possible, while being able to dish out heavy amounts of both physical and magical damage, using a shield/wand or shield/sword depending on the situation. Even without extra points in summoner and without using infusions, the physical damage from the wood totems and regular incarnate plus the AOE from the warrior skills guarantees multiple CCd enemies on the first or second turn. Now that the saving throw for Decaying Touch is Physical, this means I can nuke one target with Restoration and that's just 2AP. The remaining enemies that can attack usually waste their AP on the summons, and usually the incarnate survives. I actually haven't used any of the infusions, so the only other summoning skill I use is Dimensional Bolt just for the magic damage. Usually I'll always manage to keep up at least 1 totem, but I seldom cast a new incarnate after the first one dies simply because there is a more direct option. As the enemy pack dwindles, I'll have up to 3 totems and at that point the battle has long been won.