Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Totem Exploit Fun

I've found a fun exploit with Totems!

Totems summoned near enemies sufficiently far from the summoner will enter combat, but won't pull the summoner into the fight. This leaves the summoner free to summon as many as desired, making fights trivial.

For optimal use, first summon an Incarnate and have it run up to enemies to start combat. This will lock enemies into the fight and will prevent anyone from taking an action.
Next, Summon totems from as far away as possible.

Using high-ground and the "Far Out Man" talent can help get enough range.
If the summons aren't done from far enough then the summoner will get pulled back into combat.

There doesn't seem to be a limit on the number of totems that can be summoned at once.

Enjoy!

This is awesome! I'll have to try this on my next playthrough. That is a crazy amount of totems on the screen. I thought they were weird-looking ice surfaces at first.

You need to get a job at Larian QA.



Keep it up.

So I went a little nuts with that totem exploit + static puddles recently.





Needless to say, Dallis & company fell to the Endless Totem Army. Electric totems helped to keep the water static for the whole fight, while my Hydrosophist hid in the dungeon (she would randomly get pulled into battle, so a combination of flee and going down the hatch helped).

It was pretty hilarious. Dallis started by "purging" Atusa of course, but then proceeded to purge a totem. Enemy turns took a while (presumably because so many totems lagged whatever systems calculate pathing and logic), and things got funky if I tried to move a box (it didn't move, and I couldn't do any action after that, but I could still move around).

I gotta say, it was really satisfying to take down Dallis with totems, haha.

I started having similar issues, but only when I loaded a save with a large number of active totems (~40+). Several of my skills just stopped functioning and I couldn't interact with ladders, etc.
After the battle when the totems de-spawned I was able to resume with no further issues, however.

I thought totems expired after a set number of turns?

Edit - Oh, I see whats going on here. Clever. Kinda shame totems have a turn limit to begin with, they are kinda crappy atm, should be a number limit instead.

I think Totems are pretty great. They are fairly easy to kill, but they do reasonable damage (great damage per AP if they live the entire duration) and it's easy to choose which armor type you want them hitting. They also end up distracting enemies from killing your actual characters and they make kiting enemies easy.

A max totem limit would work to mitigate the extent of the exploit here, but I think a duration is still important. Even with a limit on the max number, a Summoner staying out of combat would just refresh them to the max anytime any died.

Without a duration it would be really easy to setup the max number of totems in key positions before every fight. With the existing duration you can only get 2 totems before a fight (without exploiting) and you have to immediately start the fight after summoning them.

I think the best solution might be to have a character get forced into combat along with any of their summons. That's the only thing that would stop the exploit. (Assuming Larian wants to stop the exploit.)

You can't really put a duration on the totems in combat that isn't turn based, because then your totems would expire if another player had a really long term (e.g. multiplayer).

The exploit is made possible because of the hybrid nature of gameplay, which allows some people to be on a turn-based "time" and others to be on a real-time "time".

Is it going to be a series "Another day another combat exploit?"

When fixing this, asume its a considerded a bug, Larians could spend also some time with old annoying "I won combat then get burned." issue.

That seems like the simplest and best way to fix it.

This issue was due to being able to spawn totems outside the sight range. That was fixed, but not in time to make it into the last update.

I'm a bit unclear on how this fix works.

Will this reduce the range we can summon Totems, or will this just ensure the Summoner gets pulled into combat too?

I hope this doesn't prevent high-ground range bonus and/or "Far Out Man" from affecting totems.

I think prevent totems from being summoned outside of sight range. The comments on the bug report say that the issue with the summoner not being pulled into combat was the vision check between the summoner and totem/incarnate failing, the programmer checked both ways the vision was being calculated (for the summon spell, and then when combat was triggered) but they used the same underlying function, and then that the issue was that it was possible to summon totems outside the sight range. Either the summoning range needed to be fixed or totems given a bonus sight range to compensate (which could be just recalculating it however the summon range was determined, and taking the higher value), so I'm assuming the former.

The high ground range bonus and Far Out Man are fine as long as they are taken into account when checking if the character can see an ally in combat.