Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General Mod Release: Baardvark's Bard Class

Yes, that's right, a substantial gameplay mod in alpha. I know, it's kind of crazy, but I can't help myself :P (Don't try this at home!) I'm hoping to get people to play through this and give me some feedback so I can know what I should focus on in release. There are various experiments in this mod so I can see if my (and other peoples') ideas really play out as well as we think they would.

http://www.nexusmods.com/divinityoriginalsin2/mods/3/?


This mod adds 22 bard skills that fall under the leadership skill. These mostly involve buffing, debuffing, and manipulating statuses in dynamic ways, offering only a couple damage skills. Purchase these skills from Laslor the dwarf bard (near Rezik the aerothurge merchant, near Griff), or Kerban in the seeker camp.

Example skills:

Swindle: Steal buffs from a character.

Dance of the Elements: apply random elemental vulnerabilities to enemies, reducing their resistances whenever they take the relevant damage.

Dream Scream: Wake up a sleeping target into pain, madness, and a random debuff.

Masochistic Melody: A buff that grants a character increased damage and crit chance whenever they receive a negative status.

This mod also grants enemies random buffs when entering combat, including extra strong "champion" statuses. Also increases enemy loot. This should improve difficulty, freshen up encounters, and make combat more rewarding.


Three new racial skills for dwarf, human, and lizard: Stone's Embrace, Tactics, and Shed Skin (thanks Stabbey and Nivv for the idea) respectively.

There are 5 new/modified presets, including bard, skald, civilian, enchanter (modified), and a "cheat" bard start, which lets you start with a bunch of diamonds if you want to gear up and breeze through the fort to the swamp because you've played it so many times.

Major Status changes: Knockdown and stunned now do not completely disable a character, but are still hugely debilitating.

A couple dozen new loot modifiers, mostly custom skills that can appear on legendary items.

A bunch of tweaks to various weak talents, abilities, and constitution to make them more desirable (I only did these because they were easy to change).


I don't think my changes will be a waste of time even if Larian completely revamps many things to make them obsolete. I could've gotten a lot more nitty gritty and rebalanced many more things, but I wanted to focus on additions and major changes. I also think my skills are fairly unique and I'd be surprised if Larian implemented anything like most of them (though I suppose they have my permission to steal my ideas :D)

Hope you enjoy, and offer your feedback here or on the nexus page. Hopefully it doesn't have too many bugs.

Where do i dump the mod and public folder if my game files were placed in my documents/larian studios/divinity original sin 2?

Usually only stuff like your saves go into the documents folder. It goes in the divinity original sin 2/data directory of your main install location.

May I ask how you produced the mod (tols used, files modified etc)?

Heh, that's the million dollar question. You can extract the files with the same tool as the old game. Stat files can be edited with notepad++. I did the same thing in D:OSEE pre-editor. I'd recommend waiting for the editor so lots of things are easier to learn and test. I'm just familiar with doing lots of things manually at this point.

What do the new Racial Skills do?

All details are in the readme on the nexus or in the download, but here we go:

Lizard: Shed Skin. Remove all statuses on yourself, positive and negative, and apply a 25% all resistance penalty to yourself for 2 turns.

Dwarf: Stone's Embrace. Grant a target Stone's Embrace, which increases their physical and piercing resistance by 35%, but reduces their move speed by 75%.

Human: Tactics. For 2 turns, grant an ally +5 initiative, or an enemy -5 initiative. Note: initiative changes don't take effect until the turn after the status is applied.

XD found it i forgot i have two harddrives and i main installed in on the 2nd one.

Now we need a mod release sub-forum (admittedly, probably just for your mod, for now!). Looks great.

Ooh. Right off the bat, I'm really appreciating these tweaks:

Also, the CC nerfs and the extra racial abilities are very nice. Looking forward to this.

Thanks, glad there's lots of little changes you like. I didn't want to get too detail oriented with all that could change, but there were a few easy things to target. And the CC changes make a big difference.

Going to need a modding forum soon indeed :P Larian probably wasn't expecting a mod like this quite yet!

Larian should have done this in the vanilla game. Fixes most of the issues with armor system. AoE CC is cancer.

Is it possible to release this change as a separate mini-mod? I don't like some of your balancing changes but this one is just too good to pass. Regardless, thanks for an awesome mod!

Edit: read through bard skills and I love how it's all about using statuses instead of dps. Here are my thoughts on some of the skills:

Song of Living Nightmares, Jingle and Resonance are all awesome. I can see a lot of creative uses for those skills.
Rhyme is too good, hould maybe cost 2 AP, otherwise it'll be a way to grant insane turn 1 buffs.
Feedback and Creative Burden, I think, make removing hard CC too easy though maybe it's fine since Stunned and Knocked down were reworked.
Swindle, Sound Wave, Lullaby: I hope it does not penetrate armor.
Masochistic Melody, Glory to Gore, Dream Scream, Inspiration of Pain: I love how much synergy this skillset has. That's something I missed with polymorph.
Earworm: for 1 AP that's plain OP. I think it should either cost more or have a higher resist penalty.
Dance of the Elements: I hope this one ignores armor.
Can't really comment on source skills because I never use any of them.

I'm not planning on releasing different versions. It's alpha after all. Most of the balance changes are in the data.txt file in the Public/Shared/Stats/Generated/Data folder so you can delete that if you want. Requirements changes the talent requirements.

I also should add a correction that staggered and stunned don't actually reduce initiative. It was too confusing with turn order swinging around a bunch.

Thanks for the feedback. Sometimes I need just someone else's initial impressions on stuff to see obvious balance flaws.

You're right on Rhyme, I'll probably up its cost to 2 AP. The buffs/debuffs only last 1 turn, but still, granting even 2+ buffs to someone is too much for 1 AP.

I'm fine with Feedback removing CC on a teammate since at least it deals some damage to them, but Creative Burden is a bit strong at taking off CC. One strategy I'm not too keen on is playing your turn as a bard when your next teammate up is CCed, and then casting creative burden on them when you have 1 AP left. You gain the CC and by next turn it's gone. I'm not sure if I should increase the turns you gain statuses for to 2, increase the AP, or not let it take hard CC. Thoughts?

Swindle and Sound Wave pierce armor, but Lullaby does not. I hadn't thought about tying swindle to armor, might be necessary. Would like to make it chance-based perhaps, depending on various factors (Some combo of wits, leadership, thievery skill and enemy perseverance and constitution.) Dazed (from Sound Wave) should probably have an armor check too, or maybe I should change the status it inflicts since I would prefer an armor-piercing status for sound wave. Maybe something like "deafened," but not entirely sure what that would do (probably reduce dodge and hit chance or something).

Earworm is very good indeed. 2 AP is probably fine. I want to see how its numbers play out before judging it. 35% more damage taken is a good amount. Don't want to increase that too much, since I want it to be able to used offensively if you want, and too much resist malus would be too easy to abuse I think.

Dance of Elements ignores armor, yes. I'm considering making this one depend on the surface the character is standing in, or random if no surface, so you can have some control over it.

Thanks again.

How about knockdown and stun retaining their harder effects too, but only in case of critical hits?
Not sure how that could be actually done, but how about it as a general idea?

Good to hear that armors can be bypassed, btw.

Btw, does this Bard build require instruments to use? It should. Instead of weapons.

Making critical hits cause hard cc sounds tough. Not sure if I want to go down that road.

Yep, you can simply remove the armor check on statuses. But then you have to script the status behavior for each status you do this with to balance it. Not too bad to do that with just hard cc, but would get annoying with every status. May be possible to make some kind of system though.

I tried hard to add a "lute weapon" but couldn't get it working. I really want equippable instruments, but not sure if I can or want to make them requirements even to cast the skills. But I want to make them give special bonuses to different skills. Not entirely sure how to do that yet, but have ideas. They may just grant you skills that let you apply a status to yourself that changes how certain skills work. For example, an offensive-oriented instrument might upgrade your Feedback skill to always activate at 1 level higher than it normally would, or another might cause your masochistic melody skill to also heal the target when they receive a negative status.

There is that Laslor (?) lute he gives to Lohse and her demon breaks.

So there is such a thing in the game files. Maybe it can be copied and stats changed. So you basically change it into a "weapon" or "staff" type of item and make bard skills (spells) gray out without it equipped.

I think it would be only fair to have such a support build not be a fighter/scoundrel/ninja too, as it was always done so far in all other games. It would make it more unique.

Additionally it would be very nice if we could get new songs from quests and NPCs based on choices. Even make new songs based on companions history or adventures we go through. But thats of course outside of the scope and existing mechanics of the whole game.

I see issues arising from that since its not an equipable item but moreso a consumable.

Obviously that needs to be changed.

As it should be obvious i am not making any demands here. Im just talking about an idea.

WOOT, got the lute weapon working. I had tried making the lute weapon it a few times, finally got it. It's a bit silly because you just whack enemies with it like a club, but hey, it's still awesome :P

Expect instruments (well, lutes at least) next version!

D:OS is classless, so I don't want to make bards feel completely isolated. Bards are often melee fighters, rogueish types, and rangers in other games too. But I might make instruments so cool nobody will want to make a bard hybrid anyway (except, perhaps, DWing a lute and an axe.)

Ah, thanks, I'll just edit things myself then. Since you made changes to random loot, do you know any way I can stop STR based gear with +5 FIN and other similar useless things from generating?


I usually have my buffer go right before my 2-handed executioner so when I saw Rhyme I immediately thought Haste+Rage+Bless+Rhyme = 2-handed warfare opness makes a comeback. And that's only the most useful buffs.


This strategy was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the skill description. Since two of the most common hard CC are down I'd rather have it not remove hard CC. Those that remain are frozen which is easy to remove with fire and various spell specific CC like chicken. I'd rather have them hard to remove since it makes those spells more attractive.
For Feedback maybe it can count each hard CC as two statuses? Also should probably count each remaining turn of each status. As it's described now there's no difference between removing 1-turn burning and 2-turn burning.


Swindle does need either to be chance based or to have an armor check otherwise it's too powerful.
Dazed is too strong of a debuff to ignore armor. Perhaps it should be on one of the source skills?


2 AP will be fine I guess.


Yes, I like the idea of making it surface based.

Thank you for an opportunity to go through the beta again without being bored.