Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Dislike Blue and Gray Bar - Fire Mage Spells

I totally dislike the gray and blue bars. Makes it doubly hard to kill opponents and just prolongs an already overlong battle. Additionally, all fire spells in the beginning end up igniting your own team!! Usually mages are kept in the back and you don't get a fireball to lob - you have cone of fire, ignite everything around you, etc. All my companions end up burning in every fight!! Stupid. Also Red Prince should be a mage with INT stats not a fighter. Beginning builds are crap.
Also poison touch ends up poisoning everyone as well not just the enemy.

Well,t he armor system is better than random chance,w here if you fire magic into your own team there's virtually the same chance that your guys catch on fire as your enemies. You just need to maintain your armor.

I for one really love the new Physical and Magical Armor Feature of the game. Makes it even better from my perspective. I wasn't a big fan of the percent chance to afflict conditions with the DOS Willpower and Bodybuilding. Nor did i like having to devote points into skills to up my saving throw chance. It took loads of skill points to develop those features.

Also i believe with the implementation of the armor system, it makes spells such as Ice Shield or Fire Shield and so on much more viable. In DOS Fire shield just made you immune to burning, where as in DOS2 You not only get burning immunity, but it also Adds to your magical armor. Making those spells more appealing to use. Plus, it's nice knowing your immune to conditions as long as you keep the specified armor up for the saving throw, another factor in making those armor boosting spells more appealing.

This is just in fact my opinion though.

I like the new feature but I understand your frustration.
Mages are used to unleash hell at the begin of the match. You gotta take care now to not hit your teammates. It's not every magic that does friendly fire tho. Gotta be more strategic. It's hard to get used to this new playstyle but I like it.

I'm kind of on the fence about armour. I like the interesting new mechanics it brings in terms of restoring it with spells and new item stats. It's a great idea in theory.

It does make for some fairly boring combat, though, since there's basically no reason to use many abilities before you've destroyed the enemies armour. They don't do more damage than a regular hit and the added effects won't take effect. They're only really useful for AoE damage.

Teamwork is also less effective as when your melee characters and mages are hitting the same enemy they're basically doing double work having to bring down two different opponents.

I preferred the combat system in the original game with stats affecting status chance (plus cooldowns and action points).

All~~~~~of this.

The system makes a battle that should already be over just ground into Wack->wack->wack->wack-> *Finally break armor* Stun->wack->stun->wack->stun->wack

Also: like half the abilities. or half the point of an ability, have no use till the armor breaks and by that point you've already won.

Just.....tedious and unrewarding. Also doesn't help that it encourages hyper specialization (having the whole team focus magic or physical)

Honestly, the problem is not the bars themselves but the strength of the effects that they prevent. Enemies have high armor because devs know that once that bar is gone, you win. It becomes a stun-lock sh!tfest. Even heavy melee-focused enemies have a ton of magic armor because they realized that once you break it, you win.

Try playing the game on the basis of stun-locking. It just ruins everything.

The easiest way to win DoS2? Build a team of DPS and high-initiative classes, bring a bunch of stun, get a few hits off and then get bored of the game.

They need to reign-in the amount of "lose one turn" you (and mobs) can put out in a fight. Then they can tone armor down a bit on mobs...or even (here's a novel thought) make a few enemies specifically weak in one sense, physical or magical, and strong in another.

So less hard CC and more soft CC and more armor specialization? Could work, but requires them testing things again -_- I'm slowly coming to the opinion this is too integral to their design and don't plan to change anything

I'm heavily against the new armor system, as it simply introduces a lot more problems, than it solves. For one thing, it doesn't the least help with the stunlock problem it was implemented for, another that it seriously hampers diversion, as going for a versatile party combination actually gimps the progress by having to wittle down 2 instead of 1 kind of armor.
Going 4x melee sneaking rogue/warfare is now even more op than it was in DOS/EE. And now you can even add in morphing... crazy.

Well they already realized their system is broken...problem is they invented a way to counter it by investing your stats in an even more broken attribute "Perseverance" which, unless heavily invested in, grants you a small amount of armor back that can be easily dispatched by the next hit anyway.

The easiest way of getting around this problem is to add another bar (please don't vomit on the spot) for CC. A "CCResist Armor" if you will, that only kicks in after your first bar is depleted and it works for all effects.

Something like this:

.5(Physical Armor)+.5(Magic Armor) = "CCResist Armor"

Key mechanics:

• Half of both armors so that neither physical nor magical armor is better at resisting effects
• Has no effect on incoming damage
• Only activates after first effect lands
• Once activated, all damage effects the bar
• Bar must reach 0 before another effect lands
• Bar replenishes 100% after each successful effect
• Armor restoration skills do not effect bar

Basically, you're adding a 'cooldown' on how often you can get stunned/blinded/rooted/etc without breaking the armor system and without making one armor better than another. The more armor you have, regardless of which type, the better your chances of surviving a fight where you 'lose one turn'.

Then you can turn Perseverance into something more useful...like each point giving you 5% more CC resist.

This may solve the attribute problem and the CC problem, but would exasperate the issue with turning fights into long slug fests where once armor is broken the fight should be done but now devolves into a health pool you slowly deplete.

I strongly dislike this new armor system. I enjoyed the way cc worked in D:OS1. What I would much rather see that this new armor system is something like in darkest dungeon. In DD if somebody gets stunned then they get a buff that makes them more resistant too it. It seems to me that would work much better than "burn x till no armor, then cc till dead." I just can't stand the idea behind CC having 0% chance till a specific point and then having 100% chance. The fact that more people aren't saying something about this is something else that I find odd.

That's just my 2 cents. A very easy fix on and old but good system, instead of the new weird stuff.

A lot of people have said something, it's just a lost cause mostly so discussion around it has died down. The armor system actually really hurts the replay ability for me, personally. I just get bored of having these exaggerated resource matches where armor is everything and the moment you lose it is the moment that you practically lose with hp just extending fights.

But, it's prettyclesre this ain't changing so...*sigh*

It wouldn't change that at all. The CC bar wouldn't block any damage.

The current problem with armor isn't that you have a health bar afterward, it's that you're fighting things with way too much armor. And the reason for that is because devs know that CC wins the fight...so they have to make all enemies have huge armor pools regardless of class/race/style/etc.

Putting this CC bar in would allow for low armor (weak to 'x' damage) targets without letting you just immediately win once you get rid of the armor.

As it stands, if the armor is gone, the fight is over....all because of the massive amounts of CC. That's what gives you the feeling of "I should have won already." Not because you actually killed the target, but because they can't put up a fight after you've beaten through the armor and make them lose one turn every turn.

Wouldn't the easiest solution be for them to either gut a number of ccs or distribute them across a wider variety of skill levels? I actually kind of like the magical armor and physical armor system when it comes to damage mitigation. They could just reduce the concentration of ccs and remove the status immunity component from the armors.

Alternatively, assuming that for some asinine reason we need to keep the number of crowd controls high, removing the resisting component off of any non cc status ailment might do the trick. Though I am more in favor of just removing the cc component from skills.

Ah, alright. I miss understood. I thought you were saying that your suggested CC bar would soak up damage when activated to block damage to the target.

So, in essence, the bar keeps from spamming CC and needs to be depleted while attacking the target in order to CC again......Does that mean someone dealing high enough damage could deplete the CC bar fast enough to effectively keep someone CC'd?

I understand the reasoning for the armor system and its issues; my apologies, I misread your suggestion.

And while there is a lot of hard CC, I don't know if it's too much. I think part of the problem is too much hard CC vs soft and that there needs to be a middle ground between impossible to CC (armor up) and impossible to CC (armor gone).

I still say I liked the roll system from before a lot more. I still don't understand the issue others had with it; we use the same system in table top games and the appeal to old-school gaming was suppose to be the appeal.

Ultra deterministic gameplay in all things sounds nice, until we realize that balancing that is ridiculously hard and everything that's been tried so far in this alpha just highlights a problem elsewhere.



It's been suggested before that more soft CC and removing 100% CC block from armor would be very nice; that had support in the threads but didn't get very far.

You can't just gut status effects or then it becomes like Diablo where instead of different damages actally having thematic and strategic importance, it just becomes "Choose your preferred color and match to defense"

If damage mitigation is what you like, I'd suggest linking the armor system more to skills and talents rather than what you wear. That way you have more control and don't have to change what you wear just cause you know what you're facing and squishy wizards stay squishy before they get off something like rock armor.

This new system also encourages everyone wearing the heaviest armor they can grab for specific enemies. Rather than encouraging building a role played character and dealing with advantages and dis-advantages.

In hindsight my attitude towards the system in terms of mitigation has shifted completely after my friends and I tried a full physical damage team with one point into polymorph or warfare. The ease in comparison to utilizing a hybrid damage team is rather extreme.

As for the players swapping gear depending on what they getting ready to fight, I don't really think that is something that can be avoided nor do I necessarily believe it to be entirely problematic in a game like this. Is it not more immersive to want to be prepared. When playing D&D I find it to be common place for players to try to retrofit themselves before a difficult encounter. With that said I do agree that swapping from things like full mage armor to full plate is a bit much. I think higher stat requirements would alleviate that though.

Yep, another thing the armor system effects is hybrids vs specialization and team diversity....and in a bad way.

Yeah, I don't mind being able to swap things, but it's ridiculous to be able to go from full mage gear to full armor at the drop of a hat. Stat requirements in D:OS were just fine in my opinion. I don't see why they changed how that was balanced at all.

Also not a fan of the revamped armor system in DOS 2. Rather disappointing to be honest. I liked the old school pen and paper approach that DOS 1 had. The system in DOS 2 feels much more reminiscent of a fps such as halo, with its shields. It feels out of place in an otherwise fantastic RPG.

I don't mind that armor absorbs damage, but why does it absorb all damage until a certain threshold is reached and then none at all? That's just awful to me. A more sensible approach would have been to have a percentage of damage be soaked by the armor and its hp bar (if you must have an armor hp bar to begin with), while the rest gets dealt to the target's actual hp. Don't even get me started on the lack of saving throws once armor is down either. Basically, once armor is down the target is royally screwed if their opponent has any abilities that can bestow a status effect on them, and everybody seems to have some ability that does. Again, why? Ugh. Again, not a fan.

I'm really hoping some talented modders can "fix" this mistake in game design. This really dampens my excitement over this game. Otherwise this game looks fantastic, but this is rather disappointing. The system in DOS 1 wasn't so horribly broken that it needed to be dumped out in its entirety, but that's what they did. They didn't improve it, they just dumped it, and this new system, for my tastes, is so much worse.

I'd rather have an armor system closer to Battle Brothers. Basically the armor absorb a percentage of the damages depending on how much armor there is left of the armor bar.
Something like:
Damage done to Heavy armor (from physical damages) is reduced by 50% (it's an example the numbers are not here to be balanced.)
So if I attack you for 100 damage you only take 50 but you have 200 armor points so you loose no health but you only have 150 armor left. Because your armor is damaged it also absorb less damages. So you have 75% total armor left so your armor absorb only 75% of what it can absorb (50*.75=37.5) So your armor absorb now 37.5% damages. Then your CC resistance = 20%+ the percentage of armor you have left.
In that case I would still have 95% chance of being CC. But when you have no armor left you still have a small chance to resist CC.

Something similar or at least less binary would be nice.