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

The second part of my playthrough is up. Did some prison cleaning here, and tackled the Dallis/Bishop fight near the end. That fight took me way too long. It was hard not relying on magic surface + AoE shenanigans, haha. I had to cheese the flee mechanic, and barricading pathways with chests/reinforced crates.

Also Paladin Cork went kind of nuts after we saved his life.


Ah, no worries. And yes, I was well aware that champions specifically drop more loot. I view them as walking loot-bags now.


My current issue with figuring out Bard combos is that I decided to go for some weird builds, and had everybody go physical damage. So I've had to scrap some of the Bard spells that rely on magic armor being depleted (for instance, in my streams, I kept trying to Swindle and forgetting that it's blocked by magic armor).

Song of Living Nightmare is great fun when the pieces are set and you dial debuffs up a notch. Song of Guilt is handy as well, and Barbarian's Delight has been, well... A delight. I haven't tested it with totems, but I imagine using the negative buff part of it would be effective.

Reposition has been really useful as well. Using it with summons feels very satisfying, especially if the person casting it has a height advantage, and can shuffle around party members and save them some AP that would have been used for movement.

I just started working Inspiration of Woe into my build, but I like the idea of turning negative statuses into a positive effect. I can see a Glass Cannon frontline build in the works, using Masochistic Melody + Woe to get some craziness happening.

Tame the Chaos is one of my new favorite spells. It's so simple, but I love the utility of creating a small safety circle in the middle of a lava lake.


That sounds really interesting, and definitely worthy of some testing. Being able to apply bleeds, burning, etc. to enemies without depleting their armor would make those effects feel more beneficial, as right now, it's usually just overkill on an enemy already headed for the grave.


I wasn't a huge fan of the RNG in the first game either, status-wise. It felt like such a waste when you'd try to debuff an enemy and it just completely misses.

With statuses like oil/slow bypassing armor, other minor status having a chance to bypass armor may feel right.

Some ideas:
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Come Together is an interesting ability. It really made me wish Warfare had a similar ability that works on enemies. Something like a small cone attack that pulls enemies closer. It would be sort of a "soft taunt", in that you could use it to pull an already clustered group of enemies closer, within attack of opportunity range (or set up an AoE combo).

Push Off feels somewhat less than ideal currently, given that it's an AoE circle around the caster. If it were in a similar shape to Battle Stomp (with shorter range), you could use it to push away an attacker, or push an ally closer to an enemy. If it worked on objects too (like pushing a barrel into an enemy), I could see some funny scenarios cropping up, but that may be more complicated to script.

I love the changes to Five-Star Diner. I find it very useful now. My flying dwarf Walnut has it, and I keep being happily surprised every time I remember it's there - A free heal/buff per turn is very nice, and being able to swap weapons to fit the situation is handy in its own right.

I think you should rename your mod to something else that Bard Class now! haha.
The bard class is like 1% of the whole thing now.

Ha, yeah. Was thinking of what to name it. Getting to the point where I should probably just make two different mods, the bard class and everything else, but that's... more work. Maybe I'll do that on release, hopefully when there's an easier way to merge mods.




Bard definitely benefits from having a fellow magic user, but should still be useful in a pure physical party. Glad you find those skills satisfying, especially Barbarian's Delight. Note that killing a summon/totem won't grant you buff when you have reapers delight, but killing a totem that has reapers delight will give the enemy a curse. I found it too punishing against summoners when enemies received the reapers delight buff and they got buffs for killing your totems.

Reposition is very nice with a 0 AP cost. I forgot civilian started with it, so I maybe overbuffed it for them, but if it's fun that's good.

Masochism/creative burden/inspiration of woe with glass cannon definitely has a lot of potential.

Agree, Tame the Chaos is a nice skill to, well, tame the chaos for a moment.



We'll see how Larian utilizes the push/pull mechanics I'm unsure about push off. I was thinking it could set Off Balance (the lesser version of Staggered) to enemies but not allies. I'll check if I can make it push items, that would fun, though d on't think it would damage enemies or break or anything.

Oops, I meant to make Five Star Diner only let you eat one free meal/drink per combat (or at least every 3 turns or something), not per turn. I imagine it's a bit too strong like that, no?

Also Dallis sounded like a challenge. Too bad you couldn't get the hammer out of all that :P

I'm hitting a sort of "Oops, am I getting too ambitious?" moment with the resists :P With how much it changes balance, and even messes with several bard skills (e.g., song of living nightmares is now meh except against armorless enemies), I have to go all in. So I definitely want to get the formula right. I've made it so int and strength boost status application chance by 1% for magic/physical statuses respectively. Constitution now boosts resist by 1.5%.

Resist Chance = Con(1.5) + Perseverance(3) + Armor Percentage - Strength or Int(1)

I'm also considering whether a critical hit should boost application chances, maybe as a factor of wits. Say, critting while using Sawtooth Blade when you have 20 wits would increase application chance of bleeding by 20%. This would also make savage sortliege slightly better.

I dunno though, I don't want to over complicate it either.

Are you planning to still have 100% chance to apply CC once armor is broken? That was one of a few benefits of armor system.

Currently, no, you have a chance to resist CC even with broken armor, but it's pretty low if not 0% if you don't invest in constitution and perseverance. I could make hard CC like stun and fear ignored by this system and apply 100% of the time, but I want to avoid that kind of inconsistency if I can. I'm not sure I see 100% vulnerability to CC without armor as a benefit, since it turns the game into pretty much you're dead without armor. But I also think armor should definitely be a majority of the defense against CC, except perhaps for a tank character.

Another thing I was thinking of was factoring character health into resists. Say, at a ratio of 2% missing max health is 1% less chance to resist. So at 50% health, you'd be 25% less likely to resist statuses. Then you wouldn't worry much about a character with 20% health remaining resisting a stun. It would also make piercing damage more useful, and add a certain kind of synergy to different damage types, where even a character with high magic armor would be less resistant to magic effects if a physical damager brought their health down low.

I guess I just dislike the idea of major "your hard CC was resisted by 1% chance" swings. So it'd be nice to have some way of applying guaranteed CC. Your health idea sounds nice. I guess no way to show final chance to CC in game until they release the editor? Would be useful since your formula is fairly complicated.

Is there currently a way to add new talents? Something like "30% of your damage is piercing" would go a long way in solving the problem with mixed physical and magical damage groups.

No way to add talents currently as far as I know, but hopefully will be on release. Maybe I'll do something for CC like when resisted, it still applies a weaker variant of the CC (like how I have Staggered and Off Balance, which reduces AP by 1). So there's still be some benefit to the CC even when resisted.

I definitely want to be able to display the formula calculation in the combat log, but not entirely sure how to do that yet. I think it's possible even without the editor.

Would be great if you did. I love the bard class but prefer the existing CC for example (battles are quicker).

I'm not sure scaling the CC resists will necessarily slow down combat. Damaging statuses can be applied earlier, which means more damage. Zero enemies have perseverance (except receiving it through a random buff through my mod), and your application chance scales with your primary stats, so most enemies will have near 0% resist chance without armor.

But I will probably just add an option to turn off the resist system. The only thing is choosing to balance around the resist system -- e.g., song of living nightmare now sucks because its statuses can be resisted. But I think I can roughly balance things for both the vanilla CC system and my resist system.

The main point that would make Push Off more appealing for me is to be able to control it better - meaning if the area you affect was directional, so you can push somebody in a specific direction, depending on your own positioning.

If you could push them off of ledges, and make them take fall damage, that would give me some hard Final Fantasy Tactics nostalgia, haha. That could be pretty complicated to script though, given that you need teleports or stairs/ladders to change elevation.


Oops, indeed! To be honest, I consistently forgot about using it, so it never felt powerful - just useful. I mainly ate something for the buff when I remembered it, so I rarely ate anything for healing.

Off the top of my head, a way to possibly balance the healing effects would be to add a "Full" status after you've eaten a certain number of food items within a certain number of turns. So continually eating while you're full just has no healing. You could even have the status continually progress per food item you eat. Something like:
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That fight was definitely more challenging with your mod, for sure. Dallis knows who really won!

Well, you might see a more directional push skill Push Off! definitely takes good positioning, particularly not being too close to allies at the wrong time. But it also could be used to space your party out, say after using Come Together. Using push or teleport skills to deal extra damage from heights is a big goal of mine. One thing I might do post-release with teleport is make it deal extra damage, maybe apply Off Balance or Staggered, when teleporting a character from a high location to a much lower one. Naturally, the skill would have to rebalanced (2 AP, longer cooldown, maybe a slightly smaller range), since it hardly needs a straight buff.

I think it might be possible to have some of push skill "teleport" enemies to a lower-ground area, though that does sound pretty gnarly to script.

Interesting idea for Five Star Diner, or maybe just for food in general. Not sure I'll go with reducing the healing effect, but definitely could be some downsides to speed and initiative for eating several things in quick succession. Adds some nice... if I will... flavor... :P I'll consider something like it.

So... how hard was it to make this? I was intrigued by the Sentinel and Juggernaut trees that didn't get voted in, and think the game could use more muscle representation. Was making new abilities super rough?

It wasn't that hard. Skills are pretty easy to chug out once you have an idea, though it depends on the complexity of course. If you're ambitious, you'll probably want to learn to script, which has a bit of a learning curve but mostly isn't too bad.