Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General What will the stipulations for Tactician Mode be?

More armour? More HP? More skills?

Tactician Mode is "Hard Mode". Beyond that we don't know the details of what it affects or how.

Fights will be a little different: more enemies, different enemies, special enemies or just enemies with different/better skills most likely stuff that gives specific immunities or enemies with specific immunities. At least that is how they did it in the first, they don't make enemies just more beefy luckily.

That and adding consumables like arrows and stuff.
I suspect they will get more of them in Tactician mode as well.

Sounds good. I'm considering to play Tactician but I'm not sure I will be able to master it. I did not try the first game. How much you had to optimize? Had all equipment to be the very best for example? Partly I like to choose items for the look.

I also wonder what Honour mode will be like.

While some builds obviously made Tactician mode easier it's far from required to run a specific party composition to get through it. The way you choose to approach the fights is much more important in my opinion.

Honour mode is just Tactician with one save file that autosaves each time a character dies. In DOS1 it was game over if both of your two source hunters died though I'm not sure how that specific part will play out in DOS2.

"The way you approach the fights", does that mean that frequent reloading is the rule, to try better positioning or some preparation in advance? That's not what I actually like so much.

For example I always start the Radeka fight like the first time, ambushed and with a stupid face. With prepositioning a victory feels not that rewarding.

From my experience off running it through with my cousin, the mayor things we did were:(We did never play a lower difficulty, so I can't comment on the changes.)

1) Focus on good positioning on combat initiation, this was particularily important for bossfights where the boss had aoe attacks.

2) Run a lot of cc, Just overall important, you want to cc as much as you can, (either specific enemies, or spread out) and deal with the dangerous enemies first.

3) Get some movement skills on appropiate characters. Like the "tank" character had a charge for example, the rogue had haste and power stance (give +movement) to help us reposition during the fight "cheaper".

4) Use crafting gear, we discovered crafting gear around level 8, and it helped us a ton, just being able to keep weaponry "up to date" with your level irrelevent of drops was a huge boon to our damage output.

5) Make sure every character had potions.
Could be seen as a bit of a minmaxing thing, but we made sure every character had 4-5 healing pots (medium and large) at all times, were pretty easy to craft, and when your heals are on cooldown, they save lives.

6) Make sure we had some synergy between our characters.
While we didn't make the perfect minmaxed builds we did try and build complimentary characters, so my cousin played a dualwielding barbarian, and I played a stun and freeze mage. (Dual wielding with power stance has a high miss chance, high damage output, but you couldn't miss cc'd targets in divinity 1)

So that's more or less it.
TL;DR You are probably, expected to minmax a little, make sure you're well equiped, and that your positioning is on point, otherwise, any reasonably synergistic "builds" ought to work.
Of course the more minmaxed (powerfull) your characters are the less you have to care about the other aspects, as well. If you have a character capable of jusdt one turn killing a boss your position is sort of irrelevent.

Little hard to read what you wrote. Reloading is always going to be a rule unless you delete your save files whenever you game over. Part of the experience is learning, planning based on what you learned, (with friends if it's coop), then trying again with a new or tweaked tactic. Obviously you're going to know not to clump together when the boss reveals it uses AoE spam, ect. That being said I think me and my brother only died on a few super bosses and we weren't really using optimized builds so yeah.

Tactician mode in the first game was challenging but not crazy hard and thankfully it wasn't sponge-fest like in most games (Dragon Age and Pillars... looking at you, bastards). I'd recommend it if you like a challenge.

We're going 3 man blind tactician this time... hopefully it'll work out haha.

I really hope they don't pull what the first game did constantly which is just spawning enemies right behind or next to you for "Challenge"

God the Inquisition bosses used to annoy me. "So you think you're getting the upper hand? lol 100% shields. Again." As tactically inept as I am, I'm not sure I'm so keen on battles of attrition either.

I agree with you, it gets tedious instead of challenging really quick. Dragon Age has always had that problem on high difficulties though.

That's just the problem with artificial difficult however, instead of hand balancing encounters to be more difficult through skills, enemy placement and composition, ect.

My guess for the reason tactician mode isn't available in EA is that they're probably using all the play test data and player videos to develop counters to popular tactics like they did in EE.

Things like Inquisition didn't really require much in the way of tactics, just spamming everything at my disposal and waiting for either my party or my adversary to eventually stagger to an often unconvincing victory. Original Sin seems to show a bit more finesse, even though I can't say the same really applies to my playing style so unlike Dragon Age I'm staying safely on the "please don't pwn me too often" setting.

That is because Dragon Age Inquisition was a One Player MMORPG :P

(Honestly if anyone told me that it originally was drafted as a MMO, I'd believe it. Just like how The Sims 4 was originally going to be a "Social" game and it SHOWS)

Truth. I really hated Dragon Age Inquisition, though ironically as long as you stuck to the core story it wasn't too bad. It's really when you entered MMO-land that things got terrible.



I disagree a bit, Inquisition was the least tactical among the three, yeah, but you still needed some good tactics and a balanced team. DOS1 and especially 2 are definitely much more tactical games than any one of them for sure, though I'd argue the original Dragon Age to be close.

I'm going to be playing on tactician since it's usually safe with Larian. Don't think I'll see mobs with 100x hp anytime soon.

What you wrote about Tactician in DOS sounds not awfully bad, more or less I already created my party this way, except crafting which I never did in the EA.

What I wrote about reloading, I don't like it as "the general tactic", so that you cannot normally win the first time because you inevitably have to know certain things you only can get from the fight. That reminds me to MMO boss fights which I always hated.

Of course in some fights it is ok. I lost some fights in the EA, one against the crocodiles, the frogs, the magical skeletons in Withermore's tomb, and two of five against Radeka. You learn and try to do better. All is in the dose, let's wait and see. I will give Tactician at least a try.

Actually that is a fair point now that you mention it: I remember things like creating some fairly complex rule sets for my characters, for example. Probably not totally effectively but in that case the tactical failings were mine rather than the game's. And they were still there by the time of Inquisition albeit somewhat less detailed. I dunno, I sometimes think I forget more than I remember.

I did actually like Inquisition overall, the characters were interesting and the world was nicely done and quite explorable, but I can also see what you're getting at in that the mystical hand of EA was often noticeable by making some things crap. And there were way too many fetch quests: bloody shards.

I was only able to play the first Dragon Age. The 2 sequel really repulsed me, ... for no good reason I am sure I really hated the shift from top down tactical to almost 3rd person action style which, still allows you to somewhat go top down but isn't really well made.

I loved DAO, played it in all difficulties, I think I finished it 3 times or something.