Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Initiative, how it works now?

Okay, from picking up bits and pieces from every comment so far and some of my insight on it.


Con is currently useless, because of the armor stats. In my opinion those armors are too OP. I'm not against them in general, having them protect you against magical or physical damage, but giving 100% resistance to most status effects makes them incredibly powerful.

Wits or rather Initiative doesn't really matter anymore and the argument about "you just go first with your entire team and CC them to death" doesn't really count either, since everyone got a ton of armor to begin with. So they practically implemented TWO systems to avoid ONE problem, which is being able to kill everything within one turn.


I'd rather go with buffing the armor points a bit, have them have higher numbers, but remove the 100% resistance. This way status effects still matter, but to actually damage the enemy they have to get through the corresponding armor at first (bleeding through armor, burning through magical armor, etc.).
Being able to run through ground effects, just because of armor sounds stupid to begin with.
Which makes them not as powerful as back in the first game.

Or leave it as it is, but get Initiative back to what it was before. You can't CC everyone either way, because of their armor. If you want to start earlier you end up making less damage, the same should go for the AI. Some enemies should have more wits, but in return have less HP and/or armor.


That's just a bit of how I'd have liked it, especially since I thoroughly enjoyed the first game and how it worked there.

Damn yeah, I agree that non CC status effects really should go through armor... or atleast their weaker parts (shocked, wet, warm, chilled)

make no mistake tho, with proper minmaxing you can still fuckup whole team in 1-2 turns, even with armors Thanks to new init, thats no longer possible so easily

i think it only forces the you-enemy-you thing if the number of characters is the same in both parties, which is very rarely the case. 'surplus' characters will be clumped together, so it still kind of matters in which part of the list they end up.

It's a shit stat now. You don't level it over 3 point with any class but archer/wayfather, because what the point?

It's only give bonus 1% crit. chance per point after it's most worthless stat.

Honestly, it's baffling that the only way Larian knew how to deal with enemies always being last was to make Wits useless. You don't fix a problem by introducing a new one.

They either need to come up with a new use for Wits or simply go back to the way it worked in EA. If that makes the game too unbalanced in the player's favor, they need to find a way to boost enemies' initiative.

Wit is still the 2nd most useful stat for damage build. Everyone, including mage, after they max Int/Str/Fin, has to go Wit second for the crit rate.

At this point, Wit is for Crit with Ini being an extra bonus, like how Str has melee damage with extra weight capacity.

Instead of 5% more damage, 1% more crit chance? Not sure if that really sounds like a fitting trade of.

The max amount you can put into a stat is 30, that's 15 levels in and you still have a long way more to go if our cap is really 30.

So with the way it works, you will get a Max Str/Fin/Int and Max Wit, with less into wit if you invest into Mem for some source skill slot and want to have 50 different skills to use with for some reason.

And even if there's no cap, after a certain point, crit % adds more damage than str/fin/int does especially if you have high crit multiplier.

[quote=Ellezard]Wit is still the 2nd most useful stat for damage build. Everyone, including mage, after they max Int/Str/Fin, has to go Wit second for the crit rate.

At this point, Wit is for Crit with Ini being an extra bonus, like how Str has melee damage with extra weight capacity.[/quote]

That's not good enough. No one is going to heavily invest in Wits at the expense of their man stat(s). Either they need to up the amount of crit chance you get, make it do something new or revert back to the old way, where whoever has the highest initiative goes first.

Also, the fact that Wits is the second most important stat for fighters is only, as you correctly pointed out, because Con does so little. This just means that two stats are essentially worthless.

It would be worthless only if you had no better stat to use - which you usually dont once you max main stat. So WIT isnt as bad really...

So the others you left at Memory 10? If your Fane has 18 at level 15 (?), then that's not so much less then what my chars have, 14 to 16 at level 10.

I'm on Classic, as I want to play normally without item hunt and special tactics. Fights go a bit longer so maybe, although all stats are lower on Classic than on Tactician.

Yesterday I had a fight against possessed dwarfs who concentrated on Ifan and I needed any support spell on my other chars to keep him alive (only to have him die after the fight running into a trap with low health, I was ... not amused).

Yeah, the rest at 10 and My Fane already has some empty slot so it's probably better to reduce it to 15 or something but there's just no stat worth getting (Int barely increases damage on him because he rarely gets to deal damage, just make everyone unkillable. Even at 17 now, I'm still using Redaka wand because it has +Hydro instead of an update done.

And once you get to 16, you will see how busted the game is with Source spell. With a teleporter in Sivah place for easy source refill, you always use source spell in every fight and some skill like Arrow storm is soooo busted. Maximum damage is just broke when enemies die before they get to deal damage so you never have to bother to heal or anything.

But if you really have trouble with survivability, go get a slotted necklace and a source orb, easy by just stealing form Tariqwhathisname. Each orb is actually worth 2.5k something (he just overprices them) and with 8 thievery (5 + 3 gears), you can easily grab 4 of them along with some gold.

Insert the source orb into the necklaces and have everyone wear them. The evasive aura makes everyone dodge everything that isn't guaranteed hit and with all 4 of them having it, you can just chain them for a total of 4 turns of dodge aura. That's like 4 turns of lolinvul.

I really don't get how people think it's a useless stat..? The way I see it, it's a complementary value to damage dealing builds with the nice sideeffect of being able to move earlier in turn order - is this not the case? Furthermore there are tactical options enabled through this like skipping a turn and being able to act two turn in a row for instance.

I play on tactician/honour mode primarily so I am quite happy the turn order is distributed over all characers in the encounter: it adds to the challange and I get to see all the baddies capabilities.

The turn order is, for whatever asinine reason, distributed evenly between allies and opponents, making Initiative completely and utterly meaningless, to the point where it's essentially a dead mechanic and might just as well be removed.

Out of all the frankly retarded decisions I've seen so far, this one really takes the cake. Completely indefensible.

I defend it, it makes combat much more fun for me, as it is now allows reactive gameplay, instead of instant win on turn 1

This does not sound like fun. Super hard difficulty solved by ubar combinations is not my preferred style of play.

But thanks for the hint. I don't like stealing but I already found one of the source orbs in Siva's flat. Momentarily sits in the inventory.

Maybe I will play as long as possible without source skills.

I have problems with survivability only in rare situations (three deaths since start, one of it outside combat), but I'm a bit undergeared at the moment, I lack money all the time.

The reason is a fair distribution of possibilities to take part in the combat.

I saw such an alternating acting order first in the Battletech beta and questioned the silly me-you-me-you system, as I was used to the whole-party-acts-first play of the DOS2 EA. I recognized quickly that it is a much better system however.

But why even bother then with making an attribute giving Initiative? You could just make it, that Players always get the first, like probably many of these games do without bothering. Player - Mob - Player - Mob - as standard. At current state Wits is missleading and pretty pointless.

Well it still allows you to set order of your characters turn... I for instance always want my elemental mage go first, so he can setup surfaces for my summoner and buff my party if I am lazy to do it before fight.. and I want my summoner to go second, with my rogue always last (as I use him to focus down out of position enemies)

This is a really weird decision. Generally there seems to have been a bit too much focus on "balance" as if this is an MMO.
That's very wrong imo. Let the systems be and if there are exploits let us enjoy them too.
Doesn't make any sense for example if I have a group of super fast elves and I fight stone golems and one of them still gets to move and act before 3 of mine. It's just wrong and weird.