Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Wits is a worthless stat

I wasn't talking about builds, I was talking about mathematics.

You should have made this breakdown the first time.


Okay, after some juggling, still not convinced (but maths tend to make my head spin, so I might have overlooked something or gone the wrong way) :

Getting 1 % more crit means that 1 % more of your hits will do 550 % damage, with the rest doing 250 %.
Getting 5% more base damage means that all your regular hits will do 255 % damage, with the crit doing 561 %.

So taking 100 damage as the base :
1 % more crit means 1 hit out of 100 does 300 more damage, so on average over 100 strikes you gain 300 damages.
5 % more base damage means all hits will do 5 more damage, and crit will do 11 more. So on average over 100 strikes you gain 500 damage, plus 6 times your crit percentage.

5 % more base damage seems to still be about twice as effective.

One thing still certain though, after level 15, you still need to put every point into Wit since you can no longer stack Fin and Str.

And crit damage will only get higher because your Str won't stop at 40. My red prince str is at 52 at level 17 and he isn't even using a fully slotted gear framed with power.

Edit: Let me look at your math.

Edit2 : I looked at it and it a major problem.

So if we look at 100 hits, you're right, it does way more damage, because that's from a sustain perspective which goes against the nature of crit.

But we have to take in probability when you calculate like that because the nature of Crit is rng.

Instead, look at it this way.

Crit is +300 damage
Normal hit is +5

The attack must not crit for 60 times straight for +1 str to be better than 1 wits.

Which results in +1 str being better than +1 wit 54% of the the time at 250% base damage.

But let's say the bonus damage number is higher at something like 300% base damage with 2-h bonus added in as well. (Weapon talent adds up with Str/Fin as base multiplier in the game equation)

300% base
Crit is 300*2.2 = 660%
100 base damage

Crit is +360
+1 str is still +5 damage

You now need 72 hits for 1 str to beat the 1 wit and anything above that, str is better.

Out of the 72 hits at that point, 1 str is only better than 1 wit 48.49% of the time with no crit.

Now, wit is better for sustain damage as well because of the DR wall Str/Fin will hit much sooner than crit because of how weapon talent works.

And we're not including the scenario I described before that post where certain moves, like Highground Balistic shot, can kill in a single hit on enemies without tons of physical defense if it crits.

So after a certain point where gears start giving you a bunch of + stat and + weapon talent (Start around level 13 with legendary gears), Wit start to outshine Str/Fin because of the diminishing return while also offering win-big situation that gives a massive boost because you no longer have to overkill a 300 hp opponents with another 2 ap.

Why no hybrids?

Wouldn't it be fairly useful to have some Int on a ranger so they can do more magical damage when needed for enemies with low m.armour, or on a scoundrel or something?

Or is it completely useless to have non-buff spells on rangers/warriors/scoundrels? I know I do like my polymorph on my scoundrel, but it's kind of a weird school, and I heard necromancy was great on a warrior (and I guess Aero is good on a scoundrel and geo on a warrior too).

I would have guessed some int could help a ranger if you want some pyro or something.

Use elemental arrow. Scales with fin and your weapon, dealing way more damage than you will ever do with non-source spell.

Also Arrow storm is ridiculously OP and needs to be nerfed. At level 17, it shoots 16 arrows, each dealing around 700. This can crit and benefits from high ground and around 5 of them will land on each target in the area.

The darn thing does 7k damage to everyone in the area with only highground and no crit at level 17! Like, wtf? Enemies barely have more than 1.7k armor and 2.5k health at level 17. That's almost twice their health.

haha What an I-Win button How scarce is source later in game? is it still plentiful, or do you have to save it?

Once you find the source fountain, you have unlimited source to abuse.

Or you can just use vampirism on whatever you killed.

well damn... that sounds broken, I honestly thought that source will be like super rare resource, so you can´t abuse all the superpowers oO

Other skills are kinda fine. It's this one skill dealing 600-700% of your normal attack damgae in one go that needs nerfing.

The last time I actually lost a fight, it was because the enemy had slightly higher ini and used the darn thing back, instakilling my whole team even with gears.

Honestly makes me think that they have accidentaly moved decimal point in code of the skill? Something like base damage x 5 instead of base damage x0.5 :DDD

For the source, don't you have access to Driftwood later in the game or Siva's home? I'm just lvl 10 atm. If you have and it stays at it is, the whole source mechanic is kind of strange.

... why would it really matter though?

It's the same thing in the other thread about the mirror granting the option to respec for free. If you think the source tanks/fountains trivialise content, don't use them? I would never think of interrupting my adventuring just to teleport/run back to recharge and cheese game mechanics. It'd ruin the flow of my gameplay. Nerfing a skill because some people choose to (ab)use game mechanics against their own better judgment (!) seems like the wrong call to me. Through normal gameplay, source is rare enough that I hesitate every time I'm tempted to spend it. Maybe there's a greater challenge just around the corner where that source point is the one thing standing between me and death?

Back on topic: I'm not sure wits needs a buff. It seems pretty powerful to me, all in all, for both in-combat and out-of-combat. The greater problem, to me, is the way initiative works now. I really dislike the change to that mechanic.

If stat have a cap, then it's just about maxing Fin/Str/Int and then switching to Wit anyway. But up to the cap, the damage stat seems to offer the most bang for bucks.

That's not a major problem in the math, that's about considering how it applies in the game.

Basically, it's trading a higher average damage for the chance of getting some lucky big hit which could dispatch an enemy one turn sooner. It's a common discussion in WoW theorycrafting too :p
I don't think the diminishing returns will reach a point where crit becomes strictly speaking better than Str/Int/Fin for average damage, but it's kinda moot because if the cap is reachable by level 15, then obviously after that you should (on a strictly raw damage point of view) focus on crit and crit multiplier anyway, which means Wit.

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I'm on two minds about this.
On one hand, yeah I dislike when something is excessively restricted just because it could be abused by people who purposedly twist the gameplay.
On the other hand, if something can be so easily abused for exceedingly big result, then it's a problem of design, not a problem of player's behaviour.

In a somewhat exagerrated way, that's the same difference in nature between someone who deliberately glitch the game to get an advantage ("hey, the game allows it, I can use it legitimately !"), and an available skill that kills everything on-screen ("but you can CHOSE not to use it !").

If source can be easily obtained, then maybe it should simply not be an actual resource, but rather a very long cooldown (or a "once per fight" skill).

Considering how initiative and detection work, it seems that Wit is only useful on the group leader. Maybe it should give extra AP to become useful (like 1 AP every 10 Wit ?).

I completely agree. Or have the resource regenerate naturally over a long time (perhaps with a very rare source pool / potion as a gimmicky booster mechanic), which essentially is the same thing, but more RP-y. Both would have felt better than what we have now, then again, it's not really that big an issue IMHO.



That would be a bit OP with the new AP scaling, I think. I agree though in that initiative (which is where the core problem lies, imo) is a bit messed up. Perhaps a slightly more balanced approach would be to bake movement speed into it, a bit like scoundrel points work. We'd have to give scoundrels a complimentary peanut for that though, I'm thinking a 1% or 2% damage and/or dodge buff per point invested, maybe.

The two are tied together. The initiative system needs to go back to how it were so it makes sense to put points into wits again. That's all there is to it.

Correct. If it isn't worth it, don't put points in it. Perhaps the premise is so simple that it is missed? But they read everything, they'll review and see if something changes in a patch. I put in the var that controls the the Crit, right next to it controls how many Init points one point of Wits adds. So you can take it in your own hands now to fix it, if one feels it is too weak.

Correct. If it isn't worth it, don't put points in it. Perhaps the premise is so simple that it is missed? But they read everything, they'll review and see if something changes in a patch. I put in the var that controls the the Crit, right next to it controls how many Init points one point of Wits adds. So you can take it in your own hands now to fix it, if one feels it is too weak.




Common stance when something like this happens. It's about making gameplay right. Why Blizz is who they are, right? If something is out of whack hugely and the dev cares to patch it, I'm for it. If not, again you take it in your own hands how you want to deal with it.

I respec your opinion, but I'm against the old system. Teeters encounters one way or the other too much.

Looking at skills.txt, I don't see that.

But having 16 shots that have the same singular value as a one shot arrow. Welp that is 16x on normal and more than that if it crits more than once.

Perhaps reducing this to like 8 makes more sense for some:
data "StrikeCount" "16"

Or dropping the standard damage down for each arrow, say half at 50:
data "Damage Multiplier" "100"

Then I see it has a low 2 turn cooldown.

How about this: If a stat or skill isn't worth it, under any circumstances, it should be removed from the game.

This is not a matter of Wits being bad for certain builds or underpowered compared to other stats. The first game had its fair share of borderline useless stats, but there was still some concievable reason you'd invest in them.

The only real reason you invest in Wits is for the init bonus. Now that bonus doesn't matter, and thus, it's an utterly useless stat.

And Crit %.

Right, but since it isn't (yet), we make do. That's what were good for, right?