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

Its not weird, it is more natural, that enemy can fight back and defend themselves unless it is complete ambush. When opponents meet up, one of them doesnt just simply stand there getting focused down defenseless - now they atleast have fighting chance - otherwise there would be no defense against 4x teleport+mass AOE

Then again in real life, someone does not wait for someone else to use all of its life action point to give him a slap.
Natural is not exactly what you're searching in a turn-based combat...

Spare us your condescending bullshit memes... thx.

My impression is that my high initiative rogue is very early on in each encounter - is somebody able provide the math that is coded in this game to back up some claims in this forum... otherwise it will stay a mystery it seems or?

Completely agree, that's how I thought it should work too. Currently mages feel pretty weak - not only enemies never have Physical resist but often do have a lot of elemental resists, CC'ing enemies with magic is more difficult now as well. Applying "mild" CC statuses like Warm or Shocked through armor should at least somehow help with elemental resists.

Spending Wits just to define an order is still pretty pointless, because in core Wits does not really do, what is described to to. You could as easily just have the players define their acting order without having to compensate if Wits on Items ruins their wished order.

I can't even believe this. I was realizing there was something wierd about initiative, but I wasnt really paying attention.

This change is absolutely crap. Im not talking about balance. Games need to be balanced, but fun is also important. You have to balance the game while keeping the fun elements. And initiative is (was) IMO one of the most fun stats. Its not just +damage or +resistances. Its something that changes the flow of battle.

And not only did they remove the stat, even worse, they make it useless while still mantaining the stat. Looks like a total clumsy last moment change without any thought put into it.

If you think players stacking initiative were beeing too powerful, do some thinking and search for a way to make a cool change, not just remove a cool stat.

I hadnt noticed it myself, but as far as Im reading in this post, initiative sets the order of movement between your chars. So, its always you, AI, you AI, and so on. But you see your rogue early, because she has higher initiative than your other chars.

crap mechanic

Yeah, so many things were good on the first game and they actually made them worse, why the fuck developers do that?

As soon as i get to respec i will only have 1 character with high initiative and will be my glass cannon one.

Spare us your inability to comprehend bullshit memes... thx.

And your high-initiative rogue is likely moving early in every encounter. That is not the issue. The issue is as I described.

There's no mystery to it, and there's no math. No matter your initiative, the turn order will alternate between enemies and allies. Initiative is therefore only relevant for determining who goes first in each team, and completely useless when it comes to actually affecting combat in a tangible fashion, or to plan synergies.

It is also, apparently, hardcoded, so it's literally unfixable by anyone other than Larian, and for whatever insane reason, this was already a conscious decision by someone at Larian, so it's unlikely to actually be resolved.

Made me shelve the game, it's simply too infuriating to play like this.

I think it's massive over-compensation.

It's like they are deathly afraid of small issues in the prior game manifesting in D:OS2, so they've effectively neutered or nuked those aspects entirely, creating new (less) interesting issues that are somewhat jaw-dropping.

But out of all of them, this one is probably the craziest one. I honestly don't know what to say. This change is making me legitimately angry because of how it affects the overall gameplay and the pacing of combat in so many different ways, and all of them are bad - there's literally no positive aspect to this, unless you're quite literally the worst player imaginable that somehow manage to not keep track of your stats at all, so you end up getting nuked by multiple enemies acting before you in combat.

But to design the game based on that is still so ridiculously myopic. I'm lacking words to properly convey just how stupid round-robin turn-order is in a game, let alone a game that actually uses initiative.

Wow, pretty dramatic change that seemed to be fairly under the radar. Wits definitely needs a big buff it only adds 1% crit. I like the concept of a more evenly distributed turn order, but forcing exact alternating turns seems a bit extreme.

The alternating turn order thing could maybe stay if there was more of a benefit to having higher initiative than enemies. Maybe your first turn you deal more damage or have an extra AP if you have significantly more initiative. But, yeah, at least the option to revert it to the old way would be nice.

There's many different reasons why this is a really bad system, but even if we incentivize things like Wits and the advancement side of things, we're still left with the situation where it's impossible to capitalize appropriately on initiative in a definitive manner as a team.

This doesn't just affect the player, by the way. It also affects the enemies. For example, enemies in D:OS2 are perfectly capable of putting out barrels on one turn, and then have another enemy break it on the next. However, this obviously doesn't happen when doing round-robin turns.

With alternating turns, the landscape keeps changing rapidly, and it's practically impossible for both the player and the enemies to use this to their advantage at any point unless they're drastically outnumbering their opponent (which in case the player is outnumbering mooks, it will not matter, and if the player is outnumbered, they're already in trouble) - because in the case of mass outnumbering, everyone not in the initial "round robin" lineup gets tucked in a nice cozy lump at the end of the turn order, where they get to do setups or wreck shit. But nobody else. Ever.

Once you notice this, you can never unsee it, and if you're like me and start reflecting over the implications both in terms of how it affects the "here and now" gameplay and from a game design perspective, it's infuriating - and an array of less flattering descriptors that really serve no constructive purpose.

Edit: As a side note, far from the main issues of Initiative being trash and the turn-orders being broken, this also makes humans go from "questionable" to "utterly meaningless". They gain +1 Barter - unquestionably the least useful civic skill - and +2 Initiative, which now ranges from "completely useless" to "actually detrimental".

Sure, they also get Encouragement (which is near-useless, even moreso when compared to the others) and +5% crit, but let's be honest here - that pales completely in comparison to the other races. But those issues are really completely beside the main issues, I just wanted to raise them.

+ 1

I like this game, but a lot of its systems seem like last minute implementations no one bothered to test. Tactician difficulty, for example, is also complete shit.

For a game that has been in early access for, what, a year, it's inexcusable such a poorly thought out approach to initiative made it in, or was even considered in the first place. If you absolutely want battles to be 'fair' in the "you go, I go" sense, you should simply have left initiative out and made wits do something else (like add to AP or movement distance).

D:OS1 already had plenty of skills, abilities and stats that were underpowered, but I think D:OS2 is the first game I've played that has a skill that does nothing at all. It's really quite astounding how something like this made it into the final product. Even moreso when you consider the fucking beta version wasn't like this.

This and the BS crazy amounts of armor in Tactician is what makes the game mode unfun to play.

If initiative let all your characters act first when it was high enough then it would be a mandatory skill, getting all your characters to act before any enemies get a chance to move is really powerful. Especially when you consider things like being able to lay down massive fields of fire/ice/lightning to control where enemies can move or that that summons automatically act after the people who summon them. Then you'd see an arms race of NPCs getting crazy high initiative just to stay competitive. Players would be assumed to be pumping initiative so if you don't then you are building sub-optimally, restricting build freedom.

I think the current system is a compromise of mechanics to allow combat to flow in a more consistent way. You can pump initiative to get one character to act first and get things set up for the rest of the battle as well as set the turn order of your pals but you can't trivialise encounters right off the bat.

A necessary loss of freedom in one aspect of the game to allow the rest to be more enjoyable.

Guys, this change came to the game beause of EA, not despite it. There were simply too many players completely abusing wits for 1turn wins with things like glass cannon and elemental affinity... It was simply too easy, because amongst 4 characters, you can setup such a fucking mayhem that no ordinary enemy stould a fcking chance.

wits as stat should be rebalanced, thats for sure, but forcing combat order was a right thing to do

Then they should remove the stat entirely, it is only useful for 1 character is just stupid.

In the mean time only enemies are allowed to go one after another... never mind the stupid amounts of armors they have in Tactician and the damage they do that can wipe all your armor no problem and leave you with multiple status effects before you get to do anything.

But hey... at least 1 of your characters went first right?

RIGHT?

guys, this game is easy. It really isnt all that hard, so why complain that it got just tiny little bit harder by this change? It made things more interesting, and made good stat into mediocre stat... In bigger scope of things, its just negligible thing imo.

You are missing the point. It's not about if it is easy or not, it is about the fact, that the attribute is lame idealess bullshit compared to the first. Only one attribute really matters either Str or Fin or Int.


Though being easy makes it even worse.

There's tons of different ways this could've been balanced without forcing a round robin system. It was absolutely not the right thing to do, because it strips the game of a relevant sub-system and cheapens combat pacing immensely, as well as ensure that neither the player nor the enemy can do proper environmental setups unless they already outnumber the opponent completely.

The easiest way to maintain a relevant system but still avoid consistent abuse would be to balance the enemies appropriately and add a per-round randomization element. The game already tracks round-to-round, only right now, it's completely useless. Instead, add a +/- 1d5 modifier to each participant on a per-round basis, possibly modified by effective level (at a rate of.. ~0,3 or 0,35 or so?).

Boom, initiative is now valuable but without being the be-all end-all of combat determinism, and it was achieved without putting combat into an anti-fun straight-jacket.
Hush, the adults are talking. This isn't about some arbitrary sense of difficulty.

In the EA all attributes had two benefits. They reduced it to one mostly, Wits has still two goodies, it affects initiative and gives + critical chance. It's an advantage if one of your chars goes first, of course a lot less advantage as going first with the whole group, as in the EA.

If you put Wits only on one char, your choice. If you want more crits, it helps also your other chars. 1% may sound low or nothing but crits can be rather strong in the game and Wits accomplish the other sources of more crit chance. When I read of late game two-handed warriors with 100% crit chance and 280% crit damage, one-shotting most enemies, I'm glad that Wits gives not more than now.