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

Yeah this should be fixed asap. It seems like a weird change focused on "balance" which should not be the focus on a single player game. Fun should be the focus.
Also since most enemies are non-human what's stopping Larian to make them have Wits of 32 or something, so that they are always first? I guess it was more time consuming to balance things per encounter and they went for this bad decision which deems a stat near-useless.
It's still early enough to fix this

Then maybe they should change "4x teleport+mass AOE"? If teleport is deemed such an exploity mechanic, then it could be easily limited by having a magic armor check when using on hostiles.

Adults? This forum is filled with kids crying like lil bitches because somebody nerfed their attribute... get your shit together
This game is already fucking complicated as it is, without your convoluted "solutions", but they still managed to somewhat balance it so well, that almost every reasonable class combination is able to complete classic difficulty, without being way too easy or way too hard.
Your crying that you can´t abuse the system more or that one of the stats is now only third best stat in the game instead of the most overpowered stat there ever was is getting little ridiculous.

Why? Teleport is one of the most fun abilities in game (and as previous poster before you, fun is the most important nuh?), so why make it useless, when it can solved other way? In way that allows and supports reactivity, which is one of the most important parts of any game. And round-robin definitely supports reactivity.

All they should do, is rebalance those stats, wits should give little better benefit now (movespeed or more crit/hit chance), and all will be good

It wasn't me that said teleport + high initiative was a problem. I am only saying that if any ability is considered a problem, that ability should be changed and not some game mechanic that influences far more than just that ability.

And if you want to use the "fun" argument. Maybe someone else thought that using 4x teleport with high initiative was fun.

Nerfing an attribute is one thing. Clearly there will always be people complaining about that stuff, if only because it affects their particular playstyle.

However, initiative isn't something that's connected to a certain class, playstyle or build, like, say, teleport. It's a core part of the gameplay. When they 'nerf' it (by making it pointless), they undermine the mechanics of their own game. That's why people 'bitch'.



No, the game isn't very complicated. And even if it was, it certainly wouldn't become overcomplicated just by having initiative do what it's supposed to do. Luckmann's 'convoluted solution' is very simple: add a dice roll so getting to go first is a combination of init and luck. That's it.



What a strange non sequitur. What does this have to do with the discussion? Are you saying that making wits/initiative useful again would break the balance? If so, they'd better come up with a new use for wits soon, because their current solution has only created more problems.



No one is crying because they can't abuse the system (although that is certainly fun). We're 'crying' because a stat has been rendered useless by a fundamental change to the core game mechanics.

Wits is not the 'third best' stat currently. At best, it's marginally more useful than con.
Keep in mind that memory still serves a purpose for multiclasses and mages who need a wide variety of spells, while strength, intelligence and finesse are self explanatory.

He's not wrong about wit being the third or actually, 2nd best stat in the game.

If we're going to judge something on how strong and weak it is, we have to consider the role and how often you take them. Every build needs Wit in it even if you don't want the Ini. The increase crit rate is the 2nd thing to always go for on any damager including mages because the magical crit talent. The only one that doesn't need it at all is pure tank support.

Mem is just there when you want to be creative. Because fights often ends in only 2 to 3 turns once source spell is involved, having 15 different spells don't really help because you will never get to use most of them without a bunch of AP boost and turn reset. You will often limit yourself to a few core spells and when you consider that you can swap spells on demand, when you know the next encounter will block a certain element, you can just swap your skills out just for that fight.

Don't view Wit as Ini boost with seconday crit chance. View it as Crit chance with secondary ini boost and you will start to see why it's decent again. The ini is just there so that bosses post level 14 won't go first and just 100-0 someone on the spot. Some bosses will even have you go doing drugs and eating potion just to keep your ini above them. The easiest example is the level 20 source master in Act 2. You CAN kill him if you want to (and learn who he is) but if he goes first, expect to get wiped in a single turn.

You obviously fail to see how utterly absurd and ridiculous that thought is.

There is no reasonable defense for stripping an attribute of the MAJORITY of its usefulness on Tactician difficulty which does not end in the conclusion that Tactician difficulty is broken and needs a complete rework from scratch.

It's not only on tactician like this but also on classic, as it seems. Did not really play so far, so can't tell.


There are only 4 stats, so being second best does not say much.

Str, Fin and Int are pretty much the same in different colors, so you can take them as one stat.

What is left is: Wits, Mem and Con, Con is obvious worse than Wits, because only damage is really important. And Mem is only situationel usefull, so can be left on the side. Being the second attribute has therefore no real meaning/value.

If I am allowed to stack Ini and just go first on most of them, the conditions for fights like REd prince story would go from "Goddamit they keep reviving gotta find a way to control them" to "Hahaha just group them up and CC them on the first turn and laugh as I complete the fight objective".

Multi-action before enemies act has never been tactical. Time warp had costs and it was considered opasfk for allowing you to act too often before enemies get to act. If doubled the action is op then what is quadruple the action?

Timing, picking key targets and figuring out the right approach is the mindset of a tactical gameplay. The whole "Take turn" is so much better and if you're not making use of the "Delay action" button, you're not really playing the game in a tactical way. Most cheese no longer work after Act 2 and Act 3 anyway and those that work will involve actual exploits like "retreat and return for extra turns" that remove the challenge out of any combat.

Okay, so you are acknowledging that Larian did such a poor job balancing Tactician that they had to hardcode one of the primary attributes so it no longer does half its stated function. Good.

EDIT: This is one of the reasons people are complaining about Tactician, that it seems half-baked if stuff like that needs to be hard-coded. It's not what was promised and what people pledged for the Tactician stretch goal for.

I'm not acknowledging that making ini work like that is poor. I'm stating that not giving enemies a single turn is a poor design and every game that used that ends up having a clusterfk of a balance that min-maxes even harder for late game content.

If the old "Your entire team all takes a turn first" makes a return, it should be an explorer mode thing. The game even designed half of Act 2 and Act 3 that are supposed to be more challenging with the take-turn mechanic in mind.

People needs to learn to adapt instead of hoping that everything will return to the easier time. Instead of just reading and complaining, they should at least try the thing first and take advice from other. The game is made to appeal to the people, not to a few entitled gamers.

Wrong. You already did. You said it implicitly when you said that Larian had to do it that way otherwise the game would be too easy. That means that Larian did a poor job with design and added in that ugly hardcoded cap to compensate.




Strawman. No one is saying no enemies should ever have a turn ever. There are other ways Larian could have improved it. It is in fact their job to figure that out. It's what people paid for the Tactician mode stretch goal, in fact.



Wow, how fucking elitest of you. What business is it of yours how other people play? As far as I can tell, you haven't even played the release version of D:OS 2 on Classic? If you can't stop yourself from being a compulsive wits-maxer, that's your own problem.



No, YOU need to learn that the world does not revolve around you and only you and only YOUR opinion matters. You need to learn that not everyone who disagrees with you is a whining incompetent who hates challenge.

I acknowledge that they need to do such a thing and make it a take-turn for the sake of the game challenge and I compliment them for that. I'm already used to many turn-based game going with this approach anyway to make their games more active and challenging.

But you decide to use my statement to support your claims that Larian fail at designing, completely twisting my intention around.

You stated multiple time you refuse to play tactician and that it's an unfun mode for people who want to exploits and have no fun. If they enjoy it, you just assume they are min-maxing and cheating exploiters who has poor taste in gaming along with the rest of the whiners.

There are so many builds now that have been confirmed to work in Tactician without even min-maxing as much as I do. How about you get out of you bubble and actually try them out first? Don't come up with 50 excuses why you will not play the mode fearing that you are actually the one killing your own enjoyment.

you keep saying that, but i'm not sure i understand the logic. +1% chance of getting 150% damage is just +0.5% damage on average, while every increase in your main damage stat gives 5%. it can be more important in systems with armor thresholds, when only critical damage gets through in some cases for instance, but in DOS2 it's not like that.

I'd just like to point out two things:

1. The game is not only about end-game when you are overflowing with points. It's also about the early stages of the game when attributes and abilities are scarce and you really think about every single point you distribute. In those stages, at least, wits is practically worthless in combat. The few points crit% make no meaningful difference, whereas combat order does, a lot. (I still think that the 'detect hidden' part of wits is quite valuable, though, and serves as a consolation prize.)

2. In the same vein, you cannot only consider the attributes by themselves, you have to consider opportunity costs as well. If you put a point into your what other games call primary attribute (INT, STR, FIN), then you get a 5% or whatever flat damage increase. If you put said point into WIT instead, you relinquish that damage bonus in favour of something else. Except, in this case, the 'something else' is, for all intents and purposes, 'nothing', because initiative does not have any kind of meaningful impact on combat situations.

The question for a game designer, imho, really is if you just want to consider WIT as a second way to increase damage (via crit), or if you want it to do something else, e.g. offer increased tactical options. Larian looks to have originally wanted to go for the second, which I also find the (much) better choice, but then got cold feet, tried to backpedal to the first and got WIT stuck in a very unfortunate position where it does neither to a significant degree, making it a useless stat for all except one character in the party.

I find it a pity that the 'increase tactical options' choice (which you get, again, in exchange for significant damage boosts that you can no longer invest in) came out so poor in a game that prides itself (rightfully, I may add) on inventiveness and creativity. Foregoing brawn for cleverness in this context should be a choice that is attractive and valid, not a surefire way to gimp yourself because the game mechanics nullify any point investment by overwriting any kind of battle order with a round-robin system.

Stat cap at +30. You can't invest more than 15 level into Dex/Int/Fin. You're stuck getting Wit anyway.

And I already did the math. If you take probability into account, after a certain point, you are more likely to deal more damage + wit than pure Str especially since you can boost Str with gear easily (Frame of power on a tier 4 rune is + 3 str on every body part). I have 65 str on my red prince now for +275% with +50 from weapon for 325%. Even if it does go up by 5%, going from 325 to 330 is only a 1.5% increase, not 5%.

And in a real game situation, a crit can potentially save you 2 AP if it lands especially on stuff like "Overpower". Due to lack of resist, you can easily calculate how much damage you need on your physical hit to kill most enemies and then start getting crit chance up instead of damage. If it already takes 2 hits to kill, chance is, another 20 str won't reduce the amount of hit but another 20 wit will save you 2 ap every 5 hits.

I may respond to this further tomorrow, but let's be clear here; the cap is at +30, for a total of 40. And reasonably, at least a few points go into Memory.

Sure, it's entirely possible to do a build without Memory, and it's entirely possible to do a build that doesn't hedge at all and that only puts points into a single damage-boosting stat, and that only ever use the base Memory because it's strictly not necessary for more. But such build is entirely a min-max outlier.

It is by no means a reasonable default upon which to base game balance or even a meaningful argument on. But more to the point, the fact is that even by your own argument, the only reason to go for Wits would be because there's literally no-where else to put points that would be meaningful.

That is, honestly, a terrible defense, and says more about the sorry state of the Attributes and their synergies (or rather, lack thereof) than it does for the practical usefulness of Wits.

And furthermore, the main issue of the Initiative issue and the round robin turns doesn't concern Wits at all, and we shouldn't stare ourselves blind on that. The fact that Wits is made near-useless due to the complete uselessness of Initiative is secondary to the mechanical effects it has, as well as the effects it has on things like combat pacing or tactics (or rather, again, lack thereof).

Hell, I'd say that the fact that there's tons of items with Initiative modifiers, now useless, or the fact that the central advantage of being Human is simply gone, takes by far precedence of the fact that Wits becomes a lackluster attribute in an array of fundamentally lackluster attributes. And again, that is still far from the central issue at hand, because Wits could always be buffed, but the fundamental problems of neutered Initiative and the round-robin turn system would still remain, because it has nothing to do with Wits in itself.

Going down that route moves the argument away from the core issues and instead makes it seem like it's a matter of Wits sucking or not. Wits could add +20% critical chance and +10 initiative per rank, and Initiative would still be busted and the round robin system would still be a travesty.

REKT.

What level of wits do you need to reveal all secrets and traps? That the new max needed?