Originally Posted by Ellezard
It always come down to the same thing.

"Wit is weak due to round robin since Ini is useless."

It always come back to this claim and no matter how much someone will bring up that Round Robin is much more challenging and better designed than "High Ini First Serve"


So Initiative being useless is compensating because players going first is an instant easy win, but NEITHER of those are design flaws? Sorry, but that statement is inherently contradictory. At least one, if not both must be a design flaw.

If the enemies always have to go in round robin because otherwise the players will always stomp them, that is a design flaw. Crippling Wits/Initiative to compensate for that problem is, as Great Guardsman puts it, a bandage on the deeper problem.


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it will always come down to "Larian can think of something then" without offering a proper solution that won't go back to "Stack INI and act 4x in a row, completely deleting the AI".



Stretch Goals

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$700,000 Stretch Goal: Strategist Mode

Akin to Divinity: Original Sin- Enhanced Edition's Tactician Mode, Original Sin 2 will feature a brand new difficulty called Strategist Mode. Rest assured this difficulty tier will consist of much more than a simple numbers game. Yes, your enemies will hit harder, but that is far from all! Each and every fight in the game will be redesigned for Strategist Mode so that enemies are smarter, often come in greater numbers and use a host of skills and tactics they won't use in lower difficulty modes. If we reach this stretch goal, the fights in Original Sin 2 will receive this epic treatment from the get-go.


I kinda think that when a company is literally given money to do a thing, that it IS that company's job to actually do the thing. But I'm silly that way.

You want some ideas? Sure. I won't promise they're all winners, because I've only had a couple hours and $0 to work on them, but here's a couple:

1) Maximum caps on WIT per level, so you can only put points into it if it is below the cap. Bonuses from buffs and gear can exceed the cap. Enemies of the same level have Init ranges which stretch from below to a bit above the cap, depending on the enemy. Thus the designer can guarantee that not all players will go first.

2) Initiative gets a dice roll component added to it before a fight starts. This varies based on difficulty. So say Players get to roll 1d6 added to their initiative, no matter what difficulty level. On Explorer, enemies get a 1d4 added to their Initiative, on Classic they get 1d6, the same as players, and on Tactician, they get 1d8 or even 1d10. Thus players are not guaranteed to go first, and the higher the difficulty, the larger the advantage enemies get. This could be displayed in the UI as Initiative 22 (23-28)

If I had a year and a team I could probably some up with more.

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High ini competition is bad and it gets boring real quick. You only enjoy it most of the time because you are blinded by the amount of power you have against enemies


I don't have a high initiative composition and my team doesn't all go first. I've got better things to put my attribute points into at the moment.

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and with that taken away, no wonder most of the complaints have to include how they feel weak compared to the enemies. They only hate round robin because it forces them to actually play well and that plans can actually go wrong now if they were pulled out of their ass in 10 seconds.


Another statement suggesting that the only reason all others who do not like the system is that they must be incompetent idiots. That's the thing that I really find most irritating.


Originally Posted by GreatGuardsman
The fact that encounters are unbalanced with Initiative proper isn't a point in favor of Round-Robin, but rather (as others have stated in this thread) show what a flimsy bandaid it is for encounter design and implementation. If Bosses are decided in one-turn rushes and powerful skills dominate encounters then perhaps Initiative isn't the culprit.

Initiative and Wits are also not just relegated to Player Characters, but are also a part of the makeup for the many foes we encounter throughout the game-- Round Robin not only robs players of build variety and options, but streamlines those same facets from the original designer's and future content creator's hands. The ability to create creatures balanced or fixated around certain speeds and making that an obstacle or feature of enemies, encounters, and equipment is all thrown out the window without a system that actually utilizes the mechanic in any meaningful way.


I only quoted part of it, but this whole post is very good.