Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Recommended difficulty?

Hello there, me and other three friends are going to start a game this weekend, the thing is, we don't know whether to pick classic or tactician difficulty. I've played the first DOS on Tactician Difficulty and I had a great experience. The problem is that I've been reading that tactician difficulty in DOSII just boosts the stats of the enemies, they get more spells and they always play they turns first, so maybe it would be too difficult or even unfair. On the other hand, classic difficulty may be too easy and we do not want a cakewalk of a game. If you could shed some light about this topic, it would be appreciated.
Have a nice day.

This is false.
Honor mode for the win
Tactician is fine, everything below it is meh - no thinking effort needed.

If you want challenge and you like out-of-box thinking, go tactician That way you cant just breaze through game.
If your friends are shitty, dont try tho, as you will need some cooperation

If you want to role play and try weird build, go for Classic or explorer.

Tactician if you want the game to at least try and provide some challenges. The game do give enemies some special aura, I think. Someone on classic will have to provide me with info if the evasive aura, terrify aura and so on are present on Classic or not.

Anyway, even with boosted stat, a properly geared and min/maxed char with no handicap will still deal way much more damage than they do while having too much armor than they can break. Only bosses and "Framed healthbar" units will really hurt you.

Even on Explorer you still get incidents involving terrify and stuff. But that's where I'm staying, the battles are challenging enough but I prefer exploring and chatting to people over carefully planning everything around battles...

Play on Classic difficulty. Ignore everyone those who say to play Tactician.

They think their way is the only possible way to play and they have literally no concept that not everyone is as skilled or knowledgeable about how to min-max and exploit as effectively as they do. They do not understand that anyone else could possibly find Tactician frustrating.

(I haven't even tried Tactician and I have no interest in trying it in its current poorly-executed state.)

The reason for playing on Classic is incredibly simple: If you are one of those people who find out that Tactician is too difficult for you, whether at the start or later on, there is no way to change the difficulty lower. That means you'll need to start all over again. At least on Classic if you find things too easy you can increase the difficulty.

This is really rude and uncalled for.
I have only played on Tactician, but of course I understand that it's not for everyone.

There is a lot of talk about "bloat" and Tactician being only a stat increase to enemies, but that really changes how you need to play. As you will learn really fast when you play, a fight is often won by getting the armor of the enemy to zero, because that makes them open to CC skills (like stun and knockdown)
Not being able to CC makes you have to adapt to a lot of incoming damage as well as dishing it out. That balance is a lot tighter in Tactician mode, and that is really fun for me.

I agree with the part about starting on Classic, as you can always increase difficulty later that way.
I think Classic is a very good difficulty for most people. You have to think on this difficulty as well, but it's not as punishing or frustrating.
If you and your friends don't mind having to load from being wiped or having to leave a fight and come back after you get a lvl or stronger items, then Tactician is great as well. It's all about what frustrates you and what you think is fun.

Classic. I would not play anything higher with other people just because you do not have full tactical control and unless you can read minds, would be difficult to plan ahead.

Although Stabbey can be quite direct, I agree with his advice: I think the Tactician mode really is intended for players who are already experienced with this game and prefer a particular type of challenge. Given that Classic and even Explorer aren't exactly push-overs, I think that starting on a high difficulty would risk alienating a large contingent of new players; and I have seen suggestions of doing exactly that, which I think is rather bad advice.

It's your choice. I picked Explorer because it's what I always do with new games: Pick the lowest difficulty first.

I started this game on Tactician because I wanted to be challenged and I don't usually get a chance to do a second play through. That being said, I am struggling at Tactician level and I'm considering a restart (level 4 in Ft. Joy at the moment).

The problem is that by starting out in Tactician and flailing a bit, I don't know what I am doing wrong. For example, I don't know if I have done the content in the right order and am missing manageable encounters. I don't know if I have the proper character builds/party composition, if I am supposed to grind exp by killing everyone I can find or if the game is just supposed to be super punishing.

One encounter in the Ft. Joy dungeon took me several replays to beat and beating it (even with a bit of luck) cost me multiple resurrection scrolls and most of my consumables even though I was exploiting every terrain, substance, and CC advantage I could think of. Even after winning, I don't feel like I "did it right," but after so many tries, I was just ready to move on.

I found classic mode to be adequate for my tastes or maybe even harder than expected. I even had to reload quite often during combats or level up and then go back. I dont consider myself newb to tactical rpg's but this game can be tough at times. Also sometimes frustration from higher difficulties makes me stop playing the game... Mind that I also tried to keep certain NPC's alive and didnt wear best armor just because I didn't like how it looked :P

The recommended is classic mode but with enemies having +20% more health and damage output.

Unfortunately there's no such option

Remember you're on Larian's forums, and the people posting here tend to be much more knowledgeable than average. Also, you're on the Internet, so people will tend to exagerate reality to make themselve look good.
So take all "it's too easy in X" with a big grain of salt.

I think my favourite example of that was a slightly inane "how tall are you?" topic on a gaming forum. I never realised so many gamers are over 6'6" tall and of an "intimidating" build: we are truly giants compared to lesser people, etc.

I think it really depends on the type of player you are. I play with another person and we both enjoy the challenges of playing in higher difficulties. Even if we have to replay the same battle a couple of times to find new and fun strategies.
If you or your friends get easily frustrated or have no patience to do loot management, pickpocket, etc just go for classical mode.

Anyway, people put waaaaay too much weight on this things. There are some guys that seem really frustrated they don't enjoy playing tactician and they blame the game and the developers. As long as you are enjoying the game and having fun, its all good.

Here's my experience -

My brother and I are fairly well experienced with tactical RPG's. We generally play well, but we do not min-max really. We started on tactician and it has been absolutely brutal, but fun. We have had to reload probably hundreds of times and find the right combination of skills to get us through a fight. It has been enjoyable, and through the process we've naturally found combos that are rather powerful.

That said, we've never min-maxed gear, stats, and we have avoided some of those weird exploit combos. I eventually moved to a fire/water/aero/geo and fire/water/summoning setup as only at level 13-14 was I feeling like the mages were doing real damage, enough to warrant fire, and the stuns were necessary from water. So I'd say we meticulously plan everything, still, and we have definitely respecced a lot as we've adjusted and tweaked over time (little things like removing a +attribute talent for elemental affinity.. etc).

The whole time we've run a hybrid two melee / two mage setup. It's been really, really hard, maybe 60-70 hours and just finishing the second island, but it's been a fun time.

If you either a) min-max everything or b) enjoy reloading often, and strategically planning every little bit (and occasionally abusing a teleport), then tactician is good. If you enjoy some a challenge but want to just play through the game without needing to reload at least once per fight, then classic. You'll probably get caught off guard but unless you're screwing around it shouldn't end the game (few boss fights that have autosaves before should be the biggest challenges). If you are new to the genre or don't want to have a challenge, just see the story, explorer.

Well if anyone wants to play on the optimal difficulty, download my mod on workshop ("slightly harder classic mode" or something like that)

Would you consider a Workshop mod that did just that?