Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Stat inflation is downright stupid.

While the game in general is pretty good, the scenery gorgeous and the writing top-notch, I have found that the ridiculous stat increase between level is really ruining my game.

It's not only looking dumb (start with numbers like 50-90, by the second island it's already in the several hundreds or thousands, then it jumps to tens of thousands, like, wtf ?) but it causes real problems both in mechanics, immersion and pacing.

The extreme power increase means that everything is obsolete within one or two levels. It means churning items like there is no tomorrow, pushing players to buy constantly new gear at the traders (am I an adventurer or a peddler ?). It makes gear forgettable as hell, kills any motivation to put time and effort into getting it (why bother, it'll be worth nothing in a couple of hours or so), makes crafting feels either pointless or a chore, and remove any worth or impact a special piece of gear could have ("hey, the super-duper artifact from the mythical... oh, a grey item two levels higher, let's trash that legendary junk !").

It also means that there is a strong push toward railroading, which goes against the whole rest of the design of the game, because if you dare to not follow the supposed path, then you ends up being one or two levels below the foes, which means something like 50 % stat less (so a pretty severe penalty). Conversely, if you managed to get a level or two ahead of the mob, suddendly you get overpowered.

Finally, the wild swing in difficulty means that half the people find the game exceedingly hard, the other half claim it's just too easy and you vaporize everything. When you can quadruple your damage just by gaining two levels and getting a new sword, it's bound to happen.

The worst is, this stat bloat adds NOTHING to the game. It's just completely pointless, it just adds tons of useless zero to numbers. It's 100 % downsides.
I seriously don't understand what went through the designer's head, but really, can you fix this by reducing A LOT the power gap between each level and the itemisation budget ? It would MASSIVELY improve balance, immersion and open up the world...

Yeah that really bugs me as well.. I think dos 1, a huge health pool was like 800?

I can't stand huge numbers

There is no real char progression left, attributes are pretty meaningless and AP are fixed, so they need big numbers, so people can feel 'mightier'.

'Tons of damage'

Railroading is indeed an issue in this game or in any of previous Larian's games, im afraid is here to stay though considering how many games they done the same design.

Do exp quest, then kill the quest giver NPC, rinse and repeat metagaming, or risks to fight last fight level 19 and get full wiped in 1 turn.

The equipment scaling is seriously out of control, especially in the later acts where a single level can have weapons of equivalent rarity shoot up hundreds of damage.
The randomly generated loot was always a weak point of the OS entries; especially since they don't really have an affix system or other interesting and functional generation system for items; though this was mitigated heavily by crafting overshadowing generated equipment for most of the game in OS1/EE.

The exponential equipment scaling is disappointing because it makes gear farming more prominent and monotonous (you have to re-equip yourself more frequently to compete at higher levels), severely damages the value of unique items (uniques are outshined very quickly, especially if you pick them up overlevelled) and makes crafting an unsustainable bore (crafted gear has trouble comparing to generated gear and its next to impossible to supply crafting materials frequently enough).

Overall, enemy stats and equipment/act scaling need to be seriously cut down and polished; but that's the kind of overhaul I expect to see in an overhaul project or an Enhanced Edition re-release, unfortunately.

I can never understand the point of randomised loot in a fixed number of encounters game. Pillars/Tyranny i never had this issue because gears are fixed and you find artifacts to build around it. Divinity 2 had fixed legendary gears you can seek and craft. But here, everything is randomised. So instead of farming the perfect gear, farming in this game for the right stats is to either wait an hour for merchants to refresh or save scumming...

I agree the stats are very bloated. Fortunately it looks like we can modify this very easily, so I'll definitely release a mod that tones down the scaling a whole lot.

I'm playing DOS1EE now, level 20 Fighter is at 3000. Just wanted to mention it. Carry on.

I get the impression that the stat inflation, and many other issues, is a consequence of the game being so long that Larian never really was able to test it by taking a party from start to finish. Even without game-stopping bugs, it would be hard to finish before new stuff gets added and the internal builds changed.

I hope we can fix it through mod, but I wonder how hard it will be. If the foes' stats are mindlessly calculated from a level-based spreadsheet, it'll be easy (it'll also be very underwhelming to realize that no customisation of enemies happened and they are just the usual "a level slapped onto a model" instead of full-fleshed creatures).
If not, it would mean altering by hand all the stat of all the mob and items in the game, which would be daunting.

And honestly, I'm starting to lose the desire to play with this idiotic inflation (and the slaughtered fighting system, which I find just a vastly inferior one to DOS1, which sadly only double down on the stat inflation problem), so I'm wondering if I shouldn't just wait for such a mod. How long do you think it would take you to do it ? :p

It'd be especially idiotic, considering such inflation is precisely a reason of terrible balance, instead of a way to camouflage it.

They did have the previous game though...
The more I read these forums the less I understand why so much energy was spent changing so much the system.
Why not just tweaking things here and there?

I think, that is the core problem: They changed war to much without even having a real concept. How attributes worked at the start of EA was even worse than as they work now.

God, the gap in numbers is really making the game nearly unplayable if you don't spend your time looking for gear...
It just ruins the fun. I'm close to just throw it out and bother with it only once a mod has corrected this retarded design.

And yes I'm angry.

before anyone get mad, i would just remind you is that you can have RUNES infused into gear. And you can craft it also and not costly.
physic runes give 10% armor each at the lowest and 20% at highest. And it's just tier 3.
20% x 5 = 100% armor bonus.
you can have inflated stat just as much as enemy.

Thanks Gekko.

It probably would help if some core elements (crafting, runes, frames etc.) were explained somewhere in detail or if there was a more in-depth tutorial in-game. At the moment I'm just hoarding whatever I find because I'm too scared to waste possibly irreplaceable ingredients/upgrades on worthless stuff. Take source orbs: I have no clue how frequently they drop, I've only seen one or two so far in my game, leading me to believe they're highly prized and rare, yet I see people recommend to eat one in a pinch...

I wonder if you read past the title, because what you describe is part of the problem, not the solution.

- The complaints is about stat inflating with level. The inflation itself. Both those of the characters and those of the enemy.

- Crafting the gear would be great if items actually lasted some time, but with how quickly they become obsolete, it means putting a lot of efforts into making stronger something that will be thrown away in a blink - it might maybe last one level more due to runes, but that's it.

For Akka, the problem is as you get to mid game, weapon are mostly legendary which deal absurd damage. You can easily dominate classic after level 6 at fort joy and level 11 with decent gear after that.

Honestly, i loathe the bloated stats enemy on tactician right now, but the game is so long that they have no idea how to balance it from mid game to late.
Runes crafting is easy, and runes are reusable.
OS1 EE tactician mode did not come from nothing. We are like tester for the game at this moment than anything else.
Give the game benefit of doubt, because this game has different mechanic than the last so devs won't know for certain what needed to make a balance game.

[quote=Violet Gekko]For Akka, the problem is as you get to mid game, weapon are mostly legendary which deal absurd damage. You can easily dominate classic after level 6 at fort joy and level 11 with decent gear after that.

Give the game benefit of doubt, because this game has different mechanic than the last so devs won't know for certain what needed to make a balance game. [/quote]

So do you think there's a chance they will patch the game and correct the problem?

Just reduce the stat on level 10-16 items by like, 15% and make it so that divine gears are just legendary with slightly more stat and 1 more stat/talent options so they no longer boost your damage by nearly 20% for just upgrading a gear tier. Also make gears from NPC cheapers (like 30%) in act 2.

Doing in this way, everyone will be able to purchase gear at every level and with the reduced stat, can no longer just outright stomp everything in a few hits. Make it feels like the fights in Act 3 where the game outright force you to use Epic crossbow since there's no shop selling legendaries and divine one just to make enemies harder to kill with ranger.

Why not simply makes stat progression linear instead of logarithmic ? Simpler and actually fix the problem at the source instead of tweaking twenty different things to partially hide the effects.