Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General My physical/magical armor design solution

I know that this topic has been discussed a lot, both here and on other communities, but I'd like to throw my armor suggestion into the ring in case anyone was interested. There's about a 0% chance that Larian could or would ever do an overhaul like this, but maybe it's possible with mods.

First, I'd like to define the reasons, at least in my opinion, that the armor system makes the game less fun:

1. It discourages hybrid characters/hybrid parties. It is categorically better to stack either full physical or full magical characters in your party. This is not about what's possible to succeed with in the game, but about what the game's mechanic actively encourage.

2. Most abilities don't do anything special until after armor has been stripped, by which time it's just better to use a hard CC on the enemy anyway.

So these are my suggestions:



What this does is incentivize having multiple types of damage, either spread across hybrid characters or pure physical/magical characters. Under a system like this, you would optimize your attacks such that your physical attackers would strip physical defenses and your magical attackers would strip magical defenses, using your AP:damage as optimally as possible.

At the same time, you don't suffer as much of a penalty for not having the right type of attack. Dealing 75% damage against merely a portion of the enemy's overall defense (if you imagine physical + magical + health as one, full pool) isn't as useless as having one magical character among three physical characters chew threw the magical armor while everyone else is already attacking health. In that case, your magical character contributed literally nothing to the fight.

So what would this look like? First, imagine the current scenario that we see. An enemy starts with 30 physical armor, 15 magical armor, and 50 health.

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A physical attacker deals 20 damage with Crippling Blow:

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And then 15 damage with a regular attack:

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At this point, a magical attacker is simply wasting damage on this enemy. Whereas another physical attacker probably could have killed the enemy this turn, the magical attacker is forced to waste 15 points of damage (likely half of their AP) and the enemy will likely get to take another turn. This isn't even touching on CC and other statuses yet.

You could reverse the scenario if you wanted, with the magical attacker going first, but then it would be the physical attacker that would be wasting damage. No matter what you do, there is simply zero synergy between two characters attacking with two different types of attacks.

However, under the proposed system, this is what would happen. The fight starts the same: 30 physical armor, 15 magical armor, and 50 health:

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The physical attacker deals 20 damage with Crippling Blow:

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The physical attacker again deals 15 damage with a regular attack, but whereas before the enemy's health started to get damaged, now we see the physical character struggle to break through the magical armor, as she suffers a damage penalty:

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Now the magical attacker isn't wasting damage. In fact, he's attacking more efficiently in this case than a physical attacker would be. He deals 20 points of damage with Electric Discharge, finally breaking into the enemy's health:

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This type of system rewards diverse characters working together without overly-penalizing stacked parties. You have physical/hybrid characters strip physical armor, magical/hybrid characters strip magical armor, and it isn't the end of the world when you can't pull off this synergy perfectly, it's just a minor penalty.

Continuing on with some other rules of this system:



There's not much to say about this. These types of abilities would be limited. Perhaps even only two total, one for each. The point is to give a few more options for parties that still would want to stack one entire type of damage.

Now to tackle the issue of crowd control and debuffs being blocked by armor. I don't think it's right to just let hard CC through armor. That trivializes combat. I will say that this system already inherently does make things a bit better: just because you've broken through physical or magical armor doesn't mean the enemy is as near death as they would be under the current system, because you still need to go through the other armor type first. This inherently increases the value of all types of CC.

But I'm also proposing one step further:



"Intensity" will depend on each status, including everything from damage, duration, as well as reducing the value of any buff or debuff. For instance, under Option B, a "partially resisted" Burning status would deal half damage, would reduce fire resistance by 5% (rather than 10%), and would increase water resistance by 10% (rather than 20%). Something very specific like Decaying, if partially resisted, would only deal half the damage of the heal to whoever has the status.

I think both options have their merits, Option B's main merit merely being its simplicity.



To further illustrate what I mean, imagine the turn stack looks like this:

[A][B][C][D] [] [A][B][C][D]

Character A uses Backlash against Character B, lowering his armor to <50%. Character A then uses Battle Stomp on Character's B and C. The turn order now looks like this:

[A][C][D][B] [] [A][B][C][D]

Character D now gets to go before Character B, and very well may be able to finish him off. This turned out kind of like a hard CC, but only by specific use of tactics between multiple characters and not because the enemy actually lost a complete, full round from a single ability of a single character, which would be quite overpowered.

If this isn't powerful enough, you could also have this shift in order continue on in further rounds, though I assume that this would be even harder to mod into the game, if any of this is even possible at all.

Anyway, these were just some ideas I had that I feel would make things a lot more fun. Thoughts and suggestions are welcome!

You do not need a hammer to fix what can be fixed with a scalpel.

All we need is Armors to reduce the duration of statuses in a way similar to the "Walk it Off" talent, without the 1 turn minimum restriction.
That way 1 turn CC's will still require the Armor be broken, and everything else will be less effective, but not completely negated.

My armor system design:

The game should only have one armor type, and this armor only function as a protection against CC, not damage to vitality. Attacks should have damage to armor and damage to vitality as seperate stats.

Then depend on how powerful the CC is, a character getting CCed would recover a percentage of his armor for each turn, charm could recover 100% armor after all turns end, stun could be 70%, taunted could be 20%, and so on. To CC the character again, the opponents need to break his armor again. Recovering armor through other means should be inefficient or impossible.

It's partly inspired by D:OS Epic Encounters mod's temporary CC immunities.