Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General The lack of skill variety is the issue, not armor

A lot of people have been suggesting how to fix the armor system by adding some kind of scaling resist and such. I honestly feel like they are tackling the issue from a completely wrong approach. Adding some random RNG won't make things more tactical, they make thing even more min-maxy with your build dedicated to removal of RNG for it to be viable.

The current armor system is fine. The problem is that nearly every skill in the game gets countered by it and there's only one strat around it atm. Almost every offensive skill in the game just "Deal damage, Leave X thing around, Inflict Y if armor is depleted". When you look at it that way, it's no wonder the game becomes a DPT race because there's nothing to do but to deal more and more damage.

All we have to do is simply introduce some skills that do not get hard countered by the armor systems with their own approach and counters. It will add way more tactics to the game while also being much easier to work with.

Here are some I can think of on the spot

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1) Delayed CC effect that goes though immunity

If turn-1 CC with no room to act is a massive issue, then make it a turn-1 CC after you get to act.

Something like

Hydro : Cold Blood

Deals A water damage to the enemies in the area and inflict them with Cold Blood.

Cold Blood: At the end of your turn, freezes you. (Goes through magic shield). Removed by taking X amount of fire damage or Y ticks of fire damage.

This kind of skill are very powerful but also come with their own counterplay. It gives the player more option and when they are inflicted with it, force them to make a vital decision. The counterplay is already in the game anyway like using Lizard racial on a frozen teammate to remove the frozen, might as well explore it.

2) Skills that scales with the enemy armor.

We have reactive armor that scale with our armor. How about an offensive spell that scale with the enemy armor? They are useful as long as the enemies have armor but become weaker once they are depleted so you can't just use them on every turn.

Some kind of "Armor swap" debuff skill would also be interesting to have. If the enemy hard counter your damage type but is weak against the other, just swap it around.

3) Lack of pierce damage and hybrid skills that can make use of it

Hybrid damage type could easily be fixed with more piercing damage in the game as it will allow mixed damage to always help each other. Shame there's a very limited amount of skill that can do it and items barely give piercing damage.

Something like Crack armor (Geo/Warfare) /Crack magic shield (Hydro/Warfare) shield would be awesome to have.

While crack armor/Crack magic shield is active, skills of that damage type deals 20% additional damage and half of the total damage becomes piercing damage. (So if it does 100 magic damage, cracked magic shield will receive 120 damage, 60 to magic shield, 60 to health)

And introduce a counter to them like "Fortify removes crack armor". This also introduces more tricks like using crack Armor to remove the enemy Fortify just so you can use teleport on them.

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Trying to change the core of the game will just lead to more issues than it solves because the whole game is already balanced around that. Take advantage of it and add interesting skills instead. The current gameplay is very consistent so it shouldn't be too difficult to focus on adding new mechanic/approach to gameplay.