Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Why armor is a failure and how to fix it

We're never gonna stop talking about armor, so I wanna talk about armor.

I gots 3 complaints with how the combat flows.

1: It's, like everyone says, Binary. If you've got the right armor type, you don't have to worry about status effects or health. If that type is down, it's CC and DoT time and even if the thing (or you) is at full health it feels like the fight's over. It even makes environmental hazards less scary! A big poison cloud is just something you can walk on through.

2: Defensive skills thus feel pretty useless. The two that aren't leadership don't defend against anything, one does damage when you take damage and the other restores some armor after you've been hard CCd. They don't feel worth it to put points into.

3: There's no way to get tougher against melee attacks. Physical armour is just a shield, it's not like resistances. Your big buff man in full plate can take more stabs before they can make him bleed, but he doesn't take less damage from the stabs. And every enemy can get hit for full physical, which is... well, one of the reasons full physical comps are really popular.

What to do about it? I say THESE THINGS:

1: Statuses that don't cause you to miss a turn aren't blocked by armour. You can bleed, burn, get poisoned, get shocked, get chilled, all those. This means that even in a fight with your armour up, you'll have to worry about ground effects and your health, as well as open up more tactical abilities for skill use. Shocked and chilled are really cool, and to only really ever cash them in for frozen and stunned is a waste.

2: Add defensive stats to reduce the chance of status effects. There should be enemies that even with their armour down you can't hard CC, and you should be able to choose skills that let you avoid CC too. The non-hard cc statuses could also have a stat that defends against them too. I think you could even roll these proposed effects into the defenses we have now(Retribution doing damage to the attacker and resisting hard CC, Perseverance restoring armor after hard CC and resisting minor statuses) and it wouldn't be overpowered.

3: Ya GOTTA add physical resist. Put it on plate mail and put it on physical armour tough guys. In games like these where damage can be mitigated, it's just nuts for physical damage to not be. You can wear a ring and drink a potion or cast a spell to take reduced damage from fire/lighting/poison/ice/earth, but there's nothing you can do to mitigate gettin' shanked! That's nuts!