Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General I am not seeing how initiative is determined.

A higher initiative than someone else does not mean you will go before them. So how does it work? Wits contributes to initiative so that would lead one to assume that initiative is the final calculation.

For example, a recent battle:

My party initiative: 27 - 31 - 34 - 31.
The order they get their turns: 31 -34 - 27 - 31

Number/Order of enemies who went first: 23 - 25 - 17 - 28

Only their highest is one above my lowest yet they all get to act first. Their combined initiative is less, individually 3 them are less than 4 of mine. This makes no sense to me. How is it determined and what do the numbers even mean?

Classic difficulty.

All combat is fixed to alternate between friendly and enemy characters, making Initiative and Wits basically irrelevant and useless. This is a change from the EA version of the game.

What Stabbey said. It's a round-robin turn order system, so Initiative is even potentially harmful to your party.

All you need to do is to make sure that you've got the highest Initiative to move first in combat, but even if you don't, it's no big loss, because only one enemy will move before you have a chance to move.

Yeah, the whole initiative system is trash.

Here's my thread on the subject. One thing I mentioned in mine that a lot of others didn't from what I saw was how detrimental making use of wits can be.

I think the solution is as easy as taking a page from DnD's book.

Combat starts, roll initiative; result = 1d20 + (wits - 10)

Higher wits will *tend* to go first, parties that invest no points into wits won't be blown out of the water by all enemies acting first, and parties that invest everything into wits won't walk all over the enemy.

Love the order of how the fights go now, so much more balanced gameplay.

The highest init overall goes first call them Team A.
Then Team B's highest goes next.
Team A's 2nd Highest.
Team B's 2nd.
Team A's 3rd.
Team B's 3rd.
Team A's 4th.
Team B's 4th.
Etc.
If teams are unbalanced, the rest go at the end in succession.

Any summons seems to go immediately after the person summoning.
Subsequent rounds they are rolled into the above.
Summons seem to have pretty high init.

To me this is superior to DOS1 where most of the time your whole team went first (faceroll) or went last (facerolled). Sometimes you got a mix, this way you always have a mix. It still is powerful being the first up to bat, it isn't one move for one move, as we know 4-6 AP can be several moves. I think there is an argument of one move period per and then next. Hey another built in mod option!

To note: I have modded wits to give 2 Crit and 2 Init per point, so it has a bit more value than what vanilla DOS2 has.

That is why that isn't a good solution and that is DOS1. The issue is the fights are too determined by this solely. Here is what we got from DOS1. Load up on Init and AP. Unstoppable force. They addressed both correctly imo. That is the problem with giving too much a good thing, some can't take being restrained for the greater good afterwards.

Okay, but here is the problem: They made that change too late in the process and they left all the old remnants of a system where Initiative actually mattered still in the game.

The Wits stat has been stripped of most of its original use, and is an attribute which is actually detrimental to take on more than one character - even if they are using the same build. Wits either needs a major rework, or should be removed from the game. Initiative is still an affix which can appear on items even though it's almost always useless.

Yeah, it's like, why even have stats at all in this game? Just delete stats and scale your attributes for you. Punish people for wanting to go first! Yay!

Sounds like fun!

I get the point and don't disagree, making it more worthy than stock would be nice. But not at the expense of losing Team A,B,A,B, that is a great idea and needed.
But to me losing flipping sides per turn wouldn't be the answer.

Personally I don't think DOS1 should have worked the way it did with init. TB is trying to mimic a real mechanic, but in a micro-controlled way. I find this more like chess and much better vs putting Init on steroids so I can ramshackle the AI. We all have our opinions on it.

To me just bumping up 1% more on Critical starts to make Wits nice. It is still good to get your team out front on the "Who moves first" order.

They could just make it always like this and make players decide their basic turn order and make something different out of Wits.

So they present a mechanic in game even though it's largely non functional and let you put points into it thinking it'll help when it does nothing to very little? In fact you can screw over your own people who benefit the most by acting early? Awesome.

That just blows my mind and seems very.. I dunno... Sloppy? So many other parts of the game are so nice and refined that are a pleasure to experience.. Then you have something like this blemishing it. I went through more than half the game wasting stat points..

Sorry buddy, but you are talking out of your arse. Wits builds are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful in the game, so the stat hardly needs a buff. I appreciate (but disagree) that you may believe that the round robin initiative system is an issue, but buffing Wits is not the answer to your problem.

Wait, what makes for a 'Wits' based build?

The delusion that 30% extra crit chance is somehow comparable to 150% extra damage.

That said, Wits is necessary to eventually get 100% crit rate, but Wits by itself still sucks, because the system is made in such a way that it's capped at +30 points; Wits only wins once you've maxed out either Strength or Finesse anyway (or Intelligence, if you swing that way).

Winning by default is not really that much of a win. It only wins because the rest are so build-dependent as to be almost completely useless to everyone else, whereas Wits may be awful, but at least it does something once you've maxed one of the others out.

That being said, I think that getting bogged down into the discussion of "What to do with Wits?" is misrepresenting and ignoring the issues with the round-robin turn orders and the uselessness of Initiative. It goes far beyond Wits, and the fact that Wits is near-useless is just one of the many symptoms.

You could buff Wits to kingdom come and it wouldn't make the round-robin turn orders and the initiative issues any better.

In particular, I find the idea of simply upping Wits to +2% Critical Chance to be a terrible idea, because it would mean it'd just be much easier to maximize your critrate. Wits would go from absolutely awful to practically mandatory for everyone, since it could by itself give you +60% extra critical chance.

False dichotomy. The sole alternative to round-robin turn orders and broken initiative is not alpha strike supremacy.

High crit chance and crit damage builds have the highest damage output in the entire game. You aim for 100% crit chance on near to that and focus on skills that boost crit damage, e.g. Scoundrel and Two Handed. It is seriously overpowered - I was one shotting dudes in Arx in my last playthrough on Tactician even though I never managed to get my hands on a decent two hander throughout the latter half of the game.

20% from weapon, 10% from hotheaded, 5% from gloves, 36% from amulet... some amount from potions/buffs, and the rest from Wits. The majority of crit is not based around Wits, it's based around gearing and other factors. Anyone can do that and all you have to do is fill in the rest with Wits. It's threshold based and doesn't scale.

You can say 'crit based' but it wouldn't do to call it 'wit based' because there isn't any particular focus on wits. In a matter of fact most of your weight is going to be in Str or Int.

That's really why I was confused; if you combine this with round robin initiative, and also add in factors like scripted fights and artificial amounts of initiative, then Wits by itself is weighed fairly low when looking at the entire picture. Buffing Wits doesn't seem that far off (not saying if it is right or wrong, just saying that it wouldn't be too bad to consider).

No, that is different. Every character has access to high crit in the end game through powerful gear but this gear is not available for the majority of the game. A proper crit build starts early in the game and invests in Wits for crit over the main stat and in the crit damage multiplier skills (e.g. Scoundrel) over pure damage skills like Warfare, Huntsman, etc. Your base damage and main stat really do not matter much when you have high crit and crit multiplier.

So, for example, if towards the end of the game an optimal Ranger would have maxed out Finesse, Warfare and Huntsman then a crit Ranger would have some points in Finesse, high Wits and an even distribution between Ranged (less damage overall than Warfare but synergises with crit), Scoundrel (practically useless for Ranger for the vast majority of the game unless you are running a crit build), Warfare and Huntsman. It is a completely different build for speccing and gearing and plays out in a different manner. A crit build also has a higher damage output overall than your vanilla cookie-cutter pure damage build.

Anyway, this is a discussion about Initiative so I will let you get back to it, but the point that I am making is that Wits is hardly an useless stat.

2 hander

So you'll see something like this: