Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Can we get a developer comment on Armor System?

I think having 2 physical + 2 mage team being strictly inferior to 4 of one or the other is silly. My 2h warrior smacks a guy around, wrecks his face, knocks him on the ground...then my mage throws a fireball at him that does zero damage. Oh hey but then my ranger has arrows that straight ignore all armor for some reason...

Does it make the game unplayable? Nope. But it definitely hurts build diversity in a game that is designed very heavily around being able to make diverse builds. You can be diverse in this game...it means you'll be strictly inferior in every way to someone who just stacks warfare + physical damage though. What's the point of a 'battle mage' when it means you need to eat through two sets of armor? It makes any build that combos damage types a "trap build". It's also incredibly common for people to report that they had to scrap their first 2, 3, 4 parties because combat was too hard with their gimped build choices - which is a sign that the combat system isn't as intuitive as people in this thread seem to claim it is.

I also don't really know how to solve this problem other than by completely redoing armor. Have armor give elemental resistances and physical resistances and then merge magical armor and physical armor into one stat - then use the resistances as a roll check modifier to a CC saving throw instead of "1 point of physical armor blocks knockdown, 1 point of magical armor blocks frozen".

And honestly the posts in these threads where people are like "I never had any problems and I'm on tactician" seem to be counter-productive. You mean you have a party with one spell caster and 3 physical and you didn't notice that the spell caster is completely useless because they have to break through magical armor by themselves? Or do you mean you had a pure physical or pure spell damage comp and so this wasn't a problem for you? There's no denying that the game is designed to let you mix and match a huge amount of things but if you actually do mix and match stuff, you're punished for it. That's a poor design element. Anyone who plays the game for a bit can figure out how to 'beat' the system but that doesn't mean the system is good.