Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General The Usefulness of Talents - A Closer Look

At some point in the game, around level 15-ish, upon leveling up, I opened up the Talents panel, and realized that, I wasn't even sure what to take next. Why? Because not much left is that interesting or useful. I remember during early game, every level-up was really exciting. Talents kind of lost their novelty for me when I was about 2/3 through the game.

Now some Talents are "decent", but when you compare them to the game-changing ones, they become really underwhelming. We have a total of 34 Talents, excluding special ones. Yet at level 21, you can get up to only 5 Talents from leveling up - I'm not counting some special ones. 5 out of 34. So I feel that Talents really should be more useful overall, than just some extra flavor you can totally do without.

1. All Skilled Up / Bigger and Better: these two are really of their own kind. They don't really "decide what your character can do" like Talents are supposed to do. But anyway, in my experience, I find that these two are only really attractive during early game. Later on, when all my stats/skills are high and I have all sorts of gears that increase my stats/skills (and I can pretty much buy anything I need at this point), 1 or 2 points don't matter that much any more. I realize I can totally give away these two Talents to get something else that actually helps maximize the effectiveness of my build.

2. Arrow Recovery: The fact that special arrows are fairly abundant in this game, even powerful ones, makes this Talent underwhelming fairly early. Granted, I haven't played an archer build, but I really don't know how much of a special arrow spammer you must be for this Talent to be that useful.

3. Comeback Kid: I played on Tactician and from my experience, I think it's not that hard to avoid dying at all throughout the game. Sure, it helps once in a while, but again, as a TALENT, it is rather underwhelming.

4. Demon / Ice King: 15% extra resistance to X but -15% penalty resistance to Y... so not a clear advantage here. Does Fire or Water constitute a major portion of elemental damage in this game? No, I don't believe so. What about the 10% extra in maximum resistance? What is the default maximum resistance anyway? I don't know. 100%? So with this talent you can stay at 110% without the need to use any potions? I mean, after Black Tea and Large Resist All, my Fire Resistance is 200 something, why would I need that 10% again?

5. Duck Duck Goose: you can evade attack of opportunity. But seriously, you can avoid it for the most part just by being careful, right? It's not like every turn 3 out of 4 of your guys would get hit by 3 attacks of opportunity...

6. Escapist: simple question: If you have beat the game, how many times have you wished you had this talent? How many times have you been in a situation where you really, REALLY needed to flee, but were unable to because enemies were too close? I'm not saying you can never be in that situation, I'm just asking how many times. In my case, one. At level 9.

7. Five-Star Diner: I don't really want to bluntly say that it's totally useless, but... If it worked on ALL consumables, it would be something, but as it is right now, just no.

8. Guerilla: if you have tried to play a rogue char, you know that this Talent is next to useless. You can take advantage of it when you know there is combat ahead, then you let the rogue guy stay back and sneak while the other guys enter combat. Then the rogue guy can get some extra damage when he lands the first hit out of stealth, which, obviously, forces him into combat. And that's about it. Now if you're telling me, "but you can make use of this Talent during combat too"...

9. Mnemonic: I admit, I had this Talent until endgame last playthrough. But at the end of the day, I would still say that, I can go without it. It is the same as 3 extra points in Memory. Again, 2-3 points in late game don't carry that much meaning anymore. Not to mention, in most fights, you really don't need every single one of your memorized skills. With a bit of management, you can totally forgo 3 memory slots.

10. Morning Person: the character gets full HP when resurrected. But even at full HP, without any armor, they can easily be incapacitated. It helps by only resurrecting near the end of the combat phase, but doing that also reduces the overall effectiveness of this Talent. I don't know, you probably must rely on Resurrection A LOT for this Talent to be somewhat useful.

11. Parry Master: I'm not sure about this one. Have you ever done a dedicated "dodge" build? I need someone to tell me how useful this one actually is. Me, I was going with a dual-wielding build with this talent, and at some point, I realized my dodge chance was pretty much crap anyway, so I used the mirror to remove it and took something else. Let's say you have 10 Dual Wielding, one other guy has 10 Leadership. That gives you 30% Dodging. Plus 10% from Parry Master, you get 40%. Maybe another 5% or so from equipment. You can use Potion of Nimble Tumble to get another 50%, and you would get almost 100% Dodging. Awesome! Right? But hold on. But when that value is close to 100, you realize the 10% extra from earlier doesn't matter THAT much anymore... You'd rather exchange it for something else that suddenly seems very attractive NOW... Not to mention, the boost from Leadership is fairly conditional, and the Potion has a duration of 2 turns.

12. Stench: the -25 Attitude can certainly be ignored. So there's the "melee fighters find you less attractive in combat" part. But how much less, exactly? Personally, I was not willing to put my faith in such a vague factor, and spend one whole Talent point on this one. If I don't get focused by melee guys, I get focused by the archer guys. Is there any fight where NOT half of their team are ranged? I'm not sure. Oh wait - the fights with the Voidwoken worms. You got me there. Still... unless every squishy guy on your team has this Talent, otherwise, the aforementioned melee guys will just focus on some other squishy guy on your team.

13. Torturer: you get another tick of damage over time. How helpful is that, exactly? Yeah, you get an extra 400 damage for free, but it comes NEXT turn, and the guy has 8k HP anyway, so...

14. Unstable: you deal 50% vitality value as physical damage in a small radius. Well... I suppose if you combine this Talent with Comeback Kid, Picture of Health, dying on purpose a lot, having a ton of HP, and spamming Resurrection,... then maybe... But wait, if you have a lot of HP, it also means it's harder for that character to die repeatedly, so... Actually, I need to try this strat and see for myself. I'll get back to you.

15. Walk It Off: this Talent reduces ALL statuses by one turn, positive and negative alike - so again, not a clear advantage here. But, if you think about it, it is actually less useful than it first seems. How so? Because, you can avoid negative statuses by playing smart. Not all the time, of course, but that is true to some extent. So generally speaking, chances are, you will be buffing your chars more often than having them being debuffed. The NET difference will be negative. It's the other way around for enemies, because in the case of enemies, mostly they will be debuffed by you, rather than having multiple buffs from their teammates. Now if you tell me, this Talent is especially good for this encounter and that encounter... then I'd still rather not spend one whole Talent point on this one just to get through those two encounters a bit more easily.

Aside from the above, some others like, Leech, What a Rush, Living Armor, they help somewhat, from time to time. Maybe 3 out of 4 fights, they don't do anything. For Leech to do much, you'd need to get HP damage regularly, access to a lot of blood surface, then you'd have to spend APs walking around, consuming blood surfaces, to gain some HP. They don't bring anything exciting to the table in terms of gameplay. Honestly, take out all of the Talents mentioned above, then the ones that don't work with your build, the rest would include the few must-haves that you would always take, and those that you take when you really don't know what else to take. Considering you can take only 5 Talents, this says a lot.

It's definitely not a simple task to make ALL 34 items to be equally valuable. BUT, as it is right now, when you have stuff like Lone Wolf or Savage Sortilege, and stuff like Five-Star Diner, on the SAME table, you can't help but ask "Hey guys what's with the balance here?"

So, this is my take on the Talents. As for, "Then what do you suggest?", that is another topic (which someone else has already opened). There is a thread where we can discuss ideas for new Talents, which is great, but an overhaul of the old ones could be a good start too. (Otherwise, we'd all just opt for the new, suggested Talents cause they're certainly more appealing)

In case anyone patient enough to read through all this, and wants to give any opinions, please, by all means.

I agree a lot of Talents are not that interesting, and there's a lot of potential for Talents which are interesting and alter playstyles which remains largely unutilized. I agree with most of your points, so I'll just comment on a few.

1. [All Skilled Up][Bigger and Better] Yeah, these are less and less interesting the farther you get. Civil points are pretty rare, but it's just not all that interesting to take this even in the early game. Bigger and Better is just a really poor exchange, trading a Talent you get once every 4-5 levels for 2 attribute points you get each level. It should give at least 4 attribute points.

5. [Duck Duck Goose] I disagree with your assessment. No, it is usually NOT your fault to get caught in AoO range because enemies tend to move to melee range. This Talent is fairly useful for Rogue-type characters to maneuver around enemies without needing to burn a movement skill.

10. [Morning Person] True, this Talent is situational, but it's not completely useless. With the introduction of the Unstable Talent, this can be a tremendously useful Talent in combination. I plan to make a build using it and Unstable in the future.

11. [Parry Master] I am running a dedicated Dodge Rogue now. Level 13 and I am up to 51% dodge. It makes a big difference against melee attacks. If you take this on a Dwarf as well, it's an immediate 15% Dodge, which is not nothing.

12. [Stench] I heard this works, but it was recently nerfed to be less effective. It was apparently working too well. I have suggested that Larian add the Talent "Punchable Face" which does the opposite - increasing the tendency of enemies to attack that character, to make a Tank archtype more viable.

13. [Torturer] I've picked this up on my Pyro/Geo character. It's not like mages have a lot of choices for mage-specific Talents (this is a problem!). It also has a narrow synergy with Spontaneous Combustion which adds an entire extra tick of damage.

14. [Unstable] I plan to use this Talent in combination with [Morning Person] to make a sort of Kamikaze 2H Death Knight. If the enemy kills me, I explode and damage them. If they avoid killing me, I continue to damage them. I'll have to see how well it works, but it sounds interesting.

15. [Walk It Off] I agree, buffs in this game already last for so short a turn that I can't see myself willing to take this. A lot of negative statuses can be blocked by certain skills anyway. I have suggested that Larian add a new Talent "Sensitivity", which is the opposite of Walk it Off - Increasing the duration of all status effects, both positive and negative by one turn. That I would take to make buffs more useful, even with the added downside of negative status effects.


Here is the current thread for new Talent suggestions, and inside there is a link to the new talent suggestion thread from Early Access. There are lots of potential ideas out there.

mnemonic is nice for mages early on. it pales as the game goes forward but i don't think that makes it bad

Some of the talents feel like they're either fillers or meant to be picked up and then specced out of later. For example, in the case of a person rushing for Summoner 10 you would pick All Skilled Up or if you wanted that extra edge in thievery.

You're right. I didn't say it is bad. Mnemonic is more like "Ehhhh..." rather than straight bad.



I thought about it, and realized it's not like you'd spam Potion of Nimble Tumble every single encounter. If the 50%-60% range is that easy to achieve, then I suppose Parry Master is alright.

As for the Unstable/kamikaze build, I tried it out for a bit. It's easy to see that for this strat to shine, you can't build like a true tank, cause no one would focus you, and you'd never die. So I think if you bump your HP to a *just right* amount, and equip only low level gear, *maybe* it'll work. It doesn't work with Comeback Kid like I thought, because Comeback Kid does prevent you from actually dying, rather than resurrecting you instantly. I tested this on the Red Prince, and let only him enter combat, with 15k HP. It actually took quite a while for him to go down, but the Unstable damage is pretty good. I'm not entirely sure what the enemies' focus would be like when they see a bare naked guy with a truckload of HP going with a bunch of squishies. If they do focus more heavily on the guy, then this strat might be ok. Could be this strat works best when your team has only two guys, so the enemies would have fewer targets to focus. This is one of those times when you wish Provoke were not blocked by armor. The suggested "Punchable Face" would work nicely with this strat too.

Unstable + Glass Cannon + Death Wish -> Run in and AoE yourself to death -> Delay -> Resurrect at the end of round -> Rinse & Repeat till 1 HP and then kill yourself next round since all your cool downs are back up.

Glass Cannon is pretty much a 'Auto Taunt all AI in Combat El oh El'.

XD You know what, I decided to take Glass Cannon just a minute earlier and was on my way to the paladin bridge to test it out. Then realized I wanted to edit in a bit about Provoke and Punchable Face, and your comment popped up.

There was seriously a point where I wanted to do that since I was getting frustrated from some bad decisions while using Glass Cannon and my gear no longer warranted keeping Alexander's robe so I lost out on a ton of fire resist.

My train of thought was: "Instead of spending time figuring out how to keep myself alive and doing dps, I could just deliberately kill myself and abuse resurrection mechanics and it would be a lot lazier than trying to keep Fane alive and just as effective. "

I was also too lazy to use resist pots since I would have to use AP during the battle and it wouldn't stop them from CCing me anyways.

Glass cannon now become a late-mid game talent instead of mid game like previous title.

Glass cannon + executioner + invisibility on a go first dedicated 'ranged' damage dealer can bring in a lot of pain for the enemy.

Sadly though, executioner is bugged atm that I already respected into another talent.

Executioner only procs once per round The Pawn is much more valuable.

Yeah, i realized that a little late on my 2h so i respect into another one, thought it was bugged because tool-tip SAY NOTHING about being procs once per round. And that is so stupid that make the whole talents completely useless piece of garbage just like taunt skill.

Does larian had staff change or what? Did some of them never use head before hand?

What I think happened was that Larian was running out of resources to dedicate to balance, so they left the system in a state of 'good enough' and moved on to finish the other acts and tune the other features of the game.

A lot of the things have a hint of being half-finished, like they knew where they were going but just didn't have the time to do more iterations.

If your team is small and your budget is limited then every day you're spending on balance issues and polish you're spending money for something that may not even give you any results till months down the line.

But yeah, I would say the Executioner talent is still useful with Rangers.

I find Executioner just fine :| The 2 AP gain is alright. I got this Talent on both of my mages, Fane and Lohse, and it worked really well. I mean, considering the fact that mages deal crazy AOE damage, the 2 AP gain is really nice. For example, you spend 3/4 APs to use Laser Ray, right? Which deals a lot of damage. If you take down someone, you get 2 APs back, so with 3 APs, you can follow up with Epidemic of Fire, which also takes 3 APs, and also deals a lot of damage. That's not nothing. In the case of Air/Water schools, aside from the damage, you also cause stun/frozen with chained Air/Water spells as well. Closed Circuit costs 2 APs, and that spell alone makes a huge difference. Repeated procs of this Talent per turn would be too op, actually. I'd say you gain more with this Talent when it's on casters, rather than fighters.

Talents, schmalents. Useless, every single one of them.
(Except Lone Wolf).

Just pop green tea + apotheosis, adrenaline rush and spam all your tier 3 source spells at the cost of 1AP and 0SP per, and have a nice day & watch as your foes disintegrate before your eyes without even having your 2nd-up character take their turn. Fight goes into round 2 and everything is on cooldown? No problem - just Skin Graft, adrenaline rush and repeat the process. Everything should be dead 3 times over at this point. Even Tactician bosses.

Seriously though, I was going to address your post but Stabbey pretty much mentioned all the same things I was going to say. But also seriously, the above strategy works and will usually yield a 1-round fight in almost any scenario once the tea is available and you're level 5 Poly.

Edit:
Nice forum avatar BTW

And it used to proc multiple times... and it was SO FUN.

But yeah, you're right.