Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Combat system idea for DOS2 EE or DOS3

I'm not a fan of D:OS2 combat. I understand that Larian wants to reduce RNG and preventing going first and chaining CC. However, IMO the combat system of D:OS2 breaks more even more things：
1) Terrain feels weak because of armor system and movement skills.
2) Hybrid teams are less efficient since they have to deal with three life bars.
3) Round-robin initiative system is counter-intuitive.
4) Absurd number scaling. High DPS destroy everything with minimum tactics.
5) Crafting is nearly irrelevant.
6) Balance and Diversity issues since there are less spaces to fine tune skill and attack AP costs. (e.g. In DOS:EE, crossbow attack costs 5 ap while bow costs 4. Both have uses: Bow for utility and crossbow for sheer damage. In DOS II, Crossbows shit on bows because both attacks cost 2 ap and crossbow have 10% more damage than bows at same level)

The following is my combat system idea for DOS2:EE. It is mostly based on DOS EE system with some changes to reduce RNG and prevent chaining CC.

1. Attributes (Start from 5, cap at 15. +5 attributes at lvl 1, +1 at lvl 3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19):

Strength
+20 Carry Weight per point (Start from 5)
+5% damage per point with Str-based Weapons and skills

Dexterity
2% less damage taken per point from projectiles (arrows, fireballs, falling rocks, ice shards, etc)(starts at 5)
+5% damage per point with Dex-based Weapons and skills

Intelligence
+5% damage per point with Int-based Weapons and spells
+5% damage of summoned creatures per point
Does NOT reduce skill cooldown
+Numbers of Skills memorized (See Part 3)

Constitution
+0.5 Maximum Action Point capacity per point (6AP at 1 con, 13AP at 15 con)
+5% Vitality per point
+5% Vitality of summoned creatures per point

Speed
+0.2 Movement per point
+1 Initiative per point
+1 Turn Action Points at 8 speed, +2 at 15

Perception
+5% Critical Multiplier per point above 5
Improved ability to detect traps
-0.5 turn cooldown of Lucky Strike skill per point above 5
Lucky Strike, 2 AP cost, 7-(Per-5)/2 turn cooldown, Set Lucky Strike (All Your attacks in this turn are critical) for 1 turn.
There is no crit chance anymore. You can only deal critical damage when affected by Lucky Strike

2. Abilities (Cap at Level 5)

2.1 Weapon abilities (+1 point at lvl 1,5,9,13,17):
Dual Wielding
+5% crit multiplier per level when dual wielding.

Two-Handed
+5% damage against opponents affected by knockdown/frozen/stunned/petrified per level when using two-handed melee weapon.

Single-Handed
+2.5% damage and -0.5 Action point spent per level with grenades and scrolls (1 AP minimum) when using a one-handed weapon with empty off-hand

Single-Handed and Shield
2.5% less damage taken per level from arrows and melee attacks when using a one-handed weapon with shield

Bow and Crossbow
+5% Damage from high ground when using bows and crossbows per level.

2.2 Defence Abilities (+1 point at lvl 1,4,7,11,14,17,20)
Leadership
+5% to all Resistances per level (Including Physical Resistance)

Retribution
5% damage (before mitigated by resistances) reflected per level.

Body Building
+1 Stamina per level (Stamina negates Blinded, Crippled, Diseased, Drunk, Frozen, Infected, Knocked Down and Weak)

Willpower
+1 Willpower per level (Willpower negates Charmed, Cursed, Decaying Touch, Fear, Mark of Death, Mute, Petrified, Remorse, Shackles of Pain, Slowed and Stunned.)

Stamina and Willpower works like armor expect they only absorb CC effects. In this way hybrid teams are not gimped in terms of damage and can cast CC based on opponents (e.g. Mage type opponents have high willpower but low stamina, Warriors type have high stamina but low willpower, archers are average on both while bosses are high on both.)

2.3 Skill Abilities (+1 point at lvl 1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19)
Warfare, Scoundrel, etc
Level 1, 2, 3, 5. Allow learning Novice/Advanced/Expert/Master Skills of the chosen school
Level 4. Increased effect of of skills on the chosen school by 10%

2.4 Civil Abilities
Same as system in DOS2

3. Memory
Only 3 Novice Skills, 3 Advanced Skills, 2 Expert skills and 1 Master Skills may be prepared each fight. Intelligence increases memory slots as shown in the following chart.

Int Novice Advanced Expert Master
<7 3 3 2 1
7 4 3 2 2
9 5 4 2 2
11 5 5 3 2
13 6 5 4 2
15 6 6 5 2

4. AP system
Basic AP is 8, with 15 speed the maximum cap is 10. With Lone Wolf/Glass cannon the cap is increased to 14.
It is similar from the system of DOS 2 except the basic AP and AP costs are doubled. This enables more spaces to fine tune skill and attack AP costs.

5. Anti-CC skills (e.g. First Aid, peace of mind)
They become sustained skills and work like auras. You could active them before combat. If teammate within the aura radius are hit by CC skills. They deactivate and negate the effect, apply buffs and enter cooldown.

6. Movement Skills
All pure movement skills (Cloak and Dagger, Phoenix dive, Flight) share a cooldown of 2 turns
All Charge skills (Re-position+Attack) (Battering Ram, Backlash, Bull rush) share a cooldown of 2 turns.

I like some of your ideas. Others not so much.

For one, I don't buy into the notion that mixed damage parties are "gimped". Are they less efficient? A bit, yeah. But enemy encounters usually involve so many enemies that you can split your physical and magic damage between enemies without "wasting" any breaking through armor. Not to mention by going pure magic or pure physical, you lose the option to target enemy's lower armor for more efficient CC or exploit negative resistances (or lack thereof). At the end of the day, pure parties are a bit better, but I don't think it's the huge problem some players make it out to be.

Second, Terrain is weaker but I think it could just use a 50% damage boost or something. I don't think the Armor system makes it less dangerous, since it's eroding your defense against CC. I think the issue is tied to something else you brought up; Level scaling; which I also agree should really be toned back. It's why I think your health and armor greatly outscale the damage dealt by terrains by the mid-game, making them a nonissue.

Third, I strongly dislike your suggestion for the memory system. I don't see any problems with the current system personally, so I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to address by changing back to DOS1's system.

Fourth, I don't know that going back to DOSEE's AP system is a good thing. I personally prefer the streamlined system, I just think it needs more wrinkles; twists here and there to shake up the AP economy. Stuff like Flesh Sacrifice, The Pawn, Executioner, Elemental Affinity, and Adrenaline already accomplish this to some extent, but I think it could be taken further, perhaps as a reward for ability investment (i.e. at 10 hydrosophist, all heals cost 1 less AP). That's a bad example but it illustrates my point.

I really like the idea of separating out defensive abilities from combat abilities though.

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If you ask me, what DOS2 needs is more armor piercing status (shackles, flaming crescendo, etc) so that everything doesn't need to compete with hard CC (and more defense against cc to compensate) and to ditch the round robin initiative system. I'd also strongly suggest placing the whole of Arx's content BEFORE the Nameless Isle.

So there you go, some thoughts you didn't ask for

Such changes would have to be for a new game, as rebalancing that much would be a colossal feat.

1. Attributes

• I generally think your changes to attribute bonuses are okay, but I dislike tying Memory slots to Intelligence. I also think removing critical chance is unwarranted.
• A total of +14 attributes. 10 needed to max one, leaving a whopping 4 others to spread around? That kills your system dead right away. That's not enough to do anything with.
• I am ignoring the existence of bonuses from items, because those are based on RNG and equipment changes often, so +bonuses cannot be relied upon.

2. Abilities

• +12.5% for a maxed out skill is a really, REALLY slim amount. +2.5% per point invested is unnoticeable. Doesn't really seem all that worth investing in.
• I dislike how scarce and spread out you've made points. It will make character growth FEEL sluggish and dull.
• Retribution is still completely worthless. Enemies have a much larger HP pool than players. It should really be 20% damage reflected per level, not 5%.
• Interesting idea to change Willpower and Stamina to a simpler status blocker, so you can block between 1 and 5 times before something lands. I think this might be a neat idea worth looking into. However, because statuses are so important and so devastating, you've basically just rendered Leadership and Retribution as useless things no one will invest in.
• I would actually change the Willpower/Stamina thing so that by default all player characters start out with 2 of each with 0 points invested in them.
• A 10% boost in skill power is far too weak.

3. Memory

• Tying Memory to Intelligence is not a good idea. Mages get to maximize their damage AND get more skill slots for free, but physical damage classes have to sacrifice their damage if they want to get skill slots. Completely unbalanced.
• You have rendered Master skills pretty useless by making them so rare and hard to get, and rendered Advanced skills for physical classes useless by making the INT requirements so steep.
• Under your system, it is literally impossible for a physical damage class to both max out their primary attribute and have more than 5 Novice, 4 Advanced, 2 Expert, 2 Master skills.

4. AP System
Not really sure what the point of increasing the AP cap is if it only goes up by 2 with 10 points invested. Literally NOBODY is going to have 15 speed. Nobody. It's simply not possible.

5. Anti-CC System
So permanent, always on, free CC removal? That's a no-brainer. I'll take two, thanks. A better idea instead of making them auras would be that they remain activated skills, you use them and they restore 2 points of CC armor.


6. Movement Skills
Why not just prevent players from taking a second movement skill at all? Because you've now eliminated the entire point of having more than one. I don't like this change. It makes the combat much less dynamic and it makes it harder to compensate for cheating enemies.


Unfortunately, while the overall presentation idea has some good points, it's almost completely killed by your miser-like handouts of points. There's no way to spread points out or diversify, you don't get enough to try things out or experiment. This is a recipe for pure cookie-cutter builds.

Sure, mixed damage works fine for trash mob fights. But they are inefficient against bosses with high armor on both.



I agree with this.



To fight against DPS bloat. In the late game you can simply oneshot everything with a barrage of master skills, eliminate the need for tactics. With the new memory system, you can't do that anymore.




Agreed

Almost all the boss encounters in the game still involve a lot of "trash" mobs. There are very very few single-target combat encounters; maybe 3-4 that I remember in the entire game, none of which are bosses.

Combat in this game is all about managing groups of enemies.


But the dramatically powerful master skills (Storm, Arrow Storm, Meteor Shower, Hail Storm) all require 2-3 source, so you couldn't spam them all in a short span regardless.

I'd rather just balance those abilities than make the entire memory system more annoying as a weird workaround.

Buds. I will share some of my crazy ideas as well ;D.

I felt that there should be more numerical points representing a single AP. For instance, instead of base 4 AP, have 40 AP. That way you could fine tune some of the skill's a bit more, where your basic attack is 20 AP(it would be cool to have some sort of skills and/or magic which could reduce that cost to 19,18, ect. with the excess being carried over into consecutive rounds) and your Battle Stop is, say, 24 AP. That way you wouldn't be able to gimp the armour and cc on the same move, without manipulating the environment first, that is. It could allow for additional weapon diversity and greater balance between weapon types, where faster weapons could make more attacks during the whole of the combat for less damage and heavier weapons less number of attacks for greater, more focused damage.

Source could work the same way. Instead of 3 points of source, have a source bar. Reduce the total amount of source available to(I am just totally speculating here) the equal of 1,5 SP and have the more costly SP skills put your characters into some sort of state for the duration of next turn(or few), because they lacked the additional source. You could also add some flavourful mechanics to this by allowing your sourcerors to become overcharged with source for a few turns, either by sucking source out from the rest of the party members, or have them donate it to the said sourceror. Make a selection of initial source skills(maybe race/class dependant), one per character, from which you can choose and reduce the cost of those to the equal of 0,75 SP. Reduce the total number of available source in the game(puddles, creatures, ghosts, orbs) and voilà.

You could very well spam those skills, because of Apotheosis and Graft skin scrolls. I one shot the final party on first turn, and one shot the final boss on first turn on my first play through.

I don't mean any critique by saying this. But from a personal perspective it felt underwhelming and ill-designed.

Maybe replace speed with memory is a better idea. I gave 2 AP to speed since Speed would be considered too weak without them. Since you said nobody would have 15 speed. Maybe we can remove speed and add the initiative bonus to perception.

I don't think removing critical chance is warranted and I have no personal problem with RNG. But if you are going to reduce it, why not do further?



I'm taking gears into consideration since +attribute gears appears to be common. It surely need more balance and testing with gears taken into consideration. Too less and it kills the system, too much and everyone has 6*15 is not good, either.






I want it slim because too much scaling punish you if you try to switch tactics. Say in DOS2, I'm a 10 pyro mage fighting against an enemy with 100% fire resist and 0% water resist. I switch to Hydro spell for damage, unfortunately i only have level 2 in hydro and lost 1-110/150=27% damage, wtf? You cannot remove resists since it makes sense that undeads are immune to poison and fire elementals are immune to fire. With a slim bonus you are less punished in situations like this.



I have no objection in changing it to 20%/level



This is also the change I want to see most in DOS2 EE.


Retribution and Leadership may be buffed to compete. Leadership may also be moved to civil abilities so there is no competition.


I'm taking gears into consideration. If +willpower/bodybuilding gears are scarce then your idea is better.



They are not always on. They block status and cooldown before they can be activated again.




Too much movement skills rendered terrain useless though. I like ground control since it is the hallmark of DOS. Maybe there are some better ideas I did not come up with.



It appears that we disagree over this problem: Should gears be taken into account or not?

If +attribute/ability gears are scarce then you are right about this. If these gears are common enough and/or can be crafted then there is no need for more attribute/ability points.

I said that I am trying to improve the system based on DOSEE so I'm also balancing the system around gearing of the first game where you can attach tormented souls to weapons for +2 STR/DEX, Craft +2 INT Wands and +2 Speed amulets.

Keeping the +5% damage on attributes is bad. It is kind of the core problem, why the endgame is pure damage bloat and also the main reason, why crossclassing is not really an option. DOS1 was better in this perspective.

Yes, but that's an issue with skills themselves, not the players access to them.

Like I said, it'd be better to balance out those powerful skills than construct the entire memory system around keeping you from equipping them.

The reason why I dislike making the assumption that people will make up for their lower stats in other areas with equipment is simply that this game has limited encounters, RNG equipment, and frequent equipment turnover. You can't be sure of maintaining the same modifiers on gear from level to level. Shopping is already annoying enough needing to wait an hour doing nothing.





That's a poorly-built character. You never do something as unbalanced as 10 Pyro / 2 Hydro precisely because of immune enemies. And in fact a mage should probably have three damage types available, which means the game needs to provide enough points to do so. Your system allows for maxing out two with ZERO points to space. That's not nearly flexible enough.

You don't provide enough points to allow players to change midstream if they have a problem or want to change their style.




You're not even providing 1 * 15 base attributes, so I think there's some wiggle room to boost the amount of points you give. Even at 5 attribute points at level 1, and 1 per level for the next 19 levels, that's 24 points, or enough to max out two of the 6 with a little wiggle room.

I also dislike your point distribution because it leads to empty levels. There is literally nothing to do at level 8, 12, and 16, and only one thing to allocate at levels 2, 4, 6, 10, 18 and 20. Other levels are feasts: 5, 7, 9, 11. and 13 have three things to allocate, and 17 has four.

Steady progression is better than a feast-and-famine approach and allows one to smooth over trouble spots or change things more easily.

Without armor system and number bloat gears would last longer. If RNG gearing is the problem then it may be replaced with gearing system of other CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Baldur's Gate where the loot is guaranteed and balance the entire attribute/abilities system around that.




Which is another reason why mages fall behind compared to physical characters in DOS2. They need to spread their points thin against different opponents while physical characters can simply stack warfare for maximum effects.

I dislike giving damage bonus to skill abilities since it create balance issues. Maybe resistances bonuses can be used.




This a good point. I missed that.

Hello guys
there are some intresting ideas here and i would like to comment on some.
The 40 ap that somone mention is a very good add as it allows the game to be tweaked in a more detailed way.
Leadership should be global in fights. When the fight begin the leadership buff should be applied to everyone in the group no matter the distance from that character provided that they are also in combat.
Constitution should be more essential than it is right now. I feel like i dont have to put a single point in that skill even though it effects the most important thing in the game...your life! To me, higher constitution should reward the player/opponent with physical restistances and lower the damage from physical attacks up to a percentage. For example if you have 50 points in consitution you get hit by 50% less damage. Now the game feels like whoever attack first kills and all characters are glass cannons.
Retribution should be removed from the game and in its place there should be a skill that buffs the offensive abilities of players like more accuracy, crit chance and even damage. Also this skill once in fight it will have a global range.
Crit chance should never get higher than 50%
I find it frustrating that crit chance can be more than 100% by specific builds. I'm a big fan of crit gameplay but having a permanent 100% crit chance is plain stupid.
Memory. This is a tricky thing. My thought of that is that we can remove that skill completely and spell slots are given by the number of the points allocated in the combat skill. For example if i put 5 points into huntsman then i get 5 memory slots for huntsman spells only (or 4 or 3...we ll figure out the formula but you get my point) if you put 10 in pyro you get pyro spell slots and this goes on. Since we have 1 skill less we need to make the rest more necessary so more points should be put in them as well. So a lvl 10 plate armor may require 13 str but a lvl 20 should require 16-17 so you have to put some more skill in a non primary skill if you wanna have a mage with plate armor ect.
Wits. Since this skill is adding to crit and as i mentioned above i dont want the game to let you get extremely high values of crit, i would suggest for this to reduce its effectiveness to half crit per point but also provide some penetration (physical and magical) so a portion of your attacks goes through armor and damages directly the HP.
These are couple of my suggestion. Feel free to comment.

Good idea on memory slots coming from the skills. If you want to have more fire spells, you need to put more into Pyrokinetics. I think it would balance the game in an enjoyable way.

This is kind of what we had in the first game.