Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Projects In Progress Divinity Combat Overhaul

I posted a topic about this a few weeks ago, asking if such a mod was worthwhile, and DOS2's combat/progression is so plagued with issues that I think it is.
While I appreciate them going for something new, some of the choices they made were questionable at best.
The amount of simplifications made to everything was astounding.
I could easily ramble about my issues with DOS2, but here's the document outlining all of the changes I'm to be making.
I've left the first tab as effectively a really long TL;DR.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VPKUJT-Zt5tEMFKi461-37MrpGibI9CshibdpgPybH8/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BGEK8jopLEl46CtMxqOXm8M2zj9uMwXDv_KWitDi7nQ/edit?usp=sharing

I don't expect a release version any time soon, but I figured I'd announce what I'm working on in case anyone else is working on something similar.
Many of the technical things are indeed working ingame, but the vast majority of the work will be the skill overhaul to play nice with the new mechanics, and overhauling all of the encounters to use the new skills/mechanics.

I feel slightly guilty not leaving any picture, so I guess here's one.


P.S. Love you Larian.

Hey! You've put a lot of thought into it, that's neat! Combat was the biggest let-down for me too going into DOS2, mainly because I came right from DOS1 and fell in love with the chaotic experimental sandbox environment where it felt free and fluid to use the environment or approaches to pick off / immobilize enemies. Whereas in DOS2, the short notion is it felt like a number-crunching "the hardest hitting team wins".

Although I feel it's important to mention for you, at least in the current state, editing UI and in proxy, the representation of stats etc in the built-in UI is inaccessible. So for reintroducing old stats you'd have to manage this through some other means than the standard UI.

Definitely keeping an eye on this though :]

Good luck, and happy new year!

Yeah, I'm aware of the technical complications what I'm trying to do here has. I've already got workarounds/plans for most things, and I've found the game is probably more modifiable than you might think if you're willing to override base game files. With the scope of this mod I've already, if unfortunately, made compatibility a non-priority.

Here's another shot, perhaps it will make a lot clearer what I'm doing with attributes here.





Another one showing piercing damage.

Quick video of the tiered status system, still very WIP:

Looks really nice!

Just a bit of a status update.
Most of the groundwork is in, all of the attributes are working, four of the Proficiencies are working (Just haven't made the other three yet), and three of the tiered statuses are fully working and the rest should be relatively easy to implement.
There's been a lot of other work done but most of it is just tedious stuff that needed done (Over 6 pages of addresses from a localization file I've modified for example), but by and large things are going well.
When all of the groundwork in completely I can then move on to adding skills, which I expect to be extremely tedious and take a while, but once that is done the mod could be considered "playable". I'll still need to go through all the encounters for adjustments and make them use the new systems and play through with the mod multiple times to make appropriate adjustments to everything.

Regarding compatibility: Mods that modify charScript files will very likely be incompatible. This is basically unavoidable with the scope of the mod. A lot of mods that add classes will probably still sorta work. Statuses used in the mod that have been swapped to the tiered system will work with the tiered system.
But given the changes to armor and damage they'll have oddities such as anything that does Physical damage will instead be doing Light damage with my mod and anything that requires, for example, Huntsman will find it instead requiring Divine.

Compatibility patches for these kinds of oddities should be exceptionally easy to patch (And I may make a script to generate said patch), but balance will of course be up in the air.

This mod is still getting worked on.
Some progress:
Tiered statuses are fully working, only took a couple hundred thousand lines of code to get all of them in.
Buffs are now also tiered, but the effects don't diminish with strength and can go up to a strength of 16 rather than capping out at 8.
They now effectively act as a buffer/shield against harmful statuses.

I'm not the best artist but I made some of the icons to be used in the mod:




I also fixed initiative.
Excuse the WIPness as usual, but here's a video of that:

Looking good, BlueFeuer!

Tiered statusses sound real fun And don't worry, the icons are looking real good
Looking forward to the next update

Sincerely,
Kevin

This looks very promissing! Looking forward to test this mod!

Indeed, will be following this mod!

Man, I'd love to have the tiered statuses and fixed initiative in gm mode.

I took a short hiatus from this mod, don't know when the next full post will be. The mod is getting worked on now though so don't worry.

Can take some time to respond though;
Was a tiny bit surprised to see a post from Larian considering the fact I'm basically scrapping a lot of the base game's combat mechanics, but I suppose at the same time not too surprised. Glad to hear it in any case.

The mod will most definitely be available in GM mod, can guarentee that one (As my GM intends to use it when it gets finished.. He asks about it every once in a while).
As far as fixed initiative goes, I actually posted a fix to the workshop quite a while ago. Wanted to see how it would do on it's own. In any case it's not up to par where I would like it to be, it's still got a few bugs I'd like to fix, but for now it works and appears to be roughly stable. Here's a link:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1304982884

The bugs on that page and when a character dies on their turn the next turn goes to Larian default order still need to be fixed. No idea when I'll get around to that.

The initiative fix mod and the main mod will probably remain as two separate but compatible mods, as the initiative fix will never be perfect (the top bar is nigh unfixable) and some may prefer to keep the clarity of the built in system.

Dude, I know how you feel. Those of us that have been modding since release (5-6 Months ago?) are feeling it. I had to take a break to do things that actually paid the bills. As fun as it is, it becomes work regardless.

That being said, I have yet to find a group of adventurers to run through my GM mod haha. Maybe I'm unbearable.

GL, HF.

Bit of a smallish update, but I figure I may as well.
There's a lot of WIP stuff on this document, but if someone wants to know where this mod's vision sits and is crazy enough to read through here's an updated document.
I'm not actually sure how much has changed since the last document but I think overall it hasn't changed much.
Mostly things are a lot more concrete now and all of the non-multiclass abilities have been filled out in their entirety.
This is also my working document so if/when I change stuff it'll be seen.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BGEK8jopLEl46CtMxqOXm8M2zj9uMwXDv_KWitDi7nQ/edit?usp=sharing

Man, what can I say... Your ideas and work on this big combat overhaul are stunning !
I can't wait to see this addon in action in my on-going GM campain :)

I have some question if you have some time to share your vision (sorry for my english, I'm not a native speaker).

One of the most disapointing aspect in this game IMO is the maths behind the scene and how the damage are calculated.
You change and maybe solve this issue in a very interesting way with this addon. But Im wondering how you manage to found your equilibrium with the bonus given by the stats. I will try to explain:
if we consider a linear damage/AP for a character, investing in dex allows to acces to a multiplicative damage modifier: 4dex = 1AP leads to a 1/6 = 16.7% more damage every 4 dex => 4.16% more damage / dex (correct me if I'm wrong). In addition more add a lot of flexibility during your turn that cannot be well evaluated.
In the over hand the damage bonus given by might is +10% (additive).
I only compare dex with might but the balance question is the same with the other stats.

We know how powerfull stacking multiplicative damage can be (ex: absurd way of Warfare works in vanilla), how do you control this ?
IMO only crit is legit as a multiplicative source of damage. Hight ground works also as multiplicative in vanilla, because your of your modifications (no easy teleport) I think this we still want to reward good positionning in this game but we cannot prevent players to set up the fight with hight ground and abuse of this source of damage, maybe hight ground could be nerfed as additive damage or reworked ?

The AP bonus given by dex is realy interesting but I'm afraid that addind an other source of multiplicative damage is risky if not controled properly. What is your position on all of this ?

P.S. I really love your work, I think it is what this awesome game deserved, I am willing to help you for ideas / balancing if you think you need some help.
Regards.

Currently the numbers are based on what felt right. I chose 10% more damage 'cause any other number felt wrong in comparison to the other attributes.
Same goes for a lot of other numbers.
I'll see how it plays out ingame, as that's where figuring out what needs changes will truly take fold.
It's not unlikely that encounters throughout the game will be rebalanced around player power level rather than the other way around though.

Crit/Might are multiplicative damages yes, and I don't like the way high ground is applied but I don't have any plans to fix that atm. Currently you can't even get bonus high ground damage and it is instead a static 30%. May be reduced.
Crit is something I wanted to be a multiplicative damage that was relatively powerful, but required investment on your character's part that could otherwise go to something else.
But I think you are misunderstanding Dex. It could be looked at 4% more AP and therefore 4% more damage per point, but if looked at in that way then it's basically a buff to everything you do and that aside if you chain abilities together using your full AP you'd probably be able to get a lot more than a 4% buff. It's not about having more AP, it's about how you use it.
However people decide to balance their Might/Dex and their other attributes is probably alright with me.

All of that aside, the mod I'm trying to make here is to make combat less about killing the enemy and more about surviving the encounter. My current plan is to buff enemy health/durability substantially so players would have difficulty killing enemies. This applies more to the late game when it's pretty easy to one-shot everything on a battlefield with ease.
If I do my job right, hyper-focusing on a damage party will leave you without enough CC to deal with the enemies before they kill you; you shouldn't be able to end a fight within 1 turn. Even 3 turns is a bit too quick for me.
If you want to worry about Damage Per Turn then play vanilla DOS2. It will be important for maybe 1-2 characters, but stunning enemies will be vastly more difficult so making sure your damage characters can actually live is also important. Damage does not equate ability to stun in this.

I am completly agree with you and my comment goes in the same way. I regret that vanilla builds only focus on damage and neglect all the other aspect because its the only way to have viable characters. I looked for intensive and intelligent encounters where CC is difficult and necessary.

IMO your decission goes in the right direction for that. I was just afraid that the stat bonus distribution that you propose create a new meta where stacking 10 AP always prevail no matter the build. I know this is hard to know before testing with the final product.

Either way, I am glad that you still working on this project and my helping offer still stand ;)

If people want to stack 10 AP then I suppose that's their prerogative. I don't even think that's a bad thing if they're level 20 and have the attribute points for that, as you'll probably have the skills to make use of that by then.
But having 10 AP would take 16 attribute points, and if you don't have any points in Strength then moving 4 over would net a 40% damage increase. Or if you don't have any in Aptitude, then with the way Grit/Willpower works all your statuses will probably apply a strength of say, 4, and if the enemies have a Grit/Willpower of 4 then all your statuses will apply a strength of the minimum of 1. That means it would take 8 casts of a knockdown to knockdown a single enemy. Moving, say, 5 points from Dex to Aptitude would increase the strength of your knockdown status by 50% and, increasing it to a total of 6, making it take 4 casts of a knockdown to actually get them down.
So I don't think that maximum AP will actually be all that useful.

But as I said, if people really do want to make the sacrifice for that much AP, then that's their prerogative.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if people have 10 AP by the end of the game, so long as enemies are tough enough to warrant that.

All of this sounds very good. Is there any ETA yet?

Something I would like to see would be a bonus on CC chances the lower the enemy HP and armor is. Basically making it much harder to CC at 100% HP/Armor but if the enemy is already below 50% HP and only has 20% armor you would actually gain a higher chance to proc CCs. I know your mod will work a bit different than just % chances but making stuns or similar things easier woulds till fit in well. I currently run a mod which gives all CC a 80% chance to miss at 100% armor which is reduced by 1% for each 2% armor missing. So a CC used on a 50% armor enemy would have a 55% chance to miss and against a 0% armor enemy a CC spell would just have a 30% chance to miss. It makes it hard to use against "fresh" enemies but you can still get lucky and makes it easier the longer the fight goes on. (but never reaching 100% chance) I like neither having a 100% nor 0% chance for CC to happen. I like when the chance becomes higher if you buildup special maluses on the enemy for a few turns but it should never be a 100% after a few turns.