Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback IMHO game has some fundamental flaws

You can tell when you play this game it is trying hard to be D&D, without using the D&D rule set. Which I applaud because I like that someone has come outside the box a bit. I am enjoying the game and having fun but I still feel there are some fundamental flaws to the game which could be addressed if not for this game possibly the next one.

My first post was about how Tactician mode is completely imbalanced which lead me to keep a serious eye on my next play through on Classic because I got fed up of being one shot in every battle I got into in Tactician and restarted.

First issue: RNG

I am typically the type of person who doesn't much favor RNG and I like tactical games where I know what is going to happen. But D&D was a lot of fun because you never really knew what was going to happen. It added that flavor of mystery and realism.

Example:

A sword does 1d6 damage (1-6). That's a huge variance in damage. But this is explained by saying maybe your hit just grazes your opponent (1) or you landed a perfect shot (6). You never really knew what the outcome would be of your attacks and it added flavor to combat and a sense of mystery.

DDO using the D&D rule sets was quite fun and interesting. I got excited seeing really good damage numbers or making that awesome save by 1 point.

As you level up you find magic gear and you gain +1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to your attack and damage. So even at high levels it would be 1d6+5 (6-11).

If you had a high str, say 20 points, that's another +10 to attack and damage. So 1d6+15 = 16-21 damage. That's still quite a big range, almost 30%. Add in spell effects like 1d6 fire damage on hit and you're looking at 17-27 damage. Now it's almost a 50% variance in damage.

You can see as you level up, get stronger and find better gear that variance is lessened but it's still there.

In this game weapons and spells have almost no RNG to them. My warriors sword does 269-311 damage. That variance is so low, only about a 20% difference, that you pretty much know exactly what is going to happen before you even attack. Someone has 500 health? it will take exactly 2 hits to kill him. No more no less. And it takes a bit of the flavor away from combat I think.

Spells are the same too. Almost no damage variance to them at all. If you meet a monster who casts fireball, it's going to hit you for that same 600 damage every single time he casts it no matter how many times you reload your game.

Spell effects also have no 'save' roll to them. In this game all you have to do is blow out your enemies armor and you get 100% chance to succeed to freeze, petrify, knock down, poison, burn etc...

I think that ends up making the game a bit crazy heavily dependent on CC. The entire game turns into whoever CC's first wins. Since wands do so little damage I've actually considered just putting 1h swords on my casters so they can use battering ram and battle stomp to have 4 characters spamming knockdown all day. I mean that sounds rather silly but incredibly stupidly effective.

Your first 2 chars leap into combat, remove opponents armor, your next battle stomps and knocks em all down. Then just rinse and repeat battle stomp with each of your 4 characters because even a caster with full intelligence has 95% accuracy with a 1H sword.. which I don't understand why accuracy of the weapon isn't dependent on the stat that is required to use them.

It's silly to think if there are 4 guys in front of you, and you blow out their magic armor in one turn all your rogue has to do is pop in and put Medusa Head on and it's 100% guaranteed 2 rounds of petrify on all of them. No save rolls, no chance to succeed... it just happens.

I think that's a major flaw and I would have preferred spell effects to have a base chance to succeed with lower probabilities against characters with higher stats. Have a higher str score = less likely to get knocked down/slowed. Have a high int score = less likely to be feared/charmed. Have a high con score = less likely to be petrified/frozen. Something along those lines. I mean you can fiddle with numbers and percentages to happen I just think there should be a way to possibly resist these effects both players and monsters.

Because of this I feel like combat is a bit predictable which actually ends up taking a bit of the fun away. You know exactly how much you're going to hit for, then know exactly which CC you're going to use, which leads to it working 100% of the time, then leads to your victory.

Second issue: Character/Item levels

Oh man. I like getting more powerful when I level up just as I'm sure anyone does. It gives a sense of purpose in gaining levels which is good. But I think Larian went over the top with how powerful gaining levels actually is.

When you gain a level you gain about 15% more life, spells deal about 15% more damage and weapons/armor gain 15-30% more armor and damage. This is an incredible amount of power over a very short period of time.

I started noticing the huge amounts of power differences in gear and took note of just how crazy it was. Let's do some quit comparisons.

Shields:
Level 11 LEGENDARY shield: 176 armor/126 spell armor (has a sweet mod to reflect 40% of damage as fire!)

What an awesome shield! So fun to play with.

Level 12: Rare shield: 200 armor/137 spell armor.

Hrm that's a pretty good increase, but meh not really enough to make me want to lose the 40% dmg reflect mod.

Level 12 Epic shield: 210 armor/147 spell armor.

Great. That's about 20% more armor which also means 20% more shield throw damage. So uh yah guess I have to dump the legendary shield for just an epic shield only 1 level higher.

Level 13 RARE shield: 280 armor/192 spell armor.

Holy crazy hell. That's almost another 30% increase in armor over the previous one. And it's only a blue shield. Just think about that for a second. A BLUE level 13 shield has 50% more armor values than a level 11 LEGENDARY shield. Like... lolwut?!

It seems almost a waste of gold to even be purchasing legendary items as you're just going to out level them in 1-2 levels since blues 2 levels higher have 50% more stats.

Now for sale at the shop:

Level 14 Epic shield: 374 armor / 262 spell armor.

Good god. That's a 33% increase in armor, which also means a 33% increase in shield throw damage! For just one level higher?

And it's 78% more armor over the shield I had just 2 levels ago. That's just....... just......

WHAT?! LOL!

My necromancer/summoner (2 warfare, 10 summoning, 3 necro) hits for 346-384 with bouncing shield... which hits TWO enemies... and he only does 206-228 with Mosquito Swarm with 27 intelligence.

LOLWUT?!

How about some weapon comparisons:

I got a sweet level 11 2H from a quest for my warrior: Unique 48-51 damage. And it gives a sweet source skill.

Level 13 Rare 2H: 62-71 damage.

Oh man. I find a blue 2H sword 2 levels later and it's already doing 30% more damage than a level 11 unique. Sad I have to dump that sword already.

Level 13 Legendary 2h: 69-76

Welp, another 10% damage boost. Gotta use it.

Level 14 Legendary 2H: 79-91 + 16-19 air

LOLWUT? What just happened? My current weapon (72.5 dps) is now obliterated by the one for sale (102.5 dps).

A legendary 2H axe just one level higher than my current Legendary 2H sword is almost 50% increase in damage? LOL!

Larian seriously... this is completely NUTS!

Level 14 Legendary 1H mace: 48-56 + 10-12 poison.

Like lol that mace does almost the same damage as my level 13 rare 2H sword.

I mean I could go on with armor too but it's the same story. The amount of power increase in stats is absolutely out of control if you ask me in how much stats change on gear even just one level higher.

This puts an immense amount of pressure on the player to upgrade gear. And with the absolutely pitifully low drop rates of gear in this game that isn't easy to do. In fact I may go as far to say it could be impossible to beat this game on Tactician or Honour modes without stealing gear/gold/skill books.

This isn't Diablo. We can't just go to an area, farm some mobs, go back to town, sell, go back out and farm more mobs. Each encounter is a set encounter and there's a limited amount of experience and gold we can earn.

Getting about maybe 8-10 encounters per level, with maybe 8-10 upgrades to gear (some gear you probably wont use) it makes it incredibly difficult to keep up with the power creep. The difficulty of this gets multiplied in Tactician mode because mobs have 50% more hp/armor/damage and if your gear isn't all up to par every single level you're probably going to get stomped into the ground.

I think this amount of power creep is a huge flaw and really should get toned down, a lot. I think a legendary piece of gear should at the very least buy you 2-3 levels of play especially since they're running me a good 3-5k gold a pop at my level. But knowing how fast they are going to get replaced it's just not worth buying them. I'd rather take the blue one for half the cost, with just a little less damage and upgraded 2 pieces of gear over the cost of 1.

I also noticed some areas seem to have a set level for the gear you can find in chests and barrels. I was level 13 going back somewhere and found a piece of gear in a box I didn't look in. It was level 10. So instantly I already know I don't care what the stats say it's vendor fodder. Which makes me a little sad.

This also meant when I killed that giant troll with 16,000 HP when I was level 13 I was super excited when I saw a legendary ring on him because he was level 18!

That ring has 279 magic armor on it which is now over half of the magic armor my rogue (540 total) has on her LOL!

One level 18 ring has more magic armor value than the rest of her entire gear set in full 12-14 finesse gear, amulet and ring.

Like really? Cmon guys that's not good balance.

I saw a 'mod' area in the game and figured I'd go see what mods are out there on nexusmods. There was a mod I saw that said it allowed you to increase your gear level for the cost of gold. I didn't really understand just how powerful that mod is till after I started looking at gear comparisons.

I mean just think if you find that awesome sword with the exact stats you're looking for like crit and life steal on it then level up once or twice that item is now all but worthless. I'm not using any mods but I understand why that mod was made now.

Don't get me wrong I still enjoy the game and am having fun. Mostly the story and the encounters though. Some of these side quests were incredibly well written and are extremely fun just to watch how they unravel. But I do feel the combat of the game could use some tweaking in regards to the points I made above.

The armor system got implemented because some people seem to have moaned about the RNG of effects on the first game. Instead of refining the system with a less harsh fail or success version, they scrapped the whole system and invented a totally new and in my eyes pretty lacking new system. The kind of put in the new system to prevent perma-cc battles, but in the end they made it more tedious to cc enemies, but much easier to keep them in perma-cc as soon as you got their armor down.

Though there have been already tons of topics regarding this topic and also the pretty insane level scaling and dependence on getting good enough equipment. Though in my eyes those problems are only the tip of the iceberg.

If you put RNG in a game people will complain about it, if you dont put RNG in a game people will complain about it, i think its almost impossible to please everyone in that sense, however i do feel that CCs are extremely powerful, once the character armor is depleted you can basically CC someone to death, maybe CCs could be nerfed(maybe the character becomes temporarily imune to CC after receiving one).
I think that the problem of item level scaling is that it scales after every level you get, in many rpgs the itens scales after every act, in other words no matter how high level you character is if you are still on the act 1 you will still receive weak itens so when you find a legendary in act 1 you will keep using it until you reach a certain point on act 2.

The way CC and armor works sucks but I don't think RNG is the way to go about this.
I'm working on a mod and my solution is to make CC/statuses much more granular by making 8 versions of all those statuses of varying strength, and applying as an example a Chill of strength 4 to a Chill of strength 2 will result in the target having a Chill of strength 6. Only when reaching the 8th tier would the target actually be frozen, and the strength of statuses can be tweaked on a per-skill basis and increased via attributes or reduced/saved against via Willpower/Grit.
Doesn't rely on the armor system and gets rid of the binarity that system brought to the table, without reintroducing RNG.

Sorry this is a feedback area so I don't tend to sit there reading through 100's of threads to see what's posted and not posted. I come in and give my feedback and hop off.

I mean it's great there's a company out there willing to try new things and come up with a system of their own. I just don't feel it was tested enough to the point where someone actually sat down and said "OK guys this combat system is GREAT! You can perma CC mobs with 3 times your vitality while you kill off the adds and every time you level you do 30% more damage!". I don't think anyone said that.

I'm also confused about other stuff too which I didn't feel was really worth make a big fuss about like why doesn't Rain of Blood apply wet? Why are wands so pathetic in damage? Why does Necromancer benefit more from Warfare than Necromancer? Shouldn't warfare be weapons only, and necromancer boost spells? Why does every single mob out there know I have glass cannon on and instantly target me over the other 3 party members? There's a ton of stuff I could nitpick about but these were the major battles I wanted to talk about.

Just feels like there was a lack of testing (in the combat area at least) done and could have used some better testers.

It was tested a lot during EA, attribute system was even more aweful than it now is. Though they seemed never that bothered to much about our opinion of a few it seems.

Magic in general is pretty weak, and got even nerfed more because magical effects now need to two layer to apply stuff like stun or burning, while physical effects always take instantly effect.

that Warfare is the go to for pretty much every physical class, just shows how shallow they made character progression. Same goes to 'take polymorph' if you want to boost all magic damage in the early game (for additional intelligence).

In the end they only read and hardly ever discuss, so we have no idea what they are thinking and why. So this forum sometimes feels more like talking to walls.

Like some other said earlier, when it incorporate randomness, people will complain and when you incorporate known data, people will complain also....and some of those will complain on both...

Best example is Bloodbowl (computer game version of it), I think increasing the difficulty seem to increase your chances to roll 1-2s on the dice...seriously...when you look at the dice thrown overall at the end of the game, rolls of 5-6 is like 15% combine and you wonder why it was so hard to do anything....well that is a game random based... and when this happens, it's no fun at all.

It doesn't make the game difficult, because the next fight, you might just rolls 5-6s 50% of the time and just cruise to victory.....so a simple reload and you're good instead of a constant challenge...

When it is chessboard style, there is no luck or very few....evens out the difficulty ahead

Many time in DOS2, you will win your fight because you know when to CC the enemy....you won't do relevant damage but knowing which enemy to counter and surviving the other enemies makes a good strategy...

As for gearing strategy, it makes the challenge harder when you have lower gear....
I like to gear up every 3 lvlup with the best gear in the shop...meaning spending hours and reloads to get the exact gear that I want....and those will last 3 lvls.... the first lvl will make it easier while the 3rd one will make this harder... so lvl 4-7-10-13-16...
it creates you're own challenge anyway....behind this, instead of comparing yourself with who can finish the game and who can't ....it is more of a how you've done this...won't show anyway either way...but you make you're own challenge, this is what I mean

Yep I figured out very quickly in this game since armor blocks CC you either want to focus your team 100% on physical or 100% on magical.

Considering the fact melee/archer characters don't do tons of elemental damage easily... it only makes sense to set your entire team up for physical damage. I actually don't even have a fire caster in my group. Warrior/Rogue/Necro/Healer. Nec and Healer with shield throw to boot. Healer just throws some ice/water to remove surfaces.

I've actually thought about turning my healer from a cold caster to an archer healer so she can pummel guys with phys dmg/knock downs in between heals.

Only way I could see magic damage working is if your entire team is set as casters. But then you have two problems:

1) You need TWO effects to CC (wet/shock to stun, wet/cold to freeze, shock/shock to stun)

2) Fire, oil and acid blow away all the wet surfaces and remove wet status. Which really sucks. You'd have to make sure your fire caster goes first with highest initiative every time then wet everything to freeze them.

Physical can just plow thru phys armor then knockdown freely.

I'm actually quite confused about the balance of armor vs vitality. If you have to break through armor to CC then shouldn't armor be the higher stat over vitality? Instead of like 1000 armor, 800 magic armor and 2500 vitality, shouldn't it be more like 1800 armor, 1500 magic armor, and 1000 vitality?

That's a bit more realistic too if you think about it. If you have no armor on i can stab you a good 2-3 times and ur dead. But if you have armor on it could take a good 6-10 hits before I finally puncture it or find a weak spot.

Not just more realistic but better game balance as well so people aren't getting CC'd constantly from 1 player attacking on first turn. This would also make skills that bypass armor a bit more useful as well.



I hope that's not true. If I put my heart and soul into a game I'd probably read feedback forums to see how people are reacting to my game. Of course you can't implement everything people are suggesting but at least read and listen.

The issue of armor got adressed since start of Early Access and pretty much the same goes for the imbalance between physical and magical, still they made magic even weaker.

Physical damage can shred armor much more easily, because damage mainly depends on weapon and not level and also there are hardly any resistances. Physical resistances got completely removed, only a few boss like creatures still have some if I'm not mistaken.

Give you healer a shield and she can do a lot of damage with shield throw alone.

Shred down armor and put them into a doom zone, than you can easily keep them knocked down every turn with warfare skills.

HP in general are pretty pointless, armor down and enemie is dead meat in most cases. Though giving them more armor would not make the game more fun, just more tedious. Even more on Tactician, were some bosses out right can do one-turn kill even the beefiest guy in your team.

The whole game is just a mess of numbers: You with a few hundred and end with xx thousend. And every level up seems to have bigger impact on your numbers than the attributes you chose. The could auto-level attributes and it would hardly affect your playstyle anyway, because attributes are only about more damage too. You can only decide on how you want to deal damage (melee, ranged, magical, crit), not on how you want to play and attributes pretty much counterdict crossclassing now, even more if you compare it to the first game.

Good topic.

Had fun reading it.

Thanks for posting... and yeah. Pretty much a lot of the feedback given already addressed the same things you were talking about. Hope Larian takes a note.