Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Definitive Edition Difficulty Mode

For someone who has several hundred hours of play, I wish that tactician mode was harder.

I remember in DOS:EE that some fights in tactician featured more enemies or random surprises that happened in the middle of fights.

In DOS2 this was just more stats and HP on enemies. This was not a big enough challenge to experienced people.

Also, the gold and EXP was too high which made the mode not as hard as intended.

Make tactician truly more difficult or change honour mode to actually raise difficulty because the experienced players are not challenged by tactician.

It's a joke

Concrete suggestions on how to change it would be more helpful, because there is an incredible variety in player skill and experience. Some people struggle on explorer, others sleepwalk through Tactician.

What kinds of changes would you like to see to make the game more challenging?

Simple: if more HP is not enough, then EVEN MORE HP 8)

Or there's a formula used by Baldur's Gate: all damage done by enemies is doubled.

Maybe a combination of both...?

There's a mod that does this: randomly promoting enemies to "elite" rank and giving them random permanent buffs. Dragon Age Inquisition's Trials has a similar feature that can be toggled on/off.

Or add a global +1 or +2 to all enemies' level. This can be seriously broken though, I'm not sure.

I would like more of the things from DOS:EE Tactician: elemental immunity, elemental wards, surprise adds during fights, new summons, more enemies, more abilities.

So the definitie editions adds a easier mode but not a harder one??

Cmon Larian, please add a more harder mode than tactician and not the Honour Mode 1 save style.

Was wishing for a mode that added more enemies (without affecting the xp progression) instead of making them HP-piñatas. I absolutely hate it when the AI cheats.

It would be great if Larian would add additional difficulty. On my second playthrough, even the Honor mode felt easy. But I doubt they would do that - too much effort and there's plenty of noobies who are having a hard time even on normal while trying to faceroll over all the encounters, without even thinking of trying to find another path. So I guess, again only mods could help us.

I'm in a similar boat - my friends and I love this game and we've really come to master the various fights and builds with a hefty amount of meta knowledge and testing. We feel that the tactician mode is far too easy (not from a boastful standpoint - we SHOULD be able to beat it easily if we have that much practice). My point is that many of us who love the game and have played a crazy amount of it search desperately through mods to find anything that makes the game very difficult despite having all that experience. We even have self imposed rules.

- We don't allow more than 3 characters
- We don't allow lone wolf
- We don't allow 5 of the more broken spells
- We don't allow prebuffing fights

...and several others, you get the idea.

SUGGESTIONS FOR MORE DIFFICULTY

Overwhelmingly we feel that too much experience is provided. We feel getting to level 4 or 5 is a fine pace but beyond that we have to actively avoid getting experience just to not outlevel everything. This doesn't feel good. I think that if there was some box we could click on the difficulty setting that said "1/2 XP GAIN" before you started a game, it would SOLVE SO MUCH. We want to feel like we need to scour the land for every drop of xp - showing true mastery of the game by completing a larger percentage of the quests and exploring a larger percentage of the game.

Increased Hit Points can help. Although usually at higher difficulties our parties focus on infinite CC loops and so more hit points aren't that hard to deal with.

Teleport to players. I love the terrain advantages (especially with height) in the system but I think it is too easy. Throw some spider goop on a pack of melees and a chest in front of a ladder and then fall asleep while you kill everything at zero threat. I wonder if it would be possible to have a large AP cost spell that allows enemies to move to a player. Just a thought.

Lower gold availability - and reduce the value of charm arrows sold to merchants. We buy every arrow/arrow head and use an infinite supply of honey in act 2 to have ridiculous amounts of gold. A lot of the merchant farming comes from having so much gold, we constantly refresh merchants to find that slightly better item. It is tedious. In earlier runs when we didnt have enough gold we didn't spend nearly so much time shopping. It was actually more fun not having access to everything all the time.

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I realize your fanatical players are a smaller percentage of your player base - but we are also the percentage of your base that keep coming back, participate in the community and bully our friends that haven't heard of these games into buying and playing with us. We are the ones that vote in online polls, we are the ones that write reviews, walkthroughs and guides. As a nearly 40 year old gamer that has experienced 100s of games, I can say that Divnity 2 is nearing the absolute top of more entertaining games - and falls short ONLY on available difficulty level. This is legitimately the ONLY thing keeping it from the absolute highest ranks of multiplayer rpg. Mods help but Larian should have an INSANE difficulty that provides a standard to all of us.

Thanks for hearing me out!

So you are exploiting mechanics to abuse the game, and then... complain that mechanics exist that let you abuse the game?

If you want more difficulty, you could try NOT abusing the game.

@Stabbey I don't want to derail the topic, but I believe the logic is consistent. Ideally I want to work within the boundaries of the game and take every advantage I can from the set of rules presented. Arbitrarily limiting ourselves is a practice we already use, but it gets a little fuzzy at times and is ultimately subjective and starts to break the immersion of the system.

For example if you are referring to selling crafted arrows for profit being abuse, then is selling any crafted item an abuse if we find that it sells for more than the sum of its parts? Rather than say "well just don't do that" wouldn't it be better if the devs looked at some resold items that were perhaps returning too high of margins and toned them down a bit?

I want to push the boundaries of any system. If we find something that gives too much of an advantage we tend to remove it from our strategy as it lowers the fun. After a while if there are too many big advantage strats then what we really have is a cumbersome list of rules to follow.

The original suggestions were for increasing some of the difficulty in tactician or creating a difficulty above tactician for those of us that want a more difficult experience without having to placing too many artificial limitations.

If it can improve the game for a lot of us without taking anything from other difficulties and without creating too much work for the devs then I don't really see any down side.

I would like it to be 75-80% of EXP earned for our characters and more enemies OR they have another 30-50% more armour.

Due to how the experience ends up scaling to levels 75%-80% would have a very minimal effect. It would be better than nothing - but I've played with the mod that removes 75% exp and even that seems to barely stop the levels coming in. I know that seems crazy but take a look at the level chart.

Ideally exp reduction would keep you about 2 levels below what we normally hit after the first island. I'd say hitting the end of the 1st act at level 7 should be the lowest you'd want to aim for.

As for armor - I'm all for that as a component of the "insane" difficulty.

+%hit points
+%armor
-%money
-%exp

Just my opinion but I think that could be great.

Do the devs here listen?

They listen to many things, that doesn't mean they act on everything. If there was going to be a harder difficulty mode added, they would have mentioned that in one of the recent updates.

Because they have not, that means there won't be one when the DE releases. That does not rule out the chance that they might add a harder mode to the DE some time after release, but it does make it less likely.

And honestly there is such a wide variety of player skill that finding a harder difficulty which would be good enough would be difficult. You have people who complain that Explorer was still too hard, and at the other end of the spectrum you have Qiox who boasts that he beats honor difficulty without using any magic schools or any healing except food.

To be honest, I doubt there ever will. A higher difficulty mode may make sense to you who may have found the cheesiest way of manipulating the game mechanics into making it easy, but you're of the 0.1% esque playerbase. The majority of players finds even classic mode satisfyingly challenging. Some have even complained it's too difficult.

So if you take into account the amount of work required to make an even higher difficulty mode that isn't only a stat-increase more hp/damage ordeal in order to cater to such a small audience that only exists because they meme the hell out of their sandbox'ey system and then complain about the game being too easy because they're cheesing it out, to me sounds like a bit of backwards thinking if I'm to be very blunt.

They could of course attempt something similar to what I'm attempting in one of the new systems in my mod, which basically tries to detect methods of cheesing and reacting upon it, nullifying the whole cheese thing. Which by nature makes the game harder again. But that goes a bit against their combat design philosophy as you're 'meant' to find those weaknesses, play around and see how well you're able to manage yourself in the world of Rivellon.

Don't be sad that the game is easy. Be happy that you're badass 😎

Yeah, it's just lazy/ridiculous to me that Honour Mode is basically tactician but with permanent death.

Why not make Honour Mode with even harder enemies, lower EXP, and different features and maybe drop the permanent death or even still keep it on.

Tactician in this game is honestly not hard at all.

Death is also only permanent, if the complete team gets killed.

Having more options for your player base is going to be better. I don't think anyone can reasonably argue to take away options (e.g. remove difficulties, remove spells, remove classes) and so I would think the inverse would be true. There seems to be quite a lot of people who would be interested in some sort of higher difficulty without having to use a bunch of mods. The mods are still available to go beyond that point of course.

That being said...........

I think the biggest issue in a higher difficulty is not "would it make the game better" but rather does it make sense for Larian to do so from a time perspective. Some of the suggestions have frankly been rather greedy and not at all realistic, and while personally I love the creativity - I just don't see it being feasible.

I think Stabbey had a good point in another thread about everything with the definitive edition being wrapped up by now so nothing we suggest is going to make it into that outside of a patch. Assuming this is the case - any difficulty suggestion would likely need to be something on the scale of what goes into a patch.

I'll advocate for a higher difficulty for the rest of my days but I also understand we need to be realistic. And, while there are a lot of us interested in a fancy higher difficulty we might want to keep our suggestions very simple if there is any chance in them being adopted.

To that end...........

My suggestion still remains a significant decrease in (EXP, GOLD) for players and a significant increase in (ARMOR, HEALTH) for enemies. I could be wrong but I imagine something like this could be done very simply and could be achieved with a check box on tactician rather than a whole new difficulty name.

I realize to some this just doesn't seem like a priority to them, and they enjoy the current difficulty options - but many of us who are looking for more of a challenge feel it could make a big difference. If the shoe was on the other foot, and I was in a thread advocating the addition of some element that was meaningless to me, but seemed to have a strong following - I would at least be neutral if not supportive of their efforts. After all I think we all want the game to be as good as it can be, allowing people of all different types of gaming preferences to enjoy themselves.

After completing countless campaigns over absolutely ridiculous amounts of hours - my group of friends feel that having the greater challenge would increase our enjoyment considerably.

@Larian - I know everyone asks this but it would be great if you gave us some of your thoughts on this concept. If it isn't something you guys are interested in doing I'll stop posting about it . Thanks regardless!

You'd be surprised: some people have been quite insistent about removing the "easier" difficulties. Because apparently the risk of alienating a chunk of Larian's player base is somehow a good idea... somehow. Likewise removing functionality they claim to not use, e.g. save anywhere as often as you want.

I agree it would be nice for the to really balance this all out, but most things mentioned aren't all that hard to modify and if/when you get it done you could share and give us all the adjustments in details.