D:OS2 on the other hand has been completely sterile. With the addition of magic and physical armor that prevent any and all statuses, the combat in the first half of any battle has been completely reduced to a 1980's style hack and slash arcade game. And afterwards? Sure there's lots of statuses you could apply after their armor is gone, but why would you want to use the vast majority of them when you can stun them permanently? The last half of every battle is just beating dead horses that can't fight back. All the interesting mechanics and options have been completely neutered. Sure, I could attempt to play the game the way I did D:OS1, but then that leads to substantially more difficult fights with the increased difficulty in D:OS2, because the AI abuses the new system like no tomorrow. The way combat works now, it forces you to play a very specific style, regardless of how tedious or uninteresting it is, or you'll be heavily handicapping yourself. The entirety of combat in the game has been reduced to hack and slash their armor, stun, hack and slash until they die, and if you dare stray from the formula, you're punished for it.
That's the long and short of it. You could try out some of the mods on nexusmods. There's at least one, if I'm not mistaken, that changes the armor system to a "resistance-based" one, more or less.
