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

ETA: Nope!

As far as your thoughts on armor, it is something I have thought about. And the answer is: Maybe.
It'd probably be, the less armor the enemy has the more status strength gets boosted on that enemy. I don't have plans for that presently but I could see that changing in the future if it feels right after testing.

This sounds great! I really would like a system like that (status strength boost of x% for every z% of enemy armor missing). Would make the turns a bit more tactical than they already would be with your mod, too. Especially with long cooldown AOE CC spells - you should never use them if you don't have other spells to follow them up, but they can be devastating for that specific turn if you have enough to combo them. (At least if the 70% of armor regenerates per turn idea from you makes it into the game - maybe decrease the armor regeneration a large notch thoughm, 25% or sth. - and increase the armor a good amount if that system makes it in? Right at the start of a battle would be the best mental and physical stability of a fight realisticly, too. So a 70% regeneration of armor would seem a bit overkill as it basically would give an almost fresh start each turn when it comes to CC reduction. I guess that needs a lot of playtesting though to see what feels right)

1. If there is no good ETA possible, can you give a range of time you want it to be done in? Can we expect it to hit mid/late 2018 or will it be more of a 2019/2020 release?

2. And another question: Will it be compatible with other mods or will everything be changed too much? I really like that you go for the just 10% increase of stats per level because I already use a mod which makes uses that system to allow a legendary weapon to actually be better than a rare one of 1-2 levels higher. Right now even a white weapon can outDPS a legendary one a level later. I want very rare weapons to be useful at least 3 levels if they stay as rare as they are right now. Same goes for money scaling with level which is insane in vanilla. But there are other mods which don't seem to be implemented in your mod already like "MonsterScaling" which levels up monsters to your level if you outlevel them while keeping all higher level enemies at their respective level. It doesn't increase the EXP gain but everything else. (I think the engine automatically gives bonus stats based on level and that's why it works so good without much scripting work done, so I wonder if your mod will be able to do the same with all the new stats you created) Especially with your focus on lategame not being a boring stomp every time - every enemy being leveled to your level if you manage to outlevel them if you do 100% of everything possible would help to further push that "lategame should still be hard" design. This way the casual player can enjoy your mod with just doing the main objectives and a few sidemissions they stumble upon but completionists will still have a challenge in lategame. Difficulty adapting to the player is always a welcome thing in games. And EnemyScaling would do exactly that.

My wife and me won't touch the game anymore until your mod is out. The patchwork mess we created works rather good (enemyscaling, the mentioned armor% mod and a couple of dozen mods ontop of that) but some things just don't work out perfectly due to the number of different mods needed. Your mod already includes half of the changes we wanted to achieve with our frankensteins monster version of the game and hence would highly reduce the number of mods needed to create exactly the experience we want from the game. I'm glad Larian gave us a lot of freedom when it comes to modding and that people like you exist which use the tools given to us to allow players to have a game exactly the way we want it to be. It's already an amazing game, but with the work of modders like you it becomes the almost perfect example of how this genre can be! (high freedom real time co op rpg with deep turn based combat with many options and possible combos - right now all of that works great except for the "deep" and the "many options and combos" parts which even lack behind the first game which was amazing in early game but was missing out on a lot of potential due to the 100% CC mess it became in lategame)

3. And one last question for this already very long post: Your resistance (not armor) system seems to be similar to D:OS 1. Will armor have different % based damage reduction for elements AND physical damage? And will physical damage be split into three categories again like it used to be? I really hate that a lot of the depth of that was lost. My ranger had no chance to kill a skeleton with normal arrows as pierce damage would do almost no harm to them. It made sense because skeletons are hard to hit with a piercing weapon as they are just bones and hence a blunt weapon would be much more effective. It added to the charm of the game that different enemies would be resistant or even weak to specific type of weapons. Right now there are still some enemies with high resistances to fire or other elements so you would need to use different schools of magic against them but when it comes to physical damage it just doesn't matter what kind of weapon you use. Just swing your weapon until something is dead. Switching a weapon before a fight or even midfight is just a waste of time right now which makes me sad. I really like the changes in your documentation on weapons (some pierce more against the real HP, others have grit throws, the damage and crit chances are balanced with lower chance to hit, etc.) but there doesn't seem to be any resistances against specific weapon types planned. Would love to hear your explanation on resistances for your mod ESPECIALLY when it comes to physical damage and if you plan on any resistances for weapon types or at least a flat/% physical damage resistance. (hitting a large pile of rocks with a weapon should for example not be effective and spells should be the way to go there - no matter if it is the start or end of a fight)

Asking the real questions here.
There's a lot of issues I have with how the armor system worked in DOS2.
Main ones being:
It was binary. I don't really have much to say, but this is why the new status system is rather granular.
It linked damage to your ability to crowd control.
That second point is important when fighting enemies of a higher level as that is what makes the level gaps that much more apparent. It was also why damage was way more important than.. Pretty much anything.
This is why the system is far more decoupled from armor than previously.
The moment you did enough damage, the enemy was easily crowd controllable for essentially the rest of the fight. This was the original reason for armor regenerating every turn.

Currently, however, armor is largely used as a way of mitigating damage rather than statuses.
With the scaling being reduced heavily I don't think relinking damage and armor under my system is a bad idea, as long as it's done lightly and keeps players thinking in the abstract, with full armor still only reducing the strength of statuses by say, 50%.
Main issue I would be concerned with about that is clarity. When a status is applied I'll probably set it up so it tells the player exactly what happened, such as -
Burning of strength 2 applied to Enemy. (6 strength - 2 grit, 50% reduced by armor)
But with weird numbers such as, enemy has 30% armor left (or worse yet, 139/417 armor left) something like that can be hard to calculate or think about on the fly.
That's something I really hated about damage linked with statuses. When the numbers got into the thousands and you had resistances to deal with, it was a bit of a nightmare to calculate how much damage needed to be actually done to strip someones armor and knock them down. Checking tooltips for how much damage it's doing now, factoring in their armor, etc. That's something I want to avoid with my mod - I want it to remain incredibly tactical, but I don't want it to get bogged down by numbers.

That ramble aside I do actually like the idea and there's a good chance it'll make it into the mod, or at the very least experimented with. I never liked my current linking of armor to statuses and have thought about removing it, but I like this much better. It will definitely make things harder to make feel right but I think I can do it.

As far as an ETA goes, uh.. Yes. Won't say what you can expect, but I guess you can hope for a mid/late 2018 release. I certainly hope I don't take the next 7 months to get a beta going. Oh boy. What have I gotten myself into.

Mod compatibility.. It will really depend on the mod. Chances are there will have to be a lot of compatibility patches made. Monster scaling relies on scripting and doesn't directly modify the stats of things, so it'd probably be compatible. It would probably only affect damage and health though.
In any case it is something I'll probably end up adding to my mod, just haven't added it to my document.
Anyways, most mods would probably not work with mine. If shown a mod I could probably tell you whether it'd work or not but even simple stuff like free bless would be rendered obsolete, faster run speed will probably be something my mod does, free pet pal will.. Well, pet pal is a druid thing now.

I know where the patchwork of mods comes from, I've been there. That was kinda the origin of this mod. So many issues with the game that I tried to fix with other people's mods until I realized the issues with the game ran deep - It'd basically require an overhaul of base game systems to get it to the point I wanted, and a collection of mods just simply can't do as the authors just can't be coordinated enough.

Piercing/Blunt/Slashing damage is something I definitely miss from DOS1. On paper combining them all into one makes some sense but in practice it's kinda a mess. It definitely removes a lot of potential depth from the game that I would have loved to have added. Unfortunately, however, adding new damage types is impossible without a hefty amount of scripting and even then, you can't deal damage to armor via scripting.
So no, new damage types are not being added.
As you probably know, Earth is being repurposed into Physical so it can deal damage to Magic armor, Physical armor is being removed, and current Physical armor is being repurposed into Light damage as a form of Piercing with a bonus to undead/decaying.
Physical (Earth) resistance is making a return however and it'll basically work like any other resistance, just be a lot rarer as an enchantment and your main source of it will be from likely the armor you wear. Enemies will also have it as makes sense by their enemy type. Bone golems or alike will probably be pretty physically resistant, for example.
With the combination of Physical into Magic armor, that also means having an enchanted weapon is actually a very good thing to have like it was in DOS1. I intend to make enchantments pretty powerful (25-50% of the weapon's total damage being made up of an elemental type, plus runes) so the element on the weapon is pretty much as important as the physical damage on it. I didn't like Physical being the be-all-end-all either.

Just stumbled upon this topic, and I'm instantly in love with your proposed system. Are you looking for any help/testing/feedback with this mod? I have a rudimentary knowledge of the Divinity Engine 2 and I understand the principles of programming well as a programmer myself, and following a busy week of university until Friday 4th of May I would be overjoyed to assist you with this somehow.

Otherwise though, please keep up the good work. I'm very excited to see how this goes, knowing fully well it could take a long time to implement.

I sent you a PM if you're serious. Right now it's a lot of crunch work, implementing abilities.

Thank you a lot for your detailed answer! I'm glad that you actually like the idea and that there's a good chance it'll make it into the mod. And I like that you give us some % based physical defence combined with the earth defence. It makes sense and should make battles against specific enemy types far more interesting. (full mage or full weapon parties won't have much of a chance against specific enemy types - like it should be) It's sad that the different weapon damage types won't make a return but I think at least having the option to get reduced weapon damage is better than what we have right now. I guess you will include an upper limit for those resistances though? Especially physical resistance would be bad to be able to go past 100%. In my opinion even more than 90% is already too much for the player races. I think investing into pyro/hydro/etc. could increase the resistance maximum, too? Not increase the resistance itself - but give you the option to go higher than say 70%. Basically everything could have a 70% (or any other specific number) resistance cap and to get higher than that you need to be trained in that element school. That way getting to 100% resistance needs actual investment and still requires a lot of good gear to get. (you know how to become a fireproof being, but you still need the magic armors and weapons to reach that resistance) Ofc the earth/physical limit still needs to be at maybe 80% max no matter how high you go as it would break the game being able to nullify or get healed by normal attacks.
Btw, I really like that you will incorporate things like faster movement speed and maybe even upscaling enemies into your mod. Pet Pal being a druid thing sounds fine to me tbh. It is not as much of a must have as it used to be in DOS1 anyways.

Aside from those things there are some other mods which I currently use which I wouldn't want to miss out on after using your mod when it comes out are. (I modified some of them slightly but you would have to tweak them to fit to your mod balance anyways) Maybe you would like to implement them in one way or another as all those are ease of life changes and no gamechangers like some of the other mods I use which I won't write down here as there are a) too many to count and b) most of them won't be needed if your mod turns out as good as it sounds right now!:
1. Let there be tooltips - This mod displays tooltips for interactive objects that don’t otherwise get them, even when highlighted. Let's put it this way: "Is that extremely barrel-looking, feeling and tasting object really a barrel? Now you know that it actually is!"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1161362151
2. Autoidentify - If you have loremaster 5 or higher all items added to your inventory are automatically identified without having to do it manually. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1179519817&searchtext=
3. Reduced number bloat - that one looks like it is going to be added into your mod already. Far less damage/hp increase per level, including less money drop and cost increase per level. To balance it out the heal potions (and poison potions for zombies!) need to get % based heal/poison instead of flat heal/poison though. And seriously: who wants numbers in the thousands anyways? Just makes it more complicated to calculate instead of acutally harder. I really like that you think alike in this regard.
4. toggle + long range spirit vision - makes spirit vision much easier to use to talk to ghosts etc. with the range being highly increased and the ability being a toggle

Will there be saving throws against CC btw? Or will it be a simple calculation to work with? I like some randomness in chance of CC and weapon swings missing even if you reach the needed thresholds. Never having a 100% chance for an effect to happen is great as it gives those crazy moments where either you or the enemy gets that 5% chance to not be affected by something even though all other criteria meet the requirements.
All those are minor things and nothing too crazy and might be nice to have already in the mod when you release it instead of people having to do compatible versions. It's great to see that a great modder actually has the same vision for the game as us. It gives us hope that you can fix the deep rooting issues with the combat part of the game and give thousands of players the experience they should have gotton in the first place.

There is currently a 75% resistance cap for everything. Elemental resistances usually have ways of getting that increased, temporarily or otherwise, such as fire resistance cap getting increased by Demon.
Physical Resistance will not be able to be increased past 75% and that'll probably apply to most enemies as well.
I don't think reaching 75% Physical resistance will be terribly easy either, or at least I will try to make it so.

The mods you listed -
All of them would probably be compatible.
Even reduced number bloat, if loaded after mine, would just override my numbers.

Randomness - No. No saving throws. Dodging is a thing but I don't think it's terribly difficult to get your chance to hit up to 100% by either reducing the enemies chance to dodge or your chance to hit. For CC effects the only RNG currently is an edge case involving Aptitude - If you cast a spell with 3 strength and you have 11 points in Aptitude, the strength will be increased by 10% up to 3.3. This translates to a strength of 3 with a 30% chance at a strength of 4.

RNG is something that I get asked about a fair bit but it's something I'm trying to break away from. That's one of the things I think Larian did right.
RNG in DOS1 was typically frustrating more than anything - Missing a 5% saving throw on a critical spell in the battle? In several cases during a DOS1 playthrough that meant the enemy was not CC'd the next turn and OTK'd my entire party, simply leading to a reload and try again. To me, having something with a 95% chance to hit doesn't create uncertainty, but rather takes something that I read as a certainty and has it fail.

I'd actually be more OK with a 50% chance for something to fail than a 5% chance, because the 50% chance you can rely on it to be unreliable. And if you can apply other statuses, potentially guarenteed ones, to make that 50% chance a 100% chance then you can turn the hail mary shots into something guarenteed with a few extra AP.

If people after my mod released still really want RNG such as that then it's going to have to come from another modder as an addon.

As someone who loves the XCOM series (at least the newer ones, the older ones had just way too many characters to control in one turn making fights way too long) I see it as "I can be lucky/unlucky - but the enemy can be lucky/unlucky too". And you plan ahead according to that. But I see your point about major RNG moments and I really like the 30% chance to get the powerlevel one higher instead of having it do nothing or everything - that makes every point into those stats useful instead of having 2 wasted points until you can invest the third one. Basically a minor RNG instead of a major one. I hope you will have more of those minor RNGs. (like the weapons doing x to y damage, spells doing x to y, etc.) Removing major RNG seems fine to me as it CAN be frustrating. But minor RNG is needed to keep you on your toes no matter how well you plan ahead. Or more accurately: it makes you plan ahead with the worst possible outcome in mind. Or makes you think about the best possible outcome (highest damage from the damage range + a crit) if you are in a dire situation you might lose if you don't try to go for that lucky shot. Having to go for a lucky crit and high damage from the damage range of a weapon or spell means you already did something wrong earlier in the battle but at least gives you a chance to recover from that mistake. RNG is not onesided but going for less major RNG seems fine to me as long as you keep the minor RNG.

And I like your approach of going for 50% chance effects which can be boosted to 100% with the investment of some extra AP with another spell. Maybe even make that buff vanish after doing a % based spell? Basically a "make your next spell/skill stronger and double the chance of all it's effects". That way it would work with all kinds of spells to increase the chance from 50% to 100% but it would only work for ONE spell. Else you could just use all the 50% chance spells together with that buff which would be bad. Could even be a source skill and have stacks, effecting the next 2 spells or sth. I dunno, just ideas.

As long as you still include minor RNG or have spells which remove 50% RNG chances from other spells I don't think anyone will need any major RNG. I like your approach of rather going for 50% chances than 95%. I think having damage ranges for weapons and spells and the 30% / 60% chance to get effects one rank higher as you mentioned depending on your skillpoints invested everyone who likes that bit of RNG will be happy. At least I would be. I mean you still got things like critchance. That way you always have a certain baseline damage with the chance of high damage. Crits, blockchance, evade and some minor damage ranges from x to y are all that's needed to give you those "YES" moments in battles when everything works together. A small question: With a 100% chance to hit - will you still be able to evade and block attacks? If yes that would make it very interesting to use debuffs on enemies AND buffs on yourself to get that 100% chance - making a 100% chance an actual INVESTMENT of AP which would be twosided.

Don't mistake what I said on RNG for what's going into the mod. Status effects/spells won't have RNG outside of what I stated in regards to having bonus Aptitude.
Using AP to get stronger effects is certainly a thing in the form of draining willpower, grit, or boosting your own aptitude. But it won't be particularly RNG-driven.

I suppose I don't view RNG the same way most people do. RNG does two things: It presents unknowables that force you to plan for the worst, and it gives a lot of granularity to an otherwise binary system.
The unknowables thing would be fine, if the worst case scenario could be planned around. But in RPG's it often can't and thus forces a reload. It may not happen often but it really does feel like the game is dicking you over.
The granularity would be fine.. If players did spells in batches of 100. In the long term it evens out and the player understands this. But it just feels wrong to me.

Unknowables/unknowns are of course what makes a tactics game interesting - with how hard it'll be to stun enemies, I'm aiming for enemies to fill that void. Without a threat of losing I don't think games are particularly fun.

Dodging however is very much a thing. If you have a 100% chance to hit and you try to hit something with 50% dodge, then you'll hit that particular enemy 50% of the time. If you have 150% chance to hit then you'll always hit it. Hitting an enemy is Chance to Hit - Dodge Chance. So yes, you'll be able to raise your chance to hit and lower their dodge to make you more and more likely to hit the enemy with your weapon, which will be important if using a low chance to hit weapon (battleaxe) or trying to hit a high dodge enemy. Or both.
Dodging and weapons in general could be viewed as a bit of an experiment on my part. Going to see if I can make RNG work as long as there's non-RNG ways to game the system into being 100% successful with what you do, but isn't required. I guess.

Crits are also still a thing, blocking is only going to be on player characters (never enemies) and will essentially act as a bit of a saving throw towards attacks.

Thank you for your response. Yeah, that it is what makes a tactics game interesting in most cases is exactly what I meant. But if the enemies make up for it with uncertainty of their actions it should still be fine. And having crits, hitchance and blockchance should be enough RNG if the enemies can offer a challenge and are a bit unforseeable in their actions, especially considering that spells can crit in D:OS 2.

The "definitive edition" has been announced for early august. I think you might want to stop the production until it releases - everyone who owns the original gets the definitive edition for free so everyone will have the new version. Would be better to build upon it for anything that can't just easily be translated over to the new version. They said the changelog will include several thousand smaller bugfixes and changes including some major ones. Would waste a lot of your time to work on it now and translate it to the new version in two months.

Yes I noticed. Unless they overhaul their scripting language or how character/status/potion/etc data is stored then the vast majority of my work will carry over on a technical standpoint, which is doubtful.
Biggest concern is any design changes they make - Should be interesting at the very least.
It's possible but I doubt the current systems in place are going to receive changes big enough for me to not make my mod. If they make combat not round robin, great. If they reduce the scaling, great. But I don't feel like Dex/Int/Fin are going anywhere and I doubt the armor system will change greatly. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

Biggest hope is that the game will receive updates to moddability, for things such as new damage types or.. Well, any of the countless things we don't have control over but probably should.
Even something simple such as getting who applied a status when it's applied is a painful ordeal. I have a workaround but I know other people do things such as: Check who's turn it is, check when someone's casting abilities, check when they attack, check everything to try to hopefully get who (probably) applied the status.

In any case I'ma keep working on stuff that I believe should translate, or if it doesn't I should still be able to run a script over the files to convert them for differences.

More options and tools for modding would be great. Let's hope for the best, the enhanced edition of D:OS had some surprising changes, too. I doubt they will change anything enough for your mod not to be needed though. Let's hope they don't delay the release so you can get into the parts of your mod which won't translate in august sooner rather than later.

Hi there, just a random dude passing by. I really love what you are doing and it look very promising. I can assure you I'm super pumped for this mod. Good luck with it.

Hi. I am too. Lots of work still to be done.

If it's possible, and if you want to, please send me a list of skill icons you want done (with detailed information on colors and etc). I'm a graphic design student and my vacations just started, and I'd like to give them a try.

Making icons for all the new stuff has actually proven to be one of the more time consuming parts of this mod. Would definitely appreciate help in that area. I sent you a PM.

Hi BlueFeuer, first, I love what you are doing. Second, I stumbled across your Initiative Fix mod on steam and eventually found my way here. I made an account and everything purely to see if you could use a guinea pig to test anything on for this overhaul. I don't have much in the way of knowledge about Divinity's inner workings, but I certainly don't mind testing (and sub sequentially breaking) anything in my own game. I do that already in the vanilla game lol. That being said I've modded games before and I'm quick to pick up this sort of thing with the right amount of help when needed. If you're ok with anything I have just said, shoot me a message and I will hopefully reply in a timely manner. I do not mind breaking my own game for the sake of testing something that could make this broken husk of a combat system. Hope to possibly work with you. ^^

Sent you a PM.
Currently I'm just setting up data for when DOS2DE launches, which won't take much testing to make sure it's working properly.
I intend to do another full vanilla playthrough when DOS2DE does launch to get a feel for where the game stands, and from there I'll begin adjusting things accordingly and tweaking/potentially overhauling encounters to fit within my systems. That's what will take a lot of testing but can't really be worked on beforehand.

Hello BlueFeuer. I had been hoping this definitive edition would have done more to address some of the wonky decisions by the devs on release, but alas, it seems it has not. In any case, I'm very interested in your mod as a person who has never shyed away from going past vanilla in most games. Do you have an expected time for an initial beta now that the definitive edition has come out? I've been looking for a decent overhaul since the release last year and this would seem to be most of the things I've been hoping for in such a thing.