Played through the game a couple times, have some thoughts about experience gain, the armor system, CC, civil abilities, gear, and also one sort-of bug to report?
NOTES: Mostly played Lone Wolf, either solo or with a single Origin companion. That probably affects a lot of what I'm saying here (and without using Cloak or Invis, so I actually engaged in combat).
BUG/ODDITY: In DE, after talking to Roost Anlon, I noticed that my Chronicle had an update mentioning that Alexander had been seen on an island (the Nameless Isle) but that subject had never come up in conversation (I had no companions with me at the time). This was really confusing, and I spent several minutes reloading and re-playing sections to figure out where that chronicle update had come from. Anyway, right now the Chronicle provides this information seemingly out of nowhere after talking to Roost, and he should probably either mention it, or the Chronicle should be changed.
EXPERIENCE GAIN: It bothers me a little as a player that some ways of completing quests, or some actions, simply provide more experience than others -- often, ways that involve killing a lot of people or engaging in more combat provide more experience. This creates a tension for me every time I play between RPing my character and optimizing as a player; do I want to let these Magisters live by talking them down, or say screw it and slaughter them all? From a pure story point of view, I understand that there isn't really an optimal path or "true ending," and I appreciate that. But because some of these paths provide more experience than others -- a limited, non-replaceable resource -- it's frustrating to play some kinds of characters compared to others. Not sure I have much else to say about that. I guess this could be addressed by modifying quests and enemies such that completing a quest will give the same experience regardless of combat or not and that quest participants won't give experience for being killed after a quest is over, e.g. talk down these Magisters for 5k + 5k experience, or fight them all for 5K + 1K/each of 5 Magisters, something like that. This tension doesn't bother me when it comes to loot; it makes perfect sense to me that killing a bunch of people would provide better loot or more money, and that crime basically pays. But experience, being to me a more abstract notion and one more fundamental to character progression, is more irritating when provided more to specific characters or play-styles than others.
CIVIL ABILITIES: These are mostly fine, if uninteresting. Not going to comment too much on specific abilities. Mostly, because of the progression speed, characters pick a single civil ability and focus on that for the first 2/3 or 3/4 of the game, which makes the whole thing a bit dull. I understand that with 4 party members, one can cover most of the important abilities. I wish that Bartering had the same QOL change that Loremaster and Lucky Charm did, in which the highest Barter character automatically used their Barter when trading (although, this would get more complicated when factoring in favorability rating, as those stats might be across different characters; not sure what to say about that). I only say that because moving stuff around between character inventories is some painful bookkeeping. Anyway, my one big combat on Civil Abilities is that Lone Wolves get screwed here: in every other respect, they can sorta keep up with normal characters, but a pair of Wolves gets 1/2 the Civil Abilities and a solo gets 1/4 -- basically just enough to cover either Thievery, Persuasion, or Bartering. Lone Wolves are already really strong for most of the game (haven't played a solo in DE into Arx yet), so I get it if they aren't supposed to be wonderful at Civil Abilities as well.
GEAR: People have mentioned it elsewhere, but a way to genuinely change the level of gear would be neat, other than using Corbin into Arx. I understand, however, that if there was a consistent and easy way to do this, people would hunt for good stats and then stick with gear forever. Maybe, like, use a Source Orb to upgrade a piece of gear to one's current level? Or upgrade it by a level or two? I dunno. One would still have to look for better gear anyway, as Legendary/Divine stuff gets thrown in the mix and one can simply get more stats from those. It just stinks big time to find a neat piece of gear with a bunch of good stats, and know that it's going to get dropped in the vendor toilet after another level or two. All gear feels transitory and somewhat unrewarding until very late into the game, at around level 18 or 20.
CC and ARMOR:
Crowd control and armor is really important to a Lone Wolf character. Playing as a solo makes the details of the armor/effects system more apparent, but it also means that these comments matter less to standard groups of 4 or even 2. So, take these however you will.
I know that people have talked a lot about the armor system, and how it can be weird or bad -- combat being very much about blasting through one kind of armor ASAP so that one can then layer on the CC and deal real HP damage; additionally, having armor stop CC means that most interesting status effects are non-existent until a unit is already half dead. Yeah, that's kinda true. What has bothered me is how much armor is straight up superior to health a lot of the time, and playing Lone Wolf, health is nearly irrelevant: in at least half of the encounters, as soon as a relevant armor value is down, the CC starts and it's game over (for oneself, and often for the enemy). At the same time, I really appreciate some of what the new armor system does: it makes damage calculation clear and easy, and it allows status effects to have consistent trigger conditions without making them always-on deals (though this is somewhat inconsistent with the continued randomness in accuracy and critical hits, which are a nasty issue on Honor mode). Playing solo, with very few exceptions, getting CC'd a single time means death. All of this in mind, here are three potential changes to Armor and CC that would be tweaks without overhauling anything. I'll start with the smallest and work towards the biggest changes.
1. Change Perseverance. Make it return armor at the beginning of any turn during which a character doesn't have the corresponding armor type, not just when recovering from CC. This ability is garbage right now except on bosses, and this change would make it more interesting -- and maybe too strong, except for how it would interact with change 3.
2. Make many forms of CC reduce AP generation, rather than skip turns entirely. For example, Stunned, Frozen, and Knocked down could cause -4 AP generation rather than totally skip a turn. In plenty of circumstances, this would be the same as skipping a turn, except that a character would get to use any AP they had stored -- at most 1 or 2. A Hasted character would get maybe 1 more AP to use. Bosses and Lone Wolf characters, however, would have some chance to reply (I get the sense that most bosses generate a crap ton of AP). Lone Wolves would still gain 2 AP for their turn, and bosses would gain however much, making CC still painful but less devastating against big, single characters. The game could be less about blasting through resistances to stun-lock major enemies, then, even if the same idea would apply to crowds.
3. Make all damage be dealt half to armor, half to HP; effects still only trigger when armor is 0. This would make healing and Necromancy better, and raw armor generation worse -- as a matter of fact, it could be possible to have too much armor, such that a character would die before they can lose it all. This change would also delay how quickly CC abilities come into effect. It might be worth increasing all HP values by about 15% to compensate (which would make fights a tad longer, not a bad thing). This change would also make abilities that directly destroy armor values a lot better, like Gag Order or Corrosive Touch, because destroying armor is now different from simply dealing damage of a particular type. Finally, this would make split damage more relevant, whether that's a weapon that deals physical + poison + fire, or a team that has a single mage. Now, every character is contributing some damage, whether or not they are part of the right element. Plus, this armor change would do nothing to screw around with the benefits of the current system mentioned above, namely the simple math and mostly predictable results.
4. I don't know if this is really necessary, and I am not suggesting it per se, but if the above armor change would too dramatically reduce the importance of status effects, and those won't to be brought back into the game, then maybe armor could only partly reduce status effects as well. For example, if a character would be Knocked down or Crippled, they instead become slowed; if a character would become Frozen, they instead become Chilled; Chilled becomes Wet; Stunned becomes Shocked, and so forth; while armor is up, anything that would trigger a higher-level Status instead causes a status one level lower, and the highest level CC (hard CC, whether of the current kind or the -AP kind I mentioned) would be impossible, and would simply renew the duration of the effect one level lower. This way, elemental effects could remain important, without being a binary all-or-nothing deal.
I know some of those changes would be fairly drastic, and I don't mean to say "Make these changes or the game is bad" or anything like that. I've really liked DOS2, and so the things that bothered me have stuck out, and I spent some time thinking about them. That's all. There's a bunch of crazy stuff one could do if one wanted, like introduce a regular predictable system for Dodge and Crit to make it more inline with the armor system instead of the %-chance system, but that seems too drastic to me. Thanks for the game!
