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

Probably don't expect a release date for a few months. Work on this project has kinda hit the backburner as far as priorities go but I'll find some time coming up to work on it more.

There's a lot this mod is trying to do and a lot of it is incredibly time consuming and tedious to get done.

Especially with some new systems already in place like a talent which makes damaging dots go through armor some more balance shifts are needed for the mod, too. And many features like UI changes for mouse/keyboard from the DE are still coming and not yet out.

not going to lie, epic encounters made CC harder to stack and added a stupid 2 turn out of 6 limit to hard CC which pretty much downright ruined CC completely. I hope thats not what youre going for here. if so please consider splitting the changes into seperate mods where possible. I like the stats changes, I like the INT fix, but if you mess with CC the way epic encounters does...big thumbs down.

Interesting you should mention the two turn limit. I've done a couple playthroughs of DOSEE with Epic Encounters and one of the things I manually disabled pretty quickly was the two turn limit on hard CC.

But making CC harder to apply to enemies; Sorry but that's not really going anywhere. If it's possible to disable all enemies in a fight that makes it impossible for meaningful risk management to occur when paired with the removal of RNG. It's one of the main reasons every fight plays out the same way in the base game and makes enemies all feel similar; the only difference between them is the amount of armor they have.

And as far as splitting the mod up into multiple parts; I don't think that's viable. Many of the changes are dependent on one another. The Status overhaul needs to be paired with the ability overhaul to function, the stats overhaul is dependent on the status overhaul. I could take time to make changes to separate these but that would involve maintaining multiple versions of the same mod.

Just leave it as one big mod. If someone wants to change it they can always tinker with it themselfes - simple changes to already existing mods are rather easy to do after all.

How is progress going btw? With all those stat changes and new encounters I guess you will have to change the enemies themself one by one from the groundup. Especially considering the changes to balance of many spells which would be reverted if you used old values instead. But all the groundwork like icons and new effects/scrips/spells could just be ported over if already done, right?

Oh well, keep us updated if release draws near. Would like to get excited beforehand. After all it's not just the present that's fun but also the time before opening it.

Currently in the first act of a vanilla playthrough. As I said in an earlier post I'd like to do a complete playthrough of the DE to see where things stand.
I actually haven't touched encounters yet; Decided not to after the DE was announced. Didn't want to have to do it twice.
And yeah pretty much everything I've done can be ported over. All the abilities in my mod aren't parented from vanilla abilities; I have my own script to generate the abilities based on parameters I set using an Excel sheet and a generic base to fill in whatever parameters I don't set depending on the ability type. Makes creating/modifying abilities far easier than the laggy and sometimes difficult to read Divinity Engine and also means even stuff in the vanilla game such as Fireball will not be changed by Larian updates as they are completely new entries.

That's a very good news. I'm excited to see what you can pull off. If at some point it you need a beta tester for your mod add me on steam : https://steamcommunity.com/id/youhmani/

I will be glade to help out, even though I know nothing about modding.

I'm actually glad it took longer than expected because larian is pumping out so many hotfixes right now that it will at least take a few more weeks until the final patch arrives. Better to have a mod for the finished game than for a buggy one.

Can we expect a nice christmas present this year or will you need more time to get version 1.0 ready for release?

How well will your mod be compatible with other mods btw? I really want one of the many less stat bloat mods for example. Mods which reduce the levelscaling of things like money, vitality, damage, etc. Will something like that be compatible or will you even include something like that in your mod? Can't wait for the full mod description showing all changes.

Probably don't expect a release until late January at the earliest.

Compatibility is something that's on my mind a lot, but it's simply not going to be terribly friendly with other mods. I'm overriding every skill in the game and changing how many core features function among other things.

Some mods will be compatible though. Less stat bloat mods are pretty simple (only changing a couple variables) and would be compatible, but I'm including my own override as it is. Hard to say what exactly would be compatible or not, generally mods that only add and don't change existing stuff should be fine, more or less.
Skill mods would of course be tuned to the vanilla systems and use vanilla statuses so those probably won't work well without a patch.

Nice to hear from you again! Yeah, I figured mod compatibility would be rather wonky. But you already said that some "must have" stuff like faster movement speed outside of combat will be included in your mod already. And I don't really care for skill or class mods as the vanilla game and your overhaul already have more than enough classes, spells, effects and skills to choose from. I'm very excited to see your hard work starting to come to fruition so my wife and I can finally play through the game after we stopped halfway through because we were just too annoyed by the current combat systems. Finally the "each battle is a puzzle" system will be back!

Btw, if you intend to change around hp/damage/money/etc scaling be careful with the difference is scaling for magic damage. Things like the less bloat mod try to address this making a 5% instead of 7% scaling to magic damage but even then some numbers are just not where they should be. Larian for some reason decided to make just a handful of spells scale different - which you would never notice in the game without changes to global level scaling. And if you touch it in any way I would recommend changing potions and poison potions to be percentage based to up to 40% for the largest one to be balanced with the new HP values. (especially poison - which the author of reduced numbers bloat forgot as he didn't think about zombie healing from poison)

I hope you have a massive list of changes so we can get a "changelog" when you release the mod. (especially things like faster movement speed which are added ontop of your new core mechanics) Wishing you all the best!

Hi BlueFeuer! I checked out your spreadsheet and I think what you're doing here is very exciting! If there is anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Any luck for a progress update? I had this bookmarked for a bit and I've been really looking forward to see this exciting project come to fruition.

I guess I probably should give a progress report.

Hoping to have something to release soon. Ideally, in a month.. Unforeseen issues have been popping up. Like for instance I just spent the last week rewriting ~400 thousand lines of code to work around a limitation I don't think was present in classic. Using a hacky feeling method I ended up fixing that issue and shortening the script to ~13 thousand lines, but due to a separate issue I needed another workaround that ended up extending the script to around 40 thousand lines. With other work that still needs done, lots of abilities still need some additional scripting but I don’t expect that to take long. Still need to redo localization again. Got lots of smallish stuff I simply haven't gotten around to that I generally don't expect to take long. I’m almost done replacing all the placeholder effects throughout my mod but even so I still have a fair amount to do on that front.

Here’s a video of one such effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfv2i-nIWPU

So basically still lots to do but everything is shaping up well. For a while the mod didn’t actually have a lot of work done on it (Maybe 10ish hours a week) but starting ~2 months ago I found the time I needed and have been working on it non-stop for up to 80 hours a week so things are progressing way faster.
For now I’m focusing almost exclusively on getting the base overhaul gameplay ready, but I have plans for what’s to come afterwards.

Anyways, here are some things you should expect from the mod following its release:

A "Specialist" class will be introduced, which does absolutely nothing on it's own. Instead, you'll be able to choose at the start of the game what it does via mutually exclusive talents. Both Crafter and Druid are slated to be moved to this, and I will be introducing more classes to this as time goes on. It's not possible to add new classes directly (Which is why every mod simply uses base game classes), and my mod is no different, with new classes just being renamed old ones. So this is a good middle ground. It'll allow me to add as many classes as I want, and if two classes simply don't make sense to be taken together they will be, by nature, mutually exclusive.
Some classes I intend to add:

Beastmaster; Gain a permanent animal companion (Wolf, Bear, Boar, etc.) to follow you. You'll be able to control it in battle and it will have a small selection of abilities. Putting points into Specialist will give you abilities to buff or assist your companion, and your companion will also gain a few select abilities depending on it's type.

Dragon Disciple; Gain aspects of a dragon as your Specialist goes up, eventually gaining the ability to potentially turn into a dragon under certain conditions and gaining permanent draconic wings.

Necromancer; Separate from Witchcraft. Harvest components from defeated enemies to be able to place bodies of your own on a later battlefield, which are usable for things such as Bone Cage. More importantly, useable in class skills such as Bone Golem, requiring 5 bodies in a small area to summon a powerful amalgamation of Bones.

The Specialist class is also how compatibility with other class mods should be handled, such as Umbra, Vampire, or Constellationist. Naturally compatibility patches will still be 100% necessary, but it should serve to make them feel a lot more integrated, and have less potential for being overpowered.

Also, Crafter will be seeing an overhaul from its current iteration. I’m not happy with how it turned out so it’s undergoing an overhaul and will be released later. For now it’s not going to be included in the mod. As far as what the overhaul will look like:
Instead of simply being limited use abilities, a crafter’s abilities will typically require reagents. Simply place the reagents on the battlefield from your inventory and cast skills on them like a Necromancer on a body. Most machines will typically require scrap metal, and an Oil barrel will probably be worthwhile to carry around.
Skills may include:

Animate Armor; The targeted armor will begin to act on it’s own, gaining the stats of the armor in question. It will also pick up and equip nearby weapons and other armor (Such as leggings, gloves), and gain abilities depending on the type of stuff picked up. It’s unlikely you’ll get what the summon used back when it dies or times out.

Refuel; Target a nearby Oil Barrel to gain a stack of Oil.

Gravity Manipulator; Target any Earth Essence on the battlefield. If you are carrying scrap metal and have a stack of Oil or an Oil Flask, consume them and create a Gravity Manipulator at the Earth Essence’s location.
The Gravity Manipulator will slow down all characters in a ~7 meter radius, with the strength of the slow dependent on the tier of Earth Essence used, with later tiers applying additional statuses. Can be destroyed.

There’s also a lot of smaller stuff I’d very much like to do, to name a few off the top of my head:

Racial abilities. Small changes to abilities based on race - This is more for flavor than anything and shouldn't wildly influence which race you take. But I always disliked how races were handled in the base game. Most races will have a handful of these changes per class. Some examples; Lizards will have a slightly better version of Dragonhide, Undead will have undead versions of Druidic transformations, and Dwarves will have defensive skills in general slightly buffed (Such as Fortify or Stalwart Defense). Other skills will simply have to be discovered ingame.

Uniques. Probably similar to Epic Encounters for DOS1 - Random drops from enemies that could be potentially build-defining and level up with you. I have some ideas such as potentially unique runes but nothing super-solid, definitely something I look forward to creating though.

New and overhauled encounters.
All encounters in the game will of course be changed to fit within my systems. But as of right now you won’t be finding shapeshifting druids to fight. That aside lots of fights will probably get substantial changes to be more engaging.

Overall I’m excited to get this out there and am getting impatient myself. At the end of the day all I really want is for DOS2 to be the tactical masterpiece I know it could have been. I feel like I had more I wanted to say but no idea what it was. Back to work.

I'm glad you got everything figured out and can now wrap up the work for a release version of your mod! You should definitly apply for a job at Larian. You seem to fit in perfectly with those people and I bet you would be a great addition!

I had just remembered to check back in after a few months; how is the project coming along? I imagine it's been quite a lot of work. Do you think there will be a release any time soon?

Oh well, such a massive project can take longer than expected - especially with the new limitations and changes of the definitive edition. You can work around them but it often creates more issues along the way which then have to be ironed out, too.

We are very excited for the mod though. My wife and I will wait until it releases before touching the game again. Hope it arrives soon. ^___^

Hi BlueFeuer, just passing by to see how it's going ! I hope you are doing fine, I too am excited for the release of your mod !

Hi!

I specifically made an account here to ask how is this mod coming along, you haven't posted anything since February. I'm very interested in a mod like this and this seems to be the best overhaul mod I have found for this game so far. Just want to know how is it coming along or are you making it anymore?

Yeah I'm still working on it. Busy with RL stuff off and on. Every time I feel like I get close to a release I realize just how much I have yet to do. Surely one of these times I'll be right about how much is left.
I'll have a release before year's end.

I feel bad for taking so long on this. Apologies.