I wanted to re-visit this topic because I wanted to see if I was remembering everything in here properly while mass editing my own feedback thread. I kind of realized something in the middle of all of this. I wondered if part of the comments that Larian had about the Bless spell had actually been referencing their own Bless spell in Divinity Original Sin 2, which was JUST as worthless for several *other* reasons.
For the uninitiated, the D:OS2 Bless spell had a variety of applications, the most direct of all being a small stat boost to the targeted party member (and countering the 'Cursed' status). But it was primarily used to change field effects to provide beneficial effects to all characters within, such as Fire (which obviously hurts you if you travel through them) to Holy Fire (which heals you and provides high fire damage resistance), and so on.
The problem is, the opposing effect, Curse, was FAR more common in the game's encounter design. Most enemies would generally spam some variation of it first thing, if not outright bleed it. If you hit an enemy capable of bleeding out cursed blood or water or acid or something while they were standing in a bunch of fire, congratulations, you just set off a chain reaction that turned all of that fire into cursed fire, which is extra bad because for some reason Larian decided that nothing can remove cursed fire/necrofire except for the passage of time or use of the Bless spell. And even then, both solutions just turn that cursed fire back into regular fire. (Okay, the Tornado spell gets rid of all fields entirely, but you literally don't get access to that until the last third of the game.)
The real kicker? Bless cost a single Source Point, which is basically D:OS2's equivalent to having spell slots, and you were limited to 3 maximum depending on your progress in the game. And other Source skills could use 2 or even 3 points at once. Bless also had a 5 turn cooldown. The opportunity cost of using Bless was simply not worth it. You could have used Bless to revert that cursed fire back to normal fire that could get doused by water, but enemies could just as easily do it all over again for a fraction of the effort you put into getting rid of it to begin with.
There is a reason why one of the big features of the Divinity Unleashed mod for D:OS2 was the removal of the source point cost for Bless, along with making it an innate player skill available to be used at all times instead of one that had to be memorized. (Divinity Unleashed was a mass rebalancing mod aimed at overhauling the armor system into a damage reduction system, along with rebalancing certain skills, status effects, and stat weights. While playing D:OS2 with the mod myself, I immediately noticed how it allowed for more tactical variety than vanilla D:OS2, as in battlemage builds were actually viable. I personally had party member Beast running a dual wielding aeroteurge blindness/dodge tank build, which would not have worked in vanilla D:OS2 due to the armor system. I would dearly hope something like this isn't necessary for tactical variety in BG3.)
I sometimes question if Larian learned anything at all from making D:OS2 beyond 'let's throw everything at the wall, hope players figure it out by themselves, and give everyone pats on the back while calling it creativity'.
Last edited by Saito Hikari; 20/02/21 04:09 AM.
