Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General DMG's advice about house rules.

DOS2 Bless was a self-fulfilling prophecy in itself. It got shot in the foot for so many dumb reasons that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the DOS2 community that actually uses it. The overbearing limitations placed on it has resulted in what I'd call that game's biggest wasted potential ever.

1) It's a skill you have to spend a memory point to maintain in your skill list. Despite the plot treating it as if it should have been an innate skill that you'd have memorized all the time.
2) It has a source point cost. Okay, it makes sense considering that your ability to cast it is the very first sign that you are able to wield the power of Source at all. But from what I've heard, it did not have a source cost during EA.
3) For some reason (that makes me HIGHLY suspicious about how encounter design after Act 1 is going to work out in BG3), enemies in Act 2 and beyond in DOS2 spammed the everloving SHIT out of Curse effects as soon as you got off the boat (the direct counter to Bless). To the level that some enemies straight up BLED it when you hit them with a physical attack, transforming the field below them into the curse variant.

Simply put, the cost/reward ratio for using Bless was not worth it when damn near everything had the ability to immediately reverse what you spent your precious source point doing. All the Necrofire memes? For an equally weirdass reason, Necrofire can't be removed by anything other than a very late game Tornado spell, or Bless transforming it back into a normal fire field, which can then be removed by normal means if it doesn't get almost immediately re-cursed afterwards.

Honestly, other Source abilities were just more useful than bless imo. Not so much in that they were flashier, just more useful, especially the racial ones. Three off of the top of my head are Red Prince stripping away magic armor from a target, essentially setting up massive mage turns, Ifan could summon his wolf (and with a later Grab bag buff it to be the most OP summon that even outperformed the incarnate who was my mainstay), and Fane could just straight up grant extra turns. Bless didn't fail because it lacked flashiness, it looked really nice, it failed cause of its costs and the fact that there were better tactical options at almost all points in the game, and its use ended up being to cure some pigs and thats it.

I remember using the Dos 2 bless quite frequently at first, when the EA started, until they added the source cost for it and amped up the frequency of cursed damage making it useless the following turn.

So it’s… bizarre to read them claiming that “they tried their best to make it appealing to the player to no use”.

Nicely put. I tried to say this but couldn't find the words to really express how I feel about it.

I feel that one problem here is that when Larian tries to make something stand out and draw players' attention they just go way over the top about it. It'd probably be fine if they didn't try to do this so frequently. The silliness in DOS, the curse, necrofire (or just fire in general...?), surfaces, height advantages, level-up power curve in DOS2, and now based on what feedbacks I've read on BG3 EA, from companions being fancy races and having "epic" backgrounds and quirky personal traits to all the so-called homebrews.

It's a shame, because without the over-the-top execution, most of their ideas are fine. The idea that "you should feel powerful when leveling up" - I get that, but that power curve in DOS2 is too much. It would be better if Curse were more powerful but you only run into it occasionally. Same for surfaces. The fact that they "amped up the frequency of curse" might have been intended to encourage players to use Bless more often, but then again, it was way overdone.

Now that they seem to be intent on adding so many of their own things to 5E rules for BG3, I'm curious to see how this will turn out. Should be interesting.

True, though I felt the issue lied with armor (which has similar problem as current backstab-height-ground & bonus push/jump). I don't have to care about status effects as long as I have armor. So combat in D:OS2 comes down to:
1) have as much armor and as many ways to rearmor as possible.
2) do as much plain DPS (physical or magical) so you can burn through enemy armor and stunlock them before they burn through yours.

That's it. That's all the depth that D:OS2 had. Sure you could try to counter enviromental effects, and bless the water etc... but what for? Those are tedious, unreliable and not universally useful. I would rather had extra protection skill or DPS skill, or stunlock skill then Bless.

Same with BG3 - sure I COULD buff up, and analyze enemy, and prepare to exploit its statistical weaknesses. Or I can jump behind him and get advantage! Or push them off cliff and give them disadvantage for the next attack. If there is an easy, reliable, always available and free way to get what I need in any situation, players will just use those, instead off digging through limited spells to achieve more or less the same thing.

"One thing that we learned from the statistics is that people are completely uninterested in a lot of buffing and debuffing spells – we have stats where you can see how many people are using what spell and how often they’re using it, and that made us realise every magic spell that we put in an RPG needs to have this ‘oomph’ factor. You have to want to click it, or you’ll never click it. You cannot sell a bless spell to people. It’s boring. They don’t care – they want to see fireworks, they want to see damage."

What in the actual fuck happenned here. What. What.WHAT. I spammed the shit out of this spell. Increasing your hit chance increases your damage output therefore increases your healthpool available to fight one enemy. It's obvious. That comment hurts right in my meow meow. Sven what happenned.

There was a pretty gamechanging mod for DOS2 that I played around with for a bit called Divinity Unleashed that, among other things, made Bless an innate skill and removed the source point cost for it.

I probably used Bless more in a single hour with that mod than I had ever used in the previous 2 years before that. I had seen blessed surfaces that I had never had the opportunity to see prior, and actually using it to counter curse spam became viable.