Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion General feedback from BG3 -> DOS2 new player

Hey, so I started Larian games with the newest entry of Baldur’s Gate 3. I absolutely love it. I’ve probably played through it with 8 different characters now. I recently decided to give Divinity Original Sin II a playthrough after how much fun BG3 had given me.

It was a mistake to do so.
Now hear me out as to why I say that, because I mean it in a very good kind of way.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is unique, amazing, and I absolutely love it. But after playing DOS2 I’ve argued internally a lot over which game I genuinely enjoyed more. It’s been a strong internal debate and I’ve had a lot of points of contention over it, but I firmly think I want to say that despite its flaws, I genuinely enjoyed DOS2 so much more than Baldur’s Gate 3. Seeing there will be a new Divinity game and that the sentiment is “moving past mistakes from DOS2”, there are certain things I absolutely loved about DOS2 that I desperately hope aren’t overlooked or overshadowed by changes & adaptations to Baldur’s Gate 3.

The key takeaway is this: What I hope for Divinity 3 is not that it runs with Baldur’s Gate 3 as a standard, but instead takes the lessons learned & improved aspects over DOS2 and works to keep DOS2’s extremely strong sense of identity, more tactical decisions, and willingness to make the player think rather than hand them the information they need.
Put simply: I don’t want Divinity 3 to be “DOS2 but better”, I’d hope for it to be a culmination of the best of both games, rather than overcorrecting from the loudest criticisms of each.

Let me start with some general notes of what I think was absolutely amazing about DOS2, and then break down what makes them so good to me compared to Baldur’s Gate 3:

• The story, narrative progression, and how everything kept you guessing
• Turn cooldown combat
• The strong physical, visible, and gameplay difference between all the various races in the game (lizards, elves, humans, and so on)

The Story
Without getting too much into spoilers for any BG3 players reading this who haven’t given the game a play & might still want to, the story admittedly feels like it jumps across several different narrative interpretations as the game goes on. This is clearly the intention, but it could have probably been handled a little more cleanly. Each act feels more like the theme/idea being presented about the gods suddenly changes with each one. It’s all building to an ultimate point in the story about them of course, but it’s more like several disconnected narratives of trying to figure out the truth going on only at a given time rather than a more natural web of information the player needs to decipher. What I mean by this is that the story is extremely well written, but there’s like a case of whiplash about what the game is trying to nudge you towards at the start of each Act with near zero transition.

There are of course some criticisms about the story. Namely every faction is weirdly black & white, very face-value. Even characters who early on give the impression of being reasonable will later be seen as very biased & deeply into a “me & my people first” mentality. This was clearly because of world events after the events of DOS2, but it does feel kinda off regardless. But anyways; as a direct comparison for what I meant earlier by “It was a mistake to do so”: over in BG3 the story is still an amazing one, but it feels very watered down compared to the complexity of ongoing elements in Divinity 2. As a direct example of this: BG3 makes basically zero attempt at hiding the true nature of The Emperor. It also so strongly throws you into the narrative that the Absolute is nothing more than a fanatic cult abusing mindflayer parasites that once you end Act II & are suddenly thrust into “oh yeah that was all a lie btw” with VERY little inclination or hint towards this, it can be a little offputting to say the least. When BG3 does eventually reveal that the Absolute’s apparent nature is a complete lie I felt the transition from the cult as a primary driving threat into the larger political conspiracy was far less enjoyable than the way DOS2 makes the player think with hints here & there which makes them gradually change their interpretation of the plot. I would have greatly enjoyed BG3’s primary plot a lot more if it had made me slowly question the Absolute’s legitimacy overtime rather than how it tries to hammer home repeatedly that the Absolute just is what it is at face value, but there’s very little to none of this. For myself and I imagine many others the Absolute was just a cult being mislead through the abuse of mindflayer “technology” if we can call mind altering parasites a technology. Hitting Act II’s ending can potentially (and probably was for most players) feel like it hits completely out of left field as the idea of the Absolute is completely shattered. This is what I meant earlier about “DOS2 was willing to make the player think, but BG3 seems to prefer just handing the player information”.

Spoilers for DOS2 ahead, I would like to describe my first time playthrough assumptions of how I interpreted the developing main story through each act:
The Combat System
First, let me get one point out of the way: the source point system SUCKED. It was especially awful how, spoiler alert:
Cooldowns & Limiters
That out of the way however: Cooldowns over limiters is so much more fun for enjoyable combat. AP gained per turn also adds a very interesting tactical consideration dynamic to your positioning, how & when you should attack, and especially having to be considerate of your party’s capabilities. After more than half a dozen playthroughs of Baldur’s Gate 3, I would still take it over D&D’s short/long rest limiters, spell slots, action vs bonus action, etc. Having to consider my positioning, opponents capabilities, if it’s really worth it in the encounter to use a 4-6 turn cooldown ability at any given moment, and so on are MUCH more enjoyable than entering combat and realizing “gdi I forgot to long/short rest and now I can’t use a lot of my abilities because my rest ones are used up and I’m out of <x> slots". This is compounded by Baldur's Gate 3 often making you feel like long resting is a massive risk of churning a world event you might miss out on, or something you've forgotten to do. I don't think it would be a world ender if Divinity 3 kept move speed as a separate resource from your action points, but I strongly respect the vision DOS2 was going for here.

Difficulty, Progression, and Exploration
All of that glazing being said, it is far from without flaws. DOS2's combat is BRUTALLY UNFORGIVINGLY EVIL. Shout "skill issue" all you want but I genuinely could not beat DOS2 on its standard difficulty without enabling the gift bag feature for bedrolls to heal outside of combat. Unless you cheese the trading system Act I felt basically unplayable since there were no viable healing options out the gate and I was regularly running out of revive scrolls. Hell, it basically took until mid-late Act III for healing potions to become readily available. The game is ripe with absurd difficulty spikes & level gates without even warning you at all or giving you any real indication. You can be walking along a path and 20 steps later suddenly be assaulted by an enemy 2-4 levels higher than you, which is more often than not a death sentence. The area layout, especially in Act II, is far from good. The entire region is a huge open map, but isn't structured in a way that encourages the player to approach levelled enemies in an order that the player can actually face. My first time playthrough had me skipping past Driftwood thinking "Oh, this place is controlled by Magisters, I probably shouldn't go here yet" which was actually the exact opposite of what the game intended. So I ended up continuing North to find what else to do only to immediately be humbled by literally everything else past that point. Then as far as level progression goes, I've noticed several things:
1) Even when trying to absolutely maximize my XP gain, I am constantly underlevelled for most encounters.
2) The class balancing is very not balanced. For my custom character I was doing a fighter greatswored melee build the entire game and it basically took me until the final moments of Act III for it to finally become somewhat useful, and towards the latter half of Act IV it just skips straight into overpowered territory.
3) Trying to "multiclass" is more often than not just screwing yourself over. Even within the same class trying to level up multiple types of skills (air vs lightning or fire vs earth as two examples) will often just be ruining your ability to do anything because the level of enemies & their sheer amount of health & armour means if you aren't maximizing your potential into a specific line you WILL struggle heavily to actually do anything to them.

Physical/Magical Armour
Let's talk about the physical & magic armour system. It's not great, but after a lot of thinking I think I do prefer it over D&D's Armour Class system. I would hope for something new in Divinity 3 that is neither of these two things. Armour Class to me always felt like a very lazy "my number is higher so you're more likely to miss or your attack does nothing", and that sucks. DOS2's physical & magical armour system was far from greatness, but being able to still actually do something to your enemy even if they had resistances was a huge breath of fresh air after countless "Missed!" rolls of absurdity in BG3 as well as actual D&D.

If I would be given the chance to, I'd suggest a middleground of the two where we keep physical/magical armour but instead of them being an immunity to status effects just have them be a damage resistance from that damage type. You could use this as an opportunity to introduce an inverse counter to it instead of DOS2's direct counter (sword kills physical, magic kills magic). DOS2 does a straightforward "These armour types are just extra health against this type of attack", and that is frankly kinda lame. Have physical armour be weak to magical attacks instead, and magic armour weak to physical attacks. This will transform the playing field into a game of cat & mouse where rangers present the middleground capable of equalizing the field from how their bow/crossbow abilities are already a hybrid of physical & magical attacks. Melee fights become duels of tactical attrition, magic vs magic becomes epic scale magical showdowns; and mixing the two on the same battlefield means one can either go after the other, or hold the line for everyone else. Rangers in this idea would become the universal threat (much like DOS2 already has them be from the absurd damage they can output) to both physical & magical combat types as well as other rangers. DOS2's physical/magical armour served as an exclusionary mechanic, rather than approaching combat as "This person has x, I should do y" it was "This person has x, I can't do y". When you make everyone uniquely deadly but equally capable of dispatching one another, it becomes a character driven choice of what you do rather than a system-limited one. A character's armour & combat style should reflect the character, not be driven down what the system design dictates & create what feels like wasteful combat. I recognize my suggestion is far from bulletproof, but it would still probably create a much better user experience overall than either DOS2's sponge system or D&D's Armour Class miss system which both create the same problem under different conditions.

Surfaces, Materials, etc
I've been pretty negative towards Baldur's Gate 3 so far so let me switch it up: Here is something it does better than DOS2: Surfaces, materials, and physical elemental interactions. Baldur's Gate 3's surfaces & materials are… better in almost every aspect compared to DOS2. I think the only thing I would say DOS2 was more interesting about was the sheer variety of surfaces, mists & fogs, and transformative surfaces. The most you really got out of this in BG3 in practical use cases was water -> ice, but you really had to go out of your way to get weaponized water to begin with, ice spells were more common anyways. But in terms of practical gameplay application the surfaces of DOS2 were so abundant they worked against the biggest factor of combat: Movement & positioning (OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS CONSTANTLY ON FIRE OR NECROFIRE). BG3 heavily learned from this, instead making surfaces, barrels, and etc either well placed setpieces or obvious things to be interacted with or aware of to steer clear from.

A footnote I can’t figure to fit anywhere else, another clear lesson learned & massive improvement in Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2 was simply the physical space for movement & combat. It was a constant frustration in DOS2 how many clearly open sightlines were blocked, or how a prop took up a padded space around it that it clearly didn’t visibly take up, harsh cornering, and etc making some encounters absolute agony to deal with. This is also coupled with physical interactivity being a much stronger core of Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2. Pushing/shoving, jumping, verticality, and generally much better navigation & ability sightlining are all amazing over DOS2. I missed these severely when playing it.

AI fairness, cheating, and cheese.
This is an area Baldur’s Gate 3 HEAVILY improved upon, but if I’m going to be completely honest, it may have been an OVERcorrection from DOS2. DOS2 AI regularly cheats via impossible ranged attacks, scripted encounters where something MUST happen, attacking through fog, occasionally being given more AP than physically possible, and absurd spamming of teleport-like abilities which make it an absolute aggravating chore to play for melee builds. There’s also many encounters, especially in Act IV, which have clear scripted behaviours for the entire combat encounter. Virtually all of this was solved with Baldur’s Gate 3 and I have a high expectation that Divinity 3 will keep this trend. But that being said, it also feels like the AI awareness & decisionmaking was severely dumbed down in Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to DOS2. After completing DOS2 with my girlfriend, we went back to a new playthrough on Baldur’s Gate 3 and it’s just… too easy now, even on the highest difficulty we just fly through the game. DOS2 was an absolute meat grinder that required us to learn so much more and completely changed how we approached the game in almost every regard. Even with less predictable AI compared to DOS2, BG3’s AI is remarkably… well unremarkable. The only enemies to give us trouble now are the area & act bosses. I really hope for Divinity 3 to de-overcorrect in this regard. I want to lose for making bad combat choices, not because the game decided or was designed for an enemy to have an unfair advantage which breaks the rules I am bound by.

I’d also like to acknowledge a MAJOR improvement Baldur’s Gate 3 made over DOS2 in this category: Encounter placements & initial layouts. DOS2 was constantly actively designing basically every single encounter in favour of the enemy AI. The player had near zero hope of getting an advantageous position before a combat encounter in DOS2. This was basically entirely fixed in Baldur’s Gate 3. There are still encounters where the player explicitly starts at a locational disadvantage, but they are much more fair about it and include believable pathways to solve the issue. There are no more issues of “the enemy has rangers & mages we cannot reach and have no hope of killing so we have to pull back to a choke point & force the enemy to stupidly walk into a bad position we can abuse”.

Physical character differences
This is admittedly one of the largest areas of concern I have for Divinity 3 after seeing the grotesquely horrifying announcement trailer. I can see the lizards still have their usual digitigrade legs, elves are still tall & slender, but everything is so much more homogenized. The lizards have very humanoid proportions, more human body height, and the elves even have much more human-like faces. Baldur’s Gate 3 was a very strong disappointment in this field despite its very in-depth character creation. The creatures & beings of Faerûn vary WILDLY in physical proportion. This was achieved in DOS2 but was very neutralized in Baldur’s Gate 3 despite the tech being there. I REALLY hope for the races to regain their physically defining characteristics like seen in DOS2. These characteristics were beyond purely visual, they affected how the game was played and that was awesome. It was also heavily embedded into the world & how the people interacted which was somewhat absent from Baldur’s Gate 3 barring the Githyanki having a huge presence in the plot. Each physically distinct race having their own skeletons, animation sets, body shape, silhouette, and so on was HUGE to me and was a core aspect of what made Divinity so much fun.

A Conclusion & Summary
I absolutely love both of these games. Baldur’s Gate 3 was absolutely amazing to the point I replayed it more than half a dozen times. But having played DOS2 I can now see the exact points where criticism came from that lead to both extremely good corrections but also strong overcorrections within BG3. DOS2 was so good despite its flaws that it had me looking up more about the game, its development, ambitions, reading about what was cut from it, and so on. There was just too much overambition for what Larian wanted to do with DOS2, but they’ve very clearly learned from the experience and it shows. My only hope is that fear creating overcorrection to criticism doesn’t define future titles. You guys are already on the right path, don’t trip and fall over right before perfection because of very vocal criticisms. The systems of DOS2 were flawed, but there was a very strong vision and I can see it. I genuinely hope for Divinity 3 to be a realization of a lot of the stuff you guys were working towards but weren’t able to iron out or fit into DOS2 while getting it out the door with the lessons learned from DOS2 -> BG3, and now BG3 -> Divinity 3.

What do you mean endgame reveal?

This was directly told to you the very moment you unlocked source capabilities. As well as reiterated many, many, many, many times throughout various dialogue encounters with spirits. Potentially even causing companions to get angry with you and leave due to the nature of it.


Ehh? You quite literally have a class that gets a heal skill at level 1. With how ridiculously easy multi-class is, you can equip your entire party with heal + both armour restoration skills to heal up.

That said, there are some incredibly unforgiving aspects to the game. Notably electrified surfaces which will perma-stun any character lacking magic armour (There's a particular ambush in Act 2 near the bloke who dropped his wedding ring that TPK'd me due to this particular thing, where they in 1 turn wiped out my entire parties magic armour which left them perma-stunned for the entire fight due to electrified surface...)


Honestly, I never encountered such a thing. In fact, I ended up using a mod that causes enemies to scale UPWARDS (Including scaling them several levels higher than me) as a result, because naturally it's easy to end up outleveling everything you encounter. Especially when just following quests you encounter (Even without companion quests, as I originally played Lone Wolf as just me and my wife Lohse)

Keep in mind, that I only ever played on the hardest difficulty.


It's more the opposite really. The game HEAVILY rewards multiclassing. Since quite a lot of the best skills are the rank 1-3 ones. Beyond that there's mostly just the more situational Source skills which are limited in availability because of Source. As well as some rank 5 multi-school skills that are pretty good (Which you know, is more reward for multi-classing)

So just grabbing a lot of these skills ends up providing more rounded characters while hyperfocusing leaves you with bugger all because of how little you get outside rank 1-3. This is even more apparent if you do try to make a "Fighter" or "Rogue" character because even of the rank 1-3 skills there's only like 1 that's actually good in each class (Thus you end up going Warfare + Scoundrel + Polymorph anyway just to get a few physical skills worth anything)

This is reinforced with literally every companion starting class innately being dual class. It's the game outright telling you "Hey, you should be multiclassing"


AC is the way it is because of TT gaming. The simple nature of it, plus the penchant for misses, works well for Tabletop. It makes it easy to factor in so that people can focus on playing the game rather than calculating combat and in TT failure is actually interesting because the DM gets to decide consequences (Including them being able to mitigate bad luck. I.e. If you keep missing your attack rolls, they can make your fumbled attack go and strike another target instead)

It's just it doesn't transition well into video games because the lack of an actual DM to fudge things or make failures funny means that bad streaks just feel bad (Same is also true for skill checks)

That said, I'm fond of how AC incorporates actual defences from a logical perspective. AC involves both the ability to evade (Which is where Dex modifiers come from) as well as armour being able to deflect/absorb incoming blows (Which is where Heavy Armour's high base AC comes from). As opposed to "I have some weird magical shield granted by this special pair of socks I'm wearing".

In regards to DOS2's armour system, yeah, no it was utter trash. Between it providing status immunity (Making most skills worthless) and pushing you into singular damage type party set ups (Because having everyone focus down the same armour type is just flat out better than having some chip away at physical armour and some chip away at magical armour as you only need to remove one armour type to damage red health)


Interestingly, this is what the Divinity Unleashed mod does in DoS2. It replaces armour being separate health pools and turns them into damage resistances. Reworking skills and effects into being more balanced for always applying (I.e. Electrified Surfaces no longer stun, they instead daze). With stuff like the Armour restoration skills being buffs.

Of course, if you do play with this, you do still see that this armour system still isn't "Great" it's just massively improved over base DOS2 armour system which is utter trash.

Notably, it doesn't really create any sort of dynamic gameplay with skill selection... You just build your characters to do a certain thing and then you do that thing irregardless of what armour values the target has. Which is in part, due to the nature of DOS2's skills and their lack of any mechanics to capitalise on this (It also cripples some skills, like that Scoundrel skill that normally is interesting because it bypassed armour just... Doesn't do anything special in this mod and is literally no different to just using a regular attack)

Really what is warranted is a system that isn't so restrictive as "Armour as extra health pools" but is more interactive than "Everyone just has passive damage resistance" so that gameplay can revolve around exploiting weaknesses or trying to debuff strengths.


Ehh... BG3 has the whole "Wet > Lightning/Cold Damage" thing which is quite stupid. I'll take everything being on fire (Which I can Bless to turn into Blessed Fire) over "Here's a ridiculously easy way to get a 2x damage amplification"

BG3 also suffers from the same issue as DOS2 when it comes to surfaces. Which is EVERYTHING CREATES ONE. Especially the absolutely dumb mechanic of being hit = blood surface at your feet (Which is so incredibly good at absolutely ruining every notion of actually using surfaces. Be it in BG3 where Fire or Acid surfaces are instantly replaced by blood or in DOS2 where the entire battlefield just becomes Electrified Blood)

I've made note of this thing before in my feedback in other threads that approach this topic, but there should be segregation of skills that explicitly create/exploit surfaces rather than the mechanic shoehorned into every ability in the game.

There should be a clear tactical decision to use a skill to create a surface. Which would limit surface spam that plagues DOS and BG3, while opening up more options for builds and tactical decisions (Especially with more interactions and combinations than even DOS2 has with its surface and mists)

With this also extending to enemies too, so most enemies don't make surfaces, but select ones will. Creating more diverse encounters where some will warrant playing around surfaces (Such as that encounter in DOS2 with the tar slugs and that guy you try to save) while most will not have you being spammed with surfaces.

A footnote I can’t figure to fit anywhere else, another clear lesson learned & massive improvement in Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2 was simply the physical space for movement & combat. It was a constant frustration in DOS2 how many clearly open sightlines were blocked, or how a prop took up a padded space around it that it clearly didn’t visibly take up, harsh cornering, and etc making some encounters absolute agony to deal with. This is also coupled with physical interactivity being a much stronger core of Baldur’s Gate 3 over DOS2. Pushing/shoving, jumping, verticality, and generally much better navigation & ability sightlining are all amazing over DOS2. I missed these severely when playing it.


To be fair, a lot of the changes in BG3 is due to having to be based around the D&D ruleset.

The use of AC, the toning down of surfaces (Which don't exist in D&D and was homebrewed into the game because Larian likes them), the use of Standard/Bonus/Reaction actions over AP etc. It's all because BG3 has to use D&D and specifically 5e rules.

As a long term D&D and Larian fan, it's very easy to see all the places where Larian have homebrewed in some aspects of their design into BG3, to the point where BG3 is actually a terrible D&D game because of the excessive homebrew (While being a watered down Larian game due to the D&D systems they were forced to include)

It's what makes me very curious at to how Divinity will turn out, a title where they have total freedom to do their own thing without D&D's systems. Both in terms of what they learned after DOS2, but also what (If anything) they might incorporate from the D&D systems they were forced to use in BG3.

All I can recall was a one-off notion from Siva I think it was? (probably misremembering) About a vaguely moral implication to it. It probably doesn't help that my first playthrough of DOS2 likely ended up aligning story-wise with characters who seemed to have no issues with it. Those being Red Prince & Beast.


Starting out the gate, and again a first time playthrough so I was still learning everything and describing the first time player experience, my girlfriend & I were a fighter and a necromancer. As we found Beast & Red Prince we had no real grasp on what all the options would be for how the characters would work out or classes they should be doing. We ultimately ended up with Beast as our tank on an Aerothurge focus and Prince as our magic damage dealer/healer combo with fire focus, though by the end of the game basically everyone had at least one healing ability from either an item or a spell.


Yeah, cool. Modded playthroughs heavily alter the gameplay. I don't have any way of knowing you don't have other mods which could radically change the gameplay from the vanilla experience that made you feel the need to make the game even harder.



Multiclassing from how it felt for me & my girlfriend on our first time playthrough felt extremely limiting until much deeper into the game when we had the room to sacrifice a couple points into something else. My girlfriend in particular was heavily trying to multiclass for most of the game but it basically never worked out for the entirety of Act I-II. She ended up having to abandon necromancer basis pretty early on & just went full ranger so she was actually capable of doing something besides getting out-dps'ed by the enemies constantly.



Hard disagree, especially because of the lack of availability of Source points if you're not going to be using vampirism. Every single time we attempted this strategy the enemy would just immediately re-curse the fire. It really doesn't help it effectively requires two source points to be expended (Cursed -> regular -> blessed) to do this, and if there's any enemies between turns for a chain bless it's basically a guarantee to not work. Couple this with the consideration of AP usage, a lot of the time it might be better to just not bother trying and get in some good damage instead.


True, but most of them are very much a moot point. Acid especially is just "oh no, -1 ac; anyways..." The AI don't seem to be smart enough to consider surfaces in BG3 ever in my many playthroughs. I've never seen an AI ignite a wine/oil/powder surface with intent. I have seen them attack a smokepowder bag before, but often not even with an igniting ability/weapon/ammo. They also regularly waltz through tangling vines, lava, ice, etc. DOS2 AI actively navigated around all of these kinds of things & other dangerous surfaces, but seemingly not the BG3 AI.


I am aware of this, but I was reading some posts online about how it seems like Divinity 3 is going to be taking notes from Baldur's Gate 3's action economy & armour which is why I was so heavily making notes about what I don't like from it or found more enjoyable in DOS2 in here.

So, the fact that your character will outright tell the god that such a thing is horrible, that literally every spirit you use it on screams in agony as you delete their literal soul and many interactions with souls that have a "Consume them" option always causing companions to get annoyed at you didn't land?


There's a dialogue option when you go to recruit a companion that lets you ask them to be another option, where they quite literally describe everything each thing does.


You mean other than such a point would be irrelevant to bring up had I used other mods to adjust gameplay?

I was playing base unmodded. Then modded to make the game harder. I later also used Divinity Unleashed when I got fed up with the crummy armour system and that's about it (I did dabble with mods to revamp classes and add new ones... But I never kept them because they never really felt worthwhile, especially when they crashed the game often...)


Which is entirely due to Necromancer being gimped af, where their only good spells are Raining Blood (Multi-class Necro + Hydro) and Grasp of the Starved (Late game Source skill) and even then Raining Blood is only really useful because it enables Grasp of the Starved. Which is a shame because Necromancy is so cool as a theme but my god does it suck so bad in DOS2 (Not even mods can save it... Even with Divinity Unleashed all you do is cast Raining Blood and Grasp of the Starved and that's the only skills worth using from the class)

Most builds work best as multi-class because that's how you get access to good skills. Like having everyone with a heal skill from Hydro/Huntsman, skills like Tentacle Lash from Poly, Teleportation from Aero etc.

The stats you get from actually leveling the skills are generally a trap compared to the benefit of multi-classing. Especially since you only need 5 points to access the ultimate skills (And 3 points to get all non-Source skills) the former not even being relevant all the time (For example, Grasp of the Starved is Necro's best source skill and one of the best skills in the game... But it only needs 3 points in Necro compared to the 5 points for Totems of the Necromancer)


It's still a thing that can be done and is more interesting than "Here's free double damage because the game wasn't easy enough". It goes with a lot more options to interact with surfaces in DOS2, with the only really annoying thing that Voidspawn make everything cursed which makes it harder to deal with (But you still have that capacity to use a Source to uncurse it and try and swap it with something else, if only to make it something that won't get cursed by a Voidspawn standing in the necrofire 10m away)


Aye, but still, that -1 AC from acid could be useful early on when you have less +attack bonuses... It it wasn't removed in a single hit because the enemy bleeds and replaces it with a blood pool.

Same thing with other interactions, there's that piece of equipment that adds surface effects you're standing in to your spells... Rendered obsolete when you get hit and bleed which replaces your fire damage with nothing.


Yeah, BG3 AI is super junk. Which is odd because there quite literally does exist some AI pathing, if you select a location to walk to, your character will in fact avoid mud and other surfaces to move there. It's just, for whatever reason, this behaviour is missing from NPC's (Including party members following you)

The only time I've seen anything different from NPC's is sometimes Goblins won't run through Vines and will instead sit at the edge of them and throw rocks at you (Then casting Fog or Darkness to obscure their ability to range attack will have them just sit there passing their turn)


Aye, though it's hard to say exactly how much and what parts of these things they'll be "Taking notes from"

Like, "Taking notes from action economy" can range to be anything from "Copying it exactly" to "Maybe we just make movement not consume AP" and everything in between (Such as having Reactions. Having a secondary AP pool for "Bonus actions" like using items and minor actions, having multiple attacks per "AP consumption" etc)

Same is true for armour, which has a lot of possibilities. Also, very glaring problems even in BG3 (Notably how Medium Armour with no Dex cap is king for literally everyone and there's no reason for a caster to wear robes unless they give ridiculous bonuses and how Heavy Armour sucks outside the very specific build of Abjuration Wizard Tank with Heavy Armour Mastery)

We'll have to see when it hits EA, as if it's anything like the prior titles, it'll go EA pretty early and have a lot of adjustments based on player feedback.