Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Builds/Combat in the new Divinity game

Since DOS2 and BG3 have grown so much on me, I wanted to share my thoughts and a bit of a wish list for the upcoming Divinity game. I’m coming from the perspective of someone who loves creating different builds, experimenting with skills/spells in interesting ways, and generally focusing on combat-based gameplay, which is the main focus of this post. I’d love to hear how you feel about the points I mentioned, since this is of course very subjective. I have also only played those two Larian games so far, so I can’t comment on the older ones.

Gear:
Based on the recent AMA on Reddit, it seems like they are moving away from the randomized gear system. I assume they are leaning more towards a fixed item system like in BG3. I think both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, and I wouldn’t be inherently against the way they handled it in BG3. That being said, there are some negative aspects that should be taken into account.

• If you play with friends, it doesn’t feel great when one person gets the “best option” (for example, Markoheshkir being the best staff for almost all mage builds in BG3), while the other players have to settle for the next best option. Even when playing alone, it can feel like you plan one character around their optimal gear, while the rest of the party has to be built around avoiding overlap in gear. This can make it difficult to have multiple characters that invest into the same school, because they might compete for the same items.
• Considering that items in the upcoming Divinity game may have passive effects that enable builds, similar to the special armor sets in DOS2, this could become even more problematic if multiple characters want to utilize the same mechanic. One way to address this could be to avoid having items that are objectively better than all other options and instead give them more unique advantages and drawbacks. Build-enabling passives should also appear on multiple pieces of equipment. For example, if a passive allows you to create fire while walking, and two characters want to use that effect for different builds, there should be more than one way to access it. The items do not have to be exactly the same, and getting multiple copies could be more difficult or expensive, but it would prevent one player’s build from becoming impossible simply because only one item with that effect exists.
• Locking gear behind quests is a nice way to give players meaningful rewards, but with a fixed item system there is a chance that an important item for a planned build can easily be missed. This could force players to restart their run or switch to a different build because the one item they needed is no longer available. This goes back to the suggestion of having important passives appear on multiple pieces of equipment.
• Aside from that, I would love to see gear pieces have more interesting effects than just increasing stats or boosting certain schools, which was the case for most items in DOS2. Especially conditional effects that require certain actions or situations instead of simply adding more damage and stacking as many damage modifiers as possible.

Surfaces:
For me, one of the most memorable fights in DOS2 was the “oil fight”, where the surface played a huge role in the entirety of the combat. It felt crushing at times but it also felt epic once you have the upper hand in the fight in the midst of a huge inferno covering the battlefield. I know opinions on surfaces were quite divided in the community. I am part of the group that thinks surfaces are awesome, and I was quite disappointed by how much they were toned down in BG3, to the point where they barely played a role.

I think creating different surfaces, dealing with existing ones, and combining them together, such as extinguishing fire to create fog that you can hide inside, adds a lot of depth to combat. At the same time, I agree that DOS2 might have relied too heavily on fire/necrofire. I think a better variety of surfaces, as well as more ways for martial characters to interact with them, would improve the system.

In DOS2, only Huntsman really had the ability to make use of surfaces through elemental arrowheads. Warfare and Scoundrel mostly had to deal with the disadvantages caused by surfaces without many ways to benefit from them. At the very least, the “Dip” action from BG3 should be a common action available to everyone. Maybe it was handled better in DOS1, but I have not played that game, so I cannot comment on it. On a side note i would love to see a shove action/skill in Divinity as well.


Environments:
In both DOS2 and BG3, you were able to interact with the environment, but these interactions were quite limited, like shooting the braziers in the Goblin Camp so they fall onto enemies (although this was rarely worth doing) or destroying ladders, hitting levers and certain objects such as explosive barrels.

I hope they greatly expand environmental interactions both in and outside of combat, allowing for more creative and interesting gameplay. Some ideas I had:

• Setting up traps, such as digging a pit trap, starting combat, or luring enemies into it to gain an advantage.
• Climbing trees to gain high ground, if the mechanic exists. Of course, you should also take fall damage if you fall.
• Attacking weak points of buildings, such as a fragile balcony that collapses onto enemies or burying enemies under a collapsing structure.
• Using a rope or other items to create a improvised bridge.
• Creating environmental destruction, such as destroying walls, boulders, creating craters or fissures, or summoning boulders. Even if these actions do not always have a major gameplay impact, they simply feel cool and satisfying.
• destroying/turning of lamps, so the light source is gone

Schools/Skills:
Creating combos is one of the things I enjoyed most about DOS2, such as using Chicken Claw with Rupture Tendons, and I would love to see more possibilities for this through stronger synergies between skills or abilities that enable other skills.
Obviously, there are already surface combinations like rain plus lightning or ice spells, but I would like to see more creative and interesting combos, especially between party members not just by one character. This also means having more unique spells, especially ones that do not simply deal damage, buff, debuff, or heal.
Utility spells felt somewhat underwhelming in BG3, where combat often revolves around stacking as many damage riders as possible onto attacks and bursting enemies down. In DOS2, only a few utility skills such as Adrenaline, Apotheosis, or Tactical Retreat felt truly impactful.
Since the combat system still follows the traditional idea of reducing the enemy’s HP to zero, damage will always be king. However, I would prefer if overall damage was toned down and skills became more effective when certain conditions are met.
For example a Warfare skill could knock an enemy back but deal little damage. However, if you create a wall behind the enemy with a Geomancer spell and they are pushed into it, the skill could deal significantly more damage. This would encourage creative combinations instead of simply using the strongest abilities whenever they are available.

Regarding schools, I like the idea of having a separate poison, acid, and plant school while letting Geomancy focus more on earth, metal, and minerals. However, I would not mind if they kept them combined into one school. I played with a friend who used a geomancer, he would frequently curse about how often poison immunity came up due to zombies beeing everywhere, which i can certainly understand since half of your spells would become useless and the other half is on cooldown. I think the frequency in which a certain damage type gets nullified by enemies should be a bit more balanced or at the very least more spread around instead of one act beeing full of an enemy type that all nullify one damage type. Beeing able to double the damage for two or three damage types (water/lightning) while there is no way to do so for other types of damage feels a bit unbalanced.

Some racial abilities were much stronger than others, such as Flesh Sacrifice and Fane’s Time Warp being extremely powerful. I hope racial abilities are balanced better in the future, so your go to character doesn't always have the same race.
I would also like to see more interesting talents that enable unique builds.


Difficulty Mode:
I enjoyed the overall difficulty in DO2 for tactician and honor mode. BG3 on the other hand became extremely easy due to the reduced difficulty of the base game and challenge modes having global multipliers on top of the extremely easy base game. I understand that the easier game modes should be accessible for players who just want to enjoy the story, but it should not impact the challenge modes to the point that it almost feels like cheating, if you play with a party of 4 characters. After all their whole purpose is to be challenging. You should be able to give it your all and it should still feel like a challenge just like in DO2.

I think a mix of both fixed and random could work well.

Random gear being more generic stuff (Like BG3's regular "+1" and "+2" gear with no fancy unique effects) that you can use to fill out your slots while you run around bumping into the fixed stuff that has more bonuses for specific builds.

Also having fixed gear having multiple potential spawn locations would be interesting. Meaning, they always exist within a run. But their placement can differ between runs. To mitigate the BG3 aspect of "Just running directly to the same places at the start of every run/transition into a new area to go pick up all the notable loot" thing and make it more of a natural progression of acquiring items when going through and clearing areas.

Outside of that, something to consider would be some sort of crafting system where you could build your own items, utilising effects you've previously found. Meaning you can make items you found that boost your build in Act 1 into having stats that are relevant in Act 3 instead of having to ditch the bonus that fits your build perfectly as soon as you progress into the game... This could also help alleviate the issue of shared loot, if you can craft a copy of singularly good items to allow use on multiple characters.


I think the best way to handle surfaces is to put them onto specific skills.

One of the main issues with surfaces across Larian games, is that every fight always becomes dominated by them because of how every single ability would be creating/interacting with them. Which made them kind of annoying and tedious, or outright frustrating (Trying to use things like Poison or Acid surfaces... But then any attack against a target in them makes them drop a blood surface under them that replaces it... To say nothing about how dropping blood surfaces on hit lead to DOS2's "Everything is an Electrified Blood surface" nonsense)

If players have to intentionally go after making surfaces, with the exception being very specific encounters that might have enemies based around producing them, as well as more intentional means of interacting with them (I.e. You have to actually target the water/blood surface to electrify it rather than it being a byproduct of hitting a target) you then reduce the relentless spam of surfaces everywhere.

Once this is established, there can be a lot more development into surfaces themselves. Having more combos, interactions and layers (DOS2's "Clouds" that can sit above a surface).

Which could lead to more build variety as you could spec a character into surface manipulation as a primary means of combat, while people who don't enjoy surfaces can stick to regular skills and not be throwing out surfaces constantly.


For me, the main thing I want, is more emphasis on LIGHT.

I found it really cool that you can light up braziers and torches dotted around the place by interacting with them or hitting them with fire spells. The lighting systems also made things look really neat.

It's just that such mechanics were ultimately pointless as everywhere was well lit (Even more so if you were one of the 90% of characters that had Darkvision in BG3...). Like, even in Shadow-Cursed Lands where this was more of an actual mechanic it was so underutilised because you got the curse immunity like 2 seconds into the zone (As well as those shadows that turned off lights in an aura whenever it would be relevant after that).

I'd love to see more actual dark places, so you have to properly think about light sources. Carrying torches, using fire surfaces, carrying around candles (Which I did in BG3, not for light but as a means to burn away webs/entangling roots), setting characters on fire, interacting with braziers etc.


Honestly, it's hard to really talk about this without knowing how they plan on doing skills.

Whether they want to continue Original Sin's classless system, or want to take on a more restrictive class based system.

Based on DOS2, one of the main things that I found was that there really needed to be a LOT more abilities to actually acquire. Especially when it came to mono-skill builds, like it always sucked if I wanted to have a character be a tanky tank person and there was like 2 abilities worth using from Warfare so you had to go Polymorph (For again, like 2 more skills worth using).

Really, what I'd love to see is an updated AP system from DOS. Instead of 5 AP maximum and getting 2 (3 with Lone Wolf) per turn and almost everything using 2 AP. Having a wider scope of flexibility would be cool. Like say, 15 AP maximum and getting 5 (8 with Lone Wolf) AP per turn and a plethora of skills that cost 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 AP allowing you to mix up AP usages based on what's available (I.e. Cooldowns) or what the situation requires.

Also, would love to see movement be divested from AP. At least having a baseline movement capacity independent of AP, with optional "Sprint" style consumption of AP for further movement (As well as an AP sink for disengaging from targets). So there's more freedom to use positioning, as opposed to Original Sin where you just sat there like turrets because spending AP on attacking > spending AP on moving (Not to mention how this also neutered enemies, who'd waste all their AP running at you instead of attacking)

You mean sometimes enemies drop +0 and sometimes +1 and +2 weapons? I wouldn't mind it but i don't think it would make a huge impact in terms of gameplay, maybe slightly more/less damage or defence sometimes but that's it right?
I think the majority of the people who rerun the game propably plan out builds and want it to come online asap. If there is x amount of locations where you could get one of your core pieces, I would rather find it annoying, since i want to play with my build as much as possible. Crafting could be an option, but it also requires to be balanced correctly with multiple copies of an item, which is a worry i have.




Yeah I would agree with that. Not every spell needs to create a surface as a side effect. Maybe 3 or so per element i don't know (also depends on the cooldowns). And you still have dedicated spells that only create a surface like rain/blood rain.



More light impact would also be nice, maybe day and night cycle as well. I felt like even in the shadow cursed lands you didn't have a huge disadvantage without dark vision or a closely located light source. Range is a big thing too - in bg3 combat areas tend to be smaller than in dos2, so you would almost never have much issue hitting the target as a mage with your spells. That could be something to consider as well.




Yeah the movement beeing tied to AP is a bid odd but i can see it as a balancing tool. It is a bit tricky, on one hand i would like to chain a lot of skills to get out cool effects and on the other hand i don't want to burst down the enemy. I think I would also not want to see kills, that just give you more AP (basically beeing the Pot of Greed of Divinity). You where able to get to ridicoulos levels with adrenaline+flesh sacrifice+skin graft to reset those cooldowns again and gain even more AP. At that point every fight becomes redundant.

I also forgot to mention that i would love vertical targeting like using a skill underneath or above you. I saw that on Solasta 2 and thought it was a really need idea to use skills.

That and being able to find such things from relevant sources (Such as weapon racks, equipment chests and the like)

It might not necessarily need to be as simple as BG3 where it only amounts to +1 attack/damage or AC.

But the general idea is that you can build up some generic equipment to gain stats, rather than feeling the need to rush to unique items.


The crux of this is more so the fact that you have these build critical items in the first place.

If you need specific items for your build to work, then that is a design issue with items.

Ideally your build should come from how you built your character, where items are supportive rather than "I need this item for my build to work, so I need to rush to grab it 0.01 femtoseconds after starting the game!"

Also, I don't think the majority of people who rerun the game plan out builds. A lot of people play casually and will rerun to see different options, play different classes, romance different characters.

It's only min-maxers that will meticulously research and plan out builds, and they can still min-max and rush to all potential spawn locations to get their desired items as fast as possible.


Again, this comes down to how item design ends up working out.

The more power that's put into actual character building, what stats they level, skills they raise, feats they take and abilities they utilise, the less impactful gear needs to be.

The less impactful gear needs to be, the less of a concern being able to duplicate (Or improve by way of making "Perfect" statted versions of) items would be.

Again, this doesn't necessarily need to mean boring and generic, but simply less build defining and more supportive.



The issue is the way the balancing works is it generally means "Moving is almost always worse than just using ranged attacks"

Like, ranged is already heavily favoured in combat anyway, due to the ease of being able to hit targets, while being out of range of melee attackers (With of course many ways to abuse this with obstacles in the path of you and melee enemies or persistent AoE's like Wall of Fire or damaging surfaces not to mention CC like knockbacks, slows, teleports etc)

Punishing melee even more by making them have to sacrifice the ability to attack just in order to get into range to attack just massively pushes things towards ranged combat even more.

This is before you even factor in how it limits potential when actually fighting in melee. Such as being able to swap targets, move around to get flanking bonuses, repositioning for skills (Like pushing an enemy into an AoE) etc.

Like, the only way you can "Balance" this is if you make melee so much stronger than ranged that melee characters just do obscene damage (But then this too can backfire and go back to ranged favoured combat as you try and kite enemy melee units so they can't blow up your party... Especially when factoring in Larian's love of having a billion enemies per combat)


Ehh... It's just a balancing thing.

Damage output vs health.

In addition, there's the scaling to what AP equates to an "Average" attack. Which is actually one of the issues I had with DOS2's AP system. 2 AP was an average attack and since most skills used 2 AP they all did average attack damage so it was like... Why do I care to even obtain these skills when I can do a regular attack for the same damage?

Similarly on Lone Wolf its like... I could spend 2 AP on a skill... Or I can use my special normal attack that uses the 3 AP I get a turn to do more damage.

With increased AP per turn for more flexibility in skill usage, you can still tune how much damage skills do based on AP costs. Like, even with 5 AP a turn, maybe a 5 AP skill does as much damage as a normal attack in DOS2 and using multiple cheaper skills just adds up to equal this. Thus damage output per turn remains the same as with DOS2 balance, but you have more control over how you play your turns, with more room for support skills or AP saving (Whilst still doing something during your turn) and the like.

In BG3 you need specific items for your build because they come with passives, that allow you to create synergies. If they only come from the classes/schools or talents i think that would vastly limit the variety of builds. So in that sense they should have passives and therefore be crucial to your build.
Maybe I misunderstood you but it sounds like you want the gear to be more like stat blocks and the effects coming only from your classes/talents?


I think even if you just want to get different endings/dialog options or play different characters, you most likely plan your build for the next run, since you propably don't want to play the exact same as in the previous run.

There is a reason that there is a subreddit with over 200k people solely with the focus of creating builds. You see plenty of people wanting to just roleplay and still asking for a fitting build. And in order to create synergies for builds you need to optimize somewhat (and I would argue that humans do have a tendency to optimize that you just can not get rid of and should not try to). Of course not everyone is min maxing trying to squeeze out that extra 3 damage per hit but i also don't think there is anything wrong with that.


I just don't see the big benefit to have to run to 5 enemy points and have a 20% chance to get the thing you want immediately. If i am unlucky i played those 4 other fights without the item i wanted and lose out on the experience how the other 4 fights would have turned out with the item.
I mean it wouldn't be the end of the world or whatever but i think i would rather percieve it as a negative than a positive as a player.
And if you want to have less impactful gear the rng-element would matter even less.



What would be an example of a less impactful gear? To me it would be super boring if its just stats and maybe +5% more fire damage or something like that. There would be no creativity in that.




Yeah i agree with that. Range is definetly more favoured compared to melee, at least in DOS2 and BG3. I am pretty sure you can make it balanced with walking not taking actions like in bg3 and make it balanced as well.




Its not that easy to achieve though. On one hand it feels odd, if you did a whole combo of like 5 skills and not do a lot of damage, since that wouldn't feel very rewarding and on the other hand it would feel very boring if you just one shot everyone after you did your combos. Getting that sweet spot is propably really hard.




I don't quite understand.. you had your "normal" attack and the sills usally did more than that with equal ap costs. Whirlwind for example does 100% fo your attack damage as an aoe, so minimum it does as much as one attack vs 1 enemy but it can do 5x that if there are 5 enemies around you. And skills that less than your actuall normal attack had like a big debuff, such as battle stomp with 60% of your attack damage ( though it also does aoe so it can deal more damage than your normal attack vs 2 or more enemies). I think 5 ap instead of 4 is fine though. It just shouldnt get to like ridicolous levels of 10 ap or so. Also because your turn might take years.

What I mean is something like the difference between Returning Pike and Ring of Flinging.

Returning Pike is a build critical item. As it allows (Non-EK) characters to access infinite throwing items. It is a key part of the functionality of a throwing build. This is poor design as it means you need to go and get it ASAP for your build to work.

Ring of Flinging is a supplemental item for a build. Throwing builds still work without it, but it is nice to have for bonus damage. Functionally, you could have some generic ring item that gives "+1 damage" to use before you obtain this, lessening the need to rush to pick it up since your build still works, you just get marginally more powerful for obtaining this item on a build that can utilise it.

That's the sort of thing I'm on about.

Have the build critical things be stuff you build for on your character via feats, stats, abilities and all sorts of potential avenues for actually giving your character some innate abilities.

While items are more supplemental, even with unique and build specific effects.

This would not only take away some of the pressure to rush and pick up unique items, but also allow new players (Or players who don't look at a wiki to find every item in the game before playing) to make builds on their own without having to luck into a build critical item to make them function.


Not necessarily in much detail.

Like, do I need to plan out every single item and its uses on my characters just to play a different class? No.

I just need to think "I want to play X character. What other classes do I want in my party to work together?"


From what I've seen on these forums of people asking about builds, they're mostly just asking about party compositions, class combos and combat styles (Great Weapon Mastery vs Sword and Board vs Dual Wield) rather than "Please tell me about every unique item in the game and how I should optimise them"



The general idea, and my insistence on reducing build critical items, is to reduce the need to rush and get the thing immediately.

Meaning you play more organically, going to take on areas and fights when you naturally get around to doing them. Rather than "I NEED to go do X, Y and Z in that order to make my build work ASAP"

Having more freedom to do things in different orders to get different experiences, rather than playing like a speedrunner and doing the same exact thing every run.


There's plenty of examples in BG3.

Stuff like the Gloves of Belligerent Skies and Luminous Gloves. They're nice and can be pretty good in certain builds, but they're hardly game changingly powerful and aren't necessarily broken if you can have multiple of them.

Same with the Heat items, they can be interesting to build around (Even though Heat sucks horribly in BG3), but aren't necessarily broken if duplicated.

The problem items are the really game changing ones, such as Headband of Intellect and Gloves of Dexterity which can allow you to dump those respective stats. Or really strong items like Knife of the Undermountain King or Markoheshkir that are either ridiculously good stat sticks for any build, or provide a powerful ability to any caster.


It's not that hard. If you combo'd 5 skills, it means you combo'd 5 skills that are 1 AP meaning they're going to be weak.

Bigger AP costs will do more damage.

Meaning that all you have to tune, is how much damage you are capable of dishing out with the AP you get per turn and multiply that by the number of characters in your party and then average out this result against how long you want the standard enemy to last.

If you want standard enemies to last 1 turn, then have the damage possible from all your characters equal their health. Thus, stronger enemies take more turns by nature of having more health than the basic dudes.


That's the point. Whirlwind was one of the few skills worth actually getting because it had the potential to deal more damage.

Most of the Scoundrel skills for example did exactly the same damage as your regular attack. But only hit 1 target. The "Debuffs" they provided were irrelevant because of the stupid armour system blocking them (With the time when enemies had bare health and so could be affected by debuffs being when they died in like 1-2 character turns because 90-95% of enemy "Health" was their armour)

Even with Divinity Unleashed that reworked the armour system and so all enemies could always be affected by debuffs... Most of the debuffs were watered down to the point of irrelevance, especially with co-ordinated attacks to nuke down single targets (Which is generally how combat is best done) meaning that the target wasn't affected by them for long enough for them to matter.


A higher cap is necessary with more AP per turn, since you need to facilitate AP saving as a mechanic. As it is a gameplay feature that provides more flexibility and options compared to a strict "If you don't use all your available actions, you lose that resource" which plagues BG3 and the need to weaponise Bonus Actions as a result.

Not to mention that with higher spenders then high caps don't necessarily take long to deplete. Like, if I have 10 AP and use 2x skills that cost 5AP then that it done. It's only an issue if for some reason, your play is to do 10x skills that cost 1 AP (If you even have that many, realistically, there would be more focus on 2-3 AP skills with 1, 4 and 5 AP skills being less common, so you're doing on average 2 actions per turn, similar to BG3 and your Standard + Bonus action)