It would be alot more convenient to make the whole squad return to thier position set in Party Formation whenever there is a battle.

I'm having an awkward situation where my main is a ranger and i want her to do talking, but then she will be the first on front line when a battle begins.

I thought the same myself. What use for Party-Formation, if your Main-Character isn't an Meele fighter on the Front. Than again i thought, however, if they would implement it that way, that your Party takes Formation ones the fight beginns, it wouldn't be that dynamic anymore and would forgive to much, like if you mindlessly run into enemys/fight/ambush with your Mage or such.... I don't know an proper solution, maybe for Explorer-Mode?

ambush is usually set up with enemies spawn circle around your whole squad so i dont think it matters much.

Then again when exploring, your front-liners will be always the one to lead ( like the swamp ) so the party formation as it is now will works as intended.

It only becomes a problem when there is a fixed battle after certain dialouges and you want your main to do the talking instead.

Make it like Pillar Of Eternity, the party formation stay still whenever you engage a conversation with your controlled character BUT the nearest character to that NPC will run up into him instead and you do the talking at the backline.

It works nice and doesn't break the immerson much. If i'm going to talk with a stranger and i'm not good at close combat but good at range, i wont mind talking with the target from few miles away while my bodyguards stand guard in front and ready for trouble.

How do you set up a party formation please?

Press ESC and and you'll see [Party Formation] option. It's added in the latest patch.

Thanks, I've got it now.

Your first instinct was right. Your second thought was wrong.

Literally the only point of formations is to arrange your party on combat. If it doesn't do that, it's not working. If your formation has the mages at the back properly, but they are at the front if you had one of them leading, then it is not working. You should not, in any way, be punished for that. DOS 1 rearranged the formations properly based on the chain order, so DOS 2 can do it as well. It should NOT be an "explorer mode only" thing.

Something seems weird about the formation esp given that the order of the character in the chain list and the leader (person you are controlling) has more impact on the actual formation than the formation you select. While I had arranged the four members as two in front and two in back frequently they came out in odd arrangement dependent on who actually entered combat first.

While there is some logic to this I would prefer that the actual combat order respect the formation and not who is leading or the chain order.

To hear that from someone, who can't stand that they carry Weapons on the Prologue-Ship because of "Immersion", but in case of combat it should be like: "Oh we have to fight, wait we have to take the proper formation"... That wouldn't be pretty immersive for me as well.

And the first one did have an overly silly story, should we argue now, that Larian should get rid of the more Serious tone of the sake how the first one it did. Lastly also nice, how give yourself the right to judge my feelings & thoughts on that, while you complained the last time as i did about your immersion thing. But whatever - in case of Formation i don't care either way how Larian it handle, so i let you people argue about that.

What kind of connection does "silly story" have to do with "combat formations"?

In D:OS 1, do you know what happened when you were walking and entered combat? Your party members jogged from the formation they were walking in to the positions dictated by the formation and chain position before the participants got their first turn. It took about a second and a half. There's no reason why that can't happen in D:OS 2. That is no sillier than people in combat being frozen while those not in combat can walk around in real-time (and sneak through combat areas in real-time too), and that is still in D:OS 2.

that happened (the party members jogging) in DOS 2 until the formations were in place the only thing i hate about it is it's Super buggy. Even in DOS: EE my characters would clip into terrain (rarely but points remains).A part of me appreciates this change but part of me is still annoyed about all the times i've chosen to roleplay and control my squishy main character and forget to switch back to my tank character and have him in front. The current system is something i like but it punishes me at the same time decreasing my overall experience.

I am having issue with formation too, especially in tighter space just after descending stairs with straight line formation, e.g. 1-1-1-1 at the place where there's a shrieker. The last on the line doesn't seem to run down the stair and instead run back around the shrieker and got 1 shotted. I think it maybe because of the lack of space after descending the stairs. What I think Larian could do is to show the cursor of every party member instead of the one selected while moving and let us rotate the cursor like Pillars of Eternity, so we could expect the positioning of our characters.

Where does Sebille go if you swap her out for Ifan please?

Is there any reason for why there couldn't be an optional pre-combat positioning phase? I haven't actually played DOS2, but at least in DOS:EE I would often enough unlink all my characters and pre-position them before initiating combat. (Including some ambushes, which obviously mean that I'm pretty much save-scumming.)

Only reason I wouldn't do that every time is because it's too tedious, and sometimes I don't save frequently enough. (Even though I'm basically using F5 every minute or two as the experienced RPG player I am...)


If there was an (optional, like maybe even a checkbox in gameplay options) setting to move your characters before combat begins it would fix a lot of the clunkiness from the formation system.

And not just for gameplay reasons either, I think it make sense. Even if you're walking in formation, wouldn't you take the terrain and environment into account and position yourself accordingly?


Of course, I think it would be totally fine if there was a 'penalty' to it. If you want to move a character you still need to spend AP*; Perhaps incorporate initiative & whether the party is being ambushed or not to affect how far or how much AP they need to spend to move.


Of course if you have a character that you know will go first, you wouldn't need to move him before combat, but from lurking the forum I've gathered that going first is uncommon.



*An extra perk for The Pawn talent? Not sure if it's currently a good or bad talent as I haven't played DOS2, but I'd assume that AP is more precious than in DOS and walking even just a bit would be twice as expensive. So at least from an on paper perspective I thought it seem like a useful enough talent, especially for rogues who need to backstab.