Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Divinity II - The Dragon Knight Saga 4th time and still love this game. BUT...

Spoilers kinda lol.


Yikes lol, is it ever easy now even on hard difficulty(Yes, I know...it's been posted already :P). I personally didn't mind as It's my 4th play through but I'm thinking somebody new to the game/series might find it a bit TO easy. Even the final fight was Literally joke easy. I don't know if it was the character I played this time(an Int/Str/Dex Based mage/warrior hybrid. If you ask why dex well I like big crits and really with charms you can Easily get all three to mid 80's) or the SIMPLE to get Epic's now. Ohh, also....weapons. I LOVE dual wield. Always play them. NEVER play 2hander characters. With that being said dual characters have a HUGE advantage not only in skill efficiency but also in gear especially with the remaster. My lordy those special bought weapons. Last the entire game and blow the 2handers out of the water lol. Mr Smashy at level 15? Maxos Mallet I used till end game and only replaced my level 15 Smashy with the blade of hypnoromachia from the ministry. Holy smokes that sword is a beast(until Fov lol....then it's OK at best)

I finished up at level 36(I know, it's higher than mobs in ED. But the end fight should still have caused me to use a health pot on hard no? lol.) fully charmed out with around 1200HP, 600 mana. Maxed whirlwind, Fireball, Firewall, Way of the Battlemage. About 3000 base damage pre Way of the Battlemage with a crit% of 50+% in both hands. When you can crit 5-6+K a Fireball and your Whirlwind is a 1 second cooldown with mana/HP leech most non boss mobs die in one hit. This is NOT a brag, anybody can do this quite easily if they wish to take some time gearing themselves. I guess I can summarize:

1: Dual Wielding is King(for melee....Not comparing to mage/archer) 2hander and sword/board are WEAK compared. Dual should have been lower damage but more crits maybe. 2hander should have been Bigger hits with maybe 1.5 times the stat allowance on the item(just seems a bit unfair that you get double the stat increases going dual). Sword n Board should have had a real benefit to using a shield. Once you max your resists and get close or above 50% magic/melee/range resistance a shield doesn't add crud lol. Maybe having a Block ability built into using a shield would have been handy. Not doing as much damage? that's ok cause you're a tank and take fewer hits.

2: I felt that ED was not hard to begin with lol. For those that felt it was hard, shame on you. Go play Demon's souls on PS3....come back and sleep while playing ED hehe. Now, it's easier!(In the remaster) I really do hope they add in that Nightmare difficulty that was talked about recently. Seriously, No pet and not one pot for final battle on hard. Jump to the side, Way of the Battlemage, Jump in middle of room and drop Firewall, Fireball and 2 whirlwinds(missed Zandalor with first Whirl) and everything was dead. Total time was 12-15 seconds?

3: Equipment is SO easy to max out now. EVERY piece of my kit is an Epic(Red) including jewelry and my two weapons are store bought lol. To easy to get...WAY to easy. I love being powerful and class myself a min/maxer but it's nice to earn your stuff rather than saving a few $$. I wish I knew how to take a SS(Why can I not find a SS key??) of my characters stats....it's wild how easy it is now to gear out. The beginning sets are Good(Defenders, Rivellon, Wild, Blood) but the end game(ED) Sets are stink other than looks Even a mediocre store bought set with the right enchants is FAR better.

4: I love this game.....don't be fooled by my rant lol. I'm just starting FoV and looking forward to it

Larian, Thank you for such a wonderful game and all your hard work and dedication are VERY much appreciated by myself and many others. I've been playing Fantasy/RPG games since the Bard's tale, Questron and Ultimas were around so I've been around. This game Rocks. Thanks!

This is the feeling across the boards. I'm waiting for their patch to start being able to promote my friends. If I'd tell them to get the game now they'd criticize me big time for the lack of difficulty and tell me to play a game with a real challenge.

Pretty much the weapons and armor are meant for beta testing purposes just to make combat a breeze while they check story and quests to make sure everything works correctly. Then the stuff is suppose to be tuned down for public release, which it wasn't.

From what I've heard so far, next patch will weaken the weapons and add the Very Hard mode since it is requested so much.

My int-based mage found it sufficiently challenging, but MAN, did my 2-handed Warrior have a good time. I only put 1 or 3 points into Life Leech, but the huge bonuses to Life leech and Regenerate from the set items gave me a seriously huge regeneration rate, 1.5% - and when your health is over 1000, that's 15 HP a second. Enemies couldn't hurt me fast enough. Giving them more damage wouldn;t help because that would crush my mage, and nerfing the regen rate would.

I had maxed out all useful skills and I was cleaving through enemies with ease using a two-handed sword. I can't imagine how much easier it'd be with dual-wielding.

I used the set items, and the bonuses they offered were HUGE and worthwhile - so worthwhile that I'm planing to make a character that never uses set items.

havent finished the game yet so cant say about difficulty (playing on hardest) but as the OP pointed out, this game could REALLY use balance. even early game, just looking at skills and swinging a sword and trying hand2hand, i could already tell 2W trumps 2HW and hand to hand is useless. why put a skill on h2h then make it useless? also cant recommend it to friends yet for that reason. hopefully it gets fixed or an editor released

Hand-to-Hand could probably be improved if the skill specialization gave much higher bonuses, if Strength wasn't capped at 100, or if gloves and leggings added damage to hand-to-hand fighting (and only hand-to-hand fighting).

You must be referring to FoV sets stabbey? I know the end game ED sets are not worth using over store bought/drop armor pieces. Can't wait to see the FoV sets! It's funny i'll likely be using the mage set on my melee being magic/int based. Is there plenty of charms available for a new set in FoV?

It's strange...I was struggling to survive from levels 1-8, chugging potions, leaping an dodging and pausing to target each enemy. Then something happened, and by level 14 I am an unstoppable juggernaut - just a simple sword and shield magic user. The thing is I have this sword that gives me +65 to magic damage I found around level 10. With my emphasis on intelligence this makes both my sword swings and spells stupidly powerful. I took out Amdusias just with one fireball and two sword swings. He was shooting stuff at my creature so I took no damage....this was the big bad boss of the first act? Time to crank the difficulty up to hard.

A very good plan I think to make the game for yourself a(real) challeging in the meanwhile (I hope) Larian make a crazy Nightmare mode
(but do no change anything on the loot!)

Nightmare mode should have resurrected enemies after 10 mins of being killed

What a fitting username.

Warriors were equally easy in Ego Draconis, really, with the way damage scaling worked.

I'm partway through flames of vengeance now and my impression, I agree but also disagree. During my play I found it difficult at times but very easy others. I entered broken valley at level 1, didn't really do any leveling up in farglow. This led to early fights with the trolls to be a little more lead a couple away and take them on in small bumbers. Goblin chiefs had huge damage output and I didn't to start with so it was quite diffult for a bit. Till I got a weapon with 65 magical damage, then things evened out some, the enemies hit hard and so did I. So normal goblins went down easy, chiefs I had to be careful, two or three hits and I was done by them and vise versa. I started dual wielding once I got far enough into the game to start putting points into the skill. First half of ego draconis it was mostly the same, they hit hard and so did I. So while it was easy as long as I took them out before taking damage I found myself often retreating or puring enemies from large groups out. Maxos tower boss was the major wall, first few tries he one hit me with exploding arrow, even if I got some ranged damage through spells on him early he was still too much to take on. I left a bit, gained a couple levels went back level 13 I believe with a little better armor and resistance, through down a potion and rushed in and took him out before he could get anything on me. So not really an epic battle and appeared easy, but really it isn't as all it came down to was beating the enemy to the punch nothing more, if he confused my character or got an explosive arrow out I would of lost just the same. Late in ego draconis it started getting easier till the flying fortresses. Way more difficult there attempting Raze's, the enemies had brutal damage as I explained in another thread my creature was all that helped me survive without luring one enemy at a time out. Till this point I had just been using best equipment I found. After exploiting the workshop, throwing .225 health regen on a number of jewlery that already had some regen, taking my best weapons and putting 100 melee and 75 magic on each,, charming my equipment for even more resist it got quite easy. After that taking a full set of I believe it's called ulthrig's armor, enchanting it for 10 resist of different types and charms for added statpoints and resist. Since then it's been very easy. Which for the time I kinda enjoy, feels good after all the tough parts early to have the enemy be the underdogs.

All this on normal difficulty and my first time playing divinity 2. I have a lot of experience playing RPG's of many types and I can honestly say as a first time coming in I didn't find it way easy like many are calling it. It's way easy if you either one taking out enemies before they hit you, or two exploiting regen and things to overcome the damage the enemies do. If you play just taking what equipment you find it seems to be a fast battle game with heavy damage on either side, so you die a lot but it's hard to say it's very difficult reality you just losing the timing game or falling to bad luck. Like when I found the 5 dragon slayers and they stun me battle start and proceeded to take me out before I ever got control of my character once. Health potions seem to fall more to a defence rather than recovery, most often they are best used before the damage hits you to absorb it and keep your health up, if you wait till damage is done it doesn't do much good. Most RPG players are going to try the latter, potions usually are best used to recover, which they still can if you can retreat but often you don't get much chance fighting the big enemies.

The easisy part by far was the dragon parts for me, only time I died in dragon form was the one time I had to fight a boss in a small cave with a nest dais in it, you could easily get overwhelmed there not being able to avoid attacks. Personally it's a very fun game but I still don't think combat is extremely easy just because of the overpowered weapons, I still think both sides need balancing, the players weapons as well as the enemies damage output so that battles are more than a few second affairs and really intense fights.