Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Fire

In attempt to get this issue a bit more visibility...


Fire creates several unintended issues in the game.
Spells are great, look powerful, its fun affecting envrionment wiht it and all that.
But, it creates some issues.

Because it is too powerful and have too big effects on enemies and our characters.

It should be balanced a bit. Adjusted.

As it is now enemies and our character burn too much - too fast. It doesnt matter which kind of creature we are talking about, (except the charred soldiers) what kind of resistances it has - nothing.

You touch fire and - Wooosh! - youre gone. My characters burn as if they are made out of gasoline.

It creates the additional problem with characters accidentally walking into a burning surface - dying so fast you cant even click onto anything and resurrecting characters who died in it - only to see them die again.

Resurrecting in such situations will be handled by removing that part of burning or otherwise deadly surface - as "lar" said on chat yesterday. And thats fine. Ok.


BUT... that still leaves the previous issues with fire the same. My characters will step into fire and go Woosh!
I had a character just go close to a normal torch once and then literally bursting into flames because he caught one of the sparks or "touched" the torch. Its not that big of a problem because we have resurrect spells and all that but, its just annoying. And frustrating - without any real need to be like that. Having resurrect spells shouldn't be an excuse for unbalanced features.



Solution:

The amount of damage and how fast it is applied - can be reduced a bit. A bit. Which would result in us having some time to react to such accidents with our companions.

It would still be dangerous - only not in such, almost ridiculous manner as it functions now.
It would still cause damage to us and enemies - but not with such crazy speed.

It would still be a excellent weapon but not so overpowering it looks like a cheat or a bug. It is very unbalanced now.


Ive heard from one player that if you raise the fire resistance to 100% - it begins to heal you. As if you were one of the burning legion.

Thats great.



How about if level of resistance to it lowers the speed at which you gain damage from it?

FWIW in the global chat yesterday Lar said that the surfaces under bodies would be removed, so resurrecting will no longer be such a problem.

Yes, and i say so in the post above. Thanks for reading it.

Resurrection problem can be handled in other ways too, and it was you who pointed out to me i can use the teleport spell even on dead bodies of my characters to handle it.

But all that is just a side effect of the main issue with the fire.
(poisonous surfaces work in pretty much the same way)

I do know that we can use the rain spell to remove most of the fire surfaces, but thats not really the best solution because it forces everyone to learn water magic or at least buy a lot of those scrolls. - And that doesnt remove the problem entirely because the burning surfaces still damage the enemies and my characters too much - too fast.

That is good news, Raze. I do agree with Hiver, though. Fire and Poison do excessive damage, and removing the surfaces under bodies isn't enough. Just skimming near the edge of the burning surface will set you alight.

I've had more than one battle lost because of losing the war of attrition between healing and DoT (plus direct enemy attacks). Yesterday I was doing great in a battle against the 3 undead boars north of Cyseal, I was using status effects to lock everyone down. No one had died even after whittling them down to just one boar left. My Rogue and Knight weren't in perfect health, but they did have high health. The combo of poison + physical damage of the boar killed them both in one turn for a game over.

I can confirm that poison resistance over 100 does heal you from poison instead of hurting you. It wasn't much, since I only had like 105% PR.

The problem is not that burning and poisoning do too much damage, the problem is that we encounter these things too early in the game. Undeads at level 2 or 3 should be skeletons doing physical damage. Having to deal with poison and burning at level 2 or 3 when you don't already have the response to it is a problem. They are doing too much damage compared to low level health. But if you reduce the damage, then these conditions will barely scratch a high level player.
You can scale the damage to the player's level ( not very realistic ) or introduce conditions later in the game.

Also damage is high and duration is short. Reducing the damage and increasing the length would give players some time to react and would make removal spells more useful.

Thats good to hear. It means that the mechanic is already there.


All that needs to be done is to enable resistances to specific element to slow down the speed at which you gain damage and slightly minimize the damage from that element.

I cant give proper or exact numbers for that myself, but i trust the devs can do that to fit with what they want for the game - relatively easily.


Speaking in simple terms, someone with 30 % fire resistance (or poison) would be damaged a bit less and a bit slower, then one with 0%. One with 50% would be damaged a bit less and slower then that - and so on - until 100% when you would start to heal from the fire.

Or poison.

No, unless you want "these things" to be removed from the early game.
The problems actually is in the fact that these elements do to much damage over to short of time - in TB combat and especially in real time, outside of combat.

As your own suggestion bellow actually confirms. Which is something every player knows as a fact very well.



As i was saying... and thats exactly what my suggestion would handle - through the mechanics of the game, instead of through some meta measures that would ruin the game.



That doesnt make sense since you yourself can deal these same types of damage at those levels.

In case of undead - it is only archers who do this - and they have two special arrows at the most at those levels. Or mages - who have their spell lists intentionally neutered by the devs so they cannot damage players too much.


It is only the problem of players not even trying to use the right equipment with right kinds of resistance bonuses or to use any food and other items such as potions - that provide real resistances.

- when we are talking about combat against enemies.

When we are talking about environmental effects then resistances dont play any role at all. They have no effect whatsoever.




High level players will never meat low level enemies.


what a horrible unimaginative idea.
... level scaling and just removing whole features....


Burn it with fire.

Hiver once again you are being rude in another thread...

Fire is a destructive element and when enemies used it I really had no issues..sounds to me like you are not pre planning your team. When any of my characters would get caught on fire. "Rain" was used by my caster. Then for the next few turns while "Wet" status was in effect. Fire did not do so much.

I really like this idea. Even just increasing the duration could help.

This, in combination with fixing the double dipping of damage on the first turn could help immensely in reducing the potency of fire and poison.

@Ellary - Im getting quite fed up with your intentionally false accusation based on your "personals issues" and inability to understand what is written, or not reading posts that you reply to.

That is actually very rude, and insulting. Besides being quite stupid.

*finger twirl* And you assume Raze did not read your post was kinda lame.. I have come to accept that you are just angry and unhappy all the time Hiver. I started a thread for Mod Requests...as much as I dislike you and how you treat others. I did include your mod requests (yes requests as they are personal needs you want)

Everybody can read my posts.

And there is nothing rude in them. Except you.
You start replying without even reading what im saying and you make posts based on your "personal dislike" of... something.

I dont care. Youre on my ignore list. Stop spamming my threads. Dont make me unignore your posts just to check have you posted another of your invented accusations or lies.

???

Where?

Hiver was actually doing good here and making good points.

There is a difference between attacks that deal direct damage scaled to the caster's level and attacks adding a condition to the target.
High level players will face the same conditions.
When an attack causes burning or poisoned condition it is not scaled to the caster's or target's level so you will face a balance problem. It will either be too strong for lower levels or too week for higher levels.
Waiting 2 or 3 levels to introduce them will allow the players to get more health and learn some spells to reduce the effects.
Later in the game you will have ennemies producing multiple conditions and/or AoE conditions, along with getting more resistances and immunities.

If you just reduce the damage done by conditions to allow the players to survive in the fight against the first zombies in the western part of the map then you will be quite immune to these conditions at high level.

Not an assumption. Fact. You are wrong here.

Here is the progression:







You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

I think an apology is in order here, don't you think?

Maybe they could put a natural "resistance" on player char's depending on level of char.. at level 1 your fire resistance naturally "not visible to player as in thier stats" but a invisible stat that would make fire seem to not hurt you as much and as you level up this invisible stat lowers so it "appears" fire is getting more dangerous at later levels but at the same time visible stat of resistance might be counteracting it... wow complicated balancing lol

No. They do too much damage even later on. In the boar encounter I mentioned, I was level 5, it was a level 5 encounter. My rogue backstabbed a boar and got some poison on his boots. He took 134 damage immediately as soon as his turn came up (15 + 59 + 60), and was poisoned to take something like 42-60 per turn after that. The initial poison didn't kill him, but it was a massive chunk out of his health and that led to his death within a couple turns.

The problem I have early on is that enemy archers are using AoE arrows when there are single-target versions available. That would introduce the concept of special arrows equally as well.

Weirdly enough, the archer in the boar encounter only used single-target arrows like Stun and Slowing.




It DOES scale. I just confirmed it.

In the graveyard tunnel, there's a poison-gas spreader covered by a crate. I broke the crate, and walked my character in and out. I moused over the "Poisoned" icon beside my portrait to see how much the status was doing. This is for the exact same trap:

Level 2: 23-31 Poison
Level 3: 31-42 Poison
Level 4: 38-52 Poison
Level 5: 46-63 Poison

This is because skill/spell damage scales up as you level, to keep lower-level spells useful even later on (not a bad idea given the new restrictions on how many skills you can know). I think that's fine generally, in this case the base damage is too high a percentage.




Yes, I think this idea is interesting and it might make sense.




Please don't start. Just ignore it.

Hmm... I wonder how hard it would be to rework the way the fire progresses in damage. Yes, you guys say it scales, but maybe the issue is not a static scaling that is needed, but an exponential progression of damage that would allow them to tune the problems of taking too much damage too fast and yet still make being in fire a nasty thing? So, lets say your first few rounds are much lighter on damage (to simulate that you have clothing and armor protecting from the immediate heat), but then... over time (few rounds), that damage begins to scale up quite quickly, maybe even higher than it currently is.

This would give people time to react, but also keep fire and other like elements deadly. /shrug

Edit:

I may be missing things, I haven't played the game so if I am ignorant of something and not making sense, just disregard.