Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks Luculla Forrest - Seriously Unbalanced?

I made it through Cyseal without too much difficulty and found the game balance to be quite good.

Not so in Luculla Forrest. First, you run around without much of a clue what to do. Still haven't found the spell to release the barrier for the white witch.

The tasks that you get, you cannot finish.

"Invulnerable Death Knights", WTF? So no go in the mines.

"Desert Slowdown" - hard time with the spiders. No fun.

Fight against the Immaculate Priests - impossible to win for me. Even though I have pretty good resistance, the whole party gets frozen, stunned, whatever. Once you manage to kill one of the freaks, he comes right back with a resurrection spell. And that was on "easy".

Everything but mages appears to be bloody useless. No matter what the dexterity, damage level of the bow, a ranger does no damage in a fight like that with the Immaculate priests. Summoned creatures, useless (get dealt 9000 damage in one attack. Jahan is useless as well here.

I played through Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity and Dragon Knight Saga and had a lot of fun with each of them.

D:OS is fun while in Cyseal (even though it is kind of slow to start), after that it is just frustrating.

I guess I will uninstall and forget about Larian Games for the future. Yes, maybe my character balancing was not ideal - but with 50+ hours of game time up to this point, where I am stuck, I just cannot justify the time to restart. I still have a life. In the past, even an average gamer could have fun with Larian games, even if character choices might not have been the best. D:OS is pure frustration past Cyseal.

I agree with you about the areas. Cyseal was balanced, and from then on it's pretty ridiculous. But not because of how hard the fights are (I'm doing fine on that despite having skilled like shit, i.e. none of the OP stuff like Leech) - mostly because you're constantly confused about what to do.

I might help you with my travel guide:
http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=512459#Post512459

The problem here is that only a very small part of Luculla forest is made for low-level characters. You should do the White Witch quest first and travel to another map before you come back to the forest.

You can explore more extensively the area in you safely travel in Silverglen/Luculla or you can simply type in Google Search the issue.



If you truly feel this game is not worth your time, though, please, do uninstall it, as you are clearly deriving no enjoyment from this game.

This is not a game that is going to hold your hand and guide you through every step of the way, making sure you always win, this just isn't that genre.

I'm not hating on you, but you need to keep that in mind, if an area is significantly higher level than you, it's not an area you need to do right now, there will always be an area suited to your level. When in doubt, follow your quests, at least one of them will guide you to the correct area.

No, the forest is really badly designed. I am used to no handholding, but the game just flat out gives you wrong information (mushrooms/scroll) or literally NONE.

And I played through the forest the wrong way, I killed goblins first, then spiders, then the priests, I was in the ghost forest before I ever figured out how to get in the barrier without killing the shrooms.

I finished the game at this point, but the forest was a really weird experience. Sacred Stone has literally no quests (which is odd to say the least, I just made my own quest and killed them all/freed the prisoners and called it a day)

The mine expects you to sneak through undead enemies that can walk faster than you can sneak, so it's a luck challenge. Especially since you can't know where the temple door is (or that there is a temple in the mines...) and the logs you find tell you everything, except the most vital information!

Then we have the spiders, which were imo super easy once you understood the system behind these fights, but anyway.. you kill the queen, and caravan guard remains enchanted... so yay? No quest, no update, nothing for killing a GIANT MANEATING SPIDER? ^^

Goblins... to get the bloodstone there you have pacify them with giant explosions even if you made the speech check against the shaman. There is literally no (obvious) peaceful solution to this (seems like Larian intended there to be one though)

So sorry to say, but to me the forest was one of the weakest areas of the game. It was super pretty and challenging, but it was really really flawed as a RPG map. Well, that's my 2 cents

Avoiding the knights in the mines is REALLY easy once you know how. You don't even have to sneak for a single second.

1) Let a char with invisibility scout the area and discover the second portal.
2) Leave the mines through the entrance.
3) Teleport your whole party to the second portal.
4) Avoid the last two knights which is really easy if you follow the southern (trapped) path to the temple door.

Act 2 is extremely convoluted in the order you're supposed to do things, but in terms of the difficulty of the fights it's much much easier than Cyseal.

Which is mostly caused by the fact that the enemies are basically the same while your party has acquired and learned how to use new skills...

Actually Act 1 (if you mean Cyseal) is exactly the same...

Not really.... at no point did I not know where to go in Cyseal or what to do..... everything can be deduced by map markers and hints or plain monster level. (Maybe that you have to confront Evelyn Esmeralda to have the quest advance properly is convoluted though.. or maybe it's just plain odd scripting) look my topics for help here and you notice the first time I had a problem was when the game triggered the homestead invasion before giving me access to tenebrium weapons (Kinda huge flaw, wouldn't you say?) and simply because I explored the bridge map change to see where it leads. And that you can find the skill book for this in geomancers office in a city with no quests on a shelf that doesn't highlight unless you stand directly underneath it.... ;P

I dunno how to say this, but while I love D:OS for what it is, hardcore CRPG and all, it is also the weakest in terms of story/writing and simple "purpose" (compared to Torment/BG2). Even if it has a interesting story, but thinking more about it it doesn't really offer a lot of depth. (It's always a bad sign when you can sum it up in 1 sentence and end up describing the entire plot)

Act 1 is most definitely convoluted but it is not nearly as confusing and simply purposeless than act 2. You are not given a direct purpose, you just kinda wade through the forest because you are done in cyseal. Maybe that is your point with "no handholding" but to me this is bad writing. Good writing gives you a purpose, and lets you figure out things in-between.

And let me tell you, but if you don't free the white witch as first thing, then NOTHING in act 2 and act3 makes any sense at all. Now that's not the bad thing, the bad thing is that you are not given proper purpose to free her. Instead that's told to you as a "thing you may wanna do at some point" like washing behind the ears, or picking up mushrooms.

I wonder, % wise, how many considered the white witch to be a major plot point when entering the forest? Because I didn't until I freed her, way way later ;P

It's not even close to as much. Yeah it's not exactly the easiest thing since you just run around looking for enemies your level, but Luculla is way way worse.

I'm not saying it takes away from the game, but it is ridiculous enough to have thrown me for a while...



I managed to get almost to level 13 before going to Hiberheim. I was certainly very, very confused.

I felt that it being a major plot point was completely obvious, but I do admit that I also ended up doing it much later than I was clearly supposed to have done. I found the trap cliff and I also got the hint about the location of the stashed spell being between the two bridges, but then I kind of left them to one side and went to deal with more accessible stuff.

That said, I didn't feel like it was purposeless at any point, I was just a lot more immediately focused on investigating the Immaculates than freeing the White Witch. It was only after I found Maradino's lair and realized that the solution to freeing the witch without killing the mushrooms wasn't there either that I thought to go back and check out that trapped hill.

Other than that I honestly found the whole forest pretty accessible and straightforward. The only bit where I got confused was not freeing the witch early on.

I did a lot of Luculla out of order too, the only place it gave me any real trouble was against the spiders, where I swiftly realised I was out of my depth. I'd already gotten the barrier down by this point, but I just explored at my leisure, seeing where I could and couldn't go.

Honestly I had more trouble with figuring things out in Cyseal than Luculla.

I nearly completly agree!

I nearly completely disagree.

Finding the White Witch is kind of the "main quest" (A Source Hunter's Journey) in act 2...



Following this quest leads you exactly to the "right" spots with enemies balanced to your level.

A game without enemies scaling to your level is never really open world. And it's really not all that hard to think about what to do next...

No, it really doesn't. My quest journal entry after talking to the mushrooms and answering their riddles is "Maradino might have stashed a spell to break the barrier somewhere in the forest". That is it. While I don't mind the lack of information, it surely doesn't point anywhere, unless you consider "somewhere in the forest" a proper location indicator.

Also, after talking to all the people in Silverglen, not a single direction was given to me. Sure, they told me the mines are overrun by goblins, but noone told me where the hell are the mines. Loic told me to find a second part of the Immaculate book, but did not give a single hint as to where to look for.

In Cyseal, people had the decency to at least tell you what direction they want you to go. You know, clear the area around lighthouse just west of the city. Check the ruins up north. Or if they didn't, the quests and characters involved made sense and you could figure out the rest. Luculla forest gives no crap about that kinda stuff though. The quests are straight up "Find this" the end.

From all this it probably looks that I'm hating on the game, which I'm not, I love this game, I'm just a bit salty about the way it's treating me at the moment in the forest. Because now I have no other choice but to explore the area blindly and hoping for a lucky find. And I don't really mind doing that at all, because I would do that anyway, but I will argue that the quests in the forest area are poorly delivered.

To me, enemies I can beat are the right enemies.. ;p

But imo, It should not be possible to literally ignore *this* quest and yet do all the others that are directly related to it. A main story quest + world that you can (accidentally!) skip is not integrated into the game properly. But maybe this is related to the general feeling that the forest is a bit "under-stuffed" with quests. It feels to me as if quests were cut from that area and the ghost forest. And maybe with more quests, more hints could have redirected us to the witch quest if we had not freed her at some point.

And yeah, just like Delaron says... the forest / white witch quest has really bad guidance, the mushrooms either don't tell you anything, or they MASSIVELY misdirect you.

And you end up feeling REALLY lost at some point.

Also I am not fishing for agreement or disagreement, I am honestly just wanting to discuss this, I think it's interesting that many others were also confused by the white witch quest (and in what order you were supposed to do anything)

To me, this is one of the most confusing quests in D:OS .. and it doesn't help that the German D:OS version is abysmal ;p (Lots of text not translated!)

Did you know in Cyseal the main source hunter's quest isn't something you pursue immediately? You end up doing a bunch of other stuff along the way like "Shouldn't I be doing this...?" By Act 2 you get vague hints about the white witch and how to get to her, but the way it's worded and the way Cyseal was makes you think "Oh I guess I'm supposed to do other stuff to get to her..."

Not to mention the fact that you find an NPC and ask her where she is and he just says "Over there!" Where's there, exactly? I managed to find just about everything before the witch's cabin because "there" is not exactly helpful.

I had no idea how to get to the white witch either. I just wandered around and happened to stumble upon the solution thanks to one of my characters' high perception scores (after triggering a whole bunch of other quests, like the homestead invasion, which also really confused me since it told me to go close a portal I had no ability to close, and inhibited all my homestead progression).

I think the quest guy I was supposed to talk to ended up getting killed by the spider queen or something, because I sure never found out how I was supposed to discover that scroll otherwise.

Have you looked at your map? The cabin has quest marker once you've talked to the NPC at beginning of Luculla forest...

OF course you COULD do other stuff first. But in the end, you'll see that enemies are too strong for your party or not balanced to your party elsewhere. So following the White Witch quest just seems to be the next reasonable step...