Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General End game weapon skill balance (Spoilers)

This is about the skill Tenebrium.

I think this skill may require some looking at?

The premise is that in the end game weaponry is dependent on the Tenebrium (the mineral) upgrade, since even the enemies have Tenebrium weapons. (Of course it's not a mandatory upgrade, so the premise is open for discussion.)

Currently, Tenebrium weapons are modified exclusively by the Tenebrium weapon skill, regardless of weapon type, so bow users, crossbow users, 1 handed users and 2 handed users all receive bonuses to damage from the one weapon skill.

So long as your weapon has some minute amount of Tenebrium damage, the Tenebrium weapon bonus is applied. This bonus is based on the base damage of the weapon, not just the Tenebrium damage portion. Also, your Tenebrium weapons now no longer receive bonuses from your original weapon skills.

I.e. you've used daggers from the start so you've sunk 15 points into 1-handed. You find a Tenebrium dagger and you have 1 point in Tenebrium. The Tenebrium dagger receives no bonus from the 1-handed weapon branch but receives its damage bonus from the Tenebrium branch.

Issues with the current system:

- using the above example, your characters is as proficient with a Tenebrium dagger as s/he is with a Tenebrium crossbow or spear

- proficiency with a regular dagger has no bearing what so ever on a Tenebrium dagger

Suggestion:

Maybe Tenebrium skill should only modify the Tenebrium damage portion of the weapon? The original weapon skill will still modify the default weapon damage (i.e. crushing, slashing, piercing).


Any thoughts on this?

That idea works. I'd go as far as to suggest some internal consistency; the various Elemental skills also enhance elemental damage on weapons.

I like that idea

Is everyone else Ok with how the current Tenebrium skill works then?

I admit, for marksmanship or marksmanship/scoundrel this skill is great, why choose between bows, crossbows or 1 handed when you can just choose Tenebrium.

And for man-at-arms chars this is great too, you no longer need to choose between 1-handed or 2-handed. You can have both.

Just don't waste any points in the original weapon proficiencies and you don't even need to respec

My only problem is that makes the Tenebrium skill mostly pointless beyond 1 point. Why would you ever sink points into a skill that gives maybe +5 tenebrium damage per rank.

The elemental skills give bonus to weapon elemental damage? Cool, but they also allow you to cast a lot of powerful spells. Tenebrium doesn't, so if it did nothing but boost the tenebrium damage of weapons, they'd have to significantly increase the % at which it does. And at that point you're in a world of pain balance-wise because someone with total 10 points in weapon and tenebrium will do insane amounts of damage.

There's really no good way of doing it. I think they should make Tenebrium Handling a talent that can only be learned from whatever options there are now of unlocking the skill. If you want, add a second talent to boost tenebrium damage by +50% or something.

That way you're not dealing with the issue of one skill making others obsolete, you don't have to deal with balance issues regarding how much benefit you can get per skill rank, and just generally it's not something people need to be worrying about. You've learned how to handle Tenebrium, good for you, now continue on like nothing changed, because really, nothing has (other than unlocking a new material of weapons) (You would need to make it a talent that can't be unlearned via respec, I guess)

Tenebium staves

Well Tenebrium (skill) is actually a requirement for some Tenebrium weapons, so you need to increase your Tenebrium skill if you want to use higher level Tenebrium weapons, but I get what you are saying.

I like the Talent idea, it's probably the easiest solution in regards of maintaining game balance, but it would require modifying items, e.g. Take out the Tenebrium + modifiers that can spawn on items, remove Tenebrium skill level requirements from Tenebrium equipment. I'm not sure how easy it is to implement.

Would a different scaling for the Tenebrium damage bonus be workable?

E.g. -33% at 1, the skill just allows you to handle Tenebrium weapon, but there is actually a damage.
0% at 2, damage penalty removed, +33% at 3, +67% at 4, etc.

You get a lot more Tenebrium with this model but then again you are devoting a lot more points into weapon mastery, maybe you should benefit more from it?

Lol I know, eh?

well with the current model, you are as proficient with a Tenebrium staff as you are with a Tenebrium bastard sword. Maybe the current system is the superior method

Thematically, there being no overlap between the weapon skill and the Tenebrium skill can make some sort of sense when you realize that the skill is all about handling Tenebrium safely.

Imagine, if you will, a person who has both a water balloon filled with normal water and one filled with radioactive water. The person can be skilled with using the normal water balloon all he wants; flinging it, juggling it, etc etc, since there is no risk to his person. But the radioactive balloon requires more care, different techniques to handle properly without risking damage. A Water skill of 5 won't mean a thing if you're pulling your punches trying to use the radioactive balloon with 1 Tenebrium skill.

Conversely, the techniques used to handle the radioactive water balloon would have little effectiveness when handling normal water balloons.

The point I'm trying to get at is that the Tenebrium skill is like an exotic stance that all weapons have; it's not really compatible with how the weapons would be wielded normally if they weren't radioactive pieces of Rot.

I'd agree with that if Tenebrium weapons didn't came in different flavours.

Using your analogy, let's say we also have water guns in our water weapon arsenal. I think we can agree the way you use water balloons vastly differ than the way you use water guns. Now you add radioactive water. While it's true we need new techniques to handle radioactive water, you still don't handle radioactive balloons the same way you would use radioactive water guns.

But anyways I just wanted to point out the weirdness in how weapons proficiencies are applied, but is everyone else happy with this then?

With the advent of the tenebrium skill, mages should have a Void spell equivalent, but that's a gripe for another day.

Now, I'd just settle for actually having tenebrium staves in the game...

But that's the thing, would a Tenebrium staff even be an upgrade for a Mage!?!

Depends on the stats, but mostly because:

a) Crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom

b) A certain quest in Luculla Forest

c) Crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom

Add in a black-dyed robe and hood, laugh.

Exactly, I haven't really seen a staff that would benefit from the Tenebrium upgrade. Staff of Magus is actually dependent on the 2 handed weapon proficiency

+1 for crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom though

One of my thoughts is that staves could add their elemental damage to the damage done by spells of that element, but that runs into the problem of tenebrium again...

Maybe a theoretical tenebrium staff always adds its tenebrium damage to any spell of any element...

At the very least, mages would have a reason to upgrade their staves.

That would require extensive work.

I'm here thinking worst case scenario, we'd have to make the mods ourselves. This would mean we'd have to rebalance all the spells for weapon bonus on top of adding new calculations to determine net spell effect. Lol do you have an easier idea to implement?

It seems the only people interested in this is us two?

Maybe I should have made the title more salacious?

"Worst game ever! Tenebrium broken! Needs fix now!"

The easiest idea, straight up, would be for staves to have a special pool of staff-only suffixes and affixes. Dunno how that would work for scripting, but maybe staves have a higher chance of spawning with Int or mage skill modifiers, or with spells?

Or maybe staves act like the Elemental Affinity talent, lowering AP cost for spells of the staff's element by 1.

Affinity with stave bonus means -2AP... I think the staff bonus should be applicable on one particular spell only then, not an entire spell category. It's a lot better than 15% chance to blind on a staff but it wouldn't be over powering

Looking at item stats it looks like it wouldn't be too bad adding staff only modifiers, provided Larian gives us better tools to add resources like that.

Yeah, that's fine too.

Glad I read this before end game. I would be pissed about having wasted points.

Perhaps the Tenebrium requirement on the weapon should subtract from the normal weapon skill (representing the difficulty in handling a Tenebrium weapon safely), and each point in the Tenbrium skill offsets that penalty.

i.e. a tenebrium requirement of 3 on a two-handed sword applies a -3 to the users two-handed weapon skill, but can be lowered to a penalty of -1 to the two-handed weapon skill if the user had a tenebrium skill of 2.