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

Let me get this straight. late game there are weapons which are superior but can only be used with tenebrium skill. So all the points you put in to your normal weapon skills become useless. Seriously who is the person that designed this? How does crap like this happen?

Tenebrium skill could perhaps have a prerequisite of 5 in a main weapon skill. You could then only use tenebrium weapons which match your chosen weapon skill. Ranking up tenebrium would apply a small damage bonus perhaps? 5% 5% 5% etc. Maybe this would contribute too much to the damage snowball effect late game.



+ or - what? AP? This could work and end game damage wouldn't snowball with more damage bonuses. I haven't made it to end game yet but have read it gets easy, even on hard. Perhaps combine your suggestion with mine, a primary weapon skill prerequisite of 5 and only use tenebrium weapons of your chosen weapon skill. I like it.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should pursue my current save or wait for another patch or two.

I'd go as far as to suggest that high-end talents need to be looked at as well. There's such a disparity between mage and rogue archetype talents, and warrior talents, that it's almost painful, balance-wise.

Rogue archetypes (MM, SC) and warrior (MaA) archetypes share Leech and Zombie, but the MaA prerequisite talents blow every other talent out of the water with just how powerful they are. Rogues get Guerrilla and that one sneak talent that lets you move at normal rate when sneaking (which is more utility than anything), and Mages get that +2m range talent and that +1 Int talent, and...that's about it. Demon and Ice King are horrendous, with only the Geomancer talent being anywhere near MaA talents, and even then it's still trailing far behind.

I don't know if Tenebrium was originally handled this way during concept or alpha. For example, there is one unique dagger (Snakebite) in the game that comes Tenebrium damage. One of the modifiers on the dagger is +1 handed; there is no +1 Tenebrium on the dagger

If the normal weapon abilities weren't supposed to modify Tenebrium weapons, then this unique weapon was made as a slap in the face for rogues.

Also, why bother separating bows and crossbows in the regular damage trees when there is no separation for Tenebrium bows and crossbows?

@Vedros
If you are going to respec, I suggest hunting for skillbooks

@LordOfBOnes
Also, how about the talents Bigger and Better as well as All Skipped Up? Those 2 talents seem to be made to encourage people to respec.

Funny enough there was some talent balancing that nerfed the rogues. If you look in the code there is a talent for rogues that reduced basic attack AP to 1.

weapons actually made of tenebrium directly are usually a fair bit stronger than equal weapons (outside of crafted ones). I think that was their form of balancing since they probably assumed players would have already invested into whatever weapon they preferred.

Personally I'm among the crowd of 'i can make a normal weapon and toss a tenebrium ingot on it instead of bothering with tenebrium's skill'

BaB and ASU are general talents, so I'm not too fussed about them; you could just as easily use those to grab that extra bit needed for a 5 in your specialized skills.

But the talents that have skill prerequisites, however, are weird. Man at Arms blows every other skill out of the water with its talents.

@Dogi

I can live with the way the Tenebrium skill is right now because as it stands, it's a better weapon ability to abuse than the others anyway. As you said, Tenebrium weapons are already beefed up and letting the skill apply a bonus to the entire weapon adds even more oomph. I just thought others might be interested in knowing how this skill, um, shifts the game balance.

A lot of people say the end game is easy enough but Tenebrium is like extra icing on the cake.

@LordofBones

Well, with the amount of posts by people wailing about how underprivileged melee characters are, you'd think Man-At-Arms characters need all the help they can get so why not super talents

This is a bad design. A person should not get over half through the game only to realize all those points in a dedicated weapon type become useless. If skill books were not such a pain in the rear i could chalk it up as a money sink, but that is simply not the case. with the randomness of acquiring skill books its just bad design for this to happen.

tenebrium skill should probably just be removed and replaced by normal weapon skill.

i would suggest things like letting the stack for reduced amounts or something, but with skill points being limited this would also be a bad design. you simply do not have the points to double-up on a weapon skill like that.

Man At Arms? Underpriveleged?

MAN AT ARMS?

Man, I can understand the mage schools or scoundrel, but Man At Arms? Rage + Nullify + Flurry = Murderhobo.

I'd say melee, ranged, staves, robes and armor should each have their own pool of suffixes and affixes, with unique items having scripted abilities or effects. Magic armor should always spawn with a +1 to their governing attribute (Int for robes, Dex for leather, Str for scale/plate) in addition to any secondary stats.

Also, I'd heavily suggest that Sarongs should have Str and Dex counterparts...surcoats and kilts, maybe?

I think part of the lack of responses to this may be that many people, myself included, are having a hard time wrapping our minds around this tenebrium concept.

If I understand, even if you have 15 in 1 hand skill, you suddenly get no benefit from using a tenebrium dagger because of the material its made of? Your 15 points are irrelevant to your use of a 1 hand weapon made of tenebrium? And yet points in the tenebrium skill allow you to use a 2 handed tenebrium bastard sword with the same effectiveness as a tenebrium dagger?

If I am understanding this correctly, its one of the worst RPG game mechanics dealing with weapon skills I have ever seen.

If its a particularly rare material with specific usage requirements from a story line perspective, I can see there being penalties to your weapon relevant skill that might be offset by a talent or skill line. But no one skill should allow you to use completely different weapons with equal efficiency and no material should be so exotic as to completely negate extensive experience with a weapon.

I would very much like to see Larian or the mod community fix this (unless I am mistaken in my understanding).

You are. And it should come as no surprise to anyone who noticed the damage type triangle on weapons and how pointless of an addition they've made that. The Diablo 2 solution to doing the exact same thing the "damage type triangle" accomplishes is much better.

Rather than bothering with damage types that are almost completely ignored they simply gave +50% damage to undeads to every single mace.

Piercing and slashing almost never being different, or at least different enough to notice the difference is a joke. Not having the choice between them (Dex characters always use piercing, and strength characters almost always use slashing with a choice coming up very rarely) further removes the point of having it.

That is my thinking as well, and why I suggested that the Tenebrium requirement on the weapon 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.

That said, I am not using Tenebrium weapons yet in my game and may be missing something.

I'm at the point in the game where I have gathered Tenebrium enough to probably enhance every weapon I get from here on out with it ... and suddenly find that enhancing a weapon with it causes my damage to decrease! And you can't respec henchmen...

That would functionally be WORSE than the way it is now, since you'd have to invest in BOTH skills, or neither. At least this way if you haven't invested (or respec) you only need to invest in one.

Honestly, I'm a little more concerned with protecting players who have invested points in a weapon skill than not trying to make things even simpler for those who haven't. I don't feel that having 0 skill in (example) two-handed weapons and 2 points in Tenebrium handling should make you a better two-handed tenebrium swordsman than someone with a maxed two-handed weapon skill and 1 point in Tenebrium handling.

Respec is so poorly implemented I don't see it as an option. People should not have to risk permanently losing skills/spells just to respec for Tenebrium handling.

So I'm just checking out the forums and I notice this thread. "No," I think, "that's just too stupid to be true." So I start up the game and find myself a +1 Bow item so I can check out how my archer's damage changes with her Tenebrium bow. No change whatsoever.

So then I think, "holy crap, it really is true. Wow, is that ever insanely stupid." (But with more curse words involved.)

I'm not sure what the fix is, but the point should be: being skilled with bows, or one-handers, or whatever, shouldn't just go away because it happens to be a Tenebrium weapon.

@LordOfBones
Surcounts and kilts would be awesome, along with cloth bracers and boots beyond level 7...

I think the armors should still be able to get other traits other their primary, though, for hybrid builds.

@Jei
You understood it perfectly

Free Tenebrium ores and slabs are as common as, well, I don't think there is anything more common than Tenebrium in the game... maybe empty bottles and cups. Even if your weapon is not originally made of Tenebrium, you can upgrade it anytime (except for staves) if you have a person with skills in blacksmithing. You can't remove Tenebrium.

@Tyhan
Actually, there are enemies in the game who are immune to piercing but not crushing/slashing. Just not a lot of them...

@Gyson
That's not a bad idea. Since Tenebrium weapons are supposed to be more beefy than common weapons, the penalty makes sense.

At this point, I'm OK with just taking out the Tenebrium bonus damage all together. They can make it strictly a requirement for using a Tenebrium grade weapon and let the original weapon ability apply the damage the bonus instead.

@thrakkemarn, ScrotieMcB
I was pretty surprised when I first noticed this and I'm glad I'm not the only one. Hopefully the devs get a chance to rework the ability before we resort to mods.

Just did my first playthrough, tbh didn't pay so much attention to the actual weapon damage since I was convinced that both skills would determine damage. I'm quite surpised this is not the case.

However all this talk about tenebrium being so called "superior" weapons is not really true. You find a alot of non-tenebrium high dmg weapons in late game, even legendary ones. I was specced +5 one hand and +5 tenebrium and I even ended up using a non-tenebrium weapon in the last battle because it was superior damage. Didn't craft any weapons at all.

I agree though that tenebrium skill should be reworked, because wasted points is not good, however it should not buff man at arms users. I found my man-at-arms user to be extremely hard hitting (flurry, battering ram, whirlwind) and had the best synergy with talents. I mean weather the storm is completely insane, 50% resist all elemental damage permanent and picture of health 25% extra vitality, bully 50% dmg vs. some disabled.... None of this insane talents were available for magic users.
However magic users is not to be called bad either, meteor storm is the most hard hitting spell in the game, even on single targets, the witch finger or whatever its called is not too bad either.

Yeah, what I meant was that, for example, magic plate would always spawn with +1 Str and +1 to any other attribute, so both pure archetypes and hybrids don't feel cheated.