Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General I refuse to coop with people who use LW/GC

GC is absurdly overpowered, even on hard difficulty. I started off with one character on GC, Jahan. On the first map things could get pretty rough for him if I didn't pay attention to line of sight, control, and sometimes he died because of dumb luck. I can easily see how this would be annoying in a multiplayer game.

But after a while, everything starts to work together and GC becomes ever more obviously powerful, mainly because you slowly fix the health weakness. GC gives you more action points, meaning you get to use more of your abilities/spells which in turn results in more control overall so the enemy often doesn't even get to attack. When I noticed that, I also picked GC for my Scarlett geo/pyro. Then a bit later I also went with GC for my ranger. Once you have some points to toy around with and can spec into man-at-arms/picture of health, there is really no reason not to take GC. My only character that didn't have GC had, in the end, roughly 20 speed instead, my 'tank', simply because I thought it was silly to pick GC for a tank. In hindsight, it would've been perfectly fine giving the tank GC as well, just not as early as my casters.

Also, 20 action points per turn isn't the max. The bar will just fill up with more points to the right. I ended up with 24-26 points max and per turn on Scarlett/Jahan and my ranger, whereas Madora was stuck at around 16 max, 14 per turn or something like that. With haste, my ranger sometimes had 30 action points in a turn, which was absurd (especially coupled with 5 sneak and guerilla).

Perhaps it isn't even GC that's overpowered, but the GC/picture of health combo. It fits perfectly with GC as you'll already quite early want to spec into constitution, because of your low health as well as to increase your max action points. The amount of points in speed needed to get a decent number of action points without GC just feels off.

Edit: And yeah, in the end all my characters had 5 man-at-arms, picture of health, weather the storm, and three of them had glass cannon. It felt game-breaking to be honest.

LOL. OP is this tx3000 dude again. Don't feed the troll folks.

So far in this thread, he is not trolling. If you want to be prejudiced against someone privately, you are free to do so; that is the point of the Ignore function. If you're going to make it public by posting, take the time to assess the current situation.

So... Tell them you strongly prefer that they play without Glass Cannon/Lone Wolf, or else don't play with them? Just communicate better. And if you're are already communicating this, then isn't this topic is redundant?

Now if they lie and do it anyways, they're not worth playing with anyway. It's not like they're forcing you to play with them. Play with them, or don't play with them. Your choice.

Strangely, this is the first time I agree with tx3000. I don't necessarily refuse to co-op with someone using the build, but it would be boring after a while. He is right about the importance of losing battles, too.

If I very clearly stated that I want someone that is actually going to play and not some mindless player that doesn't actually play, then telling someone not to use something to adjust to my preference isn't them playing the game, it's me telling them what to do which totally contradicts what I just said.

I already said if they use it I just don't play with them.

So I'm not really sure what the point to whatever it is you're post is all about.

I don't I have the nerd comprehension levels, some of the same people who say this makes it too easy, are those who are telling everyone to get secret books at lvl 2 an 1/2 or that save is worthless, push stats to the limit, and work around on the really tough combats with "dumbed down" tactics.

Playing with a RL friend, I had gotten LW and GC, he disagreed but we did a battle. Without buying new stuff, working the char to max that build... We reloaded because the build was a little too good, we didn't even really discuss it, just both saw it was way OP and would probably dumb down the game. At that point the game was so good and fun for us, we didn't want to taint it. That spoke volumes to me.

Im still playing my first go through and I cannot imagine thinking this game was difficult enough to warrant min/max or purposefully playing 'cheat' builds.

For me and my buddy, the game was easier in Co-Op, not harder, so I gotta agree with the OP on this topic. If someone started justifying it instead of re-rolling, I would find a new co-op partner for sure.

I refuse to dumb down myself down to increase the game difficulty. The only way to go is up! Working to make myself as OP as possible

Like considering any fight lasting longer than 2 turns as a failure, failing to kill anyboss in one turn a failure, losing more than 20% of hp in any battle at any point a failure, having a non-maxed out item at any slot a failure, wearing fugly equipments (read robes and full plate armors) a failure etc...

Uh, no, it's called communication and compromise. You're not telling, you're asking and asserting. Do you ever leave the house?


So... you waste your own time rolling characters and then quitting, instead of communicating beforehand and not only saving the trouble, but possibly convincing your partner to play the way you like if it's not that big of a deal to him.

Shut up. I play to have fun. Not to win, Mangoose.
And everyone must play like me or suffer the KONSEKWENCES!

About the posts I just deleted: Please do not register a new account just to attack someone, or I will delete it. That is cowardly, and proves you are inarticulate enough that you can not criticize someone legitimately using your real account. If it wasn't an existing forum member, your obvious personal conflict isn't wanted here.

This is fucking hilarious though, RK. Not in a bad way. Like, this is a great idea. And I bet it's something you do, isn't it, RK?

If, theoretically, there was a mod that made it so that taking Glass Cannon reduced your base Recovery AP prior to the GC buff being applied, how much of a reduction would be necessary for it to be balanced?

Like if the reduction were 3.5, then with 5 speed + GC would equal (3.5 base + 5 speed - 3.5 GC penalty)*2=10, while without GC and 5 speed it would be 8.5, with the difference increasing by 1 with each point in Speed. At 10 speed it would be 20 vs 13.5 for example.

Or would it be more balanced if GC were to multiply AP recovery by a smaller amount, like 1.5x instead of 2x?

I think another interesting interesting way to nerf GC would be to add more disadvantages to it. Maybe a reduction of some sort to BB/WP, resistance, armor, greater reduction of vitality or a combination thereof. Make the glass cannon health reduction harder to counter that is. That doesn't solve the problem of high AP + high initiative + Control spells stopping any foe from acting at all though.

Maybe just add a flat -2 or -3 speed modifier to force the player to invest more in speed and thus have less points to add to constitution.

Actually there's a JRPG that rewards quick combat resolution.
And discourage players from taking it slow.
It's a risk vs return kind of thing.
Larian may want to delve a bit deeper into that meta.
So as to clarify to those who think playing badly is fine, it is part of the game and explain (VERY POLITELY BECAUSE PEOPLE GET OFFENDED EASILY LMAO) that 'hey you kinda suck at this game, here's less EXP for resolving this combat in 20 turns and 3 retreats.'

All you'd be doing there is turning GC into a math problem. If (condition) then GC else not GC. Not interesting.

The only way I could possibly imagine the Glass Cannon benefit being both balanced and interesting/fun is if it was directly tied to the Lone Wolf drawback. I mean straight-up; no Vitality adjustment, no extra Talent points, just the loss of a party member and the doubling of one party member's AP. This would require the current Glass Cannon drawback and the current Loan Wolf benefit to either find new homes or cease to exist.

That's a problematic mechanic for this type of game, rk47, because giving a bad player less xp means that they are basically just screwed. Enemies don't respawn in DOS and being underleveled can be hugely debilitating.

Batman Arkham City actually did something that worked well, in this regard. The more skillfully you fought, the more xp you would get. If you never broke your combo, never got hit, and used a wide variety of moves, you would get more xp.

But unlike DOS, leveling up in Batman didn't necessarily make the game easier. Enemies would scale to your level, so leveling up means you fight tougher enemies, many of which have built in counters to your easy techniques. However it also means you can unlock new abilities.

I feel that is the correct way to do things. When the player does a good job, reward them. Don't reward them by making the game easier, reward them by making it more interesting. New options, new enemy types, more varied gameplay. If they are struggling, then slow down how quickly you introduce new mechanics. Clearly they haven't gotten the hang of what they're currently dealing with.

The best way to learn things when stuff don't work is to take a break, go seek another opinion, discuss things online on how best to approach the situation. Maybe be a little more open minded instead of blaming the unfair game balance or jumping to conclusions. The game is hard to understand at first, but D:OS opens up so easily once you figure things out.

I'm a psycho in real life and I've met several people who blamed their situations on other external factors except for themselves. Don't have a job? It's not because they declined the job offers, it's because the job sucks. Not enough money? Not because they spent a lot, it's because price of things are increasing. It's all relative. I really blame bad upbringing for this sort of attitude.

On a more serious note. There's the easy difficulty button to add more EXP.
But I really love it if designers would reward good players more.

For multiplayer, if I would want to go glass cannon, I'd probably avoid it at level 5, save up a few points so I can get picture of health first, then go glass cannon. That way you'd avoid most of the potentially annoying dying when you take glass cannon instantly and end up with less than 100 hp for a while.

But without taking glass cannon/picture of health/weather the storm (for the sake of challenging yourself I guess?), what else are you supposed to put your talents in anyway? It's not just that the particular glass cannon combo is overpowered, it's that most of the other talents are barely useful enough to consider for a caster. The attribute/ability ones are worse than the Moloch-trades. An aerothurge has a bunch of nice options, but most of the other caster-talents aren't so much upgrades as side-grades and perhaps fun for roleplaying. I used my casters for all the miscellaneous stuff - pet pal, crafting, leadership.

Meanwhile, my melee and ranger had a wealth of fun and strong talents to choose from. Man-at-arms talents in particular are plain awesome, but the options for a bow or melee ranger are also quite good.

I could see a lot of blind co-op'ing players want to take Lone Wolf, since it reduces party maintenance by quite a bit and being strangers it's going to take enough time and date planning to finish the game no matter what choices you make. I would think over time the GC option will fade some as you'll be playing with people with a couple play throughs completed and are looking for more of a challenge.

The good news is you'll now this right up-front at char creation, not many hours in.