Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Should More Skills have Friendly Fire?

While you can damage your teammates with some skills, a lot will just go through your allies. Should a warrior be able to battering ram right through his whole team, or an archer shoot an arrow through his team? Certain abilities shouldn't hit teammates; how obnoxious would Ricochet be if you never knew if it might hit a teammate? But it might make things more tactical if you had to position yourself to avoid friendly fire. Or would it just be more annoying?

Another issue is that it'd feel unfair if NPCs didn't get the same treatment, but we all know how bad they'd mess themselves up with more friendly fire than they have now. Then again, it could be fun to manipulate the AI into killing themselves, as long as they aren't doing it every turn.

Is this something people might want to see as part of a difficulty mod?

It sounds funny but I wonder how big of a change that would really be, alone.

Mid-fight, you'll have to pay more attention to AOE spells (mass disease? or the marksman lvl 15 AOE spell?), but usually I start the fight with all the AOE, simply because I kill everything in one round usually (and thus your change wouldn't change anything).

I think it would go hand in hand with a buff in health to ennemies, but it could change alot so I think it needs testing first.

And if you change friendly-fire, you could give it to ennemies too because that wouldn't change much for them: they mostly don't use AOE abilities except for grenades which already are damaging to everybody.

For ricochet to be less obnoxious in a friendly-fire setting, you need to know how it works and if you can control the angle (I think there's no angle, it just selects targets available in a 7 meters radius, no matter the impact direction).

I think Chrest has a point one of the big issues in the game is actually enemy positioning. Generally you are always in a battle of L side vrs R side. So you can mass spam AoE and not really have to worry.

They should had more "pop up" spawns where enemies may appear from unexpected locations such as under a bush hatch. Or teleports in behind you etc.

I can guarantee you that the mage Meteor & poison area spells have friendly fire on. I have killed many a teammate by accident.

No, because while that might seem like a small change, I can virtually guarantee that it would have some massive effects on the balance of the game. You'd have to do a lot more work than you're expecting.

Oh well what's the fun of a rebalance/difficulty mod that doesn't push the boundaries :P I don't think the game is going to be suddenly completely different if you knockdown your allies while battering ram; you'll just have to be more careful about positioning. Most of the time you'll just be able to take a couple steps over, but if you aren't thinking, you might find yourself wanting to battering ram through two teammates because repositioning would make you eat an attack of opportunity. Some wide-ranging AoEs like Mass Disease would probably be hard to use, so maybe abilities like that wouldn't get affected, though then again Mass Disease is kind of OP from what I hear anyway.

It could have the general effect that melee characters are put at a disadvantage because mages and rangers will have less control over their abilities and so will generally want melee characters out of the way. But most damaging abilities already cause friendly fire or are single target or small aoe though. Really, it's actually not that many abilities that would be affected. At most: Earthquake, Mass Disease, Mass Slow, Horrific Scream, Splintered Arrow, Arrow Spray, Rain of Arrows, all special arrows, Battering Ram, Whirlwind, Divine Light. Half of those are master abilities that, as mentioned, people often use as openers anyway or are overpowered as is. I mean, I could also make buffs (like mass healing) apply to enemies as well, but that's probably too much.

I do think giving AI more friendly fire could have more unforseen consequences than player FF, but I'm not quite sure how many enemies use AoE. Probably just another thing for them to stumble over.

For fighters "moving over just a couple of steps" can mean the difference being able to do something that turn versus nothing.

Um, a big part of the reason why Earthquake no longer has friendly fire is because it was literally garbage when it did have friendly fire. Horrific Scream is kinda mediocre as it is even without friendly fire.

You are quite right that this doesn't really affect spellcasters because most spells already have FF on already. Which means that everyone else gets a nerf to effectiveness.

I'm just saying that it might seem to be only a small change, but small changes can have big consequences, so be cautious.