Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Zombie perk - am I missing something?

So, taking the zombie perk makes poison heal you... but I've only found three poison skills, one of which doesn't hit the caster, and another of which is a source skill. Furthermore, healing hurts you. So this means all heals are out, potions are out, and bless... makes everything hurt you? And necromancer causes you to hurt yourself when you deal damage?? I ask myself constantly, what kind of maniac would even look at this perk right now, but I've played two pubs with a multitude of zombies in them. What value do people see in it? Is there something I'm missing? Or are these people just gods at the game, playing the ultimate challenge run, and I am not able to comprehend because I am not on their level?

There is poison laying around everywhere in the game, at times it can be hard to get past.

Also a decent trait for solo play

Have you tried rain of blood/rain + contaminate? That makes huge pools of poison. NOw you just stand in them, (or walk around in them for better healing)

^ This.

The idea behind Zombie is that you're more or less giving up direct heals in favor of a.) not taking damage from poison anymore, and b.) getting healed by walking around on poison surfaces. Zombie's good for a melee character who can spread poison around. In the same space your enemies are taking damage, you're getting healed.

But what happens when you have teammates without the trait? Or if someone wants to cast bless? Or you are locked down by someone with Opportunist, and can't afford to run around?

You do the same thing you did in the original game when you had a tank that really focused on elemental resistances and a more fragile character that did not. You controled them differently based on their resistance.
The character with zombie can stand in poison, the one without can't. Whats the dificulty here?

The difficulty is that I have a zombie in my party now, who keeps poisoning everyone else in my party. And every time someone casts bless, he just dies. It's like voluntarily ruling out one of the strongest abilities in the game - Bless - just for some extra resistance to something that pops up every once in a while. Plus the ability to heal from damage, I guess? But it's coming at the expense of everyone else in the party. Even if everyone was a zombie, the lack of Bless and hydrosophist burst heals is a huge detriment in favor of some very, very minor healing from poison, which he needs to run around in order to benefit from. Not to mention the fact that the constant poison surfaces make us extremely vulnerable to fire of any kind. It's kind of a liability, in my experience, because he almost can't take any damage of any kind, since he heals so slowly and so little from poison, and healing a reasonable amount costs him AP to run around, assuming there isn't already fire everywhere.

Zombie doesn't work for every party composition and tactic. You either play the strengths of it, or you don't play it.

I think it is hurting you because we are only playing to level 8. At higher levels there will be more poison around and it will help a lot more then.

Ehhh I always considered zombie as more of a challenge run :P

Zombie made D:OS 1 an absolute cakewalk. I would always do my Tactician runs where everyone had Zombie and at least Magical Poison Dart. You could essentially have infinite poison bottles to heal yourself with. Almost every enemy had a poison attack. Etc.

They probably just wanted to scale it down a bit.

And how do you not identify this as a problem with your strategy? Did you ever have a character with elemental tortoise in the previous game? Did you experience a problem with fire because only one person in your party was immune to fire?

Its as if you actively try to create a problem for yourself and then act suprised when you succeed.

Have the characters who are immune to poison use that to their benifit, and avoid poison with the rest. Do not have a zombie and a non zombie close to eachother. WHat's the problem here?

First of all, he follows me. I cannot get away from him, as he starts right next to me, and when he doesn't, he is quickly focused and killed. So, he is always next to me, since I am the tank. Also, he has higher initiative than me. I literally go after him. No amount of strategy will stop him from using blood rain and then contaminating the ground under me. Therefore, this is unavoidable in every sense of the word. Next, I don't waste the cooldowns of my pyromancy spells on a flame resistant warrior to heal him. I just heal him. Not to mention, the last game didn't have bless turning everything into a healing surface, including aforementioned contaminated ground under us. Furthermore, for a fire resistant warrior, when you throw poison at fire, you get more fire, allowing healing. Oil also gets you more fire. So does fire. That's three elements that can potentially heal you, plus healing itself. How exactly am I actively creating a problem? I don't bless him. I bless myself to save myself from his poison, after I teleport away. I don't even use poison spells. The worst thing I am doing is trying to build around it by building teleports and staying very far away from the fight after I've done my job soaking up the alpha damage. And I'm not losing any fights. All I'm losing is resurrection scrolls, and money on resurrection scrolls. In fact, we recently beat the game with this build. By that point, we had lost so much money that we could no longer afford scrolls, and my companion was permanently dead because of it. I beat the last boss fight solo, after fire blew up him, his poison and his Red Prince (also a zombie) on turn 1. How is this strategy supposed to deal with fire, again? He had on three fire resistance items, so that doesn't work. People keep drawing parallels to fire resistant warriors, who can be healed by anything that creates fire as well as healing. But zombies cannot. As I mentioned, they heal only from poison, which is very weak in the first place, and can then be blessed or lit on fire to create something equally harmful. Fire does not have these problems. It never has. So a zombie and a fire resistant warrior is not something you can draw a valid parallel between. Especially not one using elemental tortoise, as that skill makes them further resistant to poison and earth, further amplifying the effective healing from those elements when they create surfaces. So, tell me. Where exactly, specifically, incidentally, have I mentioned a flaw in my strategy? In your opinion, what exactly do you think it is that I am doing wrong?

People do not follow you in combat. They go where you click them to go. Only outside of combat do they follow you (and it is possible to disable that). So why would you need to walk in poison with your party outside of combat?

The problem is not this talent, the problem is you not understanding basic game mechanics.

You are quite rude, aren't you? Yes, he does follow me into combat. He is controlled by my friend. I have literally no control over him. What, do you think I've been poisoning myself the whole time? After getting zombie on half my party? And then building a build to escape myself?

This clarifies a lot. Your original post sounded like you were poisoning yourself the whole time. Now it seems that it is a trouble coordinating tactics with your friend. If either of you have zombie on any member of the party, all players need to change tactics to take advantage of this talent and not make it a liability.

Your friend needs to stop following you in combat and move his zombie character away from the tank and instead rely on poison to protect him.

Also, grouping close is typically a bad idea anyway because of powerful AOE and environmental effect combos.

Given enough time, I'm certain that these facts will present themselves clearly to him, but similar advice of my own from me to him has fallen upon deaf ears.

This game doesn't prevent other players in multiplayer from trolling you misusing the zombie skill is just one of the ways to achieve that. There are many skill combos that can "unintentionally" damage allies you would be better off asking for a no friendly fire switch then asking the devs to remove/change the zombie perk.

I can deal with friendly fire. The problem is keeping my friend alive; if he's on fire, then it's literally impossible to heal him. Bless doesn't work. Restoration doesn't work. Healing Ritual becomes a liability. Steam Lance becomes a teamwipe. Poison spells are limited and very weak in terms of healing anyways, if he wasn't somehow always on fire, and rain and blood rain both have cooldowns (he likes casting ignition + shackles of pain, by the way. Sometimes in that order). The problem has rarely been surviving friendly fire; the problem is getting him to survive regular fire, of any definition. I can't stress this enough: no build in the game has actually been difficult for me to keep alive, besides zombie builds. Did I mention he's not the only one? I've seen three zombies so far, and even the best one was at best a walking fire hazard, and at worst... just... I don't know what to say. I'll try playing with it myself when Iget home, but from my experience in DOS original, Zombie is really weak, and now hat they've added bless, that's 4 new surfaces that hurt them and 0 more that heal them. That, and he prevalence of fire in Act I means a bad time for zomboes. So from what I've seen, I'm not optomistic. Has anyone here even tried using zombie in #2?

Just let your friend heal himself, I don't find it necessary to heal during combat in this game and it's easy to set up a poison field to heal up in after combat. If the zombie perk is really getting in the way just tell your friend that and reload an earlier save or start a new playthrough. I think zombi would work best when you are using rain/rain of blood + contamination all over the place and have all party members with the perk, not all perks are are powerful as each other and some need you to build around them. In the same way a stealth focused build works a lot worse if you have party members that aren't using stealth, zombie doesn't work well when not everyone has it.