Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Fort Joy too easy, Silent Monks and Magister buffs

I played 5 hours straight yesterday and got from the beach to the Shelter. Fort Joy's skeleton garrison of Magisters was annihilated by yours truly in around two and a half. Though I enjoyed killing all of those red-coats, in retrospect I realize that killing every Magister in a fortress at Level 3-4 shouldn't be that easy.

Let me break down what I mean by "easy". I'll demonstrate what I mean with an anecdote.

I was playing on Classic Mode - the supposed more difficult mode. I had just reached Level 3. After robbing the entire castle of its portraits and paintings, I decided I wanted to save the prisoner lady being judged by Orivand. So I snuck up right next to Orivand and his entourage, then sniped one of his mages with Sebille. Combat ensues. A swordsman Phoenixdives into my party of four, the mages unleash elemental abuse the like of which has not been seen since a baby threw a hissy fit, and Orivand contents himself with buffing his allies with movement speed and walking as close to my warrior as he can without actually getting into combat range. Realize that at this point, nobody in my party had actually suffered any damage at all. I proceed to Hammertime and Freeze all of the Magisters, kick them in the kidneys until they die and then wait for the rest of the enemies to show up. It was literally over in one turn - and they were one level higher than I was.

I hope that shows you what's wrong. I think the Magisters should be more powerful or have more CC abilities, because as it stands, it's just too easy for a determined low-level player to simply sneak into the castle and slaughter everybody from within.

I think one way to fix this would be to add more, more, more Magisters. The fortress feels very hollow - there are, what, like 50 Magisters in the entire place? Bump that number (whatever it ends up being) by 25% or 50% and make the place feel more alive! I really think this would bump up the difficulty AND bump up the atmosphere of the place.

Alternatively, perhaps there also should be more high-level Magisters present, or Orivand ought to be buffed. High Judge Orivand is a pathetically weak fighter - though admittedly I abused Rage and Flesh Sacrifice and Warlord a lot during these encounters. Perhaps Rage should be given more downsides, such as the massive elemental debuffs suggested in another thread. The point wouldn't be to actually nerf the good sides of Rage, but to add in a suitable downside as well. I'm not a game developer, though - these are observations followed by solutions I personally find appealing.

Also, the Silent Monks don't even fight me - I can just walk by them! Maybe that's as intended, though.

Once I also I had a bug where a Silent Monk talked to my character, asking about a murder (I had just sniped a Magister near Han's boat) - that ought to be fixed. They can't talk, right?

Silent monks are mindless goons, they don't attack without orders, they only defend themselves.

Of course the game is too easy, many skills and their combination are still to broken and the stats system is broken as well, you are stronger at a lower level stats related. Warlord is still the most broken trait in the game. And CC is far to easy.

All those broken mechanics are hot topic in many topics.

Depends on your definition of "easy". Those source hounds hit like a mac truck once they get in melee range, for example. They managed to dispose of my fully-equipped tank in 1 round.

Yeah, the hounds were a bit tricky.

Also, another bug: apparently if you pray at the Shrine in the Shelter (where Gratiana is), and you get the holy water which heals you... well, the next time I came there, Gratiana was dead. She was dead apparently because healing damages her? And she got too close to the water?

Are you sure you didn't tamper with her soul jar in braccus' vault?

Oh... fuck.

Damn, I had no idea she even had a jar there. I more or less consumed all of them in there.

I didn't even realize those jars were connected to living people, now I wonder how many innocent undead I massacred XD

ALSO another bug: when at Gareth's Rallying Point after finding a Source Weapon, you pickpocket the spying Magister. He finds out and you resist the search, EVERYONE attacks you! That was a pretty funny scene.

I'm not at all against the idea of more magisters. However, if you add more, it just adds a little more absurdity to the living conditions of the magisters:

It's absurd that the island has been used as a concentration camp for YEARS, and yet there's nowhere for the troops to sleep and nowhere for them to prepare a meal. There's no armory or storage area to keep their supplies organized.

I think Fort Joy needs another floor, which contains a barracks and kitchen for the Magisters, and some other things as well.

Maybe that could be placed between the prison and surface floors, so taking the stairs up from the prison puts you in the barracks, and taking the stairs down, or the door in from the surface level puts you in the barracks.

Indeed.

The final boss fight is also pretty much a mess at this point. There's absolutely nothing one can do to avoid having half of one's party getting one-shotted by the crazy Magister casting "Burning Skies" somewhere.

I agree with the point about the magisters being too weak and too few. A recurring theme in the beginning is "watch out for the magisters, they so strong". Get to lvl 3 and they are literally useless as guards, as has been pointed out above. Actually, I'm quite sure with the numbers in fort joy, they would be useless from the start if everyone revolted, considering everyone is supposed to be some sort of sorcerer. On that note, if the mechanic/tink decided to help the camp in fort joy, and no one had a collar, it would actually be a slaughter of the magisters. This doesn't really effect the gameplay too much though, and it wouldn't be a huge deal if it wasn't fixed. It would help the story feel more real, and would help fort joy feel more oppressive if the magisters and their numbers were significantly buffed. I can't see it being too hard to just add a few more patrols and standing guards

The game is very easy in general, and I didn't try and make particularly amazing builds or anything. This isn't the true hard mode though, so I'm not surprised, but even so, classic mode almost feels like how Explorer mode should feel to me. Not sure if it's the enemy stats are too low, or just the mechanics make the game easy.

Regarding Fort Joy itself, I do think there could be a couple more guards in the actual ghetto, and a second story for in the interior like Stabbey suggests. What if the magisters had some kind of (melee?) ability to send a current through your collar and stun you? Obviously this would make magisters super dangerous and scary unless you removed your collar, though maybe you could modify your collar to disable that stun effect but keep the source muting.

They are just regular people baring a few notable figures and being a sorcerer just means you won/lost the blood lottery, most of them are not even trained to fight at all which means even a "town guard" could take them with those collars around their necks.

Griff's gang is the only power in the ghettos, and they would get handily wrecked in any head-on battle against the Magisters.

The point is, the Level 3-4 player would not get wrecked in that head-on battle. The Magisters do.

Nah there is an underground fight club with quite decent fighters and a brawny paladin. Griffs squad of goons are more then capable. The card players are capable fighters, there is a random fully armoured lizard warrior. Stingtail is decent, silence is strong, Id say its almost a 50/50 split of civilians and capable warriors. If you combined all of them, I think they would definately have a good chance in a fight. Certainly a big enough chance to make them consider revolting. But thats all very hypothetical. Either way the magisters arent strong enough individually, and I would argue their numbers arent nearly high enough to police fort joy

Nor are their numbers high enough to wage war against all of those Seekers AND taking care of the Voidwoken. I think they ought to have a separate quarters on a separate floor, like Stabbey proposes in his thread Prison Economy.

I also like the idea someone had that you add in some sort of a shock collar mechanism into the source collars. So any one Magister can just stop a collared prisoner on their tracks if they do anything. Or maybe just give this power to the higher-ups?

A rebellion as a way to get out of Fort Joy would be pretty neat, though all of the characters fighting at once would be really hectic. You'd probably only be able to recruit some of the prisoners, like Griff's gang and the arena fighters and a couple others. It would take a lot to convince everyone to join in, but it could be a really satisfying solution. Probably would entail some magister buffs, given you can already basically take them by yourself (at least, with some good builds).

Keep in mind that many of the people mentioned above either think that the Magisters are truly there to help them or seem indifferent to the situation.

It's also worthy of note that the most potent aspects of their force are things we see but don't interact with directly. It's made pretty obvious in the game that there are two parts of the Magisters. The low level grunts that are pretty much just a cover and the people who know what's really going on that tend to be much more powerful.

As a side note, while I don't remember specific instances of this in game, there could easily be a bit of guilt in play for the sorcerers in question who may have, even without trying, been causing the world to decay. The truth of the matter may or may not be that but if they believe it then that is what they would act upon.

Regardless of that, the entire fortress feels a bit empty and there don't seem to be enough Magisters anyway. If those higher-ups really knew what they were up to, wouldn't they actually have even a few more troops? As it stands all they've got is a skeleton force of weak Magisters, and yet we're led to believe that they're this huge oppressive force that you should never oppose because you'd stand no chance. If you want to make them weak, I'm fine with that, there's a story to be had there, but right now the message I get is "big evil magister nazis with huge army", not "weak tiny magisters with a token force not fit to hold even an inn"

I still view Fort Joy as nothing more than a "processing centre", a fairly transient concentration camp. It doesn't need too many guards, nobody's really there long enough to organise themselves into a serious opposition and the factions that do exist amongst the captives don't get along anyway. It only needs a skeleton staff which seems to consist of assorted zealots and ideologues, and probably a few who were sent there as punishment, obviously in addition to the senior magisters who are running the show. And as such, a few tents will suffice: why give the dregs of the Holy Order comfortable accommodation? The maniacs will enjoy the hardship and the reprobates don't deserve to.

Anyway, that viewpoint works well enough for me.