Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Latest News Patchnotes v3.0.31.292 - Meet our new AI system

AI 2.0 is a thing. I have never ever seen such a great AI. This thing correctly combines pathing, visibility and various spell effects and forecast moves. Creative Assembly :Total War, didnt achieve it. They still struggle with pathing and use skills is pathetic. Until now DOS2 is and average game, this AI will create attention. Make it scale by Int attribute. Horde of zombies which outsmart me is true horror.

With new AI enemyes could be more solid. e.g. Saltwater crocodiles dont need mindblowing set of spells. They are still animals not epic mages on the beech party, right ?

Bug report - Scoundrel and Ranger skill books say : " Damage receives bonus from Intelligence" is it correct?

95% base acc and +5% plain bonus to any crossbows is good. However make bow vs crossbow difference more - >
1. tip Bow shot provokes Attack of opportunity. Crossbow can point blank shot.
2. tip Crossbow hit kicks like a mule e.g. critical hit is a serious punch - > easy way: Apply Slow for 1 turn(better way : move target one meter back. Yes, on crit hit it could shot down a character from a tower/platform. <- I love this.)
3. tip Bow has longer range.

"Reduced AoE radius of most area spells to promote tactical gameplay"
Good. Looking forward for next AOE nerf round. Here is a first candidate - AOE Spell Cripple of Warfare. Actually its rather One target skill.

All Durability changes - nice. I like it. Be aware of NOT create unbreakable weapons. Repair hammers could be removed at all. It reduce a junk drop. Also make repair only by NPC - money sink. Broken Epic weapon - expect epic bill for repair. Maby some NPC could be considered as Items - moving statues, Sparkmaster 2.0 for example. Also attacking a petrified person should damage a weapon. At least blade weapons. That brings nice mechanic/decisions.

Attack animation by the new contact system - generaly good feeling. Some attacs are too much close. Especialy dagger attacs - models interfere each other. Backstab looks quite sexual. Use Adrenalin skill right after the back stab you get a porn. lol.

I just find a delay button. That is masterfully hidden in plain sight. Do you collect a metrics how many people use it? Maby, you could add an achievement for using it Sorry for being salty, ... delay need to be visible, right next to End turn button and in the same style(format). So the user making decision move mouse a bit left or a bit right. These two buttons work together. Same for short keys, keybinding for these two must be some keys right next each other. Home and End for example.

Green exclamation marks above head are not very highlighted. Some other colors like shiny gold or deep purple ?

Dwarf wears two handed sword in his hand not on his back like usual crap cliche. Big swords didnt has any scabbard and actually were transported in a hand or on a shoulder. Unfortunately he handles with sword properly only in fight. When casts or walk it snaps on his back. Thats awful, please fix it ! Let big sword put on the shoulder and walk, or it disappear if you must, but do not snap it on his back. That is so stupid.

Lootable "Gold pile" object. That gives so much satisfaction. In previous game I clicked thousand times on a heap of gold in the cave of Troll king. I was soooo mad I cant take it. Could you make it so, when I loot "Gold pile" it disappear ? So a player feel that he find a pile of gold and took it. Or change to somthing cheap, like small pile of rubble.

/// UPDATED

the looting is odd atm for me.

- When i drag an item from a loot stash/body to other party members , sometimes it work , sometimes it doesnt.
- Same goes for take all , sometimes it work sometimes clicking it doesnt do anything. I have to close the loot window then re-loot again for it to work.

In my opinion , it would be quicker and better by making the loots go to the current selected character . So you dont need to drag the item to Bob or r.mouse > send to > Bob when you want Bob to keep it. Its quite tedious.

Other bug ( or might be intended by devs ? )
- Some elemental Surfaces ( Oil/Fire/Ice/...etc) stay permanently after the battle is long over.


yeah , i noticed it too , actually the line "receives bonus from stat X " is based on the type of weapon you are carrying xD.

Right, all those things should be added. Also like -50 relationship to all vendors. And -100 for those who sells food or drings. No one wants to visit a food shop with a rotting corpse right?

Anyway you can do inspect by right click on a model. So the AI does the same. Its correct.

Or maybe if you take the Zombie Talent, the game automatically quits and deletes all your save files.

(Zombie is already a very bad Talent and adding more nerfs is not a good idea.)

Decaying touch ?

Obviously not or else he would have said. Even if that was the plan the AI intended, you should apply that first instead of the healing.

So ; blessed and cursed fire are both permanent. I object to this by merit of fire being the thingt hat's supposed to be temporary - other cursed or blessed surfaces should go ahead and be permanent, but the flame derivates shouldn't, I think.

As for Zombie - yeah, it's already one of the WEAKEST freakin' things, it shouldn't be that the enemies just instantly know to attack you. Especially from an in character perspective.

Similarly I like the line from the Frost Dragon when he's in human form about how his eyes are crazy because of his Spirit Sight or w/e.

Has anyone tested the use of the new talent or whatever it is, where you recover armor after being CCed?

@TraceChaos

I've put a few points into it on my tank, I haven't noticed that great of a benefit from having it, but I think you'll need at least 4 points or so before it really becomes worth having. Problem is right now normal difficulty is too hard and shreds all armor too fast and explorer is too easy where you never really need to worry about recovering it from that skill.

I just finished my run with the new patch, I like the new changes but noticed that the AI still has the old Height bonus which could be annoying in some fights when you don't think they can reach you. A good fix for that would be making Mark Target reach further, it would then also be useful.

I Don't think the difficulty was that hard to manage but I guess I have a lot of experience in the DOS games. The only thing that I found was hard is the fact that money is more important at vendors since books seem to be really expensive, after getting a few skills, as usual, the game was pretty easy to finish.

Can't wait to be able to try Tactician or honor mode.

I did not try it , my strategy is not getting hit. I usually go very offensive. I hardly put any Con points in

It seems more and more that the patch only made the early-to-mid game much harder, but once you do manage to save up the coin to buy all of the core skills for your party composition, and builds, the game still becomes rather easy. Perhaps make skill books more available (can you still create skill books with scroll + book crafting?), or maybe make them as rewards for some quests or something.

I hope we get an update with just reduced cost on all books, that alone will make this game far more enjoyable. Books should be reduced by 50%.

Yes, apparently forever.

I left an Ice surface fighting Dallis at level 5. Went back at level 7, it was still there, Walt slipped over on it and the whole camp turned aggro.

Hahahaha. "Man slips on ice. Declares war on entire city."

That is, in fact, something that needs to be fixed - if surfaces are permanent, people need to NOT aggro every time they walk into surfaces. Like, only actually attacking people should aggro them, not just them walking facefirst into a puddle of fire, or worse yet HOLY FIRE that HEALS THEM, y'know?

What needs to happen is for the town NPCs to be able to realize if they are being attacked or if they were just clumsy and walked into a surface to cause damage. This is probably a hard problem for the larians to resolve. Though ice and fire surfaces shouldn't last more then a minute outside of combat.

The idea is dumb in so many ways. This is just an example - it is similar to using ricochet and hitting someone uninvolved except this is hours later.

Ice should melt, fires burn out, clouds blow away.

It also (during a fight) makes it too easy to box people into a corner and your enemies just sit there doing nothing.

You can dump oil patches all around your enemies before a fight and they will just stand in one spot. It is a great way to block melee fighters from advancing into your group. If they do a jump attack, just teleport their ass right back and they will just stand there skipping turns until they can do Phoenix Dive again.

Also, all the source puddles are gone from the last build. You can only get source points from the soul jars.

Well, that was challenging. A second playthough on classic with the new AI and I can confirm that monsters and allies are considerably smarter.

Now, for the second act...

After completing Act I again on the most recent patch, here are a few things that come to mind:

Glitches & Inconsistencies
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You can avoid spending AP to pick up items during combat if you right click the items on a corpse/container and send them to a party member's inventory instead.

Ricochet is broken and only bounces to targets within 2m (not sure, but it's a REALLY small radius) from each other. It's practically unusable in this state.

There are two copies of the same Fire Source Skill: Epidemic of Fire and Infectious Flame. Both of these skills have the exact same description and effects except for their name. If you learn one it also will say that you have already learned the other if you try to use the other skill book. I wasn't able to cast these spells for further testing as I never gained any source points to test them.

Whenever enemies landed critical hits on my party, they would do LESS damage. Enemy critical hits on my party members would consistently deal 0-6 damage.

Blindness seems inconsistent in what it does. Some characters could still cast spells and skills on anything in their immediate surroundings, while others could only self target their abilities. I'm not sure what causes this, but it might be related to the type of weapon they are carrying (melee vs ranged/wand/staff).

If the player is interrupted while talking to Gareth after rescuing him, it is impossible to talk to him again and get him to go back to the Seeker Encampment. In my case, the player I was co-oping with somehow upset him (may have been a hostile surface or affliction from the fight) and interrupted him while he was talking to me. This also led to a game lock up when I tried to talk to him repeatedly (cursor was stuck as an attack cursor, could not click or interact with the UI in any way).

Personal Observations
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AI is smarter but tends to tunnel vision on certain party members. In my playthrough, AI would always go out of their way to target Sebille, which resulted in them often wasting their AP to reach her instead of dealing more damage/CC to the rest of my party. This meant that for certain encounters, I could keep retreating Sebille to make enemies waste their AP chasing her while the rest of my party did all the work.

The final encounter is brutally hard or incredibly easy, depending on how you can handle the first two turns. Because of this, I feel like by the time the Void Worm shows up, you have either already killed Alexander and his entourage of magisters, or he's long since killed your entire party. If the worm shows up alone, it is very easy to deal with and feels a bit underwhelming.

Detonating poison clouds does not create smoke, as it did in DOS:EE. I'm not sure if this change is intentional or not, but the Poison Cloud + Explosive Arrow combo was what carried me through Tactician Mode in DOS:EE. Sad to see it gone, but it was pretty strong. That said, it seems very difficult to create smoke clouds now.

Chain Lightning's branching radius is HUGE. For reference, in DOS:EE it had a 7.0m range; in DOSII it has a range of 13.0m. That's nearly double the spread. Even a party that's significantly spaced out will have every single member hit by it. For an ability that does massive magic armor damage, stuns, and creates static clouds, I feel like this is too much. Please, tune this ability so both enemies and the player can at least position against it. I get that source skills are supposed to be powerful and impactful, but I think they should still have their tactical applications and not be an instant "I win"/"You lose" button.

Provided you have someone with high enough Loremaster in your party, it would be nice to be able to see enemy elemental resistances without having to right-click and examine each an every enemy. Maybe place it by their health bar, or have it toggle when you hold down a button like ALT?

Suggestions
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Some skills feel like they have their identities mixed up or are just simply outclassed by others:

Whirlwind is a Warfare skill that has:
- AP Cost: 2 AP
- Cooldown: 3 Turns
- Situational AoE (Centered on Player, no additional range from weapon reach)
- Damage ~150% of Weapon Type (Magic/Physical Versatility)
- No additional effects

Crippling Blow is a Warfare skill that has:
- AP Cost: 2 AP
- Cooldown: 2 Turns
- Versatile AoE (Centered on Target, extended range from reach of weapon plus AoE radius)
- Damage ~170% of Weapon Type (Magic/Physical Versatility)
- Additional Cripple

From these stats alone, Crippling Blow completely outclasses Whirlwind in ALL areas. What is the niche that Crippling Blow and Whirlwind are supposed to fill? With the four friends I've played with, we all used Crippling Blow for our melee AoE nuke, and only considered the cripple as a nice side effect rather than it's main focus. Shouldn't Whirlwind excel at doing melee AoE damage considering how it's the only thing that skill can do?

Suggestion: Increase the damage on Whirlwind and lower the damage on Crippling Blow. Adjustments to the ability cooldown may also be needed. However, this may make players drop Crippling Blow entirely since the main reason it is used is for the damage. So... I propose a more radical change: Buff the Cripple status effect. (But don't forget to weigh in this status buff to the skill's power budget after making the change).

Make Cripple an effect that can be applied through armored targets. Some of these "piercing" skills exist already: most notably, oil surfaces applying slow. Cripple is a situational effect that is a relatively weak CC: it doesn't prevent a target from acting unless they have no means of mobility or ranged options (be they skills, grenades, potions, buffs, etc). There's absolutely no situation where a player or enemy would benefit from crippling a target they could knockdown instead. Knockdown is also more plentiful/accessible than Cripple currently (Battering Ram, Battle Stomp, Knockdown Arrows, etc). By making cripple pierce through armor, I think it would be an attractive, situational CC option with enough impact to contribute to rewarding, tactical opportunities.

Furthermore, the large amount of mobility skills in this game makes it incredibly easy to escape any target from melee range. You can teleport the melee attacker away or use any mobility skill (Tactical Retreat, Phoenix Dive, Battering Ram, etc) to escape and gain distance from your target. If Cripple pierced armor, it would give melee attackers/characters a way to lock down their targets without having to rely on a cheesy/passive taunt system. It would also allow warriors to assert a front line "wall" around them and also keep evasive targets in their range (or at least get their target to burn their mobility skill if they want to escape).

This operates on the assumption that there are no/very limited long ranged cripple options, as this would cause problems for balancing (rangers and permanent cripple party builds, oh no).

Similarly, I think the Bleeding status effect should apply through armor and do piercing damage so it will directly damage vitality. It would allow the bleeding status to differentiate itself from poison/burning, and also give characters with piercing abilities (rogues, rangers, necromancers) a way to whittle down vitality over time, which would compliment the piercing damage in their respective schools. Piercing damage as is feels highly situational and most of the time I would rather have physical damage in order to weaken/break through armor.

That's all I have for now. If you read this gigantic wall of text, thank you for your patience and I hope my feedback was insightful!