Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General AI 2.0 Patch Pros and Cons Mega Thread

I mean, if you're so overpowered, why do you even want to buy anything better? The economy's working just right for you, if you're doing well in terms of gear, isn't it?

I found that due to the increased combat that I am sneaking a lot more and avoiding battles. the encounter with griff, I gave up the lizard without thinking. (I did kill the assassin they send for him so yaay?)

Overall I do like that surfaces persist, but I have had instances that neutral people become hostile due to this or because he got caught up in the cross fire. ( eg: I am trying to kill your assasin please stop attacking me)


@Lar_q : did you find your old password? because the previous posts were from lar
:p

After you leave fort joy, the economy/trading factor died because there's really nothing to buy compared to the last patch.

The new patch, I had to wait until they restock before new gears appear and even then, I still end up wearing bleh ring or necklaces because majority of the purple stuffs are gone from the store.

I wasn't even using up-to-level gear when fighting around the end portion of Act 1 compared to pre patch where I bought a bunch of purple stuffs from the seekers to get some extra power. It was just Haste + Rage + Adrenaline + 2H/Bow being so ridiculously broken that I was still able to rekt it.

If you can wipe out 4 enemies in your first turn with the latest patchs inflated enemies-values regarding skills/damage/whatnot a proof would be in order.

And finally a respone from Sven! Din expect that.

And I can just add once more, that the new AI and it's more versatile use of it's skills, is a good thing!

The bad stuff is, that the player is handicapped all the way, at least as far as the current content goes.
Playing right now feels like yelling "Run!" at a wheelchair user.

All the CC and there is barely any armor available to shield one with. It may be really bad luck (which also speaks for itself...), but upt to level 5 I often have less than 10-20 armor thanks to missing funds, drops and crafting. And as enemies tend to do more damage than that in a single blow, its use is completely negated.
Please, don't ignore the shortcomings of the basic concept of this system! Lots of people already wrote about it and made suggestions.
I'd actually completely change it, but as you probably won't change it that completely anymore at least consider the two most important/talked about facts:
- disconnect it from damage > only the applied status effects influence it
- combine the two protection forms > right now spreading different types makes no sense as it is always more effective to concentrate on one type

And that even doesn't count in that all enemies have tons of imunities... reducing that even firther.

In general I sadly have to say I'm somewhat disappointed tbh about the insipid enemy characteristics. Almost every enemy has the same skills, throw the same grenades, deal almost the same damage... doesn't feel really different.
A fire slug with battering ram... larian humor I guess...?
Sadly doesn't help to make it more distinguishable compared to magisters, skeletons, ...

Since when does the Survivor of Hathsin have a problem with theft?

In all seriousness though, the automatic bag-checks that NPC's perform if you steal from them are quite frustrating, I would prefer that the bag check be performed if you're caught stealing, or if you're reported by another player/companion.

Spoilers.

Here's how you do it.

High wit ranger (in this case, my lizard custom)
High wit Thief with aero (Dual knife ifan for me with teleport)
Low wit Mage with Aero, swap and haste
Lowest Wit Warrior with tons of Str, good 2H, Adrenaline, Rage, Crippling, Battlestomp and Whirlwind

Get "The Pawn" to be able to reposition without losing any AP

Your mage should always act second to last with the warrior acting last because their initiatives are really low.

Encourage + Use the bedroll before starting off the fight for team stat bonus with Ranger preemp snipe to get them to lose some armor or health. Shoot them again on the next turn because if you have been increasing Wits and using Blood rose potion, your initiative will be ridiculously high. If your fingers are fast enough, you can do Encourage, Haste, Rage, Walk-in-Shadow or Sneak and snipe then follows up with 2 more crit shot on turn 1, instantly killing anyone not a tank on turn 1 outside bosses with massive amount of damage especially from high ground. Bonus snipe + 2 bow shots is like, 4 shot and with crit, just imagine doing 600% of your damage on turn one.

Use Thief to whittle down a little more people or just finish off the squishy almost killed by your ranger. Teleport people around to group them up (usually the mages) with remaining AP. Just don't forget to manually reposition after using Vault because the AI loves to run out of the backstab area in this patch.

All enemy should act by now and at least 1 of them should be close to you especially the one you recently teleport unless it's a ranger with Tactical retreat, or the melee that comes in for a crippling strike or phoenix dive.

With the mage, Haste the fighter (give him more AP and movement at the start of his turn). Reposition and aero swap you and your target along with another teleport to group enemeis together. you should be able to easily group 3-4 targets easily this way for your fighter to completely destroy.

On the fighter turn, The Pawn will allow him about free 5 meter movement to get into the enemy with 5 starting AP. Use rage (5->4 ap left), use Adrenaline (4->6 ap), Use Crippling (6->4ap) , Tornado (4->2 ap) then stomp (0 ap). That should kill all of them or knockdown all of them, giving you another free turn next turn. The moment you acquire that axe from Zaleskar, the game already give you your tickets to 300+ damage crit AoE combo with knockdown. You just need to find the right amount of Warfare + 2-H allocation so the bonus stacks for best result.

So you're exploiting the system's bugs in order to give yourself several free hits pre-fight and with a min-maxed build, and then complain that the game is too easy.

Of course you also need ton of skills for that strategy to work, which are hard to get early on.

They're bugs? Not in anyway. It's just the usual "Buff and preemp strike" that is very common in turn-based game, just with optimal min-maxing. You get one hit so it's best you go with the most powerful and broken preemptive strike, Super Buffed Stealth Snipe.

If you want it to be even more powerful, use Sebille or Elven Racial. That thing is so broken because with Haste + Elven Racial + Rested + Encourage and high wits, you can actually shoot the Houndmaster crossbow in the early game TWICE because you get 6 AP per turn along with +20% damage and insane stat bonus. This allow you to 1 turn 100-0 nearly every target or drop their health to almost nothing before you even gain access to Rage and Snipe assuming all 3 shots hit.

So instead of calling it an exploit, the game should balance Warfare Rage and Elven Racial for being the two best and easily used damage buff in the game with minimal draw back. (Especially Elven racial. Pft, -2 con drawback? They can't hurt me if they're dead.)

And I have no trouble with the economy. I'm trying out Origin-character game with Red Prince as my main and I already have 3500 recyclable gold by level 4 through the power of crafting. This is also part of the game because the game tip states right there how to trigger a merchant inventory reset. (level up or wait for an hour based on what happens first after the latest reset)

Everyone that will die as part of the quest chain, I will buy their whole inventory first with junk that you get back from killing them and this allows me to gain access to a bunch of stuffs to recycle easily as I loot them all back. Because gold are not looted back on merchant death (for some reason. Logic), recyclable junks are worth way more in Fort Joy. Add in stealing post-level 5 to regain all the gold you invest into building attitude and crafting, it's very easy to leave Fort Joy with 10k+ gold in tradable consumable/grenade/scroll and actual gold.

This pic is from my last playthrough that I used to make write the tip/trick to solving every possible gold issue outside "Having nothing to buy"




Also, don't kill or ditch any merchant NPC via quest until you are at least level 4 to unlock everything in their inventory like tier 2 skill books.

===

Also, for the person asking for proof that it shouldn't be possible, here is me storming the gate at level 4. My skill isn't fully learned yet on my main Red Prince since the lizard merchants are the last one I will shop with in town after I get rid of Griff first (but before that, I need to wait 4 hours to be able to pruchase 4 copies of Walks-in-Shadow)

My Red prince weapon is the Ordivand Hammer (not that great but shops no longer sell easy green/blue 20 damage 2-H weapons that I can just buy and win anymore)

At the start of the fight, Sebille already went and sniped the archer to the left side of the gate and 100-0 her with 1 snipe + 1 shot from Hound master.

I used the next 2 actions from Ifan and Lohse (who specs into pure utility) to group them up. However, the remaining archer decided to act cute and run away for a Richochet shot so with 1 AP, I use my the teleport from teleporter glove to round them up.



And then I follow it up with Adrenaline, Rage, Crippling and Stomp.



You can see from the turn at the top that only one target is left alive with very little health and also knocked down, easy to finish. The only reason one target survives is because BattleStomp can't crit and I have no Tornado/Battering Ram yet. If Lohse also had Haste, I would be able to add one more attack and do at least 50-60 more damage overkill above their healths. Also, I forgot to use the resting bag in this case and have no "Burn my eyes" yet for more stats on Red Prince attacks.

Pretty much every fight in the game ends like this in 1 or 2 turns even at the Marsh on my last completed playthrough. It's hard to experience what 2.0 AI is like when they die before even getting to act much. Rage guaranteed crit for only 1 AP is so broken.

Ah k, exactly what I expected.
It's not just the first turn but the first round! And additionally it exploits the importance of Initiative and right now way to low requirements of skills and abilities. JFYI, nobody is denying that, but instead already looking for solutions how this (as you say yourself) imbalance can be compensated.
Same goes for the gathering of funds to buy equipment with stealing and so on.

Btw you can do similar things even easier, for example exploit rage combined with markmans fang or vault+piercing knife. Add in glass cannon and enough initiative and you can pierce their armor 4x and so kill at least one, possible more, enemies and then simply flee combat without any chance for them to retaliate.
Doesn't change the fact though that if you DON'T come first the enemy easily CCs you to death without exploited equipment (stealing for funds n stuff).

The goal is to even that out, at least a bit.

That is wrong. You do not need any points into Sneak to snatch the prison key. All you need to do is to get close to it while keeping your body outside the sight cone, and you can still take the key off of the stool without being seen even though it is inside the sight cone.

That actually makes sense since it's a lot easier to see a person in peripheral vision than a quick darting in of an arm in and out.

I don't see how this is a bad thing.
If Initiative wasn't important then you'd only stack Strength, Finesse and Intelligence with the occasional Memory for skills.
It gives Wits a purpose.

Yeah. I just tried that the other day: first time I got caught; thanks to the handy autosave immediately beforehand I had another go, more carefully manoeuvring my totally unsneaky character into place and swiped it without incident.

It's literally its only purpose, though - extra crit change is negligible. I'd much rather stack in those other skills, at least they make my guys stronger and beefier and deal more damage. I never find a moment to put points in Wits tbh.

I've just realized that we can't edit older posts.. so that makes it significantly harder to update the main post. ;_;

Unless I'm an idiot and am missing something obvious..

I'm afraid they're only modifiable for a fixed amount of time; a week, IIRC, but Raze may care to confirm.

I tried the whole prison thing and it seems to work with 0 sneak now. I used to get caught all the time if I pick the key with my thievery lizard before this patch so I had to use the 1 sneak Ifan because the darn char would run into the red line of sight all the time if I tell him to pick the key.

===

And pretty much every turn-based game I played, Initiative is ALWAYS the most broken stat because of how simple turn-based game are in general unless they purposefully nerf it or do something like tripling everyone health to make it nearly impossible to 100-0 on the go without investing into a bunch of damage stat (Which won't work here because perma CC is too easy).

An example of how a game can nerf it is Wakfu where maximizing initiative used to be the best thing ever before they 3x everyone health in PvP and implement the "team initiative" where instead of simply deciding who goes first based on ini, it also alternates between team as well so you can't just move all 3-4 members of your side and gip half of the enemy team before they even act in both PvE and PvP. This is pretty much the state of the game atm and all the hard encounter are enemies exploiting this high initiative winning strat to use the best skill before you act.

To rate now, the most powerful to least powerful stats atm are

Wit > Str > Finesse > Mem > Int > Con

Mem isn't that as only mage will really need it to have all the buff spells accessible. The other ranger/fighter can just wear +1 mem stuffs looted from withermoore or blue gears to have the extra slot.

Int is worthless atm because magic damage sucks and is only good for personal challenge.

Con is horrible in a game with easy perma CC. Int and Str also gives Physical/Magical armor bonus anyway.

If I really want to exploit multiple free cheap hits, I will just abuse the chat-and-fight thing that is already reported as an issue. If you talk to a boss, start the fight hitting the worthless pawns and then end the conversation to start the fight again, the turn order pretty much gets a reset. The fast character can act twice or even thrice if you also get the guard to hate you by blantantly stealing in plain sight or hurt your own teammate with teleport to get them to initiate another conversation with the other slower character before the preemptive strike. (This is outside the valid min-maxing method though so don't use it unless you really can't win the fight.)

And I wouldn't worry about getting CC to death. Gawin robe, Carin shield, Migo breastplate and Bracchus gears are easily obtained for early defensive stat without buying anything. The whole idea of "Lohse and Red Prince goes last" is so that Lohse, who is the tankiest member, can always remove the cc with stuffs like frost shield before buffing the Red Prince so he always get to act and wipe the enemy team right away. The only CC red prince has to worry about anyway are magical CC because of Str build = very high physical armor.

There's also learning how the AI will move to force them to come closer without using any skill. For example, the voidwoken even with 2.0 AI, if you enter from the right instead (the high ground area connected to the pig area), the Voidwoken won't start the fight with any spell and just run toward you, giving you an easy time to just teleport it in and cc it or even kill it. The only thing you have to watch out in 2.0 are ranged mobs because they use all the special arrows/skill for environment effect now. Pretty much every thing in this game, if they have a melee basic attack, will run into your face if they can't use range spell so just use this knowledge to force them to waste a turn if you can't act first.

My feeling are... please just add more difficulty settings and perhaps we can all find a happy place.

The last game got better with patches spanning nearly a year, but still wasn't masterful. It seems developing DOS2 won't have the extra extra time to really balance this amazingly. Most companies aren't afforded this, but hell that is gameplay.

We could modify csv files in DOS1 to make gameplay changes to player, monster and skill stats. Hopefully something even more professional will be available in the case we have to take this in our own hands.

We can't really judge the difficulty without seeing tactician mode. Virtually everything was available in the first game to tweak difficulty to your taste, including editing AI, though it's beyond most people's interest to really go nitty gritty to boost difficulty, further tweak AI and balance (barring obsessed people like myself and the modders in my sig.) And D:OS2 will be even more modder-friendly, nevermind game-master mode making the game as tweakable on the fly as you want. Plus with AI at a fairly high standard already, which is a major difficulty for achieving challenge, I wouldn't have any concerns about achieving the level of difficulty you want. Would be nice to have plenty of default options, but at the very least I'll probably release a enemy statboost in Tactician mode in the first couple weeks.

Finally finished my play trough:

thoughts:

At first the AI was really kicking my ass, but in the end my level 6 characters beat alexander and the void worm (2 levels up). What changed? I figured out that the AI will always try to attack/win. I on the other hand was running and guiding them to a choke point (playing for tie, (not losing)). Once you block a path for them to rush you they scatter and attack you one by one.

In the fight with Alexander I triggered the battle and then teleported away. I let them come to me and with some fire en poison 3 enemies did not move, 2 walked trough the fire, 1 decided to take the long detour. If they joined together to attack it would be a lot harder.

No sourcepools -> no way to get braccus rex helmet (I released all those poor souls)