Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback AI 2.0 - a couple thoughts on power and civil pts

Power Levels - Skills and Equipment
So, this is the opposite of what most other people are saying, but I like that you can't get fully geared and skilled up easily. This island wants to feel like a world of extreme scarcity, with a few hidden caches of goodies, but mostly you should be trying to make do with very little. I would probably actually take it further - I don't think you should be able to get more than 1-2 new skills on each character in act 1 and you shouldn't necessarily be able to get anything but common items for most of your armor and weapon slots (maybe some of them don't even get filled in act 1). I want it to feel more desperate - I don't want to be a powerhouse and right now I'm tearing through most enemies like wet tissue paper (albiet, in Explorer mode).

However, I think the same thing about the enemies that you face. It seems like most of them are using a much wider array of skills/spells and items early in the game than they should be. Not that I want them to be stupid or weak, but most of the enemies feel too advanced and well-rounded when I'd rather see them more focused on the one or two things that they know. Maybe even have their abilities be somewhat random each run through (i.e. archers randomly get one or two of the four basic huntsman skills maybe one random special arrow; they shouldn't all be good at the same things or all the things). Primary villains (e.g. Bishop, High Judge, Radeka, Deep Dweller) might get a little more than this or might get specific skills if the situation calls for it.

Civil Points
Civil points feel a little underwhelming right now. I can't put my finger on it, but I'm often not sure what to do with them and some of them seem like they should come from another place. e.g.
-You could get better at Thieving by putting points into Scoundrel.
-You could get better at Sneaking by putting points into Scoundrel and/or Huntsman.
-You could get better at Telekinesis by putting points into Aerothurge.
This would also help the combat skills feel a little more important to skill up past level 1.

If you play explorer, it is no wonder, you feel less desperate. Better try Classic first then.

Also each fight is prescripted regarding enemies, the only random stuff is the loot there. They will hardly change that and I'm sure I would not want that either.


About Civil Points you surely have you points there.

The purpose of my comment is not to say that it's too easy (it's easy, but that doesn't bother me), but that the pacing of the power ramp-up feels wrong. I don't think the heroes or enemies should have as many abilities as they seem to so early in the game. I don't think the heroes should be decked out with lots of nice armor so early in the game (especially while isolated on a prison island - in a big city is another story). If this doesn't apply to Classic mode, then fine - that's up to Larian. It doesn't change the fact that it feels (to me at least) like Explorer mode wants to slow down a little.

I'd like to see the characters have to adapt more. Right now, it seems like at the beginning of the game you are encouraged to say e.g. "I'm building this guy as an air/fire mage that will dual wield wands." or "This character is going to be a two-handed melee fighter." and all of your points go into the skills for that specialization and nothing else. This is possible because there is a pretty good supply of weapons available, so you can always find something that fits what you already decided to be. I'd really love to see a setting (at least in act 1), where there is such a scarcity of weapons, skills, etc. that you can't hyper-specialize - you can pick a general direction for each character, but you have to be flexible enough to be able to use the things that you find. I'd love to see the skill book vendors not even have every skill available. This is a different kind of challenge from the one where you have to min/max to defeat really decked-out opponents, and one that I find far more interesting. If the prison is supposed to feel scarce, I'd like to see actual scarcity.

I can't disagree more with this. The magisters and the player characters being powerful and well rounded early game is an integral part of the story, otherwise it wouldn't be believable that either of these factions are even remotely capable of preventing the void from returning. If anything the magisters should be even more powerful and have even more tools than they already do...that said...I would greatly appreciate it if Larian decided to not do that.

You could remove assigned civil points entirely and make the skills derived from stats (leave them as skills instead of just making actions straight stat derived, so you can have items that boost the skills still)

Sneaking could be based on fin
Thievery could be split into pickpocket(fin) and lockpicking (fin+int/2)
Loremaster and telekenesis could be based on int
Barter based on wit+int/2
Persuasions based on str+int+wit/3, with speech checks (intimidate, reason, charm) based wholly on those specific stats.
Lucky charm could be removed and made item only. its effect could be increased some to compensate, maybe only certain unique items have it

Con should be changed to give +5% vit, PA, MA instead of its current +7% vit, to compensate for the other stats becoming more useful.

I like this idea, less points to manage. But it does give less flexibility to building your characters the way you feel like it.
Also is crafting gonna be added in civil?

Oh, they are re-adding a crafting skill? I had hoped they were just going to leave it as it is where you can craft freely. They better add more civil points if they dont change things but add crafting too.

The main complaint i had with crafting skill in the last game, and this may have changed at some point (i played it right at release mostly) was that if you wanted to be optimal you ended up never taking crafting on a main character and just had a hired crafting slave you used for crafting and never even took with you anywhere. Id preffer for the party to feel more self sufficient with just the 4 people.

A note on the concept of freedom. Free choice just leads to a hand full of optimal outcomes. If you want actual diversity in playstyle you want restrictions. In a more restrictive system you have as many choices as you have restrictions, in a free system you have one choice, the 'best one'.

If this game used a fixed class based system instead and had say, 10 classes to pick from, you would end up with vastly wider array of party configurations. Sure some of the nuance might be flexible right now, but right now you will have certain abilities on 'someone' in the party, so in essence the 4 characters are just 4 parts of a single party unit and you assign capabilities to someone and in the end you have very similar looking parties even if the specifics are altered. Give people only a choice of restrictions however and they will have to play around them, focus on strengths and weaknesses of their party instead of just min/maxing the weakness into irrelevancy. It causes people to experiment with what is possible rather than building a gimmick party to exploit what is optimal. People would pick their party and then figure out how to use them, instead of figuring out how to game the system and then building a party to do it.

So, with all that said, something that 'limits freedom' in a game that already dictates to you your party composition, but just gives you the illusion of freedom in how you divide them up among 4 parts isn't really a bad thing. It would mean that you just wouldnt have a thief if you wanted to make a party of nothing but strength warriors. That would result in a much different playthough, one where you couldn't lockpick or pickpocket anything! Imagine!