Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Percentage based physical and magic armors

I think ive said something about this already, as a part of a long post about a bunch of stuff, but maybe its worth separating it into a specific suggestion.

How about if physical and magic armor beneficial effects would be percentages instead of hard points you need to reduce to zero?

This way, you and enemies could still have additional benefit of this new mechanics but it would not be such a hard barrier as it is now.

In this case you could still hurt someone who has only 50% of his armor, and damage received would be reduced by 50%...?
Or he would have 50% chance to resist magic and 50% of magic damage that went through...

And lets say that a difference between a 100 points and 200 points of armor is that it should take more damage and time to reduce those 200 points ... i guess?

So... you would still damage and reduce the armors by hard damage points, only their effects would be percentage based instead of hard points you need to reduce to zero.

Im not sure is my mathematic logic good here, but thats the main gist of the idea.

Main point against would be:
It would reintroduce effect RNG, what some people don't like at all.


That is also why I suggested for example that piercing weapons should pierce armor at least a bit, while crushing weapons should deal extra damage to armor.

Pfft, some people... there is always "some people" who dont like anything.
And there is quite a lot of some people who dont like the current system.

There are already RNG-like mechanics in the game, most of combat mechanics work like that one way or another.

Better to focus on whats good for gameplay.

As the situation is, the armors are basically invulnerability spells that you need to chip away to be able to actually use your skills and spells on enemies and apply any status effects they provide.

The damage received could be made to be hard points reduced by the armor current state, so if you have physical armor of 25% you would receive 75 % of the damage. (minus additional resistances and protection from equipment) If you have 80% of armor then you would get 20% of the damage.

But the status effects of spells and skills could be calculated as percentage chance... which is how its done now anyway.

The goal being to remove the need to destroy armors down to zero points. Or to have that kind of armor working at 100% efficiency while its damaged and reduced to any amount bellow 100%.

This would greatly increase flexibility and fluidity of combat.
It would increase diversity of how you resolved any combat encounter which would benefit any replay.
It would allow you to use your skills and spells to some extent even against enemies with high armor - but you would still need to get it under 100% and you would benefit from damaging them even more. Same for enemies against you.

This would also make elemental surfaces have some effect on enemies and you - before the armors are reduced to zero.

And it would increase importance of the equipment primary/basic defensive stats.
This way you could have armors or robes that provide bigger physical and magical armor values but have worse primary/basic defensive stats, or the opposite. And epic equipment that has both.

I also don't like that no statuses work while armor is on.
If you're running a build that tries to do damage from Poison, Bleed, Burn, etc., you gain no bonus until you finally work through the armor. The armor prevents this damage, but you can't do a lot of your damage until the armor is off. A bit of a catch-22. This is made worse by the fact that elemental effects, (e.g. wands/spells/etc.) are heavily balanced around the assumption that they will inflict statuses (Burn/Poison/Stun/Wet) and for as much as the first half of their target's effective health they are unable to.
This reduction hits Magic attacks much harder than Physical, as attacks from Physical sources are largely pure damage anyway.

Perhaps if statuses blocked by armor caused some loss of armor; or if armor only blocked damage and loss-of-control statuses, then this problem could be alleviated.

I'm not a big fan of random chance mechanics myself. I'd prefer to know what will happen and make a plan for that, and not have to mentally weigh the percentages to get expected gains.

As i said, most of game mechanics are "RNG" like, but none of it is actually random.

And this is the case for most cRPG games i know. Or maybe people who dont like it would want a 100% chance to do anything.

Physical and magic armor are going to be either a hard invulnerability barrier you need to chip away to Zero, or some sort of soft barrier. And percentage based is one reasonable easy way to do it. Which is in line with the rest of the game mechanics.

not agree

Personally I'd rather have the current system than have RNG back. What's the fun if you can just permalock CC every enemy from the very beginning. Imagine having 4 party members all with at least 4 CC spells each. How is that more fun?

I saw somewhere a really good idea that for example if an enemy has magic armor and you use shocking touch, they are not shocked but then with a second application of stun with a diff skill will increase the probability or something like that. That still includes RNG though.

A good alternative might be the following:

Consecutive applications give a damage bonus up to a maximum cap(thus speeding up the process of grinding down the armor).

So for example, if I use 3 air attacks in a row, each successive attack does 5-10% more damage, but after the 3rd attack the dmg bonus is capped. This might be a fair compromise. Thoughts?

The problems with the current system in my eyes are:
- The current system puts balanced setups at a disadvantage because it is more effective to either focus the physical or the magical armor portion.
- Low damage CC strong skill trees like Hydro and Aero are less effective than damage heavy Pyro and Geo, with which you can blow all the shit up.
- If everything is predictable, it is less of a fight and more of a puzzle game. It feels less like a CRPG.
- Every mage can now take a warrior skill and use its CC with full efficience. In DOS1 you needed the right stats to increase success chance, now you don't. Which kind of makes skill hoarding even more likely.


Your idea would even enforce focus based team and skill hoarding even more. Either all will need to have the same kind of skill set, or all will have pretty every skill, to chain up those elemental reactions. With only 4 AP one char alone can hardly profit from such a system.

I see no sense in anyone complaining about RNG is a cRPG game because large majority if not all mechanics are based on percentages for success.

You might as well go and play a shooter if that is bothering you.


@kalrakh

Im not sure if that is reply to me. In any case i dont see how my idea would necessitate anything like that.

I may be wrong but as far as i see, the fight with this system i suggest would go:

You hit the enemy with some armor:

- you damage the armor for certain amount of points as its done now anyway. Lets say the first hit only damages the armor.

- lets say you take 30% of armor down.

- next hit with any physical damage skill will cause precisely 30% of damage while 70% will be deflected by armor which will be damaged a bit more. So its not any kind of RNG itself because you know exactly how much damage will go through. If your attack is doing 10 points of damage you KNOW 3 points will go through.

- as you lower the armor even more the more damage gets through. And you know exactly how much. (provided the enemy doesnt dodge or resist due to other stats - which are all percentages.)

In case of magic armor and spells as weapon the same thing happens in terms of damage going through, but the status effects work or dont depending on that same percentage + other resistances.

The other resistances which are calculated as percentages ANYWAY.

So this is nothing different then how the entire game is working right now.
Except the current extra armors.

I agrea with vivalafai on some points, that the actual system has good points and i like it. Trying refont him like you can be stunned proportionnaly to your armor is quinda killing it. better leaving the armor totally in that case.

I would sugest a simple think that will make mages (because they are really weak as dps, they can only be good support , sad tought) a bit "in the game". simply putting to cc spell damages bonus proportianal too the cc they are applying (in the case the target as again magical amor).

An example is alway better: i cast shoking touch (that deal 20 eletric damages and stun) on a zombie witch with 40 magic armor, it break 20 magic armor and can stun, so the stun (that isn't stunning tho) deal additional 5 (maybe 8) eletric damages. This would make two birds one stone:
~giving mages a little up (not making them op tho)
~making you less recluant when using cc spells on a ennemie with hight magical armor (and so said making thoses spell a bit better maybe).

Same goes for the burning, and buffs effect damages i guess?

PS: this is far away from buffing the mages to the point of "overpower". i mean i killed the voidwoken the a lvl 5 team because i had one ranged with the new polymorf, and in thoses 4 lvl 5 characters i had 2 thats din't played a single turn (one glass canon of a friends was usless and the other loshe when full beugged and couldn't use spell). Sorry saying this here but ranger with polymorf is kinda unfair to the game lol. (killing 3 ennemies in one turn is kinda rude :p )