Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks Skill crafting

http://www.divinity.game/newsposts/2017/8/1/kickstarter-update-41-but-wait-theres-more

Well, we have 4 elemental masteries and 6 non-elemental masteries.

Does it mean that there are 24 craftable skills plus 24 craftable Source skills? Or do specific skillbooks matter?

It appears that specific skillbooks don't matter, but it's hard to tell. They combined rain with decaying touch for blood rain, Some cool things to notice in the video (tisk, tisk, Larian, you knew somebody would point these things out :P)

Necromancy will have raise dead/bone manipulation skills: one of necromancy skills they flash over is "Raise Bone Widow," with the description "Raise a walking pile of bones. It can consume corpses to restore vitality and receive a stacking damage buff." Another skill was "Bone Cage," which restores physical armor + more armor per nearby corpse.

Many skills will have higher ability requirements. We see Steam Lance has a hydrosophist requirement of 3, and the raise bone widow requires necromancy 2. This isn't much of a surprise, but good to see that confirmed.

Blood rain had a requirement of hydrosophist 1 and necromancy 1, so it appears skillcrafted skills will be hyrbrid skills.

Steam Lance had 2 turquoise lines in the upper right, which I believe represented that it took 2 source points to cast. This indicates to me that source will be much more common, even in the first act, than we've seen. This is a good thing to me, since it will be easier to balance around common use of source skills rather than making them rare.

They showed a level 19 character with 5500 vitality, and about 500 phys/magic armor. That's a pretty massive discrepancy in vitality vs. armor, though maybe there was a reason for that. Then again, the bone cage skill increased armor by 1000 + 1000 more per nearby corpse, so who knows. There was also a level 22 character with 12000 vitality, so who knows. Just kind of interesting to see what sort of scaling we might see. Good to see that elemental resists were quite low (5-15% resist mostly), so looks like that might not end up getting super inflated.

Thanks, I did not notice some things you pointed at.

Vitality inflation disturbs me a bit. I hoped it will keep being lower than in DOS1.

I also wonder if the Source system will be punishing for "lawful good" characters or there will be some kind of compensation for restraining from soul consumption.

I am hoping that there is a little more depth to skillcrafting than just Fire skillbook + Necromancy Skillbook = Corpse Explosion and that's it. Like Decaying Touch (or whatever the necro skill book was) + Ignition/Conflagration = Corpse Explosion and then Decaying Touch + Searing Daggers = Withering Flame (or whatever).

I know Runecrafting would kind of fill the niche of a Battlemage hybrid damage like enchanting a sword with a fire rune for some bonus fire damage but a skillcrafting combo like Crippling Blow + Ignition = Flame Blade would really sate those who go for a might and magic combination (like I do)

This is what I was worried about after watching the video. One can only hope it will be like this in the beginning just so they could squeeze it into the game and it will be revamped later for different combinations. As it is now I wouldn't really call it skill crafting.

I can only hope it is easy to address in GM mode.

I imagined it like all the skills have some variables assigned and crafting adds or replaces some of them.

For example, Crippling Blow: Melee, Weapon damage, Crippled, AoE. Fossil Strike: Ranged, AoE, Slow, Oil, Earth Damage. You combine these skills and get a Crippling Fossil Blow skill which converts all the damage to Earth, slows and have a bit wider AoE with your Melee weapon. Crippling Blow + Heart of Steel restores your physical armour and have increased damage to the enemy physical armour and so on.

It seems that I was wrong. At least we will have some more skills.

I think that is what everyone imagined.

Yup, that's definitely what "skill crafting" implies. But I never really expected that sort of system. Theoretically moddable, though it would be a good amount of work to make it worthy of the name "skill crafting." Not super difficult per se, just tons of work making variants of different skills, new crafting recipes, balancing and making new skill effects and icons stuff.

Was more realistically imagining something like 8-10 "base" skill types like rain, AOE attacks, summon types, self-teleports, cone attacks, etc, that could be combined with a few different skills each. So you could make blood rain, fire rain, oil rain, poison rain, etc. Or you could make a sort of flaming whirlwind, a poisonous whirlwind, an excessively gory whirlwind (e.g., causes bleeding), etc.

Whether or not that really leads to more interesting skills than more specific skills like corpse explosion is hard to say, but it's more skill-crafty than 48 pre-designed skills that don't really have much to do with the specific skills used to craft with it.

I think how skill crafting will work is there will be at least 1 generic combination where as long as you combine 1 element with 1 non element you will get some kind of new skill book, but there will still be craftable skills for very specific skill books. Kind of like how all you need to make a sword that does poison damage, is some source of poison (could be a poison barrel or a flask of poison) and a sword.

Hoping the skill requirements remain low, and steadily increase throughout the acts. Like no higher than 4 points in any give skill school to learn an ability by the end of the game. I really enjoyed how in act 1 the penalty for being able to do everything was that you missed out on minor bonuses and buffs and did less damage at one time overall. Act 1's progression feels, at least to me, leaps and bounds better than the entirety of Dos1/DosEE, so I hope Acts 2 & 3 follow its example.

Tyranny Devs managed to implement skill crafting and I anticipated that it will be much better in DOS2 due to more interesting "base skills" that are already present.

Besides, I am quite sceptical about 24 Source skills as they are not meant to be used often. I wish we could have other 24 ordinary skills instead.

My main concern here is about magic/physical damage dualism.
For example, if all the 4 Warfare hybrid skills deal physical damage, the system will not give new opportunities of dealing magic damage by warriors. If they deal magic damage, 4 skills are only a reasonable minimum (take into account ability points to spend too) while "physical" warriors will get nothing from skill crafting.

source isactually very common for "Evil" characters... as you can steal the source from dead bodies with spirit sight... as far as good players source will indeed be rare (which will make quests that require bless all the more harder.. since bless is now a source skill and only lasts 2 turns now)

It was said during the undead reveal stream that 48 Skill crafting skills are available so yeah 24 regular and 24 Source skills would be my bet too.

Now Tyranny, I was hyped by the game for this spell crafting but in the end I felt that it wasn't that great and I prefer that Larian added "Hidden skills" (you do use crafting system but you don't really craft them as in choosing their effect) rather than having some mildly interesting system with 200+ possibilities but only a couple are interesting.

I still think the spell crafting of Morrowind was fun (was a long time ago, maybe I am just nostalgic) and I wish it would be made again and improved in a different game.