Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Tactician mode feels busted

Changing my perspective, I'm actually enjoying tactician mode now.

It's a mode where you do whatever you can to not win fights but to beat the game itself.
You need to know exactly where to go to make the early game easy (Houndmaster Crossbow + Ancient sword + Migo stuffs + extra magic loots OP) and once you have all the gears, it becomes a game of manipulating the map to manipulate the AIs. The game is still fun and challenging in its own way as long as you avoid using game breaking exploits like "Side-line Mage" and "Infinite Turn".

And? The core problem remains, it's still has nothing to do with 'tactic' ^^

I found out that respeccing your characters doesn't delete the abilities they've learned so I changed my 1½ mages into pure archers with only a couple of geo spells for the oil effects. It's going slightly better now but the fact that I 'need' to do this is utter rubbish, especially considering a part of the appeal of DOS1's tactician mode (at least to me) was that despite the difficulty you could still use any party setup as long as you remained within reasonable boundaries.

Manipulating the enemy AI is actually a tactic especially when you consider how key targets will rekt your team in a few hits now.

So while it is disappointing, the mode still forces you to change how you play to deal with the bloated stats. For example, Judge Orivand battle must be taken from right in front of him so you have 2 turns to act (the purged elf will spend it first) and in that 2nd turn, unless you have godly gears, you will have to knock him down or his 53 damage battle stomp will likely knock down your whole team.

You do have to consider the game is as casual and simple as it can be so don't expect them to add any crazy tactics into the game. There's no game changing debuff and buff that you have to keep in mind of and always cleanse. It's just "You get CC'd, you lose. They get CC'd, you win".

well I've gotten all the way to level 12 with a summoner fighter/geo tank fighter/aero/hydro tank and a ranger I mostly just used smart tactics; ie don't forget you can run away and come back after you kill one and even go run heal and join the fight mid battle haha, I love the new respect cause you can fine tune your build and get rid of points you used to survive early game only real fight I had trouble with was the end of 1 act on the boat going to act 2

If you're going to go that far to beat the game, might as well just go all out and abuse rejoining mid battle for infinite turn until they fix it.

It's kinda sad the whole "Kill one, escape" is still in the game. They need to make it so that retreat is not possible if you used your AP on something outside movement (so no hit -> retreat or super long jump -> retreat) and that you need at least 2 AP for it. Also track who retreated so if they rejoin the fight, they cannot get another round of action until the turn is over.

Honestly If you've ever played the epic encounters mod for dos 1 ee its pretty much the same level as this except they cant 75% resist all cc and they mod had enemy level scaling as well lol haha it's not that hard :P

Also they change how far away you need to be to escape now it's not like the first one you can escape with people right next to you; also I usually don't need to run away I've only done it a couple times

Yeah just get wiped from Alexander fight. My 285 armor 365 hp tank got one shotted from backlashing Gheist. Don't know if it's possible without cheesing your way.

that is just as cancerious as early access where you have to win on turn one to get CCed to oblivion

The game adds way to remove some of the CC yet forget to add spells that grant immunity to those CC.

We really need more defensive magic in this game that isn't just "Gain Armor" or "Gain Magic armor". A pure anti-cc abiltiy would have been nice, like "Stand your ground" for shield user where it creates a cover for teammate so projectile can't get through to them and prevent stuff like "Battering ram" from dashing right through.

It was fine in early access because the numbers were reasonably adjusted and you had just as many ways to avoid and/or getting out of crowd control effects as you had ways to inflict them.
This isn't the case now because the enemies deal so much damage they completely bypass your armour anyway and at the same time have additional armour themselves so you will have to stack one damage type and focus fire one or two enemies at a time while simultaneously spending half of your turn recovering from whatever your enemies are throwing at you.

Well on the bright side, they completely broke thievery again that a single person with thievery gear is enough to rob a person completely. I used to cycle between 3 to 4 people to steal with sneak but now, I only need one because at level 6 with 3 thievery and 1 from glove, that 2.4k gold total stealing really go a loooonggg way.

No, thats just manipulating enemy Ai. Its a meta shtick, which is used and abused outside of the game and its gameplay, which makes the internal game mechanics and gameplay mostly pointless.

Its a meta strategy abuse, not a tactic.

What does this do and what should i edit?
That file in the game directory? Or do i copy this file you posted and paste it into the appropriate directory?

I should edit only the "hardcoreNPC"?
What do i edit to lower their hp bloat and armor bloat?

As for the consensus, Ill make the fing consensus myself.

HP or vitality should be only 10% higher. If even that, so we can really see if there are any other changes that make anything more tactical.

Armors should not change at all from classic.
The mechanic is a cancer anyway.


edit:

this section needs to be edited?

HARD:

new entry "HardcorePlayer"
type "Character"

new entry "HardcoreNPC"
type "Character"
data "ArmorBoost" "50"
data "MagicArmorBoost" "50"
data "Vitality" "50"
data "DamageBoost" "50"
data "Accuracy" "10"


ok then, so


HARD:

new entry "HardcorePlayer"
type "Character"

new entry "HardcoreNPC"
type "Character"
data "ArmorBoost" "0"
data "MagicArmorBoost" "0"
data "Vitality" "0"
data "DamageBoost" "0"
data "Accuracy" "0"

hows this?

Or do i just delete those last five entries alltogether?

I'm enjoying tactician. I never played DOS2 in classic mode (i only tested classes during the beta cause i didn't want spoilers), and i decided to go straight with tactician.
I struggled a lot at the beginning cause at level 3 with no gear you can't do anything, but i liked that i had to avoid every fight trying to get exp and loot in some ways.

Everything changed after i managed to kill Kniles. And to manage to do that at level 4 with shit gear (i had only one decent char, my rogue had 2 lvl2 shivs) i had to know exaclty what positions to play, craft the correct arrows and food, abuse every combo of spells i had, etc.. I think that's tactician enough

After that i got lvl5, good loot and now i can play the swamp like a normal game. Also it feels so rewarding when you get good gear in this mode, cause it makes so much difference.

It's a turn-based game. You can't expect it to have insane tactical approach.

Just look at games like Fire Emblem which is considered to be one of the harder Turn-based strat game. What is the entire game strat and tactics about? Manipulating AI so they don't run across the map to kill you in 2 hits with a perma death while making sure you obtain the best result from that.

Pretty much every turn-based game has the same optimal strat too. "Stack damage, act first, CC people in order and beat them before they can deal any damage". It just so happens that the terrible armor system is further flawed and punish people for not min-max to high heaven in its most bloated mode. (Which really should be the case anyway but losing an entire role because of it is kinda lame.)

At this point, I have a feeling that people expect this game to have some real-time factor tactic in its tactician mode, which is not there because Divinity combat is NOT in real-time unless you exploit it with the mage side-line so one can buff in real time while everyone else still act in turn. The most you can do is cleanse those knock down, freeze, shocked and so.

The huge difference is: In Fire Emblem you use combat mechanics: That is tactical gameplay. In D:OS you can use out of combat mechanics, that is often not tactical anymore, it is just abuse of the flaws of the core game mechanic.

ITT: Hard more is hard, please make hard mode easy.

Nope, you are totally missing the point.