Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Wits is a worthless stat

For some reason, Larian decided to ditch the old system from the early access and use an "I go, you go" staggered initiative system instead.

This means that even if your entire team has a better initiative score than the enemy, only one of your characters gets to act before them.

This basically turns initiative (and in extension, wits) into a stat that's only good for deciding which of your own characters gets to open the fight. Regardless of whether all of your guys have an initiative of 20 and the enemies have 0, the enemies always go second, fourth, sixth, while your guys go first, third, fifth.

That's awful, because it basically means that you should only increase wits ever in one party member.

The other effects of wits, spotting hidden objects and the miniscule boost to critical chance, don't make up for this.

It has to be fixed somehow. Either Wits need to be revised so it does something new, or the old initiative system needs to be brought back (possibly with a bonus to enemies' wits stats, so they don't always go last).

Then don't put points in it. I feel strong about one thing. It is impossible to properly balance a game and it can go from crazy easy to crazy hard if your team starts first or last. I think it is brilliant that they stagger it, like a game of chess. Much easier to balance, more reasonable over all.

1% Crit chance seems weak but so is 5% base damage.

but when it becomes 30% crit chance, it's as strong as 150% base damage.

i'm not sure what to think about that tho...it sure would be quite strong if all of your team was playing first...but also the opposite, if i dont invest in Wits enough...then all of my team will go last...

I would not say wits is a totally useless stat.. but there are plenty of other ways to get crit when you get 36% out of a 3 socket amulet. my knight had 79% with hot headed up last play through. there are certain instances where if you dont have enough wits you will not get certain dialogues finished, or talk your way out of things.

I like how it is now. You can pump wits on one toon to find all the secrets and go first and the others you can go hybrid with.

What good should hybrid do? If you split your points between Str and Dex, both will deal less damage than they could, because their damage increase is only half as good.

Thanks to diminishing return, its not really true =)

Data.txt:

key "CriticalBonusFromWits","1"

One chance out of three of slightly increasing damage is as strong as multiplying your damage by 2,5 ?

Wut ?

Please keep in mind, that with proper skills and equip your crit damage can be more than 250% of base damage (atleast on 2H WF, but I am sure it can be achieved on ranger too). Crits in every game are all about huge scalings, it wont do much if you dont scale both parts, but when you have good base damage, increasing both crit chance and multiplier can increase your damage MUCH more than any flat stat could.

I don't understand the math of both of you.

Basic crit damage is 150% of base damage. If you have a crit chance of 1 in 3 (33 %), then with three hits of a 100 damage weapon you had a damage of 100 + 100 + 150 = 350. You had 300 damage without crit and 450 damage without crit with half the base damage added.

So rising crit chance to 30% is not the equivalent to 150% base damage. And I don't see a 2,5 damage multiplier anywhere.

Crit chance becomes much more intriguing with critical damage increase, like for two-handers.


Edit: TsunAmik's post came parallel to mine. To take it into account, with 250% crit damage, a 33% crit chance would be the same as an increase to 150% base damage. Or?

2.5 multiplier is achievable with 10 points in 2h and 10 points in scoundrel... considering there is possibility to reach over 50 percent crit chance AND we have enrage, this build can be potentially really deadly.

Yes, but that's a 2,5 crit damage multiplier, not a 2,5 damage multiplier. Except with 100% crit chance.

Sure, when did I talked about standard damage multiplier? Oo we were talking crits of course...

I referred to Akka's post, talking about multiplying your damage with 2,5.

When you start abusing multi-hit attacks like Arrow storm every fight, the extra crit chance goes a long way, especially with 200-250% crit damage later.

My high wit ranger deals as much or even more damage than the max fin ranger (and dumping into wit now) simply because he has 20% more crit chance and right now, at level 17, a long distance balistic shot from the highground is a 100-0 to most enemies if it crits. 44% crit chance on him atm means I have a rather high chance of killing an enemy in only 2 AP instead of 4 compared to the 23% crit chance on the high fin which is not that reliable.

Ellazard's post :

1% Crit chance seems weak but so is 5% base damage.

but when it becomes 30% crit chance, it's as strong as 150% base damage.

It compares 1 % crit to 5 % base damage, and then expand on saying that 30 % crit is equivalent to 150 % base damage.
So it's a GAIN of 30 % crit/150 % base damage. A gain of 150 % base damage means doing 250 % base damage, hence multiplying damage by 2,5.

Still don't see how 1/3 chance to do 150 % damage can be in any way, shape or form superior to simply doing 250 % damage.
Unless there is some very specific effect for a critical strike, the first is about 115 % of base damage, the other is doing 250 % of regular damage.

So : wut ?

If you're talking about 40 wits 10 fin, that's a crap build anyway because crit build needs some base damage going.

After a certain point, like 30 fin, 1 wit with crit gears add almost the same amount of potential damage per point since crit is a final multiplier.

And when stuff like warfare and ranged bonus are included, wit will start to add more damage.

This is even more obvious in 2H build because they can get +50% crit damage and even more if you have scoundrel from gear. At +30 Str and 220% crit damage, you deals 250% base and 550% if it crits.

So each point of crit here is worth around 3% extra total damage.

Each point into Str is worth around 2% extra damage.

And while it does have some diminishing return, it will still add more damage because you have even more str which scales even stronger with crit damage.

One argument on 2H is that you can use enrage but that thing sucks now since it eats 2 AP. you're better off using 2 attacks instead of just critting once because you will either deal the same amount of damage with no extra crit or crit twice and deal more damage. Right now, Enrage is only good for preempt strike unless you really want that Overpower to kill.

Edit: Fixed a potential misunderstanding about 30 str. I mean +30, not +20 on that 30 str.

Really?... 'Don't put points in it'? What happens if they nerf the rest of the stats so they do nothing as well? Don't put points in them either?

I agree a game like this can't ever (and shouldn't ever) be perfectly balanced, but clearly a main stat needs to do something. Otherwise, why is it there? Might as well remove it, along with initiative.