Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Balance Change suggestions/feedback

Firstly, physical skills are still too strong. Yes, they've nerfed rogue but honestly physical skills are simply too strong throughout the game. Most of the skills require only 2 ap versus 3 for some of the stronger skills of magic.

Elemental Affinity is one way to counter this but honestly that comes with its own weaknesses eg. ap spent to set up the environment/damage. Plus, you need to actually spend a talent point on it.

Second, resistance...while there are certain cases where the enemies have -% resistance, those are far and in between. Most of the time, the "weaker resistance" is still a positive. Not to mention physical = magical armor in terms of effects.

I suggest removing the resistance for magical armor so that mages can actually the debuff the character easier.

Third, physical skills essentially do the same thing as magical skills but do it way better. CC, aoe, etc. Even anti-healing relies on physical armor. Not to mention, magical skills require you to spend your skill points in a wider variety of schools. eg. aero/hydro for cc and pyro for dps.

If you look at physical skills, you merely need to focus on one skill eg. Warfare to get CC/aoe/mobility all in one. PLUS, all the physical skills buff each other! Warfare benefits scoundrels and vice versa. Compare that to pyro which only boosts itself. It's so much easier to stack damage on physical skills without losing any utility.

Fourth, physical skill bonuses are simply too strong, as mentioned above, everything works together for physical skills. One of the biggest offender is two handed. It actually boosts your crit damage and two-hand damage all in one skill...seriously who thought this was a good idea.

An example of the disparity: it takes 3 source points and 5 ap to cast a meteor storm. I get roughly that much damage by stacking 90% crit chance and 275% crit damage and simply using whirlwind. My overpower does 13k crits at lvl 18.

As for the so called environmental bonuses, they are lackluster in tactician where some of the bosses have like 30k hp.

Let's not forget that magic requires a freaking talent point to crit! This requirement needs to be removed and some form of crit damage bonus added to stats like memory or one of the magical schools.

As for the advantage of range...just blitz attack them and whirlwind. Range doesn't matter when everything dies in one hit. My normal hit actually does more damage than my laser at 90 int...

Aye, I've finished the game with a ~85% physical party (token enchanter to buff / put out fires), and now trying to do a magic run is making me wonder why -do- those skills have such long cooldown when they're doing less than a warrior's base attacks. Though with that said warriors also have it p. tough in fort joy as little/no armor in the first 4-6 levels means they can't really serve as tanks / often don't even have opportunist in their template, which also indirectly devalues mages.

I ragequit on my mage run when my geo / pyro + summoner / hydro ran into fireslugs. Everything I do explodes and heals them... ._. And the long cooldowns / low damage on water skills make fireslugs' weakness to frost negligible, as I can't kill them before they heal to full from fires all around them.

I think the problem isn't so much that physical is strong but that magical is more 'offensive utility' oriented, and offensive utility in this game is blocked by magic armor, which for a good half of the game your wizards won't have enough 'oomph' to deal with, without also putting all their utility on long cooldown.

I almost misinterpreted that to think that you had one character running geo, pyro AND summoner, but it was just geo and pyro, with the other one being summoner and hydro. I guess you forgot about the fire slugs?

Okay, well obviously you'll want to give your pyro a third attack type, because as you realized, the two you have aren't going to work well together there. This was the case in D:OS 1 as well. You need a third element as backup.

I'd make the pyro a summoner as well, because if nothing else they can cast Dimensional Bolt and/or Create Totem very turn. Take Dimensional Bolt and use it in areas not likely to be set on fire, and make air/water totems and incarnates, or just plain wooden ones for physical damage.

As an aside, the fire slugs are totally optional. You don't need pet pal, you don't even need to fight unless you get near the queen. The only one who you can't sneak past is in the back and if you're polite, they just let you go through. I almost always leave the fire slugs alive because they're nicer than the magisters.

I don't really want to see physical nerfed - I'd rather see magic buffed a bit, preferably to the tune of lowering AP costs and cooldowns rather than increasing damage. That said Physical is mostly strong because Warfare's passive is brokenly good - it should be additive with all the other bonii instead of multiplicative - as it stands it's so universally good that it's better to stack warfare on a ranged character than to pick up the ranged skill.

I'd like to add that there are a bunch of magical damage skills that target physical armour for their effect, but not the other way around.

Not quite true. Gag order, Chloroform are two counterexamples off the top of my head.

Ah what I meant was: Skills that deal magical damage, but whose effects target physical armour. Gag Order deals both magical damage and goes for magical armour on its effect.

Sorry for the confusion. ^^

I generally agree with what's been said so far, but want to emphasize that I think a major part of the problem is how physical and magic armor work. Completely reducing the chance for status effects to 0 while the associated armor type is > 1 is a huge nerf to the effectiveness of many spells. On the other hand, combat against enemies with no physical or magic armor are trivial for the same reason. I feel it would be better if status effects had a chance to proc, maybe influenced by armor but certainly not to the extent that they are currently. The fact that enemies have so much more armor than PCs just further emphasizes the problem to me. It's way easier for the enemy to get status effects on PCs than the other way around.