Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Can we get a developer comment on Armor System?

At first I was opposed, and annoyed, by this mechanic as well. Over time I got used to it and can see its positive influences. Having a hybrid party is not a downside at all. You need mages to take down magic armor of the warriors, while warriors take down the phys armor of mages. And both your melee and magic characters have access to CC abilities that can assist in both situations.

However it is still a problem that it takes a few turns to have the armor down and you can do actual battle. And once you do it is usually over really fast.

I disagree with the point that there are few ways to invest in your armor type. During many fights managing your party armor values through Metal Mend, Fortify, Frost Armour etc is more important then using restoration spells to heal your HP value. The aforementioned skills basically are your heals. So the armor mechanic has given you more ways to heal/mitigate damage and thus increasing your survivability.

In my opinion. If the armor values are lowered, and thus be taken down a bit faster you can have more CC and strategic combat. Only if you increase the HP value of the opponent in question so have a slightly lengthier fight after you took care of its armor type. Other then that the cool down, and limited amount of CC's an individual party member has means you won't be chain CC'ing entire groups anyway. Not until their numbers have been sufficiently reduced. And by then you earned the right to control the 1-2 guys and finish the fight easily.

In DoS:EE I did enjoy the moments where you threw a charm grenade and were clenching butt cheeks in life or death moments hoping to get enough success to aid you. In DoS2 it is an auto success so far as soon as the armor is gone. Which...is less fun. On the other hand, when playing xcom-esque combat, it is nice to have some reliable methods to mitigate. But you got Chicken and such for that.

More health instead of more armor would not do anything good. It would make the fight longer without any kind of challenge, because as soon you have the armor down, the enemy is most likely perma-cc'd anyway.

Because of that constitution and picture of health are pretty useless stats. Leech and the vampirism of necromancer ist not as effective as it could be and heals are less important than armor refreshing skills.

No they won't be perma-cc'ed. Even if you give all characters ton of CC's, which would gimp you badly, you won't be able to unless you're down to the last 2-3 opponents. CC options are less then they used to be it seems and have longer cool down timers as well. By the time you can perma-CC the remaining opponents you earned the right to pull it off since you're going to the end of the fight anyway.

Less armor means you waste less time bursting damage an opponent. And more health means the overall length would still be the same as it is now. But you have more of that fight spend using your abilities besides bursting down armor types.

Further tweaks could be added by having the success rate of a CC be countered by opponent natural resistance to elements, or their class type and mental fortitude and such. That way success rate of CC is % based instead of auto-success. Which would come into play once the lower armor value has been taken down.

No, you do not. You just stack one damage type and kill the enemy. You literally don't ever need hybrid damage types for anything at all. In the first act, there are places where people have 100% magical armor or 100% physical armor but this is generally limited to act 1. After that, the armor values differ but the strategy of "stack damage and kill the enemy" is still the most effective way to play the game - as measured in "least number of turns to win the fight". So yes, having a party which is a hybrid of elemental damage and physical damage has a downside - it takes you longer to win fights. This isn't really debatable unless you're limiting your conversation to act 1.