Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General On balance

Dunno what to tell you. Rogues can use all of the same mobility skills that a Warrior can, but on top of that they not only get Cloak and Dagger earlier than Warfare gets Phoenix Dive (moot point if you simply dump two into Scoundrel with the Warrior, but early on it's harder to justify) and they start with Backlash, which is dagger only. That's 1 AP for moving 8m as as well as it giving you a backstab.

Warriors do not have anything remotely as efficient aside from hitting a row with Battle Stomp. Blitz is only really comparable when you hit more than a single enemy. Otherwise, it's effectively half as efficient for the same damage (less in the case of a Rogue). Battering Ram is okay, and if nothing else at least better to use for moving around than simply walking for a while. Barely. Also, Warriors had absolutely nothing comparable to Backlash > Rutpture Tendons > Chicken. Nothing. That's been nerfed now, and I haven't tried it out to see how much of a difference it makes, but from the point you could use that previously, it took out any non boss in one turn without fail. Later on it became less useful, since other options unlocked that allowed you to simply kill them directly on that turn, but it was still one of the most broken combos in the game.

I don't understand why you would be having so many line of sight issues with the Ranger either, when not only do they technically have just as many mobility options, they also need to move less overall most of the time. Warriors in general suffer an AP tax on everything they do, which makes them the most inefficient physical class until late game.

Casters don't need a bunch of extra pseudo movement skills from Warfare similarly to why Rangers don't. Early on is the worst for them in that regard, but eventually they can have both Tactical Retreat and Cloak and Dagger, although grabbing more than one is hard to justify due to memory slots. You really cannot afford to invest in MEM with a caster you want to deal damage with. It's all INT and then WIT.

Also, until it gets hotfixed, enjoy the new and grossly overpowered Reactive Shot. It was supposed to work like the Overwatch skill from XCOM and Shadowrun, but almost never did anything. Now it basically kills anything you target for 2AP on top of killing whatever moves inside the area on the next turn.

One of the problems is that both schools and attributes were seriously gutted in OS2. In the transition from OS1 to 2, Necromancy lost its niche as the buff/debuff king, and in addition to the loss of Lower Resistance, Oath, Malediction and Drain Willpower (which would have been wonderful to strip MA off mobs), you also lost a pair of decent summons, Vampiric Touch and Death Punch. The 5th level skill for Necromancy is horrible and scales with Summoning better than it does with its parent skill.

Intelligence in OS1 lowered cooldowns of Int-based spells, and in addition spell slots were tied to your school, not yet another skill.

That's not getting into the source skill nonsense, which means you have to spend trips back just to refill so you can cast another master spell/Bless.

necromancy has been reduced mainly to a support tree now, which befits melee fighters better due to its physical damage scaling, which is disappointing

All the spell schools got gutted. Necromancy's just a lot more glaring, since it can't really stand on its own feet anymore.

I suppose we'll just have to wait for an Epic Encounters mod.

That sort of says it all right there. Having two spells (Bone Widow and Bone Totems) that don't even scale with the school itself is pants on head levels of not doing it right.

MadDemiurg mirrors my feelings exactly. The problem is the lack of counters used against physical damage in the encounters. That and the multiplicative scaling of warfare make physical characters vastly more powerful in virtually every encounter. Some characters should be knockdown immune and many many more should have some amount of physical resistance (ghosts, slimes, heavily armored, etc)

Adding friendly fire to some or all of the physical skills should also be considered. It doesn't make any sense that smashing an area leaves friendlies unscathed.

By contrast, the enemies should almost always have an elemental weakness that gives someone on your team a time to shine. This comes up occasionally, but infrequent enough that going pure physical is clearly optimal.

I'm a bit into act 2 now, so that is as far as my experience goes but i have noticed a trend of issues surfacing while playing my mage character. Especially in contrast to my party (playing 4-player coop, the hardest part is organizing a time when we can all play).

To start off it would appear that spells scale very poorly. Physical build scale well with weapon, with their stats, with skill schools (especially Warfare for double dipping it seems), and Critical chance. By comparison my spells only scale with Inteligence and the Skill points, and no such generous scaling as with Warfare. My spells cannot even natively crit!
In top of that every single enemy encounter we run into the enemy seems to have a resistance to atleast one of my schools, often several and fairly high. We're just playing Classic mode here, why are there so many enemies with 40%+ resistances? Seeing physical resistance is exceptionally rare, the one time i did the enemy also had even higher magical resistances.
My spells already scale poorly, why are they then punished extra hard with constant heavy resistances they have to try and punch through?

The next issues is the cooldowns. My god are the cooldowns long. Fireball, a fairly basicly, early-game, straight up damaging fire skill has a 4 turn cooldown. It doesn't even compare to a regular attack from either the Ranger or the Rogue in our party, and even the Tank deals more damage with her physical abilities.
Pyro has only a single damaging skill with "just" a 2 turn cooldown and that is Ignition. The other spell schools don't have any at all with less than 3 turn cooldowns. Especially daunting when enemies have such high resistance to one or more elements that those skills might as well not even be on my bar. Which happens quite often i have to say, in particular Fire seems very commonly resisted (to the point of healing enemies even).
To compound this the AP cost of spells also seems way to high. Without any extra AP generation from Haste i can sometimes do little more than throw out one spell in a turn. Which then gets put to shame by our Ranger or Rogue, who happily keep throwing out that kind of damage every turn.

Our Ranger can throw out Reactive Shot. Let's compare to Fireball. Both req. 2 in their respective skill trees. Both inflict AoE damage upon cast, both cost 2AP, both are Ranged. However Reactive Shot does more damage, has only a 2 turn cooldown, targets enemies for more damage if they move (vs. Fire field), as a Physical skill doesn't have to worry about resistances, and is smart enough not to hit allies.
Basicly a much better version of Fireball outside of very specific situation where enemies are desperately weak to Fire or you need a Fire field for some reason.

The fact many spells can be a real liability, or have mechanics complicating them further also doesn't help. For instance Laser Ray, nice spell but its outright unusable when i am on an elevated terrain. Which is where a ranged caster is suppose to be, right? Nether Swap, nice utility, if it works. Which it often does not. Fireball, mediocre damage skill with some AoE fire field. Goodluck not hitting more of your allies than your enemies. Rain+Electric combo, water spreads where it wants to and you just don't know ahead of time if you end up accidentally with more of your allies standing in water.
This doesn't exactly help trying to strategically plan your actions ahead of time.

I think Warfare needs to be fixed, physical damage is far to powerful as it is. Savage Sortilege should be a baseline Talent, spells should crit natively. Maxing respective skill trees (i.e. 10 Pyro) should reduce the AP cost of the skills within that tree. Cooldowns need to be reduced for many of the damaging spells. Something needs to give penetration for resistances, perhaps as a stat always present on Staffs. A weapon that currently feels very underwhelming for Spellcasters. This helps Staffs be more usefull, and helps Spellcasters with their problem of benefiting very little from their weapons. Point in case, im still using a lv8 staff because it has 20% crit chance while i am actually level 13. Simply haven't found anything better yet as Weapon damage is inconsequential to me.

I don't know where to begin.

1 magic scales with level, intelligence and skill. Getting items that boost those is way more important.
2. Mordus is undead, of course he has 200% resist to poison. Every undead does. They also take piercing damage from healing.
3. Mages do continuous damage through surfaces. If you're upset fireball does only 100 damage, but ignore people took 70 from walking out of the fire and applied burning which did more. You're not doing proper analysis of mage contributions.
4. There's so many ways to utilise environmental interactions, like using smoke to block los, oil, frozen terrain, etc that mages can be hard to quantify for value.
5. A caster only party will likely want a summoner to do physical damage with
6. Ideal party is 2 casters 2 physical look at armour values and priorities targets. It may actually be best to have 4 character's who do a bit of both to some degree. E.g. support mage who summons. Battlemage with physical and a backup school. A huntsman with elemental arrows and some magic and an offensive mage who can poly or whatever. Just so you can consistently distribute damage to targets.

I'm constantly annoyed at how the only pure physical character on my team can't do damage to characters with stripped magic armour likewise, when my dedicated offensive mage can only explode someone who's got an exposed physical armour.

People who don't run balanced teams must have huge issues with tons of gear they just can't use. I imagine they'd be constantly complaining about how they need to spend ages on itemisation and gearing people up to get better gear.

Idk about you guys but I just soloed the ship fight on tactician with a lvl 8 mage using pure unique gear, and on first glance this fight seems almost impossible to solo for a warrior, maybe a rogue can dps the mysterious figure down before Malady dies? But he has like 3k hp lmao.

Ok, I think we are talking past each other here. I am not saying that Warriors have more mobility than Rogues - this is not the case because Rogues get both Warfare and Scoundrel, but what I am saying is that all of Warriors' mobility needs are covered by Warfare. Battering Ram might not be the tool for each situation but it is a tool for a situation, just like all of the other abilities I listed. Furthermore, 2 Handers have more range than daggers and there is no need to reposition for backstabs (which also annoyingly leaves you open for Attacks of Opportunity requiring further repositioning).

As for the Ranger, the concept is that IF a Ranger needs to reposition they need to waste AP to do it, whereas a Warrior's repositioning skill also deals damage - this is not wasted AP. The reality of it is that if you are using your AP for movement as a Warrior then you are doing something wrong because there are so many tools in the repertoire for changing your position.

Anyway, we are getting sidetracked here.



Hey man, I am not going to lie, I find your posts a bit puzzling. I made this thread because I believe that magical damage based classes are significantly weaker in this game than physical damage classes. I have played this game ALOT (misspelled for emphasis because this is what the cool cats do nowadays) and I find this notion difficult to disagree with. The reality of it is that physical classes do everything that magical classes do and more.

I have spent some time on this forum and I have come across various posts by different people complaining about different aspects of the game. Some people have their knickers in a twist about round robin Initiative. Is it perfect? No. Do the developers think it is perfect? No. Does it matter? No. It is a policy decision and the game works absolutely fine with it. A DOS:EE system is arguably worse. Other people complain about gear scaling. Again, is it perfect? No. Does it really matter? No. In my latest playthrough (on Tactician) I was in Arx and I realised that one of my characters was still wearing a level 3 Migo's Breastplate. The only items that actually matter in this game are weapons for physical damage dealers - for the rest you might as well be running naked so long as you have a proper build.

And this is the fundamental notion that I am getting at. Here are some basic premises: balance is good. Balanced difficulty is better than spiked difficulty. In this game, magic is strictly worse than physical. You may disagree with this, but in doing so you have to acknowledge that you are in the minority and fighting an uphill battle. So far I have not seen you put forth any credible arguments to support your position. Yes, magic scales with level, intelligence and skill. But so does physical, AS WELL AS with weapons. Yes, Mordus is undead and heals from poison. And from earth damage. It's cool for lore but shit for mages who deal poison and earth damage. No such issues for physical. Yeah my Fireball does 100 damage and an extra 70 tick for every step. Meanwhile, my Ranger does 1,000 physical damage. Terrain interactions are fun - this is why I am playing mage - but in a battle where the point is to eliminate the enemy, the ones who deal actual damage (physical) are better.

An ideal party is not two casters and two physical damage dealers. An ideal party is two/four physical damage dealers. How about this: I will do an Honour run with a physical damage team, you do an Honour run with a balanced team of two physical damage dealers and two mages. Let's see who gets further. Challenge accepted?

I have not yet mentioned the imbalance in talents. Magic damage dealers scale better with talents simply by the notion that they are crap in contrast to physical damage dealers. Savage Sortilage is great - but physical damage dealers already have it by default. Far Out Man is very good - again irrelevant for physical damage dealers. Picture of Health is insane - but only of value to physical damage dealers who scale with Warfare anyway. Elemental Affinity is also really good - let's be frank, every fight in a magical damage dealer party ends with the mages standing in a pool of fire. Mages need talents to be good - this is not achieved until the late game when everyone is good anyway. Physical damage dealers just need Executioner - the rest is irrelevant/cherry on top of the cake.

The earliest proof that all is not right is the very first encounter in Gargoyle's Maze.
100% Fire and Poison immune. Have fun with that with your 2x Pryo/Geo and 2x Hydro/Aero team, even on Classic. You end up having to wait on cooldowns and on top of that, skip the turns of the two Pyro/Geos so that the other two can wand them to death.



I just can't agree at all with this logic. You should have The Pawn on the Rogue, and repositioning is never a problem, especially for the very first thing you target since you automatically get placed behind them anyway. Warfare skills that move you and deal damage aren't really much of a factor either because the damage on those skills is very low comparatively AND they cost 2 AP. Rogues are simply more efficient at killing until near the end of the game. Warriors only truly shine in those very rare scenarios where you can hit a group with anything other than Battle Stomp.

Far Out Man is moderately useful on physical damage dealers BTW. Not only for Rangers, but it affects teleporting skills like Backlash, Phoenix Dive, Cloak and Dagger and Tactical Retreat. Affects grenades too. It's not a talent that you would pick up early for melee, but it is something you'd pick up right away on Rangers. The description is deceptive.

Oh yeah, I remember that. I think I ended up staffing the fuckers down - in my dual LW run one mage uses dual wands and the other one uses staves because I wanted to see the difference in action. One observation is that you really do not want poison damage wands. The Fire / Poison combo is great when it works, but there are simply way too many undead enemies in the early acts and this is where your weapons become a liability. Melee does not work for Mordus, though, his health pool is simply much too big.



I appreciate that we disagree on The Pawn / Executioner. I have not done a four player Tactician run, but in my Classic run even my poorly built Rogue was getting a kill on every turn - making Executioner strictly better than The Pawn. There isn't a universe where I would pick The Pawn over Executioner but, at the end of the day, both work just fine.

Also, I agree that Rogues are superior to Warriors but, again, this is deviating from the point. My point was that Warriors get all their mobility needs from Warfare. Yes, Blitz Attack damage may not be great in terms of dealing damage, but using two skills that deal damage AND reposition (2+2 AP) is always better than using one skill that repositions without damage and a damage dealer (1+2/3 AP). Even in the worst case scenario, it is autoattack+.

i think there's something to be said about how underused staves are due to wand + shield on mages being so much better. the staff skill (i forget the name) is underwhelming and is something i would use only if literally every other offensive skill i had was on cooldown, and on tactician difficulty i find myself needing a shield due to the sparse physical armor given by mage armor. i could invest a couple of points in strength to wear warriors armor, but that feels bad when i'm already putting a ton of points into memory and robbing my int each level

My 2 cents.

I am currently runing a team of 3 hibrids(battlemage,cleric,wayfarer) and 1 rogue.

My battlemage has a good mix of aoe and single target skills as well as some mobility skills from poly. So far I am at act 2 and I feel my battlemage is rather slugish vs voidwoken. I believe that having resistances and magical armour is too much and that the resistances should be removed from the game not the armour system.

I like the armour system very much but it makes encounters vs magisters very predictable: give your battlemage a wand and shield or a staff and he can kill magister knights,fighters and some battlemages with little resistances, if necesary switch your staff for a 2h axe to gut rangers and rogues if they have high magic armour.

I feel Warfare is a decent talent tree but I dislike the fact that Blitz Attack and Whirlwind require 2 points into Warfare,making staff warriors/battlemages a tougher sell than it already is.

It actually all depends on item choices.

Sacrificing 2-4 int may be worth it depending on what armor is available and Alexander's staff has 3 slots in it which makes it competitive.

You shouldn't be putting in so many memory points where your damage no longer becomes competitive; it may happen with Wits but that's a diffferent story because you're sacrificing damage to go first.

You also don't need a shield on tactician difficulty.

2 points into a skill tree is nothing to have access to higher skills. In D:OS1 you had to invest far more to have access to higher Tier skills. It's part of the 'dumbing down' of everything. Having only a third of the knowledge of a skill tree but already being able to master even the most fierce skills just sounds odd. It also means that 5% more damage is pretty everything you will get for leveling up your skill trees even more which sounds pretty uninteresting.

Maybe we need a Magefare tree that would increase all magical damage passively and offer magical utilities, such as weakness to fire spells (single target and AoE and spells of increasing magnitude) and ally-protection spells that would prevent friendly fire from harming party members. Alternately, percentages of spell penetration and party protection could be added as passives with each point invested. After all, resistances and friendly fire are currently only significant issues for mages. At least I've not seen a lot of mobs immune to physical damage or seen physical abilities inflicting friendly fire.

While I find the idea of a Magefare tree intriguing, it would be similar to the crit issue. Spending points and skills on something that physical characters get for free.

I don't think magic is vastly underpowered. It's not that hard to bring into balance:

-Add serious elemental weaknesses to all the enemies with strong resistances (ie: anything with +100% fire should have -100% water).

-Heavily armored troops should have phy resistance and should be weak against magic (ie: no 40% resistances across the board, which is often the case).

-Remove the damage scaling from warfare. It makes no sense that putting points in warfare is more beneficial than spending points on the specific weapon type (2h, dual wielding, etc).

-Add a benefit to using staves. Having a global -1 to cooldowns while wielding a staff would be a pretty cool one.

-Allow crits naturally for spells.

You have to be careful with comparisons to other titles. Yes, D:OS1 did things differently, but it does not mean that it did it better. Neither is "dumbing down" an issue per se. Some systems are simply too complex to appeal to anyone but tiresome obsessives. If that is your target then fair enough but you are locking yourself out of the broader market. The reality of it is that, regardless of how sophisticated something is, the question to answer is: does it work? In this game, for physical, yes, it does. For magical, yes, it does, but just about and far less than physical. It doesn't really matter if you have A points in B or X points in Y - so long as a character is well built it should be optimal. The reality of it is that in the current state a well built magical damage character does not even near the effectiveness of a well built physical damage character.



Being frank, 2H has their use in crit builds so it is not a redundant skill.



Bravo - give the man a medal. I think some of your suggestions are really, really good. As things stand, the present encounter model is that you have 2 melee enemies with high physical resistance, 2 ranged enemies with high magical resistance and 2 caster enemies with high magical resistance. This means that a physical party is always going to be much more effective against four out of the six enemies.

If you add 50% physical damage resistance to the melee dudes and provide a negative magical damage resistance to some enemies it would mean that you actually have to pick your targets instead of just picking them off one by one. Rock, paper, scissors. Under the present system, magical provides for one while physical provides for all three. This would also restore the capabilities of a diverse party.