Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback The Flaws of Divinity: Original Sin II

Once again, I'm glad there could be some discussion about the document and what it entails, and that content creators in the community have taken notice of it.

Currently I'm working on my own modding goals, trying to feel out what exactly is possible in the realm of new abilities and status effects and the feasibility of a full Ability overhaul from the ground up; however I'm not able to do this all of the time, and have plenty of time to think and write.
I've been debating writing up a guide on the topic of Encounter Building for future campaign creators (speaking primarily from experience in other settings like tabletop and modding), but I'm open to suggestions if there's any topics I or the community have brought up that you all would like to see me expand upon.

I'm interested in how to step into modding the game. Haven't done much in the way of mod creation so I don't know where to start with this game. Less in the field of creating new encounters or quests, and more in the realm of tweaking the base game. Such as mods that add a source fountain to the Lady Vengeance, or change how many points you get every level, or reduce health bloating, etc.

I just want to find a way to add more/change effects given by stats such as combat skills or attributes, since those are the main culprits for the massive imbalance in the game, and let's not forget how uninteresting they are.

Already made a thread , but no bites yet.

I don't mind stream lined RNG itemization as long as the RNG algorythm is done right. The stats I hate the most should be exlusive to Greens or removed all toghether.Blue should have 2 bits of the good stats and with the generosity of RNG one rune slot. Purple should give either more of the good stats from blue or the same stats but at the advantage of 2 rune slots.Purple shouldn't be a thing and Orange is....in an ok place I guess....some of them feel like Greens to be honest....like Garrick's boots.

In this game with low wealth and encounters it stands to reason that most of your gear should be generic (white) unless you manage to rob a barack belonging to either black ring or the magisters clean of any quality piece of loot. But what ends up happening is that you cycle through greens and blues just because you are psychologicaly manipulated to keep them because they are better because they have stats instead of just going for the white's and give the middle finger to blue's and green's until the purple stuff pops out....and in most cases blue does indeed trump whites....unless they get green worthy stats.

Also while I am at it I will like to contest some flaws,namely numbers 7,8,10.

Contesting 7:

For me terrain continues to play a part in my how I strategize my battles. I am currently playing a party of 4 lead by my custom avatar,a battlemage clad in plate armor that brings elemental havoc from his staff in close quaters combat, Ifan the Wayfarer, Sebile the Master Assasin (warfare scoundrel hybrid) and Fane the healer.

My battlemage (his name is Jack by the way) and Sebile,get very upset at Ifan and Fane when the later casts Blood Rain because Ifan ran out of water grenades and water arrows while he is engaged in melee combat because his shocking touch can electrify both the target and the blood,which can in turn electrify Jack if his feet is touching the blood.

The reason why Jack and Sebile are annoyed at this because the damage of the electrified surface is increased based on Jack's stats and that can screw up both their magic armour,leaving them vulnerable to lots of bs from the enemy casters.

Contesting 8:

Summoning is meant as a support class for single element mages. Summoners could also dip a few points in random elemental classes to get that classes summon + the requirements to craft infusions for their incarnates.

Contesting 10:

Ow GreatGuardsman, do you remember last century when I argued with the whole community that the AP was meant to be restrictive because of the multiplayer aspect of this game,where if you want you can get a friend and compete with him for completing quests. Well this ties right into that...if you could apply the amount of CC you could in D:OS 1 in any of the modes available in D:OS 2 would you argue that would be any fun for the guy on the receiveing end of that shockingly chained AoE CC.

A fun story about stealth in D:OS 2

Also just for fun I would like to mention an instance where I broke a boss fight with the stealth mechanic. So I was in Blackpits fighting Aetera.She started first and wiped my party.4 reloads later I got the bright ideea to focus all of my atention on keeping Sebile's armor as high as possible,because she had 2 in sneak (just from gear),because he had 6 in thievery (I steal that much!) and she also had Chameleon Cloak and Cloak and Dagger.

I let my party members die and tryed to kill as many blue wolves as possible in the process. In the meanwhile Sebile managed to escape the shit storm that took a lot of hours out of my live and managed to sneak back to the boss fight area and stealthly managed to revive the whole team on her own.

With the mobs still spawned I drew agro with Jack and Fane,while Sebile and Ifan were in stealth and walking to the oposite where Jack and Fane were, towards Aetera. All the wolves surrounded Jack who was bashing heads with his mighty overchared elemental staff,while Fane was cowering behind his shield and throwing ocasional heals and time bubbles at Jack.

While the party with the wolves was hard and heavy, Sebile jumped first on Aetera for a bloody 1 on 1 rematch, while Ifan was busy calling his soul wolf in order to change Sebile's steamy reunion into a masacre of epic proportion,where physical armor got shreded in 1 turn by claw,dagger and arrow....meanwhile Jack ace'd the wolves.

To clarify a few things, namely in regards to my last post: I did not mean to come off as an experienced modder; my expertise here is largely in design itself, I'm having to teach myself from scratch just like the rest of you (the majority of my recent experience coming from XCOM2/Skyrim, with some hazy memories of Doom/Quake mapping and working with eAthena).
If there's any topics pertinent to the aspects of outlining and designing content, that's the kind of thing I'm probably going to be most able to provide insight on.

@Draco359
On 7: I'm not saying that Terrain and Traps aren't nonfunctional, I'm saying they're significantly robbed of impact and strategic importance with how little they do in terms of scaling and application. Standing in electrified blood when you've got no MA left is still going to stun you-- It's the fact that it's so easy to ignore terrain effects and how difficult it is to make consistent use of them that I take issue with.

On 8: I think you're missing the point. Summoning is an interesting choice and a welcome addition, but there's a few issues with it's implementation (along with complimentary issues with how summoning in general is handled): Notable among these are that non-Summoners can't invest in their summons without sparing points for Summoning, that Summoning's scaling is out of whack, and that non-Summoning summons scale even more ridiculously because they try to compete with Summoning.

On 10: I'm not solely referring to CCs/stuns in this point; in fact I'm largely referring to the vast number of utility, damage, and buff/debuff-oriented abilities that are either irrelevant or weak and overshadowed by more directly impactful effects. Effects like Bleed, Blind, Chilled, etc are really underrepresented for a variety of reasons, and they could do with reason to shine; but what basically inspired this point was Flay Skin.
On a relevant note, I'm not calling solely for the previous AP system; simply pointing out that the removal of AP Management was a void that hadn't been filled in the mechanics, and that our current scale and implementation of AP is too tight and underwhelming (this is especially reflected in AP costs).

I largely agree with the list as well – and I hope someone from Larian takes note, though I highly doubt I’ll play through a game this huge again, unless there was some major overhaul.

Having finally finished, though, I can chip in with a few words myself.

-- MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW --

To start with the positive, this game very nearly is a masterpiece that’s chiefly let down by a rushed Act 3, weak characterisations and an over ambitious agenda that could have benefited from shedding some of its larger promises that it obviously couldn’t uniformly deliver in the time it was given.

The visuals are easily the best I’ve seen in any game. And here I don’t mean the technical bells and whistles, which are no doubt excellent in themselves, but specifically the art direction. The storytelling, hugely improved over D:OS 1, can’t live up to the imagination that went into the environments, or the creature design. Take the Harbinger of Doom that stops on occasion to neurotically chew on its own arm – this is a vividly wretched creation that sticks out in memory. And the kraken is, I think, the most original, and convincingly warped invention since Giger’s mind-bending human-machine hybrids – it definitely needed more show time than it was given.

There’s an expanse of thousands of candles the quietly opens up in a demon’s lair that was so simple, evocative and well-played that it trumped the entire narrative efforts of Act 3 combined. The timing of the lashes of rain during what is, for me anyway, the game’s second best battle – The Drillworm and Alexander – makes for some great visual drama.

I could go on about the visuals – but long story short, the artists are doing their job, and doing it better than most.

Narrative-wise, the game starts strong, and is infinitely improved over the goofery and cartoonishness that made D:OS 1’s story seem so slight and forgettable. But the foundation starts to tremble somewhere during Act 2 – and by Act 3, it has completely lost the plot, almost as though the writers suffered some kind of artistic crisis and couldn’t pull it all together at the last minute.

Characters like Dallis, Alexander and the mysterious ‘Cloaked Figure’ disappear for massive stretches, only to show up so abruptly that they might be characters from another game. Somehow, Braccus Rex is unmasked as the main antagonist during the daftly unbalanced final battle. Didn’t he die in the first game? Never mind: I don’t want to know the hokum that’s shoehorned in to make this plot twist viable. He’s fighting alongside another character who’s also had no development (read: appears as a relatable person, with lines of dialogue) whatsoever throughout the game. I’m talking, here, about Lucian the Something, who I think had a few waypoint statues made in his honour, and was mentioned fleetingly in dialogues here and there.

Because these characters scarcely appear in the scenarios leading to the climax, there’s no investment on the part of the player. No big payoff in watching them live or die through what follows.
The weak characterisation is problematic across the board, however. In a story full of largely well-written, if underdeveloped, female characters, all of the males, bar Ifan, get the short end of the narrative stick, and end up snarling lines like the zingers our man Braccus flings at Lucian – ‘you babbling buffoon!’. It schlocky stuff, I’m afraid, and there’s a lot of it.

There’s no Jon Irenicus or Master Mirror from The Witcher 3 that the game badly needs to give it some edge in the villain department.

Act 1 is, for me, the strongest part of the game, with a sturdy if somewhat bloated Act 2 following close behind. Ultimately it’s the slapdash Act 3 that lets the game down the most. Everything about it seems hurried. There are technical slowdowns witnessed nowhere else in the game that tell a story of developers who didn’t have enough time to optimise code. There are paintings that actually have the name ‘placeholder’.

There’s a passable fantasy city, full of a couple of named merchants and dozens upon dozens of anonymous ‘cizilian this’ and ‘paladin that’ types. The village areas of Driftwood and Fort Joy had more personality and life. They were more organic, more lived in – more populated with people than walking placeholders. The quests in Arx are maddeningly designed, culminating in a pipe puzzle that makes you wonder what on earth the designers were smoking at this point.

The game becomes the equivalent of that really great, nearly five star movie that gets four stars because it was ‘30min too long’. Except here that 30min is exploded tenfold into hours upon hours of messy, badly designed Act 3 quests that pale in comparison to the quests that preceded them. I would have been happy if they’d just ditched Arx completely, took its best elements and turned them into an epic final few hours that consisted of 10% of the time you otherwise have to waste in Arx.

The best battles in the game are the ones where randomness was allowed to create its own drama. The highlight for me is still the brilliant Blackpits oil field battle with the slugs. It just so happens to be the best fight I’ve ever played in a game. Simply genius design, full of deviously unexpected moments. The rest of the game’s battles are unfortunately the same thing over and over. The same number of enemies, the same enemy types reskinned to look like monsters but that are really just variations of the standard classes you’ll encounter throughout the rest of the game.

If only they’d thought of more enemies like the revenants that respawn in cursed fire (although some of these, with infinite cursed arrows, are clearly broken). Now that’s what adds tactics to the game, not inflated HP and armour bars.

The boring tactician mode could really benefit from the few more randomised encounters seen elsewhere but are sadly limited in number.

Level progression also becomes a problem, when nothing ever really changes, bar the health bars. The same set of skills used in Act 1 will still be used in Act 3, alongside ridiculously overpowered ‘source skills’ that really should just belong to a few boss type enemies and not be available to the player. The problem is that the base skills don’t evolve beyond damage boosts and the like, so very little seems to change, beyond the length of time it takes to end a fight.

The environmental eruptions of poison, ice, fire and so on, once one of the great innovations of the game, degenerate later on into cursed variations (inevitably cursed fire) that are immune to the more interesting clean ups and mutations available to their earthly counterparts. It’s either tornado or bless, which is dull and limited and the very opposite of what this mechanic offered in D:OS 1.

All of that being said, it still manages to be a fantastic game. The visual artwork, in particular, is exceptional. The story, though flawed, is far better than that of most other games, and the writing, though occasionally hockey, is nonetheless solid enough that it never completely embarrasses itself. The actors appear to enjoy delivering their lines, at least in Act 1, where the writing affords the characters some personality and variety. But by Act 3, it sounds like even the voice actors gave up and are just going through the motions.

Thanks for the entertainment anyway, Larian. It was well worth taking a trip around this remarkable, flawed, inventive creation. And I’ll be glad of long break from it all as well!! Best of luck with your future projects. Cheers.

I get shock stuned with MA at 20% or less if shocking touch or point blank electric discharge hits both the target and a electrifiable surface. I have that kind of luck.



I do have to strugle a bit to proc Chilled on opponents I give you that,but Blind is one of the easier conditions to apply (dust spells,burning whip and blinding radiance) you just need to cast the spell when you know you can blast through the magic armour. Bleed doesn't need many representations due to the fact that RNG is very eager to give you weapons that proc it on auto attack (or at least it is generous to me about it?)Scoundrel and Necro have more than enough entries for this proc to keep me happy.

Get a staff and set of full plate (if that set gives bonuses to warfare and scoundrel you rock) and the whirlwind skill on your mage and put him on the front line. You will laugh at the number of targets you can CC with blind(ing radiance). I do agree that poison,burning and cursed representations are over represented in this game.

And again I am simply not feeling that restrained by the AP system,I actualy view it as a masive improvement over D:OS 1. I like the fact that I am limited and have to think really hard about how far I move and if I should attack this turn....this is what makes Arena Mode and Single Player fun for me.(I bought the game so I can mod arena mode -combat is a big thing for me in this game).

It's unfortunate that I found the most dull portion of the game to be the ending. Suddenly they drop Lucian out of no where, and Dallis is suddenly leaking exposition and explanations for her actions. I thought they were gonna make a big deal out of Lucian, but I barely had the dialogue option to say "Holy hell Lucian is alive and you are working for him?!" Let alone question how truthful the seemingly deceitful Dallis was. Braccus felt crammed in and the boss fight to follow was horrendously dull. The Kraken was cool looking, but did almost nothing besides mimic the Braccus Rex fight from the first game, just without any interesting mechanics and with FAR less climactic summons. And as a lone wolf my 2H friend 2 shot lucian without even using Onslaught and the fight just ended. My most notable gripe is that the God King didn't even make an appearance, and given the epilogue it seems like they are saving him for a DLC or something.



I am doing a second playthrough by myself on classic mode as Fane, with Ifan, Lohse, and Red Prince, and just today I got through the Alexander fight at the end of Fort Joy. I don't know what it was but that was actually a tough fight for me, almost more so than when my friend and I did it on tactician (which is also when we accidentally summoned a demon from the Braccus Rex helm at almost the worst possible moment). Any who, when the rain started and the music intensified, the feeling was epic. Add to it that I had to use several res scrolls during the fight, and that the drillworm appeared at a critical moment when I needed just a turn or two for respite and it all came together as an artistic masterpiece for me.

I suppose my posts keep coming back to boss battles, and I find that relates to what you said. Most of the boss battles blended together. Even acknowledging that most of my Act 2 and onwards experience is with two lone wolfs on classic, the fights were far too bland. This was made worse by source spells which relates to a disfunctional source system. Source vampirism has no genuine drawbacks besides being a moral jerk in some cases and combine that with the incredibly powerful source spells and all the unoriginal fights become inconveniences at best.

I have to agree that the oil slime fight was ingenious because even though my friend and I were feeling the power of being lonewolfs, we had no idea how to handle the fight (we were still too low level to have access to any big AOE source spells like lightning storm). It felt wonderful to realize that we had no idea what to expect, and that we would have to think on the fly.

I empathize with most of the rest of what you said, just wanted to point out where it really resonated with me.

first off all thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I relived so many thoughts of mine as I read this document.
I wish Larian would lose ten minutes of his time to read this document and seriously change this game to a masterpiece never seen before.

After more than 150 hours in this game I can only heavly agree with every single point OP mentionned.
I hope they will take this into account...this is the report that their comunity manager should bring to their meeting table.
I would also be very interested to see detailed the major issue around how you/the community think the Ability system could be redesigned (ability-non-scaling skills, imbalances, specialization uslessness etc.).

And then I can only wait for them to go through the list..

Don't forget how some schools don't benefit their skills. The entire necromancer school is this personified, and the Master skill is the only one that doesn't scale with its parent school. Totem of the Necromancer, the highest level necromancy spell, scales off summoning.

I believe in one of these observations (M.15, after checking) I specifically point out Necromancy as one of the Skills/builds that is a poorly supported option.


I apologize for a lack of updates or additional content, as working on my personal projects for the game has been a little disheartening, and I've been rather busy in meatspace this month.

Amazing article, I agree with pretty much every single point. I made my own discussion pointing out my first impressions, maybe you can get some useful thoughts out of it:

http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=638931&gonew=1

I'm loving the game and progressing just fine now, although I needed three restarts to properly set up my party and follow the specified path, otherwise I just hit a brick wall. But I'm amazed at the insane amounts of flaws it has, it's like if a completely different team from DOS:EE made it.

GreatGuardsman thank you for putting together that document. I haven't played through the entire game yet. Party is level 15, three source points, about 2/3rds through the second part of the game I think. Overall, I like the game a lot and I can already tell I'm going to play to the finish AND play again from the start. That said, I've often felt frustrated with combat in this game and your list contains about every reason why. I thought of starting a thread about it. Luckily I stumbled into this one before I did. I'll take this opportunity to support some of the points you mentioned. I don't agree with your whole list or don't have a strong opinion on some subjects but I recognize the vast majority of issues you mentioned.

In my own experience (point numbers from your list)
1. initiative. It took a while before I understood what happened to initiative and I still do not like this change.
3. Level scaling. Aside from items being antiques after 2 levels it leads to enemies one or 2 levels above yours having bloated stats which leads to you having to play everything in the exact order you're supposed to. Maybe that's what the designers intended?
7. AP I disagree with this one. As long as the game is balanced around having only 4 or 6 ap per turn that's fine.

Major flaws
12 Quest log. Only issue I had here so far is some lacking information. I resolved one of the many quests in my quest log, now I have to go back to Garvan. Hmm, Garvan.... where did I run into this guy? Check log: no info. Check town with 50 npc's. nope. I have to hope I'll accidentally run into him again.
17. Line of sight/pathing One of my major sources of frustration. Always shots I can't make and things I can't see. Highly infuriating the AI knows exactly where an npc needs to be placed to make the shot it wants. Solution: like in xcom 2 have icons/outlines appear on enemies as you move your cursor over the terrain to show which enemies will be visible/hitable from that position.
18. Cursed Terrain . Starting from the second half of the first island, every combat quickly devolved into chaotic cursed terrain. The minimap has often been a lifesaver. Without it, I couldn't find out where all the enemies were positioned in all the necrofire and cursed clouds and whatnot.
24. Better tooltips A must! Give accurate descriptions of what a skill/item does. How much? How far? What's the radius? etc...

I loved combat in DOS1. I am very disappointed in the combat in this game so far. It feels as if they tried to overstreamline the balance in the game. My experience has been that almost every battle is the same, whether they are humanoids, animals or monsters. Exceptions have been scarce.
I fight a group of 4 to 6 creatures or less than 4 but guaranteed they summon/call/unburrow extras when combat starts to end up with 4 to 6 foes.
2 or 3 of them (animals included) have teleporting abilities. (throw tactical positioning out of the window)
Most of them are spellcasters (yes animals too).
Even if they are all the same creature, one of them will have no or low phys armour but high magic armour, one will have it the other way around, others have an equal balance of both.

Then add the issues previously mentioned on top of that and battles have been mainly annoying/repetitive.

Also every enemie type has the same smartness, so in general you are fighting the same enemies all the time. Only their appearance is kind of left to make a difference.


Regarding AP:
There are to many skills that give you AP on use or make you reset all cooldowns/make a follow up turn.

I think somebody figured out a way to use 14 AP or something about that number in 'one turn', which will make you pretty much broken if used.

Also somebody once mentioned, that AI always seems to starts with AP advantage.

IMO the entire new combat system is a mistake. DOSEE combat with some balance patch addressing chain-cc issues would be good enough.

The new combat system takes them too much time and probably leads to a buggy release.

Case in point: unexpected path interruptions and cursed terrain chaos.
Something invisible in mid air obstructs the arrows path from my archer to the advocate.
Also, try finding the advocate and his associate who's been knocked down on the ground lying 1 m away from him.
[img]https://ibb.co/cHamC6[/img]

Nice reading and a nicely written critic by OP. Then I agree with this post but the main issue here seems to be crafting is underdeveloped/useless. No way to craft armor/weapons with custom properties, even if it would requiere expensive or hard to get ingredients. The only use I make off crafting for me is spending all those crappy ingredients for economic purposes (selling everything I created).

As long as you can't craft items of divine value, crafting will be always underwhelming because all that matters are numbers in this game. Also flat numbers will be always pretty weak in a game like this. Skills need to give percentual boost to have a lasting value into the end game.

All this aside, let me just voice one complaint (or technically two): why did Ice King and Demon make it into the game unaltered? Literally. Useless. Traits.