Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The Intelligence stat

YoungFreshNewbie: That is a brilliant suggestion, I really hope that Larian takes it to heart!

Still not happy with Intelligence!

The new patch sees Intelligence get a huge boost again. Now it is the *only* stat a Wizard needs to take if he has any front row fighters on his team. While a Warrior still has an incentive to get it, and to do so *right* away, since it has a nice bonus On Level Up. I'm a hybrid Warrior/Mage, going for 1H/Shield/Way of the Warr, Water Magic, Reflexes, Armor Spec and generally putting points towards Tankiness and Battlefield Control.

This is working great with the current version, especially on later Levels. A straight up Warrior might not want to invest so many Points into Intelligence though, since he deals no or little Elemental Damage (unless Weapons count here?). However the fact that Skills do cost quite a few AP to activate there is an incentive to go for Intelligence anyway, making it an inefficient and unfair Statistic for Warriors. Tell me, what does the Wizard have to put Points into that gives bonuses he doesn't really need? Lets not forget that the Wizard may also very easily pick up Way of the Warrior if he so wishes for some extra beef and, primarily, the bonus AP/Round. It all seems unfair to me, Magic is simply to heavily favored.

Don't even get me started on the bloody Damage the spells deal inherently (ofc I will start anyway), I usually have my Rod go dedicated Fire Magic, cappin' it high right away and spending a few Points in the Way of the Warrior and Reflexes Abilities as well; keeping him upright through a fight. Since he is *swimming* in Ability Points he can One Hit most foes once he reaches Level four, sometimes taking out as many as three or four at a time... Meanwhile my Warrior, while still strong, is dealing about a fourth of his damage, and most importantly - is able to use one nice high level Skill every other round or so, with Rod often managing two and on rare occasions three really nice Skills each Round. Note that my Warrior has a nice high Constitution and gets more AP/Round than Rod, but she simply burns through them so fast that it is silly.

So please make it so that Intelligence is obsolete for pure Warrior builds? OR grant similar bonuses to Strength and Dexterity, so that a Wizard would actually like to take it/them. From my side of the hedge it seems clear - remove the bonus Ability Point aspect of Intelligence and simply grant more points when you Level Up.

If I have simply missed something vital then please set me straight!

Spot of Math! And crazy ideas, amateur warning here guys...
Int grants -1 AP cost per 2 points or smt like so.
Con grants +1 AP/R per 2 points or smt like that.

If you use 2 Skills in a Round, then Int has Granted 2 AP/Score that Round, while Con has still only granted 1AP/Score that Round. Considering that Int is also the prereq for gear, grants dmg (hopefully offest by Con +HP), and grants Ability Points... Con based builds just drop to the floor and weep, mathematically that is. Maybe Con should lower the AP Cost instead? Since pretty much any build could benefit from *some* Con anyway. Or just increase the Int req for the AP Cost reduction, one every five maybe? Juuuust suggestions, thought provokers or smt, I'm sure there are better ways to go about it, and I trust Larian could find them ^^, if we agree with each other.

Linking Intelligence to magic power is always going to be problematic since it either ends up nigh-useless for non-casters or way too good for casters. It would probably be better to distribute magic-related traits through several stats instead of loading them all onto a single one.

Constitution would work just fine as the "you can push more power through, so your spells are stronger" stat, for example; defense against magic could be handled by several things, if it even needs to be separate from nonmagical equivalents. (Does magical fire really need a different resistance mechanic than nonmagical fire?) Ranged spell targeting, if it comes up? Why not link it, like bows, to Perception and Dexterity instead of or along with Intelligence?

This assumes that the game wants to stick with "Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc" as a feature, which it probably does. A case could be made for doing away with them in favor of directly dealing with the derived values, but it's probably too late in development to go that route.

Referencing my previous offer on how stats should work, I would like to point out that what mine does is avoid single-stat-dumping like a mage going all out in Int. Any relatively balanced character is going to need at least a few points in speed and constitution unless they want to be very inflexible (say the ultimate glass-cannon mage, etc).

The real choice that mine offers that I think is still not present in the current stat incarnation is this: imagine you had a warrior. To make it viable in Larian's current incarnation, stack Con. Just stack it. Maybe some strength, but anything but strength and con is almost madness. It doesn't matter what you want to do.

Now in mine, a warrior has a lot more viable options. Strength gives him some HP, so he could dump into strength and become a bit of a physical glass cannon. He could do Strength Con and Speed (probably with some dex too) balanced to get a good, consistent-over-time in battle warrior, or he could stack Speed and Con in order to be defensive and good at controlling positions and cover your less-tanky members better. Even further, he could do something interesting like increasing speed, dex, and strength evenly and go for a critical build.

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What I'm trying to show here is that we need to split apart needed features of every type of character into different stats to allow a diversity of build options and make stat-dumping even, if not a bit worse, than some thought and moderation.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a post on the first page here I made about what I think stats should be (roughly. I'm sure if requested for explicit calculations of what the stats give numerically I could create the system, but that's a significant amount of work for something possibly coming to naught).

Edit: Upon some further thought it might be better if AP per turn were consistent and AP was balanced directly, where skills instead had a stat barrier over an AP barrier (like Larian's barrier for high level magic is currently an AP barrier according to the recent video).

There really are multiple ways to tackle it. We would have to make each stat have something else desirable in this case (that is, speed, con, and int), to account for a removal of AP altering attributes. Perhaps speed giving a chance for a double attack, int giving perception score bonuses, and con giving dot resistance? Those are just kind of out of my ass on the fly, so I'm not really convicted to them.

YoungFreshNewbie, we get Primary Attribute points once every 2 levels. When last I heard, the maximum level Larian expects players to reach is about 20. That's 15 attribute points to play with, if you count the starting 5 as well. We can put in an average of 2.5 points for each of the 6 attributes (except that we can't do half-points).

With that many points, dump stats are kinda mandatory, so making every attribute useful for every class is not a great idea. This is another total reboot of the attribute system. Yes, that won't be the first time, but there's only so many times Larian can do that before they have to figure out what to use in the game.

I don't think it would be a big deal to get 1 point or maybe even 2 points per level and simply scale the rewards per point down in order to encourage at least a two-stat-dump over a one-stat-dump. That's not particularly difficult or involved to scale what's given, by what I know of how stats are probably coded.

I can definitely see not wanting to have to take all stats in this system, but single stat choices that ultimately seem impossible to balance without serious reconsideration (Constitution I am really not happy with you right now) seem to be worse. Indeed, who would ever throw it all behind speed, or much of anything behind speed? And yet trying to make all stats a single-stat-dump possibility is also going to be silly and yet seemingly be necessary if anyone is going to consider each stat as a real piece of content.

In brief, I think we could make 2-stat-dumps and 2-major-1-minor builds very viable with some scaling (more points for less power per point), and open up a lot more thoughtfulness in character development and replayability.

I think the problem with the skills at the moment is that the game encourages a high-intelligence character specialising in a certain attack combination.
What the game really needs to encourage more of, are adventuring skills (both social as well as crafting and lockpicking).

The Player characters, IMHO, ought to receive two skill point pools - one that can only be spent on adventuring skills and one that can be spent on either adventuring skills OR damage skills.

As the Player interacts through either Scarlett or Roderick, these two characters need to have an aspect of damage-dealing to them (as with NPC party members), but also justifiably well-rounded adventuring skills.
Spending points only on adventuring skills makes Scarlett and Roderick less appealing in combat. So it feels at the moment like my choices, as a player are:
- Open more locks and get some items (nice) OR
- Craft some stuff (also nice) OR
- Bring righteous fury down on large groups of Orcs (awesome!)

This is why I think getting adventuring-specific skill points for Roderick and Scarlett in addition to their regular skill points would be ideal.

I think giving bonus ability points from intelligence stat discourages playing any class other than wizard. Truly, you only need to raise intelligence with that class to be a good spellcaster and you have way more ability points than other classes to spend on other things, like social or general survivalist abilities. Rangers and warriors, on the other hand, need to raise more than one stat to be effective and they barely have enough points to specialize in their own tree. This all seems very unbalanced. I think bonus points from intelligence are in need of removal.
Also, I think AI should be programmed to attack wizards on higher priority to encourage players to spend points on raising HP and speed for running away.

My kinda rough idea was something like the higher of either Intelligence Constitution or Dexterity determines Recovery AP.

EDIT: Hurrrr... I wrote Intelligence and meant Constitution.


Here's the current issue:
- Big tough warrior guys want points into Strength and Constitution (polearm/spear users pick Dex instead of Strength)
- Archers and sneaky Rogue types want points into Dexterity and Speed.
- Mages want points into Intelligence and... huh

Perception is the odd stat out. Maybe that should be associated with mages a bit?

I think it's very nicely done. For example weapons/armor I found while being lvl 8 in alpha require 11 str. That means if you want a nice weapon/armor you have to invest the majority of points in str. Most warriors will only be able to attack once and then twice the next turn. But this is already a lot, because the dmg is very high and they can tank a lot. The wizard gets more AP and thus can do more damage, but also dies quicker. The drawback now is that armor boots/helmets/gloves doesn't have a str requirement, which makes the wizard tanky as well. Also the wizard gets spells that cost like 9 AP early on, so he needs that huge ap pool. But you can also give your mage a melee weapon, spears are very nice and let him attack 2-3 times.

Been playing some coop, my friend is an all out STR (2 points Con, rest Str) Warrior and I go for the above mentioned Tank/Watermage. I outperform him in *anything* but lifting, melee hitting and equipping high tier Str gear. *EVERYTHING* as in, life, armor (armor specialist + robes :O), dodging, general damage output, battlefield control - the list goes on. Why? Because I'm bathing in a river of Ability Points which allows me to kick serious butts at anything given a few levels. Intelligence *is* to strong, and this needs attention!

Not for long.

Intelligence and ability points

A good move and a needed change. I've never particularly liked mechanics like that.

Nice, this should even things up a bit.

Thank you for the posts, might not have found this out otherwise! And I agree, this should take balance once step further towards the finish line.

Now if we could only even out the amount of points the varying classes need to spend in order to be efficient, balance might get even closer. That's for another topic though.