Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Bugs and balance suggestions

So I ran into a few bugs and balance suggestions around Cyseal area. A few reasons that lead to death from combat and an excess use of resurrect scrolls:
-The number one issue is in a multiplayer, somehow there is a desync in stats that leads to thinking some characters have more, or less HP than before, this leads to frusturation and the question "What the hell?" as I see Madora, level 5-6 ish range resisting death at 116 or 160 health, then being hit again and having no health. When being resurrected characters have the same health from when they died off too, making it appear that they have no damage taken, or not as bad, and is very confusing. I noticed also, when fighting (Spoiler alert) that the desync also appears at the end of turns.
This may have been a previously patched issue, but I've never played multiplayer before nor have I had such an issue before, I was connected to my friends game and the stats were based off his computer.
AI aren't able to completely avoid hazards and neither do characters, I understand this much. But the fore and attempts to stay in perfect formation sometimes makes them want to step on the smallest spaces of fire and poison, which also often makes them die in 2 seconds; outside of combat. It's not AI that needs balancing but hazards/out of combat hazards.
200HP or so, level 5 can be wiped out just by stepping once in a hazard and leaving, killing three characters at a time. Similarly, some induced hazards, other than traps, may be stuck on the ground from enemy NPC death/attack states and cannot be removed normally, without ice spells at level 1, they cannot be removed, and create a permanent hazard which cannot be removed and are sometimes hard to spot, being relatively only one space in size. - Some hazards can be removed with water, but not all.
It appears to be a bug that appeared recently, the ability to use certain items has been removed entirely, or broken due to bugs. Filling containers with water now leaves the original container in your inventory, while dropping a bucket, or cup, with the water on the ground, and can be cloned over and over again. However, the new water filled object cannot be picked up, for all other purposes, they can be moved however. I believe smithing and forging of new weapons/metals suffer a similar fate of not being able to be crafted with nearby supplies.

Finally, referencing back to the hazards, they appear balanced like while in combat, but way over powered and ridiculous outside combat, barely giving time to cast a single spell or drink a potion before you have a 30/70 chance of luck to avoid turning to ash. Especially if it's the finish move from combat and the AI doesn't respond right away to movement, standing still and roasting themselves.

I vote for having AI send the characters to run outside of hazards immediately after combat and possibly towards the group leader if anything, and a check to resync in other cases, after every turn to make sure the stats are all accurate.

the problem with the hazards is basically, that there are also "turns" while out of combat. You can for example heal someone for 3 turns, or set something on fire for 2 turns out of combat, what makes the effect tick down in seconds i think (i dont know how long one turn/tick is out of combat exactly).

this is an issue i think, but it is imo really hard to find a solution, because every solution may add new issues. For example:

1. adding a pause button:
if they would add a pause button, this may create some issues in multiplayer (who is able to pause the game, who is not, what happens when the party splits up?), also it may enable the player to bypass some obstacles or puzzles in a way that is not intended by just walking into the poison surface/trap/lava and pause every 2 seconds to use consumables to heal.

2. trigger combat every time you get damage:
this would mean that combat starts every time you or your party step into poison or lava or a trap, what gives you the time to use heal spells or food and move your characters out of the hazards. This creates a new issue: now the combat ends as soon as there are no enemies left. What would now trigger "combat ended"? Also now there are a lot of beneficial effects too. Would combat also start every time you heal? There is a trait that lets you heal trough poison, what about that?

3. increase the duration of turns out of combat:
this would give you more time to heal or move your character before he dies, but would be especially annoying if you want to "heal your party quickly" before entering the next battle, because you would have to wait much longer for your spells to recharge, also putting out a fire with rain and then wait a bit until you are not wet anymore...

imo, the only things that may help make hazards less annoying would be:
- remove the hazards you or your enemies created during combat as soon as combat ends. this would help because you would not die in the remains of your own fire elemental after combat anymore. Traps and puzzles would be as dangerous as they are now, what is fine i think. The only disadvantage would be, that also beneficial effects would stop after the combat ends (such as buffs, rain, healing...), but since you can use all spells also out of combat, this is fine. You could also still die in hazards you created out of combat.
- ressurection-teleport: give us a spell or scroll that is either able to teleport or move a corpse in a certain range towards you or ressurect a character near you instead of where he died.
- improve the KI. In the end, forcing the party to restore the formation directly after combat makes them walk into the lava, mostly. If the characters are unable to do this without being poisoned, burned and such, they should simply not move at all. If you want to force madora to step into the lava you should have to take full control of her, for example.

Im sure the issue with hazards and turns is a bug. One turn in live mode is still supposed to be a second or two, evident with the heal spell which ticks quite slowly.

Yet standing in a hazard can almost insta gib you with half a dozen ticks. I think some of it may be stacking - standing in both steam, a firey patch, and actually being on fire and burning. That equates to three ticks of burning damage per turn.

Whatever the cause, sometimes its fine and not a big deal. You take a bit of damage. Sometimes you step on a firespot and you are dead.

Even in turn-based, you can sometimes be hit with what seems like 3-4 ticks. It's a bit better now, but still.

yep, this is frustrating i have to admit. During the last beta, this happened to me:

during a boss fight, i used jahan to cast firefly to burn away some summons. of course this created a huge fire surface, what was not a problem because everyone in my party was safe where he was. Because i did not want to create a party wipe after combat, my plan was to cast rain before the fight ends. But my rain-spell was recharging, so i had to be careful with doing dmg to the boss, to make sure the fight goes on until my spell was ready again, so the boss killed my main char - i sacrificed him basically - during the fight. In the end, Madora critted so hard, that the boss died right one turn before Jahan was able to use rain again. Fight ended, party restored the formation, everyone died in fire. Right next to the party-wipe notification, i saw at least 2 legendary items laying around ^^. Of course, after re-load and doing the fight again, the loot was cheap blue crap, bwaha ^^.

Also this was strange, because i used rain first before i entered combat. rain didn't last long, because i started it in real-time, but the recharge took longer because i was in combat now.

so basically i wiped because the boss was killed earlier than expected.

what i do now is just separate the characters during the fight, so that they stay where they are after combat, then heal and remove the hazards as good as possible and restore the party as soon as everything is safe.

They stay where they are after combat now, even if they are linked together. They dont move on their own, to take formation or because you changed who the selected character is anymore.

Which Larian did based on our suggestions directly, which was very nice of them.


The problem with the hazard surfaces is that they damage you:

- every time you make a step over them, for every step taken - if you have status effect of burning or poison.

- they lower your resistance to that element to about -20%, regardless of what resistance you had before (except maybe a full 100 which is rare)

You can imagine what these two things do in combination. In fact you dont need to imagine it because you see it all the time.

I usually have characters with fire resistance about 20-30% which now, with new adjustments to the system, gives me some protection against fire, mostly from weapons, and it even makes me capable to not get a burning status when im in some hazard area - either environmental or those created by enemies spells and weapons.

BUT - as soon as that fails and that character gets a burning status effect - the resistance magically becomes - 20% or similar.

If the combat ends - it is instant death because damage accretion becomes even faster and the mouse pointer has a 3 seconds delay between casting one and selecting another spell.
Which makes it impossible to do anything.


***


The solution is actually rather clear. The damage of these surfaces has to be readjusted, those consequential hits removed or slowed down based on resistance, the bugs of getting hit all over again for every step taken and effect of lowering resistances - removed.

The resistances should slow that rate down in real time and in turn based combat - which i what i suggested a week or two ago already.

So, a character with zero resistance could still get that fast 25,30,40,35 - damage strike. While characters with 20-30% resistance would get 25..... 30..... 40..... 35.... damage, etc. In combat and real time.

If the mouse pointer lag is also removed or brought down to some normal levels you could even do something about it.

While the solutions presented are there, to use rain to remove hazards and such, the end of combat ticks is still an issue. As half the time I find Madora is somehow standing in fire so I rush to click and hold to move the party away and off of hazards, by the time that happens Madora has a slim chance of living and not roasting.
Simply stepping in a hot patch and moving further wipes out more than half health, if not all of it, my game was basically 3 mages and a warrior. The healing spell takes the mentioned 2-3 ticks before a spell can finally be cast, so trying to start out with that is pointless because then they'd die while standing in fire before I can do squat. Outside of combat. Speaking of which though, outside of combat and taking a step together may be more damage than what it should be intended as, as it's about half a second before Madora and my friend take 1-2 different sets of damage at a time.
Removing hazards Removing hazards don't always work, I mentioned in first post, some hazards tend to linger and do not leave, trying to remove them becomes impossible because there's no ice spell readily available at level 1 and Cylia may not sell the spells needed to ice terrain. Not early enough in the game. However the resulting issue from such are:
fire/steam clouds which cannot be removed, poison clouds which cannot be removed, fire that cannot be removed, and patches so small you don't even see it, before you blindly walk in to that one (un)lucky spot and burn to death before you can look back to see what even got you, let alone get a potion or healing spell set.
I like the idea of resurrecting at a different place, because so many other scrolls have been wasted trying to resurrect while standing in place but fail because they're still standing in a steam or fire patch of some sorts, they respawn and before anything even happens, you hear a second death cry and they fall over again. To make the spell simpler though, the targeted person, without having to be near them if possible, resurrects near the caster, more like an angel from the sky I suppose as it'd be less hassle, and a lot less work than wasting several scrolls before having to go to end of time and back and catch up to where you left off with even more traps now in your way...

- wrong poster -