Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General bad news on the patch

Larian do caps themselves. Divinity 2 has them; even in D:OS, there's cap for base stat.

elemental healing was probably an oversight or intended design gone wild. what they want is for the elemental creatures to be healed by elemental attacks. yet it was calculated by the % of resistance~

I actually thought it made the game fun and interesting. My argument against caps on resists is as follows:

There are two camps of people: those who want caps and those who don't. There are two states the game can exist in: one with caps and one without.

In the state with caps:
-Those who want them will be happy
-Those who don't will not

In the state without caps:
-Those who want them will not be happy
-Those who don't will be happy

The difference is that in the former state, there is no choice for the unhappy players. They must deal with the cap. Whereas in the latter state, the unhappy players can self-impose caps or simply use different equipment/talents.

As an advocate of free will, I strongly support the latter case.

BUMP

Boggles the mind how much bad crap could be added to a game using that logic.

I actually dont mind the caps. I almost think that removing the healing that came from having over 100% was what they were after but in doing that they made zombie worthless. And for those who are quite far into the game and dont feel like restarting its a bummer. At least have a free reset.

On a more positive note I was able to rollback my Steam version. Yay for pre patch gaming days ahead! Now I can get my D:OS fix on

If you don't like something... don't use it.
No one is holding you at gunpoint to do anything in this game.

Edit:

How were you able to roll back your Steam version? I was under the impression that you could not roll back Steam games. This question has been asked several times on this forum and I would be interested in getting an answer out.

I can't believe that Swen actually allowed the resist caps to be in a patch. I'm just shocked by this, well I guess I'll just wait until the next patch to play the game.

Being that zombie and leech are now broken, it is clear that they didn't do any real testing. This is a crap update that I'd expect from EA or even Blizzard. Not here...

I'm just so disgusted now...
Thanks for making a post about this and warning everyone.

Please don't tell me that resistances are now capped...

They are. At 80%... even in the case of the Zombie talent.

Well there's 2 options. 1 legit and one err not so legit.
option 1 requires you to have a backed up copy of your game from the Steam folder. Just straight overwrite.
option 2 requires you to find a patch online for v107. I wouldn't recommend this route unless one's sure of their sources and not exposed to all sorts of virii. With this option the patch is 417Mb.

I used option 2. Install is slightly different. Backup the patched game (v130) in steam first. Extract patch to a separate folder and then copy everything over to the steam game folder but (very important) the steam api file. Tested and my steam recognizes the game and time played/achievements still work. Game shows v107 on the main menu.

Seeing as how patches go here might be a good idea from now to do backups esp if on Steam.

FFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck...

Yo dawg, I heard you like crying on forums so we put MMO-style balancing in your single-player CRPG so you can cry while you cry.

During my months of play, I had 3 full playthroughs each on a different difficulty, I was only using a balanced crafting mod that made it so that unavailable recipes were fixed and there was some extra stuff for crafting/bs 5+ which I can't recall having used.

During these playthroughs I had great fun building and leveling the characters from 1-14 at that point most of the builds you created are well rounded and only require some finetuning and you require some blessings from the rng gods as far as loot goes. Even after level 14 I had great fun trying hoard all the arrows and different items making sure I bought essences and trying my best to grab rubies and making sure to say hello to some vendors in order to try and make some sword of the planets and grabbing some sextants and tormented souls.

During these playthroughs I have not been blind, I saw the strength of having talents like zombie/leech and grabbing a ton of resistances. I personally did not like the zombie talent (Even though there is no visual drawback I personally don't feel like playing an undead.) and as far as leech goes, I gave it to Madora on the 1st playthrough and it was rather overpowered. So overpowering that I stayed away from it during my other playthroughs. I am somewhat old school so I did not mind having my mages using healing spells on my melee characters. Although I am not judging anyone who took these talents. That is not the point I am trying to make in this post that will most likely be too long.

The point I am trying to make is, that I felt that it was up to me whether or not I would take some talents that would make the game a lot easier. On my normal playthrough I made a spellsword or battlemage w/e name you will prefer to give it, and I really made sure his fire resistance was allways 120%+ so he could make use of self immolate, phoenix dive and explode and as an added bonus it was great to heal him incidentally with fireballs. (although that was not the initial intention.)

I too have experienced the latest patch, and even though I was just horsing around, trying stuff out in what most likely would not have been my 4th playthrough I was pretty amazed to see that there were some game altering changes that in my opinion were not in the best interest of the game.

As I advocated earlier, I strongly feel that people that want to take full advantage to what the game offers may do so. (Especially in a single player game.) And the people who think it would be too easy or that just don't want to use those advantages can just ignore them. Therefore I am sad to say that I actually am surprised that you put in a hardcap on all resistances which hardcaps at 80%.

*Hardcap means that no matter what you do to increase the % it will never show as more then 80%. You can have 130% fire reistance which is shown as 80% and if you get a 50% resistance penalty you will still have 80%.

I ofcourse have no idea what you guys from development are thinking or what your gametesters are doing, however I do have some issues with this is in general.

The zombie talent is currenly broken because of this, it took me like 1 minute to realize this, how on earth did your gametesters miss that?

During the game you will be able to craft/find/buy a lot of resistance potions and with the introduction of the hardcap there usefulness will decline, especially the large resist all potion (that confers a +70% resistance) feels rather useless to make now as with or without cap the lowest potion will probably suffice in 9 out 10 situations. The search (and joy) from finding elemental essences and/or rubies went down in value aswell. With an enforced hardcap you probably have the basic 4 elemental types capped around level 11-12 with a melee character and that does not include any rubies/essences. The "ultimate" man at arms talent Weather the storm has become utterly useless because with a hardcap there is no reason to "pay" 1 talent point to get an extra 25% basic elemental resist. Not to mention ofcourse sword of the planets loses some of its value aswell.

Add to that, that I could not find the elemental resist 80% hardcap in the patch notes. (I might have overlooked it, so if it was there my apolagies.)

It saddens me to say that for me this last patch even though it has fixed some issues that needed to be fixed, namely actual bugs or performance issues due to technical issues did not really come through as progress.

This is what I expect to happen with games that are in BETA and the developers/testers are like... oops that was not intended. This is not what I expect from paid professionals. You guys have had a lot of time to test this game, and you had the funds to do it. The game picked up a lot of momentum and from there on you did great things and when you released the game, I expected a semi finished product where you *points* were going to polish up the game a bit, add some extra companions, maybe add some extra sidequests or a random dungeon. I did not expect you guys to adress "balance" issues. Those things should have been done in alpha, you had tons of time to test the stuff back then, the fact noone noticed that leech/zombie/glass cannon and or mechanics weren't working as you guys wanted or intended is something you should have noticed then. If you happen to have missed them I will work as free tester in the future to sort out all of this OP stuff for you in order to prevent stuff like this happening in the future.

I am aware that as a game company you can not make every customer a happy gamer. However if you really adress balance issues in a finished single player game that will heavily affect gamepeplay I am somewhat disappointed. I think so shortly after release dealing with balance issues should not be a high priority either.

There is a decent chance I will use this post in topics regarding the lastest patch, this is not because I'm suddenly starting to spam, but I feel strongly about this, so I really want to get my/the message across.

With kind regards,

Rashar.

*Edit: Tried to filter out most of the spelling errors and providing link for 200% resistance mod.

200% resistance mod (All credit goes to Rhidian):

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=546666&gonew=1#UNREAD

Well said, Rashar, Master of Nine.

Instead of hard-capping, they should have have simply adjusted the bonuses downwards.
Make it unfeasible to have permanent 100+ resistance to multiple elements.

Resistances no longer being allowed to build so high that a character is immune and even healed by an element is a great change as far as I'm concerned. It's too bad it wasn't that way from the start.

Imagine that.. characters actually taking damage in combat and having to rely on intended forms of healing. I'm not sure why people are frowning at this concept.

Because now their uber-builds are obsolete.

Going over 100% resistance was quite silly and it is a good step forward that it was removed. And there is no worse thing then bringing out "free will" as an argument into discussion. The free will is provided in the form of modding tools, but a base game should be more balanced and far less prone to uber builds.

Though hard-capping at 80% might not be the best solution. A better approach would be to introduce diminishing returns on resistance buffs/advantages such as the more you pile on a certain resistance the less bonus you get. When calculated properly, this would effectively introduce a soft cap upon the resistances and do not allow you to pass over 100%.

And on the patchs' status...well there is nothing to worry about it. It is not likely they will let things remain as is and since the game is quite content-balance heavy, there is always a possibility a patch can break some other parts in unintended ways. It is the nature of programming. So some people should stop crying like they lost their sweetroll.

Yes it was silly. But we're playing a game in which a talking-cat gives you a remote control to a rampaging mech operated by an evil skeleton. Obviously silly is not a problem.

Going over 100% was an interesting mechanic that was poorly implemented.

I like the idea of building a character who can heal from fire. Obviously Larian thought it was neat, since they put the Zombie talent in the game so you can build a character who heals from Poison. The problem was that it was so easy to get to that point for every element, all the time.

In my ideal system I would say
--120% resistance to ONE element, all the time.
--50% resistance to ALL elements, all the time.
--Some middle ground between those two options.
pick one

As silly I meant as imbalanced/improper not as whacky or awkward which are stamp of Divinity games Healing from resistant element is not an original mechanic. In old RPGMaker 2003 games, the mechanic was beaten to death. For example attacking a shadow resistant creature with shadow spell caused you to heal the creature etc.

Soft caps on resistances along perks overriding that (for the case of Poison) would be a better approach in this case. Elementals can be given their own flags where they can be healed by their element.

Perhaps a perk for each element provided in an exclusive manner(if you get one, you can't take others) can be the way to go. You will spend a perk and choose only one element to heal you which would be a strategic decision.