Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Racial Talents

I'm of the opinion that racial talents should benefit whatever combat style the player choose to use, to avoid punishing the min/maxer for roleplaying their preferred race. To explain what I mean, let's go through the current racial talents.

Humans gets +2 wits, +3% crit chance and +1 leadership. Awesome, no problems there. Wits and leadership are universally useful, and the crit chance can be made useful for spellcasters with the savage sortilege talent.

Elves get +2 finesse and the hilariously awesome corpse eater talent, bravo to whoever thought that one up. Finesse however determines your chance to hit with daggers and bows, improves scoundrel and huntsman skills, and increases dodge chance. This is obviously a great stat for rangers and rogues, and is reasonable for front line fighters with the dodge chance. Mages on the other hand, not so much. Yes, dodge can be useful for anyone but with magic to keep attackers back and a tank to protect them, it's a very inefficient stat for mages. Instead of finesse, I would suggest +2 memory which helps everyone and ties in very nicely with the elves focus on memory in the lore.

Dwarves get +2 strength and +1 sneaking. Strength improves your chance to hit with swords and axes and so on, increases the damage of warfare abilities and lowers the heavy armour movement penalty. Sneaking can be useful for anyone, but I would never invest in it if I wasn't going to make use of it in combat by playing a rogue. I would change both of these, the strength can easily become constitution which is great for everyone. It's a much more useful defensive stat for mages than dodge, as they're more likely to be hit by a magical attack from range than take a blade to the face. Sneaking can easily be exchanged for either bartering or lucky charm, both of which fit dwarves nicely, as does constitution.

Lizards get +2 intelligence and +1 persuasion. The persuasion is great for a main character in a roleplaying game but the intelligence very much pushes lizards towards being mages of some description. Intelligence doesn't do anything for you if you're not using staves, wands or offensive magic. This is the one race I'm unsure how to change though, as it would be boring to give a second race the same bonuses as another. Perhaps Lizards get 1 and 1 split between con, wits or memory. Or perhaps Lizards get an extra talent point instead of attributes, which I kinda like.

Let me know what you think!

The +2 in a stat seems indeed rather extreme.
I kind of like how WoW handled it all with small perks for each race.

I don't know though, I wouldn't play a dwarf to make him a mage, the racial traits does seems to make sense, and you have the whole "i don't want to be a fighter" shenanigan if you really want to push the RP that far. A min-maxer by definition does not care about playing roleplay, he just wants to be the best at one thing.

Pretty neutral on this topic, I understand that it can be bothersome without actually be that bored myself (I intend to play an undead with necromancy, i'm pretty sure it'll be ok...)

Maybe I'm not a hardcore min/maxer but when I can make the strongest character I can, while still playing what I want to roleplay, I'm happy. There would still be an optimal choice with my suggested changes, but it would certainly be much, much closer.

Yeah, I agree and have said as much in my feedback. When they initially revealed racial traits I had thought we would end up with a couple, like say 10 or so traits to choose from unique to each race.

Ideally, there would be a variety of unique traits for each race that would set them apart, while also allowing each race to be viable for whatever build you wanted.

Just as an example, imagine if say....you were going for a mage type character, undead could have a selectable trait that increased magical healing and damage dealt to a target at under 40% health, or for lizards, a trait that made magic damage deal more damage to an enemy's magic armor pool.

They aren't exactly great examples, but the idea is that each race has a couple magic, melee, stealth, or ranged oriented traits that makes that race play slightly different from another race, even when choosing the same class.

In the kickstarter update as example, a part of the Lizard's racial description initially mentioned their obsession with physical perfection/selected breeding, which could lead to appealing traits for a ranger, rogue, or fighter, alongside the ancient sophistication/spellsong angle which benefits mages/battlemages. That however appears to not really be present.

The suggestion to change the Dwarves +2 Strength to +2 Constitution is pretty good. If you think about it, right now, the Dwarves two racial talent bonuses somewhat go against each other. Sneaking is good for rogues, but the Rogueish type favours bonuses to Finesse. The +2 Strength is good for making a warrior, but a warrior won't have as much use for +1 Sneaking.

+2 Memory for elves is also not a bad idea, although I don't think that mind them keeping +2 Finesse would be terrible.

I'm not sure what to do about Lizards though, as you are right that it pushes them to be more mages than anything else.

Letting the player choose their starting racial talents from a selection would certainly be the ideal solution, albeit the more complicated one to implement. It would make a lot of sense from an RP point of view though, depending on what your character did before the game started would influence his or her stats.

Completely agree.

On your last note about not knowing what to change lizards to, that's also something I was having issues with which doesn't even take into account whatever the undead's racial traits will be.

I strongly agree with this. As I understand it (I could be wrong) Strength is almost useless for a pure caster. Since I like dwarven mages, the Strength bonus reduces my enjoyment, as it seems to tell me that I am doing it "wrong". In a game emphazising freedom as much as Original Sin, this seems weird. Pyrofox' recommendation with changing it to Constitution is great, as Con benefits everyone and fits the dwarves perfectly.

Memory for elves is also great, as the memory acquisition through cannibalism feature gives elves a memory theme already.

Memory, Wits and Constitution are great racial bonus stats, as they can benefit everyone.



Of course, elves having something as wonderfully flavorful (in more ways than one) as corpse-eating makes everyone else's bonus boring in comparison (except the lizards' dragonbreath, I guess).

I agree with most but intelligence can be useful due to scrolls.

Also there is the option of making each stat somewhat useful to all class even if they favor 1 class more. as long as they aren't useless, so maybe the effect of finesses could be tweaked.

Intelligence doesn't benefit scrolls at all, I just tested that. I also don't see how strength can benefit rogues and mages outside of perhaps throwing things around but maybe I'm missing something.

[quote=Pyrofox]Intelligence doesn't benefit scrolls at all, I just tested that. I also don't see how strength can benefit rogues and mages outside of perhaps throwing things around but maybe I'm missing something. [/quote]
well in previous divinity str accounted for carrying
and scrolls did get affected by int they should just roll back those changes from previous games...

As one of the posters says, Dwarves should have +2 to STR and CON, it makes the most sense to me. Sure, they could have sneaking, but height shouldn't be the sole factor in making a better sneaking person. I could easily see a slim, fast elf be sneakier than a bulky, slow dwarf. For elves, +2 in finesse and +2 memory seems more matching since elves can now read memories of the dead it makes most sense they have a bonus in it. As for lizards... hmmm... it really depends on the direction Larian are pushing them to be, a more magic or strength orientated race. To me, they are more magical than brute, so perhaps a mix of +1 and +2 for magic bonuses, maybe even intelligence?

Humans are humans, you could apply any bonus to them really, but the leadership and wits bonuses are fine.

I honestly think it would work best if bonuses were tied to the tags you picked. You're a scholar? Well that sounds like an int buff to me. Barbarian? Strength, anyone? Noble could be 1 int and 1 persuasion. Sure this might push some bonuses on the prebuilt characters that you wouldn't really want, but it would fit with their personalities more that way. At least in my opinion.

Great suggestion!

[quote=Asgharm]I honestly think it would work best if bonuses were tied to the tags you picked. You're a scholar? Well that sounds like an int buff to me. Barbarian? Strength, anyone? Noble could be 1 int and 1 persuasion. Sure this might push some bonuses on the prebuilt characters that you wouldn't really want, but it would fit with their personalities more that way. At least in my opinion. [/quote]

I LOVE this idea.

Also, the elf memory would be a good lore-based change in current system.

I like the idea of moving from stat bonuses (or at least the very class-specific ones) to racial traits that can benefit any class and/or serve roleplay instead.

Tying tags to stat bonuses? That's a pretty neat idea, although I do still like the idea of racial bonuses as well. I'm conflicted.

I like the sound of bonuses coming from background tags, but I'm not sure attributes would be the best way to approach that.

While it's not the most original way to solve the problem, Larian could consider taking the D&D 4E approach to racial balance by offering a choice between two attribute bonuses. IE, as a Dwarf, you can pick either a +2 bonus to CON, or a +2 bonus to STR. Maybe Elves have Finesse and Memory as their options. This way each race retains a bit of its specialization, but also gains a bit of flexibility as well.

I'm not much of a lore expert, but Lizards are known to have a "House of Law" and "House of War". To me that sounds like the perfect opportunity to give the player the option to specialize in either INT or STR, respectively. The House of War already establishes that the Lizards do have an entire House dedicated to soldiers, despite how the game mechanics makes warriors one of their least favored classes.

I'm aware that doesn't really fix the problem of making every class/build viable for every race, but I feel as though it is a step in the right direction that would not require an overhauling of existing systems.

The proper solution to this problem is to make the Racial talents and skills a set of options from which you pick one.

I myself am not very fond of lizards breathing fire, and would prefer mine to spit acid; a dwarf could instead of turning others to stone, turn his skin to stone, recovering and boosting his armor; ect.

Having thought about the idea of tying racial talents to tags some more, I think it runs into the same problem. I'd also forgotten that you can't change the tags of the origin characters which doesn't help things. So with the feedback so far I believe the best solution is to give the player options on their racial bonuses, which would require the most work from Larian. Almost as good would be what I suggested in the original post but I'm still unsure what to do with lizards and undead so it isn't ideal.

This thread isn't really about the racial abilities but I will chime in and agree with Naqel, it would be very cool and thematic and useful if Lizards could pick the type of their breath weapon attack.