Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Should Armor + Magic Armor skill be one skill?

I was thinking about this for a bit.

Currently enemies usually just break through your armor quickly and can do magic and armor damage at range and point blank. So there is no real reason to get one over the other.

Yet together it has enough lean to make it an investment without becoming a drain on your skill points.

But perhaps I am wrong, hense why I am asking you fine people.

How much armor and magic armor do you generally have? What's the maximum you've come up with without sacrificing damage or utility?

That question makes no sense. the game isn't static and thus you can have a variance of 0-100s

The question makes plenty of sense -- if you have variance provide a range. For example, in my current run through I have unbuffed 248 and buffed I have near or over 400. In previous runs where I was less knowledgeable and far more impatient, I was generally running with 150 magic armor. So my range is from 150-248 unbuffed. Now, based on that, how easy is it for encounters in Act 1 to break through that?

What is the threshold for which armor has accomplished its goals for Act 1?

Also what encounters are we talking about? Some are almost strictly magic based whereas others are mixed.

The question makes plenty of sense, in order to proceed with the argument I have to accept your premises. I am contesting the first premise.

Let me see... A level 4 enemy can break 150 in a single turn. 248 also in a single turn.

400 in about 2 enemy turns.

These are non-boss enemies that can appear singularly and as a group.

And I assume this 150-248 armor is while your level 2 of course.

It wouldn't really acomplish anything other than make the skills cost less points.

The real problem with armors right now is that:
A - they're binary in nature, you either have enough to protect you, or you don't
B - it's largely impossible to kill someone without exhausting at least one of the armors fully


Both issues would be solved by my suggestion from another thread on the issue, making the armors gradually lose effectiveness as they are depleted.
I.e.: At 50% remaining, an armor absorbs 50% of the damage(the rest bleeds through), and provides only 50% reduction to harmful effects being applied.

Couple that with a variable application rate(some skills having 50% chance, some having 200%), and there is a lot more room for cool tactical gameplay where armors remain an important factor, but do not outright decide the outcome.

C) armor is broken far too easily by enemies

It ends up feeling more like extra HP then anti-CC for the player (well ok... it stops the initial CC attack... some of the time... Some enemies have really nasty initial volley attacks)

Note that I am talking about magic armor, if I want to stack armor I can go much higher. And 150 was the bare minimum to get my game plan to work in the last encounter where I only really have to worry about Alexander (and even then it's a minor inconvenience).

So it takes about 2-3 mobs to take down all the armor within the first turn assuming they happen to focus fire that target. If they don't then it'll take 2-3 turns or more to get rid of it. The general duration of combat is about somewhere between 2-3 rounds.

Instead of time, I would propose we look at the other resources it takes to get rid of that armor (magic or physical) and what are the consequences of failing to do so during the first turn really means. When combat lasts for such a short duration it's hard to quantify something as 'quick' without looking at resource expenditure.

You are playing on classic right?

But Blargle I am now going to have to jump through arbitrary hoops now to do this topic.

So your premise is that the game is balanced at the top tier.

Now I could talk about the game until then, but I'll play your game.

I don't think they both need to be into one skill... they just need to be worth investing in, none of thise 1%/2% per level crap

Feel free to skip everything I've written if it annoys or bothers you or if you feel offended etc. You're mainly jumping through these hoops because we're establishing context; not everyone has the same shared knowledge, experiences and what not.

My premise is far ruder than that and it's very thinly veiled at this point. But on the surface level I am making only one claim and that is armor is correctly functioning based on the pacing/time-to-kill. A follow-up question would be: is the pacing of the average fight supposed to feel this way?

Yeah, this sounds right. I don't see any real point in splitting the skills. It's actually probably better for balance if they keep them separate.

I think the idea behind those abilities should be that for a warrior who mostly wears Physical armor, you give them a couple pieces of magical armor, then put points into +Magic armor to give it a boost to useful levels. Meanwhile, they won't invest much into the +Physical armor ability, because they get enough from their equipment. The opposite should be true for mages.

What if the bonuses worked more like this:

[x] Armor
Level 1: +25 [x] armor, + 5% [x] armor
Level 2: +20 [x] armor, + 5% [x] armor
Level 3: +15 [x] armor, + 5% [x] armor
Level 4: +10 [x] armor, + 5% [x] armor
Level 5: +05 [x] armor, + 5% [x] armor
======================================
Total : + 75 [x] armor + 25% [x] armor

At low character levels, the flat bonus gives you a useful amount of armor when the percentage is underwhelming, then at higher levels, the percentage becomes the most useful part when the flat bonus seems small.

It would go a long way to adding actual tanks to this game.

You should work on reading comprehension, cause that's contained within A, and it is not entirely true.

During my play-through, It was only in a few fights that any of my characters had their armor depleted, and once I got the relevant skills to refill it, it was rarely a problem I couldn't work around of.

It's also not a problem with the mechanics, nor one that would be solved by merging the skill points being spent.
It is entirely an issue with tuning the existing system, which isn't really going to be a sufficient solution anyway.

I dont think the flat bonus should get lower but stay at 25 or whatever ( it looks better for the player ).



A - is not a problem but a good thing. RNG in CC is bullshit and should never come back
B - Thats what armor is for

'RNG CC' while far from ideal, is infinitely better than the current system. Risk management is a big part of what makes P&P RPG's work, and those are the primary inspiration for Divinity.
Being made to take uncertain risks on receiving/failing a CC makes for a much wider variety of combat scenarios.

Armor being for protection is one thing, but once again it is far more interesting to have to manage healing and restoring armors at the same time, than it is to do one after the other.
Having armor offer diminishing protection also means it's much easier to give high amounts of it to characters that are meant to resist CC very well(tanks, bosses), as it means those characters can still be killed without stripping that resistance before hand, AKA preventing the from just chain CC'ing them, without giving them explicit immunities to everything(which is a much more elegant design, since it puts all combatants on equal footing rules-wise).

P&P RPGs ( DnD atleast ) have encounter/daylie powers for strong CC.
A better approach to armor and CC would be to give bosses or boss mobs more skills to increase armor or to remove CC. Your idea would just allow us to CC bosses with attack 1 while the binary approach helps bosses to actually do something.
A non binary approach would also nerf no dmg CC spells because they would mostly work on tanks.
Someone with just 1 max armor would loose it all with the first attack but you could easily "repair" the armor back to 100% -> CC immunity again. While tanks would maybe loose half and you can only repair 25% -> tanks is not CC immun.

The balance with non binary CC is horrible too.
Should the encounter be balanced for CC hitting or for CC not hitting or maybe half the CC hits?
If all CC has to hit you are fucked if it doesnt. If you dont need CC ( or just a very small amount ) the encounter becomes too easy.
Adding to that most CC is multihit in OS. A stuncloud checks whether you get CCed or not when created and at every move you take -> non binary approach ( OS1 ) it always works -> the reason CC was so goddamn overpowered.
Did a charm work first try ( or first round ) in OS1 on a very strong enemy -> enemies are fucked because the high damage high CD skills will be used on their teammates.
Right now we will always take the first round of damage and round 1 is the hardest hitting one.

I kind of wish they'd change the Physical and Magical Armor attributes so that, instead of just increasing however much you have by X%, they make it so that Physical/Magical Armor increases your resistances to damage of those types. There are already very powerful ways to increase your Physical/Magical Armor in the forms of fortify and magic armor, both of which become more effective if points are spent into geomancy/hydrosophist respectively.

I don't think that requiring those very specific schools and that very specific spell should be the only way to increase the amount of physical/magical armor.

Resistances are applied before the armor takes damage. Increasing those resistances is, effectively, increasing your armor. However, it also gives you some benefit once your armor has broken.

In the current model, you sink some points into armor, maybe use spells to recover some of it the first time it breaks and then it breaks again in 1~2 turns based on how enemies decide to attack. Once your armor is gone, those points in physical/magical armor do nothing for you.

I also can't say for sure if fortify is the only spell that recovers/increases physical armor. Same goes for magic armor. All I know is that hydrosophist gives a bonus to magical armor recovery and increase while geomancy does the same for physical armor. Larian says they've added hundreds of new skills in DOS II and all we have right now is the intro map, there could be several more out there that come from schools other than hydrosophist and geomancy that recover/increase physical/magical armor.