Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General I loved DOS1, but something is off with the combat

The game looks great and I'm looking forward to one day play the final and polished version. I've kickstarted both DOS1 and 2.

There some niggles that are stoping me from enjoying the combat. Here's a couple things that are worrying me:

- Area effect spells: when you're preparing an AOE spell, you'll see a preview of it's area of effect and the people/monsters affected by it will be highlighted. However, many times I hurt my own characters because this system is not accurate. I make sure that my characters are not in the circle/cone of the AOE spell. I make sure my characters aren't highlighted. Yet, they get hit anyway.

- The initial animation that positions your characters (and enemies). So, I'm careful to spread my characters before starting combat, but when it starts, the game positions my characters together again, so most of my combats start by the enemy throughing a grenade or an AOE at my party. That's really annoying. Isn't this supposed to be tactical combat?

- Somehow, I'm having more difficulty to "read" the battlefield. I don't know if it's because the max zoom out is still a little bit too close. Pressing "O", the vertical angle and the enemy highlighting helps, but it's still too close to the ground, I can't get a good overview of the area. There's no way to see most enemies on the same screen.

What do you think?

You make good points. A further zoom would be nice, automatic grouping is painful (by the way, they won't group up if they're unlinked, but it doesn't take much thought to realize that this is sub-obtimal), and Hail Strike in particular is quite bad, since it only shows where the strikes will land, not where they will affect. Other skills, like Electric Discharge and Ricochet, hit neutrals when they bounce, leading to a lot of dead or aggressive "allies". Range indicators seem accurate on skills like Fireball and Impalement, though, so it's mainly just that *some* skills REALLY suck. This is just from what I've observed, though; maybe other skills are giving you trouble? which ones in particular are causing you friendly fire?

1) Yes, but it's a known issue/bug.

2) Yes, I hope this will get changed in the final version. Making ambushes is part of the fun.

3) Agreed. The camera should allow for higher zoom levels.

Something else I've noticed playing up to level 4 or so with different parties (Im a chronic restarter), is that it's more difficult to get an intuitive feel for what would be an effective chokepoint in OS2 in the areas I've played so far.

In OS1 it was pretty easy to intuitively identify an effective chokepoint at a glance, and to cast an AOE there, or plant your front liners there to guard the back row. In OS2 Im finding that a lot of areas that would have been a chokepoint in OS1 are surrounded by terrain that doesn't look passable but actually is, so enemies are slipping around, running right past my Opportunist front liners directly into my back row.

It's also proving more difficult to get a feel for whether or not an obstacle provides any protection from ranged attackers, with their generous firing arcs. Line of Sight seemed easier to reckon in OS1 which I was playing just this week.

I don't know if this is intentional or incidental, but it's definitely thwarting my attempts at tactical thinking that would have been effective in the previous game.

Agree with #2. Hopefully it'll get fixed at some point. It's impossible to carry out ambushes at this time.

Something I've noticed:

If I'm casting an AoE spell or throwing a grenade, and I put the targetter right at the edge of my range, even if the circle surrounds enemies slightly outside the range, the spell or grenade won't hit them. It's like it completely cuts off a large portion of the AoE just because it's outside of my "range" or whatever.

Range should effect how far away the centerpoint of your spell or grenade can be cast, instead of affecting the size and shape of the AoE itself...

Less linear battlegrounds are hardly a bad thing.
Besides, no one's stopping you from making a chokepoint yourself. You have the tools, even if enemies sometimes prefer to go straight through elemental hazards. All those molotovs and barrels are great for area denial.

You skated right around the problem he was bringing up lol

Uhh, kinda. To be honest, I never saw enemies go through "seemingly impassable" terrain or anything that'd break chokepoints.

First off, Im not looking to "dumb" the game down or make it easier. My personal comfort level is playing on Tactician mode in EE, and even that's pretty easy once power creep sets in. So there's no need to be defensive.

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TL;DR--lack of accurate feedback for AoE targeting, LoS difficult to predict, unintuitive battlefield control systems--->
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My observation based on limited play, was chiefly that concepts in the game are striking me as much less intuitive than in the original game. The OPs point about AOE spells not giving accurate feedback on their actual area of effect is an example. Making tactical situations easier to read is not "dumbing" the game down--it takes quite a lot of skill to create a game where players can intuit tactical situations at a glance.

The fight that jumps to mind is the early fight against the crocodiles on the beach. That fight took a lot of trial and error the first time I approached it, because I couldn't find an effective way to keep the crocs from reaching my back row almost effortlessly. I restarted the fight from the raised wooden platform because it looked like it had a "wall" of stoney material to its right that would have read as impassible in the previous game that would have forced the crocs to travel in a path around it to get to me. So I laid down an AOE there, but they just walked through it for minimal damage and walked right through that stoney ledge and right past my "tank" to chomp on my squishies. Obviously the crocs have ranged and teleportation abilities that make this sort of thinking useless, but Im just illustrating my point.

That's not the only example of not being able to trust intuition to make tactical decisions. I'm reserving judgement until I've got more playtime under my belt, but I strongly suspect that I hate the new armor system. It makes no sense to me that some unarmored rogue can just run through your carefully placed patch of burning ground with impunity to stab your wizard to death, because he has some sort of arbitrary blue bar left.

I'm not trying to make an argument for rigid realism in a fantasy tactical battle game. But games should have some sort of internal logic. In the last game it was intuitive...you set terrain on fire or put down a poison cloud and no one could come through it without paying a price, unless they were specifically (and again, intuitively--makes sense that fire elementals are not affected by fire) immune to those elements, or benefiting from situational spell protection.

This system feels much more gamey and arbitrary, requiring you to whittle away different colored bars with different flavored attacks before enemies will suffer the logical consequences of a specific effect. I'm not warming to it as yet.

I'm also experiencing seemingly arbitrary spread of battlefield terrain effects. One party member runs *away* from a patch of fire, but then slips on some ice and is suddenly on fire, and has also somehow set the party member next to him on fire. A party member is hit by a poison arrow near a patch of fire, and that somehow extends the patch of fire underneath him as well.

I'm not saying there aren't mechanical reasons for these things happening--I'm saying you can't easily predict them from visual evidence, which is an impediment to tactical decision making.

I agree completely.