Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General A thought exercise: Balance

So how would you, the average forum user, balance the game as it stands right now? What do you find too powerful? Here's some thoughts to start: right now, we have warriors that can hit for 1200 a strike, Perma CC With Winter Blast, Stealth not preempting enemies to search. What specifically would you change to remedy these concerns? What of other concerns that you personally have? I know most sensible people would like to see changes to rage, but how? Try to not remove any skills, but change them so they're balanced!

Let's have a fun and creative discussion!

I would remove Magic and Physical Armor and replace them with Saving Throws just like D:OS1, then work on balancing stuff from there.

The concept of the thread is nice, but the whole early access thing that spans the whole forum and every avenue of data gathering the devs are using is already gathering such data that is being asked for, albeit from bits that need articulation.

I think suggestions should have their own sub-forum and be somewhat organized. Ideally said sub-forum would have one topic per distinct idea and people would search for previous data on their new-sounding idea, but I've never seen that work.


Now, in the spirit of this thread's point, I will say that based on my focus on mages, having played a double mage playthrough, I would maybe adjust cooldowns on spells to about as much as the surface they create would last. And lower the hail spell's damage so that its overall damage on magic shield isn't as obscene.
I would also make money a little bit easier to come by, while raising stats on enemies slightly higher than an equivalent balance would require.
Lastly, I would make the memory stat's utility increase, starting with a better ratio of slots per investment to something either 2 per 3 levels, or 3 per 5, mostly leaning towards the 3 per 5. Still thinking on whether the slot count increase is powerful enough as the sole role of Memory.

Haven't really got much data of my own yet, and even that's going to become very irrelevant once the iterations on the game and its balance start cycling.

Yeah, the point of this thread was to make people think. The whole discussion is pointless, but I always have fun with these kinds of things =D

I'd probably be inclined to increase armor and what not across the board by double or more. Add a few more options to regenerate armor such as abilities on shields and staves that have a moderate cool down (4 turns?).

Money curve definitely should be normalized a bit more.

Would like to see more combat actions like brace and overwatch.

And, of course, I would like to see abilities like counter-spell and parries.

How would skills like brace work? I think I'm familiar with overwatch because of XCOM, but what exactly would counter spells and parries look like if they were implemented?

You tryina' expose me as a fraud who can only criticize and play devil's advocate? Truuuuue.

The primary purpose of Brace is to drastically reduce incoming damage in order to force the opponent to spend more resources to eliminate you. It'll function similarly to delay where you can only use it before you spend any AP. The damage mitigation might be related to CON and scales by level or it could just be something like 50% damage reduction.

Counter abilities when cast would flash up something like *prepares a hidden ability* and trigger when the conditions are fulfilled. And it would have its own AP costs etc.

So, a counter spell would look something like this: 2AP, 6 turn cool down, Memory Cost: 1,2,3... , radius of something, prevent a spell from resolving if it was cast within the radius and has the same memory cost until the beginning of your next turn.

Parry would function similarly though it would have 4AP or so and the radius would be restricted to weapon range and only deal with attacks.

The reason I want these things in is to give the AI more defensive options because players will most likely be the ones taking the initiative.

Give all of the bullshit that we have to AI. Allow them to throw oil /acid barrels into fire right next to you, let them separate your party with teleports, teach high-level Leadership to their leader types (Alexandar, Dallis, the rest of the named magisters come to mind), that kind of thing. Specific enemies already use bombs and it's a step in the right direction.
AI in general needs a tune-up, but Larian are already working on it.

Tweak most CC. CC spells that deal good damage don't need 100% chance to disable the enemy. Same goes for AoE. Skills that disable enemies for multiple turns need to have their cooldowns increased.
Maybe bring back saving throws in some form. Just make sure they do something aside from forcing you to pump Int.
Source-based CC, if there is any, shouldn't be affected by this.

Some specific gripes: Blinding Radiance should only blind enemies that are looking at you.
Walk in Shadows was a mistake.
Enrage is busted. I'd say it could reduce your Con, but that'd severely fuck up the enemies that use it. Not sure what's the answer here.



I like the ideas, but I fear it might lead to enemies turtling instead of actually attacking you. Or trying to brace instead of launching a last-ditch assault at the end of a fight.
Counterspell sounds pretty great all-around though.

Oooooo, this sounds tasty! All great suggestions!

I mentioned in another thread that essentially the AI needs not only the same tools the players have but probably a little more.

The AI thematically should have different game plans, different ability pools to draw from, as well as resources (consumables, to call-ins, to whatever else) on the fly and spawned before the encounter begins (like when the map generates).

There needs to be more ways to regenerate armour. The spells are nice, but abilities on shields and a "defend" option like there was in OS1 would be great. So much of the game relies on armour and there's lots of ways to strip it, but not lots of ways to get it back. There's too much offense around it and not enough defense around it.

I don't understand why no one likes the phys/magic armor system

I think it's fine

I can see two problems with it: you have to open with damage, and you're defenseless after your armour drops. I'm okay with reducing the power of direct CC, but I think without any way to get your armour back characters feel weak after a couple rounds.

Definitely. We're going from a system where characters always have some sort of defenses based on the way you've spec'd them, to a system where most of your party will be defenseless after the first round or two, no matter how you spec them.

In D:OS1, the intensity of the battle was spread out throughout its complete length. Both CC and Damage abilities were used throughout.

In D:OS2, the entire intensity of the battle is in the first round, where all the damage abilities are used to get rid of everyone's armor, which is pretty boring. And after that, everyone just spams CC and no one has any chance of avoiding it, which I'd argue is pretty boring as well.

You have to assume they've done things to balance encounters for the current phys/magic armor system.

If they give us permanent armor instead of used-up armor, then they'll just re-balance the encounters for that system and we'll have basically the same result.

So the question is what do you really want? More survivability? Isn't that already kinda up to you, as the player?

Fyrestorme doing due diligence for Charity.

The 100% crit on enrage is probably the biggest thing that comes to mind for me, we had our friend 2h with enrage and warlord basically one shotting everything for free o.o

Okay. How would you balance this? Any idea works, such as "make it a flat damage boost that doesn't scale with scoundrel like crits do, disables criticals, and reduce chance to hit", or even "make it purely cosmetic and therefore relegated to a tool for intimidating the opponent in PvP". I'm sure the second one would be effective, because it would give us early access veterans instant PTSD flashbacks, acting as IRL CC.

I'm fine with the physical/magic armor system, but what I don't like is the lack of ability to resist CCs once it's gone. It's easy to keep enemies in stunlock, and it's easy to get stunlocked.

The remedy would be to, while keeping the armor system as is, implement a saving throw afterward. It may not be a great chance to resist, but it's a chance, nonetheless. The chance should fluctuate based on resistance attempts, too. If you fail to resist, your resistance goes up a bit. If you successfully resist, your resistance goes down a bit. This normalizes it some rather than leaving it entirely up to chance.

Do elemental resistances give a chance to resist CC, or do they just reduce damage from their respective sources?

For Enrage, what I would like to see is a penalty to critical damage added on, but the penalty is reduced by your crit chance, so your crit chance still matters. For instance, the base penalty could be 20%. So, if you have a 6% crit chance, your penalty would only be 14%.

An indirect nerf to Enrage would come in the form of crippling another overpowered ability called Crippling Blow. For an ability that is AoE and also applies a debuff, it does more damage to a single-target than any other non-source ability in the game. I think the nerf to Crippling Blow would come in the form of reducing how much of a damage bonus it gets from your weapon. Sword & Board warriors already kinda suck, so you don't want to just outright nerf the ability, but instead reduce it's effectiveness for meat cleaver warriors.

You have to admit, when you're playing a meat cleaver warrior (warrior using a two-hander and spec'd for pure damage output), after you Enrage, the first ability you usually use is Crippling Blow, and you know why that is.

True, true. Enrage is broken, Crippling Blow is broken. But even with nerfing those two things. Why would you play a mage, if you had no way to guarantee your CC anymore? Why would you waste your time gimping yourself with a class that can (barring hailstrike, wands) burst out 450 damage in a single turn using 8 AP, rage, savage sortilege and flesh sacrifice? Without any guarantee that you'll disable anything? What's to stop you from picking Warrior, and presumably having CC that's just as effective, or rangers with their special arrows, and in both cases, having many times the damage output, and often from longer ranges? This change that people keep proposing, of bringing back chance based CC, means either bringing back primary stat scaling again (which was bad design, since it pigeonholed you into investing in intelligence exclusively), or spells like Drain Willpower to guarantee that CC, and once again continue the boring infinite CC cycle that we had in the original. The only other options are to either A) make it so CC chances cannot be increased, rendering mage's strongest offensive option (double wands) just a lower damage, lower range version of bow attacks, and equating mage CC to that of grenades, or special arrows, or warrior CC, etc. or B) just adding more ways to restore armor/cleanse CC into the game. We saw plenty of that in EE, and it worked well at breaking the cycle, between Purifying Flames, Winds of Change, Cleansing Water, etc. Do you think that implementing such abilities could be a viable alternative to the nightmare that was the original's system of chance based CC?