Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback The CC is over done to a ruining experience

Except it only comes into play if CC chain lock isn't going on. Which is if someone bothers to employ the tactic once armor is gone

Take a one vs two with the AI. Break their armor and stun them. Now repeat that till they die.

That's such a doable strategy it's game breaking.

The only counter argument is "group tactics" which doesn't help cause if my follow up points of defensive vs aggressive and the fact that divide and conquer is easy to manage with patience

At this point what you are talking about isn't something that can be quantified. As I have stated numerous times, these games are very clearly not intended to be perfectly balanced offerings. If you can manage to CC down npcs and find a way to do it then great, more power to you. There are plenty of situations currently in the game where that specific solution will not comprehensively solve a combat and that would be the only thing I consider to be a problem in a game designed to be so volatile. A one size fits all solution is bad, finding a way to manage specific situations isn't even if that situation is common.

Except I can do it through 60%+ of the EA easily. I can do it to the boss easily. This is without me actually attempting to break the game with it too

It most assuradly approaches a one size fits all. If it's wasn't such a prolific problem I wouldn't be calling it a problem. You say the situation is simply common, if that situation is 75%+ of encounters than the devs have failed at the stated goal of consistent difficulty and the problem is common enough to be nearly one size fits all. At this point it's very uncommon to run into a situation where the above problem doesn't come into play.

It should be the other way around.

Nobody appreciates it when a game can be broken with one tactic. Goes back to the same reasons people are discussing why the warrior needs work cause it kills everything to easily and why the elf racial skill makes every other one moot

Alright, well that's progress. We've at least identified the issue. There needs to be further variance in the way specific enemies defend against attacks. Not just CC, but attacks in general. An easy but not very elegant solution would be to just grant immunities to certain keystone enemies. A slightly better, but not perfect, solution would be to have immunities based on race. A good example of this would be having creatures with more than two legs or none at be immune to knockdown. This sort of system makes it so that there can never be a true one size fits all answer but not in the best way possible, I'll try to think of a better way though.

Now you get it.

The most elegant solution and more readily and generally applicable would be to evolve the current armor system and how defens against CC is managed.

Otherwise the devs have to consider each individual enemy type and so on.

There's also the fact that the solution you propose for the enemies doesn't solve the same problem on the player side.it just hasn't seemingly come into play often cause the AI isn't the smartest yet

Yeah, I'm with you there. I just think that this fresh approach to defense is really nice and I'd hate to see the baby go out with the bathwater in this pool of CC hatred... :-/

I like the new armor system too

It's just that it's still in it's infancy. It needs some growing up to flesh itself out.

It could've potentially stood as is but that would mean changing everything else around it to suit it at this point.

I've only advocated for one of two evolutions of the current system; notice how both include the armor system?

This thread is about the CC. CC is an issue a major issue for weaker classes. It prevents you from making classes that dont spec heavily into defense against them and allows the enemy to stunlock. Mixed with the ini of never going first, in 2 rounds they get for your 1 on classic, they drain your armor and proceed to stun you while most classes cant break through their armor or magic armor in one turn.

There is no defensive skillset, only a handful of defensive skills in total through all of the skill pools, and only one not emphasized way to increase defenses outside of armor. What part of the game makes you think that they want "tanks" to be a viable option?

Edit

The emphasis is pretty clearly on executing a well planned strategy to take control of the battlefield. How you achieve that can vary, but that end result is what they have decided is what people should be aiming for. You're free to not be satisfied with that, but that's the way it is.

Me and my friend fought a battle about 20x never having first move. The opening move for the enemy team was to stun me or him which is instant. So now im down. The other would use frozen grenade freezing him. We lose our first turn, he loses his second turn. They effectively won by doing nothing but cc. Every fight where the enemy had CC ended like this with us reloading and having to bait the enemy with CC. Most of the fights turned into this, "He who CCs wins." By saying its more tank proned, classes that build into defense and stack high magic armor and regular armor only benefit from not getting permanently cc'd. If you want to make a team of 4 squishies the sheer amount of CC prevents this. The ability to pick and choose your classes for different play styles is limited.

What makes it a horrible fight system is you literally turn every fight into a CC war, add the horrible ini system and this just becomes an increasingly annoying fight where you enter battle and just explode, unless you yourself keep so far distance that their first move spends all their AP and you stunlock them on your first move. Tactics shouldn't be I avoid the enemy to make them burn their moves so they are useless, so I can stunlock them to turn them into meat shields. That is a boring fight system.

Initiative system isn't horrible.
AI is just given higher initiative because it's dumb right now.
Grenades offering CC too easily is a problem. (but one abuse able by the PCs as well)
Fear doesn't destroy magic armor.
Stop redo-ing a fight that you are losing.

CC is happening too easily for a variety of reasons, which is not something anybody in the thread is disagreeing with.
It's simply too prevalent for this stage of the game (remember having to frost strike someone multiple times to freeze them because it only applied chilled?) Ya, we are missing that right now.

@DontTouchMyHoHos

I almost exclusively play all squishy teams including my first full playthrough and have never had much issue with getting chain CC'd. If you are having trouble, try equipping some magic armor which will, in the worst case scenario, at least prevent the first hit against you from CCing you. I don't think anyone here was saying that building tanky is the answer and I was actually arguing that building tanky is intentionally pretty much impossible.

@Surrealialis



I and many others disagree to varying degrees. I won't speak to how specific others feel about the situation but I for one thoroughly enjoy the high stakes, volatile play encouraged by the current system. The only real issue there, in my eyes, is that the initiative system is terrible which leads to many feeling frustrated by the supposedly unstoppable CC chaining. This stems from the stat system which is also terrible for very different reasons.

Currently when you level up your effective power, at least as indicated by the UI, drops and in order to get it back you have to invest your points into your primary stat of choice. As a mage, it's hard for me to make the decision to pay a few points into wits to improve my initiative or any other flex stat you might want because level ups are holding our damage hostage and the ransom is all of our stats.

This is the core issue right now. Instead of having each point of Int/Str/Fin increase our damage by a flat or static amount (Something very easy to balance around), we have this weird 30% min/max cap system that doesn't reward the player for becoming a pure glass cannon. 30% damage bonus for a glass cannon is terrible, especially when you NEVER go first and die to a gentle breeze because of your build path.

The bonus needs to be additive and rewarding, not an exponential pain in the ass. Why is my character, hilariously enough, at the "Peak" of power at the start of the game, with me chasing that 30% ceiling for every level afterwards? We're supposed to get STRONGER as we quest, adventure and plunder. Not weaker.

You didn't say what fight this was specifically, but I get the strong feeling that you are talking about the first two magisters on the beach prior to getting to the Fort Joy Ghetto.

Those guards are level 4 and you were most likely level 1 with base gear and skills -- so of course it's an extremely difficult fight. (I'll let others debate if that fight should be moved, scaled down, or avoided till later)

I'm not here to really argue how crazy CC is or even suggest changes.

I'm actually just here to express my surprise that you frequently mention that you never go first and offer help.

Putting points into Leadership on one or more characters is an effective way to improve your initiative for your entire party.

You can also put points into Wits (really useful at the first couple levels) or equip gear that increases Initiative/Wits.

Lastly, just like that first encounter with the magisters will show -- levels do matter greatly and contribute to your initiative.

Anyways, I know that doesn't solve what you view as CC issues, but hopefully you and your friend can enjoy the game a bit more now.

Cool, go discuss ini in the ini thread with me then. This isn't about ini.

I've been doing a dual lone wolf playthrough in OS1 in between testing OS2 and providing feedback and I can say that CC is an issue in both games.

If you have higher initiative and a lot of CC, it's basically a free win. The enemy will be stunned, knocked down, frozen, etc, while you beat on them, buff yourself, and while the CC skills you JUST USED move towards being off cooldown allowing you to use them again. It's incredibly cheap. Even with 2-3 people I've found I can CC everyone fairly easily in OS2, and then annihilate people with my warrior while they're helpless.

But it works both ways. We only have one act so far, but since the system is fundamentally the same, it's the same as OS1 insofar that, if you have shit initiative/are facing a lot of enemies/don't have a full party, you are entirely at the mercy of CC. You can find all your characters disabled in the first turn and then you get to just watch yourself die as the game plays itself. Not good, and makes harder difficulties/something like an ironman mode an exercise in frustration and cheap CC exploitation from both sides.

Honestly, aside from a couple of 1 turn disables, I think most CC simply needs to be changed from hard CC to soft. Don't disable people; gimp them. Frost can kill your movement, shock can kill your accuracy, etc. But either us or the enemies being helplessly beat on is bad. It was bad in the first game and it's bad now.

@DontTouchMyHoHos Whoa! I was trying to sidebar and help you out, not derail the topic.

What my issue is, everyone has these things to mitigate CC, but that is the exact issue. The entire fight is to mitigate and avoid CC. You can't fight the enemy you fight the CC. CC is so prevalent that it becomes the focal point of every battle.

A good chunk of the fights in the game don't even have any CC in them and most of them don't have a significant amount. It's really just specific fights that are causing people trouble, which is why it's important to understand how to mitigate CC for those fights.

They appear to have made it so that all shields provide magic armor in addition to the armor they provided before so now we have reliable access to magic armor earlier. This should smooth out the early play experience for most now.

On of my main issues with CC is, it makes fights mostly to easy. No risk in failure, because your hard CC will always work. If the enemie is under control he has no chance of escape this control.