Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Let's talk about durability

Haven't posted in a while, but finally got to playing D:OS 2. Quite enjoying it. Anyway, I also found the repair hammer change questionable, and the identify glass one moreso. Repair hammer consumption at least disincentives chest-bashing, but barely. A single unbreakable weapon makes that a non-issue, or just use spells as error3 said. Or even just using the million extra junk weapons you find. An extremely ineffective solution with the cost of more inconvenience.

I prefer other ways to "punish" bashing open chests and doors. Breaking items in the chest, like Surrealalis suggested, would be a strong deterrent. Maybe just slightly, but permanently reducing the armor/damage on weapons and armor looted in a broken open chest?

Maybe a few abilities that set items to 0 durability could be cool, but mostly player abilities. For example:

Careless Strike: Strike with a high damage and guaranteed crit + bleeding (or whatever), but you break your weapon.

Overcharge (Aerothurge?): Double the stats of a piece of armor for 2-3 turns, but at the end of that time, it breaks. Difficult to balance, but could be cool.

Scales to Bone (Geomancer?): Heal for the remaining durability + X on an equipped item, breaking it.



These would synergize nicely with a talent that would let you equip weapons or armor for no AP once a turn or something like that.

Even these abilities could be easily done without durability just as well. Make them unequip the items and unable to re-equip them for a few turns, or the like. It's going to take a lot to make durability interesting, but abilities that interact with durability would be a great start. They would make for both tactical decisions about when you'd want to sacrifice an equipped item and resource ones, where using these abilities would cost money, though they could also open up new strategies for using the many weapons and armor you find that you might otherwise throw away.

If limited use repair hammers stay, I also agree they should have a repair amount instead of just single use. The higher the blacksmithing, the more you can get out of one hammer. And if that's the case, a repair all equipped items button would remove a ton of tedium. I don't know if it's worth the effort to make durability interesting, though.

My humble suggestion for a few changes with the durability:

- Remove the durability and replace it with just two states "intact" and "broken"
- Each "intact" item has a chance of being "broken" upon its use: a weapon when it is used to stike someone or something, armour when the character wearing is attacked
- Different items should have a different chance of becoming broken: kitchen knives e.g. 10% (meaning that a kitchen knive will break on average every 10 times it is used), legendary swords less than 1%
- Increase the chance for being broken when attacking doors or chests
- If an item is broken, it can no longer be used and must be repaired (for example with a repair hammer which can be consumed)

With such a system, there is always an element of surprise of a weapon becoming unusable in combat. The player also does not need to repair all items after the combat but only one or two which got broken.

I don't like the aspect of the idea that all melee and ranged characters now have a chance to have their weapon break mid combat. That is probably actually worse than any of the effects of the current system.

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Are we kidding? We must be kidding, it must be. Weapon degradation and durability just adds an obnoxious level of micromanagement that I have hated ever since I played Diablo, and that was 15 years ago. Weapon degradation doesn't add "depth" or "fun" to any game whatsoever, at best it just adds another annoying feature that you MUST keep tabs on whenever you play. Same with Morrowind (F*** you werewolves and your armor-rending attacks, I've consumed more repair hammers and prongs playing Bloodmoon's main storyline than I did with the vanilla campaign, and that says a lot!), Oblivion, Fallout 3 (where every single gun and armor felt like it was made of glass judging by how frequently they needed repairs) and New Vegas (ditto).

I don't remember Baldur's Gate I and II or Skyrim ever having had equipment degradation, yet those three titles are considered the undisputed kings of the genre.

If using weapons to destroy chests and doors is the main concern, just use a script that creates only useless broken items once you've smashed a chest open, like Neverwinter Nights 2 did, and make "sensitive" doors unbreakable.

Another thing...magnifying glasses for identifying equipment? More micromanagement. The early access' campaign thus far is great, but one thing that constantly annoyed me was having 10 unidentified items in my inventory but only 3 magnifying glasses, and having to scrounge the whole map for more glasses. How about a Right click + a lore check as it happened with Neverwinter Nights?

IRL armor would degrade quickly and weapons are sharpened between each battle typically. If you've done a bit of cooking you would know that knives get dull with the quickness. That being said, I don't know about you guys but I don't play games because I want to experience the most boring aspects of life. Maybe that's just me though.

I think that it all boils down to the question: Do you want the game to be completely deterministic where you can carefully plan for each and every situation or do you want the game to throw at you a few nasty surprises (like a weapon breaking in the middle of a fight) which force you to rethink your whole strategy? While I am a strong advocate of the latter, I understand that some people don't like the element of randomness.

Considering that I've been practicing HEMA for the past 10 years, I can kinda see your angle. But if we're looking at things from that angle, IRL you can't shoot fireballs, magic wands don't have magic at all, and the best you can get out of a staff is a walking stick or firewood. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the only intelligent being on the planet (unless you consider maybe whales, dolphins, ravens and african grey parrots) and eating food doesn't instantly restore your health.

Besides, as someone has already pointed out, you can effectively break open doors and chests with magic, therefore nullifying the intended purpose behind weapon durability.



That is correct. I'm not playing D:OS 2 because I love having my weapons and armor break every 20 minutes and repairing them.

Deterministic. If it was possible I would remove the concept of rng from strategy games entirely. I hate rng with a passion when it comes to strategy games. It's fine in DnD because it is not set on rails so you can "fail forward" as it were. In single player games on rails, not fine at all.

This is a very bad idea.

It was like this for some weapons in valkyrie profile and it was super frustrating, so I never used weapons that could break no matter how good they were.

I think we should remove durability and have broken items as penalty for bashing things. If we keep durability this should only happen when you bash things or when you or the enemy use a special skill that may damage equipment. If we keep durability, please add a "repair all" button.

Games should be fun. This game is about exploration, story and tactical combat. It is not a realistic middle age combat simulation or a survival game. I do not remember any classic RPG where repairing or identifying added much fun to the game. When games used very complex system regarding repair and identify it was very frustrating, not fun. Skip it completely or keep it simple. Focus on the parts of the game that make most fun. People in this forum will tell you what they find most important and fun, and I do not remember anyone said repairing equipment.

Nope, it's not just you.



Agree again. I'd also remove the scourge that is level-scaled content (e.g. shop inventories scaling to player level, which I believe is still in as of D:OS 2 early access), but that's a whole 'nother topic.



Exactly.

I think it will be great, if guards react to broken doors.They think like "Look somebody crashed door, we must go in!".If you use lock piking guards will ignore the door. Or (I remember in first DOS was hearing) guards can hear you when you attacking door.

I don't think this would be any kind of improvement on the current system.

It would result in equipment breaking much more frequently, possibly in each combat if the RNG is bad. Even if the chance of a break is only 5%, that's one out of every 20 attacks, which is a lot given how many times you can attack in combat.

Once the item breaks in combat, you have two options: Waste your AP on a repair or flee combat and run back to a blacksmith to repair it, then run back.

This also dramatically affects melee classes much more than any others.

"Surprises" are not always a good or fun thing. I don't know where some people get that idea, that if something happens which is unexpected, that's automatically fun. Life offers up lots of incredibly horrible and unfun "surprises".

Larian could program a surprise "Hard Drive Wipe LOL" which has only a 1/10000 chance of occurring when you save your game, but that wouldn't be fun, now would it?

Havent' read this entire thread; but i kind of like damage to item reducing effectivenss and not having the ability of repairing things to 100%. This means that things will wear out over time. For example if you could only repair things to 95% then after 10 repairs it would be down to 65%; if effectiveness was 1.4 of % then the effectiveness of 10ac would be down to approx 7.8. Type of armor could impact max repairbility. Of course if items wear out too fast this can be quite annoying et all. However, with this system any item worn too many encounter will eventually break which means you will be forced to change items over the course of the game.
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I don't know how well D:OS-2 items will progress but i know in d:os-1 it was not uncommon for me to find the 'best' item for my character early (amazing number of mid-level items were used until level 18 or 19). Anyway just a thought.

So, most of the items you were using at level 18-19 were found in the mid-game (level 9-12)? If I am not mistaken, loot in D:OS 1 is scaled based on the level of the chest/enemy which drops it and maybe partly on your level. Also, most of the loot in D:OS 1 is RNG-based, found in loot or bought off of vendors. So what that suggests is that you didn't have all that many good loot drops for the last third of the game.

To me, that makes your suggestion of loot degrading into uselessness extra-bizarre.

This is not Diablo or an MMO. The game does not contain respawning enemies and infinite loot, and probably not even a huge amount of unique items compared to a Diablo game. You can't trade good items between characters - you have to take what you get.

It's already annoying to go for ages without finding good weapons - my archer and mage were using their basic level 1 crude weapons for a very long time because nothing good dropped and I couldn't afford much of anything for sale. Adding on degradation so that eventually your gear breaks down just seems like it would be a further punishment for the RNG not giving you anything good to replace it.

While I agree with your general sentiment, Skyrim isn't even close to being one of the best RPG games, and it certainly is behind both Morrowind and New Vegas. Skyrim will not stand the test of time the way Morrowind did, and nobody will remember it's story the way New Vegas is remembered(people already forget Fallout 4 exists).

Not to mention that given the specific goals of equipment maintenance being put into those games(enhancing realism, justifying a skill tree outside of sporadic use, encouraging weapon variety), their absence in Skyrim is actually a detriment(especially when you consider all the other tedious junk that got put into it).

I will note that even in Morrowind (which despite its flaws is definitely a classic), the repair mechanic was much less obnoxious than in D:OS as currently implemented: you only had one character's equipment to worry about, and the repair UI was also very convenient - you clicked once on the repair hammer, then could easily click through a sorted list of items to repair all worn and carried equipment (rather than having to move the mouse dozens of times between the hammer/each equipment piece on a player's paper doll/for each of up to 4 party members). Again, though, my personal preference is a "repair all" button (if Larian insists on keeping weapon/armor durability in the game), or better yet, eliminating weapon/armor degradation from combat altogether.

I'm basing the suggestion off of dos-1 loot drop which was plentiful though the best items (for my build) was not so plentiful. Yuo have to make a hard choice what you use and when. Obviously if items wear out the loot drop has to be designed around that mechanic.

I wrote a big huge thing about the importance of identifying in games until I remembered that it's not on the table.

Here's what I think about durability: It's a cool mechanic in games where you're worried about how to stretch your resources, games with survival elements and stuff. I like those games, I modded my Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim to have food/water/rest mechanics and put the wonderful Frostfall mod into Skyrim and had a really cool experience. Worrying about your weapons and armour being in shape because you're so far from home and you need them and you can't get back easily to have someone fix them for you is a nifty feeling. Being lost, strained on supplies, and worried about your equipment's integrity can be a fun time.

Durability is also important in dungeon crawlers, as a natural way to create a "you can only go so far" mechanic. Durability, inventory space, quests and potions all work together in those games to make a rhythm of how long you spend out and when you come back. It's very useful there not as an atmospheric thing, but as an integral part of the gameplay loop.

For this game? I donno. I get the idea that you don't want people bashing down everything they see, but durability doesn't help that cause everyone's already probably gonna be at least half wizard and they'll just magic the doors down. I get you want some gold sinks, but it wasn't exactly expensive to keep up armour and weapons, and mages get to skip that whole thing anyway. So I'm really struggling to see how durability fits into this game in particular. I'm not opposed to its existence, but I have a hard time figuring out if the game needs it at all because there's so many ways to not care about it and it doesn't really enhance the flavor of the game.

Let's be objective: whether you like skyrim or not, it's still considered a masterpiece by a wide margin of the audience as well as critics. The story may be run-of-the-mill, but it is wrapped in a really nice package of narrative, environments, and functional mechanics. None of which thankfully included weapon degradation.

As for fallout 3, fallout new vegas, morrowind and oblivion: those games are classics, sure, but let me ask you this: are they classics because of the equipment degradation, or in spite of the equipment degradation? I don't remember anyone having ever said "repairing your equipment surely adds that little touch to the game, that's why it's so perfect!".

Morrowind and Oblivion did have skill trees focused around repairing armor and weapons, sure, but since you prongs and hammers didn't cost that much and didn't weight that much, there simply was no reason to invest in those skills if not doing so just involved having to use those prongs 2-3 more times. Even in F3 and NW it just set the limit of how much damage you could repair, and the mechanic per se was still a pain in the backside. Apart from that, am I the only one finding ridiculous that a measly 10 mm pistol can degrade a set of power armor, usually designed to turn its wearer into a walking tank? And then we had the exact opposite of the spectrum, with deathclaws being capable of making your equipment unusable in 4-5 blows, which forced you to always carry a spare set of power armor along for on-field repairs, with all the ludicrousness that it entailed. But I'm digressing.

What I'm trying to say is: degrading equipment has hardly ever done anything to enhance gameplay or the fun factor, in most cases it's always been a major hassle implemented mostly for strategic reasons, as someone has already pointed out.

D:OS is neither a diablo clone where every 10 monsters you kill you get a weapon drop and you have to strategize your crawl through 10-levels-deep dungeons, nor a mmorpg where equipment degradation is a way to keep the economy in check - and guess what, even there it still doesn't work, as all those players with 400+ millions of gold coins can attest.

That's exactly why I say Skyrim isn't a good game.
I enjoyed my time with Skyrim, but not because of what was there when I first played it.
It's not a masterpiece, it's a platform for mods, which are it's only redeeming quality.

The same isn't true when talking about Morrowind, for which mods were just a nice bonus, and New Vegas earns it's place in gaming history by being the true successor to the Fallout franchise(as opposed to Fallout 3, which was average at best).

In both those games, gear maintenance was a part of the overall flavor and never to the detriment of the respective games(especially New Vegas, where it was an important mechanic for Survival mode).


As far as Original Sin 2 goes, we do however agree that the repair mechanics do not add to the experience, so let's not derail the thread further.