Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Poll on the armor system

Well this one is easy. Gemonacy on 1 or all 4 people in group. Polymorph, necro and warfare on 1 person wich uses plate. You can buff that one person past 17k armor, then just use 1 overwhelm. Done. All armor gone.

I'd like to see something closer to this:

1. All attacks deal some amount of damage to all armor types.
2. You need to eat through both Armor types to start damaging health with any kind of attack
3. Physical attacks deal 75% damage against Physical Armor and normal damage to Magic Armor
4. Magic attacks deal 75% damage against Magic Armor and normal damage against Physical Armor
5. Maybe those could be swapped if that makes more sense, with Physical attacks being the counter to Magical armor and vice versa
6. Some attacks would deal bonus damage to Armor, something like "Sunder Armor, deals X - Y damage, and a bonus A - B damage against Physical armor"
7. These special attacks could come in every permutation, e.g. a physical attack that deals extra damage to physical, a physical attack that deals extra damage to magic, a magic attack that deals extra damage to physical, and a magic attack that deals extra damage to magic
8. The Resist system can stay the same. This way you'd try to focus down an enemy's weakest armor type and then use a crowd control spell of that type before going to work on the other armor type/health. Right now, by the time you get around to being able to CC someone, you may as well just kill them instead.

I think this also solves the issue of hybrid characters and mixed groups being less optimal. If you routinely need to eat through both physical and magical armor, then a character/group that can do both isn't at a disadvantage.

You also don't remove the option of pure physical or pure magical groups because of those abilities that damage the opposite armor type. You even have the perfect system in place for those abilities. Take that "Sunder Armor" example ability, combine it with any elemental skill book, and get Sunder Magical Armor. Now your pure physical team isn't weak to magic armor anymore.

This is too much for an official change, but I assume something like this could be modded.

Larian will pick up only those ideas that fit with their ideas or dont drastically change them. The only worthwhile result of these kinds of discussions is whether some modders pick up a good idea or not.

The Baardwark Bard mod should be the best option to hope for since it also includes changes to CC effects. And may also change how armors function.

The armor system and CC effects are very codependant and both need changing, not just one, to really have a better and more tactical gameplay.

The way to do this is to make a lot of softer CC effects that do not completely stun or freeze enemies but cause softer debuffs and similar negative effects. And then also keep hard lock CC effects - as critical hit success only. This would make them rare and hard to achieve, but still available because they are fun and tactically useful abilities - if they are rare and hard to achieve.

Some further balancing of how crits happen and what requirements they should have in order not to be too easy to achieve would then be relatively easier to add.

This could also improve value of Wits.

Constitution could then give resistance to critical strikes - and therefore higher chance to avoid hard lock CC effects, which would make it more valuable.

Thus the attributes would be balanced and improved.


Armors of course, should work in some form of percentage based defense/damage reduction as i (and several others) already suggested.
It could be a simple point for point system because that is elegant and easy to implement - and extremely easy to understand even by the most casual of players.

While the insane amounts of armor and Hp numbers need to be toned down. Dealing in thousands of points is pointless.- ba dum-tshh.
Its literally pointless bloat that serves no purpose.
All numbers should be lowered into hundreds at most across the board. Armor, vitality/HP and damage values.

Thats not a big demand or a big issue but it would make the whole system more elegant, lean and mean.

Do mods prevent achievements?

I think the game designers at Larian don't really know what crowd controll is and why current armor system renders every cc skill and tanks useless.

Because the game had an early access and many ea-players reported this flaw.

Hate it ...

Overall the game is much better than DOS1 but because of this system it isnt.

This also makes physical damage compared to magic damage VASTLY SUPERIOR, why ? Because there is no armor anymore which reduces physical damage, only the shield system but both sides have to damage through their shield type.

But magic damage also gets reduces by resistances of mobs and often they are also immune to one type. Now you could argue that they also have minus resistances but it means you have to distribute equally into 2 damage types, a phyhsical damage user dont have to do this.

So if you want to play this game ideally you would take 3 physical damage users and one pure healer /sigh.

And it just feels so wrong and also chaotic with this system, like you have sometimes spells which gets damage from str. instead of intellect or vice versa and "melee" CCs that are immune from magic shield.

I have so many cool freezing, cc spells and status effects which most of the time just dont do anything. Sure if the shield is down but guess what ? The fight usually is then over aswell.

Dont like this system a bit, this is so sad because the game overall is superb but because of this DOS1 is much MORE FUN.

Shield system would have made sense for buffs only but since every armor piece and nearly every mob has it ..... /sigh.

Hi, if you are troubled by armor system so much, I really recommend this mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1139221227&searchtext=
BUT because it doesnt change player armours, your party becomes bit stronger than it should be, so I would recommend playing on tactician difficulty now, but its upto you of course!

Just make CC effects ignore all the armor, on Tactician every mob gnawls through any armor type with just one hit so this Status protection almost never works in your favor.

Well thats part of the difficulty, you must outsmart them, not outstat them!

[quote=TsunAmik]Well thats part of the difficulty, you must outsmart them, not outstat them! :)[/quote]
I tried to outsmart them but it was resisted by physical armor.

That was not smart enough. Use your surroundings, high grounds, teleports, barrels, line of sight, positioning, scrolls...
Not just "mah stun"...

Because lets be fair, if they had every first turn, and you could get CC´d indefinitely, there would be helluva lot of complaining aswell

I made a mod that makes most of the lesser debuffs apply through armour. All hard CC still needs armour to be destroyed.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1139858748

[quote=crusher1980]Hate it ...

Overall the game is much better than DOS1 but because of this system it isnt.

This also makes physical damage compared to magic damage VASTLY SUPERIOR, why ? Because there is no armor anymore which reduces physical damage, only the shield system but both sides have to damage through their shield type.

But magic damage also gets reduces by resistances of mobs and often they are also immune to one type. Now you could argue that they also have minus resistances but it means you have to distribute equally into 2 damage types, a phyhsical damage user dont have to do this.

So if you want to play this game ideally you would take 3 physical damage users and one pure healer /sigh.

And it just feels so wrong and also chaotic with this system, like you have sometimes spells which gets damage from str. instead of intellect or vice versa and "melee" CCs that are immune from magic shield.

[/quote]

You seem not to realise some enemys have physical resistance. Examine the Genie if you happen to meet him in combat ;]

problem is not just you cant CC them all. Real problem is ineffectiveness of player's parties where 2 parts of it dealing different damage type, so enemy gets doubled advantage in defence (to CC or just to kill). It's not about difficulty, it's about that the game, which claims total freedom, forces you to play with only physical or only elemental party to be more effective. That's dumb. Just dumb. Dumber than taunt that is not work because of armor so it have no use now...
Looks like i have to wait another year for D:OS 2 EE. Maybe then devs would realize that and change it for some more reasonable concept.

[quote=Sergey Butsenov] ... It's not about difficulty, it's about that the game, which claims total freedom, forces you to play with only physical or only elemental party to be more effective... [/quote]

Not at all true for my friends and me. We are a hybrid team, playing blind and therefor doubtfully optimized very well (case in point, just found out how initiative works today, having essentially wasted about 5-10 attribute points across the party), and we are doing fine on tactitian mode. It was very hard in the beginning, when still in rags, but after fort joy it's not hard but doable. We very rarely die anymore and only rarely needs to reload a fight.

But who knows, it might get worse later in the game, tho I've seen people stating otherwise as well.

Again, the problem mentioned by Sergey is not difficulty, but the fact that to optimize (the word "force" is maybe going a little bit far) your party, it would be "easier" with a party with only one type of damage. Which is to be fair mostly true.

What is not true? I didn't tell that you can't play with that. Re-read my message and try to play all 4 phys-DD party and you gonna do what you already did much easier.

Excellent.

Even such a relatively small change will add a lot to the gameplay.

You can delete posts yourself?

Forgot its a part of the edit options, and exactly where. See it now.