Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Tactician mode feels busted

There are so many ways to cheese, you could aswell be cheesing, without knowing it.

Even knowing the fight in advance, were which enemie will stand, and how you can take them out without endangering yourself, can be quite a cheesy way.

As long as you don't see, how someone is playing, it can't be really said, if they are cheesing or not. So, saying: "It is totally easy, get gut or go back to classic" is pretty meaningless and gives even less value to a discussion than in other games.

Stop fooling yourself this is not brutal it is easy as fuck it is just unfun to play like this, seriously this people thinking this is "difficulty" when all the enemies have is bloated armors and a retarded as fuck AI.

Someone hasn't been to act 3 yet where Tactician mode is completely balancd around usin 3-source spell every fight if they want to kill the enemies before they act.

And even then, it isn't even guaranteed to kill.

And the last fight is so epic because enemies don't die straight away. so much exchange.

How it is fun cheesing here and there and using only crossbows/summons and oil?

The game knows that crossbow is too strong late game and stop producing Divine tier crossbow for the level 20 - 22 end game.

Arrow storm went from ridiculous broke to "highly damaging" with how shops all sell Epic instead of LEgendary and Divine crossbow.

"I cannot complete the content because the enemies are too strong, that means it is "easy as fuck""
?????????

It's amazing how the final boss fight can go from "Holyshitit'ssodifficultwhatdoIdo" to "Wow, that's actually not that hard" once you know what are you doing.

Makes me want to facedesk for the ridiculous amount of retry.

Dude, you really need to learn English...

Surely this is the game, to be able to work out how to do it all.

I'm still on my first play through, 60 hours in and level 17.

I'm playing tactician. I wouldn't want to be playing on classic.

/facepalm

[quote=Ellezard]Someone hasn't been to act 3 yet where Tactician mode is completely balancd around usin 3-source spell every fight if they want to kill the enemies before they act.

And even then, it isn't even guaranteed to kill.

And the last fight is so epic because enemies don't die straight away. so much exchange.[/quote]

If you mean nameless isle by act 3 then I do not see the problem. In fact it has been the easiest area so far, I barely use my source spells and most used one is the dome thing.

The difficulty in general has been dropping the further I get, maybe it is because I do most of the quests so I'm usually at least at the same level as my enemies.

That's part of Act 2. Act 2 becomes really easy because of how gears scales compared to enemies and that once you gain access to level 3 source spell, the difficulty is completely dropped.

Act 3 starts at Arx where encounters are level 18-20 and the game gears no longer allow you stomp all the time. They actually balance you fights around using the 3-source like Arrow storm/Meteor Shower and if you have red prince with you, is when you get probably the most tactical fight in the game IMO.

Atm i'm on the nameless, and finally i'm stomping enemies like a beast. I know, it will not last long, but i'm enjoying this a lot

The high armor values actually adds another level of complexity to the game which many people are not seeing. It is a phase of combat without CC and you need to treat it as such. I've come to enjoy that phase because once I get their armors down it's just a CC fest. DOSEE tactician was just a CC fest right from the start (or nuke them to hell with a mage from the start), which made it a little less fun (I still enjoyed it). DOS2 has two phases to the fight which makes it quite interesting. The game gives you many ways to get through this phase and you need to adapt.

It's not a cop-out on Larian's part simply because the solution was a simple one. Simple solutions sometimes yield the best results. The AI is mostly pretty damn good though. I should have written a list of all the crazy stuff they have done to me. The cheekiest was a melee 2H guy crippling my sword and board tank and walking just out of 1H melee range. Bastard.

Also I'm actually using all my consumables! When I pick up a potion or food I'm pretty damn excited. Normally when you finish a game of DOSEE tactician you have tons of arrows, grenades, potions and food in your inventory. I'm actually using everything now and it feels pretty awesome. In that case above with the 2H guy crippling my tank, it would have caused me to lose the fight if not for my single armor potion which I promptly drank.

Unfortunately this is too difficult for some people. My suggestion would be to create a difficulty between classic and tactician. I would venture a guess though that the same people who are not good enough to beat tactician and cannot acknowledge their own lack of skill in spite of other players doing it just fine, would be offended by there being a difficulty they cannot conquer. This is a reflection of society's greater problems with the mentality, "If I can't beat it then it shouldn't exist."

This is how it was in the old days though before full guides for every game under the sun on the internet. You play the game and get your ass kicked. You go compare notes with your buddies. You try again.

Dito.

really enjoying tactician so far. I think too many people are trying to bulldoze through a wall heads first and get reckt...
especially from the comments I read >_>
I was having some great difficult but fair fights without cheesing or AI doing completely dumb shit or whatever seems to be the issue for some.

Ai always tries to take out my most vulnerable member.
Ai even sacrifices itself (e.g. when shackled of pain) in order to kill someone off.
AI focus fires mostly.
Ai has been smart enough not to blow cooldowns on a bone armor heart of steel fortify stacked dude sporting 6k Armor.

every single party member has the means to regularly recover armor in some way. Throughout the whole fight my armors get broken and pushed back up. Frequently life drops into critical regions. A death might occur too.

through this hardship and analysis I was able to build towards my weaknesses. I now accept and anticipate that one of my heros might die. So i gave my tankiest char living on the edge + last rites just for that very often inevitable situation. resurrection scrolls also become cheap later on. investing into morning person for a hero who likes to die might not be a bad idea either.

probably most peopel are to stuck with their damage stat hoping for quick kills.
4 points in finesse / str usually mean almost nothing roughly 10% less dmg - yet the same points in con and you're suddenly playing in a whole different league having up to 700 more vitality at your disposal.
1 or 2 points more into hydro or geo instead of warfare or scoundrel don't seem big. but it all adds up and 10 % more damage means nothing if you still need 2 rounds to kill something. but 10% more recovery can mean the world if it prolongs your fight even just for one more round.

I then also see post about how huntsmen is "probably the worset" combat ability. They have no idea. Huntsman together with scoundrel and warefare scale multiplicative with your base damage from attribute and weapon.
thus huntsman can turn your damage formula into a quadruple polynom.

I have to fight for High ground a lot of the time and That is great. It takes the whole team effort to stop the enemies from raping my ranger up on the roof. just he by himself uses cloak and dagger + tactical retreat+ wings+ teleport + nether swap. it really is a whole fight in itself but a fun and important aspect to jugle with.

the witch north of cloisterwood in the firefield. Is insane when you don't know what's going on. but your team needs good fire resistance in order to beat her. So what you do is you find all the fire gear you can make some fire resist potions and let the person who you stack fire resist on also stack leadership as high as he can.
one would be suprised how well that can go.

Leadership and perseverance in general are super important stats in my opinion. every new piece of higher level armor that doesn't have perseverance on it where it should I first have to calc through whether the increase will net out vs the loss of perseverance.

I don't think people are considering this at all.

the 50% boost in stats does exactly one thing. It literately wrecks an easy mode strategy - glass cannons or the idea that you can focus down an enemy each round and overpower your enemies. Which is a great thing cause suddenly the most straightforward and boring strategy became useless and you have to become inventive.

I can only repeat what was previously stated, in that tactician mode has presented no discernible challenge so far because it’s simply extended the length of battles without creating any imaginative difficulty.

I don’t want to post any spoliers, but (and I'm trying to be as general as possible) there’s one particular fight in the blackpits against a group of oil slugs that’s been one of the highlights for me so far. This is a very cunningly designed fight that exemplifies what tactician mode should really be. The placement of the oil spills. The inevitable fire blaze that results. And then the fire immune/resistant slugs that appear later are all very devious contrivances that kept my non-overpowered party on its toes, forced me to actually think laterally and the result was highly rewarding.

There was no banal inflation of stats. Just very cunning design.

It was a tense battle for a party of non-exploitative builds, fairly levelled, using no cheese tactics or overpowered skills. To me, this is the way the game should be played, and it’s how tactician mode should have been structured – with clever ‘twists’ mid combat that keep you on your toes.

Of course, the ingenuity here all hinged around the randomness of the enemy encounters. You never knew how many enemies you were going to face, or what their strengths/weaknesses were going to be. All of the ‘random’ encounters in the game so far (read: battles introduce random enemies at random intervals) have been the most engaging. That’s why I support more randomness, especially for tactician mode.

The inflated stats are merely a chore. With enough workmanlike dedication, you can win – but there’s no sense of reward, since I never felt I had to use my imagination in the same way as the oil slug battle. It’s simply chipping away, chipping away, chipping away until Goliath falls – and it was never a challenge. Never ‘difficult’, because you merely use the same workmanlike strategy over and over to whittle down the inflated health. I won all of the tactician mode fights I fought. And thought all of them cheaply designed in the extreme.

Everyone that is saying that they are not cheesing AI or exploiting the game to get crazy amounts of gold are lying.

This difficulty is completely unfun to play.

I love tactician mode and I don't break the game. I even find it easy most of the times.

I do engage on a health amount of pick pocketing, keep most of my bartering gear and waste a little time thinking where to place my chars. Nothing game breaking.

I don't understand this mentality that if you could not stroll trough the game on the hardest difficult, therefore no one can. That's why the lower levels of the game are there for. If you are not having fun playing on tactician, try classical or explorer out and enjoy the game.

I would say that tactician isn't exactly an enjoyable difficulty, really. There's definitely things I want to tweak.

This is speaking from a playthrough sitting towards the end of Arx right now, and it's gotten absurdly easy actually, with no fights posing a serious challenge.

The difficulty curve is really weird. The beginning and halfway through act 2 was absurdly, absurdly difficult and really, really fun, then it got quite easy and never stopped getting easier.

Secondly, once the fights in the early part got to stunlock, it was just tedious. Quite tedious. But the initial part was actually really fun and seemed really tactical. I think there's tweaks to it, though, that could be done.

tactician mode should be renamed min/max mode then you will have fun in early levels, once you get enough skills just lol at the enemy in later acts. NO NEED for any tactics other than min/max each character. NO need to spread skills around at all just go pure nuf said. NO need for a magic and physical split just go pure you will break armor then break them. the only skills you want to mix in is invis/ports/adrenaline.

EDIT: nah honestly there is still some tactics involved. just dont try and build fun/split up builds in a games hard mode i guess thats just asking for a downfall. really like elletard says you should learn the basics in easy mode. Then in tactics mode you know what tactics to use and where to use them.