Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General The lack of skill variety is the issue, not armor

A lot of people have been suggesting how to fix the armor system by adding some kind of scaling resist and such. I honestly feel like they are tackling the issue from a completely wrong approach. Adding some random RNG won't make things more tactical, they make thing even more min-maxy with your build dedicated to removal of RNG for it to be viable.

The current armor system is fine. The problem is that nearly every skill in the game gets countered by it and there's only one strat around it atm. Almost every offensive skill in the game just "Deal damage, Leave X thing around, Inflict Y if armor is depleted". When you look at it that way, it's no wonder the game becomes a DPT race because there's nothing to do but to deal more and more damage.

All we have to do is simply introduce some skills that do not get hard countered by the armor systems with their own approach and counters. It will add way more tactics to the game while also being much easier to work with.

Here are some I can think of on the spot

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1) Delayed CC effect that goes though immunity

If turn-1 CC with no room to act is a massive issue, then make it a turn-1 CC after you get to act.

Something like

Hydro : Cold Blood

Deals A water damage to the enemies in the area and inflict them with Cold Blood.

Cold Blood: At the end of your turn, freezes you. (Goes through magic shield). Removed by taking X amount of fire damage or Y ticks of fire damage.

This kind of skill are very powerful but also come with their own counterplay. It gives the player more option and when they are inflicted with it, force them to make a vital decision. The counterplay is already in the game anyway like using Lizard racial on a frozen teammate to remove the frozen, might as well explore it.

2) Skills that scales with the enemy armor.

We have reactive armor that scale with our armor. How about an offensive spell that scale with the enemy armor? They are useful as long as the enemies have armor but become weaker once they are depleted so you can't just use them on every turn.

Some kind of "Armor swap" debuff skill would also be interesting to have. If the enemy hard counter your damage type but is weak against the other, just swap it around.

3) Lack of pierce damage and hybrid skills that can make use of it

Hybrid damage type could easily be fixed with more piercing damage in the game as it will allow mixed damage to always help each other. Shame there's a very limited amount of skill that can do it and items barely give piercing damage.

Something like Crack armor (Geo/Warfare) /Crack magic shield (Hydro/Warfare) shield would be awesome to have.

While crack armor/Crack magic shield is active, skills of that damage type deals 20% additional damage and half of the total damage becomes piercing damage. (So if it does 100 magic damage, cracked magic shield will receive 120 damage, 60 to magic shield, 60 to health)

And introduce a counter to them like "Fortify removes crack armor". This also introduces more tricks like using crack Armor to remove the enemy Fortify just so you can use teleport on them.

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Trying to change the core of the game will just lead to more issues than it solves because the whole game is already balanced around that. Take advantage of it and add interesting skills instead. The current gameplay is very consistent so it shouldn't be too difficult to focus on adding new mechanic/approach to gameplay.

But I suspect the impact of these skills won't be much smaller than changing core mechanics, the game wasn't balanced around having a different anti-CC mechanic, it wasn't balanced around having a lot of armor countering skills too.

There are plenty of skills. Much more than EE. Some of the schools have +20 spells.

I have to say this is one of the more constructive suggestions that doesn't simply turn back to the Saving Throws system of D:OS1, so props for that. You seem to be focusing on the aspect of character building and interactivity in combat, which I think definitely advances the design philosophy of combat and the armor system in a way everyone can appreciate.

The idea of Delayed CCs is a fantastic one, and I think that introducing them as you've described would help introduce another layer of depth to character building and combat; a Delayed CC is far more interactive and seems to suit the current Armor system very well. Having to account for, manage, and react to these CCs rather than wholly diving through the DPS race sounds like it'd be a lot more engaging.

I also agree that there is a major lack of skills that actually INTERACT with armor outside of the binary yes/no resist system. Abilities that have different effects based on armor, work better against armor, and so on sounds fantastic.

Hybrid Damage and Piercing Damage is also thoroughly underutilized, and I feel like even the weapon statlines could better represent them with their untapped potential. Even abilities that make use of Piercing damage or target off-type defenses are scarce or underwhelming (Scoundrel abilities are the largest offender, personally).

Most of these are already in the game like using Magic shield to remove Stunned and using Fire attack to remove frozen.

And considering that there are already anti-armor skill like Overpower crushing all your armor if the damage dealth puts your armor below the attacker, it is possible to make more of them.



Having multiple skill doesn't really help that most of them just do the same thing. Like Oil and impalement. They both do the same thing, except the spike move is just way better at everything.

Situational skills that are extremely good is heavily missing from the game. We need more stuffs that allow player to be creative and come up with their own kind of answer to issues when they arise, not just brute force their way through everything until they get bored of it, which is already presented in multiple complaints how the armor system causes them to feel like the combat is just a bunch of number check.

Since it's unlikely that the armor system itself will be changed at this point, my main thought toward this is that CC abilities might have a partial effect if the armor value is below a certain threshold (scaling by level). If the usual effect is reduced by one step (Stun becomes Shocked, etc) and only lasts a round, those effects would still be helpful, especially against enemies that have lopsided defenses.

Even if we do that, it doesn't help the real core issue.

There's only one playstyle in the game right now, "Number rush". Even if low-rank CC still work, people won't bother with those because skill that inflict those CC are not compatible with the direction of the combat unless they also deal massive damage.

We need to introduce more playstyle to the game especially when you consider that this is a turn-base game with no execution skill required.

This is the core issue with the game right now, even more than the armor system itself.

What if there really isn't a big overall problem and it is just one of many systems a game designer could choose to use?

Fine you can share your ideas, perhaps some will be taken forth in DOS3. I'm pretty confident there won't be a major overhaul to DOS2, nor at this point I feel there needs to be. Balancing tweaks/bugs? Sure.

Most of your points though can be addressed with stat manipulation. You can do one of two things... hope Larian agrees with you on many and addresses in a patch OR you can take your own notes and take the easy steps to address your own game to your personal liking. To me that later is the direct approach to quick inner happiness.