Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Why armor is a failure and how to fix it

I like the core idea behind armor system but I personally don't think the current implementation is good for the game. Just like you said it forces you to focus on either Physical or Magical because if you do not, you have to go through 3 different buffers instead of just 2. Making almost all encounters more tedious than it needs to be and for what exactly? I can't see any reason other than just goofing around.

My solution to this problem would be to shatter both armors if one of them breaks. This would further encourage hybrid parties and would give a new meaning to skills like Chloroform.

Other than that I do not have much problems with armor system. I think CC part should remain the same.
This suggestion at first glance might feel like it might make the game way too easier but remember this goes both ways.

Everyone who thinks like that misses the one B.F. part of the discussion. This DOES NOT eliminate RNG, it switches focus of it from rolls on CC to rolls on gear. It is much easier to calculate risks of using CC and failing and getting that 'what now?!' moment then it is to control what and where drops. Especially that the gear is the most important thing in DOS2.


I dont know why people hate % so much, in the end they always will be in these kinds of games. Maybe DOS1 was a little bit too 'for the glory of Rngsus' but still it felt much more organic.

First point, standing up for a mechanic because it reduces save scumming is fine and all, but that's not so much a design problem as it is a gamer problem. Don't be a little pansy and take what you get. If you don't, it's you're fault. Not the developers.

Back to the issue at hand it's kinda cheesy that someone can have 1hp after getting beat down by melee, but if they have a bunch of magic armor left you can throw fireballs and supernovae -all kinds of stuff at them it they're completely fine. Meanwhile a butterfly can flutterby and kill them by perching on their shoulder.

Other than completely overhauling the system, some degree of armor penetration or dual damage functionality may be more appealing. Sure the current system works. That's doesn't make it good, though.

I understand what the goal of the armor system is but it's current implementation, while functional, is simply not fun. I also don't like feeling pressured to use a shield on my mage because otherwise he doesn't have enough physical mitigation and gets smashed. Shields Up is just too useful. I haven't needed a staff, and I've barely used my wand. It's there for stats. Of course there are a slew of other problems with casters IMO, but that's for another topic.

TL;DR I don't like the armor system very much.

We're never gonna stop talking about armor, so I wanna talk about armor.

I gots 3 complaints with how the combat flows.

1: It's, like everyone says, Binary. If you've got the right armor type, you don't have to worry about status effects or health. If that type is down, it's CC and DoT time and even if the thing (or you) is at full health it feels like the fight's over. It even makes environmental hazards less scary! A big poison cloud is just something you can walk on through.

2: Defensive skills thus feel pretty useless. The two that aren't leadership don't defend against anything, one does damage when you take damage and the other restores some armor after you've been hard CCd. They don't feel worth it to put points into.

3: There's no way to get tougher against melee attacks. Physical armour is just a shield, it's not like resistances. Your big buff man in full plate can take more stabs before they can make him bleed, but he doesn't take less damage from the stabs. And every enemy can get hit for full physical, which is... well, one of the reasons full physical comps are really popular.

What to do about it? I say THESE THINGS:

1: Statuses that don't cause you to miss a turn aren't blocked by armour. You can bleed, burn, get poisoned, get shocked, get chilled, all those. This means that even in a fight with your armour up, you'll have to worry about ground effects and your health, as well as open up more tactical abilities for skill use. Shocked and chilled are really cool, and to only really ever cash them in for frozen and stunned is a waste.

2: Add defensive stats to reduce the chance of status effects. There should be enemies that even with their armour down you can't hard CC, and you should be able to choose skills that let you avoid CC too. The non-hard cc statuses could also have a stat that defends against them too. I think you could even roll these proposed effects into the defenses we have now(Retribution doing damage to the attacker and resisting hard CC, Perseverance restoring armor after hard CC and resisting minor statuses) and it wouldn't be overpowered.

3: Ya GOTTA add physical resist. Put it on plate mail and put it on physical armour tough guys. In games like these where damage can be mitigated, it's just nuts for physical damage to not be. You can wear a ring and drink a potion or cast a spell to take reduced damage from fire/lighting/poison/ice/earth, but there's nothing you can do to mitigate gettin' shanked! That's nuts!

It only does 150 damage if you think of armors like a combined pool. Think of armor like a single total with a modifier for how effective it is vs magic or vs physical. So the same 100 points of magic-focused armor are twice as good against Magic as they are Phys. In that sense, your 50 phys damage strips 50 armor, but 50 magic damage would only strip 25 armor because that armor is twice as strong.

This is functionally equivalent to having 100 and 200 armor, where 50 phys strips 50 phys armor and 100 magic armor simultaneously.



This is exactly what I am suggesting, except that I think both types of damage should contribute to shattering armor. If your target has 200/200 armor, and you do 100 phys, 100 magic, and then 100 phys damage, normally that 100 magic damage would be a total waste. The armor is shattered when you hit that last Phys point, at which any magic damage you have done so far may as well not have happened.

You COULD simply have a single 200 armor total that blocks both physical and magical damage, but doings so takes away the ability for characters to be anti-phys or anti-magic focused, which is pretty cool. By splitting the pool but damaging both in proportion like I originally suggested you can keep that. The OTHER way to keep it is to have physical/magic resistance, which works exactly like the existing elemental resists, and makes hitting with the preferred type more efficient. However, I like the way the current armor system displays, as it's much easier to see that someone has 2500 physical, 500 magical armor and is therefor weak to magic, than it is to inspect them to see that they have 80% physical resist and 0% magic resist, with 500 armor. Plus that resist would apply to armor only and not vitality, adding to the confusion.

My main issue, so far, is that it does seem to limit your options for group/character build diversity and your ability to do things how you want. Parties should clearly all focus on the same type of damage (magic or physical) for the optimal result in a given fight. While there may be some cases where a major fight does not work this way, i think in the main your party is disadvantaged if you split up. Say you have two front line physical damage, a ranger, and a magic user. The magic user is going to struggle to take down an enemies shield and kill them, and your physical damage guys will struggle because they are outnumbered (as usual) and they cant focus individual enemies to kill them as swiftly. It also eliminates a certain amount of experimentation as it separates the two damage types so you can t really combo a caster and a physical damage dealer. Its not inherently a bad system, just encourages narrowly focussed gameplay. Besides, if you wanted to fix it, you would have to just combine the two armor types into one larger armor pool and maybe give damage bonuses to magic/physical based on enemy class. Probably not that simple, but you get my drift.

I dont really like the binary status effect system either. Every battle devolves into burn armor > CC enemies and kill them while they are helpless. But i dont see how to change that without changing a ton about how the combat encounters work.

Edit: It does occur to me, after posting, that this is an intentional system to give advanced players a way to keep challenging/handicapping themselves.

Untrue.


So basically you want to go back to the first game where everything was chance based and not tactical."Tactician chore" lmao.

Combat in DOS1 was ok but I like the new system way better.

The only complain i have is that environmental hazards are useless cause magic armor blocks almost all of them.

Lol. But there are no tactical possibilities in the systems.
If in the first game you had to think and count, what enemy to control, what enemy to kill, then in this game you just choose one goal and kill it. there is no tactic, no strategy. You can not choose whom to control, and whom to kill. Given that many enemies have more armor than health, then even controlling them does not make sense - you break through the armor and immediately kill.

So what tactics are you talking about?
In the first, she was preeminent. With some enemies had to rack their brains, choosing the order of priorities and controls. There is no such thing here.

Uhm, not sure.. in the first game you just had to do dmg and applying random ccs and HOPING they would land.. You just had to do proper target selection.. but that's the same you do in the second one.. Why don't you have to chose a priority order here? Even more so, you do it cause you know you can apply statuses afterwards. For example: there was a fight with a voidwoken and some frogs (guy that lost the ring) and that was SO difficult on tactician. But then i realized i could go on a high cliff and shoot from there, and i just attracted enemies there, used a love grenade and the fight i lost to 10 times suddenly was very easy. And i could do that only after using loremaster to verify voidwoken resistances, type of armor of all the frogs and coming up with a plan. I liked that a lot.
Maybe in the first game i could have done it in a dull way just by loading several times until i managed to apply that 10% chance cc.. I like it, what else can i say I find it rewarding.

No. no. No. And no.
Yes, in the first part there were chance triggering skills. But this was not an absolute accident. First, the skills had a high chance of triggering. Secondly, if the skill did not work - it was just harder to continue the fight. The control in the first part was not some kind of an uncontrolled decision, but only diversified tactical possibilities.

Here we do not even have this. Control is useless in 90% of the battles. Simply because destroying enemy armor - it's easier to kill an enemy than to start controlling it.
And unlike the first part, where you chose many goals at once. For example, the magician controls those two, the tank holds three more.
in the second part there is no such, and it is useless because of the armor. It will not be possible to control several enemies at once. The most effective tactic here is to kill the entire target with a whole crowd.

Sorry but i can't agree on those.. Control is for me the only way to win fights Some enemies have low armor and extremely high hp. Why wouldn't be possible to control several enemies? Just lure them..

Just those 10% of the battles that I talked about.
In the rest ... Well, how can control help win when, in order to control one goal, she needs to demolish all the armor? And next to it there are five more enemies.
Does it help you to win only 1-2 control steps for one goal?

1-It is factually true.

2-Basically I want to go back to have fun with a FUCKING VIDEO GAME.

3-There is NOTHING Tactical about this new "cheestecian mode" in DOS2.

He is talking out of his ass, he is clearly mentally handicapped to understand what you just said to him, probably to him "tactics" it is all the cheesy ways you can disturb the AI behavior like blocking paths or fleeing each time you kill an enemy, or maybe he is talking about how you can pretty much cheese the game by stealing everything you want from vendors and be rich no problems.

The only way to play this game now is go FULL DAMAGE.

Literally for mental invalids.

I remember the first DOS, the orc mini boss on the beach, near the skull cavern : we used so much elemental cc with my friend to kill the bastard. That was fun : shit gear, but a nice stat.

I did not felt the same in DOS2 : the void mini boss with the skeletons in Fort Joy Island, at the center of the forest... it was not a fun fight. I did it with 2 physical 2 mages in tactician. How did I win ? By cheesing the fight.
No masterfully planned stuff to stun with spells and ground effects. I let the boss teleport on my team far from the skeletons, I ganged up on him and killed him with physical dps !

I did the same with my solo physical enrage warfare+necro 2h lone wolf, and it was faster and stronger.

Physical is king, dps is king. The only great stuff about magic casters is support spells and oil ground effect. And source spells. But arrow source spell is stronger for aoe so...

Bring back cc as it was. Luck in a "rpg" is not a bad thing : a shield that gives 100% resist or 100% chance to stun when he's down IS a fun killer. Because you can't have a weak team (gear wise) with nice tactics and great use of spells, you need DPS to bring down the shields and THEN you can have fun perma stunning ennemis ? That sounds like a chore.

A patch is needed.

I actually really like the idea that sure keep magic and physical armour separate but shattering one removes the other completely making the target vulnerable to any source of CC.

This would give mix dmg parties an advantage again, promote proper target selection, and still allow for defensive specialization.

If you have enemies that are stacking a lot of physical armour but have less magic protection you use your mages to focus them down till their armour is shattered then move in with your physical dmg dealers, or the reverse.

You can still rock single type dmg parties but some fights will be harder for you because you wouldn't be able to target their weak defense type.

I don't know this is the only idea that I feel still accomplishes their goal of making perma-CC harder from the start of battles while still allowing for build\party diversity.

Yep, it is all about how the fight is going to play and then reload and cheese the fight, there is 1 strategy that never fails in Fort Joy, go first with 1 character preferably a Glass cannon, start the fight and then drag the enemies to a place where they will arrive 1 by one to be killed by your party, this way you will avoid all of those retarded ranged enemies that always CC and do insane damage and attack 3 times ina row, in this aprticular fight you described, the void thing will not teleport if you are too far away so you will kill the skeleton cunts first and then the void at the end.

That was 100% NOT fun.

I have a improved version of the idea:
If you break the physical armor, the target suffer magical damage equal to its maximum magical armor, and vice versa. So any damage prior to armor break won't be wasted.

Edit: I forgot armor can be break multiple times, so better just record how much damage the other armor received, and turn that into vitality damage, rather than simply use the maximum.

Simply put, armor was created to counter mass CC being op. So the obvious solution is to make armors do that and only that. Make knockdown and stun effects do a small amount of secondary phys or magic stun damage to the armors until they break. After the stun is over, the bar that broke refills. If you wanted to encourage mixed magic/phys play, just make the phys or magic armors bars get larger with every recovered stun in a battle. Knockdown a guy a few times and doing it again will be much harder, but stunning him won't be.

This would also fix the players getting chain stunned because they got surprised in a bad position unavoidably. (happens alot).

There is no way to balance a game around cheaters and degenerates. They're always going to cheat and be degenerate.

Practically no-one was save-scumming just to get spells in, and if you want to, you can save-scum like mad in D:OS2, too.