Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Physical damage dealers still too strong

They were completely ridiculous in beta, so congrats on some improvement at least.

However, they still have a huge number of advantages over elemental damage and snowball really hard in the lategame. This was probably stated in a number of other threads, but:

-Even if physical resistance is listed when you inspect mobs with loremaster, in reality it's nonexistent. Elemental resistances are ubiquitous however, meaning you can't really specialize an elemental damage dealer unless you're ok with them being weak in some fights (which is an ok concept, if it applied to all specialized characters).
-For some reason physical CCs are stronger than elemental. Knockdown applies in 1 hit, unlike shock and chill, chicken is 2 turns and medusa head is actually stronger than most int based CC abilities (yes, it's an elemental ability for once but it's in poly and scales with STR meaning it would likely end up on a physical damage dealer). Yes, you can use surfaces and clouds for better CC with elemental chars but it usually ends up being a lot more work for similar results.
-Specialization is heavily rewarded. With both main attribute and skills boosting damage it's very rewarding to max 1 skill for damage and the relevant attribute. E.g. Finesse + Warfare. This works way worse for elemental characters however because of resists.

Overall it's kind of a shame to have combat system with a lot of work put into complex elemental combos, only to have them being completely irrelevant cause you can do better by maxing 1 skill&stat and autoattacking.

The game is super easy when you figure the systems out even on tactician, so I would mostly advocate for some nerfs here, but also some design changes.

Specifically:

-Add physical resistance and/or much higher dodge to a number of enemies. I would say 25-30% physical resist on fighter type mobs is not unreasonable going up to 50% for some really tough ones and maybe a few odd ones that are completely immune (not too many though). This would encourage to have some elemental characters in the party or have ways to do elemental damage with your physical characters
-Nerf knockdown. Have some "out of balance" debuff that needs to be applied first for knockdown to work. This would need some other skills to be able to apply it though and it should be applied through physical armor (debuffing let's say accuracy and dodge).
-Introduce some combos between elemental and physical status effects e.g. freeze + knockdown = shatter to further encourage cooperation and give some bonuses for destroying both physical and magical armor.

I think Warfare needs to be changed from buffing physical damage to something else, maybe even % physical resist. Damage already comes from weapon skills, so having it double on warfare is wrong. It's also the go to for boosting damage on any physical build as it doesn't care how you hold your weapon.

This is actually a pretty good idea, and would also automatically add phys resist for all mobs that have warfare, the only problem is that it would be hard to balance to be useful for LW and non LW characters, then again LW currently completely breaks the game and likely needs a rework too.

They could make it so that warfare skills apply CC after breaking through magic armour if you have an elemental staff equipped. Warfare skill damage already scales with INT if it is higher than STR. I think they should keep the physical damage bonus of Warfare as it is, because of runes with extra physical damage.

That would just make staff melee mages stronger, and they're pretty decent with stuff like supernova as is. Wouldn't change the fact that knockdown CC is too easy or the obscene damage stacking from maxing main stat + damage skill + crits.

Tbh I feel like it would be nice to have lower impact of primary stats and skills across the board and maybe have diminishing returns on them to make hybrid more viable. I don't like current design with them giving damage in the first place and would prefer something like PoE stat system where most stats are useful for any character, but it's unlikely they'll change that post release. Diminishing returns and/or skill bonus being additive instead of multiplicative as well as maybe warfare switching from damage to something else sounds reasonable to me.

Agree. Warfare is too powerful- it's so good that every physical class maxes it before their respective counterpart (IE, you get huntsman high enough level to use your abilities but you max warfare first). Whenever that's the case you have a good candidate for a strong nerf. One good way to make elemental CC a bit better is to allow them to be stacked. IE, if you shock someone already stunned by electricity, it adds one turn to their CC. If this is too powerful, consider just doing an added damage bonus. Regardless, knocked down > stunned/frozen right now and it really shouldn't be considering magi have to set that up, get through magical resistances, get through magical armor and they do less overall damage already.

I also think because magi have to split their specialization more than physical damage dealers, every spell should benefit from putting points into a school of magic. As an example, putting a point into hydro might increase spell damage from all sources by 3%, water specifically by another 3% and magical armor restoration by it's current 5%. The overall scaling should be higher than physical scaling because there is no physical resistance whereas various elemental resistances are very common (too common).

Who would've thought the damage type that doesn't have resistances apply to it is the most powerful? Trying to stab a guy in full plate or a turtle should feel like casting lightning bolts at an air elemental: a bad idea.

Yeah, there should be different physical resistances, too:
- Slashing
- Piercing
- Bludgeoning