Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Armor rework for a possible enhanced edition?

Its better than relying on a percentage to win or loose a fight.
Honestly for me, it is as good as it gets.

I think a long time ago when I still regularly posted here, I once had the idea that Physical and Magical attacks do only 70% of their damage to the same type of armor, and 30% to the opposite type of armor. If one type of armor is 0, the damage passes through to health, inflicting any status effects.

That would require a rework of armor values or damage throughout the game, but it would make mixed parties stronger without killing single-damage-type parties.




If someone is save-scumming for crits on every hit, that's the fault of their own OCD, not the game. There is literally zero reason why any sane person should make fights take 30 times longer by reloading after every non-crit.

It's still save scumming and doing exactly what the complaint was earlier about RNG. This garbage armor system does nothing to fix that problem.

If I had a donut for every 95% chance-to-hit-but-missed that my knight did I'd be a baker. Misses and lack of criticals will ruin you in tactician so let's not pretend like the only difference is 5 minutes. Having the first round go terrible is as good a reason as any to reload the save file.

I don't agree that critical hits and miss chance MUST be completely removed from the game. If you feel the need to reload after every non-critical hit on tactical difficulty, I suggest not playing on Tactical difficulty.

I never really understand the whole save scumming "problem". If you like doing it, do it. If you don't like doing it, don't do it. If you resent "having" to do it, perhaps you need to step back for a bit. Occasionally I'll do it myself when it's a rare chance of obtaining an extremely rare and extremely useful item or advantage, but otherwise it's just that sort of RL "that's the hand you were dealt, deal with it" kind of thing.

What I do object to is when people either say that they have no self-restraint so the game must hold their hand, or that they like to interfere with other people's gameplay so they can't do something they object to on principle. That's too bad and nobody should be expected to accommodate those sort of demands, no matter how loudly they're yelled. Which isn't a comment about anybody in present company, but I have seen both touted as reasons why Something Must Be Done.

I agree that RNG is bad. That's why I was excited about the new armor system because it removed a huge RNG element from the game. I think the new armor system is a step in the right direction, but it's not perfect. I think a well designed class with this armor system is scoundrel. Scoundrel has attacks that deal magical damage based on finesse and apply powerful debuffs/CC to enemies without magic armor, while most of their attacks are still physical based. Scoundrel also has a powerful piercing attack option to strategically switch targets to something that may have high phys armor still, but has had its health and magic armor stripped away to the point of near death. Scoundrel has an option for that. I'd like to see the design philosophy of the scoundrel applied to other schools of magic a bit more. I'd remark on something like pyro's corpse explosion as a good idea, but flawed in execution. It's a pyro school skill that does good physical damage, but scales like ass because it scales with warfare. I'd remark that the way skills scale is also one of the core flaws that needs improvement with OS2.

Scoundrel did get it right in this armor system, and I'd say so did ranger. Ranger has interesting option for crafted arrows vs. no armor targets, has access to piercing damage elemental arrowheads etc. And here exempifies why physical parties are considered generally better. Not just because battering ram/battle stomp are so good and it's easier to set up AoE CC chains on enemies, but also because physical damage is a bit more versatile, consistent and less resisted by enemies. Magical schools need more options to access piercing damage, need not to be so limited in scaling to purely a single school of magic, and could benefit from more effects that are powerful against targets without phys armor. (Geo is the notable exception with earthquake/impale).

For you RNG might be bad, for us RNG makes the fight interesting and less predictable. In a real battle not everything is predictable, a real battle is messy and not like chess. If plan A fails, you have to adapt and use plan B.

If you want a game without RNG, you should remove all RNG: Hit chance, Crit chance and Dodge chance are RNG aswell and can still mean, that an enemie survives instead of dying.

But however, the core issue with the armor system is still, it punishs mixed setups and together with the poor attribute system it ruins the core feature of the first game: cross classing like mixing scoundrel with Aerothurg.

Mixed party setups are still the optimal parties, because enemies usually favor one kind of armor so you need to be flexible.

And characters can deal both kinds of damage. Archers easily deal both because of elemental arrows and traps. Scoundrels just got a huge buff and can strip a ton of magical armor (Gag Order). Summoners can easily deal both kinds of damage. And mages could always cause decent physical damage via Necromancy or by using a shield.

I played through tactician with the enemy scaling mod and the enemy variation mod (adds challenger affixes) and had every enemy at +4 levels above me and my buddy playing on LW. I've played through this game many times as every different build and can say with certainty that all phys comps are significantly better than magic comps especially early in the game. This balance shifts toward late game once you get 3 source skills.

There are enemies with a lot of physical armor, sure, but there are also enemies with a lot of magic armor. There are enemies with magic immunities and stacked resists. Meanwhile there are only a very few select fights where enemies have evasion or immunity to knockdown. Evasion is easily countered by spider legs with web not being blocked by armor, meanwhile magic users have nothing to counter immunities.

Battering ram and battle stomp are also super easy to set up and AoE CC groups of enemies at a time. Necromancer is also absolutely broken in terms of damage output and living on the edge is the best defensive ability in the game by far.

The drawback of warfare is relatively bad source skills. Necromancer has absolutely broken source skills.This said, thunderstorm is absolutely broken as well and so is pycroclastic eruption if you teleport/swap stack enemies next to eachother to all get one shot.

On tactician mode without any difficulty mods anything works because any one character (even non-lw) can solo most encounters.

What I'm really saying is that a balanced party comp is not better. An all physical comp is objectively better. The runner up to an all physical comp is an all aero/hydro comp. Following that is any variation of all magic, because really you can just burn anything down before they really get a chance to act. A balanced comp works fine and I think lends to more interesting game play, so i'm absolutely not saying it's bad, but it's not better than an all magic or all phys comp.

I found having a single aero/hydro with 3 phys goes quite a long way. Allows for easy CC on mobs without magic armor while your phys dps burst down mages and some added support via healing/magic armor restoration/CC removal.

Necromancy/using a shield on a mage is still suboptimal, since you're gonna lack the warfare points. So that's straight up 50%+ multiplicative damage out of the window.

On a sidenote; How do you enable scaling above +1 with the enemy scaling mod?

i'd say this is more of a problem with the way stats work than with how the armor system works

also don't agree with your position on RNG; most games have RNG values that you can either increase or decrease with other variables like crit chance or dodge chance. this is different from making mid-fight strategies rng-based, and there's no need to remove the former just because the latter doesn't exist

either way, it is what it is and there's no reason for Larian to change it. if the first game had more rng with regards to CCing then it catered to people who prefer the rng approach, while the second game caters to people who prefer to keep rng values to a minimum. neither of these things make either of these games better or worse; they just suit people who value different types of combat

as for the hybrid complaint, this is something i agree with and i think stats could do with some change so that different skill combinations become more viable

edit: re: magic comps vs physical comps

from my understanding all physical teams tend to be better because physical resistance is a relatively rare trait on enemies, whereas most enemies have arbitrary resistances to most if not every magic type, if they aren't just flat out immune to one or several (think alice alisceon on tactician with water immunity, i had to use necro spells and healing to kill her with my friend when we ran an all-magic composition because magic is just that inefficient vs some enemies)

RNG of CC effects was adjustable like dodge and crit, so no idea what your point is there. There were ways to debuff your enemies and buff yourself, there were also because of that defensive skills who felt purposefull.


Mixing scoundrel with aerothurg in D:OS1 was great. It gave you tons of CC option, 2 invis and other damage reductions and later on even stun immunity. Mixing scounrdrel with aerothurg is pretty pointless in D:OS2. You main damage is physical, so all magical damage won't help you much in most cases. The synergy potential between scoundrel and aerothurg skills is pretty limited, you have one skill to remove magic armor and one skill that is kind of broken in itself anyway. At least I don't recall much more.

What the armor also kind of killed:
- weapons that have effects of the opposite damage type like petrify on a physical weapon
- element damage on physical weapons
- special arrows with magic damage lost a lot of their usefullness too, even more in full physical team

Honestly in the first game the chances of those effects were often so low, that they were hardly usefull too, though the armor system makes it even worse.

As a general side note: The RNG issue with equipment overall got made much worse thanks to the armor system and of course the poorly implemented attributes.

The magic schools in D:OS 2 have a lot of skills which don't scale with INT and synergize well with physical classes.

My first avatar character in D:OS 2, which I beat the game with, was a Scoundrel/Aerothurge. It worked great. It was a "Position Master" rogue. Teleport and Netherswap were great tools for moving enemies around for better backstabbing. Uncanny Evasion and Evasive Aura were great. Tornado, Vaporize, and Pressure Spike can help manage surfaces.

The game isn't exactly hard to beat in the first place, so that's not really anything to go by.

As for the listed abilities, while it's true that they're useful tools in general, that's exactly what they are. Useful in general. Not much synergy with melee stuff specifically.
Now if we're talking about shocking touch and blinding radiance for example, which both work for melee range only, that's a different story. Except that neither will do anything of worth in 95% of all cases, because either you might as well spend the AP to just kill the enemy, or can't get through the magic armor in the first place.
Does it still somewhat work? Probably. Is there any reason to do it, besides flavorbuilds? Probably not.

Yeah, as Velcas already stated, you just proved my point. You used none of the standard combat skills from aerothurg. I would not call it 'playing an aerothurg' if you only use utility skills. My aerothurg-scoundrel in the first game used skill like the lightning dash or shocking touch regularly, he loved to enlighten the ground after we casted rain and made everywhere water.

Utility skills are the reason, why my rogue had points in most of the skill trees. Because of the low requirements you can give those utility skills to pretty much every char anyway. Damage does not matter for utility.

I don't understand why so many people hate RNG, there's nothing wrong with RNG, it makes the combat more interesting and is responsible for some interesting situations where you need to improvise, and promotes critical thinking when you get bad rolls, but I guess people can't just deal with it and want the game to play exactly how they want and never worry about losing or having to actually use consumables or being forced to retreat from a fight and deal with consequences.
I see some posts here saying that removal of RNG is good, because people savescum. Why do you even care how others play their game? People cheat all the time, so what, unless you're a savescummer yourself, so you have to ruin it for everyone else, because you lack self control.

The current iteration of the armor system just ruins way too many things, which were most likely designed before the armor system was added, such as:

>Traps being completely harmless, just run through them and you'll be fine.
>Same for surfaces, I remember in the first game, moving through fire was a big risk and you had to decide if it's better to stay in place and slowly burn while being an easy target, or move away and eat a lot of damage with each step. Nothing like that in this game, I can't even remember the last time I cared about standing in necrofire.
>A lot of status effects became almost useless, like soft CC and DoTs. By the time you remove enemy armor you can use hard CC and not care about other effects and just nuke your target while it's permastunned.
>Hybrid classes and mixed parties being overall underwhelming.

Aside from these it just makes the entire combat really stale, where you just use the same tactic over and over.

Just look at the modern XCOMs, those games are full of RNG, yet they're still extremely popular and still played by a lot of people regularly.

my point was that these things are comparatively minor to CC rng, and aren't as devastating to in-battle strategy when they don't proc (not scoring a critical hit isn't as big of a deal as not stunning an enemy)


i really do not see what the issue is here. this isn't a part of the game. in DOS2, if you were to mix scoundrel and aerothurge, you'd do so either because you wanted a rogue character who had options vs enemies with low magic armor, or because you wanted to make use of utility skills. with the former, the real problem is that skills are too stat-reliant, and you'd do pathetic damage with magic on a finesse rogue because your intelligence stat would be too low

the thing that can (and should) be changed is the way stats work, not a revamp of the armor system that by and large accomplishes what it's supposed to

i don't understand why you think this is a problem with the armor system instead of, for example, a problem with the aforementioned effects appearing on items that can't make use of them, which is a pretty widespread issue with items in this game. lots of items are randomly assigned stats, effects and skills that devalue said items (for example, a staff that can inflict bleeding or a mage armor item that gives scoundrel), and the obvious solution is to prevent those things from appearing on those items

the posts on this page just further reinforce the subjective nature of this discussion, nothing about the armor system actually needs to change at all

So because there is no RNG in how CC effects are applied, then I assume that for you, every single battle in the game went exactly as planned, with no surprises or unexpected consequences you had to react to at all?

Can you truthfully say that is how the game went for you?

I never said that, don't strawman me.


Yeah, let's just remove features that worked before, instead of fixing the problem. I guess we can also remove traps from the game completely too, as they're completely harmless.
Elemental properties on weapons were always a big part of RPGs, meant to add some other source of damage to your main one, and they usually also enabled some specific builds centered around them and made the itemization overall less boring. I mean isn't it always cool when you find an enchanted weapon that deals some kind of magical damage? Why remove it?

Then don't strawman other people first with statements like this: