Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 Armor System Discussion

[Black]

grog smash head against physical armor wall

You'd have a point if the headsmash didn't work.

 

[Cleric of Asmodeus]

Alignment systems DoS2 Armor system Turn based RTwP Swen Enhanced Edition Paladins Old graphics Minsc lore Brown elves Josh Sawyer Popular on steam D&D 4E 2E 5E pathfinder Casters OP Early access Respect for BG2's level of cuckery no more no less Wizardry 7

 

[NJClaw]

[...]

This seems all very hypothetical speaking without any actual connection to reality.

Forgive me but I'm going to aggressively multi-quote, because some of your points seem completely nonsensical to me (the first and the third). In particular, this one:

First of all because you might not have one of these skills on a character and rely only on your main damage source;

"Your characters are useless if you build them specifically to be useless" is not a valid point. The system already is as easy to master as it gets, even a three-year-old could build a functional character in this game (I know this because I'm basically a three-year-old when it comes to non-D&D systems). Expecting every character to be as efficient as possible is Sawyer-talk.

second of all because a single skill is rarely enough to finish off a mob, putting it on cooldown and there's a chance your other characters won't be able to kill the mob even in the next round, so you are left with at best a severely gimped character yet another turn;

This happened to me exactly three times in the entire game: against the blood-chick that wants to fuck you in the first area, against the super-evil guy in the cave in the third area, and during the longest voidwoken fight in the last area. Again, doesn't seem very relevant in a 100 hours playthrough.

third of all because it forces you to build all your characters very similarly, with similar strengths and weaknesses

What? Why? Literally the only skills shared by two characters in my party were Tactical Retreat, Adrenaline, and Cloak and Dagger. Giving Chloroform to your ranger doesn't make him "very similar" to a pyromancer.

At best it forces your "off-damage" characters to fight at like 10% efficiency, at worst it makes them useless.

Again, this seems completely baseless to me. To estimate your character's "efficiency" you also have to take into consideration how faster he lets you deal with the other threats in the encounter. And disabling an enemy for one or two turns is not 10% in my book.

I don't see how you can defend such a system?

I'm not saying I like it, but I don't understand all this talking about it making split-damage party useless.

 

[Cleric of Asmodeus]

Strangely getting horny to return to one of my DOS:2 saves and play it again lol

Mostly to make some new builds to handle the various threats. I think that's another aspect that makes the system tolerable for me; the challenge of building characters that have some versatility by using the stuff in polymorph, necromancy, skills like teleports, etc

 

[Lacrymas]

NJClaw, I don't know what to say. It happens to me basically every other fight and I even have some magical skills on my physical characters and some physical skills on my magical characters. This seems like a feature to me, and not a bug. And there is no way around it unless you mod out armor and buff hp to compensate. Which I actually might do, now that I think about it.

 

[Yosharian]

The game therefore favored a mixed party setup capable of dealing with both physical and magical-heavy armor enemies.

Lmao come on Rusty this is not even remotely accurate

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The game therefore favored a mixed party setup capable of dealing with both physical and magical-heavy armor enemies.

Lmao come on Rusty this is not even remotely accurate

People who hate the armor system: "GROG ANGRY HE SMASH HEAD ON WALL AND IT HURT"
People who like the armor system: "Why yes, I do have 14 different PhDs and think a split party is best because it maximizes your ability to overcome various obstacles presented to you throughout the game."

 

[Yosharian]

You can easily steamroll the game using only physical or only magical though. And arguably having e.g. only one Mage in your party and 3 physical damage dealers isn't optimal because your Mage will have trouble getting through the magic armour of enemies in order to have his CCs work and also to damage the enemy's HP.

I really don't think the game encourages mixed party setups

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm pretty sure the optimal way is concentrating on a single damage type, and not only because of the things I mentioned. They might have wanted to create a system in which a more varied approach is better, but they failed. Besides, I don't want to be "encouraged" to play the parties they want me to, I want to create my own.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it solves.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.

Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.

I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking Christ if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.

 

[Ontopoly]

Alignment systems DoS2 Armor system Turn based RTwP Swen Enhanced Edition Paladins Old graphics Minsc lore Brown elves Josh Sawyer Popular on steam D&D 4E 2E 5E pathfinder Casters OP Early access Respect for BG2's level of cuckery no more no less Wizardry 7

You should help Lilura with her search engine optimization.

 

[Lambach]

I really don't think the game encourages mixed party setups

It doesn't. Only someone who hasn't played it, like retard_sheepfuckerford, can claim otherwise.

 

[Sharpedge]

I'm pretty sure the optimal way is concentrating on a single damage type, and not only because of the things I mentioned. They might have wanted to create a system in which a more varied approach is better, but they failed. Besides, I don't want to be "encouraged" to play the parties they want me to, I want to create my own.

The optimal way to play is to focus on physical. At 1 point I got into an internet argument with someone over this about 2 years ago and I autistically took screenshots of the stats of every single boss in the game as well as their henchman to prove the point. Contrary to what people believe, although in theory it makes sense to have a physical damage dealer focus on physical and a magical damage dealer focus on magical, most enemies in the game either have higher magical armour than physical armour, or their elemental resistances cause their effective HP to be higher regardless. There are only 2 enemies in the entire game that have physical resistance, the first is those bat demon things which are encountered in act 2 in Morgus's (spelling?) cave and the 2nd is a reflection of yourself which is encountered in 1 of the source point dream things when you inhale the magic smoke. If someone wants to see those screenshots as evidence, I can probably dig them up.

Even in the first act of the game there are enemies with immunities to specific magical damage types (nature, fire) and as the game goes on, the issue only gets more and more pronounced. Pretty much the ideal way to play if all you care about is optimization is a character that dumps almost all of their points into warfare, with 1 or 2 dips into other schools for abilities (for example, scoundrel for adrenaline and polymorph for stuff like skin graft or chameleon cloak). If you take this approach, even soloing the game without lone wolf is not very hard and by the time you get to the final fight, you can 1 round kill the final boss, completely denying them an opportunity to participate in the fight. You don't even need to respec for this either, you can play a single build throughout the entire game.

Playing the game like that is not very fun though, in fact, I would actively recommend avoiding playing physical builds because of how easy they make the game. DOS:2 must be 1 of the only RPGs where playing a caster is gimping yourself. The game is still fairly easy if you play a caster, especially if you use the OP spells like detonate corpse or traps, but there are far less broken spells and abilities to avoid on casters than there are on physical builds. At the end of the day though, the game is pretty easy. There was a video some years ago of a guy 1 shotting all the bosses with some of the most creative stuff i've seen (not barrels, I promise), unfortunately it not nuked on youtube otherwise i'd link it.

 

[Cleric of Asmodeus]

Yeah, I think that playing a split party might not be optimal but it ended up working for the highest difficulty and tuning the builds to have some options was a fun for me, too. Some of the encounters had interesting strategic angles of prioritizing different hard and soft targets. Some were not so great. All in all, it was fine like a frozen pizza or something but not some top shelf New York shit.

Not optimal, but neither is not filling out your party with multiple Kensai or sword saints or vivisectionist or whatever in various IE games/Kingmaker etc. Not sure an argument about “does this system get broken in half over your knee if you build a one dimensional party” and talk about D&D crpgs with a straight face lol

 

[Sharpedge]

Yeah, I think that playing a split party might not be optimal but it ended up working for the highest difficulty and tuning the builds to have some options was a fun for me, too. Some of the encounters had interesting strategic angles of prioritizing different hard and soft targets. Some were not so great. All in all, it was fine like a frozen pizza or something but not some top shelf New York shit.

Not optimal, but neither is not filling out your party with multiple Kensai or sword saints or vivisectionist or whatever in various IE games/Kingmaker etc. Not sure an argument about “does this system get broken in half over your knee if you build a one dimensional party” and talk about D&D crpgs with a straight face lol

Yeah, it really does not matter how you build your party, because as I said, an optimized character has no issues soloing the game on tactician without allocating lone wolf. Optimizing how much fun you get out of the experience is far more important in my opinion and for me, in order to do that fights need to at least offer some challenge. That means banning a lot of spells and abilities in order to bring some semblance of challenge back into the game.

 

[Gyor]

Remember when this thread was about BG3 instead of DOS2? Good times!

 

[jackofshadows]

All this talk about builds in DOS2 looks extremely pointless to me since a) the game is quite easy overall b) the game has endless respec option. Personally I prefer not to abuse shit like this but if even the devs themselves as if saying "look, we don't actually care about builds, so should you". Unless it's all about how much fun do you get out of it... which I cannot fathom, unfortunately (couldn't manage to pass beyond ~40 hours).

 

[Alienman]

Remember when this thread was about BG3 instead of DOS2? Good times!

Been about DOS the entire time.

 

[Catacombs]

Remember when this thread was about BG3 instead of DOS2? Good times!

Been about DOS the entire time.

 

[Alienman]

Another split... yawn. Could be one of the most annoying things going on on this forum.

 

[Faarbaute]

The problem with the separate armor/magic shield is highlighted by running a party that is lopsided in either direction, like 3 phys users and 1 magic user or vice versa.
You will find that the odd man out is often very limited in what he can do during a combat round and still be effective, even if he's not completly useless.

Instead of promoting diverse party setups the system rewards 2 playstyles. The even split, where you rigidly always try to teamtag with your phys buddy or magic buddy.
Or you go all in and run 4 phys users or 4 magic users and completly circumvent the system wich i feel is a bit of a shame.

You can still play any setup you like and be successfull because the game is quite easy, but that is beside the point.

On another note, I think the sytem would have been better with a single shield type. That way you avoid this whole issue.
If you were to introduce phys and magic damage resistance ontop of this, you could still maintain the relative diffrence between fighting an armored knight with a massive phys shield or a mage with a big magic shield.

 

[BarbequeMasta]

Rusty I think deep throating Larian so hard is stoping the oxygen from reaching your brain. That armor system was retarded, People who like and hate the game both tend to agree on that.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

We’re telling you it not factual you flaming fucktard.

You can tell me whatever the fuck you want, but I'm not paying attention to your delusional autistic rambling.
And you better start watching that dirty mouth when addressing strangers or someday someone is going to bitchslap you into copious amounts of mouth bleeding, until your retarded tinfoil plate will shut down and start melting in self defense.

Also, what the fuck do you even mean by "your generation" anyway, you useless mongoloid?
How old do you think I am?

 

[Tigranes]

Oh great, the boomers are fighting again

 

[Desiderius]

Are there any Boomers here?