Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[Darth Roxor]

*bites AwesomeButton on the ear*

mmm you smell of strong

 

[AwesomeButton]

*bites AwesomeButton on the ear*

mmm you smell of strong

You don't scare me!*

BTW I forgot to mention the ear-bites I've also been subjected to.

As The Red Prince.

Lizards have no fucking ears, you horny writer-gurl-I'm-happy-I'll-never-know!

* - and you'll never be the same as my Viconia!

 

[Lhynn]

I'm thoroughly fed up with the infantile, yet relentlessly devoted, treatment of the themes of sex and sexuality in this game.

Im just amazed this shit made it into a game in 2017. And that they got away with doing it.

Roguey Sebille being written by a cuck makes sense.

 

[Eyestabber]

Oh god no, it can't be..
Did Larian go after the bioware audience?

Are you surprised? The Bioware throne has been empty for a while now. Someone would go for it, sooner or later.

Wow too much of this mental illness homosexuality being forced on the player, I wanted to play an RPG not some degenerate sex fetish game. Also I noticed one of the random NPC Elves is a guy but the text calls him a her. Also a queer cannot be a Paladin what a joke.

We are witnessing the tipping point for Larian but unlike Bioware EA didn't force them to do this they did it to themselves.

Why the bad ratings? He is absolutely correct. I'm only lvl 11 and already starting to get "degenerate fatigue" from this game. Faggot torturer, faggot rogue, faggot paladin...why?

I wanted to play as Doft and antifa Dwarf was too much for me so rolled my custom chair; besides the predefined char was fun to play with... in first Twicher. They are more fun as companions anyways except for Dorf and Elf. As to cheese and exploits playing using mages is exploit and cheating to begin with; play party of two warriors using lone wolf and then tell me game is too easy faggit. Larian aproach to game is fun unlike any POE balanced bland shit.

My party has them both. The Dwarf is a generic dwarf, didn't pay much attention. "Something something, the queen, something something BOATS BOATS BOATS!!!". That's the extent of my knowledge of his personality. As for the elven chick, I thought she would be a nympho and my MC would get some Snu-Snu, but no...she is just a psychopath. And considering that elves are cannibals, I wouldn't risk getting a BJ from Sebille.

So far the biggest weakness of the game for me is the way power scales with level. The curve is too steep, and leaves very little room for tactics to overcome stat differentials.

This. In the first game when I lost a fight I would go over my strategy and try something different. This time around I just press "I", check every piece of gear and then fast travel to merchants (those nice guys who always seem to know my level and stock level apropriated gear in proper fashion) and buy those awesome purple pants that will help my guy survive the CC barrage.

It also suffers from some conceptual issues where on one hand it destroys corpses (Raise Bloated Corpse, Raise Bone Widow) but also benefits from corpses still on the ground (Bone Cage). It doesn't seem to know if it wants to support melee (Blood Sucker, Bone Cage, Decaying Touch, Living on the Edge, Death Wish, etc.) or support casters/do debuffing (Summons, Raining Blood, Silencing Stare, etc.) A lot of the buffs are potentially strong, but costs so much to use and last for such a short time that even if the situation arises for where they'd be useful; Death Wish relies on the common trope of converting the amount of damage you've suffered to damage you do, which is almost always a bad idea, but it only lasts for 2 bleeding (literally) round, and it does damage to you. Last Rites allows you to resurrect someone, but it charges 3 AP for the pleasure of fucking killing yourself and it sets Potion status.

Necro, and pyro, suffer from some of the same issues:
1. Lack of hard CC abilities
2. Their elemental debuff is a weak DOT

Necro has fewer bottom tier skills than the other schools and all of them are meh. Could really use something cool like an AOE weakness aura, or summonable circle of bone walls that blocks sight/movement, a bouncing lifesteal like hydro's bouncing heal, etc etc.

In DOS1 pyro had an ability to lay a smokescreen. I think you need oil in order to smokescreen in DOS2, but without Midnight Oil its hard to make a big one.

The DOTs- poison, bleed, burning- are pretty bad. Part of their weakness is that they do nothing useful besides damage but are blocked by armor. They should not be stopped by armor. They should damage the armor bar before the health bar, but I can't think of a good reason why they should require saves.

I need no further evidence of this than the fact that Earth damage targets Magic Armor, not Physical.

Earth damage does target physical armor. Poison targets magical.

You guys are talking about different things. Earthquake and impale deal damage to the blue shield, but are resisted by the grey shield. Hence, if you already depleted the other dude's shield, but not his blue shield, he is going to get CC'ed, but won't take HP damage.

Man.... that Bishop Alexander fight (on Tactician)...

I won mine because two enemies killed my archer dude in the opposite side of the map and then spent the rest of the fight guarding his corpse.

Tactician is ez, need harder.

Yeah, we need a mod that adds even more bloat and cheap shit. :rollseyes:

Anyone else playing coop experiencing disconnects? For the last 2-3 days we can't go on for longer than 30 minutes without disconnecting, and once it happens it tends to happen again every 5 minutes.

I think the game is trying to tell you something

Regarding rainjerks, the fuckery is even greater when you consider that your main weapon and all skills do physical damage, but the speshul arrows are all blocked by magic armour.

Mmm...no. It's bad design, sure, but it doesn't make the ranger weaker. Knockdown arrows are blocked by grey shield, use those. Special arrows (fire/poison etc) will CONVERT your damage to elemental (magical), targetting the blue shield. So that makes the ranger the only class that can use his basic attacks to target either shield, allowing for much greater versatility. Also, get yourself some charm arrows, they are gud.

Random observation; environments are OK but character/clothing/armor/wep art sucks in this game; they don't look good nor distinctive from any cam angle/distance.

Can't comment on that since characters are on fire 90% of the time and the flame effects are too "dominant" for my taste. Most of the time I have to squint to see where the fuck are my enemies amidst all those flames/poison/clouds and whatnot. Really wish character models had visual priority over enviromental hazards...

 

[KateMicucci]

You can turn on combat highlights in the options but red-on-fire is still hard to see.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Luckmann]

These are my thoughts regarding some of the issues discussed, why they're issues (when not obvious), and thoughts on what can be done about it. I'm just listing these based on the small list of suggested issues mentioned earlier in the thread, and while other things have been discussed, most other issues have been simple matters of taste, or things that are literally unfixable at a fundamental level (there is no way to get the money back that was spent on voice acting, anyway). These vary greatly in their size and relevance, as will commentary on them. Some are minor, and some are really major in how they affect the game.

There are also very specific issues in the game, such as how specifically Necromancy seems to have been somewhat shafted, or how incredibly fucking broken Bone Widow is, how oil surfaces penetrate anything but completely non-magical fire surfaces somehow target magic armor, or the apparent tendency towards massive over-compensation, will not be addressed. They're simply too specific and this would quickly simply devolve into a laundry-list of unconstructive bitching, like a list of unforgivable grievances straight out of the book of grudges. It's an imperfect world. The intent of this episode of "Issues as according to me" is to examine things that are actually fixable or discuss things that are systemic in nature. Not every single flaw in the game, big or small.

I do this, as stated, because I feel it necessary to do so, lest bitching remain simple bitching. I genuinely enjoy most of D:OS2, I absolutely adored D:OS1 and think it was one of the best co-op experiences I've ever had in a game, and while I doubt that D:OS2 will reach that same level simply because it seems to be based a lot less around the idea of co-op (I will forever lament the fact that there appears to be no points of contention or places in the game where there's an exchange between player characters on what to do next, and that the contentious resolution system (Rock–paper–scissors), however silly it may have been, is gone forever; it was a nice piece of shared storytelling, whereas now the focus appears to be on an individual story that you just happen to share).

There's really no way to TLDR this.

• The AI behaving retarded at times, for no discernible reason.

This one is actually quite minor, but frustrating, because it is so consistent. By far the most common issue is that enemies often tries to run away from players with Opportunist, suffers an Attack of Opportunity, lose AP, and proceeds to commence the attack they were seemingly planning all along - often a touch-attack spell or even a melee attack. Neither of which they would've needed to move for to begin with. And this happens a lot. Sometimes, they break away from someone with Opportunist, only to run to someone else (that may also have opportunist) and attack them - then, the next turn, they break away from the character they are now engaged with, suffer an Attack of Opportunity, and runs back to the one they first ran away from. Sometimes this happens even over environmental effects.

Now, someone might argue that "the AI doesn't know that you have Opportunist, nor should they!" - and that's a fair point, and one I happen to agree with, but it is already an established fact in D:OS2 that the enemies are psychic, as evidenced by their use of everything against Glass Cannons, or how they immediately target undeads with healing spells. I personally believe that the AI should treat all opponents equally unless they have cause to do otherwise, meaning that until they know that someone is undead, they won't target you with healing spells, and until they know that you seem to have no armor at all, they should treat you as if you do, and if someone runs away from an Opportunist and immediately suffer an Attack of Opportunity, everyone involved should know that that man does Attacks of Opportunity, and stop trying to run away and get pelted again-and-again.

It's absolutely jaw-dropping. In many, many ways, the AI is actually fairly clever, and sometimes (but rarely) they do very clever things - although this is somewhat restricted by another issue that will be discussed later. While there's been a lot of discussion about these AI issues, make no mistake that the AI is a lot better than it was in D:OS1. Sometimes, the enemies even use barrels or multi-stage setups, and sometimes they even try to cleanse themselves of effects. All of this is well and good, but this also means that when the AI does something stupid, it really stands out, and it stands out every time. The AI can - provided that they are considerably outnumbering the player - move things around and set up smart tactics at the end of one turn, only to have another AI-controlled creature literally run around in circles at the beginning of the next round.

Since everything that has to do with the AI is fairly esoteric, I cannot fathom why this is, or what can be done about it, but, fundamentally, the AI should be reluctant to move away from someone with Opportunist, and they should be similarly reluctant to move on dangerous surfaces. In D:OS1, this wasn't a problem, and the AI had no trouble avoiding running around on dangerous surfaces. Therefore, I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the armor system, and I have consistently seen enemies with very little magic armor run straight into blazing infernos, only to - of course - catch fire two steps in. At the same time, the AI being able to tell exactly how much damage moving a certain distance in dangerous terrain would cause them would be equally silly - just like the psychic nature of enemies in regards to the nature of the various allied characters (undead, glass cannons, etc).

And for all that is holy, tell the AI to stop trying to run away just to get a set distance away from you before they engage you in melee or casts a touch spell. I suspect that this is due to some order that they have to get in range, with "in range" defined as the maximum distance of whatever they're trying to do, and they're ignoring the fact that they are already close enough. I'm probably wrong, because it seems too simple, but that's the impression I have of what they're doing. I've seen enemies die to this on multiple occasions, and it's.. I don't want to sound entitled, but they really shouldn't be doing that; it's simply unacceptable. And I don't mean that as some kind of childish demand from my side, I'm saying that you, Larian, must agree with me, from your own point of view, that an enemy literally killing itself in front of me instead of attacking is unacceptable.

• The laughably bad defensive abilities.

Another issue that I have a feeling can largely be chalked up to the binary armor system, because they seem to exist on some kind of principle, but are essentially vestigial since the binary armor system rendered the original defensive abilities meaningless or non-functional. The new ones, however, in what appears to have been an inability to conceive of new defensive abilities to match the new combat format of binary armor and outcomes, aren't just conceptually lackluster, they're simply bad. Now, I won't pretend like the defensive abilities of D:OS1 were amazing, or that the system was some perfect gem, or that I ever put a ton of points into any of those, but they all had a purpose and while a min/maxer might argue that they were a waste of points, it was never a complete loss to invest in them, and again, they still interacted with the overall system in a meaningful fashion.

Defense abilities in D:OS2, however? Can they really say the same? Leadership didn't even use to be a Defense Ability, but seems to have been moved under that header in an attempt to salvage the category. What's worse, the bonuses aren't necessarily bad, a bonus to dodge and a bonus to resistances, but at the same time, the range is restricted to 5 meters. 5 meters. That's practically "melee combat only" in D:OS2, but for whatever reason, Leadership is an "ability" Conjurers start with. A min/maxer might argue that you can move those points around - and you should, absolutely, because Summoning is the only ability that has a capstone reward at 10 points (which is a bad idea for many reasons, but that's another discussion entirely) - but from a design perspective, the preset is encouraging the use of an ability set (or, as I would call it, skillset) that will practically see no use.

Perseverance is even worse, conceptually, but only because the armor system is bad, and Perseverance has the potential to take it from "bad" to "borderline psychotic". But more so than that, Perseverance is simply bad. It allows you to restore Magic Armor after recovering from Frozen or Stunned, and Physical Armor after being Knocked Down or (for some seemingly arbitrary reason) Petrified (which does Earth damage, targeting magic). The only one out of those that happen consistently is Knocked Down, and at best it gives you a small breather from being affected by the same thing(s) again, but unless you're facing tons of enemies, it is unlikely that armor will actually remain long enough to matter, and if you are facing tons of enemies, it will be stripped anyway. Perseverance appears to be an attempt at create a relevant defensive ability in the context of the binary armor system, in lieu of other potential abilities that can boost defenses, but because of how the armor system functions (i.e. there are no other defenses), there is no way to properly balance this or make it relevant enough to matter within this context.

Even in a best-case scenario, it's extremely situational, and if you invest enough for it to even matter in those scenarios (so, 10 points for 50% restoration) you've irrevocably shot yourself in the foot. It would surely be fun when it does trigger, but by the time it does, you could've done something useful.

Now Retribution. Now we're really deep into the barrel of uninspiring, lackluster and useless. This thing deserves some kind of reward for it's uselessness and just how ill-fitted it is for this kind of game. A retribution-based ability is something you'd expect to see in a run-of-the-mill ARPG, and in such a game, it might even be useful - to an extent. But to have it in D:OS2 is just.. weird. And the ability is terrible. Not just in the applicable sense, as in it likely being the single most worthless place you can waste a point, with little-to-no battlefield application, but also conceptually, in a mechanical sense.

The reasons for this is actually quite simple. It is terrible as a choice for the player because it is entirely reactive, and completely dependent on the damage the enemy does to you. With 1 point in it, you take 100 damage, and you'll reflect 5 damage. The thing is, though, even with 10 points wasted into it, you'll "only" be reflecting 50% of the damage done to you against your enemies. And when has an opponent ever done damage anywhere even comparable to his health pool relative to yours?

Keep in mind that this is also in a game completely without defensive abilities beyond these three, and if you were to put those 10 points into, say, Single-Handed, you'd instead have +50% Damage and +50% Accuracy with one-handed melee weapons. Nothing that wouldn't absolutely destroy you will even react to the fact that you reflect 50% of the damage it does to you, and it certainly would not compete with a consistent +50% damage (and Accuracy!) that a weapon ability would net you regardless of whether the enemy is attacking your or not (such as being under Crowd Control).

However, even if Retribution would be buffed to 200% in returned and you had the defenses of a god, simply standing there until the enemies kill themselves by hitting you, it would still be conceptually ruinous, because you'd be committing one of the biggest sins in design that you can commit: you'd be rewarding the player.. for doing nothing. Just stand there, soak it up, and have the enemies kill themselves. In a turn-based, ostensibly tactical, role-playing game.

There's no way to actually save this ability. It should never have existed, and it should simply be removed. It's not just bad, it's conceptually and mechanically unforgivable.

I honestly cannot understand who thought that was a good idea, or good design, or how they even thought it could be useful. It deserves it's own little special layer of hell.

Spoiler

(Also, a completely separate issue, let me state for the record my enduring hatred of the D:OS franchises cemented tendency to systematically and categorically conflate the terms "skills" and "abilities" in a way no other game I have ever played does - "Skills" and "Abilities" are, everywhere outside of Belgium, apparently, the other way around. This messes considerably with my ability to uphold consistent terminology.)

• The near-meaningless attributes and the slaughter of complexity & depth.

Now, I'm not going to pretend like D:OS1 didn't have any balance issues. That would just be silly. We all know it did. It was generally easy to simply pump one Attribute, maybe two, and that was it, and due to some other issues, largely absent in D:OS2 due to other changes, stacking modifiers to AP and Initiative was king - move first, move hard, and then move again.

But look at this. And then compare it to this.

It's depressing! It's downright pathetic! It's jaw-dropping how an attribute system can become so watered down and so simplified that it almost has no meaning or point to it's existence. This is Diablo 3-levels of oversimplification and dumbing down, with the exception that we pretend like there's any meaningful choice remaining, by still allowing the player to place their points.

"You are playing an X-type character. Do you want +5% damage to X, +5% damage to Y, +Health, or +1% Critical Chance? Or do you want to pay this Attribute Tax so you can have more skills?"

While there are more major concrete issues in the game, this thing is probably the one that makes me the most depressed, because it shows such a clear decline in meaningfulness, build versatility, and system complexity. It is really on a point where I feel that you might as well remove Attributes as a concept altogether, and simply apply +5% damage to the character, a health boost, and an increase in critical chance on a per-level basis, because none of this ultimately constitutes a meaningful choice; it's entirely and painfully obvious from the creation of your character to the end of the game where you'll be placing you points, and the near-obligatory points you practically have to put into Memory doesn't change that, but is rather to be considered a form of cheap attribute point taxation in order for you to be allowed to use more skills - not that you have to have that many skills, due to other issues in the game, since action points are very limited, cooldowns short and crowd control shorter.

I really don't know what else to say about this, and there's no simple way to fix this. The attributes need to do different things in different ways, and with so many parts of the game cut into in terms of depth, with no saves or resistances (beyond pure damage), straight-jacketed action points, and completely normalized ranges across the entire field for weapons (13 meters, I believe, whether we're talking crossbow, bow or wand), it's hard to determine what the attributes should actually do.

A lot of these changes shouldn't have gone in to begin with, especially not if they affect the core character mechanics in such a way that you eventually come to the final conclusion that "Oh, wait, what are these attributes supposed to do now that we've stripped out all the subsystems?". Someone might argue that it's "balanced", but balance for the sake of balance itself has no inherent value. Balance is only needed in the sense that too obvious options are stripped out to avoid one-trick-ponies or abuse, and forcing the player to think and adapt, deriving pleasure from outwitting or outsmarting the opponent or the system, strategically or tactically, but here, it has clearly come at the cost of meaningful player agency in terms of attribute distribution and build versatility - the very things that the concept of balancing is intended to support, because if it's not that, then what point is there to it?

• The rollercoaster-ride of Talents.

Oh man. Should I take Five-Star Diner or Duck Duck Goose? Should I take Escapist or Executioner? Should I take Ambidextrous or Far Out Man? Should I take Elemental Ranger or Guerilla?

All of these questions are rhetorical. Some Talents are extremely powerful. Others are almost completely useless. To add insult to injury, some completely beneficial, while others constitute trade-offs. Escapist is based around the concept of actually losing a battle and fleeing, Five-Star Diner doubles the bonuses of food, but the issue with food was never the bonuses it gives, but the duration which it lasts, and why on Earth would anyone waste four Action Points to go into Stealth in order to do 40% extra damage? Either you spend 6 Action Points to do 140% damage, or you spend 6 Action Points to actually attack 3 times to do 300%.

Why do Ice King and Demon come with trade-offs in the way they do? If it trades 15% for 15%, the only real benefit is the +10% to a single resistance cap, which you'll be hard pressed to reach and that matters a hell of a lot less in a game where the armor system negates magic damage for a while anyway.

Why does Leech completely consume blood on the ground, when Undead don't consume ooze/poison? Is it just to make it incompatible with the single most thematically fitting combination you could do when you play a Leech, which would be that of a Nercomancer with the Blood Sucker skill?

Why are Slingshot and Far Out Man separate talents, when they essentially do the same thing conceptually?

Why does Ambidextrous have absolutely nothing to do with actually being ambidextrous or duel-wielding, and do you actually expect people to invest a talent in the concept of leaving their one hand completely free (foregoing both the more powerful bonuses of two-handers and the dual bonuses of having a secondary weapon or a shield)?

Why are The Pawn and Executioner mutually exclusive? Are you really so deathly afraid of people saving even a single extra AP and being able to kill someone? It's not an amazingly powerful combo, even.

So many questions. The Talents are a mess, ranging from amazing to questionable to functionally worthless. And what's worse is that this was true already in D:OS1, but it has somehow gotten even worse, with many talents removed or nerfed - some of them because the subsystems sadly no longer exists to support them (Courageous, Voluble Mage, Headstrong, Lightning Rod, Sidewinder, etc.) and others seemingly arbitrarily and without reason (Packmule, Sidewinder, Swift-Footed, Thick Skin, Anaconda, etc.).

What's left is a small number of Talents that vary wildly in usefulness, and are almost all universally applicable, with very little effect on actual build or character, with a few exceptions (Opportunist is obviously for warrior-type characters, etc.).

The solution here is both complex and very simple. First of all, if some things are changed for the better, such as the current armor system, the return of flanking, etc., many of the old Talents could easy be recreated and reinstated. But also, some Talents simply need to be buffed, or have the trade-offs removed from them, to actually make them solid choices. Other talents could be merged together, such as Far Out Man and Slingshot.

There's no reason I should go through all the potential fixes and things that could be done to each individual Talent, it should be fairly evident in each case. And for fucks sake, stop having Leech such the blood from the ground so you can actually use it with Blood Sucker (which should remove the blood from the ground).

• Binarity of outcomes, predictability, and the armor system.

I'm unsure of where to even get started on this one. D:OS2 uses a binary system with two different types of armor, each of which determines whether something does damage to Vitality or not, and whether an effect of practically any type works or not, whether it's Taunt, Burning, Charm or Frozen.

First of all, it's completely unintuitive. You launch a big rock and throw it at the enemy? It targets magic armor and is absorbed by it, and only does damage to it, not to physical armor at all. You scream at someone and call 'em a cunt, trying to use Taunt on them? It literally bounces right off the shield, targeting physical armor. You launch a fireball? Magic armor. You throw a physical barrel of oil on someone and then throw a physical molotov cocktail on the barrel, creating a burning inferno? Soaked up by magic armor, and enemies can pass over it with little difficulty, without catching fire.

But that giant boulder you launched at the enemy, which was completely soaked up by magic armor? It spread oil on the ground, imposing the slowing condition, which automagically pierces all forms of armor, both magic and physical.

But the fact that it is unintuitive and feels arbitrary (which it isn't, it's actually completely consistent) is actually completely secondary. What it does is that it leads to a completely predictable combat system on any given turn. You know, with 100% certainty, whether something will work or not. There is absolutely zero ambiguity to it. Do they have armor? Your effects will fail. Do they not have armor? Your affects will succeed.

Any feeling of suspense is removed, and any risk taken with practically any action, making your actions in any one turn likely a given, without any considerations, hail mary's, or surprising turn of events. Simply put, the armor system completely negates any element of the Delta of Randomness. This is terrible design in itself, because that delta of randomness is one of the staples, I would say fundamentals of good turn-based gameplay, and the armor system breaks this completely on a systemic, tactical level.

So how can it be resolved? Short of reworking the entirety of the game and reinstate a save- or resistance-based system, there's not a whole lot that can be done. If absolutely determined to maintain the armor system at it's core in how it works right now, several things would have to change.

First of all, the intuitive nature of the system is more important than consistency. Whether something targets physical resistance/armor or targets magical resistance/armor should be determined by the nature of the spell or skill or item used, not by the damage type or the condition it imposes. A rock should target physical resistance/armor. A fireball should target magic resistance/armor. A molotov should target physical resistance/armor. And a lot of things - such as most surfaces or Taunt, should not stoppable by armor at all. The ability to resist them should either be by a flat percentage, or modified by something else entirely, such as Wits, or mental or magical resistances.

Furthermore, rather than having a system in which armor either completely blocks something or does nothing at all to block anything, the protection garnered could be a percentage based off remaining armor. If you have 100% magic armor, you could have a 90% chance to resist most spells or magic-based effects, as well as the magic armor soaking 90% of all magic damage, meaning the spell would only do 10% of it's damage to vitality.

At a theoretical 0%, the chance to resist would inversely be a mere 10%, and the spell would do full damage to vitality (since the armor is now completely gone).

While I would consider this approach imperfect, it would be a way to keep using the currently existing sub-systems and itemization and so forth, while constituting a considerable improvement upon the nature of combat resolution and the tactical layer of the game, which right now - for all practical intents and purposes - simply do not exist.

• The Round-Robin Turn Orders.

This thing right here. I've pointed it out to multiple paste-eaters, and despite the very obvious and major issues, they simply hadn't noticed. It boggles the mind. And once you see it, it cannot be unseen. Most people assume that Initiative has a meaning in the game. They assume that it works like initiative usually works. They assume that the rounds in D:OS2 are operating on an initiative-based system.

I mean, it has to, right? I mean, if Initiative doesn't matter, then the mechanical benefit of Wits would be reduced to a mere +1% critical chance, the +2 initiative benefit for being human wouldn't matter, and all those initiative modifiers on items and equipment would be irrelevant? Surely, initiative must matter in a tangible fashion?

But it doesn't. D:OS2 operates on a round-robin turn system, where the only thing initiative determines is who goes first within a given group. And it is, hands down, the absolutely worst aspect of the entire game, and the single most indefensible design decision. To understand the issue, you must understand the implications of this, and to do that, you must understand how it works.

In D:OS2, allies & enemies always alternate their turns throughout a round. No matter who has the highest initiative, the opponent of that person will go second, followed by an ally, and then an opponent. Regardless of actual initiative scores. Let me give you an example:

Let's say your party of 4 has an initiative of 10, 11, 12, and 13 respectively. You are meeting a group of 8 enemies that all have an initiative of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. So, markedly lower than even the lowest one in your party.

You will move in this fashion, bar any special circumstance (such as summons):

You (13 Initiative)
Them (8 Initiative)
You (12 Initiative)
Them (7 Initiative)
You (11 Initiative)
Them (6 Initiative)
You (10 Initiative)
Them (5 Initiative)
Them (4 Initiative)
Them (3 Initiative)
Them (2 Initiative)
Them (1 Initiative)

Now, that alone should be enough to make you raise your eyebrows and go "Wait, that's retarded!", but the issues with it goes far beyond that.

First of all, this completely invalidates Initiative as a relevant secondary attribute. That +2 Initiative humans get? Completely irrelevant. Wits? Neutered; it effectively only gets +1% critical hit chance, and the only reason you'd take it is because you maxed out either Strength or Finesse, or to find secrets, which only one character in the party needs to do - presumably the one that you want to move first in the turn order and use to initiate combat.

All those items with +Initiative? Useless. You used a Bucket for a helmet for much of the initial stages of the game? Makes perfect sense, because -Initiative literally does not matter, especially if you are the one to initiate combat anyway.

But these issues are secondary or even tertiary to the effect it has on the strategic layer of the game, the layer beyond the actions of a single individual character (so brutally savaged by the aforementioned armor system). The execution of plans and the evolution of the combat landscape during the course of a single round is essentially non-existent, and it affects both the player and the AI.

Because of the round-robin turn-orders rather than an initiative-based system, the battlefield is a constantly changing landscape, to the point where it's hard to actually determine what is going on, or make any plans.

A common concept that I would consider foundational to the very concept of turn-based as an enjoyable way to play out key resolution mechanics is the ability to think ahead and act upon the perceived development of the landscape as it is (and by landscape, I don't just mean environment, I mean it in the widest possible meaning of the word).

In D:OS2, that's simply absent. Or at least it seems to have been lost as a key source of enjoyment, because it is practically impossible to plan ahead, because a single turn later, the landscape may be completely different than from when you ended your previous turn. And then it changes during your turn, but is immediately undone the next.

Furthermore, you may not even WANT to put down water (just as an example) because the next turn, there's a guarantee that no-one in your party will be the one taking action, so you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot - but there's no way for you to know if you are.

You don't want to throw out a barrel, because there's almost a guarantee that it will blow up in your face - if there's even barrels around at that point (which is a big difference from D:OS1, where barrels sometimes would not even get used in combat, or simply not get hit by environmental or AoE effects, which is almost a guarantee in D:OS2).

And this goes both ways. The AI doesn't want to do these things either - unless there's a significant number of enemies, meaning that they do get to do several consecutive turns at the end of the round. The end result is that the idea of planning ahead or predicting the actions of your opponents are absent from the considerations in D:OS2 combat. The kind of set-ups that were so common and so integral to the enjoyment of the combat in D:OS1 is entirely absent in D:OS2, and combat in D:OS2 often devolves into "playing catch-up" and reactionary decisions on a turn-to-turn basis; and because of the armor system, the actions taken within those turns are entirely predictable and essentially binary, meaning that you know exactly what to do and what will happen at any one time within any given turn, removing any feeling of suspense or momentary hopefulness.

Before I got a chance to examine the game and notice the major issues with it, my SO was already all in planning-mode about how we should plan ourselves to be complimentary, and how if she was using fire magic, I should take something to use earth magic, so if I made some oil, she could set it on fire. But in D:OS2, that doesn't happen. What happens is that I throw oil, and the enemy either remove it or avoid it and set it on fire themselves. And this doesn't just affect the player - it affects the AI too. The AI has the capability to do these things, I see them do it, it's actually quite awesome. But if they were to (like me) throw out a barrel from somewhere in front of them, I'd drop it on their fucking faces the next turn.

The only time set-ups like this can be done reliable, to see a plan and see it take shape, to get that rush of "FUCK YEEAAAAH BURN YOU FUCKING CUNTS, YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, NOW DID YOU?!" is when you're at the absolute end of the turn order in a little clump. And 99 times out of 100, that's just going to be the enemy in one of those fights where they come busting in from every direction at the drop of a hat as the BBEG twirls his mustache and goes "Hohoho, you didn't see this AMBUSH coming, did you?".

There are no moments of "YES!" or "Aaaah, noooo!" in D:OS2 that isn't caused entirely by your own fault, or that comes unexpected, and there is no enjoyment in the procession of consecutive turns because there is no way to fulfil even a short-term plan. And both of those things are absolutely essential to practically all turn-based systems.

But it doesn't end here. No. It gets worse. There's not only a de facto inability to plan and execute, further hampered by the randomness of the evolving landscape in any given encounter, but round-to-round, the turn order can be perceived as essentially random. "How can that be? Weren't you just saying that they're utterly predictable?!" you might ask.

Yes, yes I was, and they are - to a point. You won't be the one to do the next turn, but you might not know who will be taking that next turn. You can probably figure it out, but it's by no means intuitive or sensible. You see, the turn order I described earlier is mutable. After all, enemies can die, right?

And if you kill an enemy, you might expect them to be removed from the turn order, right? Well they are. But someone else will immediately take their place. This leads to the fun, fun, fun situation of you killing a weaker opponent towards the end of a round, and in the next round - which is coming right up - the much stronger opponent has now taken his place, meaning that he may be moving before, say, the 4th person in your party, whereas if that enemy that had just died previously would otherwise have been moving in his stead - and maybe he would've died this round instead, or maybe even on his own turn by being on fire. But because you killed an enemy last round, the turn order gets reshuffled, and the much stronger enemy gets to move instead, and he might kill your 4th party member before he even gets a chance to move.

This has created the situation where you as the player, by killing an opponent, actually ended up in a much worse position than you would otherwise have been in if you had left the enemy alive. Yes, this is an extreme example, but this is still something that happens all the time in the game, even if you obviously don't end up losing a party member every time it happens. However, the fact that you can regularly screw yourself this way is completely absurd; taking out an opponent should always be something positive, bar special, narrative circumstances - the default should never be for the player to question whether he ended up in a worse position or not, or if he should simply have ignored the enemy until next round, maybe simply skipping taking any action, despite being maxed out on action points.

But wait. There's more.

For simplicity's sake, imagine a scenario in which you are alone against two opponents, and for whatever reason, they both have higher initiative than you. It results in the following turn-order:

Enemy #1
You
Enemy #2

Soon, you'll kill an enemy. Who're you killing? It better not be Enemy #1, because then the following happens!

Enemy #1 takes his turn.
You take your turn, and you kill Enemy #1.
Enemy #2 takes his turn.
Enemy #2 takes another turn, because it is now a new round and Enemy #2 at the top of the turn order now, because Enemy #1 has died.

Again, the player has boned himself by killing the opponent, through no fault of his own. Had he instead killed Enemy #2, the result would've been different, without the enemy essentially getting a free turn.

But wait. There's more!

You summon something. The summon moves right after you. But then at the next turn, it gets shuffled into the round-robin turn order, meaning that one of your characters can be pushed back as much as three turns, suffering additional attacks that it would not otherwise have done.

Summoning an ally, presumably done to improve your situation, might end up screwing you completely, and there's really no way to tell beforehand. The system punished you for buffing. This becomes very obvious as a Summoner especially, since Totems are extremely weak, but get shuffled into the turn order too, so that "lump" of potential "overflow" opponents could end up picking them off one-by-one in a single round before they can even possibly act in that round.

But wait, there's mooooooooore!

Because all Initiative does is determine your in-group turn order, gaining initiative is potentially detrimental. Why? Because if the only benefit of Initiative is between the player's own party members, it means that if a party member actually gets "too high" initiative, it puts him above another party member, and it might be disadvantageous for him to do so - such as if someone with Fire Skills gets bumped above someone with Earth Skills, meaning that if you rely on (in the extent you can rely on it in D:OS2; this is really just for the purpose of explanation, I know full well that this doesn't really happen in D:OS2, because of the armor system and the round-robin turn orders) the latter laying out oil so that the former can set it on fire, you can't do that anymore.

Another example would be a warrior getting higher initiative than the buffer in a party where you rely on the tactic of buffing the warrior before he moves. In fact, I know that there are players that consider initiative purely a negative stat for their main character, because their main character is a summoner, and relies on others putting down environmental effects before he takes his turn.

Can similar situations arise in an initiative-based turn-order system? Yes, but it is a lot more manageable, because if two party members are close to eachother in initiative, they at least do not suffer from the fact that an enemy will forcibly be inserted between them, further exacerbating the issue, and if someone gets higher initiative, it is still a net benefit vs. the opponents themselves, on average.

So what can be done about this? It's actually quite simple. Simply flipping the switch and make the game Initiative-based would be a tremendous improvement, and I know that D:OS2 can handle it, because that is apparently how it used to be, and in fact the entire game already appears to be geared towards using an initiative-based turn-order system, as evidenced by the modifier humans get, the initiative bonus from Wits, and the many items and equipments in the game which supports the notion that initiative is intended to matter and is intended to be a positive modifier.

But while that would be a tremendous improvement, it wouldn't be perfect, because it would obviously mean going back to the issues that prompted the round-robin turn orders to begin with. The ideal solution, in my mind, would involve rebalancing encounters to avoid massive stacking of initiative as an end-all be-all viable tactic, as well as to add a per-round element of randomness that, despite constituting a random modifier, would not be so strong as to undo the benefits of getting a higher initiative.

While obviously completely untested, my suggestion would be to flip the aforementioned switch and thus go back to an initiative-based turn order, and then, round-by-round, modify every participant's initiative by +/- (essentially either add or withdraw) 1d[total initaitive/2].

What would this mean? It would mean that someone with an Initiative would have a per-round Initiative range of 5-15. Someone with 20 Initiative would have a per-round Initiative of 10-30. Notice how the average is always equal to your base initiative, meaning that if you have 13 initiative, during the course of all your rounds, you will average out at 13. Your initiative still matters just as much as it did before.

However, it also does not guarantee you to go first in any given round. But at the same time, each round in itself will play out predictably (turn-wise), and you will never be punished for taking out an opponent, you will never be punished for summoning, and you can prioritize targeting. Obviously, up to two or three rounds should be displayed to you, with the modifiers for each participant already determined, so you can actually tell who moves when - and, as opposed to as how it is now, rely on that information.

I can only hope that Larian listens. Especially on the last topic. Because currently, it's balls.

 

[Lhynn]

These are my thoughts regarding some of the issues discussed, why they're issues (when not obvious), and thoughts on what can be done about it. I'm just listing these based on the small list of suggested issues mentioned earlier in the thread, and while other things have been discussed, most other issues have been simple matters of taste, or things that are literally unfixable at a fundamental level (there is no way to get the money back that was spent on voice acting, anyway). These vary greatly in their size and relevance, as will commentary on them. Some are minor, and some are really major in how they affect the game.

There are also very specific issues in the game, such as how specifically Necromancy seems to have been somewhat shafted, or how incredibly fucking broken Bone Widow is, how oil surfaces penetrate anything but completely non-magical fire surfaces somehow target magic armor, or the apparent tendency towards massive over-compensation, will not be addressed. They're simply too specific and this would quickly simply devolve into a laundry-list of unconstructive bitching, like a list of unforgivable grievances straight out of the book of grudges. It's an imperfect world. The intent of this episode of "Issues as according to me" is to examine things that are actually fixable or discuss things that are systemic in nature. Not every single flaw in the game, big or small.

I do this, as stated, because I feel it necessary to do so, lest bitching remain simple bitching. I genuinely enjoy most of D:OS2, I absolutely adored D:OS1 and think it was one of the best co-op experiences I've ever had in a game, and while I doubt that D:OS2 will reach that same level simply because it seems to be based a lot less around the idea of co-op (I will forever lament the fact that there appears to be no points of contention or places in the game where there's an exchange between player characters on what to do next, and that the contentious resolution system (Rock–paper–scissors), however silly it may have been, is gone forever; it was a nice piece of shared storytelling, whereas now the focus appears to be on an individual story that you just happen to share).

There's really no way to TLDR this.

• The AI behaving retarded at times, for no discernible reason.

This one is actually quite minor, but frustrating, because it is so consistent. By far the most common issue is that enemies often tries to run away from players with Opportunist, suffers an Attack of Opportunity, lose AP, and proceeds to commence the attack they were seemingly planning all along - often a touch-attack spell or even a melee attack. Neither of which they would've needed to move for to begin with. And this happens a lot. Sometimes, they break away from someone with Opportunist, only to run to someone else (that may also have opportunist) and attack them - then, the next turn, they break away from the character they are now engaged with, suffer an Attack of Opportunity, and runs back to the one they first ran away from. Sometimes this happens even over environmental effects.

Now, someone might argue that "the AI doesn't know that you have Opportunist, nor should they!" - and that's a fair point, and one I happen to agree with, but it is already an established fact in D:OS2 that the enemies are psychic, as evidenced by their use of everything against Glass Cannons, or how they immediately target undeads with healing spells. I personally believe that the AI should treat all opponents equally unless they have cause to do otherwise, meaning that until they know that someone is undead, they won't target you with healing spells, and until they know that you seem to have no armor at all, they should treat you as if you do, and if someone runs away from an Opportunist and immediately suffer an Attack of Opportunity, everyone involved should know that that man does Attacks of Opportunity, and stop trying to run away and get pelted again-and-again.

It's absolutely jaw-dropping. In many, many ways, the AI is actually fairly clever, and sometimes (but rarely) they do very clever things - although this is somewhat restricted by another issue that will be discussed later. While there's been a lot of discussion about these AI issues, make no mistake that the AI is a lot better than it was in D:OS1. Sometimes, the enemies even use barrels or multi-stage setups, and sometimes they even try to cleanse themselves of effects. All of this is well and good, but this also means that when the AI does something stupid, it really stands out, and it stands out every time. The AI can - provided that they are considerably outnumbering the player - move things around and set up smart tactics at the end of one turn, only to have another AI-controlled creature literally run around in circles at the beginning of the next round.

Since everything that has to do with the AI is fairly esoteric, I cannot fathom why this is, or what can be done about it, but, fundamentally, the AI should be reluctant to move away from someone with Opportunist, and they should be similarly reluctant to move on dangerous surfaces. In D:OS1, this wasn't a problem, and the AI had no trouble avoiding running around on dangerous surfaces. Therefore, I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the armor system, and I have consistently seen enemies with very little magic armor run straight into blazing infernos, only to - of course - catch fire two steps in. At the same time, the AI being able to tell exactly how much damage moving a certain distance in dangerous terrain would cause them would be equally silly - just like the psychic nature of enemies in regards to the nature of the various allied characters (undead, glass cannons, etc).

And for all that is holy, tell the AI to stop trying to run away just to get a set distance away from you before they engage you in melee or casts a touch spell. I suspect that this is due to some order that they have to get in range, with "in range" defined as the maximum distance of whatever they're trying to do, and they're ignoring the fact that they are already close enough. I'm probably wrong, because it seems too simple, but that's the impression I have of what they're doing. I've seen enemies die to this on multiple occasions, and it's.. I don't want to sound entitled, but they really shouldn't be doing that; it's simply unacceptable. And I don't mean that as some kind of childish demand from my side, I'm saying that you, Larian, must agree with me, from your own point of view, that an enemy literally killing itself in front of me instead of attacking is unacceptable.

• The laughably bad defensive abilities.

Another issue that I have a feeling can largely be chalked up to the binary armor system, because they seem to exist on some kind of principle, but are essentially vestigial since the binary armor system rendered the original defensive abilities meaningless or non-functional. The new ones, however, in what appears to have been an inability to conceive of new defensive abilities to match the new combat format of binary armor and outcomes, aren't just conceptually lackluster, they're simply bad. Now, I won't pretend like the defensive abilities of D:OS1 were amazing, or that the system was some perfect gem, or that I ever put a ton of points into any of those, but they all had a purpose and while a min/maxer might argue that they were a waste of points, it was never a complete loss to invest in them, and again, they still interacted with the overall system in a meaningful fashion.

Defense abilities in D:OS2, however? Can they really say the same? Leadership didn't even use to be a Defense Ability, but seems to have been moved under that header in an attempt to salvage the category. What's worse, the bonuses aren't necessarily bad, a bonus to dodge and a bonus to resistances, but at the same time, the range is restricted to 5 meters. 5 meters. That's practically "melee combat only" in D:OS2, but for whatever reason, Leadership is an "ability" Conjurers start with. A min/maxer might argue that you can move those points around - and you should, absolutely, because Summoning is the only ability that has a capstone reward at 10 points (which is a bad idea for many reasons, but that's another discussion entirely) - but from a design perspective, the preset is encouraging the use of an ability set (or, as I would call it, skillset) that will practically see no use.

Perseverance is even worse, conceptually, but only because the armor system is bad, and Perseverance has the potential to take it from "bad" to "borderline psychotic". But more so than that, Perseverance is simply bad. It allows you to restore Magic Armor after recovering from Frozen or Stunned, and Physical Armor after being Knocked Down or (for some seemingly arbitrary reason) Petrified (which does Earth damage, targeting magic). The only one out of those that happen consistently is Knocked Down, and at best it gives you a small breather from being affected by the same thing(s) again, but unless you're facing tons of enemies, it is unlikely that armor will actually remain long enough to matter, and if you are facing tons of enemies, it will be stripped anyway. Perseverance appears to be an attempt at create a relevant defensive ability in the context of the binary armor system, in lieu of other potential abilities that can boost defenses, but because of how the armor system functions (i.e. there are no other defenses), there is no way to properly balance this or make it relevant enough to matter within this context.

Even in a best-case scenario, it's extremely situational, and if you invest enough for it to even matter in those scenarios (so, 10 points for 50% restoration) you've irrevocably shot yourself in the foot. It would surely be fun when it does trigger, but by the time it does, you could've done something useful.

Now Retribution. Now we're really deep into the barrel of uninspiring, lackluster and useless. This thing deserves some kind of reward for it's uselessness and just how ill-fitted it is for this kind of game. A retribution-based ability is something you'd expect to see in a run-of-the-mill ARPG, and in such a game, it might even be useful - to an extent. But to have it in D:OS2 is just.. weird. And the ability is terrible. Not just in the applicable sense, as in it likely being the single most worthless place you can waste a point, with little-to-no battlefield application, but also conceptually, in a mechanical sense.

The reasons for this is actually quite simple. It is terrible as a choice for the player because it is entirely reactive, and completely dependent on the damage the enemy does to you. With 1 point in it, you take 100 damage, and you'll reflect 5 damage. The thing is, though, even with 10 points wasted into it, you'll "only" be reflecting 50% of the damage done to you against your enemies. And when has an opponent ever done damage anywhere even comparable to his health pool relative to yours?

Keep in mind that this is also in a game completely without defensive abilities beyond these three, and if you were to put those 10 points into, say, Single-Handed, you'd instead have +50% Damage and +50% Accuracy with one-handed melee weapons. Nothing that wouldn't absolutely destroy you will even react to the fact that you reflect 50% of the damage it does to you, and it certainly would not compete with a consistent +50% damage (and Accuracy!) that a weapon ability would net you regardless of whether the enemy is attacking your or not (such as being under Crowd Control).

However, even if Retribution would be buffed to 200% in returned and you had the defenses of a god, simply standing there until the enemies kill themselves by hitting you, it would still be conceptually ruinous, because you'd be committing one of the biggest sins in design that you can commit: you'd be rewarding the player.. for doing nothing. Just stand there, soak it up, and have the enemies kill themselves. In a turn-based, ostensibly tactical, role-playing game.

There's no way to actually save this ability. It should never have existed, and it should simply be removed. It's not just bad, it's conceptually and mechanically unforgivable.

I honestly cannot understand who thought that was a good idea, or good design, or how they even thought it could be useful. It deserves it's own little special layer of hell.

Spoiler

(Also, a completely separate issue, let me state for the record my enduring hatred of the D:OS franchises cemented tendency to systematically and categorically conflate the terms "skills" and "abilities" in a way no other game I have ever played does - "Skills" and "Abilities" are, everywhere outside of Belgium, apparently, the other way around. This messes considerably with my ability to uphold consistent terminology.)

• The near-meaningless attributes and the slaughter of complexity & depth.

Now, I'm not going to pretend like D:OS1 didn't have any balance issues. That would just be silly. We all know it did. It was generally easy to simply pump one Attribute, maybe two, and that was it, and due to some other issues, largely absent in D:OS2 due to other changes, stacking modifiers to AP and Initiative was king - move first, move hard, and then move again.

But look at this. And then compare it to this.

It's depressing! It's downright pathetic! It's jaw-dropping how an attribute system can become so watered down and so simplified that it almost has no meaning or point to it's existence. This is Diablo 3-levels of oversimplification and dumbing down, with the exception that we pretend like there's any meaningful choice remaining, by still allowing the player to place their points.

"You are playing an X-type character. Do you want +5% damage to X, +5% damage to Y, +Health, or +1% Critical Chance? Or do you want to pay this Attribute Tax so you can have more skills?"

While there are more major concrete issues in the game, this thing is probably the one that makes me the most depressed, because it shows such a clear decline in meaningfulness, build versatility, and system complexity. It is really on a point where I feel that you might as well remove Attributes as a concept altogether, and simply apply +5% damage to the character, a health boost, and an increase in critical chance on a per-level basis, because none of this ultimately constitutes a meaningful choice; it's entirely and painfully obvious from the creation of your character to the end of the game where you'll be placing you points, and the near-obligatory points you practically have to put into Memory doesn't change that, but is rather to be considered a form of cheap attribute point taxation in order for you to be allowed to use more skills - not that you have to have that many skills, due to other issues in the game, since action points are very limited, cooldowns short and crowd control shorter.

I really don't know what else to say about this, and there's no simple way to fix this. The attributes need to do different things in different ways, and with so many parts of the game cut into in terms of depth, with no saves or resistances (beyond pure damage), straight-jacketed action points, and completely normalized ranges across the entire field for weapons (13 meters, I believe, whether we're talking crossbow, bow or wand), it's hard to determine what the attributes should actually do.

A lot of these changes shouldn't have gone in to begin with, especially not if they affect the core character mechanics in such a way that you eventually come to the final conclusion that "Oh, wait, what are these attributes supposed to do now that we've stripped out all the subsystems?". Someone might argue that it's "balanced", but balance for the sake of balance itself has no inherent value. Balance is only needed in the sense that too obvious options are stripped out to avoid one-trick-ponies or abuse, and forcing the player to think and adapt, deriving pleasure from outwitting or outsmarting the opponent or the system, strategically or tactically, but here, it has clearly come at the cost of meaningful player agency in terms of attribute distribution and build versatility - the very things that the concept of balancing is intended to support, because if it's not that, then what point is there to it?

• The rollercoaster-ride of Talents.

Oh man. Should I take Five-Star Diner or Duck Duck Goose? Should I take Escapist or Executioner? Should I take Ambidextrous or Far Out Man? Should I take Elemental Ranger or Guerilla?

All of these questions are rhetorical. Some Talents are extremely powerful. Others are almost completely useless. To add insult to injury, some completely beneficial, while others constitute trade-offs. Escapist is based around the concept of actually losing a battle and fleeing, Five-Star Diner doubles the bonuses of food, but the issue with food was never the bonuses it gives, but the duration which it lasts, and why on Earth would anyone waste four Action Points to go into Stealth in order to do 40% extra damage? Either you spend 6 Action Points to do 140% damage, or you spend 6 Action Points to actually attack 3 times to do 300%.

Why do Ice King and Demon come with trade-offs in the way they do? If it trades 15% for 15%, the only real benefit is the +10% to a single resistance cap, which you'll be hard pressed to reach and that matters a hell of a lot less in a game where the armor system negates magic damage for a while anyway.

Why does Leech completely consume blood on the ground, when Undead don't consume ooze/poison? Is it just to make it incompatible with the single most thematically fitting combination you could do when you play a Leech, which would be that of a Nercomancer with the Blood Sucker skill?

Why are Slingshot and Far Out Man separate talents, when they essentially do the same thing conceptually?

Why does Ambidextrous have absolutely nothing to do with actually being ambidextrous or duel-wielding, and do you actually expect people to invest a talent in the concept of leaving their one hand completely free (foregoing both the more powerful bonuses of two-handers and the dual bonuses of having a secondary weapon or a shield)?

Why are The Pawn and Executioner mutually exclusive? Are you really so deathly afraid of people saving even a single extra AP and being able to kill someone? It's not an amazingly powerful combo, even.

So many questions. The Talents are a mess, ranging from amazing to questionable to functionally worthless. And what's worse is that this was true already in D:OS1, but it has somehow gotten even worse, with many talents removed or nerfed - some of them because the subsystems sadly no longer exists to support them (Courageous, Voluble Mage, Headstrong, Lightning Rod, Sidewinder, etc.) and others seemingly arbitrarily and without reason (Packmule, Sidewinder, Swift-Footed, Thick Skin, Anaconda, etc.).

What's left is a small number of Talents that vary wildly in usefulness, and are almost all universally applicable, with very little effect on actual build or character, with a few exceptions (Opportunist is obviously for warrior-type characters, etc.).

The solution here is both complex and very simple. First of all, if some things are changed for the better, such as the current armor system, the return of flanking, etc., many of the old Talents could easy be recreated and reinstated. But also, some Talents simply need to be buffed, or have the trade-offs removed from them, to actually make them solid choices. Other talents could be merged together, such as Far Out Man and Slingshot.

There's no reason I should go through all the potential fixes and things that could be done to each individual Talent, it should be fairly evident in each case. And for fucks sake, stop having Leech such the blood from the ground so you can actually use it with Blood Sucker (which should remove the blood from the ground).

• Binarity of outcomes, predictability, and the armor system.

I'm unsure of where to even get started on this one. D:OS2 uses a binary system with two different types of armor, each of which determines whether something does damage to Vitality or not, and whether an effect of practically any type works or not, whether it's Taunt, Burning, Charm or Frozen.

First of all, it's completely unintuitive. You launch a big rock and throw it at the enemy? It targets magic armor and is absorbed by it, and only does damage to it, not to physical armor at all. You scream at someone and call 'em a cunt, trying to use Taunt on them? It literally bounces right off the shield, targeting physical armor. You launch a fireball? Magic armor. You throw a physical barrel of oil on someone and then throw a physical molotov cocktail on the barrel, creating a burning inferno? Soaked up by magic armor, and enemies can pass over it with little difficulty, without catching fire.

But that giant boulder you launched at the enemy, which was completely soaked up by magic armor? It spread oil on the ground, imposing the slowing condition, which automagically pierces all forms of armor, both magic and physical.

But the fact that it is unintuitive and feels arbitrary (which it isn't, it's actually completely consistent) is actually completely secondary. What it does is that it leads to a completely predictable combat system on any given turn. You know, with 100% certainty, whether something will work or not. There is absolutely zero ambiguity to it. Do they have armor? Your effects will fail. Do they not have armor? Your affects will succeed.

Any feeling of suspense is removed, and any risk taken with practically any action, making your actions in any one turn likely a given, without any considerations, hail mary's, or surprising turn of events. Simply put, the armor system completely negates any element of the Delta of Randomness. This is terrible design in itself, because that delta of randomness is one of the staples, I would say fundamentals of good turn-based gameplay, and the armor system breaks this completely on a systemic, tactical level.

So how can it be resolved? Short of reworking the entirety of the game and reinstate a save- or resistance-based system, there's not a whole lot that can be done. If absolutely determined to maintain the armor system at it's core in how it works right now, several things would have to change.

First of all, the intuitive nature of the system is more important than consistency. Whether something targets physical resistance/armor or targets magical resistance/armor should be determined by the nature of the spell or skill or item used, not by the damage type or the condition it imposes. A rock should target physical resistance/armor. A fireball should target magic resistance/armor. A molotov should target physical resistance/armor. And a lot of things - such as most surfaces or Taunt, should not stoppable by armor at all. The ability to resist them should either be by a flat percentage, or modified by something else entirely, such as Wits, or mental or magical resistances.

Furthermore, rather than having a system in which armor either completely blocks something or does nothing at all to block anything, the protection garnered could be a percentage based off remaining armor. If you have 100% magic armor, you could have a 90% chance to resist most spells or magic-based effects, as well as the magic armor soaking 90% of all magic damage, meaning the spell would only do 10% of it's damage to vitality.

At a theoretical 0%, the chance to resist would inversely be a mere 10%, and the spell would do full damage to vitality (since the armor is now completely gone).

While I would consider this approach imperfect, it would be a way to keep using the currently existing sub-systems and itemization and so forth, while constituting a considerable improvement upon the nature of combat resolution and the tactical layer of the game, which right now - for all practical intents and purposes - simply do not exist.

• The Round-Robin Turn Orders.

This thing right here. I've pointed it out to multiple paste-eaters, and despite the very obvious and major issues, they simply hadn't noticed. It boggles the mind. And once you see it, it cannot be unseen. Most people assume that Initiative has a meaning in the game. They assume that it works like initiative usually works. They assume that the rounds in D:OS2 are operating on an initiative-based system.

I mean, it has to, right? I mean, if Initiative doesn't matter, then the mechanical benefit of Wits would be reduced to a mere +1% critical chance, the +2 initiative benefit for being human wouldn't matter, and all those initiative modifiers on items and equipment would be irrelevant? Surely, initiative must matter in a tangible fashion?

But it doesn't. D:OS2 operates on a round-robin turn system, where the only thing initiative determines is who goes first within a given group. And it is, hands down, the absolutely worst aspect of the entire game, and the single most indefensible design decision. To understand the issue, you must understand the implications of this, and to do that, you must understand how it works.

In D:OS2, allies & enemies always alternate their turns throughout a round. No matter who has the highest initiative, the opponent of that person will go second, followed by an ally, and then an opponent. Regardless of actual initiative scores. Let me give you an example:

Let's say your party of 4 has an initiative of 10, 11, 12, and 13 respectively. You are meeting a group of 8 enemies that all have an initiative of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. So, markedly lower than even the lowest one in your party.

You will move in this fashion, bar any special circumstance (such as summons):

You (13 Initiative)
Them (8 Initiative)
You (12 Initiative)
Them (7 Initiative)
You (11 Initiative)
Them (6 Initiative)
You (10 Initiative)
Them (5 Initiative)
Them (4 Initiative)
Them (3 Initiative)
Them (2 Initiative)
Them (1 Initiative)

Now, that alone should be enough to make you raise your eyebrows and go "Wait, that's retarded!", but the issues with it goes far beyond that.

First of all, this completely invalidates Initiative as a relevant secondary attribute. That +2 Initiative humans get? Completely irrelevant. Wits? Neutered; it effectively only gets +1% critical hit chance, and the only reason you'd take it is because you maxed out either Strength or Finesse, or to find secrets, which only one character in the party needs to do - presumably the one that you want to move first in the turn order and use to initiate combat.

All those items with +Initiative? Useless. You used a Bucket for a helmet for much of the initial stages of the game? Makes perfect sense, because -Initiative literally does not matter, especially if you are the one to initiate combat anyway.

But these issues are secondary or even tertiary to the effect it has on the strategic layer of the game, the layer beyond the actions of a single individual character (so brutally savaged by the aforementioned armor system). The execution of plans and the evolution of the combat landscape during the course of a single round is essentially non-existent, and it affects both the player and the AI.

Because of the round-robin turn-orders rather than an initiative-based system, the battlefield is a constantly changing landscape, to the point where it's hard to actually determine what is going on, or make any plans.

A common concept that I would consider foundational to the very concept of turn-based as an enjoyable way to play out key resolution mechanics is the ability to think ahead and act upon the perceived development of the landscape as it is (and by landscape, I don't just mean environment, I mean it in the widest possible meaning of the word).

In D:OS2, that's simply absent. Or at least it seems to have been lost as a key source of enjoyment, because it is practically impossible to plan ahead, because a single turn later, the landscape may be completely different than from when you ended your previous turn. And then it changes during your turn, but is immediately undone the next.

Furthermore, you may not even WANT to put down water (just as an example) because the next turn, there's a guarantee that no-one in your party will be the one taking action, so you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot - but there's no way for you to know if you are.

You don't want to throw out a barrel, because there's almost a guarantee that it will blow up in your face - if there's even barrels around at that point (which is a big difference from D:OS1, where barrels sometimes would not even get used in combat, or simply not get hit by environmental or AoE effects, which is almost a guarantee in D:OS2).

And this goes both ways. The AI doesn't want to do these things either - unless there's a significant number of enemies, meaning that they do get to do several consecutive turns at the end of the round. The end result is that the idea of planning ahead or predicting the actions of your opponents are absent from the considerations in D:OS2 combat. The kind of set-ups that were so common and so integral to the enjoyment of the combat in D:OS1 is entirely absent in D:OS2, and combat in D:OS2 often devolves into "playing catch-up" and reactionary decisions on a turn-to-turn basis; and because of the armor system, the actions taken within those turns are entirely predictable and essentially binary, meaning that you know exactly what to do and what will happen at any one time within any given turn, removing any feeling of suspense or momentary hopefulness.

Before I got a chance to examine the game and notice the major issues with it, my SO was already all in planning-mode about how we should plan ourselves to be complimentary, and how if she was using fire magic, I should take something to use earth magic, so if I made some oil, she could set it on fire. But in D:OS2, that doesn't happen. What happens is that I throw oil, and the enemy either remove it or avoid it and set it on fire themselves. And this doesn't just affect the player - it affects the AI too. The AI has the capability to do these things, I see them do it, it's actually quite awesome. But if they were to (like me) throw out a barrel from somewhere in front of them, I'd drop it on their fucking faces the next turn.

The only time set-ups like this can be done reliable, to see a plan and see it take shape, to get that rush of "FUCK YEEAAAAH BURN YOU FUCKING CUNTS, YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, NOW DID YOU?!" is when you're at the absolute end of the turn order in a little clump. And 99 times out of 100, that's just going to be the enemy in one of those fights where they come busting in from every direction at the drop of a hat as the BBEG twirls his mustache and goes "Hohoho, you didn't see this AMBUSH coming, did you?".

There are no moments of "YES!" or "Aaaah, noooo!" in D:OS2 that isn't caused entirely by your own fault, or that comes unexpected, and there is no enjoyment in the procession of consecutive turns because there is no way to fulfil even a short-term plan. And both of those things are absolutely essential to practically all turn-based systems.

But it doesn't end here. No. It gets worse. There's not only a de facto inability to plan and execute, further hampered by the randomness of the evolving landscape in any given encounter, but round-to-round, the turn order can be perceived as essentially random. "How can that be? Weren't you just saying that they're utterly predictable?!" you might ask.

Yes, yes I was, and they are - to a point. You won't be the one to do the next turn, but you might not know who will be taking that next turn. You can probably figure it out, but it's by no means intuitive or sensible. You see, the turn order I described earlier is mutable. After all, enemies can die, right?

And if you kill an enemy, you might expect them to be removed from the turn order, right? Well they are. But someone else will immediately take their place. This leads to the fun, fun, fun situation of you killing a weaker opponent towards the end of a round, and in the next round - which is coming right up - the much stronger opponent has now taken his place, meaning that he may be moving before, say, the 4th person in your party, whereas if that enemy that had just died previously would otherwise have been moving in his stead - and maybe he would've died this round instead, or maybe even on his own turn by being on fire. But because you killed an enemy last round, the turn order gets reshuffled, and the much stronger enemy gets to move instead, and he might kill your 4th party member before he even gets a chance to move.

This has created the situation where you as the player, by killing an opponent, actually ended up in a much worse position than you would otherwise have been in if you had left the enemy alive. Yes, this is an extreme example, but this is still something that happens all the time in the game, even if you obviously don't end up losing a party member every time it happens. However, the fact that you can regularly screw yourself this way is completely absurd; taking out an opponent should always be something positive, bar special, narrative circumstances - the default should never be for the player to question whether he ended up in a worse position or not, or if he should simply have ignored the enemy until next round, maybe simply skipping taking any action, despite being maxed out on action points.

But wait. There's more.

For simplicity's sake, imagine a scenario in which you are alone against two opponents, and for whatever reason, they both have higher initiative than you. It results in the following turn-order:

Enemy #1
You
Enemy #2

Soon, you'll kill an enemy. Who're you killing? It better not be Enemy #1, because then the following happens!

Enemy #1 takes his turn.
You take your turn, and you kill Enemy #1.
Enemy #2 takes his turn.
Enemy #2 takes another turn, because it is now a new round and Enemy #2 at the top of the turn order now, because Enemy #1 has died.

Again, the player has boned himself by killing the opponent, through no fault of his own. Had he instead killed Enemy #2, the result would've been different, without the enemy essentially getting a free turn.

But wait. There's more!

You summon something. The summon moves right after you. But then at the next turn, it gets shuffled into the round-robin turn order, meaning that one of your characters can be pushed back as much as three turns, suffering additional attacks that it would not otherwise have done.

Summoning an ally, presumably done to improve your situation, might end up screwing you completely, and there's really no way to tell beforehand. The system punished you for buffing. This becomes very obvious as a Summoner especially, since Totems are extremely weak, but get shuffled into the turn order too, so that "lump" of potential "overflow" opponents could end up picking them off one-by-one in a single round before they can even possibly act in that round.

But wait, there's mooooooooore!

Because all Initiative does is determine your in-group turn order, gaining initiative is potentially detrimental. Why? Because if the only benefit of Initiative is between the player's own party members, it means that if a party member actually gets "too high" initiative, it puts him above another party member, and it might be disadvantageous for him to do so - such as if someone with Fire Skills gets bumped above someone with Earth Skills, meaning that if you rely on (in the extent you can rely on it in D:OS2; this is really just for the purpose of explanation, I know full well that this doesn't really happen in D:OS2, because of the armor system and the round-robin turn orders) the latter laying out oil so that the former can set it on fire, you can't do that anymore.

Another example would be a warrior getting higher initiative than the buffer in a party where you rely on the tactic of buffing the warrior before he moves. In fact, I know that there are players that consider initiative purely a negative stat for their main character, because their main character is a summoner, and relies on others putting down environmental effects before he takes his turn.

Can similar situations arise in an initiative-based turn-order system? Yes, but it is a lot more manageable, because if two party members are close to eachother in initiative, they at least do not suffer from the fact that an enemy will forcibly be inserted between them, further exacerbating the issue, and if someone gets higher initiative, it is still a net benefit vs. the opponents themselves, on average.

So what can be done about this? It's actually quite simple. Simply flipping the switch and make the game Initiative-based would be a tremendous improvement, and I know that D:OS2 can handle it, because that is apparently how it used to be, and in fact the entire game already appears to be geared towards using an initiative-based turn-order system, as evidenced by the modifier humans get, the initiative bonus from Wits, and the many items and equipments in the game which supports the notion that initiative is intended to matter and is intended to be a positive modifier.

But while that would be a tremendous improvement, it wouldn't be perfect, because it would obviously mean going back to the issues that prompted the round-robin turn orders to begin with. The ideal solution, in my mind, would involve rebalancing encounters to avoid massive stacking of initiative as an end-all be-all viable tactic, as well as to add a per-round element of randomness that, despite constituting a random modifier, would not be so strong as to undo the benefits of getting a higher initiative.

While obviously completely untested, my suggestion would be to flip the aforementioned switch and thus go back to an initiative-based turn order, and then, round-by-round, modify every participant's initiative by +/- (essentially either add or withdraw) 1d[total initaitive/2].

What would this mean? It would mean that someone with an Initiative would have a per-round Initiative range of 5-15. Someone with 20 Initiative would have a per-round Initiative of 10-30. Notice how the average is always equal to your base initiative, meaning that if you have 13 initiative, during the course of all your rounds, you will average out at 13. Your initiative still matters just as much as it did before.

However, it also does not guarantee you to go first in any given round. But at the same time, each round in itself will play out predictably (turn-wise), and you will never be punished for taking out an opponent, you will never be punished for summoning, and you can prioritize targeting. Obviously, up to two or three rounds should be displayed to you, with the modifiers for each participant already determined, so you can actually tell who moves when - and, as opposed to as how it is now, rely on that information.

I can only hope that Larian listens. Especially on the last topic. Because currently, it's balls.

TL;DR

 

[Tigranes]

Actually it's all very sensible and very clear. The game still manages to be fun for me at the moment when I take it as a 'off the cuff chaotic fighter' with my Rogue and Ranger, but the ability to really plan out elaborate environmental disasters and satisfyingly pull them off (or satisfyingly have it scuppered) as in DOS1 is basically gone; it almost feels like a turn-based action game, in that sense.

 

[toro]

... snip ...

Please post this on Larian's forum or on Steam.

 

[Luckmann]

... snip ...

Please post this on Larian's forum or on Steam.

Waaaay ahead of you.

Edit: Not going to do Steam, because I'd have to reformat the entire fucking thing. Larian was easy - only links and bullets were broken.

 

[Eyestabber]

Luckmann beautiful wall of autism, m8. You just wrote an in-depth "everything wrong with D:OS 2". I agree with every line. However, I doubt Larian will "fix" any of that (maybe the initiative thing) because the grey/blue shield system was a conscious decision to dumb the game down and we've seen that before: when is commercially successful it is never EVER rolled back. And this game seems to be selling like hot cakes so...

I just wanna point out that this system KILLS the entire purpose of having a gazillion different status effects. Why bother with taunt when you can knockdown instead? In the first game weaker forms of CC were balanced by either being more likely to succeed or having a wider area. In this game you just choose whatever drops the shields faster and then go for the strongest and longest CC available. Meh...

 

[Stavrophore]

Maaaaan, write a review already!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...-divinity-original-sin-2s-singleplayer-great/

How multiplayer makes Divinity: Original Sin 2’s singleplayer great

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site].

It’s the holy grail for RPGs, right, that perfect mix of a strong story and freedom to do what you want. But if players can do anything, how do you tell them a story in the right order and without bits missing? What if they kill some plot-important character or sell the magical thing that does the special thing?

Quite a few RPGs do a good job! Planescape: Torment, for one, presents a fantastically dense and interwoven set of characters and scenarios which you can approach in many different ways. But Divinity: Original Sin 2 goes a step beyond, telling a clear story and allowing – even encouraging – you to do all kinds of dumb things, all without completely breaking. How does it succeed? Well, through a feature that you’d never think is related.

THE MECHANIC: Multiplayer

Very mild spoilers follow, but nothing actually spoiling, promise.

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you give players room to do what they like together, you can also give lone players the same thing. “The singleplayer is much stronger because of the multiplayer,” Swen Vincke, head of developer Larian Studios, tells me. “It enforces more freedom.”

DOS2 has many features that simply wouldn’t exist if it didn’t incorporate multiplayer, simply because – in Vincke’s words – they’ve been so challenging to develop. The key one, though, is the ability to detach members of your four-strong party so you can direct them around the world entirely independently of each other. You can have one standing on the beach on one side of the world, another in a forest on the other, a character in a dungeon and one in the main town. You can then switch between them at will.

This feature enables connected players to occupy the same world but not be bound to the area encompassed by hosting player’s screen. It’s not a new concept, just ask Neverwinter Nights, but DOS2 develops it further. For one thing, you get all kinds of strategic options, such as positioning your party ahead of a battle. “It gives you a very strong sense of freedom, and that freedom is necessary if you want to work with multiplayer; without it the multiplayer wouldn’t be fun,” Vincke says.

And outside of battling and messing around with DOS2’s mad chemistry set, it’s also the foundation for a set of dramatic wrinkles and features, or what Vincke calls “interesting complications”, which help to bring it to roleplaying life.

Like most RPGs, DOS2 features a set of six what it calls ‘origin characters’ who you can play as and add to your party. Their backstory, motivations and aims influence the unique dialogue options you’ll be offered when you play as one of them, and when they’re companions, they can interject in certain conversations to further their own goals, if you let them. But in DOS2, your companions are independent NPCs, so you’ll only hear what they say, not hear their internal dialogue. An echo of the nature of playing with someone else, separate but together, they feel like separate beings, despite being able to direct them around the world.

So let’s say you’re playing as Lohse in singleplayer and recruit the rogue-elf Sebille, and then detach her to wander the world for a while. Sooner or later, she’ll encounter events and characters who are a part of her individual story, but since she’s not with your main character she’ll engage with them outside of the influence of your main character. “Those are what we call orphaned origin moments,” Vincke says. “We had put logic in to account for them.”

The fact that you, Lohse, can listen into their conversations is explained away through you being linked together through Source, the magical force that runs Divinity’s world. But since you’re not Sebille, you don’t have control over what she will say. For example, she might meet a lizard called Stingtail camping at a spot outside the early-game hub, Fort Joy. Thing is, she hates lizards, so much that it’s a key point in her backstory and goal, and if she talks to Stingtail, she’ll immediately kill him.

Now, Stingtail is important to the Red Prince, an aristocratic lizard and another of the origin characters, because he’s part of the Red Prince’s personal quest to reclaim his birthright. And yet, if Sebille doesn’t assassinate Stingtail, she can’t continue her own personal quest. So even as you have incredible freedom to do as you like, DOS2 is always careful to weigh consequences against it.

They don’t feel forced, though, because the consequences usually relate to the relationships between the origin characters. In another echo of multiplayer, where you can always turn on your friends because why not, you and your companions are not necessarily best friends 4 lyfe. In fact, the game continually puts you in situations where the aims of one character conflict with those of another, like those of Sebille and the Red Prince. It makes for deliciously hard decisions, with the constant chance that a character will turn on the party.

Powering this is a simple attitude system, where each character has an opinion that’s influenced by your actions. Say nice things and it’ll go up. They’ll like you even more if you let them take over a conversation, but sometimes that’ll land you in hot water. You can stop them, but that comes with the cost of them getting upset with you. Each character has an upper attitude threshold, which will lead to stronger friendships and even let you influence key decisions, and a lower one, which will cause them to hate you and leave the party.

All this freedom within flexible systems presents two sticky problems. One is kind of intractable. If you don’t play the game at least 11 times, once each for the cast of origin characters and once for each of the five races, you don’t have a chance of seeing everything in the game. For those who play to feel completion, or who feel the burning sense of missing out when they sense they’re not seeing every major plotline and revelation, DOS2’s approach to the RPG will be uncomfortable. “Those players are angry at us!” says Vincke. “That’s literally it. We understand they’re angry, but it’s impossible. It’s too complex.”

The tagging system only makes things worse. Just as various dialogue options are only available to certain origin characters, even more are only available to certain races or classes of character. Scholars, aristocrats, outlaws and dwarves all have their own things to say and will cause NPCs to react to them in certain ways. Fane the ancient skellington, for instance, has a knack of completely horrifying the non-dead, while many humans dislike lizards and dwarves. The result is that DOS2 features over a million words of dialogue, which mostly comprises responses that cater to all the different tags.

“We spend a lot of work making sure you feel the things you did had an impact on the world,” says Vincke. “That goes quite far, actually, especially when you get to the endings. Nothing in DOS2 fits in a nice tree. It’s all nodes linked and mashed into to each other so it becomes very hard to get a singular view of all the options you had. And that’s because of the way we make it. It’s deeply embedded in our design methodology. It’s cool, but that can be frustrating if you’re the type of player who wants to see everything. The best thing to do for them is to read through our design docs, but that’s not necessarily the most – ” he laughs “ – fun literature in the world.”

The second problem is the sheer number of ways that DOS2’s systems can potentially break the storyline. But DOS2 stands as evidence that this one is not intractable. On one hand, it makes it clear when you’re choosing to break things, such as by letting Sebille kill Stingtail and therefore end the Red Prince’s dream of regaining his throne.

On the other hand, it pulls various tricks to keep things ticking over. Plot-important characters can be killed off because their story payloads can be offloaded to you in other ways. The old but crude way of dealing with this is to have a diary or journal hanging around for you to find if its owner isn’t around to tell you. DOS2 isn’t above using such fallbacks, but it’s more creative, too. You can, for example, talk to their ghosts once you’ve learned a specific skill during the main quest. Or you can eat corpses. This is an innate skill of elf characters: eat a body part and they’ll remember its owner’s memories. And what’s more, Fane can use his Mask of the Shapeshifter to wear an elf’s face to become an elf and use elven abilities.

“They add extra solutions to players so they could find narrative they may have missed because they, for instance, they blew up an entire city, which is possible,” says Vincke. “We can safely say that there’s never a moment that the game completely blocks you out just because you exploited the freedom it offers.”

I have to say, once you start eating corpses it’s hard to stop, because it’s the source of even more little details and richness about this world and the people within it. And here lies the real strength behind DOS2’s blend of story and freedom: “We know if we give a tapestry that’s sufficiently dense and sufficiently broad, players will be able to pick up their own storyline, which is the most fun in an RPG anyway.” The result is choice at every turn, which is exactly what a multiplayer RPG requires. It’s rather wonderful to see that necessity benefitting singleplayer so profoundly, too.

 

[cannondwarf]

I like how every single review only has images from act 1 or early act 2

 

[Immortal]

Again - Agreed.

Armor and Magic Defense hasn't added that much depth, just reduced viable party comps and thinned down viable strategies. You are basically encouraged to nuke down single targets instead of micro managing multiple opponents.

I don't think so. Full phys, full magic and 50/50 splits are all viable, at least on Classic. Even on tactician, nuking single targets is not a given. I do that on some fights, but on most I try to juggle multiple enemies with knockdowns, petrifys and blinds while wearing them down slowly. And the fact that all of my guys carry both phys and magic save skills to use against whichever armor the enemy doesn't have is already depth on its own. In the DOs1 system there would be no reason to give my spear warrior Chloroform when she has two knockdowns already, for example, but with the dos2 armor its been very useful.

But why? Setting up enemies for CC always feels like a pain because they are so easily countered.

Point Form Reasons Why CC Sucks:

• You can almost guarantee they have spells to break CC.
  • CC Breakers generally offer a tangible benefit in addition to breaking CC (aka First Aid Cures Health And Knockdown)
  • CC Breakers are usually on a similar Cooldown
  • Enemies outnumber you so they have more casts of CC breaking than you do of CC.
  • CC Breakers are very cheap. Usually 1 AP vs the 2AP cost to CC something. It's a shit trade.
• It's extremely easy to regenerate Phys / Magic armor, enemies do it all the time to themselves or their allies
  • So you usually have to CC the same turn you broke their shield
• If the enemy went before you CC'd them that round, you have to pray that nobody else breaks it before their next turn otherwise you just wasted 2 AP for nothing.

I say all that to say this. I'm not complaining that it's too hard. It's just easier to kill someone than waste a bunch of AP "Controlling" them.

When you start abusing AP Increase Spells + Chains + Healing spells, you can quickly rack up ungodly amounts of damage that totally eclipse a 1 turn knockdown (assuming they don't get a first aid thrown out right before their turn).

I'm not saying you can't use CC.. but it feels like it just needlessly draws out the battle, because all spells are basically on cool downs, the more turns you leave someone alive, the longer they have to regain cool downed abilities that let them replenish their Shields / Health / CC you / Heal other CC's.

It feels like a game of magical chairs except the chairs are working together to fuck you over.

What's the point of leaving someone with half health as a chicken for 2 turns? Your giving them 2 turns to rebuff themselves / get healed / restore cooldowned abilities, while you work on chewing through another enemies shields.

TL;DR
Best CC in the game is "Death Status"

 

[fantadomat]

I like how every single review only has images from act 1 or early act 2

Well i am surprised that the jornos managed to get past the tutorial.Those void cockroaches could be dangerous on story mode.

 

[Immortal]

Hamburger Hepler would be triggered that they didn't add a Story Only Mode.
What do you mean I have to fight stuff?

 

[siroptimusprime]

There are some fights very late in the game where not knocking down a character means you either have to chase them halfway across the fucking map with dives and teleports and shit, OR not knocking them down means eating 150 AP worth of insane damage overpowers and whirlwinds or sparking strikes chewing you up. There's one fight in the last act with a fighter-type that ate ~10k health + armor in a round if I didn't force a knockdown.

Or, some fights that start mages a good distance away from you and they get a guaranteed rain off due to the PlayerInitiative+1. Well, the next guy can chain lightning all of your magic armor off and stun 3/4 of your party. You can probably survive that stun if you push on, but you could also dive a dude back there and stomp his ass into the dirt, distract the other mage, and create enough havoc that you strand that previously scary fighter. Formation change doesn't work in that scenario.

Also, enemies using First Aid to restore KO was extremely rare in the entire game. And, frankly, if they do that they're just restoring meat health. My party comp had 3 characters with at least 1 physical knockdown (not including arrows) and a summoner that I loved power infusion on. The few times a ranger character got anywhere near to use FA, I just laughed and battered the idiot ranger and his dumbass friend so now my stuns are twice as effective. It was likely just my comp that allowed for that, since I only used my pyro and hydro skills as secondary damage or utility just for dudes with low/no magic armor.

 

[Immortal]

There are some fights very late in the game where not knocking down a character means you either have to chase them halfway across the fucking map with dives and teleports and shit, OR not knocking them down means eating 150 AP worth of insane damage overpowers and whirlwinds or sparking strikes chewing you up. There's one fight in the last act with a fighter-type that ate ~10k health + armor in a round if I didn't force a knockdown.

Or, some fights that start mages a good distance away from you and they get a guaranteed rain off due to the PlayerInitiative+1. Well, the next guy can chain lightning all of your magic armor off and stun 3/4 of your party. You can probably survive that stun if you push on, but you could also dive a dude back there and stomp his ass into the dirt, distract the other mage, and create enough havoc that you strand that previously scary fighter. Formation change doesn't work in that scenario.

Also, enemies using First Aid to restore KO was extremely rare in the entire game. And, frankly, if they do that they're just restoring meat health. My party comp had 3 characters with at least 1 physical knockdown (not including arrows) and a summoner that I loved power infusion on. The few times a ranger character got anywhere near to use FA, I just laughed and battered the idiot ranger and his dumbass friend so now my stuns are twice as effective. It was likely just my comp that allowed for that, since I only used my pyro and hydro skills as secondary damage or utility just for dudes with low/no magic armor.

Slow is a easy CC to apply that goes through Armor / Shields (I think?). Same with Teleport.

I'm sure CC can have some situational use in some edge case where your fighting 3 enemies lined up with zero physical armor.
Don't be so pedantic. Generally speaking it's useless. IMHO

 

[siroptimusprime]

They were lined up with 0 physical armor because it's easy to create that scenario with a fighter/fighter/ranger/summoner squad. That's why I mentioned that it's likely my composition since I built the party to do exactly that.

It was not an edge case, that happened in the majority of my fights.

 

[Sjukob]

For 75 hours of gameplay, I've been subjected to more kisses, gentle hand touches, femmes fatales, flashing thighs with roses arranged on them, and misunderstood theory of bait-and-switch tactics (on the girl's side) than I've seen in my entire gaming career. And mind you, I've played through the likes of BGII and The Longest Journey without batting an eyelid.

I'm 75 hours in as well . And I haven't even flirted with anybody , aside from prince randomly offering me sex when I asked him about succubus . I have no idea how you people are doing this .

 

[Tigranes]

I'm aware I'm playing a modified version with a nonstandard party, but for me CC is a question of (1) keeping someone disabled if they're dangerous and I can't get to them or they have a mountain of HP, while I knock off other dudes; (2) making sure that guy can't run away / restore himself if I can't kill him this turn, so that I can finish him off next turn.

I can imagine how (1) becomes less common with 4 party members, for one. But running two (which also means each dude has more AP to attack and CC etc in the same turn via Lone Wolf), CC seems fairly important.

 

[fantadomat]

For 75 hours of gameplay, I've been subjected to more kisses, gentle hand touches, femmes fatales, flashing thighs with roses arranged on them, and misunderstood theory of bait-and-switch tactics (on the girl's side) than I've seen in my entire gaming career. And mind you, I've played through the likes of BGII and The Longest Journey without batting an eyelid.

I'm 75 hours in as well . And I haven't even flirted with anybody , aside from prince randomly offering me sex when I asked him about succubus . I have no idea how you people are doing this .

Are you for real?Everyone is offering me sex!

 

[Immortal]

For 75 hours of gameplay, I've been subjected to more kisses, gentle hand touches, femmes fatales, flashing thighs with roses arranged on them, and misunderstood theory of bait-and-switch tactics (on the girl's side) than I've seen in my entire gaming career. And mind you, I've played through the likes of BGII and The Longest Journey without batting an eyelid.

I'm 75 hours in as well . And I haven't even flirted with anybody , aside from prince randomly offering me sex when I asked him about succubus . I have no idea how you people are doing this .

Even in a fantasy RPG you're trapped as a sexless virgin. Hmm..