Divinity Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

[Grunker]

Was pretty easy; teleport, boulder bash and flare did the job for me. Their dog hits like a truck though.

Don't have fire or earth spells currently, unfortunately. Got some scrolls I could test I suppose.

 

[Zeriel]

Spoiler

Spoiler

Just finished on Honor mode, that was fun. The ending was pretty good. Walking away on the path leading out of the Academy was neat, wish more games went and did a "after the ending" level. But I don't know how much of that was changed in EE since I never finished it before. Also, for those wondering, Honor mode ending DOES give you the achievement for Tactician mode too.

I have a question for others who have finished the game, too. The very last text of the ending implies your source hunters can be lovers. I'm not entirely sure though, since Larian love to troll. Both of my characters had romantic trait and still got the "one of them wasn't into it ayy lmao" text, so I'm guessing either this is Larian messing with people or it is for some reason gated behind a completely unrelated trait/option. Did anyone get a different result?

Maybe I'll write a post about things I'd like to see changed in D:OS 2 later, there's a few that have been bothering me as I was playing through.

 

[Ivan]

Damn, tactician and honor?

 

[Zeriel]

They are the same thing, Honor is just an iron-man on top of Tactician mode.

 

[Watser]

Report to larian, with a bit of luck you are the first to have beaten honour mode.

 

[Zeriel]

I really doubt that, it's probably just a handful of players. Swen did tell Codexers we had to beat the game on Honor mode, though, so that's what I did.

[+1 Obedient]

 

[Zanzoken]

I would really love for them to overhaul Traits in the sequel. I'm assuming the design goal was to flesh out your characters and add some personality, but tying the Traits to stats just causes me to game the conversations in order to get free skills and immunities.

I feel like a better option would be to make Traits change how NPCs react to you, or even affect which quests you get offered. For instance, it makes no sense for Blossius to ask you to deliver his will if you're a known Egotistical Heartless bastard, nor does it seem reasonable for Eglandaer to hire you as a hitman if you're a Compassionate, Considerate goody two-shoes.

 

[Zeriel]

I would really love for them to overhaul Traits in the sequel. I'm assuming the design goal was to flesh out your characters and add some personality, but tying the Traits to stats just causes me to game the conversations in order to get free skills and immunities.

I feel like a better option would be to make Traits change how NPCs react to you, or even affect which quests you get offered. For instance, it makes no sense for Blossius to ask you to deliver his will if you're a known Egotistical Heartless bastard, nor does it seem reasonable for Eglandaer to hire you as a hitman if you're a Compassionate, Considerate goody two-shoes.

It's even worse than that, and one of the things I REALLY want them to change: traits determine the outcome of quests.

Spoiler

Bairdotr will turn on you and die if you don't have the right trait, Madora won't forgive someone leading to the "bad" outcome of a quest, etc.

Considering how random and unintended on the player's part traits often end up being, they shouldn't play such a major role in the narrative's outcome. If they're going to determine something like that, the options that cause them need to be communicated much, much more explicitly.

 

[Anthedon]

Just finished my tactician playthrough. Is it normal that

Spoiler

the soulforged lady turns on you during the final fight? It's implied that it can happen but I didn't see the exact moment since I was reading a book during the fight, so it could've been some form of friendly fire.

It's even worse than that, and one of the things I REALLY want them to change: traits determine the outcome of quests.

Spoiler

Bairdotr will turn on you and die if you don't have the right trait, Madora won't forgive someone leading to the "bad" outcome of a quest, etc.

Considering how random and unintended on the player's part traits often end up being, they shouldn't play such a major role in the narrative's outcome. If they're going to determine something like that, the options that cause them need to be communicated much, much more explicitly.

I hope they abolish the whole personality trait thing in D:OSII or at least make it more transparent somehow. I stopped paying any attention to it after the first few hours.

 

[cvv]

I think the last patch broke Lucky Charm. My char has 3 and he hasn't proc the animation for ages now.

 

[Zeriel]

It's a pretty bad skill in any case. 5 skill points nets 8% chance to get an item that is probably bad and can never be particularly high quality. At the lower end of investment (anything below 5 points) it might as well not exist at all for how low the chance is. I guess they balanced it around the tons of empty containers they put in the game, but it's still a mediocre skill.

 

[Zanzoken]

How many hours of content would you guys estimate there are in Cyseal? I'm guessing it took me about 30 hours to clear it all, not including a handful of side quests that I can't be fucked to go back and finish, and a non-trivial portion of time that was eaten up by fiddling around with inventory, shopping, and crafting.

I was running around Luculla last night and for some reason I feel unmotivated to continue playing. I think it's because Cyseal got to be so grinding after awhile -- I'm pretty sure it's the most time I've ever had to spend in a single area in an RPG -- and even though I'm finally getting to move on, maybe my brain is just ready for closure.

 

[Zeriel]

I'd say 10-12 hours not counting time spent training/inventory shuffling/taking every painting in sight/digging up sheep. Your first time through will take a lot longer than subsequent playthroughs, and that applies to every area in D:OS, since it has a lot of non-obvious things you need to do to progress. No quest compass means more time spent figuring stuff out.

 

[cvv]

Cysael is ginormous, my first playthrough it took me like 30 hours. Although I was dicking around a lot, as per usual.

It's a pretty bad skill in any case. 5 skill points nets 8% chance to get an item that is probably bad and can never be particularly high quality. At the lower end of investment (anything below 5 points) it might as well not exist at all for how low the chance is. I guess they balanced it around the tons of empty containers they put in the game, but it's still a mediocre skill.

Yeah, I was running with 5 for a while, just for the balls of it, and it was proccing reasonably frequently, problem is you just get normal loot, arrows, empty grenades, ton of shitty armors etc. Useless skill but can't say it's not fun. Well, was.

 

[saltyshanty]

How many hours of content would you guys estimate there are in Cyseal? I'm guessing it took me about 30 hours to clear it all, not including a handful of side quests that I can't be fucked to go back and finish, and a non-trivial portion of time that was eaten up by fiddling around with inventory, shopping, and crafting.

I was running around Luculla last night and for some reason I feel unmotivated to continue playing. I think it's because Cyseal got to be so grinding after awhile -- I'm pretty sure it's the most time I've ever had to spend in a single area in an RPG -- and even though I'm finally getting to move on, maybe my brain is just ready for closure.

My brother and I are up to 22 hours in Cyseal so far and we haven't even approached Braccus yet. Granted Tactician mode has padded our playtime a little, but both of us have played the game multiple times before and neither of us tend to dick around very much. It really is a fucking huge area.

 

[cvv]

Have they changed the way armor works? Because I don't get it.

My rogue has 60 armor rating without any chest armor which translates to piddling "1% physical damage reduction". When put a 60 leather armor on him he has 120 armor rating and still fucking 1%.

Meanwhile Madora has 170 armor rating, meaning "15% damage reduction". When I strip her down to 105 she gets the 1%.

Is there some kind of threshold? Like you gotta have at least XY of armor for it to matter?

 

[Zeriel]

Armor rating damage reduction is based on level. The higher your level, the more armor rating you need to get X amount of damage reduction. I THINK it is in relation to monster level, so monsters below your level will have to chew through more damage reduction than the tooltip says. As far as I know it has always worked that way. Even plate armor that is too low level will grant essentially zero protection.

 

[Roguey]

Never forget

Pure % DR turns into extra hit points against which there isn't any real tactic. Non-linear scaling -- where you get some abstract armor value like "291" that correlates to a percentage value based on your level and the enemy's level -- is a black box that forces people to reverse engineer what's going on just to make sense of how their bonuses influence how well protected they are. In both of these cases, the general result is that armor doesn't really feel like much of anything. In a system where you have inflating hit point values, percentile reduction also forces the damage values to spike even higher and higher because a greater portion of it is being swallowed by the % reduction. You wind up with endgame scenarios like Fallout 1 and 2, where % DR negates such a huge amount of incoming damage that typically only triple damage armor-bypassing crits (against the eyes, naturally) really get through.

 

[V_K]

God, this game's systems are so ridiculous.

 

[a Goat]

You wind up with endgame scenarios like Fallout 1 and 2, where % DR negates such a huge amount of incoming damage that typically only triple damage armor-bypassing crits (against the eyes, naturally) really get through.

This was a good thing about Fallouts.

After all power armours were the best thing pre-war world had. They were supposed to be THIS powerful.

 

[Zeriel]

This was a good thing about Fallouts.

After all power armours were the best thing pre-war world had. They were supposed to be THIS powerful.

Yeah, not to mention that Fallout had static DR too. It is nothing like D:OS's system.

 

[Athelas]

This was a good thing about Fallouts.

After all power armours were the best thing pre-war world had. They were supposed to be THIS powerful.

You're talking about a huge, bulky armor that somehow makes you more agile and better capable of avoiding attacks (and also somewhat dubiously doesn't require any strength to use). I'm pretty sure its designers didn't have serious simulation in mind.

I'm not sure when linear armor progression became a good thing though.

 

[Zeriel]

When we were introduced to the horrors of level scaling. Linear progression is far preferable to that.

 

[Roguey]

(and also somewhat dubiously doesn't require any strength to use)

Well, yeah, it's power armor. The suit's doing all the work for you.

In JSawyer, Josh changed it so that instead of needing power armor training to even equip it, doing so without it would come at a weight penalty. Having training would make it weightless when equipped.

 

[a Goat]

You're talking about a huge, bulky armor that somehow makes you more agile and better capable of avoiding attacks (and also somewhat dubiously doesn't require any strength to use).

No.

I am talking about huge, bulky armour that's powered to not slow you down and you're not avoiding attacks, you're taking them head-on because you're a fucking walking tank in this thing.