Divinity Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition

[Nael]

Blargh, early part of the game was stupid easy and all of a sudden I'm getting fucking destroyed by every encounter outside of Cyseal.

Lowering difficulty to Easy.

You must have a severely gimped party, then. I was steamrolling all enemies outside Cyseal on Normal with my Cleric (Men-at-Arms + Hydro), Wizard (Geo + Pyro + Aero), Witch (Witchcraft + Aero) and Rogue (Marksman), so I actually had to switch to Hard to maintain some challenge.

Edit: I was level 3 when I went outside, now I'm level 5.

How do you have 4 characters with these specs in Cyreal? I thought only Jahan and Madira were available at the beginning.

You can unlock henchmen quite early in the game. They're as Diablo 2 "kleenex" mercenaries.

Is this "The Hall Of Heroes" I've heard people mention? I still haven't found it.

 

[Black]

People actually aren't playing 2 lone wolves?

 

[Night Goat]

Does anyone know where to buy ranger skill books and lockpicks? I've looked all over Cyseal and can't find any.

 

[pakoito]

People actually aren't playing 2 lone wolves?

My double lone wolf build is pages ago. The difference in difficulty is noticeable, that extra HP and AP is just what makes the game playable. My two fem thugs are having a blast around. Love combat based off strategizing and adapting on the spot rather than numbers and skill cycles.

Is this "The Hall Of Heroes" I've heard people mention? I still haven't found it.

Not a real spoiler if you're 2 minutes into the plot.

Spoiler

Earlygame (late?) you'll be looking for Star Stones. The first one you find will open Shelter at the End of Time, which is the goodies hub and plot driver. The second one opens the henchman hub or Hall of Heroes.

The first, fastest, stone you can find is the one the healer girl has in the hospital by the market square.
The second stone, although plotwise should be your first one, is in the inn's room where the murder took place. You need to have visited the Legion's Barracks and obtained permission from the Legion's leader.
The third one is a far way ahead.

 

[JasonNH]

Does anyone know where to buy ranger skill books and lockpicks? I've looked all over Cyseal and can't find any.

In the middle of town, right across from the fish dealer where you ran into the thief, is a fletcher. She has ranger skillbooks. Lockpicks are not common to find from sellers. The best path to them is to craft them.

 

[Ulminati]

Vendors in Cyseal in case people are missing something:

Spoiler

Witch and Thief skillbooks, thief weapons -- Woman with bodyguard on 2nd floor of the King Crab inn
Mixed adventuring gear -- Fabulous five woman on ground floor of king crap in
Air/Water skillbooks, potions, crafting ingredients -- enctantress seller at market square
Ranger skillbooks, ranged weapons -- fletcher at market square
Fire/earth skillbooks, mage gear -- Ahru, 2nd floor of legion HQ
Warrior skillbooks -- legion commander, ground floor of legion HQ
General weapons and armor -- Esmerelda's shop, NE of market square
General weapons and armor -- Legion quartermaster, 2nd floor above legion mess hall

Undead Phoenix and I are getting wrecked by Pontius Pirate atm. Trying the fight on hard at level 5 is a recipe for pain.

 

[RK47]

What's the advantage of playing co-op again?
Aside from having real people argue with you on decisions and what to do.
I can understand if it's real time, but turn based co-op seems awkward.

 

[Excidium]

What's the advantage of playing co-op again?
Aside from having real people argue with you on decisions and what to do.
I can understand if it's real time, but turn based co-op seems awkward.

Same advantage of co-op in any game: lulz

 

[thesoup]

Vendors in Cyseal in case people are missing something:

Spoiler

Witch and Thief skillbooks, thief weapons -- Woman with bodyguard on 2nd floor of the King Crab inn
Mixed adventuring gear -- Fabulous five woman on ground floor of king crap in
Air/Water skillbooks, potions, crafting ingredients -- enctantress seller at market square
Ranger skillbooks, ranged weapons -- fletcher at market square
Fire/earth skillbooks, mage gear -- Ahru, 2nd floor of legion HQ
Warrior skillbooks -- legion commander, ground floor of legion HQ
General weapons and armor -- Esmerelda's shop, NE of market square
General weapons and armor -- Legion quartermaster, 2nd floor above legion mess hall

Undead Phoenix and I are getting wrecked by Pontius Pirate atm. Trying the fight on hard at level 5 is a recipe for pain.

Completely unrelated, but I have a friend who won something in a local gaming magazine for coming up with the name Pontius Pirate. I don't remember what he won or what he named as it was ~9 years ago.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

About the music complaints, there was an update in which Sven said Kiril got sick, and it was very serious, that he was unable to finish his music work fo D:OS, so they got what he already made, remastered some old unused music kiril made for all previous larian games and inserted in the final D:OS.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

What bullshit

Nope.

firstly, your value system sucks.

Nope.

This game is great because of it's fun combat, great encounters, challenge, and loads of content, not it's Fable/WoW marriage when it comes to art.(There's a reason morons automatically think Diablo when they see this game.) Environments in D:OS are beautiful, but I don't think they're better than PoE, just more saturated and with xtra bloom.

'k.

tl;dr, graphicwhoredex is fucking annoying, but this game is at the height of it's hype, I'm sure everyone will get their heads out of their asses when it dies down.
Going play the game, interacting with the fanbase of something you like always leaves bad taste.

Has nothing to do with graphics but cool post, bro. Also not sure a guy who wasn't familiar with Larian and was gifted the game by another forum member qualifies as "fanbase" but you seem to know your Codex history so you must not really be referring to me, right?

***

Anyway, not sure what all the fuss about magic vs melee is about so far since my current character (using a great combo of haste + backstab) is doing better than my full on offensive mage during the initial Alpha release. I'm sort of re-thinking my next run as two hybrid characters because of this, actually. Still nowhere near the time I had over the holidays to run through the game though, so I can't say more than I've already said during the coverage of the previous releases.

 

[Yuri Gagarin]

Does anybody have any spare D:OS 2 key for a poor bro?

 

[sser]

Does anyone know where to buy ranger skill books and lockpicks? I've looked all over Cyseal and can't find any.

In the middle of town, right across from the fish dealer where you ran into the thief, is a fletcher. She has ranger skillbooks. Lockpicks are not common to find from sellers. The best path to them is to craft them.

The elementalist across the town square has lockpicks

And they are pretty expensive.

 

[A user named cat]

This music thing that's been mentioned is still a bit strange, even if Kirill had gotten sick towards the end considering all the tracks he must've done while the updates chugged along. DD1 was one of the very few games where the audio not only perfectly fit but greatly enhanced every area you explored. Sounds like a bummer they weren't able to replicate that.

 

[commie]

This is not diablo. Do you look in all barrels in the real world?

Yes. Yes I do.

I'm seriously getting pissed that I still can't play the game, because I only have the subpar GOG version, while the Steam owners play the patched game. What the fuck Larian!? At least provide patches that I can download from your site and install. You know, just like in the old days!

Get Sven onto your next Matt Chat and give him a good going over. Grow some balls for once.

Click here to greatly increase your experience on the Codex.[

Thanks for that great link! It really enhanced my Codex experience!

 

[Broseph]

Lot of people have been having problems with stuttering, even though the beta had no such issues. Poor optimization, likely aggravated by one or more of the shit ton of patches released since then. God, early access/kick starter should be really, really under more stringent rules when it comes to software. Steam should not allow poorly optimized games to go through until they are properly fixed. In fact early access should be perma nuked.

Another huge issue is that loot in chests is randomized. I hate this so much, because it tempts me to save scum before opening any chest to min/max loot.

Aside from that, great game. Dunno why people are moaning about Melee being weak, just focus your skill points into one weapon build, and pump the requisite special skill. Skills from other camps can also be cool as supplements, tho I haven't tried them myself because skill points are too few. For instance, a warrior with man at arms could benefit from even 1 level of rogue, for the self haste skill book and possibly te trip/knock back skill books (though those require higher levels, or if they can be used at lower will cost more APs)

Geo magic seemed like shit, like most earth magic in all rpgs, until I got a rare drop of Fortify. This is an insane spell. Cast it on your melee machine and watch him wade into melee and hardly get scratched.

Wanted to pump a point into water, but will settle for the henchman for now. Skill points are really too few. Anyone know if we are really supposed to save skillpoints for 5 levels in order to max out a skill (i.e. get it to level 5?) The all skilled up trait is a no brainer, and I hate that.

And a very easy way to get a ton of money in Cysel

Spoiler

Just 'acquire' paintings. They sell for a huge sum of money each. There is also an abandoned house with locked doors you can break into. It's the general merchandise store that has been shut down. Not only will you find paintings and no one to catch you 'acquiring' them, there is an entrance to a dungeon in the house tht has some tough yet cool fights, and some great loot. The chest down there drops at least one rare item. Save scum until you get that special armor or two handed sword you wanted, or a skill book.)

I accidentally got the dog killed in the graveyard before bringing him any items. Hope I didn't fuck up the main quest doing that.

 

[commie]

The "No AI" option and making my two characters argue with each other is easily my favorite feature of the whole game. Finally, a game that lets me craft my own companion, but they're not just a silent automaton, nor am I fishing blindly for approval Bioware style. I'm actually roleplaying both of them but not LARPing. It's awesome and I just know this will probably be the only game to ever implement it.

Yeah I enjoy role playing with myself.

I really enjoy arguing with the AI. It's really cool to have one opinion about what to do then get into an argument about it and either use skill or play the mini game to get your point across. Needless to say I wanted to help the Shell but lost the Rock Paper Scissors game so had to ignore its pleas. I ended up actually being quite shitty at my companion for not letting me do a good deed, but also felt great that such an interaction actually solicited a genuine emotion and that I could actually try and 'argue' my case. This wasn't Biowarean binary rubbish where you try to steal a guys credits and Carth Onasi tells you it's a bad thing and that's that. That makes the player annoyed too but since that's the only outcome possible it's a simple railroaded faux argument that you always will lose.

I don't know how this works later, but it would be great if it was expanded upon. I could imagine a NWN2 style court case with arguing companions.

Finally, there is a thread here relating to save scumming and saving and reloading in case the 'choice' doesn't work out. There's obviously nothing to stop you reloading here either, but the argumentation just feels so neat and natural that it's easy to just go with it as the player tends to feel more that they 'lost' fair and square, rather than having something forced upon them.

 

[Nihiliste]

Fucking stoked. Don't have time to play for the next couple weeks but I'm fired up.

 

[deuxhero]

Found an exploitable AI quirk

Spoiler

The AI will NEVER cross Midnight Oil's effect if it isn't already slowed, even if it is surrounded by the oil. Beat the giant orc by making a barrier to stop him (partially from the ooza barrel), killing off all his minions who got ahead of him, then spaming midnight oil outside the reach of his crossbow for a few dozen turns, eventually summoning a spider around a corner and in his melee range and making the burning oil finally touch him. He then spent his entire movement running over burning oil, nearly killing him

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Lockpicks are expensive, they seem to randomly disappear on me, and disappear if you get interrupted, and disappear if you fail, which happens a lot, I think it's a hard threshold. On the other hand unlock scrolls seem to have 100% chance, so yeah, lockpicking is pretty worthless.

Only invested 1 skill point in it though, so maybe someone whose focused on a lockpick type character can give a better rundown of the usefulness of the skill.(Yes I call them skills, And I call the skills abilities, because it makes sense to me.)

 

[Black]

I had thought that "act II" would be shorter and smaller. How naive of me.
Well played, Larian.

 

[Tigranes]

You don't need to invest a lot though. I had a +1 lockpick item and only ever put 2 into lockpick, and then possibly because of personality bonus, I was able to open almost every chest in Cyseal.

 

[Suicidal]

Really liking the combat encounters, but the enemy AI is all over the place. Sometimes it does smart things, like focusing all fire on my mage, nearly killing him in 1 turn, or setting up elemental combinations. Other times it does some really stupid things - for example, I was fighting a bunch of undead, and a couple of skeleton soldiers almost killed Madora, but after being dealt the killing blow she survived with 1 hp cause of that perk she has. Instead of simply attacking her 1 more time, the skeletons started running away from her and attacking my other party members, as if the AI thought that Madora was dead. So weird...

 

[Cyberarmy]

You don't need to invest a lot though. I had a +1 lockpick item and only ever put 2 into lockpick, and then possibly because of personality bonus, I was able to open almost every chest in Cyseal.

Only once chest in Black Cove needs 4 lockpick I guess, 3 is mostly enough for first part. I had some "sets" on me for this kind of situations, thief has lockpick, pickpocket items and mage has crafting, barter items.

Games loot system and RNG gods clearly hate me, played without a good dagger for a long time, found a realy good one at shop and bought it for a hefty price(with many paintings ) After that 3 boss kind of enemies I killed dropped really powerful daggers...
Backstabs in this game really gives satisfaction, especially on bloody part Also my knight henchwoman is going nuts with 2 handers now, inflicting near 400 damage on criticals.

 

[tet666]

Lot of people have been having problems with stuttering

With Stuttering you mean the framedrops while scrolling?
If so i might have found a solution, disabling the texture streaming in
C:\Users\username\Documents\Larian Studios\Divinity Original Sin\graphicsettings.lsx fixed that for me.
just change it too:
<node id="ConfigEntry">
<attribute id="MapKey" value="TextureStreamingEnabled" type="22" />
<attribute id="Type" value="0" type="5" />
<attribute id="Value" value="0" type="4" />
</node>
It will reset if you change any graphic setting so make the file read only .
The initial loading will be a bit longer but its way smoother without it,
i didnt see any downsides apart from that so far.