Divinity Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Definitive Edition

[Brickfrog]

I think the armor system was an attempt to encourage diverse parties and also serve as a nerf to CC compared to DOS.

The problem he was trying to solve came in 2 parts, the first one was him wanting to prevent the permanent crowd control which was possible in the first game and in addition to that, he wanted to encourage more diverse parties.

I'm a fucking oracle you guys

 

[Volourn]

Anyone who thinks DOS2 is the highest selling CRPG turn base is on crack. FF series says hi. Lmao

 

[rusty_shackleford]

FF series says hi.

what crpg is this?

 

[Roguey]

Not that it really matters, but this is factually untrue.

Ahem https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Flay+Skin

Destroy [100% of total damage value] Magic Armour magic-armour on target character. Set status that halves resistances.

"I am a mage player, I'm going to rely solely on spells that do damage" - some dimwit who's better off playing a barbarian character if that's his idea of what magic should be

I mean you can make that same kind of video with regard to the original Diablo and yet a lot of people enjoyed playing as high-maintenance wizards in that game.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Not that it really matters, but this is factually untrue.

Ahem https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Flay+Skin

What's even your point?

 

[Roguey]

What's even your point?

If you run into an enemy with an elemental resistance you want to kill quickly, use that spell to subtract 50%. But if you want to one-shot entire groups of enemies with a single aoe, that's not going to happen and they in fact deliberately made sure that wouldn't happen.

Three point Source skill nerfs (Arrow Storm, Hail Storm, and Meteor Shower are still very strong but are no longer a one-shot "I win" button).

There are some people who continue to gripe about how powerful barrelmancy is, so mages are fine. Additionally, status effects are more important than pure damage numbers (as is also the case in D&D).

 

[Sharpedge]

Not that it really matters, but this is factually untrue.

Ahem https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Flay+Skin

Destroy [100% of total damage value] Magic Armour magic-armour on target character. Set status that halves resistances.

"I am a mage player, I'm going to rely solely on spells that do damage" - some dimwit who's better off playing a barbarian character if that's his idea of what magic should be

I mean you can make that same kind of video with regard to the original Diablo and yet a lot of people enjoyed playing as high-maintenance wizards in that game.

With the exception of maybe 5 enemies in the entire game, there are no enemies at all that have physical resistance. Flay Resistance is a single target spell and it only (yes, I am using the word only here) reduces an enemies resistance by 50%. Many enemies have much higher resistances than that and even after applying Flay Resistances their effective HP [(Armour+Life)/(1-Resistance)] is still higher for magical damage than physical damage. What compounds this is there are 4 resistances mages need to deal with, where as fighters only need to "worry" about 1. After about level 12, a well built physical focused character can finish combat in the first turn of combat, solo, without lone wolf. That is not an exaggeration, its very easy to find videos of that, which I can do if you want evidence of it. The only direct damage elemental spell mages have which remotely competes with a physical focused character (Rogue/Hunter/Fighter/Necromancer) is Pyroclastic Eruption. This isn't to say mages are useless, they are not, but using them to do elemental damage is strictly worse to just doing physical damage and spells like teleport, nether swap, shackles of pain, living on the edge, death wish, etc are far more useful offensively than any direct damage spell they could be using.

Again, I am not saying that if you want to play an elemental caster you shouldn't. They are fun to play. I have and do play them because they are more interesting to play than a pure physical character, but just because you can play something doesn't mean that its as good or better than the alternative.

 

[Infinitron]

How does it feel to have our games running on the Steam Deck? We cornered Swen and asked him!

We never did get that Steam Deck back.

 

[Volourn]

Trying to smog my way through tactitian', and ooo boy, the cheesing and cheating. There is nothing tactical about it. The game cheeses, and the player's mission is to outcheese it. Even when I defeat a challenging encounter I get no enjoyment out of it. I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese. FYI, I am in ch2, and lmao. Like wreckers cave. Lol Or the arena champion. Good grief. The cheating cheese there... yet I won because of luck not tactics because tactics don't exist. :D

 

[Darth Canoli]

I think the armor system was an attempt to encourage diverse parties and also serve as a nerf to CC compared to DOS. I felt like it was pretty inelegant. And it failed completely on the "encourage diverse parties" front.

DOS 2 armor system is what happens when an incompetent dev/dev team tries to steal a weird feature which never worked to patch a barely functionning system of their own which only worked for the first half of their previous game.

When you're incompetent, just go with a faithful adaptation of D&D and don't try anything funny with the rules.

That's the golden rule.

 

[RunningWolf]

I never minded the armor system. I feel like it didn't achieve anything it was supposed to anyway. If you properly stack damage and use active skills that have good scaling its almost irrelevant since you will be depleting it in a turn.

Worst part about DOS2 combat is the braindead choice of strategies you have at your disposal, despite hundred active skills in the game, half of which are sadly complete trash. There's no other strategy than doing more damage. Because its TB, the fights take so long for an average player, the damage you dish out has to be high, otherwise they will take way too much time and people get bored. The quicker you kill an enemy the more efficient is your play, because that way you steal their actions(turn), thus dealing more damage becomes the best form of tanking and the best cc. This leads to all characters feeling the same unless you're memeing with your build. You're either a damage dealer or gimped trash.
And another thing that there's little to no difference in gameplay between melee and casters, except melee plays up close. What is the gameplay difference between whirlwind and corpse explosion, except distance from which you click an icon and AOE kill every mob you stacked with teleport? Special effects i guess.
I probably enjoyed my unstable build the most because killing yourself is the only truly unique way to play. Every other build just a a different coat of special effects on the same exact gameplay.

 

[Roguey]

"I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese."

On release, this thread was full of people who chose tactician off the bat and were utterly seething. Meanwhile the people playing on normal or below had a good time.

 

[Darth Canoli]

"I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese."

On release, this thread was full of people who chose tactician off the bat and were utterly seething. Meanwhile the people playing on normal or below had a good time.

So it's a game for wimps and storyfags...
QED.

 

[Roguey]

So it's a game for wimps and storyfags...
QED.

Nah, the game is challenging enough on classic. Tactician is stat-bloated nonsense.

 

[BruceVC]

"I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese."

On release, this thread was full of people who chose tactician off the bat and were utterly seething. Meanwhile the people playing on normal or below had a good time.

I played this game on normal and I loved it, I play all my games on normal

Very rarely I lower this but thats only for specific battles and then I put it back on normal

 

[Roguey]

I played this game on normal and I loved it, I play all my games on normal

Very rarely I lower this but thats only for specific battles and then I put it back on normal

I try to go for whichever mode the game was balanced for before scaling was applied. For D:OS 2 that was definitely Classic. For a few, it's actually Hard (and then they scale down). I played the original D:OS on Hard even though Normal was the base, because I had something to prove and was wary about people saying it got too easy after the first area (not so in my case, but that was also because I kept hoarding attribute points).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

So it's a game for wimps and storyfags...
QED.

Nah, the game is challenging enough on classic. Tactician is stat-bloated nonsense.

tactician AI is different, encounters are designed differently

 

[Shrimp]

So it's a game for wimps and storyfags...
QED.

Nah, the game is challenging enough on classic. Tactician is stat-bloated nonsense.

tactician AI is different, encounters are designed differently

How many encounters does this actually apply to though? One of the things I liked about DOS1's tactician mode was that the stat changes were fairly insignificant (I think it was something along the lines of 25% extra health) but almost every encounter were noticeably different - usually either additional enemies or giving some of the enemies immunities towards certain damage types.
From what I recall the amount of these Tactician-exclusive changes in DOS2's opening act could be counted on a single hand and I think they got even less common as you got further into the game.
Instead most of the difficulty came through stat boosts (+50% health and damage) as well as further increasing armour to accommodate for the player's exponentially scaling stats and damage output which is an entirely different issue.
I kind of wish there was a comprehensive list of all DOS2's tactician exclusive features, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find one. I think the original DOS1:EE patch notes had a list of them.

 

[whydoibother]

"I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese."

On release, this thread was full of people who chose tactician off the bat and were utterly seething. Meanwhile the people playing on normal or below had a good time.

Same with Pathfinder. All the le epic hardcore 420 grognards were seething at 99 armor class kobolds, while everyone else was enjoying the game on the intended difficulty.

I played the original D:OS on Hard even though Normal was the base, because I had something to prove

Me too, and after a 30 minute battle of me creating a barricade of furniture and throwing scroll summons at the enemy, I decided enough is enough.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

"I swear however anyone who claims it us 'easy' are either lying or are people who really work at finding exploits and cheese."

On release, this thread was full of people who chose tactician off the bat and were utterly seething. Meanwhile the people playing on normal or below had a good time.

Same with Pathfinder. All the le epic hardcore 420 grognards were seething at 99 armor class kobolds, while everyone else was enjoying the game on the intended difficulty.

they had to wait for people to make them incredibly broken cookie cutter builds to follow
buildfag games are gay

 

[Roguey]

tactician AI is different, encounters are designed differently

Earlier in the thread someone claimed that playing on tactician with a de-bloat mod had no discernible difference from classic.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

tactician AI is different, encounters are designed differently

Earlier in the thread someone claimed that playing on tactician with a de-bloat mod had no discernible difference from classic.

and they're wrong
you can verify this just by checking the AI scripts that come with the toolkit

 

[Volourn]

Tactician is hilarious. I just did that ch2 graveyard quest to get the relic. Fighting all those statues was hilarious. Even with their shifty defenses, the battle is cheesy. They can kill your tank in one round just with one. Even spells like fireball et all can't wipe them out. I had to cheese the encounter by hiding behind the dsmn treasure. LMAO And you get o xp gor killing them. Lol

Lmao Too many if the Uber abilities suck ad well and seem to be highly needed. Arrow Sprsy is such literal garbage, I don't bother with it now. Trying Chain Lightning but it looks to be garbage as well.

It is amazing I have been able yo progress as far as I have. LOL

That said I probably don't have the perfect party, but it is what is.

FYI, The magic arrow suck outside of knockdown and probably charm ones. Lolz

Again, it should not be called Tactitian. It should be called Cheesy.

 

[RunningWolf]

It was understandable on release because people had no clue which skills are good, which ones are OP and which ones are worthless trash. There are a lot of trap skills and skills that have very bad damage scaling for bizarre reason, or even skills that actually don't do anything useful or have better lower ap alternative. If you insist on using them, then yeah the game will be difficult, because you're basically memeing.

In general 3 ap skills are almost never worth it, unless you have nothing else. They're mostly to be used as a fight opener. Same for the source skills. They're mostly trash with a few busted exceptions like Pyroclastic Eruption which oneshots entire final boss room.
Setting aside Lone Wolf and Glass Cannon and Skin Graft all of which completely remove any challenge from Tactician - once you understand the power of adrenalin and chameleon cloak, torturer, teleport and "jump" skills, barely anything in the game can even touch you.

If you interested in depth which skills are good and why i recommend you to watch Grey NunSei on YT that did runs with different classes where he always explains what skills/traits are worth using for a particular build before starting fort joy.

 

[Volourn]

Nah. I'll figure out which cheese to use on my own. I'll stick to hiding behind piles of fake gold and treasure chests. Lmao

I use teleport but they use teleport. It is all good. Cheese Competition mode has its moments. Lmao