Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks Source skills adjustments

I understand, as a player, that an exhaustible resource, like source points, leads to a situation in many games where people hoard their "ultimate abilities" for a day that never comes (and thus all Larian's efforts to design these cool abilities are largely wasted as they are never used....). That's not very fun.

Likewise, I understand that Larian wants to keep source abilities feeling "special' and, to be honest, it's probably too late in the development cycle, balance and story wise, to just ditch the concept.

Why can't both points be addressed?

What if source abilities were regular abilities - unless source points were "spent" to empower them. For example...

Chain lightning by default would hit 3 targets. Using a source point would increase it to 7 and up the damage.

Epidemic of fire (or whatever) would hit 3 targets by default. Using a source point would increase the targets to 5 and inflict necrofire instead of regular fire.

Etc.

I'm a bit torn: I can see that would gain access to spells that might otherwise never be used, but if source just becomes a sort of caster's nitrous oxide that does reduce its special status quite a lot. I think I'd prefer to keep it as its own class of spells that I can't otherwise use, even with the clear risk that I may never use them.

All those 'source' skills where non-source in the first game, so using source to empower skills would be far more logical.

Or just lose the anti fun system and just give the cooler spells longer cooldowns

I love the idea of making them "source empower-able". I think it would fix both issues ... In any case it would be sad if the system remains as it currently is, because I would like to be able to use these skills. Right now, I don't even buy them because it's just a waste of gold and Source Points. There is no fight that is unbeatable without using a source spell (afaik), so why use them at all?

I like this idea and hope Larian adopts it or comes up with their own solution. I don't even learn skills that require source points anymore, especially now that source vampirism was changed to source disruption .

It would, but it would also introduce the Problem Of The Larian Skill Designer Going "what the fuck do you mean 'we need to figure out how to empower 160+ skills'? AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

(Plus Skill-crafted skills? Nah, we can let them off and say crafted skills can't be empowered.)

I think it would be sufficient to have different types of empowerment:
- some skills get a hefty damage boost (single target like Overpower)
- some get a boost to number of jumps or/and range of jumps (like chain lightning)
- Pure buff or debuff skills would get turned into a mass-version
- AoE skills perhaps get a slight damage buff and an areasize increase
- summons would summon a more monstrous version

Just something like this. Some skills perhaps have just no source-version because they are to simple, perhaps just every Tier 1 skill. At least source versions of tactical retreat or Rage won't be that necessary or would perhaps even be to good? At least here I could only thing of prolonged duration of the buffs.

It really would not mean, every skill needs a unique source version in my eyes.

I would probably limit it so only Source Skills can be source empowered.

That way they only have to make different versions of the available source skills.

Is this a joke which is going over my head?

He just means, to give source-skills a 'base' version additional to their 'empowered' version, instead of giving all base skills an empowered version.