Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Stabbey's Feedback, Part 3: Talents, UI, Mechanics

I finished my first and only complete play-through of DOS 2 a couple months after it was released. So much of my feedback may be out of date.

I should have posted this well... months ago, but I didn't then because I wanted to polish it up, but I didn't do that either because I wasn't playing the game, so I wasn't thinking about it. And the more time which passed, the more I felt like it was too late to post it, especially after the patch which adjusted a lot of skills.

Now with the Definitive Edition coming out in a couple of months it is absolutely too late. So I am not expecting any of this feedback to be taken into account. This is just one person's opinion based on really, only one complete run.

Stabbey's Feedback, Part 1: Skills
Stabbey's Feedback, Part 2: Abilities and Attributes


Talents

Talents remain an area in need of much improvement. There remains so much potential for Talents which promote interesting and unique builds any have rarely lived up to their game-changing potential as originally pitched in the D:OS 1 Kickstarter. Talents feel neglected, despite the wealth of suggestions posted on the Larian forums. Of particular note is a major lack of Talents aimed specifically at mages.


[Human] Bonus to Initiative is of questionable use
Why? - For the same reasons mentioned in earlier posts - the Round-Robin turn order system greatly lessens the impact Initiative has on combat strategy.
Suggested Change: I don't really have a good idea. Maybe something like "Uncanny Luck - +10% extra chance to dodge when health is under 35%"? Nah, probably too annoying or worthless.


[Lizard] Sophisticated is Underwhelming
Why? - Elves get lore and some free skills from eating body parts. Dwarves get more HP and evasion. Undead get their annoying HP reversal thing. Lizards get a couple token extra resistances the same as can be found on standard equipment. It's hardly a gamechanger - ESPECIALLY when the bonus is only 10%.
Suggested Change: I don't really have a good idea, but the bonus should at least go up to 25%


Buff or Remove Guerrilla
Why? - This Talent's role is poorly defined, making it underwhelming no matter how you look at it. If it is only intended to be a first strike Talent, used to start combat, that requires a lot of extra effort put into setting up the situation, and knowledge of what is to come. 40% is free damage, but not a lot considering how much extra effort you would need to put in to take advantage of it. More importantly, Rogues have many Talents to take which are more effective than Guerrilla.

If Guerrilla is meant to be used as an in-combat Talent, then it is useless because the Damage-Per-AP (DPAP) comes nowhere close to matching the damage done by standard attacks. Right now Guerrilla, which is Sneak (4 AP) + Attack (2 AP) has a DPAP of -60%. (DPAP below 100% is bad.)

Suggested Change: Guerrilla only works when character is NOT in combat. Boost the damage from +40% to +100%, but make it work with normal attacks only (not skills). Maybe optionally it could work with grenades and Special Arrows as well. However, some kind of flag would probably need to be put into place to prevent a player from initiating a sneak attack, fleeing, then returning to get the sneak attack again. It will have to be only usable once per encounter.


Add Punchable Face, an "attract enemy attention" Talent
Why? - To create a role for tank characters in the game. Enemies hit hard and their AI leads them to prioritize targeting weaker characters, making a Tank archtype both somewhat reasonable to have, and also ineffective at their job. This Talent would be the opposite of Stench, giving a big boost to the chances of enemies taking an interest in this character, allowing for a Tank archtype to draw fire more reliably.
Suggested Change: Call it "Punchable Face". Stench has the drawback of lowering disposition with NPC's. In this case the drawback is the primary point, but it will be somewhat dangerous to the user, as it can't be turned off. Perhaps the best thing to do would be that the Talent stops working once the character is under 40% health. Either that, or add a secondary positive effect, such as 5-15% physical and magical armor regeneration at the start of each turn, maybe a little more depending on testing.


Add Talent which increases duration of all status effects
Why? - To increase the power of buff skills, at the cost of making debuffs also last longer. Working name is "Sensitivity", but I'm sure you could think of another one. This Talent has its own inherent downside attached to balance it.
Suggested Change: All status effects (which have a non-indefinite duration) - both positive and negative - have their duration increased by 1 turn. Incompatible with Walk It Off (and vice versa).


Buff Bigger and Better
Why? - It lets you spend a once-per-four-levels Talent point to get the same amount of attribute points which you get once-per-level. That is extremely underwhelming and it makes no sense for anyone to take after Act 1. I believe that most people only take it at level 4 to give them an edge for Act 1 until they reach the respec mirror. The higher you go, the less useful the Talent is.
Suggested Change: Bigger and Better requires level 8 (maybe up to level 10) to take, but now gives you +2 to ALL attributes - STR, INT, FIN, CON, WIT, and possibly MEM. Because builds can only practically make use out of one of STR, FIN, and INT, that really makes it +2 to [PRIMARY], CON, WIT (and possibly MEM). That now makes it equivalent to the amount you would get for three (four?) levels worth of Attribute points, without making any single attribute point get a huge boost. (Technically this would give more points to someone who is splitting their points between STR/INT, STR/FIN, or FIN/INT, but I don't see that as a big problem because those builds are weaker by definition.)

The downside and perhaps fatal flaw is that this would make the Memnonic Talent (+3 Memory) seem less good in comparison, because BaB would give 2/3 the same bonus to Memory, plus +2 bonuses to CON, WIT AND [PRIMARY]. One possible change might be to boost Memnonic from +3 to +5 Memory, but only if this Talent is changed. Alternatively, this new version of Bigger and Better boosts every stat except Memory by +2, which would prevent the overlap with Memnonic.


Rework Demon and Ice King Talents
Why? - Talents which boost your resistance to one element by X, but lower it against the other element by X mostly cancel each other out in the long run, thus not really making it worthwhile. Essentially, what these Talents effectively do is increase your maximum resistance to an element by 10%. But because equipment changes so frequently, it's hard to build up resistances in gear. I pretty much ignored all resistances and even at the end I was never close to the cap, largely because it seemed like resistances on gear were low and resistances were intended to be supplemented by runes. Which are also highly RNG dependent (the finding of them and the finding of gear which can support rune slots).

Suggested Change: Demon could reduce active cooldowns fire skills by 1 when affected by Burning or Necrofire status, to a minimum of 0 (you can use any one-turn cooldown skills immediately as long as you are on fire and have enough AP). Ice King could boost the effectiveness of healing and armor restoration skills by 25-50% when Chilled, Frozen (that is to say that heals work better on you when you are frozen) and possibly when standing in water or on ice (but maybe that's too powerful).

Both of these Talents suddenly become much more interesting for specialized builds now that they're no longer only +10% MAXIMUM resistance.


Buff All Skilled Up
Why? - This is only worthwhile for the additional Civil Ability skillpoint, but when you only get 5 Civil skill points in a game, one extra point is not much in the grand scheme of things.
Suggested Change: Increase it to 2 Civil ability points and possibly 2 Combat ability points as well. Boost the level required to take this to 6-9.

Rename "Ambidextrous" and create a new talent using the name "Ambidextrous"
Why? - Ambidextrous means able to use both hands equally well. The name doesn't quite fit the description of what the Talent does.
Suggested Change: Keep the effect of the current "Ambidextrous" Talent, but rename it to something else (like "Juggler" or "Bandolier"). (Another name could be "Strong Teeth" - the joke is that you're using your teeth to open the scrolls and pull the pins from the grenades.)
NEW TALENT: "Ambidextrous" - Reduce the off-hand damage penalty for dual-wielding from -50% to -25%. Requires: Dual-Wielding 5 (maybe higher) That Talent provides an alternative to just pumping Warfare like all Physical Damage builds.


Buff Slingshot and rename it to Grenadier
Why? - Grenades have a problem - unless you make sure to use all your grenades each level, they'll quickly become underpowered, because they don't scale with the player.
Suggested Change: With the Grenadier talent, all grenades in your inventory scale up to your level as if they were crafted at that level when you gain a new level.


User Interface

Improve Lady Vengeance Storage Chest UI
Why? Because I know Larian can do better. It did better in Dragon Knight Saga. The DOS 2 one is literally just a chest like any other. Same appearance, same UI, same 6x4 grid, same lack of sorting or tabs.
Suggested Change: Change the UI for the chest to be unique. It should have more slots visible, it should have tabs and ideally, a way to sort the items in the chest and put them into order.


Add "Stolen" to list of sortable categories
Why? You can "acquire" a great many items throughout the game, and sometimes you get searched which comes up with something unexpected, but you don't know what it was which gets you caught. The only way to know that is to check each item in your inventory.
Suggested Change: Allow sorting of your inventory by "Stolen"


Turn Order Portrait does not highlight characters on the field
Why? While mousing over a character on the field reveals their position in the turn order, for some reason, it does not work the other way around. Mousing over a character's portrait gives no indication on the field which character it is.
Suggested Change: Mousing over the turn-order portrait should highlight the character. It's only common sense, there's no reason why this shouldn't work both ways.


Future games should allow multi-select
Why? Because this game has a buttload of inventory management and it's tiring to have to move a lot of items one at a time.
Suggested Change: Shift + clicking inventory items multi-selects them. Items in multi-select can only be Sent-to-(storage/party member), dropped, or marked as wares. The Definitive Edition's "draw a line through your inventory to multi-select" is good, but hopefully the PC version of DE will allow mouse + keyboard to multi-select different items from spots individually instead of only drawing a line.


Range and Radius should be part of Skill tooltip info
Why? - It is a mystery to me why the casting range and radius of skills is missing from the tooltips about them. This is incredibly useful information, and yet the only way to know it is to spend a click to prepare the skill. Yeah, it's just one extra click, but it's an unnecessary extra click.
Suggested Change: Add the casting range and radius (where applicable) to the tooltips of skills when mousing over skills and skillbooks.


Bring back "these skills will be unavailable if you use this" triangle
Why? - It's not really a big deal, but it is odd that this feature which existed in D:OS 1 was removed for D:OS 2 for no apparent reason. I mean sure, AP costs are not that big anymore, but still.
Suggested Change: When mousing over or preparing a skill in combat, add the little triangle over other skills which you will not have the AP or SP to use if you cast the current/moused-over skill.


Examine should show current source points of target character
Why? - This is mostly just a quality of life thing because a lot - a LOT of enemies love to use Source Vampirism to steal your precious Source Points, and it can be difficult to keep track of which enemies you need to keep alive to break their magic armor.
Suggested Change: Examine should show current source points of target character as one of the stats.


[Polymorph][UI] Skill-granting skills should be replaced on the hotbar
Why? - Several Polymorph skills such as Spread Your Wings, Medusa Head, Bull Horns, and Spider Legs, once used, add a new skill to the hotbar. For some reason, it adds this new skill as a separate skill, instead of replacing the one needed to cast it. There's no reason why we need to see that Spread Your Wings is active while we have wings sprouting from our backs.
Suggested Change: When casting one of those skills, temporarily replace the base skill with the granted skill, for the duration the granted skill is active. This keeps things neat, and keeps the granted skill easy to find. Once the granted skill ends, bring back the base skill to the original spot with the remaining cooldown.


Mechanics and Miscellaneous

Reduce AP cost of Sneaking to 2 AP.
Why? Sneaking in combat now is completely useless. It is simply not worth the AP. The choices now are either to make it useful, or just completely prohibit sneaking in combat regardless of sight lines.
Suggested Change: Reduce the AP cost of Sneaking to 2 AP, this allows you to sneak and move, and if you also have 6 AP, you could also attack as well. If Guerrilla is changed to a once-per-encounter Talent, this will not be overwhelming.


Don't auto-assign Attribute, Civil, Combat points upon Companion recruitment
Why? - There is no good reason why, if you recruit an Companion at level 2 or higher, that the game should automatically assign the points to the characters instead of letting players do it. If that is done for new gamers, that is the Bad Type of handholding, because it interferes with players who actually have a plan and know what they're doing. This is the kind of "Helpful" mechanic which is actually not helpful at all.

I can get around this most of the time, by going to the fort, going up the side ladder, recruiting anyone I want in there, and then going back to the beach, but when players are ignoring the content in the order it is presented to get around an obnoxious design choice, that's a good indication you might want to rethink that design choice. Also, this does not work for recruiting Ifan, there's no way to get him before he reaches level 2 and auto-allocates his points.

Suggested Change: Give the NPC's the appropriate amount of XP to match the player, but don't auto-assign the points. Let players do this on their own. (In fact, ideally I would actually like to be able to manually assign their level 1 points as well, because a lot of the preset builds are not optimized, but I would settle for just level 2.)


Boost the potency of food items
Why? Food is just very underwhelming. Great you can cook a lot, but none of it is really worth using. Food still gives the same amount of attribute points as it did in D:OS 1, and that was not very strong at the time.
Suggested Change: The amount of attribute points food needs to provide should be increased, it should heal the stated amount PER TURN for the duration, not just a single one-off heal, but with the downside that you can't eat another item until the duration has expired. That alone would do wonders.

Also, fix the bug with Dwarven Stew/Dinner which REDUCES the amount of health it restores compared to plain Dinner. This would make Five Star Diner a much more attractive Talent even for those not doing challenge runs.


Using the respec mirror should not change portraits
Why? - Unless you're specifically going to the appearance tab and changing the appearance, your portrait should not change. It changes any companions portraits from the default ones which are at a slight distance to close-ups.
Suggested Change: It's there in the title.


Remove Brittle and 1 Durability from Anathema
Why? This weapon has THREE WHOLE ACTS of buildup to a wet fart at the end. Even worse is the notorious Tarquin bug which has frustrated and annoyed hundreds if not thousands of players, all for the sake of this weapon. This weapon is worthless. It's built up as the One Single Thing which can permanently kill Braccus Rex or a Voidwoken or the Divine, but because Tarquin is optional, this weapon is also optional, and Rex can die just fine without you needing to use it at all, making the entire quest line worse than pointless.

The weapon doesn't pierce armor or do extra damage to Braccus Rex's health, so you need to save it until he has no physical armor left, and even then that's not enough to one-shot him.

Suggested Change: It's really easy. Remove the "Brittle" property and the 1 Durability thing from the weapon. Just have it be a big awesome damaging sword instead of a useless gimmick piece of garbage. Alternatively, you could script the weapon so that it ignores Rex's armor and deals 50% of his maximum health in damage. Something, to make the weapon actually worth the trouble.


"Play how you like" and 100% Resistance enemies
Why? - It's true that 100% Resistance enemies are very are very rare. I am specifically speaking about only TWO encounters, in fact. The first is the dual boss in the third Hallucinogenic Smoke Cloud. You are faced with one enemy with 100% Resistance to Physical, and one with 100% Resistance to magic. This fight you are all on your own, so if you don't have another source of damage, what can you do?
The second case is the Black Mirrors in Horrorsleep. Destroying them is required, but they have 100% resistance to everything except physical and earth (which they only have 98% resistance to.) It just seems like a strange design choice to just arbitrarily force players into having specific damage types covered without any warning in advance.
Suggested Change: Consider reducing the immunities to 75% resistance instead of 100%. Rebalance vitality where needed (especially on the mirrors). This will still encourage attacking with the right type of damage, without forcing you into a narrow line.


***

Again, I'm not expecting any of these to happen, I'm just posting it for no sensible reason. Feel free to point out places where my ideas are bad ("hurr hurr, that would be all of them.")

"I can get around this most of the time, by going to the fort, going up the side ladder, recruiting anyone I want in there, and then going back to the beach."

I've found that I can't do that with Ifan because Elodi replies and you level up! Is there a way around this please?

You can choose: not taking part in the fight.
That way, they will only fight without you gaining exp, and ifan always wins.

Thanks, I'll try that.

I like most of your points. Some of these are more subtle and can easily slip off your mind when you're summing up a lot of things at once.

As Guerilla is tied to Sneaking, lowering AP cost of Sneaking automatically makes Guerilla better. So Guerilla might not need a drastic change, if the 2-AP Sneaking really happens (or something similar). I find the whole "once per encounter" concept doesn't make a whole lot of sense, aside from purely because of balance reason. If it's just once per encounter, and cannot be used in combat, then it'd better be really, really good - something along the lines of instantly killing most normal enemies. As you said, it requires *a lot* of setting up just for one attack. And, the fact is that many encounters do not allow you the option of initiating combat at all.

I also wish that there were more talents designed specifically for spellcasters. There are Fire (Demon) and Water (Ice King), but how come Earth and Air are left out? I like the idea of having separate talents that boost the effectiveness of spells within these four classic elemental schools. Shorter cooldowns, longer durations, damage boosts, etc. Maybe extra resistances against hostile spells from the corresponding school as well.

There's Savage Sortilege, but then it is tied to crit chance. Late game in my playthrough, I found myself bumping up crit chance of everyone, fighters and mages alike. While there's nothing wrong with that, per se, but it somewhat diminishes the uniqueness of being a "spellcaster".

One important question when considering a talent is, How useful is it *in the long run*? Take Arrow Recovery for example. A 33% chance might be fine in a casual situation, but in the tough fights, the most important ones, a "chance" thing like that means it's not reliable (it encourages save/reload when you *have* to succeed). Not only that, from mid game on, when you have all the gold in the world and can buy as many arrows as you like, or make pretty much whatever you want, plus the fact that magical arrows are quite abundant throughout the game, this talent becomes useless really fast.

I prefer something that is reliable, and still useful by endgame. My idea is to rework Arrow Recovery into something like increasing effectiveness of magical arrows - increased duration and/or additional damage.

Good discussion. I'll explain my line of thinking a little more

Currently, Guerilla in-combat costs at least 6 AP (4 Sneak, 2 Attack), not counting any movement required and boosts damage by 40%. 1.4x damage for 6 AP. Three regular attacks do 3.0x damage for 6 AP, giving Guerilla DPAP of -160%.

My suggestion was already assuming that Sneak gets reduced to 2 AP. That's still not enough to make it useful in-combat. Even with Sneak reduced to 2 AP, using Sneak-then-attack while in combat would cost 4 AP and do 1.4x the damage of a regular attack (2 AP). That's less useful than doing two regular attacks, which would do 2.0x damage (DPAP of -60%).

That's why I suggested that Guerilla get boosted to +100% damage, so a 2 AP Sneak + 2 AP attack would do exactly as much damage as 2 regular attacks (DPAP of 100%).

However, doing exactly as much damage as 2 regular attacks would obviously still not be any more worthwhile. Even less so, considering you need extra conditions and effort to get the same result.

In order to make Guerilla worthwhile, you would need to give it a bigger boost, to +125 or +150% damage. But I realized that if you boost the damage that much, and allow people to do that in combat as much as you want, that would make cheesy attack->escape->return->repeat tactics the most optimal way to play.

That's why it can't go higher than +100% and be usable in an encounter more than once.





One of the reasons why I probably didn't post this months ago was that I couldn't decide on what kind of talents other mage schools should get. I didn't want to delay posting this even more, though.




That's a good idea. I can endorse that one. One reason I didn't really talk about arrow Talents much is simply because on the playthrough I completed, I didn't have any archers, I went 2/2 with a Rogue and Knight plus a Wizard and Enchanter.

I have a few poorly-thought-out and probably bad ideas:

Change Arrow Recovery to something less reliant on RNG
Why? - I'll let "Try2Handing" explain:



Suggested Change: A few options come to mind.
1) NEW TALENT: "Improved Magical Arrows Archer" - The damage from all magical arrows (both direct and damage over time from surfaces is increased by 50%. (A simple, straight-up buff.)

2) NEW TALENT: "Arcane Archer" - The damage from all magical arrows now scales with Intelligence. (Allows for a mage build which uses a bow as a weapon instead of a staff or wand. Probably not that effective. Maybe it also allows regular attacks to scale with INT or FIN, whichever is highest?)

3) NEW TALENT: "Arcane Quickdraw" - AP cost of using magical arrows is reduced by 1, but damage is decreased by 40%. (Allows you to fire twice as many arrows, but the damage penalty means you're only doing an extra 20% damage over two shots.)

I think a good idea is to put talents into broader groups that target specific builds. For example, a group that aim to create a meat shield, a group for melee rogue build, another group for archers, another group for spellcasters, then the rest are general utilities. Each group might have 5 or 6 talents. Something like The Witcher 3's four separate groups of skills - one for melee, one for magic, one for alchemy, and another for utilities. That way we can make sure that most if not all playstyles are taken into consideration equally, avoiding some not receiving as much love as others.

The magic group could simply be given generic names like Fire Mastery, Water Mastery, Air Mastery, and so on.

And other factors like skills will probably need to be rebalanced to compensate for changes like this.

Here's one for the Misc. category:


In SP Arena combats, PC's should move into proper formation before fighting starts.
Why? - If you walk up to any regular fight, your party automatically moves into formation before the fighting starts. However, if you decide to accept a challenge to play in the arena, the game teleports you there into one big bunch perfect for the pre-positioned enemy to drop a bunch of AoE effects on you, putting you into an even bigger hole. There's no reason to do this.
Suggested Change: When starting an arena fight (in the single-player campaign, not the arena mode), characters will automatically move into the formation you set up BEFORE the fighting starts.


And back to Abilities for a moment:

Perseverance (on players) should passively restore some of both types of armor armor per turn
Why? - Currently, it only affects Knocked Down, Petrified, Stunned, and Frozen, and it only returns a slight amount of armor. There are so many other, more beneficial places to put the ability points. This should be altered to be useful for certain build.
Suggested Change: Perseverance will restore a fixed number somewhere in the range of 2 to 3.3% armor of both types per turn. So at level 1, you'll get 2.0-3.3% armor, but at level 10 Perseverance, you're up to 20-33% armor restored per turn. This sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that is 10 points which you are not spending on Warfare or any other damaging abilities, all it is doing is mitigating the damage you're taking.

Has anyone ever tried Guerila+Asasinate out of combat?Would it be cool to have the effect of current Guerila talent to move on to Delorus Bow and have new Guerial talent just reduce cost of entering stealth by 2AP if out of enemy LoS or if Invisible.