Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Feedback after killing Braccus

So, I played the game with the following configurations:
- knight lvl10 2 hand weapon (78-130 damage weapon at the end)
- Air mage lvl10
- Jahan as ice mage lvl10

Played in hard mode the whole game.

What I noticed in my playthrough is that the difficulty was about about balanced until the lighthouse ghoul, after that, it was pretty much a cakewalk where I had no chance of ever losing a fight. Despite the ideas and abilities for the fights were interesting, the difficulty just need to be upped.

I noticed several causes for it:
- when you reach level 3/4 way of the warrior, you can use most of the skills and with several skills redundant like battering ram + charge, you could pretty much use all your skills in the 1st two rounds of the fight and slaughter all the mobs before they could do anything at all.
- The various disables (especially the frozen ground) were way too efficient on the ennemies, teleport can't be resisted which make it even worse for them. Because of that, I barely received any damage from attacks, only damage from traps and the environment.
- the ennemies barely use abilities, at least they should try to use easy to aim abilities like charge or lightning or ricochet.
- they generally don't have enough hp and their lvls don't increase enough later in the game, the last fight against Braccus was ridiculous, after 3 rounds all the 4 bosses were dead.
- After lvl3 way of the warrior, his damage was just through the roof it wasn't even funny. Due to strength lowering the ap necessary for using abilities, fist would cost 1 or 2 ap for a shitload of damage (combined with bully and flurry, Braccus died the 2nd turn).
- last fight, the first time the 3 bosses didnt go to help Braccus, had to reload, moreover, the 2nd time, by the time they came to his help, Braccus and the twin were already dead, they need to be nearer and have more help.
- during all the bosses fights, the bosses are way to sensitive to crowd control or teleport while their allies die too fast.
- Warrior in general having too much damage once he gets a good weapon combined with too much mobility and CC (not even counting his ally boosts and nullify resistances). After the second round, most of his abilities are generally in CD but by then, most of the ennemies are dead and the few that were left wer shocked/blinded/frozen to death by my mages.
- On the other hand, the mages' damage couldn't keep up with the warrior later on, it should increase more with the level. By the end, per round, my warrior did much more damage than both of my mages combined.

To solve those problems, you could add:
- lots of hp to about everyone after lvl 5. Increase
- a few mobs with specific skills (charger, casters with offensive spells that are used in priority, etc...)
- increase the bosses hp much more
- increase the level of the ennemies around Braccus
- bring CC under control, it would also allow the ennemies to use them more without it being frustrating for the player.
- the ennemy fighters must be much more resistant than their casters or archers, they're useless right now.

For the build, you only had to boost way of the warrior/water magic/ air magic. Make it so that the other skills like two handed had more importance. Maybe instead of strength lowering the ap/cd on skills and boosting them, we could have two-handed lowering the ap when using a two handed weapon, leadership would boost heal, armor specialist would boost battering ram, etc...
Add more sinergy so that there's a real choice to be made, right now you only need to boost way of the warrior and strength to max out the efficiency of your skills. It should be harder than that.

That's kind of strange because I beat Braccus with four characters on level 10 - one of them a knight, one ranger/fighter and two mages - and I needed more than 3 rounds for them. I think at least 6 or 7...

And I only played on medium difficulty. My level 10 knight had a 70-170 two-handed weapon. But of course my knight only had level 2 way of the warrior and one of my mages was specialized in fire which isn't very useful against Braccus...

I agree that the difficulty still needs some balancing. But some fights are just easier than other fights, espeically if you have a higher level than your opponent. Braccus is level 7 or 8 IIRC which is three levels below yourself at level 10. You have a great party to crack him (melee+water+air). So yes, the fight is easy. But other players maybe don't do each and every quest before encountering him in and are for example only at level 7 with on fire mage in the party. Then the fight is a lot harder...

The conclusion I reached with my experience and what I deduced from the feedbacks of others is that :
- there's a very large difference between way of the warrior lvl2 and way of the warrior fully boosted, there's no reasons to boost anything else but that skill (same with the other classes)
To solve that, most other skills need to have similiar bonuses, for exemple:
- one hand weapon could decrease the ap needed to attack and the cooldown of skills and generally boost single target skills
- two hand would give splash damage to your attacks (with a 2h weapon) and generally boost aoe skills
- mentalist would give more damage to spells
- knowledge lore would decrease cd and increase duration of spells
- etc...
In exchange, the main stats wouldnt decrease the cd/ap cost anymore making other stats more interesting.
That way, you could potentially get stronger with level (we're supposed to be at 20% of the content) instead of peaking at 15 main stat/5 main skill which resulted in having characters that were too strong too early and a lack of diversity in builds.



It's true that different players will have more or less difficulties but in your case, the problem was that you had way of the warrior at lvl2 when there's a huge gap between lvl2 and lvl3-4 due to the abilities avalaible. Most warrior abilities can only be learnt after lvl3 in way of the warrior.
If you had those, you would have noticed a very big difference. And that's the problem, a single skill make too much of a difference for all the characters.

Of course, if the other skills are boosted to make their usefulness on par with boosting the various main skills, the ennemies will also have to be boosted a lot given that currently, I kill them too fast.

If anyone wants, I can send them my savegame from before the fight if they want to see how it goes.

Madora with 3+ warrior way can solo annihilate everybody party, using only abilities.
And you need some water mage for healing (strong regeneration heals at the 110+ hp with 16 int).

Ran into the same thing with my Friend. Min-Maxing chars for damage is way to effective atm. We unloaded all the utility on Jahan, and Overspecialized all other characters for maximum damage potential. Braccus was down in the middle of the second round, and the entire fight was over after ~3 rounds (on Hard). The duplicate skills of the warrior only make this worse (Whirlwind/Charge etc.)

Another thing that exacerbates that problem is that you can buff all your chars, cast summons, etc. right before any fight starts, allowing you to start with an obscene advantage.

This and the somewhat clusterfucky inventory management are my only issues with the game.

Well I don't actually mind buffs and summons before the fights, it can't be prevented without it seeming unnatural. The problem is that apparently, with any efficient build, you don't need any of that to slaughter the ennemies. However simply increasing the ennemy's hp seem kinda boring, that's why I proposed those other changes and I wondering what other people thought about it. Of course, increasing the ennemy's hp is still a must given how fragile they currently are.

Well, if the game is already too easy for your taste why do you make it even easier by using "tricks"???

If you want a harder experience just don't buff your characters, don't prepare for fights even before approaching enemies and don't follow a min-max strategy in leveling.

The whole purpose of a game with maximum freedom is to give you as player the choice how you want to play it. If you do everything to make fights as easy as possible, well, in that case it's your own decision. Point is: you don't have to do that. Just "roleplay" more and play with more discipline, using your skill points to make actual characters instead of making four war machines for putting out maximum damage...

I mean the concept of this game is not following the Dark Souls route with maximum difficulty and trial-and-error for which you need to train or grind or anything. If you maximize your damage skills you will win every fight easily but you lack other stuff. Combat is just one part of the game, it's not the single concept of the game. This is neither Dark Souls nor Diablo. It's not about making "the best character build". That's not the core of this game. It's a real role-playing game, not a combat-driven action-RPG.

But I agree that there should be a super-hard mode with maybe some ironman features for those people who just want to play the game for "the challenge". And general difficulty on hard could be raised a bit as well.

I agree about the buffs, but it seems like this possibility was not considered when the combat was balanced. Also, bosses definitely need more HP, some Madora's 4 bladed attack took off more then half of Braccus's Health. That just shouldn't happen on a Main Boss like this.

Another measure to tackle this issue would obviously be to add more (harder) difficulties, which should not only increase the enemies HP, but also their skill levels/action points/etc, essentially giving them a lot more options forcing a more reactive play-style out of the players.

AI also needs some work. Enemies should avoid walking into negative ground effects if at all possible, use more aoe based spells, and disable key party members, rather than bash on the closest party member.

As for spreading combat beneficial bonuses from abilities around a bit: I agree. Especially because I suspect that in the full game you reach your soft damage ceiling long before enemies reach their maximum strength, leading to a wonky difficulty curve, where the game is reasonably difficult at the start, then gets easier and easier to the point of being boring (most of what is in the Beta atm), and then starts to get harder again once all you hit that soft cap, but enemies keep getting stronger.

EDIT:


Well, tactically gimping myself in a game that prides itself on its tactical combat seems a bit counter intuitive. I want to be challenged while using all the tools the game gives me. I want to think "What could I do to be more effective", not "I know how to win this fight, but I won't do it like that because that is to easy".

As for missing out on other things: Not really you are still able to pick up Pet Pal, to successfully charm/reason/intimidate people, to craft extensively, steal everything that isn't nailed down, Identify items, or build one of your characters to be very socially adept.

As long as your Min-Max a little bit the game as of now Lacks any sort of challenge, but as mentioned above, this might change later in the game, but still cause a very skewed difficulty curve.

Don't get me wrong, I am not asking to make the game generally harder, or bashing people who don't want to have as challenging combat, I would just like the option to ramp up to challenge so i enjoy it and don't just go through the "motions" every fight.

EDIT2:
Out of curiosity: what do you think one would miss with a build like i mentioned? I only played through the game once with my friend so far, and I'm pretty sure we didn't miss anything noteworthy.

EDIT3:
If D:OS was an actual pen and paper RPG where it matters if your character is extremely clumsy and is so dumb he can barely talk I would agree with you that Overspecialization into combat is silly, but as it stands any of those things dont really change your interaction with the world... with the exception that your character is better/worse at fighting.

I agree. I think the various talents have way too little weight right now. And with equipment to buff certain stats like loremaster or crafting just for the very moment you need them kind of discourage the player to put skills in them. Same problem raises from the tons of money you can get by stealing which leads to you having no problem to pay for identifying and repairing which makes loremaster and and blacksmithing completely pointless...

At the moment there is way too little incentive to invest your skill and stat points in stuff not directly needed for combat. I fully agree with you here. But instead of making enemies just harder (which is of course an option, but not the best one imo) Larian should try to make the single skills and stats and talents more useful or their lack more painful.

That's not only true for non-combat skills and stats but also for combat skills. A warrior who only invests points in strength shouldn't be able to hit with more than 50% of his blows at best, maybe way less. And certain skills should have longer cooldown times and cost more action points or make less damage.

The biggest problem with the cooldown system is that each and every skill is available at the very start of each combat situation. There is no "starting cooldown". So a fully-strenght maximized warrior could easily use his best combat skill in the first turn, his second best in the second turn and so on. Following this route most enemies will be slain in the first two or three turn, like described below. Same is true for mages and every other class as well. In the old Infinity engine games this problem was (partially) solved by casting times. Using the most dangerous skills and spells forced you to skip X turns/seconds for casting. During that casting time you were vulnerable and had to be defended by other party members. This system led to a more balanced way of fighting and using skills/spells. You had to ponder which skill/spell to use in which situation. This system was additionally fueled by spells disappering from your pool of available skills until the next rest. You don't have that flexibility or "balanced" system with cooldown. With that system you can just use all your most powerful spells in turn 1 which maybe even leads to kill the most powerful enemy in the very first turn or the second one. This is a big weakness of the system and Larian should think about some "safetly measures" or improvements here.
Why not inventing casting/preparation times/turns as well for high-level spells and skills?

So, in fact I don't think you missed out that much. But that's also the problem. Because you SHOULD miss out stuff with characters only leveled for combat and maximum damage...if that's not the case the whole stats/skills/talents/leveling system is fundamentally broken at a very basic level imo.

I wouldn't say it is broken on a fundamental level, but I think there are definitely 3 things that should change:

1.) The incentive to build balanced characters should be higher with meaningful changes to dialogues with smart/charming/charismatic/etc characters. Higher vendor Identifying costs, much more difficult sneaking and stealing, more of an emphasis on lock-picking rather then putting the keys right next to chests, etc. Give my characters a reason to be more versatile.

2.) Advanced difficulty option, perhaps something beyond just increasing health. Make them avoid triggering attacks of opportunity all the time (seriously my Rouge Killed Evelyn entirely with attacks of opportunity). Make them avoid hazardous ground effect. Make them focus on the reasonable targets, not the obvious ones(as in: Hit the frail guy with the robe, not the Armoured Hulk carrying a shield).
In short: Improve enemies in a way that makes combat more tactical and challenging without turning everything into "bulletsponges"

3.) Re-balance all abilities and spells, as well as their cool-downs and action point cost. At the moment balance for those is all over place, like Small Fireball costing 10 Base action points, and being significantly less effective than the 5 costing Whirlwind of the warrior etc. Also having the weak and the strong version of an ability (like in the warriors case) can cause some serious silliness.

And to reiterate: I want the game to challenge me, not challenge myself because the game fails to do so.

I agree 100%.


Agreed. I think in higher difficulty modes enemy should use better skills and spells, combining effects like water and lightning and stuff (just like the player). Most of the enemies at this point just uses normal melee or ranger/bow attacks and mages just uses weak (often fire) spells. At the moment enemy AI is just really lacking imo which isn't much of an issue in easy mode but which is a clear issue in normal and especially in hard mode.
But just adding spells and skills to enemies (and giving them a better AI) isn't enough if you can just slay them in one or two rounds because your own skills are too powerful. There should be a way to prevent you from using all your spells and skills from the very start of each fight. Having everything available in turn 1 and with each spell/skill casted/performed in the same turn the player is kind of overpowered by system. That's the reason why I think the system is broken (aka not very well designed) in that respect.


Agreed. But just adding bigger cooldowns to better skills would just lead to using them all in the first round and then using normal melee or ranged attacks until the cooldown is over or the enemy slain. That would just prolong the fights in the same way as giving them more HP...


I really understand you, mate...

Greater AP costs for the powerful spells would mean you can't use them in the first turn if you jut don't have enough points.

Adding a cooldown to some spells at the start of combat seems like a break from the rest of the games rules, and would feel somewhat like a band aid fix.

A more elaborate way of fixing this that I could imagine is to instead of spells costing action points up front, finishing to cast them costs action points. And every round you can allocate X action points towards casting them, until the amount needed to cast them is reached.
Essentially we would split Magic into "At will", which would include weaker spells, and "Incantations" which would be really powerful but also costly, and possibly have a limit of how often they can be used per combat.

This system wouldn't make a lot of sense for skills though, so simply re-balancing them would seem like the best way to go for me. Also duplicates should go, the amount of distance that can be covered with 2 charges is ludicrous.

Lastly, in addition to AI improvements enemies would of course have to be beefed up appropriately so that they don't just fall over.

Overall I think adding cooldowns to delay powerful abilities is not the way to go, but rather they should be multi-turn actions.

EDIT: Quick amendment to the casting suggestion: A target for the spell would be chose once the cast is complete, not when casting is begun. This would also have the side effect of adding more reactionary gameplay such as protecting a currently casting Character from interruptions, while trying to disrupt enemy casters.

I really like your suggestion for the multi-turn spells. That would be a really good addition to the gameplay.

As I said, multi-turn spells were quite common in the Infinity engine games. Though they were RTwP the system worked quite well. Casting times were one of the backbones of the combat systems of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale for a reason...

And I also like your idea of much higher action points requirements for certain very powerful melee/warrior skills. But a rebalancing is definitely needed here.

I'm a bit worried that we won't see the whole game before the final release. That way balancing issue in the late game won't be beta-tested before release...

I too wonder how combat will turn out towards the end of the game, but even now you can see that it will be a little bit messy if things stay the way they are. At the moment the game starts out super easy, then gets a little bit harder, and eventually starts continuously dropping in difficulty. It is a little bis of a mess.

I don't remember where, but I think on one of the Q&A's, Larian said that spells which you have to take a turn to charge up wasn't going to be in. I do think that's unfortunate, though.

I think one of the biggest problems with balance is that you get XP too fast.

I am talking to Swen about this topic. My thoughts: I think too many skills do too much. For instance, most skills deal nice damage AND set a status. This makes it so that the player never really thinks: "What am I going to do? Am I going to use this skill OR am I going to do a regular attack?" This indeed causes skill spamming. In my opinion, skills should be used in a certain context, and it should be somewhat of a hard choice for the player, and should be context-sensitive.

For instance, if a skill has a chance to knockdown, its damage output should not be as high (or higher) than the regular attack. The player will then wonder "should I hit this guy, or should I try to knock him down".

Another example: the Rush attack should only make sense if a lot of enemies are lined up so you get the maximum out of that skill. Right now, you can use Rush almost anytime, anywhere.

Another example: the Bleeding attacks of fighters/rangers/rogues should not deal as much damage as a regular attack, because it inflicts a DoT attack. You should have to choose between either DoT, OR a regular attack.

So in short, I don't think we're there yet with skill balancing. I would like to see the choice between "attack" and "use skill" become a real choice, a more tactical/strategical choice, a 50/50 choice, and not a no-brainer like it is now.

For mages, this may be a bit different, but it is again so that most mage skills do too much at the same time. E.g. they AND do damage, AND set a status OR do crowd control. E.g. if you teleport a guy, it does okay damage AND you've moved him out of the way. If you moved the enemy, that's a good thing right, why should it still take away half his damage? This means that you're going to use the teleport skill on people not to get them out of the way, but to do damage. This should, imo, not be the case.

Also, yes, the AI doesn't use skills intelligently yet, or appropriately. We are aware of that, and working on it.

Thanks for the feedback, David!

I'm quite aware that all skills are "work in progress" but some really needs a serious rebalancing.

1) Most higher-tier warrior skills cost to little action points and do to much damage. Tanks and warriors shouldn't even be able to activate skills every round. In most classic isometric party RPG games (like BG or ID) tanks/warriors often just fight "normally" to put out weapon damage and to attrack enemies to fight against them instead of against the mages and rangers in the second row. I think at the moment warriors have too many options/skills at too little cost...

2) Some spells for mages are seriously overpowered. Lightning for example is heavily overpowered because it doesn't have a cool-down time and you can use it each and every round. With lightning available each round you can easily constantly stun enemy group standing in water pools caused by rain for example. A mage who casts rain+lightning in he first turn and then lightning in each upcoming turn is basically unbeatable. Blind is also overpowered, making many enemies almost defenseless. At the same times resistencies of many enemies against knockdown, freeze, stun or blind are way too low. That's especially true for bosses. It shouldn't be possible to knock-down Braccus Rex so easily for example...

I am aware of the low AP cost of warrior skills etc as soon as you have some points in STR. I should revise them. I think indeed more of them should cost just a bit more than the AP you have so that you'd have to save AP up for them. Especially if they are "high damage dealing skills".

Resistances for enemies are indeed too low. There can be enemies with low resistances, the real grunts, the ones that you can deal with easily, but they should at least be different so that you have ideal targets and more of a "chance to" instead of "100% chance". I changed some of them, but I think that change just didn't make it to the beta.

I beat Braccus this morning, in Normal mode, with:
Wayfarer 9 / Cleric 9 / Fighter 8 (Madora) / Enchanter 8 (Jahan)

My biggest complaint is that you still gain far, far too much XP. After I reached level 5, I started skipping optional fights.

I killed the Grieving orc, and I did do the Orc fight outside the Black Cove, and I entered for the waypoint, but went no farther. I skipped the Black Cove.

I skipped one of the level 5 undead boar fights in the north woods and just did the required one outside the robot tunnel. I fought the Sparkmaster. I skipped the thugs in NW Cyseal, I skipped Dietmar, I skipped the demons. I did fight the orcs in Evelyn's hideout even though I didn't have to. I cleared Evelyn's hideout.

I did clear out all the fire enemies on the east side - including the boss. The only one I skipped was the Fire Behemoth thing on the road near the path to Luculla.

I entered the graveyard. I did kill the bridge troll. I skipped the statues fight outside the church. I skipped everything in SE Cyseal, the wolves, the undertaker hut enemies, the Court of Diedrik, all of that was skipped.

Skipping all of that content, and skipping a lot of quests, I still ended up at level 9 for the Braccus Rex fight. He is only level 8. His associates are only level 8. The only reason why Jahan and Madora were not level 9 is that they died a couple times.

Braccus Rex is absolutely underlevelled. He MUST be level 10 - the only level 10 enemy in Cyseal. His underling bosses should level 9 as well.

Braccus Rex used regenerate on himself, giving him a whopping 35 HP healed/round. That's idiotic for a level 8 boss's self-heal.

Make it 350 HP/round, but give it a long cooldown! At that level, with 4 chars and appropriate gear, you should be able to deal about 350 HP a round anyway.

In the Braccus fight, The Fire Twins died really, really fast, faster than I thought they should... but on the other hand, because of their overpowered 250 fire damage punches, they did kill Jahan in one turn with two swings.

The other two bosses were pretty much non-factors. The Lighthouse Horror hit Jahan with some poison which took him to half health, and Diedric attacked my Raistlin Wayfarer forcing use of Tactical Retreat, but that's about it.

For once, Raistlin worked against me, as I used Boulderdash to hit Braccus and his buddy the Baron of Bones. Braccus retaliated with a load of fireballs on my head. Other than that one death, and having to move away from an orc outside the black cove, my Wayfarer has seen no disadvantage from Raistlin at all.

****

Party Stats (some abilities are not listed)


Wayfarer (Lvl 9):

Health: 279
AP - Max/Start/Turn: 15/8/12

STR - 5
DEX - 9
INT - 9 (+2)
CON - 8 (+1)
SPD - 6
PER - 6 (+1)

Earth - 2
Water - 2 (+1)
WotRanger - 4 (+1)
Crafting - 3 (+1)


Cleric (Lvl 9):

Health: 471
AP - Max/Start/Turn: 15/8/7

STR - 9 (+1)
DEX - 5
INT - 8
CON - 7 (+1)
SPD - 8 (+1)
PER - 5

WotWarrior - 3 (+1)
Shield Specialist - 2
Armour Specialist - 2 (+1)
Fire Elementalist - 3
Water Elementalist - 1
Lucky Charm - 3 (+3)


Fighter (Madora Lvl 8)

Health: 444
AP - Max/Start/Turn: 14/9/8

STR - 10 (+1)
DEX - 5
INT - 5
CON - 7
SPD - 9 (+1)
PER - 5

WotWarrior - 3
Two-Handed - 2


Enchanter (Jahan Lvl 9):

Health: 447
AP - Max/Start/Turn: 15/8/7

STR - 6 (+1)
DEX - 5
INT - 9
CON - 8 (+1)
SPD - 7
PER - 6

Air - 3
Water - 3

Cool, can't wait for the next update then. It seems you're on the right track here...


@Stabbey
I've even put the Twins and the poison guy completely out of the equation by summoning a fire elemental. The elemental killed the poison guy in two turns while being constantly healed by the Twins who were too dumb to notice that fire actually heals a fire elemental. Of course I just skipped the turns of my fire elemental after killing the poison guy, knowing that I wouldn't damage the twins with fire. But the elemental worked quite well as a distraction...one of the shortcomings of enemy AI atm.

And I wholeheartedly agree that Braccus Rex should be at least level 10. Evelyn should have a higher level as well. Same is true for the orc leader on the beach.

And I really hope for some non-quest relevant "ultra hard" enemies. The giant spider in the Black Cove would for example be a nice candidate for such an enemy. Why not making that beast level 12 or even higher? You people surely remember Firkraag or Kangaxx from BG2? They were both ultra hard enemies for you to enjoy and offering a real challenge without blocking the main storyine (e.g. making Braccus too hard would possible block some players from progression).