Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Anyone play Divinty 1?)

RegisterMe · Post by **RegisterMe** » Thu, 28. Sep 17, 21:42

OK, I've found something to have a good moan about. The inventory system is beyond awful :-/.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Thu, 28. Sep 17, 23:11

I don't find the inventory system *too* terrible (I mean, if you want an absolutely godawful inventory try playing Might and Magic IX sometime), but I do wish the game would allow you to switch between characters when picking a quest reward so you can directly compare the reward with what your characters' equipment.

I also find the Source abilities really, well, meh. Considering they need a rare component to use you would expect them to be more powerful and swingy than they actually are--I mean, the wolf Ifan can summon is only about as powerful as the fully-buffed Incarnate he can also get, only it has less tactical options, and Lohse's ability to send people mad and make them attack each other sounds really good, until you realise it's blocked by magic armour and is thus unusable 90% of the time you'd actually want to use it.

Still enjoying the heck out of the game, though, and I'm only halfway through Driftwood with 42 hours played according to Steam!

RegisterMe · Post by **RegisterMe** » Thu, 28. Sep 17, 23:52

79 hours, I think I'm getting close to the end of Driftwood.

Jericho · Post by **Jericho** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 11:01

pjknibbs wrote:
I also find the Source abilities really, well, meh.

Same for me... I'm assuming that you start to get a gazillion Source points later down the road, as the higher end spells need Source points and AP.

Magic armor... It's really adding a level of annoyance... I wouldn't mind if physical and magical armor were all treated as a single pool of protection... But having them as separate makes the game less fun. I know they were going for "Use tactics!!!" But what I actually get is "Oh, I have 3 AP left this round, no point using any of my skills for this character as they are all physical armor, and this guy's magic armor is almost zero... I guess I'll just waste a couple of AP and save the rest."

Edit--->>> I haven't played it for 4 days due to hard-drive issues... I'm not really missing it... I don't find it very relaxing, it is almost like work (Well, not really... But it isn't very relaxing). I love it while I play it, but don't miss it when it's gone.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 12:46

I don't have a problem with magic/physical armour. It *does* introduce tactics when you have more than one enemy--you start to think, "I should use my physical attack guys against this one because his physical armour is low, while the mages need to concentrate on this other one.".

Mightysword · Post by **Mightysword** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 16:19

pjknibbs wrote: I also find the Source abilities really, well, meh. Considering they need a rare component to use you would expect them to be more powerful and swingy than they actually are--I mean, the wolf Ifan can summon is only about as powerful as the fully-buffed Incarnate he can also get, only it has less tactical options, and Lohse's ability to send people mad and make them attack each other sounds really good, until you realise it's blocked by magic armour and is thus unusable 90% of the time you'd actually want to use it.

- Have you ever tried to use Bless on a field of fire? It's glorious.
- Mad actually very useful when you can use it. It's not rare to run into enemies with zero Magic armor but ridiculous high physical armor.
- I run a 2 mages set up, Losh is a Hydro/Gero and Les is a Pyro/Air, they can strip any amount of Magic armor real fast. The Pyri spell Laser Fire strip magic armor like it's not even there.

The inventory is horrible, which was my peeve from the first game and kinda surprise they doesn't seem even try to fix it. But if I have to note the biggest problem I currently have is ... I think how teleport spell/ability are overused in the game. Mage have, 2 Warrior have 1, rogue have 2, and that's not counting all the special abilities that does similar things that feels half the enemies out there have. I feel this is done on purpose by the dev to 'cheese' the player. I'm finding the most decisive factor in most of the fight simply how many positional spell you have.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 17:01

Mightysword wrote: - I run a 2 mages set up, Losh is a Hydro/Gero and Les is a Pyro/Air, they can strip any amount of Magic armor real fast. The Pyri spell Laser Fire strip magic armor like it's not even there.

I've got Laser, and yes, it's very good--but when it's possible to encounter guys with approaching 1200 magic armour at level 11 (e.g. most of the Voidwoken in the second level of Wrecker's Cove in Driftwood) Laser doesn't seem all that powerful anymore. Plus, one of the critical things about this game is that the enemies generally have exactly the same abilities you have access to, so an enemy using Laser on *you* can really ruin your day!

RegisterMe · Post by **RegisterMe** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 17:51

pjknibbs wrote:Plus, one of the critical things about this game is that the enemies generally have exactly the same abilities you have access to, so an enemy using Laser on *you* can really ruin your day!

One of the things I like about the game is that, apparently, enemy npcs will use a level appropriate "loremaster skill" to look at your characters and, based on what they see in terms of resistances and abilities like Opportunist, vary their attacks.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Fri, 29. Sep 17, 22:05

Well, I found Peeper's dad. The result wasn't...great, really.

Party has just hit level 13, heading into Blackpits now.

dreamer2008 · Post by **dreamer2008** » Sat, 30. Sep 17, 10:42

Divinity Original Sin 1 is great, worth playing for sure. It can be complicated at first, but once you get the Master level spells it becomes super easy.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Sat, 30. Sep 17, 14:35

Wow. I just had the most intense fight of the game so far in the Blackpits. Started out with three magisters so didn't seem that tough, but then a bunch of weak Oil Voidlings appeared. Those guys left oil pools everywhere they went, so it wasn't long before the entire screen was on fire and my framerate was tanking massively. Then a couple of bigger, tougher Oil Voidlings showed up, and some Fire ones appeared too, who obviously heal in fire so were having great fun in the sea of cursed fire that was all over the place. Fane had to flee the battle halfway through, partly because he was close to death and I couldn't heal him and partly because he's a Geomancer/Pyrokinetic and thus couldn't do anything against the Fire Voidlings, but somehow the other three managed to hold on and defeat everyone.

I reckon the fight took around an hour all told. Hope for more like that later on!

RegisterMe · Post by **RegisterMe** » Sat, 30. Sep 17, 15:10

I needed multiple goes at that fight.

Mightysword · Post by **Mightysword** » Sat, 30. Sep 17, 16:27

pjknibbs wrote:Wow. I just had the most intense fight of the game so far in the Blackpits. Started out with three magisters so didn't seem that tough, but then a bunch of weak Oil Voidlings appeared. Those guys left oil pools everywhere they went, so it wasn't long before the entire screen was on fire and my framerate was tanking massively. Then a couple of bigger, tougher Oil Voidlings showed up, and some Fire ones appeared too, who obviously heal in fire so were having great fun in the sea of cursed fire that was all over the place. Fane had to flee the battle halfway through, partly because he was close to death and I couldn't heal him and partly because he's a Geomancer/Pyrokinetic and thus couldn't do anything against the Fire Voidlings, but somehow the other three managed to hold on and defeat everyone.

I reckon the fight took around an hour all told. Hope for more like that later on!

Did you try to bless the fire?

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Sat, 30. Sep 17, 19:58

I tried that in another fight earlier, but didn't have any Source available to do it in this one.

Oh, and I totally cheesed a later fight by using crates to block the ladders leading up to the wooden platform I was on, using my height advantage to deal loadsa damage...

Jericho · Post by **Jericho** » Mon, 2. Oct 17, 18:50

New hard drive in, 'some' data recovered, nothing important lost. Reinstalling Original Sin 2.

Dreading working out which Fallout 4 mods I had installed... That's really going to screw up my huge constructions

felter · Post by **felter** » Mon, 2. Oct 17, 19:52

Jericho wrote:New hard drive in, 'some' data recovered, nothing important lost. Reinstalling Original Sin 2.

Dreading working out which Fallout 4 mods I had installed... That's really going to screw up my huge constructions

I had that issue with Skyrim, it wasn't so much the actual mods I had used but they had to be installed in a certain order for them to work together. After numerous attempts, I went back to an earlier save game and lost a lot of hours in gameplay, now I limit the amount of mods I use.

Got to love the conversation with Trompdoy, playing a female Elf Cleric:

Trompdoy "Hey! Hey you! Let me see what you've got under there. Go on, go on, show me your -"

Me "Wait and let him finish"

Trompdoy "TITS!"

I was not expecting that.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Mon, 2. Oct 17, 23:48

Just finished up with Driftwood (OK, there were a few quests unfinished, but it would have taken more effort to do them than I could be bothered with). Level 17, Nameless Isle ahoy!

Mightysword · Post by **Mightysword** » Tue, 3. Oct 17, 05:20

I'm lvl14 and still in Driffwork. But 2 things start to bother me greatly now:

- Environmental fight is overused. And by that I mean really really overused. IMO it should be something that you should specifically work toward to get an edge, but I can't remember the last time I have a fight where everything is nice and clean. Pretty much every single fight turn into some sort of field of flame that it feels like I'm fighting in hell and not in Riverellon. My gears are argument-ed for fire resistance so it hurts the AI more than it hurt me, but god my eyes.

- I noticed more and more how a lot of quests are disconnected from each step. Like one step doesn't really acknowledge what happens prior. For 2 examples:
+ I return to the Paladin to report after finishing their quest, a fight broke out and I had to help them fend them off. I think three of the Paladin died. The fight is over, talk to the the Captain and he acted like ... nothing, literally nothing had just happened.
+ I got this quest from a Lizard asking me to check for her friend family in the Pit, when I get to that family (and save them from the imminent execution no less), they pleadge to me to go look for another member. Save him from another big fight, he ran up to me and asked "hey did you run to my family before you get here by any chance"? My 2 available responses were: 1-Nope haven't seen them. 2-Refuse to answer him. And I was like what the heck, I'm here because they asked me to find you in the first place! Oh yeah and he also mentioned his "Friend" abandoned him and my character had no response ... you know, the very same friend to asked me to go help his family?

And this start to happens more and more often now (I guess the Early Access helped them hammer out Act 1, but the latter act ...). For someone who play RPG more for the story and writing, this is really getting to me, perhaps more than it should, but very annoying regardless.

PS: btw, I think I found the ultimate cheese technique especially for boss fights. You know those fight that trigger after a short dialogue?

- Only the character initiated the convo is locked. You can switch to other characters and free move around.
- It means you can position your char in a way that give you good starting position ... but that's not the "ultimate" part.
- You can actually use teleport and tele both the characters who are locked into the convo, this both include yours and the boss.

I did this for a certain fight where you have to fight a witch and a bunch of dogs (who can kill any of my chars in one turn). After a few attempt I teleport her and my chars (who in the convo lock) all the way back to the entrance and nuke her down without her minions get any wiser.

pjknibbs · Post by **pjknibbs** » Tue, 3. Oct 17, 09:17

I didn't find those dogs were one-hit kills for me? Mind you, I did that fight when I was level 15 or 16, and a single Chain Lightning instakilled two of the dogs while the other two seemed to find Fane strangely attractive and concentrated on killing him, leaving the rest of my party free to kill the witch.

Oh, and the secret of not getting hurt by environmental effects is simply to not run through them. You get the effect re-applied every step, it seems, and that will burn through your magic armour and your health pretty darned quickly, whereas if you just stand there you only get the affect applied once per turn, and the AI rarely seems to stack effects to kill you faster (e.g. using Poison on a fire cloud to create an extra explosion as well as the poison effect).

And yes, I noticed that the Paladins seemed rather unconcerned about the Voidwoken attack I helped them fight off, but the quests are still about a hundred times more connected than your Skyrims or your Fallout 4s.

Jericho · Post by **Jericho** » Tue, 3. Oct 17, 10:05

I know what you mean about the environments... It reminds me of that old game from the team that did Dishonoured... Something Magick? You always knew a fight was going to start because there would be some spikes on a wall for you to kick badguys into and a pool of oil on the floor to inflame.

Bit like Bioshock really "Oh look, a shiny oil patch, I'd better get my fire plasmid ready."

Would be good to find some false-positives: (Anyone ever play Dungeon Master on the Atari ST? The developers put in a thing where the floppy disk accesses at random times so you think monsters are being loaded).

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Anyone play Divinty 1?)