- quadrophrenic
- Feb 4, 2011
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WIN MARNIE WIN
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Divinity: Original Sin II is the follow up to 2014's Game Of The Year 2014, Divinity: Original Sin, which is the follow-up to a bunch of other Divinity games that were not as good, all developed by Belgian studio Larian Studios.
Use a bunch of genre buzzwords to describe this game.
Open world D&D-based isometric RPG with turn-based XCOM-like combat system.
What's the story?
Divinity: Original Sin had you playing as two Source Hunters; mercenaries who were employed to track down and apprehend users of Source, a dangerous form of magic. Throughout the course of their journey, the Source Hunters learned more about the true nature of Source as a benevolent, The Force-like power that binds the universe together, but was corrupted by a mysterious otherworldly evil entity known as The Void. Several more high fantasy tropes later, big battle with a big gently caress-off dragon, the vanquishment of evil, calm returns to the world, hurrah hurrah.
Divinity: Original Sin II takes place 1000 years later. Source users are still stigmatized and Source usage is now criminalized. You play as a Sourceror trapped on a penal colony, robbed of your powers, with a bounty on your head, yearning to escape...
What's so great about this game/these games?
It's a lot of everything. One of the things I loved about D:OS was its broad appeal: it combined a really stonkin' fun combat system with witty, concise writing and a beautiful, clean presentation. It had loot. It had surprisingly great music. It had strategic combat with fun elemental skill chains and environmental interactions. It had charming dialogue and memorable characters. From playing a few hours of the beta, it seems that D:OS2 keeps all these traits and makes them even-more approachable and rewarding. The fun dialogue is still in place. The combat is just as rewarding as ever, and in fact a lot of QOL tweaks make it a much more streamlined experience. It's definitely more evolutionary than revolutionary, but if you found the first game as fun as I did, you'll probably want to pick up this one too.
What's different about D:OS2?
A lot of minor differences, but most of the major differences regard the personality and conversation systems. In the first game, personality was gamified through the use of sliding meters that were affected by various in-game actions, which gave your character certain buffs/attributes. It was a neat system, but it was also one of the biggest flaws of D:OS, because certain buffs were better than others, which led to the min/maxing of personality traits, anathema to the kind of "let your own personality come through in-game" motive that Larian seemed to be pushing for. In D:OS2, this system has been completely scrapped. Player characters now have "tags", encompassing everything from race, gender, actual personality traits, moral alignments, addictions, predilictions, to story-driven tags. These tags enable extra responses during dialogue, as well as having other effects. It's sort of like Mass Effect, how being full paragon/renegade unlocked paragon/renegade conversation options, except instead of only two alignments, there's like 100 of them. The rock-paper-scissors system of negotiation has also been scrapped in favor of simple stat checks on persuasion.
All of these changes lead to a system that is perhaps less interactive than the first game, but much more enveloping and much less prone to ludic fuckery. If you are a [HUMAN][FEMALE][ROGUE][MYSTIC][LEADER] tagged character, you can expect (quite frequently!) to be able to employ any one of these traits in the course of conversation, and it really makes personality feel like more a part of the game and less like something you check after every few conversations to make sure you're still getting your +30% AP buff or whatever. I dig it!
When is it out?
RIGHT NOW BUDDY if you don't mind buying early access. The Steam EA beta comes with the first act, with a few central features (namely interparty conversations) as yet unimplemented. I've been playing it a bit for the past couple of days, and it runs like a charm save a few janky camera issues. It feels mostly full-featured. Note, however, that custom characters are disabled in EA: you can tweak a character's starting skillset, but you cannot straight up make-a-man lol I'm dumb. You can totally make a custom character. Dunno how I missed that. The EA beta functions as a preorder and you will receive the game on launch day. The beta costs $44.99 USD. game's out and it's pretty cool yeah!
Tell me about BUILDS
Here's a pretty thorough and well-written short novel about things to consider when building a party, thanks forums poster Harrow!:
So, general build advice post. I'm not an expert, but from playing, experimenting, and doing a lot of reading about what works for other people, I think I've synthesized a pretty good "here's what works given the current game balance" thing. If anyone wants to correct me or add anything, please do, especially if you're playing on Tactician and having a lot of success.
If you're not sure how to build your team, you probably want to prioritize things in the following order:
- Damage. Damage is the single most important thing your party needs to have, ideally specializing in physical or magical damage. You'll need to break through a target's physical armor to damage its health with physical attacks, and its magical armor to damage its health with magic attacks. Because physical attacks generally don't tough magical armor, and vice versa, it can be really annoying if your damage is spread thinly across physical and magical. But, perhaps more importantly, damage enables control, which is the next thing on the list. My recommendation, by the way, is to focus on physical damage. Magical damage is very cool, but most of the best sources of it endanger your team just as much as the enemy, and while magic has significantly better AoE damage than physical, I'd argue that AoE damage is not nearly as important as single-target damage in this game.
- Control. Crowd control is necessary to lower the incoming damage your team is taking. Thing is, it will always fail if the target has the appropriate armor to resist it, which is why you really need to pile on the damage. Until you break the target's physical armor, it can't be knocked down, for example, and it can't be chilled or frozen while it has magical armor. Note that there are a couple of control options that ignore armor, which makes them extremely valuable. Specifically, Aerotheurge spells that teleport a target (like Teleport and Nether Swap) don't care if the target has armor, and anything that slows a target, like oil, ignores armor, too. Once a target's armor is broken, a lot of ability sets have great options for crowd control. One early standout is Chicken Claw (Polymorph), a melee-range spell that turns a target into a harmless chicken for a couple of rounds, effectively removing it from combat for that period of time (or rendering it totally defenseless).
- Armor recovery. All the rules that apply to enemies apply to you as well: as long as you have armor, you can't be hit with the nastiest control effects. So restoring your own armor is vital to winning the action economy war. Plus, spells that restore a type of armor frequently cure status effects resisted by that armor. Geomancer spells can restore physical armor, and a character with Polymorph or Necromancer also has ways to restore their own physical armor; for magical armor, Hydrosophist is king. This is more important than restoring your health--that's a lot easier to come by, via plentiful cooldown-free potions and spells from a wide variety of ability sets.
As for building each individual character, here's my advice:
- Focus on one damage attribute, plus Wits and Memory. Rogues and rangers want Finesse; big melee fighters want Strength; mages want Intelligence. After that, everyone needs Memory for more skill slots, and Wits for better initiative (and critical chance, for your attackers). If you have a dedicated summoner/support caster and you don't care at all how much damage their spells do, you can even ignore Intelligence entirely and just go all-in on Wits and Memory. (Incidentally, this also means that Summoning on a physical character is completely viable, though given how powerful totems can be I'd argue a dedicated summoner is a very nice thing to have.)
- Constitution is secondary at best. If you have a character who uses shields, they'll want some Constitution because it's a requisite to equip higher-level shields. That said, don't fall into the trap of neglecting Wits, Memory, or a damage stat to boost Constitution. Why? By the time an enemy is able to damage your health (which is what Constitution boosts), you're vulnerable to a whole suite of nasty control effects. You don't want to be in that situation in the first place, and once you are, how much health you have isn't really your primary concern. For melee characters, it's much more important that they have high armor, good ways to restore that armor, lots of mobility, and some form of self-healing. Have all of those and you can have base Constitution and still be a tank. (I expect this point to be pretty contentious.)
- Pick three combat abilities per character and try not to spread too far beyond those. If you hit max level, you can expect to max out three combat abilities at most. At the start, you want at least two points in each non-weapon ability you want a character to use because that'll let you use any skill for that ability you'll find in Act 1. After that, pump up the one with the most useful passive effect. For example, Warfare increases all physical damage you do by 5% per point, while Polymorph gives you a free attribute point for every point you spend in it (which is really, really good). Hydrosophist increases healing you do while Geomancer increases how much physical armor your skills restore. If you have a summoner, the Summoning ability is the only thing that matters when determining how strong your summons are (well, that and your level, but that's going up at its own pace).
- Hybrid characters are great--just don't try to use physical and magical damage on the same character. You can easily have a character with both physical and magical abilities, but I'd recommend against trying to have a character who does both physical and magical damage. They use different stats, for one thing, and it'll also make you run afoul the split armor types. But giving your physical characters support spells is a great idea. For example, Aerotheurge has great support and armor-agnostic control spells, while both Geomancer and Hydrosophist are good for restoring armor and healing, and neither of those care about your Intelligence. And Necromancer really shines on a melee character.
Here are some really strong abilities or ability combinations:
- Ranged and Huntsman. Bows are fantastic and really versatile, especially if you can stock up a good amount of elemental and status effect arrows. Huntsman gives you even more of a damage bonus for high ground (which you already always want on a ranged attacker), plus mobility, healing, and some great burst damage skills like Barrage. This character's third skill can be anything you want, but I like Aerotheurge, Hydrosophist, or maybe Summoning (but see below).
- Warfare and Necromancer. Warfare has good melee damage and great control skills. Meanwhile, Necromancer lets you recover health whenever you damage an enemy's health (not armor), and has amazing survivability spells for restoring physical armor or just plain not dying when you're supposed to. Its summon can be really helpful, too, even if you don't have the Summoning ability on this character. One note: Warfare probably doesn't need to go above 5 or so (to unlock the highest-level Warfare skills), because its passive is a 5% increase to physical damage per point, and beyond that point investing in this character's favored weapon type will be better (same damage bonus but with another bonus, like critical chance or accuracy). The exception is if this character also has Intelligence instead of Strength (you might if they're a staff fighter), because Necromancer attacks do physical damage and are therefore boosted by Warfare. Bonus points if this character is undead and also has Geomancer--undead heal from poison, so you can just surround yourself with poison and constantly heal from that and the damage you deal and it rules.
- Summoning. That's all. Just Summoning. Summons are extremely versatile and strong, and don't give two shits what your character's stats are. Boost this high early and you'll get a major early advantage. If your team is focused on physical damage, try to summon incarnates and totems on pools of blood for bonus physical damage and great physical damage skills; if your team uses magical damage, summon on elemental surfaces instead. I like to pair this with support spells from Geomancer or Hydrosophist, because summoning a totem every turn can really add up, but you could also put this on your Huntsman character or really anything you want.
- Polymorph on a melee character. Polymorph's best control spells are melee-range, so putting this on an up-close fighter is a real winner. It also has some amazing buffs that a melee character will love. Spread Your Wings lets you fly a far distance every turn for 1 AP and ignore surfaces under you. Heart of Steel is a really strong physical armor recovery spell. Bull Horns gives you a big rush attack similar to Warfare's Battering Ram. Oh, and Skin Graft resets all your cooldowns immediately, which is A+ loving awesome (though it does cost a Source point).
- Scoundrel on an elf. This is basically "burst damage: the build." Scoundrel gives you good mobility options (like Cloak and Dagger or Backlash), but perhaps more importantly, it also gives you Adrenaline, which lets you "borrow" 2 AP from the next turn. Why on an elf? Because elves can use Flesh Sacrifice for another bonus AP, and why not stack that on top of Adrenaline's bonus? That combination is for those "this enemy needs to die this turn" moments. Hell, this character doesn't even have to be melee--while Scoundrel does give you good melee attacks like Backlash, that bonus AP is useful no matter who you are, and if you want your burst damage right now character to be a ranger, that'll work just fine. Scoundrel's even nice for parties that specialize in magical damage: it has two skills that damage magical armor and set status effects resisted by it (Chloroform and Gag Order).
- Aerotheurge on anyone. Teleport and Nether Swap let you move enemies (or allies) around the field and don't care about armor. They're awesome. If you take this ability set for nothing else, it's still worth it for those two spells. Spells like Uncanny Evasion are a nice bonus, and if you happen to strip a target's magical armor along the way, getting them wet and shocking them is nice for stunning, too.
As for civil abilities, the good ones are Thievery, Bartering, Loremaster, and Lucky Charm. Persuasion is nice if you want to avoid fighting in some cases. Thievery will make you an absolute fuckload of money if you steal from every merchant you can. Pro tip for picking pockets: distract the NPC by talking to them with one of your characters, then switch to your thief and sneak behind them to steal their poo poo. Once you're done, prepare to run away because NPCs will search for their missing items for a short time. Move a couple of screen lengths away and wait for a minute or two and you're safe.
Something I like to do is to use my Bartering character to just gift an NPC a few hundred gold to max out their disposition, then trade for what I want, then steal back as much gold as possible. With just one Thievery character, I find it's easier to get everything I want from an NPC's inventory that way, at least before getting Thievery to a truly high level so I can take a lot of value in one go. Do note that you can only steal from an NPC once per character ever, so make the most of each thievery session.
quadrophrenic fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Sep 19, 2017
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Sep 20, 2016 17:32
