If there is one strat and that is tank tank and range/magic range magic, its obviously contradicted by the fact that some non tanks have to wear plate armour.

Also positioning is a pretty massive part of tactics.

Also some fights do have enemy ranged and casters who target more squishy things in the back line.

I do think the game should make you work harder to keep your squishy guys safe from melee.

No it is not. It's just a safety net. It's always the same tactics. I never claimed that my strat is that. I don't also understand how wearing a different armor type changes the strat.

Positioning should be just a small part of overall tactics and in this game the positioning is critical only for the start of the combat.

no because I use that strategy for every situation. They aren't situation ally flexible, they just sit in reserve in case a mob gets by the tank. It's the same every battle. Only time they ever switch weapons is the chanter will on occasion pull out a pistol with marking. It's very rare though.

Well I'm doing triple crown and debating whether or not to enter the third act...

Oops missed the responses. Honest question: isn't the priest supposed to be an off tank and wear plate? Why would anyone have him otherwise. I can see the chanter being naked and using a gun but seems like kind of a big risk for a little added dps.



Oafk I don't seem to be getting my complaint through. It's not that the game doesn't require any strategy, it's that my strategy seems to work for every situation and it's not even a very clever strategy. It seems like my totally standard way of playing the game is enough to beat the game. Having said that, I'm debating fighting the fire dragon as I don't know how powerful she is on potd and the reward is useless.

Positioning is a huge part of tactics, its why you dont put your tank at the back.

Also if they are wearing armour, but never having to switch from ranged/magic to melee weapon, then why put them in armour? Obviously having them sit in reserve means not every fight is the same and requires some adaptation because you are creating a tactic (having a reserve) that gives you the possibility to react to situational events (mob getting past tanks)

Please note I am arguing against conflated positions here, the one strat is tank tank, ranged magic ranged magic (cept they have to wear armour so they cant always be ranged magicing).

None of that matters because it was my strategy going into the fight, nothing has changed. My strategy for my priest and chanter going into the fight are to have them ready in case the situational event (not events btw) occurs. Just because the event sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn't doesn't mean that I'm ever changing my overall strategy. It just means sometimes I need to use one part of my strategy and other times I do not need to.

A change to this strategy would be something along the lines of I use my rogue to kite a particularly tough mob around the map (which I've never done) because that is not part of my normal strategy, it's a huge deviation.

Seems like this is turning into a semantics debate so think I'm done. Anyways my point is that I'm very disappointed with the fights in the game, thankfully they are not a major reason I'm playing.

+1

To make matters worse, it feels like it's the OPTIMAL way of playing every situation.

Unlike Bluegrassplayer, fights are a major reason that I'm (not) playing. I'm waiting for a community fix.

i have my chanter offtanking with a ton of deflection in the frontlines and my priest uses a crossbow


all my ranged mostly use robes

Still struggling to see the problem with in fights the strategy of using each class to do its role seems optimal all the time.

Not too far into the game and it seems hard to me, my char is a Wizard and the first companion I get is another one? Certainly means I can't use the tank tank and magic magic strat very well. Am I missing something obvious?

Go sleep in the Inn, you'll get a third character. Also you can make new characters in there.

yeah fighter and wizard are the two fastest companions you meet, I suggest recruiting someone to replace Aloth at the inn since your main is a wizard (you can customize it like a brand new starting character! but about 1 lvl lower than your main so - i think - you probably want to wait right after you get a level up).

Classes that dont come in early or at all: rogue, monk, barbarian, paladin (if you want melees, though rogue is excellent as a range only - but dont level up backstab),

for ranged cipher, druid (both are very very strong)

If you are trying the Temple of Eothas, it's actually one of the hardest, if not the hardest, dungeons in the game. I'd definitely get a full party one way or another first.

I was a wizard my first play through as well, and two wizards is pretty bad. Honestly I didn't like being a wizard at all after I got a bit into the game and wished I could change it.

I just cleared to the last floor of the Endless Paths..

Well this is a fun bug.. did one of the bounty quests and after the fight ended, I had a bunch of nasty afflictions on my party and combat ended, but the afflictions didn't go away and my summoned ogres are still there and I'm still able to cast all of my in combat spells. I can sneak and rest and leave areas, but the afflictions won't go away. And of course I had quick-saved before noticing, so now I'm stuck like this or roll back to my last real save which was a long time ago. Let this be a lesson, make sure you're making full saves every hour or so

So on combat.

Still disagree that sniper gonna snipe all the time ( but i have to give him a side arm) is much of a criticism, but the game suffers from massive mechanical looseness and big lack of tactical pressure.

The game creates a ton of resistances, damage types etc etc, but then fails to create many situations where those things are that relevant. This for me is encapsulated by the Priest in my party.

He has a ton of debuffs and buffs. However so far, I have never met a situation that has challenged me to use the Priests support role in any kind of emergent way, to say lower the resistances of a certain enemy so I can effectively damage it, or make ideally make it vulnerable to a specific follow on attack/spell.

This also can also been seen in how the game slowly informs you of the damage types and resistances of the creatures you fight. So far this information has just been irrelevant. It would be great if there were more situations where I really had to use this information to inform the tactics and abilities I would have to use in combat, but this is just not the case.

I dont mind if magic user gonna magic user, I do mind though if there is no pressure on the how is the magic user gonna magic user. I dont mind that the what is consistent, but I want the how to vary much much more.

When first creating my toon and looking at all the damage types and resistances, and on being informed that you would get a warning if a certain attack was being ineffective, I thought combat was going to be really deep, technical and emergent, having created these systems, they have somehow managed to not make them manifest relevantly in the game.

Agreed on the depth of combat: I mostly used priest buff/de-buffs only when he ran out of Pillar spells/didn't need to heal people. The exception would be the spell that removed all negative effects from party members for a period of time.

The combat just seemed too frantic to properly allow the time to micromanage damage types - sure you can pause the game, and need to often, but often the fact that a monster is resisting my weapon's hits just results in combat that takes twice as long - with the occasional "This isn't working" coming from my guy. The combat box in the lower right was almost useless in determining this: maybe I need to change my (default) settings, but the thing was just a mass of text scrolling. I'd have rather had the damage #'s that show up on the main screen be in a different color if the attack has been resisted.

Just finished the game, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Nostalgia and all, it was no Baldur's Gate, but I'd prefer playing this type of game to any FPS or Rogue-clone. The story was well done: the writers didn't seem to mind throwing you into the middle of a storyline and having you discover for yourself WTF was going on.

One other thing - crafting seems to have taken over all RPGs now, this one's no different: anyone else end up with 3000+ items in their magical chest? Throughout the game I only Enchanted weapons/armor, never created a potion, never made a scroll or cooked a meal. I also only had to drink maybe a dozen healing potions during combat, never ate any food nor used a scroll in combat. Maybe it was because I was playing it at Hard rather than the Insane (?) difficulty, but it struck me that there was alot of game mechanics put into the game that I never needed to use.

This game's story + Divinity Original Sin's combat system would have been a juggernaut...

Re: lowest level in Endless Paths:

apparently you can use those little summoning items once per rest or encounter, which is supposed to help with that

Just finished the game and I agree with BrookTrout and Oak. Fun game, not as good as either Baldur's Gate but maybe better than IWD, I was never really in to that one as much. Also agree with the comments about the crafting and resistance mechanics being entirely superflous. Sometimes I'd bother to buff or debuff with Durance but I found it made little difference in the fights so I usually just had him as a ranged dps until I needed a big heal.

The chanter class is really cool and I wish they had more NPCs in the game that let you try out the Monk and Cypher without making your own custom NPC, and also shared your experience with your stabled NPCs so you could try them out later down the line without having them way behind everyone else. The fortress system could have helped here, make the quests there capable of keeping at least a few of your stabled NPCs keep up, possibly with the risk of having them crippled for a certain number of turns.

The loot was also pretty silly, there were really no interesting weapons and I mostly had exceptional regular gear that I custom enchanted along with a random assortment of rings and armor that all were pretty similar in stats. The sword that you get from the Paths of the Endless questline is pretty weak sauce compared to even an unenchanted exceptional sword.

The end fight was also a joke. I one shot the boss without really even needing a strategy, the only hard fights in the game I found were the dragons, and I ended up taking the dialogue options on both to avoid combat because they were so much harder than any other fight I'd had to deal with.

That said, the writing is really good and the story was enjoyable if not exceptional. Thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game and looking forward to finally playing Divinity: OS and Wasteland 2 to see how they stack up.

what difficulty did you play on?

One thing I _loved_ about Divinity Original SIn: Usually in these games you get a quick bar along the bottom for all your spells. In most of these RPG's, you can get by with just using 2 or 3 of the buttons/spells to kill any monster. With D:OS, I was using 10+ spells, depending on the enemies, the environment and the combos that I could try to pull off. Just a really well-polished aspect of the game, that made it possible to overlook the weakness of the storyline.

Never found a monk npc to join, but in regards to cipher:

self made on potd tho

Bump, I'm about halfway through this (playing a mage on Hard) and while I'm enjoying it I definitely have gripes:

- Difficulty curve is really weird. It was hard to start with, there were missions like Raedric's Hold where fighting through to the end fight was pretty easy and then the end fight was near impossible if you played it out like the game intended. Ended up skipping the conversation and just shooting one of his guards from max range, allowing my casters to get off spells to protect the tank before he got curbstomped. But now I'm in Act 2, I'm cruising through the game.

- There's way too much exposition in dialog trees. I started the game reading it, but there was just too much and so much of it was pointless and dull. I started just skipping through it all, but nothing is ever explained any other way (ever hear of cutscenes?) so I have only the vaguest clue what is going on. Apparently animancy is a hot topic. I don't even know what that is. Some of the RPG choices are odd as well. My first contact with House Doemenal was them bossing me around in the most dickish manner possible, telling me I had to go steal a thing for them. The dialog tree frequently doesn't have what I want to say but on this occasion it had it precisely right: "Get it yourself, whoreson". Which didn't go over well. I guess House Doemenal is for people who are evil but enjoy being bossed around like servants?

- The lack of cool items is annoying. I don't have Blade of the Endless Paths yet but saw the discussion earlier ITT. That is lame. In BG2 finding crazy items and making my party near invincible was a lot of the fun. I find annihilating the end boss fun, it's my reward for doing all the tough side quests along the way.

As has been discussed ITT, the combat is pretty samey and:

- The priest has a billion spells that I don't really know what they do. Usually stuff like "increases Might" which requires me to know the relationship between Might and more bottom-line stuff like damage dealt, chance to crit etc. Which I don't, nor do I want to. I generally spam healing spells with the occasional direct damage. On the occasion I have wanted to use him to stop something happening he apparently can't. e.g. one fight my tank kept getting Confused or whatever and turning red. This happened more or less instantly on the fight starting and there's no pre-fight buffs, so I couldn't stop it. My guys kept getting Paralyzed and I looked up how to prevent that and it turns out I haven't unlocked the L5 spell yet. Back to spamming heal...

- Similar for mages, the (circular) AOE spells in the early levels are just better than anything else. Slicken is absurdly good. Fireball is great as always. Chill Fog is very good too. Trying to use something like Fan of Flames is a pain in the ass. A lot of intricate manouevering to get the tank(s) out of the way and make sure my mage doesn't aggro someone and then the damage is just not that good. I could have cast Slicken instead, or just Chill Fog and have my tanks make a wall.

- Maybe I sucked at using her but the ranger just seemed awful. Her class talent appeared to be Reduce Endurance to 0 (Once Per Encounter).

So yeah. It's a modern isometric RPG, which is awesome. But the game itself is just OK.

Also I'm not a fan of the hiring adventurers thing. Being able to just order up some guy at an inn breaks immersion for me and feels like cheating. One of the reasons the Raedric fight was tough was that I insisted on doing it with a party of 4 and only one tank.