Negative relationships woes

[Cassilda]

I've been enjoying DD2 greatly. You can clearly see how its a more refined game, born from the experience of the first one. The negativity around it vastly exagerated. But...

I do struggle with negative relationships. They have such a huge impact on your party. They can forcibly equip an unwanted skill, or ruin your main moves. So I do everything I can to try and avoid them. I spend all my money on inn items to improve relationships whenever possible, I use the wolf pup, and whatever else I may find. And yet without fault, characters will get bad traits that increase negative relation chance and I will end up at the terrible Hag's Cauldron inn that make it worse.

I do hope this is in part caused by the early game and lack of unlocks. Also I have no idea how to get rid of them aside from letting a character die. So please tell me there are more tools to manage realtionship that unlock as you progress trought the altar or hope and chapters ? Maybe some road locations can help too ? Am I missing something obvious here ?

This is by far the most aggravating part of what is otherwise a pretty damn good game.

[⎝⧹Za Furan⧸⎠]

Buy inn items for improving relationships, there are a lot of them, almost in every inn you will find several of them. Also maintain low stress, with a low stress the party members are less likely to say bad things which reduce the affinity with other members and most likely to say good things which increase it while travelling. There are negative quirks which affect it too, but I don't know exactly which they are, the ones related to speech.

[Pixel Peeper]

Yes, negative Relationships can ruin a run and you often have to spend all your relics preventing that from happening.

Relationships last one region, so if you get a bad relationship at the first or second inn, don't despair, you can fix Affinity so the heroes won't hate each other for the next region.

You do get more inn items and stagecoach items to deal with this problem as you unlock things. But the important thing is to not gamble. And you can learn to promote positive Affinity by removing certain negative perks (like Tune Hummer), with location choices, and with in-combat choices (in-combat actions can raise or decrease Affinity). And obviously I don't need to tell you that Meltdowns are super, super bad. -3 Affinity.

It's always a drain on your money but it's a necessary part of dealing with a run.

[ThePlayersPassion]

The game revolves way to much about relationships. It's just all about getting positiv relationships or be screwed.

I dont understand why you are forced to use abilities with negativ relationship additions, basically removing an entire ability slot. With positiv relationship additions, you can chose if you want to use the ability or not.

[Cassilda]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2981093004

Second inn. All theses negatives ? 5-10% chances all of them.

Now I must admit, once you unlock a few more relation items, and understand the odds better its not that bad to manage.

But I still think negative relationships are a tad overwhelming in the early game and make rolling with the wolf pup and radiant flame almost mandatory.