Impact of difficulty levels and skill success probability

[lead341]

Hi everyone,

I have two questions regarding the dynamics of Wasteland 2:

1) What are the main differences between the difficulty levels? One which aspects of the game does this have influence? Does it only influence the strength of enemies, or also the amount of experience points etc.?

2) Is it theoretically possible to spend only 1 skill point for "out of combat" - skills like lockpicking or computer science and still being able to open everything by constant and time-consuming trial and error? As I understand the skill level only influences the probability of the action to be successful, which implies that even with the lowest skill level you might be able, with patience, to open for example the most difficult locks.

Greetings,

lead

[xsvenom]

I was playing normal difficutly and had not so fun of a time, I dumbed it down to easy and now I'm enjoying the game.

There is a " failure rate " for lock picking. If you fail critical you can't ope it by picking, get out some explosives and crack it open. I do think once you do that you turn what was inside to scrap.

[kooto]

Need at least 25% to successfully use a skill. With 10% you can reload forever...

[CrUsHeR]

1) i wonder myself, started a new game on Ranger and didn't have a single random encounter outdoors. While on Normal, i couldn't walk half a screen without getting attacked.
Combat however is fairly challenging, and you better not step on one of those Exploding Pods in AG Center.


2) Nope because as the success chance is dropping, the critical failure chance is rising. So if you get a crit fail on let's say a Safe, then the tumbler breaks and you can only try to open it with TNT or try to repair (which can crit fail also).

Unless you want to play the game with "savescumming", but then this is not the game for you. I personally only use the Quicksave feature and never reload unless there's a bug or someone dies (neither happened so far though).

[rakenan]

I'm not sure this is because of super low skill, but I've seen a few cases where I try to do what should be a normal skill check (mostly Safecrack) and get "Impossible" instead of a breakdown of my chance of success and critical failure. I'm guessing that's because my skill is too low.

[Ygolnac]

This game does not encourage savescumming:

every lock/trap/hack etc. have a level, and your success rate depends on item level vs your skill level. So if the item is too high and you have only one point in the skill you'll get a 0% and must try another way or come back after you raised the skill.

If your skill is minimal compared to the item the crit failure % is higher than your succes %, meaning that yes, you can reload, but you would have to try a LOT of times. You might be lucky with one lockpick, but managing all the game reloding this way wouldn't beareble to anyone.

Also these aspect of the game is not needed to progress, it's for extra loot/ extra exp, and the loot is not that good, so if a lock or a safe or a computer are too high level you can basically forget it completly, find another way or come back later.

In this aspect i think the game is well made. Loot itself is completly random, but it's not that reloading will eventually grant you a "super rare item", and you can find the same items in shops. So it's basically like: i don't need this, will sell to buy what i need.

I don't think difficulty level changes the success % of opening locks, but only enemy strength.

[lead341]

Thank you very much for your replies - that clarified things for me.