Strategy or Precognizant/Meta-Gaming

[Zaph]

It seems like every fight is either easy or super hard. With the super hard ones though you can sometimes beat them if you're the right level and plan your attack right. But that's the thing. Planning the attack doesn't really seem real or practical, because there are some elements of the fight you don't plan for (like a void nydus worm showing up mid battle) and you die, reload and prepare for the unforeseen event that happened, but now it has been foreseen. So I mean is it REALLY strategy or is it impossible with out meta-gaming the whole thing?

Like for example I went into a cave talked to a gal and then mid conversation she summoned a bunch of monsters and killed me. I reloaded a few times and found that there was no way to win when you try and talk to her and your party is all right there with you. You have to set up in tactically advantageous positions and, in my case, cast spells that create oil surfaces all over the place to catch on fire before hand, and attack her before dialog triggers. That's a WHOLE lot of preparation for a fight that your characters shouldn't even see coming. And thematically kind of turns my characters into killers who didn't even bother seeking a peaceful resolution, because they didn't talk to her.

Situations like this have happened a few times already, in regards to just talking to NPCs, but this was the hardest one I've come across so far. So am I supposed to treat every NPC I talk to like their gonna call in an army to kill me and set up ambushes ahead of time? Because that would take a while for every NPC.

I like RTSs (casually) and games like XCOM, but I don't consider meta-gaming and save scumming to really be strategy. It's just meta-gaming your way to victory, and the victory seems cheapened because of that. At least that's how I feel about it. I've done my far share of save scumming and don't blame people for doing so, it's just in a game that's not procedurally generated and is hand crafted like D:oS2 I really don't think there should be situations where the only way to win is to meta-game like that.

So idk, maybe I'm just dumb and bad at video games, but there does seem for me at least to be a lot in this game that you as a player just have to know before about before your characters actually do.

TL;DR It seems like in D:oS2 I'm just save scumming and meta-gaming my way through some fights instead of using actual/realistic strategy. Not entirely sure if it's due to game design or me being bad.

[corisai]

Game have ironman mode. So save scumming aren't intended way to play.

Just build your party correctly.

[Hans]

There are far too many fights in this game where a seemingly innocuous dialogue ends up with your party being completely surrounded on all sides, with numerous enemies having height advantages, that it's pretty ridiculous. Heck, even travesring the countryside will even result in the same thing, no enemies visible on the map, but suddenly 6 or more enemies teleport in and you're surrounded.

I must admit, I was a bit disappointed this happened so frequently. I ended up giving everyone polymorph 1 so they had chameleon and that I could just run away and then start the fight the way I wanted. That's a legitimate strategy, I guess, but it just feels like cheese.

Or, just give everyone escape artist, nuke a few enemies, retreat, and come back to finish them off.

[Zaph]

@Arngrim

I also ended up giving Beast (who I made a ranger) polymorph for this reason.

Yeah I've had to engage in guerrilla warfare a couple of times. Just trigger the ambush, retreat, then pick them off. Really boring though. guerrilla tactics are simple, they're just tedious and not very fun for me.

@corisai

I'm running a pretty standard party build. Tank/healer, tank, ranged dps, and magic dps. I was running for a while with a magic healer, but their healing abilities weren't very useful at their current level and skills. They needed more buff and healing spells to not be useless a few turns in (I'm probably leveled and rich enough to buy skill books to use them now).

What party are you running?

[corisai]

Originally posted by CLiC:

I'm running a pretty standard party build. Tank/healer, tank, ranged dps, and magic dps.

DOS2 isn't D&D or some classic dungeen crawls :)

Aren't you noticed effect of armor? You can't have tank in DOS2 - it's simply don't work here (past some very specific abuse of how enemies targetting works).

Plus cooldown-based spells screams "there's no sustain in battles, only dps-race".

You need to have 2 damage dealers with same type of damage (physical is easier overall).

So turn your party into : two-handed dps, ranged dps, magic support and summoner/necro - and you're golden (spec your dps correctly too : points in main damage stat + a bit of memory and nothing more, at first leveling only warfare and nothing more until it will hit 10, buy/craft new weapons every level).

You don't need to fear ambushes on classic (except when enemy level is notable higher then yours). Why? You will kill one enemy in turn or two and apply some crowd control too.