Debuff's not Stacking Ruined Game for Me

[enricofermi2]

I haven’t played Divinity 2 in a while, but the reason I stopped playing for pretty much 1 reason. The game is based around debuffs, like lighting people on fire, or poisoning them, or combining elements to explode. However Most of the debuffs from these mechanics don't stack, I think at most it refreshes duration.

So, you just end up lighting someone on fire 10 different times in the same turn, which doesn't do much.

It might seem like a minor thing, but combat really revolves around element types, so it's just super annoying when a spell or ability does almost nothing because the target to already debuffed.

Does anyone else feel this way?

[Pyromus]

Not at all. Their body is already completely on fire, you're not gonna set them more on fire than they already are at that point. But, a target burning gets lower fire resistance, which makes sense. It's not just a DoT effect, it's an actual resistance debuff. And since DE torturer lets me have a rogue with a burning dagger dipped in poison use bull rush and set poison, burning, and bleeding on all enemies in front of me, I don't think it would be any fun if I could stack all those debuffs every time I use a power that applies them, since the damage over time would insta kill everything and make combat stupid levels of easy.

But considering that I can use necrofire, curse, bleed fire, and nullify resistance all together, to drop resistance by about 100%, I think there's also plenty of stackable debuffs, you just can't double up.

[enricofermi2]

For me the issue is that a huge amount of the spells, and even weapons have alot of their usefullness come from debuffs. So if your target is already poisened and you have a spell that creates a puddle of poisen, that spell really doesn't do anything.

If the game was different and debuffs were a small percentage of a spells utility it wouldn't nesisarily matter.

I don't want to have to pick up 50 different spells, just so I can apply 50 unique debuffs.

[Chaoslink]

Originally posted by enricofermi2:

For me the issue is that a huge amount of the spells, and even weapons have alot of their usefullness come from debuffs. So if your target is already poisened and you have a spell that creates a puddle of poisen, that spell really doesn't do anything.

If the game was different and debuffs were a small percentage of a spells utility it wouldn't nesisarily matter.

I don't want to have to pick up 50 different spells, just so I can apply 50 unique debuffs.

Sure it does. That poison puddle under them is going to apply damage as soon as their turn starts, in addition to the poison debuff. The spell itself dealing the majority of the damage. Add in a poison cloud over the poison puddle and they take three different ticks of poison damage at once. Then laser ray that to cause both the poison puddle and cloud to explode, dealing two explosions worth of bonus damage as well as lighting them on fire, creating a fire and fire cloud while they're still poisoned. By that point they're basically dead anyways.

A majority of the damage of a spell comes from the spell itself. The debuffs are strong, but that is mostly in the CC effects, not the damage over time ones.

I really don't see where you're coming from at all. It sounds more like you lack the experience from playing enough to really form that opinion. It really isn't about stacking debuffs as much as applying a wide variety together. Once you've locked them down, its just a matter of smashing them with high damage then locking them down again. Learning the right way to cycle the abilities you have is key. Not every AP you use needs to be a spell, and you don't need to use every AP you have every turn. AP saving is actually a critical strategy.

[Pyromus]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

It really isn't about stacking debuffs as much as applying a wide variety together.

That really sums it up. You don't want poison attack 1 then poison attack 2, then poison attack 3 to all do 3 ticks of damage over time, you want impalement to oil patch your opponent, then ignite it with ignition to cause fire damage, burning DoT, and an explosion, followed by a poison dart making them take poison damage, trigger another explosion, and set a poison DoT effect.

[enricofermi2]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Learning the right way to cycle the abilities you have is key. Not every AP you use needs to be a spell, and you don't need to use every AP you have every turn. AP saving is actually a critical strategy.

Fair enough. It's really more personal prefence than anything else. I understand the game is playable/beatable. I don't want to have to cycle spells just to apply damage.

I know that sounds like I'm saying that I just want to be able to just cast 1 spell over and over, and kill every enemy but that's not really it. Casting an oil spell, and then casting fire, to cause an explosion is fun, or water then electricity. But just swapping constantly between spells to maximize unique debuffs just isn't fun for me.

[Chaoslink]

I mean, I can't think of many games that don't do something like this. I mean, you cake it out like everything is all about the status effects. While that is somewhat true, it can be just as much about personal buffs. Some builds like an elemental archer focus more on stacking their own buffs up to the point that they're dealing ridiculous damage with just regular attacks, pretty much ignoring statuses applies to enemies entirely.

I mean, its not like you can't pound the enemy with the same spell over and over either. It is a perfectly sound strategy to just throw everything at the enemy at once anyways. Mages work best in pairs, so it isn't uncommon that you're throwing the same stuff at the same enemy. Sure, shocking an enemy twice in a row isn't going to matter if the first one stunned them, but at that point it is about the damage, not the effect. There is nothing wrong with that. You're really not losing much if the status effect is wasted like that. Just use another the next turn.

I mean, I really don't understand exactly what it is that bothers you I suppose. Which is fine, there are things that bother me that are nearly impossible to explain to someone else without them being able to experience it like I do. So I can understand that I suppose. That said, I just don't like seeing someone turn down what is probably the best RPG out in years over something that, from my perspective, may or may not be there.

[Haddon]

There are a lot of mods that add new skills with new debuffs, some of them stacking. Odinblade's pyro remake and spectre come to mind, occultist (summoner remake) does too. I agree, at least with poison and burn, they should stack. The pyro remake adds "scorched" i think, an extra dot that stacks up to 5.