Switching between story mode and classic is night and day

[Toadman]

Am I wrong wanting something in between. The story mode is rather easy. Typical enemies a few hundred health points at best and you can quickly take down one of their armors, magic or physical, then stun, etc. and basically immobilize them as you kill them.

On the other hand, When I switch to classic their bars can triple I think. I switched once and it looked like the health of one character went from 300-400 to over a thousand.

i don't know what the real proportioning is but I find my skills at this game in between. I can get by on classic through the story(as far as I have so far) But the big boss fights may take me 5-10 times to pull out a win at a heavy cost in supplies and some resurrection scrolls.

There have been a few I have had to complete only on the easier mode.

IS there anyway to set up the game as something in between for the good but not great player?
I am still trying to figure out good combinations of heroes for a style I like and of course the mechanics of combat with all the surface combinations is rather difficult to grasp.

Right now I am playing a warrior, rogue, aero/water/summoner mage and a huntsman.
Since I only have one real magic caster she is mostly a healer/cc/with summoning totems and incarnates character since my other toons are heavily physical. I chose this because I thought grasping the combat would be more familiar and not require as much finesse.

Simple tactics I began to adopt, rogue goes in to dps and hopefully drop armor, warrior or huntsman finish off shields, then begin cc and damage work on him until he drops. Mage drops totems and incarnate, until healing is needed, keeping up summons.

Seems to work so far but I running into harder problems and certainly on classic. It can take me more than 2 turn cycle of combat to drop my enemy for various reasons and my party makeup is not great at cc others that have full magic shields up.

I keep reading that aero/water mage is one of the best but in order to freeze/shock them I can't get through their shield fast enough. Maybe that's why people talk about using at least 2 casters, I guess I am too heavy in physical.

Any advice or videos that go in depth into characters development, and party makeup would be appreciated. And any comments on game difficulty too.

[Randych]

Story is complete game with 1 LW character.
Classic is (idk what's classic about it given what bloody hell was in first game) is something like complete game with 1 LW but harder, or complete with 2 LW without giving a damn (didn't try much so can't tell exact formula).
If you see yourself a good player, Tactic is your choice, I don't know why you didn't choose it because it's clearly how game was meant to be played.
When you feel yourself a great player with whole baggage of meta knowledge, feel free to give it a try on honour.
And you never are too heavy on physical. I'd even say that 1 mage is too heavy on magical, but defenders of this anecdotical armor system will crowd this topic and eat me alive.
And if you really want physical damage mage, don't handicap yourself with summon and go with necromancy instead, it's a lot more balanced with right approach.

[Moist Butt]

classic is pretty balanced imo and honestly any party composition is fine if your playing on classic or lower. People have already written guides and build for this game so I won't bother repeating what's already been said. If your dying only on boss fight then thats fine. Some bosses are hard to deal with until you learn their exploits.

[Mosey]

Classic removes most of the massive training wheels from story mode and armor actually starts to matter. That's probably the difference, since it throws plenty of players. Especially if your group is mixed damage, and not min/maxed very well.

That matters more and more as you ramp up difficulty, but realistically classic is still easy by comparison to tactician, although there isn't a whole lot of difference between tactician and honor.

What matters the most is knowing what order to do things in, and until you learn that you'll find large spikes in difficulty wandering into encounters.

If you want guides, there's an entire tab full of them at the top of your screen right now. I can tell you right now that having too much physical damage is pretty much never the problem though.

It takes a minute to get used to the idea of burning armor -then- launching CC abilities. Too many people ignore their basic attacks, or buffed basic attacks, and burn their CC abilities for the damage before they should. Or just don't bother to do check to see if their CC will breach armor before throwing it.

In fairness, some people simply hate the armor system and you might end up being one of them. I like it, and lots of others like it, but some truly loathe it.

Last tip, don't think of DOS2 as a D&D style holy trinity game. It's more like a build your own character MMO, where you sometimes pick a stat point in something that's otherwise not intuitive to gain access to a particular skill that works for your build. And also, the higher the difficulty the less you want to focus on healing or support generally speaking. You'll never out heal or out mitigate incoming damage, and while healing can be useful it's almost always better to focus on killing harder.

[Stormwind]

You realize "Explorer" mode is exactly between story mode and classic mode, right?

[Chaoslink]

Explorer is the difficulty in between. Story is the "very easy" mode, Classic is "normal" and Tactician is hard. Explorer is the standard "easy" and the inbetween.

Despite what the others suggest I see you having two options here. You can either play Explorer and play through the in-between difficulty and start to learn the game at your own pace. Option two, you let me do what I do on this forum and break down your team and shave off the inefficiency and get your team fighting at maximum potential. You'll probably be able to handle even Classic pretty easily with some party tweaks, though you might need to be open to some full respecs looking at just the base class choices you've got, or I can try to make what you do have without major changes work well enough to handle any difficulty of your choosing.

Switch to Explorer if you like. Go for it. Otherwise, if you'd rather get an efficiency boost, fill me in on the details of your team. Skillpoints, attributes... basically the two pages of your character sheets with that information on it. Possibly talents too. Then I'll do some tweaking and set you up for success. Whichever you choose is fine. I'll be here to help for whichever option you prefer, should you need it.

[Xenith_Shadow]

As others have already said explorer is literally the mode between story and classical mode. Assuming you got your names right you should be reasonable comfortable just playing explorer.