I've lost my mind with this game, why so tedious?

[Shelt]

I'm a veteran of the first game, not a tactician solo masochist or anything, but handily beat it on the default difficulty and had a great time.

This game is not that experience at all. It is tedious. It is trollish. It is a repetitive save scum regurgitative experience, to the point of eyerolling exhaustion. The voice acting, puzzles, and especially the ability to talk to animals are the best things I like about it.

Part of the reason why I'm frustrated is this new ***physical and magical shield barrier mechanic*** that every character and monster has in the game now. It makes every stinking fight drag out to a ridiculous degree. In the last game, if I wanted more defense on a certain character in a fight, there were spells and scrolls and abilities for that. It doesn't make any practical sense, now, though, to start out with those barriers. Look, if some enemy, especially non magical ones like other humans, are standing 10ft away from me and I smash a burning glob of a fireball into it, it should take health damage, not slightly reduce some imaginary shield the devs masturbated into existence. It reminds me of the annoying diablo 3 item gear check controversy from years ago. I'm just thankful Larian didn't include a live auction house.

Another reason is that some of the debuffs you encounter are also ridiculous - I mean completely over-the-top game breakingly bad. You remember those healing potions, and even the elixirs, that you spent the last six hours carefully gathering and mixing? Well now they suddenly KILL your character instead. Hooray! Riveting gameplay. I guess you really got me again, Larian.

It's all just so mf'kn godamm aggravating and tedious. Why?

Why do I have to make every character in my party into an all-arounder as well? Why does my lizard tank have to learn magic to even have a chance of getting out of scrapes or defend himself? Ultimately, this game's character evolution tends toward ONE archetype, devoid of any real class identity. Why there's even a fancy showcase at the start of the game for different classes and their customizations and outfits is beyond me. By the time you get to act 2, you realize none of that scratch even matters. You better get your witch on a weightlifting regime and your tank into some remedial education classes, pronto.

Another thing is the phony, staged, ambushed battles. Every. Single. Time. Up jumps the boogeyman and ahhhhh, got you! And don't even think of wandering around trying to actually explore some area before you are = to or + level for that area, or you're going to get assassinated by a scarecrow on a stick or some demon tadpoles that jump around with haste, know more spells than your "chosen one" divine, and yes, have more physical and magic barrier than you do. God only knows why.

There's also curious decisions the devs made to interrupt and annoy you in what you're doing in noncombat situations. For example, I finally made it to Driftwood, and went to the market to foolishly see if I could afford any newer gear (I could not), when suddenly the game sends a magister over to confront Ifan and starts a fight with the party. This wouldn't have been so bad, but the ENTIRE TOWN became hostile and killed us. WTF why??? Why do I have to suddenly fight not only the guards but people enjoying their day on a picnic blanket nearby, or the guy who I was just trying to sell a crappy pair of tongs I roped together (why is that even a thing????), and a beggar in the street. Yes, a BEGGAR that was just getting harassed by the same guards, jumps up and takes THEIR SIDE for some reason. I just can't with this.

A massive time wasting gear check """"chosen one""""" adventure indeed. Gosh, we haven't had that experience in (looks at watch) at least a few hours now.

You know what? This game is so ridiculous in fact that it's pushing me to be ridiculous in return, and break it just as some crazy British guy did on Youtube by playing it in a perfectly ridiculous way. He invested most of his stats into telekinesis so that he could drag around an unbreakable chest which he kept putting heavier and heavier objects into so that it would do more damage - drug this chest around with his mind and attacked literally everyone with it and killed them in one shot. No need to talk to anyone or discriminate in who to kill, just do what the game does to you and murder murder murder everything in the most ridiculous way possible.

*deep breathe*

Well, I have to go, my friggin' tank/witch/rouge/healer/paladin/warrior/archer lizard is dead, again. I have no more money, or pots, or gear left to sell (for pennies on the dollar, mind you) nothing left to craft, no scrolls of hoo-ha to bring him back to life, and it wouldn't even matter if I could. I'm sure the next deadly dandelion void flower monster, stronger than all of us, is right around the corner waiting to waylay the party.

I guess I'll scroll through my 7 pages of saves and find a load point down around save number 148 or 156 to try. I feel an obligation to get my 20 dollars worth of ridiculousness out of this weird, rotten b1tch one way or another.

[ThatKoboldGaming | #FixTF2]

This is why I play with mods, I play for fun not for difficulty or headache

[Shelt]

Oh God I envy you.

[Levianne]

First things first. You're a veteran of the first game? Allow me to introduce Divine Divinity, that's the first game, not Original Sin. That one had a completely different mechanics from this miniseries (OS & OS2). There's total of 5(?) games in the Divinity series, starting with Divine Divinity, going on with Beyond Divinity, Divinity II: Ego Draconis and finally Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin2 (there's also miniseries of Dragon Commander, but I'm not familiar with that). Each game had a different mechanics. The first two were isometric 2D with real time combat, the third was a fully 3D, the last two are isometric 3D turn based. The first game had a very limited crafting, only potions as far as I remember. The game mechanics changes with each new title, there's no point in complaining about that.
Second: the armor mechanics work both for the enemy and for you, you get it with an actual armor, put on some gloves and (depending on their stats) you get physical and/or magical armor as well, same goes for shirt, pants, boots, helmet, it's not a random mechanics, that your enemy uses against you, you can use it against them too.
Third: you don't have to make your tanks other than physical, why would you need to teach them spells, you have mages for that, unless you go solo, in that case it's reasonable. But with a balanced mix of tanks and mages, you don't neeed to mess up your physical damage dealers and mages with the other type. That's definitely not a rule, like you make it sound.
I've never heard about potions killing you, unless you're playing an undead, in that case, it's logical, undead are decomposing, decaying ... well undead and healing items and magic hurts them, instead of healing them (it actually heals them, but since their nature is undead, decaying, it goes against their nature, thus hurting/killing them). I don't see anything wrong with it.

Or perhaps I misunderstood your rant. Maybe the game is really that bad, like you make it look and the devs just put random stuff in it and said, holy crap, people would love that, let's sell it!

[Adeptus]

Git Gud Casual

[Spawnling]

If you're a veteran of OS1, then you should know to steal everything you can. If you do so you'll leave the first island with 10-30k gold, which you'll never need.

Driftwood fight against the magisters is strange. I think the magisters need to attack you first, before you do anything, then the town wont turn hostile.

There are still spells to make you tankier (Fortify & Armor of Frost).

Don't multiclass, 2 fighter, 2 mages is most often recommended.
Fighter need warfare for damage (yes, your archer needs max warfare) and a few points in scoundrel to get movement speed. (You can put a point into pyro/geo/hydro for support spells or 2 into aero to teleport enemies)

On Lady Vengeance lower deck is a mirror that lets you reskill your characters for free.

Long and tedious fights. Once you understand how the game works most fights end before turn 3.

[Tenshi]

A "veteran" who doesn't even know how to play LMFAO.

[Calico-Jack]

Originally posted by Shelt:

I'm a veteran of the first game, not a tactician solo masochist or anything, but handily beat it on the default difficulty and had a great time.

I think that's your issue there, As someone who played DOS2 then bought and completed DOS1

I enjoyed my time in DOS1 to be clear, enough to finish the game and replay it several times.

But there were a few issues like the game response to controls being a little unpredicatble, the camera being dragged around by the game during combat, having to pixle-hunt loot, the music hadn't aged well and at times I found the DOS 1 magic system a ballache - having to cast a spell to annul resistances to elemental spells (which included arows with elemental effects iirc) which could fail and thereby screw your party over for a turn with the risk of losing the encounter is kind of why I prefer the streamlined approach taken by DOS2 - wear down the resistances to then deal damage - much less about praying to the RNG god and something you can plan around.

That said I loved the crafting system in DOS1 - detailed and granular except, oddly, flecthing wasn't a thing. You could craft a full set of armour to a given specc to outfit a specific member of the party, adding buffs to weapon or armour pick ups with random buffs to better matcth playstyle and the ability to upgrade weapons and armour so they stayed useful for longer was amazing. You can see the amputaed stumps - the forges, work benches, anvils, the ability to pick up playing cards, laying around the DOS2 world, so perhaps they ran out of time to have the working functionality.

My perfect Divinity game would be the crafting system from DOS1 with the combat system from DOS2 and adding in the level skills by doing aspect cribbed by Bethesda from MUDs of yore.

Regarding your issues with Ifan and flash mobs, just think of any group as Reddit but with line of sight. Another situation you missed in Fort Joy was going into the cave with the Red Prince and having him talk to the liizard merchant there. The dialogue gives you an option to provoke a fight, which if you don't take means all the elves, including the one you probably helped in the square and the kids will try to dogpile your party as the merchant will start attacking.

[Jesus himself]

lol

[Calico-Jack]

Originally posted by Spawnling:

Driftwood fight against the magisters is strange.

Ifan is both a wanted killer for hire and a known highly visible "face" from his time in the upper eschelon's of Lucian's army - you see this playing out on the ship to Fort Joy - gamekeeper turned poacher meeting up with his ex comrades. The OPs encounter went pretty much like getting accused of any other crime in DOS2: "Come along quietly or.." plus a couple of options requiring much higher than usual skill checks.

[Yojo0o]

Each one of your points seems to just be you not understanding something and dying because of it. Having a mechanic that causes heals to deal damage is pretty normal stuff, just because you weren't paying attention and slammed a healing potion while afflicted by it isn't a developer flaw. You're complaining about the realism of physical/magical armor while flinging fireballs? Who told you that every character needs to be an all-arounder? That's the opposite of true, the game rewards specialization.

I can't really begin to address each of these points, I'm just really disappointed with your take on the game. This isn't an easy game, and it asks you to learn how to play it. If you completely fail to do so, then yes, you're not going to enjoy it.

[[N63] chrisragnar]

Dude it really just sounds like you are bad and refuse to learn anything new.

[Shelt]

To be clear, I am making progress, one painful inch at a time.

One of my original points was that scrolls and spells for putting up in game barriers to protect yourself are gone now -- such as avatar of fire, etc.

That made sense. That was straightforward. You could plan for that eventuality if you were fairly sure you were going to be facing that type of element, and it had a downside if you guessed wrong and got hit with water instead, for example.

Now everything has this barrier (2 really) plus health before anything dies. That does not make sense, leads to a host of problems, the least of which is a massive gear check, and the gear you find is sparse, unreliable (because it has rando stats -- I keep finding spellcasting gear that has warfare on it), and new gear from vendors is expensive (and also random).

As I stated with the British guy (genius man he is), that really is the best way to play the game I've seen so far. It's disappointing that you don't get to talk to anyone while on your indestructible box-of-murder spree, but *shrug* at least you can stop and talk to the animals. Much better than talking to humans anyway.

[Yojo0o]

You can craft potions for specific resistances, and decent armor gives you protection. I still don't understand your issue here, it just sounds like you're having a hard time learning the game but aren't asking any questions to help improve.

[Levianne]

Originally posted by Shelt:

Now everything has this barrier (2 really) plus health before anything dies. That does not make sense, leads to a host of problems, the least of which is a massive gear check, and the gear you find is sparse, unreliable (because it has rando stats -- I keep finding spellcasting gear that has warfare on it), and new gear from vendors is expensive (and also random).

Lots of things (including some enemies actually) don't have a barier at all. Yes, I'm certainly picking you word by word, but you evidently call for it. There are things like door, crates and whatnot, that don't have any armor at all, you still can target and attack them. And as I mentioned even some enemies have no armor. Sure most of them have either one type, or both, but your comment stated that EVERYTHING now has, which isn't true at all. Everything in the game has a health bar, that's actually true (there's not many games, that give a health bar to static things like furniture), but check lot of things, that you can attack around you and most of them won't have any additional armor at all. And that applies to some enemies, I fought some voidlings, that had no armor, only health bar. Yes, those are just some filler to keep you busy, but there's lot of them at once to make the battle interesting enough.

[Calico-Jack]

Originally posted by Shelt:

One of my original points was that scrolls and spells for putting up in game barriers to protect yourself are gone now -- such as avatar of fire, etc.

In the ages between DOS1 and DOS2 mages moved from being restricted to specific schools by feudalist thought to being more renaissance minded.

Runes are still used to add a single type of elemental resistance on armour with slots while the old mindset of needing to counter element with element gave way to a general purpose magical barrier which can be repaired during battles by carrying a shield via Shields Up or by putting 1 point in Hydrosophist and learning Armour of Frost.

I’m not being sarcastic, simply messing with semantics btw.

Originally posted by Shelt:

You could plan for that eventuality if you were fairly sure you were going to be facing that type of element, and it had a downside if you guessed wrong and got hit with water instead, for example.

For this reason the general purpose magic barrier, also known as magical armour, was created

Originally posted by Shelt:

Now everything has this barrier (2 really)

because there are 2 damage types - think of it like real life body armour to protect you from physical injury and ear muffs or simply sticking your fingers in your ears to avoid psychological damage. Or in the case of explosives needing both physical armour and fingers in your ears.

Originally posted by Shelt:

the gear you find is sparse, unreliable … has rando stats

I agree with you on gear - I think the DOS1 crafting system is superior - even if you picked up an okay piece of gear you could adapt it to match your needs more closely, and DOS 1 also tried to prolong the life of gear. DOS2 is closer to a looter shooter where the majority of gear is okay-ish with occasional rare or ultra rare drops.

Originally posted by Shelt:

-- I keep finding spellcasting gear that has warfare on it), and new gear from vendors is expensive (and also random).

The reason being isn’t down to a broken buff randomiser but rather Warfare’s the school that Nercromancy uses to raise damage output on its spells which all attack physical armour. It's unique among the mage schools who all target Magical armour. The Necromancy skill itself governs how much health you leech back from your targets once you’ve broken through their armour.