I though I was decent at CRPGs, but this game is filtering me. I'm level 3 in Fort Joy and I can't win any fights on Tactician mode. I've done all the fetch quests to reach level 3, and upon entering the prison every single encounter has enemies with 2x my health, 4-10x my armor, and deals 2-4x the damage per attack as my characters. The fire slug king pretty much oneshot my entire party with a single fireball. The houndmaster fight instantly stunlocks my party to death to where I'm sitting at my computer watching the game beat the shit out of my party for 12 turns in a row because everyone is getting knocked down over and over again. What am I missing here?
>What am I missing here?
A brain, but that goes without saying considering you have issues in this glorified phone game and call the fire slug queen a king.
Never played with the slugs and always went through houndmaster but I remember fricker being one of most difficult fights.
Without knowing how you play it is hard to give any tips, for example I don't see any fire surfaces or shock surfaces.
If everything fails you can explore and gather all the explosive barrels and stack them somewhere near enemies and detonate them.
After this and one more fight you should be level 4 and gain access to new spells that will make game easier.
Why the frick would anyone carry those pointless barrels, especially in Fort Joy where you don't even have the stats to carry a lot of them?
The game gifts you a pair of gauntlets with Teleport, in case you're too mentally challenged to get the massive environmental clues, you can teleport one party member in the empty cell that leads to arena where the houndmaster lies to set up somebody with ranged attacks in there, or a strong melee fighter to instagib one of the magisters in there.
The houndmaster himself can be instantly rooted by anyone with earth spells and torturer, or just bumrush him by abusing the aforementiond stealth option while he's busy talking and turn him into a chicken, or kill the archer, teleport the corpse near the houndmaster and abuse the broken Corpse Explosion spell, just like you do in every single battle anyway since every fight plays out the exact same.
The problem with the game is that you either have to go all magic damage or all physical damage due to how the armor system works. I loved the game but it was annoying still
Don't listen to this moron
feel free to elaborate on how he's wrong at any point
Anon said
>you either have to go all magic or all physical damage due to how the armor system works
when he should've said
>you either have to go all magic or all physical damage if you're someone who barely pays any attention to the game they're playing, or play co-op with anyone who is like that, or are a modern zoomie metaslave
OP clearly is not paying attention though, so it's very much recommended to him.
So that anon was right, then. Because going all in one type of damage is, indeed, the optimal way to beat the game, which is what OP is trying to do unsuccessfully.
>optimal
I mean the optimal way to beat the game is cheese the hell out of it using one or more of the tens of ways of doing that. Stacking damage type is a crutch for shitters who are unable to do that either because they're not paying attention, are too unimaginative, or are "muh honorable combat" gays.
But at the end of the day, I do prefer that the "meta" of the game is stacking damage instead of some of the other shit you can pull off in this game. Because if it was the other way around, the discussion would be even more obnoxious.
I do not understand why a completely valid and relevant suggestion triggered your autism like this. You, me and anon all know how garbage and broken the Damage/Armor system in this game is, so much so that invalidates everything that made its predecessor unique and fun to play.
There is no substitute to stacking one damage type because Larian decided to eat an entire factory's worth of elmer's glue when """revamping""" the combat for DOS2.
Either use a debloat mod for Tactician or play on normal. Tactician is for powergamers who know the system inside and out.
The armor system is fine on normal. Completed it with no problems with a hybrid party.
>The armor system is fine on normal.
If by fine you mean less relevant because the lessening of value bloating (like the mod you suggested) then yeah. But the system is shit on every difficulty regardless.
The debloat mod only makes it more palatable, but quite honestly the best mod for it is the one that changes so that armor is actually a % resistance to damage and/or status ailments. That way the system is not just about making a DPS race of either physical or magic damage for the entire party.
God I fricking hate this system so much
how is stacking damage types a "crutch" when it is literally the most efficient way to kill enemies? It would LITERALLY (not zoomie usage of the term) be less efficient to break both magic and physical armor before reducing their HP to 0
That's like saying "oh keeping guns every round is a crutch" in csgo because or "Killing creeps is a crutch" in dota. It's just how the game is played, and you play this way to give yourself the best advantage against the enemy.
You sound like a moronic debategay with your choice of arguments.
But adaptable damagee is the best way to clear out the games very one type resistant mobs.
Purely physical or purely elemental is going to struggle in fights it has no reason to do so in.
>But adaptable damagee is the best way to clear out the games very one type resistant mobs
You'd be suprised at how that's not a problem at all. Because in an adaptive party you'd have, say, 2 Mag 2 Phys, so you'd always be drilling into 2 separate bars with 2 characters each to start doing damage and status ailment, right? When you play the game by its rules and have a hyper specialized party of 4 Phys or 4 Mag then you'll always have 4 people drilling into one singular bar to get to the real damage.
Now let's say each character on both parties can dish out 100 damage per turn and now you're facing an enemy that has, say 400 Phys 200 Mag (which is a pretty common discrepancy for resistant enemies) with your Phys party. In the end you'll end up taking the same amount of time to breach that Phys Armor and start actually doing something. And shit that's me being more optimistic towards the hybrid party because maybe, and most likely, 1 out of the 4 will be more dedicated to support than damage output, which would make it at 1 person drilling at 1 healthbar by themselves. Which, in contrast, the 1 damage party will still have 3 people drilling even if you have 1 dedicated for support.
I will reiterate: This is the single stupidest system and it encourages you to never diversify and it was designed by paint huffers. Any environment interaction, spell, skill and whatever other advantage only comes down to one thing: Damage. Because you can't proc anything until you have access to their health bar, and if you manage to reach their health bar before they can reach yours then you've already won the DPS race.
Yes, you can finish the game by deliberately ignoring the glaring moronation and loophole of the system, but that does not excuse nor does away with it.
Why bother with status effects at all when you can just frontload all damage on a single target, teleport the corpse around and create a domino effect with Corpse Explosion+Mass Corpse Explosion, or just stacking Corpse Explosion really?
Hell you can even setup a free kill+corpse in 90% of the fights in the game thanks to moronic shit like Flaming Crescendo, D:OS2 is pants on head moronic and the armor mechanics are honestly the least offensive part in it, somehow.
>Why bother with status effects at all when you can just frontload all damage on a single target
That's my point, really. Any status ailment is just a nice side bonus on the DPS you're already dishing and winning because of it. The entire innovation of DOS1 and how you could use so many different elements to change the tide of the fight by freezing the ground so they slip, slowing them in oil and then setting them on fire, make a smoke cloud which obstructs ranged attacks, rain down lighting on a big puddle so you can hit multiple targets, etc. One of the very firsts quests was to teach you about that when you're supposed to help put out the fire on a burning ship.
But DOS2 did away with all of that uniqueness and somehow took away even more by making status effects completely irrelevant, like you yourself mentioned. DOS2 has many problems, and the Armor system might just be the biggest of them because it is the core of every single encounter that isn't talking, which is the vast majority of the game.
Honestly I'd argue about that because D:OS1 had the opposite issue of D:OS2 where status effects being so easily and readily procced made the game just as broken, it didn't help that Larian tried to make an RPG with DOOM level design by putting barrels everywhere.
The armor system, moronic as it was, was made precisely to fix the big issue of D:OS1 where statuses broke every single fight, the choice of a forced round robin turn system was also made to prevent something like that, because it was trivial to alphastrike (AKA the real massive issue in both D:OS games) in D:OS1 and shut down anything with status effects.
Unfortunately nobody at Larian is even remotely competent at their jobs so they didn't think
>Hey, maybe we should design a sensible status systems where we have actually different statuses and not ten different colours of shutdowns
>Maybe we should design a combat system that doesn't just support but shamelessly encourage alphastriking
>Maybe we should actually focus on something other than exploding barrels and autowin carpets gimmicks
No, they didn't think about any of that, status effects bad...but not so bad so now you go ungabunga first AND ungabunga after you apply a shutdown, or just go full ungabunga.
And really, it wouldn't even be THAT terrible since you can also go full ungabunga in 90% of the games around, what makes things worse in D:OS case is that they designed the combat as some kind of MMO with cooldowns, rotations and shit, and since none of the battle encounters are varied the games end up being incredibly one note as you can apply the same exact rotations to everything, and said rotations are also the same thing mechanically regardless of which one you're using.
Turn order matters. Action economy matters. Frick up the guy going next and pay attention to skills that give you more turns.
Mobility is easily one of the most important aspects of the game. Get 1-2 mobility skills on each character ASAP. If your Red Prince is any indication you haven't been paying attention to that aspect. He should be able to learn Phoenix Dive at that point.
Equipment matters more than level. Expect your gear to quickly become obsolete between acts.
Teleportation is one of the best skills in the game. Instantly puts problem enemies out of the fight by teleporting them to the other side of the map.
Focus on either physical or magic damage. Focusing on both is suboptimal if you don't know what you're doing.
Look up a character build if you are really struggling as a beginner.
You don't need to get enemy health to 0 right away. Just deplete Physical/Magical armor, ONLY THEN you can hit them with a status effect. That should put them out of the fight until you can finish them off.
Turn order does not matter in this game, since every enemy has moronic high initiative so they always act first anyway.
What? The turns alternates between you and the AI. You only need 1 guy with high initiative.
>What am I missing here?
I wouldn't know. I used cheats for max level, instakill and have all companions with me while playing Ifan and shouting GAY RIGHTS! and giving daddy Lucian his divinity back and resurrecting Alexander and marrying him!
May I just hijack your thread to ask for QoL mods? Can I speed up their walk a little bit or something?
First playthrough here. Thanks!
>I'm level 3
>On tact
Go kill shit, in fact kill everything, you'll never go back anyways.
> I've done all the fetch quests
No you haven't. Do the arena, kill the frogs, kill the bandit leader, get the spear, get the teleport gloves, find the dog's mate, kill mego, and his daughter, and find some hidden stuff around the fort can easily push you to level 4 and damn near close to 5.
>times x of my stats
Dos2 has bs scaling even more so in tact, learn to steal thing and you'll be fine.
>What am I missing here?
Some general tips since you're playing tact.
>Get a coat
Has a big buff to your party when you use it, and you can use it before any fight that allows you to talk.
>Prebuff
Same thing as the coat.
>Never use your cc when the enemy has armor
Easier said when the character is phys in the early game, balances out later.
>Spam food items
Gives stat buffs, and lastly.
>Cheese
Tact can be beaten without it, but honestly it's more of a pain when the game has such moronic scaling in the beginning that a lvl 1 shield is almost 15% weaker than the same shield at lvl 2.
It's a shit game that belongs to >>>Ganker and
, don't play it.
easy way to cheese the game, especially at early levels, is just have 1 dude go in alone and trigger the fight, and have other people sneaking around out of sight and they can come into the fight with a free attack.
It pretty much turns tactician to "insanely how do i do this difficult" to doable with cheese strategies.
Hardcore mode is challenging until about halfway through act 2.
Hey OP... The game is very easy.
Just play with two characters with lone wolf.
I beat the end boss in one turn with just my main character. I might even play again see if the mechanics have changed.
NOOOOOO YOU CAN'T JUST HYPER SPECIALIZE THE DAMAGE TYPE OF YOUR PARTY WHAT ABOUT THE PHYS RESISTANT ENEMIES STOOOOP
>Hyper specialize
>Crossbows with trick arrows
kek confirmed for sperg
I just used normal attacks.
I did use skills on the last boss and they are seriously good and would have made the game much easier.