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dkirschner's Divinity: Original Sin II (PC)
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| [August 14, 2026 05:01:57 PM]
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My god. 116.6 hours in and I cannot beat the last fights, which are absolutely nuts. I could load an old save approximately 6 hours back, complete some additional quests, purchase some better gear, and re-do that last 6 hours. I wouldn’t get enough experience to hit level 20. That would probably add another 10 hours to the game. But, I can’t.
Here is how the last fight went. I confronted Dallis and Vredeman in Lucian’s tomb. I fought them. When Dallis’s health is low enough, Vredeman taunts her and you can attempt a persuasion check with either the nearest character or the last character who attacked Dallis (unsure which). I re-did this fight a few times to be able to make the check (strength or intellect) with a character who could pass an intellect check. It was initially using my rogue, who has neither high strength nor intellect.
After successfully making the check, the fight proceeds to phase 2, where you fight Vredeman (who reveals himself to be Braccus Rex) and the kraken. The kraken vomits up three other special enemies, and will continue spawning tough enemies throughout the fight. The first few times I arrived at the fight this way, Dallis and Lucian were also enemies to me, but they would also sometimes attack Braccus et al. I thought it was weird that they would keep attacking me after Braccus betrayed them. Anyway, this fight was absolutely impossible. The kraken teleports around the map each turn, typically to wherever the biggest cluster of your characters is, vomits up a couple enemies and uses massive AoE spells, often straight up one-shotting some characters. Meanwhile, Braccus and the spawned enemies run around decapitating your crew. Seriously, impossible. What am I supposed to do when I have a dead character already coming into phase 2, and then the rest get basically one-shot before they can do anything?
So, I went back to the initial confrontation and chose to give up my source instead of initiate combat. Well, doing this takes you straight to phase 2 with all your characters at fully HP, AND all the enemies from phase 1 (except Braccus) are friends. Now we’re cooking! Braccus et al. are much stronger than you and your allies, especially as the kraken does its teleport-and-spawn-enemies thing. But your new friends tend to go straight for Braccus, Lucian especially, and they’ll bring him down. I figured out that you need to spread out and hide. When I finally beat it, three of my crew were dead and my rogue was cowering in a corner after drinking invisibility potions for most of the battle. When Lucian kills Braccus, the fight is over, so hiding in the corner until that happens is a good strategy.
Or not. Because, to my surprise, once I (or Lucian) killed Braccus, Lohse resurrected and the Doctor showed up. What? As far as I knew the Doctor was an optional boss related to Lohse’s quest. You can meet and kill him (or negotiate with him?) in Arx in Act 6, but he annihilated me when I fought him once (and I didn’t have the option to negotiate), so I just ignored the quest and moved on. Well, APPARENTLY, if you don’t kill him earlier, then he’s the final boss. Who knew?! He kills Lohse, and then you fight him with your remaining party members, who, unlike Lohse, did not resurrect. So, it was my half-health and no-longer-invisible rogue against the final boss of the game. The Doctor one-shotted my rogue. Game over.
How is one supposed to deal with this? I suppose I could distribute scrolls of invisibility to everyone and have them hide throughout phase 2 so that I will have 3v1 for the final battle against the Doctor. Though he kills Lohse, who is my healer and magic armor restorer, before the battle, which means I would be doing a boss battle with no healer. Probably not going to work. The other option is to reload an old save…before the point of no return…HOURS ago. Kill the Doctor, removing him from the end of the game. Except the Doctor fight was also nuts; one level ago when I attempted the fight, he basically one-shot my party. Need to do other quests to try and gain another level. Buy more unique and divine items. Strategize to kill the Doctor. Maybe sneak through his home killing nurses first. After that, re-do the entire final dungeon. That would take an entire day. Why. Why is this game doing this to me!?
*Edit* - A few days after writing this, I mustered the motivation to re-load an old save—not quite as old as I thought I’d have to do, but still a couple hours old. I learned (117 hours into the game) that you can access waypoints via the minimap, which I had to do to escape the Death Room that I had saved in (and had thought—wrongly—that I was stuck in). Wow. It was about 60 hours into the game when I realized you could click on waypoints from the main map instead of physically going to a waypoint to teleport to other waypoints (which is what I had been doing). Some things are not explained well! Anyway, I went back to the Doctor to give that fight the old college try. Impossible! He freaking mind controls (“demonic possession,” permanent debuff) Lohse after three turns, which is barely enough time to get through his (magic) armor, let alone his health. At that point, it is this uber-boss, his four demonic minions, like 8 nurses who come running from throughout his clinic, and demonically possessed Lohse (again, this is my healer and magic restorer, who of course just starts buffing the shit out of all the enemies!) vs. my other three characters. Oh, also, when Lohse is possessed, the Doctor is invulnerable. So, that means that on turn 3 after he possesses Lohse, you need to then focus fire her down to kill her (maybe then you can resurrect her and she won’t be possessed?), and do that while surviving the onslaught of all those other enemies, turn the tide of battle, and kill the Doctor. How? HOW?! I half-assedly looked into completing the few other remaining quests first, but, again, I wouldn’t have gained a level, and two of those had given me tons of trouble earlier, too.
So, I have a horrible taste in my mouth upon reaching the end of Divinity: Original Sin 2. I love so many things about the game. I love that there are challenging battles. I love the magic system, the elements, the dialogue, the characters. It’s phenomenal. But there are some atrocious things about it as well. The insane difficulty spike and surprise bosses and “mandatory” side quests at the end, for one. The biggest thing though is the inventory micromanaging. I disliked the inventory system SO much. It is no exaggeration to say that at least 10% of my play time…easily 15% or 20% if you include looting...was inventory management. Moving items between characters, keeping track of what I’d picked up recently, trying to find specific items amid the clutter, ensuring that wares were on Lohse (who had the “bargaining” trait, so things in her inventory sold for more), dealing with encumbrance, searching random barrels and desks, and so on. The game has THOUSANDS of items. Hundreds of crafting recipes. Ingredients out the ass. Vendors everywhere. Items littering every building and out in the wilds and the dungeons. I was compelled to pick things up, sell them, turn a profit, buy better items. That required the inventory micromanagement. If I knew how it would be, I 100% would have made a warrior character with high strength (carry more weight) and given him the bargaining skill. Instead, it was Lohse, a mage with no strength, who had the bargaining skill. Indeed, none of my characters had strength because I didn’t choose any warriors. Which moves me on to my next point…
I probably struggled more than I needed to throughout the game because of my party composition. I had three mages and a rogue. My party was squishy and lacked mobility. One mage was a summoner/necromancer. Another used fire, geo, and poison magic. The third used air and water magic. I thought that given the game’s focus on battlefield elements, this would be fun. It totally was, but often my battlefields look like rainbows, with red fire here, green poison there, blue ice there, etc. The lack of mobility and constant need for line of sight often meant that my three casters were grouped up—easy targets for enemy AoE abilities. I also just realized way too many useful tips and tricks way too late in the game. Like, there are some amazing talents, like the one that restores you to full health when you are resurrected (instead of like 10% health) or the one that lets you cheat death. Used in conjunction with the full health restoration talent, that means that when you get killed, you cheat death (one more turn to kick ass!). Then, if you do die, someone resurrects you, and you go back to full health, and the cheat death talent refreshes every time you are resurrected. Like, I should have given both of those to every character, but either they didn’t become available until higher levels, or I was thinking about other strategies. Also, apparently I built my rogue wrong. I was dumping points into Dual-wield, which gave some damage bonus, but turns out I was supposed to be dumping points into Warfare, which added like a bigger damage bonus to ALL physical damage. I couldn’t discern that from the tooltips. So my rogue was weak.
Anyway, man, I’m so beaten down by the end. I want to persevere, but I think I need to cut my losses and just say I enjoyed the time I had with the game. I’m so close to beating it, but I would have to replay the entire ending after reloading an old save, completing more extremely difficult quests, doing a ton more micromanaging with potions and scrolls and spells, finding better gear to buy, and so on. It’s going to take forever. I should just look forward to Baldur’s Gate 3, which will have, admittedly, a more familiar set of rules.
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| [December 1, 2025 09:06:47 PM]
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The toolbox feel of Divinity: Original Sin 2 is incredible. I am barely through the second act, havent even left Reapers Eye, and have clocked nearly 30 hours. Ive explored every bit of every area I can and have been flummoxed by locked chests, complex puzzles, and difficult encounters. Often, I have been stuck on something only to have an a-ha! moment. For example, I remember when I realized the value of the teleport spell. This spell is amazing. Cast it on an object and then select where to move the object. It works on most anythingchests, items, even enemies. Chest stuck behind a locked gate? Teleport it to your side. Enemy too close to you in combat? Drop it off a cliff. One of your characters needs to be on the other side of the battlefield, but is slowed and would take three turns to get there? Boom. Teleport him. There are so many abilities like this that have numerous uses that arent obvious at first glance. At some point, I realized that if I kept spare junk weapons in my inventory, I could use them to bust down doors. Since theyre junk, it doesnt matter if they break. At some point, I realized that I could make great use of my undead character being healed by poison. So, I always keep a poison wand on him, all poison items go to him, etc., and he can always heal himself by attacking himself. At some point, I realized that it might be cool to put one point of Necromancer on each of my mages. Necromancer heals the caster by 10% of damage dealt (20% at level 2, etc.). So now all my mages heal for 10% of damage dealt. I am sure there are dozens more such discoveries to be had.
This makes combat fascinating and extremely dynamic. It is based on elementsfire, electricity, oil, ice, poison, blood, steam, etc.being manipulated on the battlefield. I mean, you can choose to ignore elements, but that would be stupid. You can use them to your great advantage, and accidentally to your great detriment, and enemies will use them too. For example, have a character hurl an oily rock that coats characters and surfaces in oil, then have another character launch a fireball at the oil. BOOM! Explosion. Have a character cast raining blood, which causes enemies to bleed if they dont have physical armor. Then have another character use a lightning attack, which electrifies the blood. A character on fire? Cast rain to extinguish all the fire. But watch out for an enemy to blast the water surfaces with lightning and zap your previously immolated character. The number of interlocking effects and systems in this game is nuts.
My party is magic-heavy. I have a summoner (my main character, the Red Prince), a fire/geo mage (Fane, the undead), an aero/water mage (Lohse), and a dual-wielding rogue (the woman who is possessed by a demon). The magic variety is awesome because I often have elemental control of the battlefield. But, if there are a lot of enemies with high magic armor, or a lot of physically strong enemies who can get up close, then I can have some trouble. Usually, my rogue can lock down any mages or archers who are around. The trick there is getting her to them quickly (hello teleport) so she can kill one and move on to the next. And my magic users obliterate melee enemies who tend to have low magic armor. The summoner is especially badass because his familiar acts as an extra character, and a strong one at that. Plus, he can summon totems that take a free shot per round at an enemy. The familiar and the totems also act as damage sponges; sometimes enemies will attack them instead of my main party members. Ill often just summon the familiar out in front of the party to serve as a tank, then bombard enemies with spells from the mages, while the rogue runs around the edges of the battlefield disposing of mages or archers who might be sniping from above. The setup works pretty well! One drawback is equipment though; I keep getting all these badass two-handed swords, heavy armor, strength equipment, crossbows, etc., with no one to use them, and I only get so much equipment that is great for mages, with three mages to share it.
Story-wise, I am loving the world and the characters in it. Its dark, funny, deep, creativeextremely well written. It was just revealed to me that each of the main playable characters (there are six or seven playable characters, but you can only have four in your party; no idea what happens to the others right now) is chosen by a different god to become The One. It introduced conflict between me and my party in what was previously a collaborative venture! Now The Red Prince (me) is supposed to distrust everyone else because theyve all been summoned by different gods, and my god told me outright to kill one of my party members (my aero/water mage, who is the healer!). I dont want to kill any of my party members! Im so curious about how these intertwining playable character narratives flow together, because any one of them can be you, the main character. That means that the game is a bit different every time, aside from the race/class/background stuff, because each character essentially has their own hero arc.
I started off playing this co-op with a friend, which had its own cool features, though we only played through the tutorial together before I got busy, put the game down for a long time, and then just continued on alone. It was fun fighting together, as you can play off each other in terms of battlefield elements and coordinate in interesting ways. I would like to play some more co-op; however, given the narrative heavy nature of the game and all the inventory management slowing me down (probably the only downside), I dont think I would enjoy playing co-op except for the combat.
Anyway, I am almost off of Reapers Eye, and then on to the next act! Excited to see where this one goes.
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dkirschner's Divinity: Original Sin II (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Friday 31 January, 2025
GameLog closed on: Monday 22 June, 2026 |
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