YMMV / Divinity: Original Sin II

• Alt Itis: There are many different kinds of builds, but you have access to only four different characters. You CAN re-spec from Act 2 onwards (or from Act 1 by enabling one of the Gift Bags), but it's usually interesting to see what combinations of classes you can pick. Regardless of your choice, the gear that you acquire will start making you feel that you're missing at least one or two characters to cover all the bases. That's not even getting into the races and the gods that your character will meet in the story.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: If you get an ending where the Red Prince survives and is on good terms with you, he might ask you to become his slave. The question is: is the request genuine and a sign that he has learned nothing from the journey (up to telling you're going to wear a collar again), or is he just joking and only plays along when you tell him you like the idea?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Many real life cultures have had funerary rites that involved eating the dead so that they may live on in their loved ones, much the same as the elves in this game.
  • In addition, the Sky Burial towers used by the dwarves are based on the real “Towers of Silence”, also used for Sky Burial, from Zoroastrianism.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Sallow Man is fast, strong and has some nasty abilities in his disposal. To make matters worse, when knocked out once, he returns to full health and you have to defeat him again to kill him. That is, unless you happen to have Terrain Transfusion. There's a body of lava nearby. Lava kills instantly, and when brought back to full health, the Sallow Man stays on the spot he was defeated in. Do the math. Sadly, you can't use this same trick in the final battle when he returns. Not that you'd want to, since by then your attention would be more towards killing Braccus Rex to make the Sallow Man and the rest of Braccus' minions disappear. Although there is still an easy way to handle him in the finale - if you have access to Teleportation, which you likely do due to how useful it is, you can teleport him to one of the small, floating platforms surrounding the arena. Doing so practically eliminates The Sallow Man as a threat, as he doesn't have any ranged attacks and can't get off the platform due to his lack of relocation skills.
  • Lucian the Divine, forms one of the "Unholy Trinity" in the Final Boss. Of them, he's objectively the weakest. This is the former Divine, so you'd think he would be more powerful.
  • Braccus Rex, if you agree with Lucian's plan to seal the veil. Lucian and his crew will be allied with you from the very beginning of the fight, and between them and your party Rex likely won't last more than a few turns. His crew is also a Keystone Army with his minions and the Voidwoken Kraken just disappearing after he dies.
• Awesome Music: "Rivellon" is way more epic than it has any right to be, considering it only plays aboard Lady Vengeance, your home base, from Act 2 onward.
  • The theme that plays just before the True Final Boss. To make things even more epic? Your voice clips are muted and your sound effects are dulled.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • The penultimate boss is a Triple Boss against Lucian, Dallis, and the resurrected Braccus Rex. Following a big explanation into just what the Big Bad plans to do and how you fit into their plans, along with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Ifan depending on whether or not you learned who used Deathfog, you get to fight them. Along with one of the best themes of the game, the voice clips are removed and the sound is dulled. Oh, and prior to this, you had all the source requirements of your Awesome, but Impractical skills used so you can go all out. You'll need it for the True Final Boss.
  • Adrahmalihk. This guy is bad news - he is an utterly depraved villain who sends his army of followers enslaved after you. In-Universe? He's one of the most powerful enemies in the entire game... and in terms of gameplay? He is a Superboss to truly test your mettle against - especially if Lohse isn't in your party and/or Lohse is in your party but you didn't go into his demonic dimension to snuff out the candles (each representing a soul he is feeding on) to weaken him. This means that you have only three turns to kill him. It's a truly frantic battle - even if you did weaken him.
• Better Off Sold: Players accumulate a Monty Haul of items with randomly generated bonuses from Random Drops, quest rewards, and looting containers. Most of it is best sold in bulk for gear that directly supports the character's abilities.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • While exploring the caves for "Shadow Over Driftwood" you can find a tunnel deeper than the rest (and in it find an item used in a different quest). The BLAM comes as you're leaving, when, after you step on a pressure plate, a ship comes barreling through the wall knocking down everyone in your party and forcing you to fight a shark on land. No explanation is given for this, and once you win and get out of the ship (via destroying its weak sides) it's never mentioned again.
  • Another rather random encounter is one at the Stonegarden Graveyards. You may notice a green path not unlike the architecture at the Temple of Tir-Cendilius one act later. Going here teleports your main character to a dark chamber, where you fight a crazy elf and his summons. It's hinted that this elf is working for the God King, but nothing foreshadows this encounter and it's not mentioned anywhere else since, not even with elven characters like Sebille.
• Breather Boss: After you get to know that the toymaker Sanders is key to accessing the Path of Blood, he allows you access to his attic for a key item necessary to getting through it. On your way, you're ambushed by his toys who have been possessed by the God King. They go down pretty easily. For an assassination attempt by the almighty demonic King, this is pretty pathetic, especially compared to the potential fight with Linder Kemm beforehand, or the God King's previous attempt on your life with the Undead Scarecrow.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Some character options are so valuable that there's no real reason not to include them.
  • Everyone wants Adrenaline. The AP boost is so valuable (and easily counteracted through other buffs) that every archetype in the game can benefit from it, and at a measly single point of Scoundrel invested, it is a snap pick on every build.
  • Basically every build wants to get some Polymorph in there somewhere. While poor as a main focus, Polymorph covers the bases that other builds miss. For example, Scoundrel (the stealth skill tree) has no way to natively turn invisible, but has many skills that can be cast without breaking invisibility and focuses around backstab damage. Chameleon Cloak, a 1 point Polymorph skill, allows you to go invisible, effectively boosting Scoundrel to new heights it could not reach alone. This tree also has the all important Skin Graft and Apotheosis skills to play with, both of which are highly valuable on casters. On top of all of this, every Ability Point invested pays out in one Attribute Point, effectively making up for the investment into Polymorph. Putting some points into this tree is thus a no-brainer.
  • If you're attacking with a weapon at all, you're going to want some Warfare. This includes a bow, crossbow or even staff. Why? Well, Warfare gives a flat 5% damage bonus to all physical damage. All of it. This quickly grows to monstrous heights as your main hand weapons dramatically increase in strength. Warfare's scaling also invalidates the bonuses given from Huntsman, as the flat 5% applies to all shots taken, where Hunstman only adds 5% damage if you have the high ground. While High Ground is always useful for ranged builds, it isn't always available, meaning its often easier to put a ton of points into Warfare and max out your damage. Intelligence builds even benefit from Warfare, since Intelligence can scale off of Warfare and dramatically empower certain spells. Spark Striker goes from a fairly niche spell to a room-clearer when combined with Whirlwind, and that's just one example, whereas the entire Necromancer school deals physical damage, meaning players only spend enough Necromancer points just to be able to use its spells (as adding points to Necromancer only gives you Life Drain) while focusing instead on getting as many Warfare points as possible.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Some players might have issues trying to sympathise with this game's characters, even those who are on your party's side, due to Rivellon essentially being a World of Jerkass by this point. Malady, technically the Big Good, is often affected by this situation.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Early in the game, Gheists. They effectively showcase how dangerous specialized Rogues can be in the game. As they have considerable investment into Scoundrel, they have very high mobility and a very high critical hit damage multiplier, alongside Backlash that is both a guaranteed critical hit and a teleport, placing the Gheist right behind your character for backstab criticals, all of this during a stage of the game where player characters have limited mobility and crowd control skills. After the Battle of the Lady Vengeance, Gheists don't show up again (outside of cutscenes or The Hammer's Pets, if the player didn't kill them earlier) until Act IV, where their threat level is severely diminished.
  • Shriekers. What's really annoying about them is the fact that they can only be killed with Source Vampirism. Unfortunately, they will activate their attack right as you enter range, before you even use Source Vampirism on them. The only way to get them (aside from purging wands) is to sneak around them.
  • Deep in the Arx sewers is an encounter with some overgrown spiders. Some of them have Deathfog inside of them, and will release the deadly gas inside of them up on death. Really, Deathfog in general is this, given its Instant Death upon contact.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Beast seems to suffer from some form of arrested development. Whatever it is, it seems to stem from his trauma of being exiled to the Isle of Mists.
  • It's never outright stated, but various cues like Sebille at first reflexively jerking away from physical contact, abrupt mood swings and fits of violence in the first chapter (before she comes back to her senses and apologizes), her uncharacteristically uncomfortable demeanor when initially asked about her past, her unusually precise recollections of traumatic events in her life, her alluding to thinking she deserves death more than once, and her usual snarky and confident personality disappearing when talking about her kidnapping all point to undiagnosed PTSD.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Three major ones, inbetween acts I, II, III and IV. The first act is very simple, and you can often skirt by wearing gear that's pretty underlevelled. By the time you head off to Reaper's Coast, keeping up with gear drops becomes more important, as the level scaling starts to take off. On the Nameless Isle, there are numerous tough encounters designed to keep you down unless you really know what you're doing and have up to date gear, and by the time you get to Arx keeping up with levels and gear is quite literally essential. Definitive Edition made this more pronounced.
  • At the north edge of Reaper's Coast, there's a crucified witch running around screaming about killing you. She drops the key needed for a different quest, and a hefty load of experience, but is also incredibly tough compared to the rest of the quest.
• Disappointing Last Level: Arx is considered to be this for more than a few people, even in the Definitive Edition. The act contains fewer conversational options than the previous act(s), much fewer sidequests (thus very few opportunities to acquire resources), no shortage of bugged out quests, bosses that are just plain annoying rather than challenging, more gimmick fights such as the endlessly-respawning revenants in the lizard consulate, a crapload of Deathfog, a series of Guide Dang It! puzzles leading to the Final Boss, and no advancement for Sebille's plotline (completed on the Nameless Isle) except for scant romance-related dialogue. The effective level of most fights are the very narrow range of 19-20, so combining the fact that you can likely be only level 18 (or even level 17!) when you arrive with the fact that there are very few sidequests to gain XP, it can make navigating Arx a chore to figure out what you can accomplish without great difficulty until you finally are level 19 to make fights more reasonable. Despite not having many sidequests that reward XP, there are so many different story ideas occurring happening simultaneously within the confines of a singular city (compared to Fort Joy or Driftwood, which take up only a small portion of their maps) that the overall plot becomes somewhat of a cacophony. Finally, Lohse got a moment denied if she was a player character in the original. It's also a lot shorter than the Phantom Forest from the previous game, but given that most of your time will be spent in Reaper's Coast, that's not hard. That said, most players agree that the Definitive Edition did indeed fix a lot.
  • The Final Boss is considered to be one of the weakest points of the game, owing mostly to the enemies being so annoying and throwing so much garbage at the player, it's difficult even on Explorer. Even from a story perspective, Lucian's entire motivation is dumped into one conversation, and the fact that Braccus Rex now serves the God King comes out of nowhere - and you don't actually get to fight this God King. He remains The Unfought and The Ghost.
• Even Better Sequel: Since the alpha, players have praised numerous improvements over Original Sin, including all of the Anti-Frustration Features, improved (for the most part) hitboxes, more conversational options, and most importantly, the ability for four players to play the game. Critically, the game received better reviews than its predecessor for improving upon the original, the story, and fixing almost all of the issues, and there's talk of the game going down as one of the greatest role-playing-games of all time.
• Fanfic Fuel: The game is a treasure trove for shippers since there are no restrictions over which companion the Player Character can pair up with, meaning any and all pairings between them are supported in-game. Then there's the matter of the Multiple Endings and the aftermath.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Unholy Trinity, for the Final Boss.
  • The second Unholy Trinity of Kemm, Isbeil, and the Sallow Man, given to a trinity of late-game boss enemies who work for the Black Ring.
• Game-Breaker: So much so that it has its own dedicated page!
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any enemy that has the means to teleport your characters. Just one more way to ruin your game strategy...
  • Enemies with Shields. So much for attempting to knock down or freeze that guy. Related to this, enemies with points on Perseverance. Make sure you manage your party's crowd control cooldowns correctly!
  • Enemies that can summon more enemies. Obviously, these jerks should be eliminated first.
  • The Silent Monks have an irritating tendency to dodge a lot of your attacks as they have a higher evasion stat, even if they are relegated to being common cannon fodder.
• God Damned Boss: The Sallow Man. He moves very very fast, and constantly spams Aerial Plague, a stacking debuff reducing your maximum health and damage output. The most common strategy to defeating him swiftly is a matter of Sequence Breaking involving lava. What's worse is that he'll even show up in the Final Boss fight if you killed him. Not that you'll know this until you get there!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In many dialogue-driven fights, only one central character is engaged in the conversation. Switching to another character will often allow you to do things like moving your group members around, and potentially even attacking other enemies, depending upon the enemies involved. For example, when talking to the Doctor, your other characters can fight and kill off the nurses in his building before finishing the conversation. This will result in you having a little more breathing room to fight him when the dialogue ends.
  • One way of making the infamous fight in the Blackpits involving rescuing Gwydian easier is to have a character close enough to the Magister gate guards to entice them to enter the fight, giving those pesky voidwwoken blobs different targets to attack, away from the scaffolding where Gwydian is being held.
  • While it is now patched, in earlier versions of the game, non-Undead characters did not treat Deathfog as a hazard. Blow up a Deathfog barrel in a choke point, and all the non-Undead enemies will happily waltz into their deaths.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Lovrik tries to claim that he set you up for a Honey Trap robbery to provide for his daughter, and cheerfully admits his lie if confronted. Much later in the game, you can find out that he really is in debt — to a Loan Shark demon who murders defaulters with Blood Magic — and is behind on his payments.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • After the Wham Episode that is the end of Act 3, your character will have the chance to share a private romantic moment with a party member of your choosing. Several of the characters will even give you a Love Confession. Special notion goes to Lohse, however, who will respond to an "I love you" from the player by tackling them to the ground in excitement and repeatedly saying they love you back.
  • Sebille's romance is a non-stop series of this past the end of Act 2. Given her usual demeanor, you'd expect her romance to follow a Tsundere dynamic or something similar. Instead, hers turns out to be probably the most openly affectionate relationship in the game. A lot of otherwise standard conversations open or end with her slipping her hand into yours, taking a moment to kiss you, unexpectedly patting you on the ass, or leaning into your embrace if you choose to hug her.^note In one instance, where you comfort her while she's talking about her tragic past, the degree to which she returns the embrace and then thanks you actually surprises your character, according to the narrator. In the conversation where she jests about crowning herself queen of the world, she'll also knight you as her Knight of the Needle, before laughing and thanking you for playing along with her jape. Her default introductory lines even change, with her always calling you "darling" or "love."
    • Notably, and extremely unusually for a CRPG romance, Sebille's actually the one who makes the first move in pursuing a relationship with the player character.
    • She has probably the best epilogue of any romantic choice as well, whether you took the Divinity, Spread the Source, or Seal the Veil endings. In all of them she makes it clear that she intends to stay with the PC and have more adventures followed by a happily ever after, a fate she'd easily take over godhood. From Seal the Veil:
  Sebille: Darling, you're here! And I'm here. Thank the gods - or whomever - for Malady.
  PC: How do you feel about Lucian?
  Sebille: A good man might make a dubious god. It's of little concern to me. I want more out of life than to sit on some stale pantheon.
  PC: Where will you go now?
  Sebille: That... quite depends on you, I suppose.
  (Narrator: She laughs, and it's music to your soul)
  Sebille: We want each other after all. We love each other, after all. Let others play the game of gods. Love conquers even divinity.
  (Narrator: Sebille cups your cheek in her hand, and in her soft cat's eyes you read the prospect of tender days to come...)
  • In Driftwood, there's a trio of children playing a game where one is Alexandar, one is Dallis and one is a Sourcerer. The Alexandar child is mad because he's dead, and the Sourcerer is sad because she's wearing a collar and can't do something. You can tell them that you see no reason Alexandar can't come back from the dead, and if Alexandar did that, why couldn't a Sourcerer learn how to break a collar? If you come back later, the narrator notes that they seem to be having the time of their lives. Considering that Alexandar survived miraculously, and you have met several characters who can remove collars, you weren't lying either.
• Ho Yay: Enjoys throwing some out there:
  • If your character is female and talks to Lohse on the ship at the beginning, Lohse will call you her wife in an attempt to trick some children into believing she's not actually Lohse. It doesn't work, by the way.
  • At Fort Joy, you can ask Lohse how accommodating she is while waggling your eyebrows, when she mentions she's very accommodating (she means for spirits inhabiting her, though).
  • Radeka the Witch, through most of her dialogue trees, will kiss a character of either gender before the fight with her (the question is whether you willingly kiss her or not). In this instance, however, she does have an ulterior motive: to force a blood rose into your character's mouth, causing them to be diseased at the start of the fight.
  • On the ship at the beginning of the game, the player can talk to Sebille and have her lick their arm so that she can see their memory of what they were doing and/or thinking about while being held with the other Sourcerer prisoners before being loaded on the ship. Custom characters have a generic shared version, while the preset characters have origin-specific ones. If you're playing as Lohse, she says this:
    Sebille: "Hmmm... You were in a cellar with other Sourcerers. A dark, dank place - I remember it well. As everyone lay sleeping, you sat in the dark with wakeful eyes, looking rather lovingly at... me! My, aren't you a pretty cup full of sugar and spice?"
  • If Lohse is the player character, Malady will flirt with her several occasions.
  • Upstairs in the inn in Driftwood there are two female off-duty magisters who ask you to weigh in on their argument about whether one of them having "a turn around the park" with Lovrik's lizard prostitute would count as sleeping with the enemy. One option is to say that they should "go 'consort' with themselves... or with each other." One of the magisters gets hilariously defensive, while the other is quite amused. Afterward they have an ambient banter where the defensive one insists, "Smile all you want, I'm not in love with you."
  • If you tell Gareth's squire Exter that he seems a bit smitten with Gareth he says, "Well who wouldn't be?!"
• Jerkass Woobie: Sebille is rough around the edges, no doubt (many of the comments with the Sebille tag are rather harsh or snarky), but during private moments she reveals just how much of a toll being a slave, and not knowing whether she'll ever be free have taken on her, and reading them makes many just want to give the poor woman a hug. Which you can.
• Memetic Mutation: "I'll yield to none!", a generic combat line spouted by the player characters after using a skill, is a common joke within the community. Specifically, the Red Prince's delivery of the line is used in numerous memes.
• Moment of Awesome: For the developers, twice:
  • Original Sin needed 12 days to reach its minimal campaign goal, whereas the sequel was fully funded in 12 hours and had attracted more pledges in just four days than the original's entire campaign. This really highlights the contrast between Larian's situation in 2013 and in 2015: back then, they were the industry's redheaded stepchild with lots of ambition but little standing; now, they are one of Kickstarter's biggest darlings, with thousands of people throwing money at their crazy ideas about RPG multiplayer right off the bat.
  • And then the game came out and immediately became the best-reviewed PC game of the year, beating out the original Original Sin as the most acclaimed game Larian has ever made, with critics and players alike placing it among the best CRPGs of all time. Add to that that it was launched without much fanfare or advertisement, making it one of the genre's most massive Sleeper Hits since The Witcher a decade earlier.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • You can cross it yourself in the final act, by using the Deathfog doomsday device in the sewers to wipe out all of Arx, despite there being no reason to do so, aside from feeling evil.
  • Arguably Lucian crossed it when he tricked Ifan into delivering a deathfog bomb to the elves who raised him, which wiped them out as collateral to the Black Ring members it was truly intended to destroy. This also had a side effect of allowing the God King to get a foothold in Rivellon, who then dispatched the voidwoken to begin causing chaos, and sourcerers were blamed and punished for it. What truly makes this a moral event horizon is the fact that he says he would do it all again, despite knowing just how much damage was caused by his actions.
  • The Seven crossed it when they cast their king and the vast majority of the Eternals, their own kin, into the Void just so they could empower themselves with Source and create lesser races of mortals whose souls would provide them with even more Source to feed upon. All the problems in this game and the last one are rooted in their actions, which were determined by nothing more than greed and a lust for power, making the gods arguably the most vile entities in the Divinity universe.
  • Braccus Rex loves to cross this horizon and dance on it. The first instance of this directly affecting the player is to burn pretty much all the Seekers on the Lady Vengeance, which also happens to kill off any Godwoken party members that aren't in your party in one fell swoop. All the while gleefully gloating about it in the most classic villain way possible.
• Narm:
  • The sheer amount of blood that comes out of elves when they use flesh-sacrifice or eat something like a body part. It has to make a "blood surface", but one would assume the elves would bleed to death.
  • Near the end of the game, you have a sex cutscene with one of the characters of your choice. It then cuts to your characters in bed... with their gear on. Making it even more unintentionally hilarious is the fact that the narrator describes the actions (before getting into anything that would give it an AO rating)... but the characters are standing in front of one another despite being naked in bed.
  • Because the game doesn't use "cutscenes" and uses the engine to render the character actions, the climactic scene at the end as well as the last words from Lucian and Dallis can be rendered unintentionally hilarious since any buffs or debuffs, such as fire or being turned into a chicken, are still on, meaning your character sits on the throne while on fire, and Lucian and Dallis give their final words lying flat on their faces... and on fire. The climactic scene is also destroyed because the game centers on you... and covers you up with the textbox, meaning you don't even get to see your character sitting on the throne!
  • Like any ability, Play Dead will sometimes trigger the user to spout of a generic line when used. Cue Fane spouting off "Glory is mine!" or even "I'll yield to none!" As they collapse in a heap on the ground and play dead.
• Narm Charm: It's possible to, if Lohse is in the party and you complete her story in the "Best" possible way ie, killing Adrahmalihk, to make her finally sing after her demon had her smash her lute in Act I. The moment itself is an awesome moment... but you can make it unintentionally hilarious by making her perform in her underwear or literally in the middle of a room covered in pools of blood and over her demon's dead body. Will you care? Absolutely not.
• Player Punch: At the end of Act one, all the party members you didn't recruit (or just flat out murder) on the Lady Vengeance are killed by Magister Dallis and Mister Vrederman, alongside some of your NPC Seeker allies that you got to know along the way, and their ghosts will call you out on not recruiting them. To make matters worse, at the end of act three, They appear again in skeletal form, still resenting you and will enter the Arena of One to try and become the next Divine, and their ghosts appear again on Lady Vengeance after you yourself kill them The only real crime that they committed to deserve this particular fate was that you didn't recruit them - and the game has an Arbitrary Headcount Limit. If you didn't hate Magister Dallis and Vrederman at this point, you will now.
  • Adding it is the fact that the characters all have a personal quest that you'll never get even so much as the option (in-universe) to complete it in their stead for them, and they'll be in the afterlife never knowing if you do. Especially poor Lohse - when you speak with her, she is still not freed from the demon, and as you later find out in the Arx, is just one of the millions of candles who're kept alive for eternity as her demon feeds off of her life force.
  • Even Alexandar is not immune from this. Should you convince him to pull a Heel–Face Turn at the end of Act III, Dallis will simply murder him in cold blood shortly after, further adding to Dallis' treachery.
  • In act one, you find a blind magister trying to keep his duty, and if you kill him, he drops a note from his family saying they love him. You Bastard!.
• Quicksand Box: Reaper's Coast is where the bulk of the game will take place - however, there is a (rough) order of events enforced by enemies of certain levels, just like the previous game. Unfortunately, nothing stops players from attempting sidequest(s), encounters, and dungeons that they are clearly not ready for - and simply picking a direction and wandering is a very very good way to get killed quickly. Because there is also very little telling players even what is available, it's easy for players to go through multiple playthrough(s) and still discover quest(s) that they had missed after they thought they had made a 100% Completion run.
• The Scrappy:
  • While Beast isn't exactly hated, he's widely considered the least popular companion/origin character, and its rare to find people who keep him in the final party. He's really Out of Focus, isn't all that important to the story, and is generally just not seen as very interesting or unique, giving you little incentive to pick him, as well as Blinding Squall being a rarely used signature ability. The Definitive Edition tried to give him more to do, but even then he's easily the companion with the least plot importance.
  • Though Red Prince himself is rather beloved, his romance is generally considered to be the worst in the game due to the Red Princess. From the very start of his arc, he is completely clear that she is the one he loves more than anyone in the world (partially due to them being fated to sire a new generation of dragons). And that is a constant throughout his entire character arc. You can't even start a romance with him unless you deliberately peep on him and the Red Princess getting it on (which you get caught doing), and even at the end when he says he has fallen in love with you, it's clear that you'll be more of a concubine to him as Red Princess is definitely his wife. Most players will advise to simply be friends with Red Prince, you'll have a better time.
  • Gwydian Rince is a minor NPC who gets little love from players, as his quest is a difficult Escort Mission to save him from both his Magister captors and a surprise voidwoken attack. When you release him from his binds he immediately joins the fight, whose chain lightning attack accidentally summons voidwoken, instead of fleeing to safety, and even runs headfirst into Necrofire. He further cements his stupidity by returning to the fray even if you teleported him a safe distance away. Most players either end his quest with Gwydian dead, or alive only by exploiting bugs to skip/ease the fight with voidwoken entirely. Lastly, even if you do manage to rescue him, he just gives you a skillbook for Mortal Blow, a lategame skill that requires three source points to use at a time when you’ll have two at most, and only if you go out of your way for it or accept the Advocate’s offer.
  • Windego is considered to be a pointless character and hardly the kind that's worthy of being the narrator of the intro and interlude scenes. Hyped up to be a serious threat, Windego then spends her second scene getting her ass kicked handily by the protagonists, only to be resurrected by her master and then get killed again. When she's considering changing sides merely due to the fact that the God King just gave up on her, players pretty much never consider her worthwhile to waste a Swornbreaker on and just kill her for the final time.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game has some of these, mostly centered around the new combat system.
  • If one is looking to min-max, the armor system essentially guts a large amount of party combinations. Armor is divided into physical and magic armor, which block physical and magic damage respectively. Armor must be got through before damage can be dealt to enemies' actual health. The problem is that this encourages dealing either all physical or all magic damage, as dealing both means having to eat through two different shields when you could have just ignored one. Therefore it's best if one's party is focused entirely around dealing one kind of damage - meaning no mages for a "physical damage" party and no warriors or rogues for a "magic damage" party. It's worth noting that having a single mage or warrior in an all physical or magic party can be very useful, since the lone damage type can punch through enemy armor that specializes in one over the other. The Armor system also turns Constitution into a Dump Stat for all classes, as increased health does not add into survivability in practice - the character is still completely vulnerable to all status conditions.
  • The level scaling in the Classic release was utterly insane. By mid game (level 10 or so) this became noticable, with levels 9, 13, 16 and 18 all having massive stat jumps for anything that reached those levels, creating extremely unbalanced combat encounters. This was toned down in the Definitive Edition, but only slightly; fighting an enemy a couple levels above you is still a de facto death sentence. This also necessitates tediously changing out your gear every couple levels, with the new equipment being identical in every way except having better stats. This is intended to mimic the Challenge Rating system found in the likes of DungeonsAndDragons (where you fight enemies relative to your own level), but due to the nonlinear nature of the games world, it's very easy to come across enemies far above your weight class.
    • The level scaling in general can be a hassle to get around due to poor world design. Rather than explicitly telling the player the average level of a specific area, the game instead chooses to simply gate off areas with Beef Gate enemy ambushes and the like. This often forces players to complete the vast majority of the sidequests they have on offer or else be wiped out by the enemies in the new areas they try to explore. Reaper's Coast is the worst for this, since the encounters range from 8 to 16 depending on the region, and the game provides no hints on where to go thanks to the vague "find a Source master" main quest. Probably the worst example is the Shadows over Driftwood quest, which can obtained immediately after getting to Driftwood and yet has multiple tough encounters designed for a level 10 party, when you can't be any higher than level 8 by the time you arrive.
  • Much like in the first game, it's possible for particle effects, NPCs, allies, or objects such as roofs to obscure your vision, even in tactical mode - which can result in several misclicks or attacks-of-opportunity that you could have easily avoided had the game not mistook an "attack" click for a "movement" click. Fortunately, the second game is much more forgiving. Similarly, any aerial attack (such as the Hydrosophist's Hail Strike) can be blocked by ceilings. It makes perfect sense, but still frustrating for those accustomed to using the abilities.
  • Cursed surfaces are easily the most annoying feature of combat, and how they tie into the blessing mechanic also sucks. To summarize, every surface has three variants- a "normal" variant, a "blessed" variant, and a "cursed" variant. Normal surfaces don't do anything aside from their base effects, while blessed and cursed variants provide beneficial effects and negative effects respectively. For example, normal fire hurts everything inside of it by applying a burning debuff, cursed fire applies a variant of that debuff that cannot be washed off, and blessed fire heals you and provides immunity to frost damage. All well and good, except creating a blessed surface is, on a point-by-point basis, extremely inefficient. Not only does it cost a Source point, which are comparatively rare and better spent elsewhere, but it also costs AP, making it even more costly. On top of this, blessing a cursed surface doesn't make it blessed; it reverts it to a "normal" surface, meaning it must be blessed twice. Meanwhile, enemies in the game curse surfaces extremely easily - sometimes by their mere presence. The player will struggle to keep surfaces simply un-cursed, much less keep a surface blessed for any length of time. Cursed surfaces are additionally difficult to remove any other way apart from Bless (cursed fire cannot be doused with water, for example). Therefore most players give up trying to bless or get rid of them and just try to avoid them or tank through them. It's telling that Bless is so useless that some of the most popular mods in the game rework it by making it free to cast during combat.
  • Summoners in multiplayer. They have to use multiple abilities to summon adds - which makes their turns take FOREVER.
  • The Loremaster skill on enemies can become this. How it works is that an enemies' relative knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses is governed by their Loremaster skill, which scans you and lists your attributes and what damage types you are strong or weak against. This does allow for some Artificial Brilliance in enemies specifically targeting your weaknesses, but it becomes extremely annoying if you have an Undead character. In-universe, covered Undead appear as whatever race they're disguised as with basically no way to tell that they're skeletons underneath. However, your attribute list still displays your weakness to healing magic, meaning enemies will know that healing you will somehow damage you despite not knowing you're Undead. This can seriously break any kind of Undead frontline fighter build, since you'll wade into battle ready to tank only to get torn to shreds by the enemy casters healing you to death. Much like the issues with Bless above, one of the most popular mods for the game is one that turns the Loremaster skill way down (except on certain enemies like Wizards) to prevent this, as it seems that every enemy in the game is completely clairvoyant about who is and isn't Undead.
  • Two words: Source Vampirism. The further in the game you get, the more enemies you encounter who use this ability on you to steal your hard to obtain Source points, mostly Black Ring enemies and demons. Bonus points for when your Maddened or Charmed teammates use it on each other. While there is some tactical wisdom in possibly preventing you from using Sourcery (although they'll often do it late in a fight whereas Source skills are best used early) and for a few powering their own abilities, it tends to come off as a big middle-finger to the player for the enemies to be using skills that specifically limit scarce player resources rather than providing immediate tactical advantage. You'll soon miss fighting the likes of the Magisters who have no such Source talents.
  • Deathfog. A cloud that causes instant death to any living being. The only reliable way to remove it is via the Tornado spell from the Aerothurge tree. Otherwise, it's a no-go zone.
  • There are so many traps in this game that it's pretty much vital to bring as many trap disarming kits, or simply soldier through the pain in moderation. However, your teammates are a bit too cautious to consider the latter. Explosive traps such as mines can be shot with a ranged weapon, substance-creating traps cannot.
  • Rewards for completing quests. You get some specific gear, and then get a choice of one item from 3-4 options. Sound good? Well, you can only compare the stats of the items against what you're wearing for the main character. Thinking about one of the armor pieces, jewelry or weapons for one of your other three characters? Hope you remember the stats of what they're wearing off the top of your head.
  • It's really difficult to figure out where the quests are. There's no way to find any that you haven't triggered, as markers only exist for quests that have been started, for the next steps needed to be taken. Finding quests just flat-out falls into Guide Dang It! territory.
• Scrappy Weapon: Most weapon types fare well in their departments. Some...not so much.
  • Wands. Meant to be the magical equivalent of bows, but doesn't deal nearly as much damage. Spells don't have weapon requirements unlike the Huntsman abilities that do require bows, and the Staff comes with a projectile attack skill on its own (it does have a cooldown, but one that's so quick that it's basically irrelevant).
  • Shields. Granted, they do provide extra armor in both categories and the Throw Shield skill is pretty handy for mages who could use a physical attack, but Tanks in general are usually irrelevant in this game due to the lackluster taunt abilities and the AI's general indifference to aggro. The hand that carries a shield is much better invested into carrying another weapon. Throw Shield also faces competition from abilities like Mosquito Swarm and Infect, Necromancer skills that deal physical damage. Though it has a very quick cooldown and is in many ways a Game-Breaker in of itself
  • Spears. While in theory, they wouldn't be too different from other two-handed weapons such as Axes, Maces, and Swords, while having a slightly longer reach, Spears require Finesse mastery to be used. Given that the typical warrior/knight would be focusing mainly on Strength for armor and weapon checks, alongside damage boosts and inventory space, Spears tend to get the shaft when it comes to selection. And no, there aren't any two-handed weapon skills that use the Finesse stat, unlike Daggers and Bows.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: You start off the story in the lowest way possible: As a prisoner on a ship that soon gets shipwrecked, only to find yourself at a prison camp, donning a Slave Collar that deprives you of using Source powers (not that you have the energy to use them anyway). Once you escape Fort Joy, the game gradually reaches its apex and options for progression start opening up.
• Special Effect Failure: If an NPC dies close to a wall, sometimes they might fall at an angle which makes it look like they are lying on a surface in mid-air.
  • Beast has a very nice beard, and while it looks alright in-game (due to the fact the dialogue isn't done with the characters "talking"), but during his intro video, it's rendered as a stiff piece attached to his chest, much like in Dragon Age: Origins with their beardy-dwarves.
• Squick:
  • Eating disgusting foods or body parts all the time. Especially since the body parts entirely vanish, implying that your elf ate *the entire limb* or torso.
  • Having sex with or as an undead. One NPC will actually say he hopes you're joking if you choose to say undead are the best lovers.
• That One Boss:
  • Bishop Alexandar, one of the final bosses of act one. For starters, he and his crowd appear at level eight. It's very easy to reach him by level five, six, or seven. He always gets initiative, wipes through your magic armour fast which allows you to be chain-frozen until you're dead, has the ability Nether Swap which can seriously mess up with your tactical positioning, has a geist who has massive movement, and what's more, another boss spawns.
    • Thankfully, the game gives you a summon cat ability that lets you trick the enemies into walking out to fight you one by one, along with tricking them into having the other boss appear, which makes them fight among themselves.
  • Magister Jonathan (or Kari, if one goes to a specific house before crossing the Paladin Bridge and kills Jonathan on the spot), who is fortunately an optional boss, but he/she will not go down without a fight. The main threat isn't from him/herself, but the blob-voidlings who appear in two waves in rather large numbers. They move slowly and cause the fight to go longer than it needs to. What's more, it's also an Escort Mission - even though the NPC you must protect (for the best possible outcome of the related quest) is smart, he can still end up getting killed by Geo Effects or decay through no fault of your own. On anything higher than Explorer, the fight is an absolute nightmare and players rely a lot on Save Scumming. And to top things off, the battle involves a lot of cursed fire. As in, an entire screen's worth and then some. Necrofire as far as the eye can see. Any lower-end computers that might be able to render the rest of the game with no issues will start chugging, with framerates low enough to count.
  • The Voidwoken scarecrows on Reaper's Coast. The main encounter boss has a permanent, unremovable, passive fear aura that will instantly fear a party member if their magic armor goes down, which effectively takes them out of the battle completely until the boss is defeated. The status cannot be cured as long as the member has no magic armor, because the fear aura is a continuous effect and will immediately reapply before your turn ends, even removing buffs like Clear-Minded to do so. And surprise, the boss comes with quite a few followers who are all extremely capable of stripping away magic armor in just a turn or two. Equipment with high magic armor values is usually reserved for mages, but the boss has exceptionally high magic armor, allowing it to take plenty of hits from the only party members that can resist being Feared for long. A reasonable conclusion would be that the best thing to do is to blitz the boss with your strongest melee attacks right from the start... But the scarecrow has high evasion and spends its first two turns using Uncanny Evasion (+90% evasion) and Evasive Aura (the same thing but also applying to allies), making it impossible to hit without preparing a very specific skill to counter it.
  • A late game boss (who can be skippable, but usually isn't) named Linder Kemm. While it seems like a simple "kill these enemies", he hops in, is probably one or even two levels above you and, since the game tells you that Arhu must survive the fight, will go right for him and kill him. What's more, those flunkies that had appeared have one purpose and that's to make your life a living hell by cursing the ground, sucking away all your source points, throwing status debuffs at you... all while he deflects all projectiles and lights you on fire.
  • The other equivalent to the above example, Isbeil, starts the fight with a height advantage against you, after torturing your party in a poison-filled chamber. You'll need to teleport your whole team to her level first, and she and her henchmen don't screw around. Complicating matters is the boxes of Deathfog, which, when broken, will release the insta-kill gas, prohibiting movement in those areas for the living, unless one has the foresight to bring the Tornado ability along. This hazard presents no danger to the enemy, as they are undead.
  • Related to That One Level below, the fight with the illusions of Bishop Alexander, Malady, Windego, and the Red Prince can end up being this, even if you know what you're supposed to be doing, which is destroying the eight or so Black Mirrors scattered around the arena in somewhat difficult to reach places. While the fight is only of average difficulty for the bosses, especially starting out with only three of them, the difficulty will ramp up after you've blown through some of your best abilities to take an enemy out quickly only to find them respawning the next round at full health due to any remaining Black Mirrors. Said mirrors only have 36 HP, but are immune to most area of effect damage and have absurdly high damage resistance of about 99% or so. The enemies will also teleport you away from the mirrors, and use spells like Madness, Taunt, and Charm to force you to lose control of the characters attempting to smash the mirrors. If you don't know the mechanics of the fight, especially since it's not obvious what's going on, you will quickly find yourself dead. The easiest way to get through the fight is to stay on the platform you first appear on and used archery to destroy all of the mirrors before any of the enemies appear, then run like hell to the exit.
  • The crucified corpse of Alice Alisceon, found on an incinerated peninsula north of the Cloisterwood, is an optional bossfight notorious for one reason; she will always open combat with the spell Burning Anger, an amped-up fireball entirely capable of delivering a One-Hit Kill to the entire party if they're too bunched up. She's also a top-tier boss for the area that poses a challenge for even a fully leveled up party (and especially dangerous to solo runs or Barrelmancer sets, as she has 10 Retribution, meaning she reflects half the damage taken), to the point that the most manageable way to deal with her is to lure her to the nearby Level 20 Jahan for a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• That One Level:
  • One section of the quest "Shadow over Driftwood" causes the party to get outnumbered by voidlings, and then dragged off and forcefully split up. When the party tries to reconnect, they will be harassed by voidlings - which can be very bad when they corner the Squishy Wizard or a Fragile Speedster rogue. The level layout is so unintuitive and mazelike that most players just exploited the pyramids to teleport instantly to other party members and exploit flight or teleportation abilities to cross gaps, rather than find all the keys like they were intended to.
  • On The Ropes is a rather tough quest found in the Blackpits. It's main gimmick is that dozens of oil voidlings will spawn, spreading oil all over the place and lighting the entire fighting area ablaze. Then they bleed and add necrofire to the mix, which is just painful to deal with. The final wave of voidlings are fire based too, and will keep the oil blaze alight as long as they sit in it. While all of this is manageable, the real challenge is that you have to protect someone the entire time, which can be absolutely impossible because his A.I loves to run headfirst into the flaming voidlings in the final phase. It's telling that the easiest way to complete this quest is by using the Good Bad Bugs related to conversation by teleporting the guy away from the field entirely, thereby skipping the entire encounter.
  • The quest "The Consulate," especially if you don't have the Red Prince with you. If you enter the building you immediately enter combat with respawning enemies, and there's little to indicate what you're actually supposed to do there unless you scout ahead with the camera and notice the portal a few rooms over. That leads to an arena with more respawning enemies in the forms of fake versions of Alexander, Windego, Malady, and the Red Prince. The only way to progress is destroying the mirrors they respawn from, which are scattered around the edges of the area, and the enemies will make your life a living hell by teleporting, dominating, and taunting your team members when you really need to keep control of them. Then you're forced into two more fights with Brahmos the Dreamer and Sadha, if you don't have the persuasion points to get past them without the Red Prince.
• Tearjerker:
  • For those with Pet Pal, Act One gives you a bear cub not too far from a dead bear.
  • To say nothing of the source hounds, when you realise just what they went through. It's one big Kick the Dog for the Magisters.
  • Near the bear you can find a Magister who was the Sole Survivor of an Undead attack, having his eyes clawed out in the process. If you're honest with him about being a Sourcerer, he'll immediately demand you submit yourself to his custody. And the worst part is he is utterly convinced its as much for your own good as everyone else's.
  • Explaining what "dead" means to a source hound waiting for its slaughtered master to wake up.
    • Then having to explain to a few kids who were waiting for their friend to return... after finding out their friend was eaten by a shark.
  • Outside the tavern in Driftwood, there's an elf who was fired from the Magisters for being an elf, after having dedicated his entire life to it. He's trying to prove himself by catching the Magister killer, which you can help him with, but if you've already done it, he'll blame himself for being a worthless elf.
  • By Cloisterwood, there's an unmasked Undead who sells books. Talking to her reveals her backstory: She was a magister, unwillingly turned what her order considered an abomination when she was burned alive alongside her beloved (and magical) books. She gives you a quest to give her a Corpse Explosion skillbook, and the quest log outright states that she intends to use it on herself.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Of all the origin characters, Beast feels a little underutilized, but only in the original version. Compared to other characters, Beast can feel like he's "Along for the ride", somewhat like Fane. But unlike Fane, who has a very important role in the backstory, Beast has a rather mundane goal and a lot of his unique interactions are either missable or are done within the first couple hours of act two. (Meaning the rest of Act Two and just about all of act three has Beast following you along, while the other characters are getting leads for their quests.) Definitive Edition fixed this - giving Beast more conversations, and adding proper foreshadowing.
• Unexpected Character: As any fan of the series can tell you, nobody expected Lucian, the protagonist of Divine Divinity to appear, much less be one of the Big Bads.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Windego. She is one of three people you can rescue with a Swornbreaker - of which two exist in the game. It seems as if she was intended to come off as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, but she just comes off as an annoyingly unnecessary character who was barely worth the experience you get for killing her multiple times for the role she plays. Very few players have ever decided to rescue her with the Swornbreaker, just because Almira and Sadha are much more deserving.
  • The player hardly gets to see any sympathetic side to the Magisters during the prologue and Act 1, when they're keeping you locked up in a death camp until it's your turn to be "cured." Later acts try to walk this back a bit and convince you that most of the Magisters are just ordinary people doing their jobs and trying to keep innocent people from being eaten by Voidwoken, and Arx further tries to drive up the sympathy by showing them on the losing end of a civil war against the Paladins, started over the clandestine actions of Dallis, which most of the rank-and-file didn't know about. Given that even the "ordinary" Magisters are still only too happy to abuse their authority over anyone who even looks at them funny, as well as every scene in the Blackpits, it falls a little flat, and makes it hard to muster any sort of feeling other than "if their name isn't Delorus, or aren't part of the expedition on the Nameless Isle where they're surprisingly reasonable, who cares?"
• The Woobie:
  • Saheila the Blind Seer was driven from the elf homeland by the deathfog attack, is incarcerated in Fort Joy, and can be found in all four Acts if you bail her out of trouble in each previous one. In Act 4, if Sebille has followed her instructions, she learns that Saheila is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, planning for Elvenkind to expand relentlessly at the expense of the other races.
  • Isla's happiest day of her life was suppose to be her wedding day. Instead, Voidwoken killed the guests at the wedding, the cake was trapped with explosives and the groom married her only for the money, having planned to kill Isla's father for the inheritance. Before the end of the day, the poor girl was left in a inconsolable sobbing mess.

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