Divinity: Original Sin 2 - daft question

[bazzabear]

I backed this game, promptly forgot about it because I was trying to complete the first one (which I never did) before I started it, and then remembered it again recently and dug out the email to find my key.

So I'm coming to it rather late!

Anyway, the question is this:

Am I missing something, or is it all but impossible to avoid damaging your own characters when using any kind of magic or projectile?

if I've got a melee character next to the enemy, there's almost nothing I can do to the enemy without it spreading to my own character. Burn, poison, shock. And it doesn't seem to be just if they happen to be standing in a puddle of oil/water/blood either.

 

[Tombstone]

Yeah thats the nature of AoE spells in D&D-like gameworlds, you spray fire about and an ally is stood within it they are going to get hit. Sometimes you can look at the tooltip for a spell and it might say "enemies" rather than "all" or "characters", in which case it would only hit enemies but most of the time friendly fire is a thing. It requires a bit more positional planning in combat.

 

[bazzabear]

I'm not even talking about AoE spells!

I'm talking about things like wand attacks or searing daggers. Stuff like that which, from the description, hits only an individual target.

I'm assuming it's when the target and your character are considered to be touching. So maybe I could try - when approaching to melee range - only going just close enough for my weapon to reach (0.8m for a dagger I think). But the game itself defaults to right next to an enemy to use a melee attack. And any enemy who moves to attack me will similarly be right up against me.

A further case in point is the spells which are 'enemy only'. Often they too will end up damaging my character because of the touching issue.


Not quite the same subject - but trying to find an occasion to use contagion to self-heal my undead (Fane) is impossible. There will always be something around that turns it into a fire/poison explosion and ends up hurting him instead!

 

[Tombstone]

I'm not even talking about AoE spells!

I'm talking about things like wand attacks or searing daggers. Stuff like that which, from the description, hits only an individual target.

I'm assuming it's when the target and your character are considered to be touching. So maybe I could try - when approaching to melee range - only going just close enough for my weapon to reach (0.8m for a dagger I think). But the game itself defaults to right next to an enemy to use a melee attack. And any enemy who moves to attack me will similarly be right up against me.

A further case in point is the spells which are 'enemy only'. Often they too will end up damaging my character because of the touching issue.


Not quite the same subject - but trying to find an occasion to use contagion to self-heal my undead (Fane) is impossible. There will always be something around that turns it into a fire/poison explosion and ends up hurting him instead!

Yeah that will be because of a small AoE effect on the spell, for example, Searing Daggers has the following attribute - "1m explode radius" , thats why a very close friendly is getting caught

 

[bazzabear]

Aha! Hadn't spotted that one! I wonder if the wands have the same - or if I've conflated different effects happening (e.g. maybe the wands have only happened when the enemy was on a surface the effect interacted with - but because this has been happening all the time with different attacks, I haven't spotted the pattern.)

Thanks for the tip, I will watch more closely when I'm next playing.