A chicken with the name of a Jimi Hendrix's song, Larian respects nothing. But something strange is happening to me : I start to get used to the fully voiced dialogues. Comes to enjoy it actually. English is not my mother tongue, so I'm less demanding in that matter but still, some voices are good. Well... animal's mostly.
Not the narrator though, and I still don't get the necessity of a voiced narrator anyway.
On another note I really struggle to find a skill that synergize well with necromancy.
Summoning or warfare for life steal.
Summoning seems to have
terrible synergy with Necromancy. Since you can only keep one summon up at a time (a really shitty way to balance things, truth be told), no matter the source, you lose out on some of the best aspects of Necromancy, and I don't think there's even any Necromancy-influenced Infusion for your Incarnate - there's Electric, Fire Poison, Water, Acid, Cursed Electric, Ice and Necrofire - the last of which has nothing to do with Necromancy, but is Pyromancy-with-Source. And if you want to put up one of the corpse summons that goes and explodes itself, poof goes your Incarnate.
Summoning is the only skill that really gets a capstone, incentivizing pumping it at the expense of everything else (really, capstones are almost universally a bad idea for this one reason), and Necromancy doesn't really synergize well with anything.
One of my first ideas was to make a Summoning/Necromancy build with the Leech talent, Mosquito Swarm and Blood Sucker, but Necromancy synergizing so incredibly poorly with Summoning along with the fact that Leech removing the blood from the ground (and thus making either Blood Sucker or itself redundant) was the reason I didn't.
There's also only very few cross-skill/synergy skill crossovers, such as between Aerothurgy 1/Necromancy 1 for Raining Blood, or Aerothurgy 3/Necromancy 3 for Blood Storm. Necromancy seem to have been largely forgotten in D:OS2, unfortunately, and whereas all other spell schools get neat crossovers, Necromancy gets basically nothing, and what little it gets is inconsistent. It also doesn't help that it's initial lineup of skills are extremely lackluster, and the ones that aren't are extremely circumstantial.
It also suffers from some conceptual issues where on one hand it destroys corpses (Raise Bloated Corpse, Raise Bone Widow) but also benefits from corpses still on the ground (Bone Cage). It doesn't seem to know if it wants to support melee (Blood Sucker, Bone Cage, Decaying Touch, Living on the Edge, Death Wish, etc.) or support casters/do debuffing (Summons, Raining Blood, Silencing Stare, etc.) A lot of the buffs are potentially strong, but costs so much to use and last for such a short time that even if the situation arises for where they'd be useful; Death Wish relies on the common trope of converting the amount of damage you've suffered to damage you do, which is almost always a bad idea, but it only lasts for 2 bleeding (literally) round,
and it does damage to you. Last Rites allows you to resurrect someone, but it charges 3 AP for the pleasure of
fucking killing yourself and it sets Potion status.
It's sad, too, because Necromancy in D:OS1 had a lot of cool skills, such as Drain Willpower, Mute, Rapture, Destroy Summon, Vampiric Touch, Lower Resistances, Oath of Desecration, Malediction, Death Punch, Horrific Scream, Invulnerability, Soulsap, and even Resurrect - no strings attached, no need to drop your entrails on the floor. It had a clear niche of single-target buffing/debuffing with summons on the side, and that's also why I think that Necromancy has suffered the most from the changes to the game, and lost it's conceptual niche. With the armor system and the binary effects, there's simply no room for debuffs of the necromancer's type - not only would armor defend against it, but many of the debuffs dealed with reducing the defenses of the opponent; types of defenses that simply do not exist anymore. Meanwhile, the summoning focus was entirely usurped by Summoning, and in the interest of "muh balance", the limit to 1 summon ensures that there's no real potential for overlap, despite the fact that
some Necromancy skills could be useful for Summoning (Living on the Edge).
And while Necromancy didn't really get any synergy skills in D:OS1 either, they simply weren't a thing. It's absence in D:OS2 is remarkable, because all the others have support for eachother, but Necromancy is left dead in the water. I've previously lamented the lack of overlap between Scoundrel, Warfare and Huntsman, but Necromancy gets a double dose of this. It almost feels like Necromancy is the opposite of Polymorph. Polymorph goes with everything, even if it gets no synergy skills with martial schools. Necromancy doesn't really go with anything. It almost feels like everything else got a final pass during the last stages of development, making sure that they conformed to certain standards (such as how every elemental school of magic gets synergy skills at specific ranks with all the martial schools, or how Summoning and Polymorph gets synergy skills with the elemental magics, etc.), but Necromancy was somehow forgotten, or somehow placed in it's own inconsistent category.
...
Also the voice acting sucked.
I will never forgive them for what they did to Murphy, the dog. We loved that part in D:OS1, but when me and the GF were going to play the game again in D:OS1:EE, we were honestly pretty hyped about playing out those scenes again because Murphy was such an awesome character and the whole thing made us smile, and the D:OS1:EE treatment had completely ruined the character. It was complete and utter trash. We never did finish that playthrough, sadly, and while it might sound petty and silly, I think we actually just sorta gave up on it after that, and while we made some attempts to continue, we never really dredged enough care from Lake Giveafuck to actually finish it.
It sorta felt like they had taken our favourite character out back and shot it.
I figured full voice acting would force them to economize on words more, and I think the game bears this out. Even if you turn the sound off, the dialogues are more readable than anything in the first game.
I'm having fun, though I'm still in Fort Joy; meanwhile at the Codex:
I think most actually enjoy the game, we just analyze and pick shit apart and discuss the flaws. It's hard to make a meaningful discussion out of the things that are good. That said, I do miss the old dialogues, they felt more engaging. I can see how some people like being just given the facts so they can get on with it, though.
In D:OS2, I think the only characters I care about are the animals, because we've already characterized them as according to their animal nature - all the other characters are largely unengaging voids that are there to shut up and give me loot. With a few exceptions, maybe.
Overall I think the voice-acting is pretty good, though. My issue with voice-acting isn't really that it's wrong or bad, but rather that it's a gargantuan waste of time and money, and that it constricts content creation massively. Larian literally cannot patch in a change in dialogue in order to fix something or add something minor that could be tremendously beneficial to the game without first recording dialogue for it, due to the standard that is set, and I don't even want to think of the number of last-minute additions and polish and potential changes that didn't make it simply because
"Nope, we have no lines for that. Fix the questline with what we have, you can't add an option anymore".
