Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Wizards are Broken.

But how can "Wizards" be broken in a Classless System?

Wizards are predisposed to take advantage of a "loophole" in the system.

That "loophole" being that a single stat is what 5 separate ability lists depend on. In this case Intelligence.

By level 8 I was 2 in Aero, Hydro, Pyro, Geo, and Witcho. This gave me access to five spells from each school. I only selected those that really shined and ignored the rest.

My Knight was a spectactor through most of my leveling. In the end I killed them and just wandered around trying to collect ever increasingly large numbers of citizens to slay.

Something must be done.

To achieve those two ranks in every school, that was 15 ability points, or slightly less than 25% of the total ability points you can hope to achieve in the entire game. You are not going to be able to max out all five schools of magic. You can learn higher level spells, but they will come with AP penalties the greater the difference between your ability rank and the rank you need to use them without penalty.

So yes, you can learn a bunch of relatively low-level spells, but higher-level ones will require you to save up much more AP than it would if you specialized in them, and saving AP will drop your damage output per turn, and your warrior will be able to fight each turn.

That's the theory, anyway. It's quite true that we have not tested out high-level play in the beta, and you may indeed be proven right.

Yes, something must be indeed done....to make the Wizard even more powerful and awesome. What you describe is how things should be....a knight wouldn't realistically be able to do anything against a mage before being turned into a pile of ashes, molten armor and bones. Stealth could be the only skill that non-wizards could realistically be expected to use against a wizard.

EDIT: and Stabbey brought an interesting point.....the Wizard could be made more awesome by being able to max out all schools of magic and use all spells without penalty. May the Wizard class become even more awesome....if Larian won't do it I'm sure mods will come to the rescue since in essence wizards should be all powerful and only be in any real danger when against other wizards.

I would like to see more about the attributes needed for skills and such. So far the only attribute problem I've seen is not having enough STR to wear some armor. But then I've only been playing a Ranger and a Cleric.

I recall even TES games (prior to Skyrim) had issues with attributes assigned to skills, but at least they did try to even them out some so one attribute wasn't helping more skills than other attributes. If DOS is using a similar system then it is easy to break it.

Every game that separates elements runs into this trap - before you even kick a ball you've got 4 spellcaster trees to worry about.

They should've combined Fire and Earth, and Aero/Hydro and added a 2nd Str tree (taken some man at arm spells and put them into a Paladin tree or whatnot) to achieve a better balance.

Then there would be:
Man at Arms/Paladin for Str
Marksman/Scoundrel for Dex
Magma/Storm/Witchcraft for Int (Magma being fire/earth, Storm being hydro/aero)

Had they done this, you'd be in a better place to balance the initial spell offerings and subsequent spell fields, so each had a similar number per level - creating better balance between attributes.

You're also a total squish monster. No points in willpower? None in body building? You're susceptible to a huge number of status effects that result in you being completely useless. In a mage duel you will lose as he resists your effect and then charms you under his control or knocks you down in a pool of fire. Or freezes you. And as mentioned you aren't a specialist and will never become level 5 in all of those abilities due to scaling costs. If you end up wanting to develop defensive abilities as you lose to archers/rogues with crowd control your spell casting will slip further behind as you become spread too thin. You rely on teammates for communication, crafting, etc. You're a mage and nothing more...which is a fine archetype!

The game is nearing a very good balance between the advantages of versatility (More situational offense, more variety of actions) vs. the advantages of specialization (Playmaking higher tier skills, more room for utility/world interaction skillsets, defenses)

There's a tradeoff in all things.

I think the main problem is the freedom in the game. There are too big differences between playing styles.

If one is playing 'normal' with hybrid characters and another one is crazy killing every NPC and has single class characters, the second gamer will have much more XP and can have stronger characters.
Theoretically.

However the RPG experience is different in both cases.
In such freedom the game cannot track how people play, and cannot dynamically balance during gaming. This would be but nice!

The keyword in your statement being "realistically", right?

I'm not going to max out all five schools but I don't *need* to.

First... you can get items with bonuses to schools... and second a number of the spells are incredibly beneficial even at low level.

Blind can stop bosses dead in their tracks. The strongest boss I've encountered in the game was brought to its knees while blinded. Teleport is *insanely* powerful for a spell you can get at first level. With a high enough intelligence you'll be able to cast it every other round, possibly every round.

You need to add Charisma based casting to divide up the schools.

I can argue that Blind is more of a case for balancing spells AP costs, cooldowns, granting bosses higher saves or occasionally outright immunity.

Your claim about Teleport is exaggerated. I made a 5 Int and 10 Int char. the 5 INT char's Teleport had a 10 turn cooldown. The 10 INT char's Teleport had a 7 turn cooldown. So you are right that there is an undocumented cooldown reduction for points into INT.

If 5 Attribute points only gives a 3 turn cooldown reduction, then you'll need 15 INT to reduce the teleport cooldown to four turns, and 20 INT to cast it every other round. I don't believe it'll even be possible to even get as high as 20 INT. To get close to that high, you'll have to sacrifice all other attribute points, which means you'll be very slow and have only the base HP, which will leave you very vulnerable to being hit - especially if you take Glass Cannon to compensate for your low speed.

I'm currently playing a lvl 2 character with 14 Intelligence. It won't be that hard.