Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks [Help] Planning an "elemental shaman" style toon

Hi guys,

I am looking for some help planning out stat-raises for a caster who uses a shield and armor. Like...barebones shield and armor.

I was thinking 1 armor/1 shield and ending up with maybe 2/2 or 3/3 by the end of the game. Just enough to sort of give him some beef to be a front-line caster.

Thinking of starting w/ 1-pt Man At Arms and leaving it, just to make benefit from Thick Skin talent. Other talent being Far Out Man.

This will not be Glass Cannon or Lone Wolf. Sort of just want my main character to be a caster, but a caster that can stand in front of my full-spec ranger.

Just looking for ideas! Thanks

You can have up to 4 party members + 1 summon/party member, so that giving heavy armor to a caster is rather unnecessary. My Warrior wearing full Plate Armour only had 189 Armour (230 if I would have boosted Armour Specialist to 7) at the end of the game while the mage in robes still had 127.
Don't use the Thick skin talent - even with 5 levels in Man at Arms it is still only a small bonus.

If your int is going to be much higher than your str, you'll only be able to use low level str armour / shield. At which point high level int armour will likely have the same armour with better bonuses.

So if you want to do it that way, it's probably better to have good str and int.

You can make a 'front-line' mage (with no strength/armour). High con, water of life, shields, touch spells, become air, elemental absorption, very tanky. This doesn't even require that much int (just enough to cast the shields without an AP penalty).

But 8 str / lots of int probably isn't so worthwhile unless you're using low level man-at-arms skills.

TL;DR
I don't really think it's worth having LOW strength for armour, but should be viable with no/mid/high strength.

If you want to invest heavily into Strength (or use a lot of STR gear), there is Nullify Resistances, which lowers the enemies resistances vs everything (including physical damage) by 50% and can even reduce them to negative values.

Thanks for the replies!

Sounds like the consensus is that if I am going to wear armor or use a shield then I should invest into STR and make a hybrid