Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General What determines special arrow damage?

So I am trying to make a build that uses special arrows but is not actually an archer. Basically, it would be a mage who uses special arrows for extra CC/elemental damage options when the relevant mage spell is on cooldown. I imagine this would be less of a problem at the end of the game, but I find it tough relatively early on to constantly have a good CC/elemental damage option at my disposal when I need it.

This would not be a particularly viable build if I needed to splash a ton of points in dexterity to make if effective. However, I was thinking that I do not really need to a for a few reasons:

- It seems to me that special arrows always hit. I might be wrong, but that's what it seems like. Moreover, even if the targeted ones do not always hit, many of the best ones will be aimed at the ground anyways, so accuracy is not an issue.

- The AP cost of special arrows does not seem to be affected by anything. Thus, you don't lose anything by not having high dexterity.

- One aspect of special arrows is sometimes that they do a certain percent of normal damage. Dexterity does not directly affect normal damage. Instead it seems that it only indirectly affects bow damage by determining what bow you can equip. However, that initial damage is not really the main point of special arrows; they only do a percent of normal damage, so the overall effect of using a worse bow is lessened.


This leaves two big questions though:

1. What determines how much elemental damage an arrow does? For instance, a fire arrow has a burning effect and a poison arrow has a poison effect. What determines how much damage those effects do each turn?

Is it based on the original attack's base damage? Is it a separate calculation just based on your dexterity? Is it based on your crafting level when you made the arrow (doubtful)? Is it based on your character's level (also doubtful)?

I imagine it is probably based on the original attack's base damage. In that case, using special arrows on a low dexterity character becomes more harmful to damage.


2. How does dexterity affect status effect percentages. For instance, if you have a low intelligence, your spells will have a lower chance of succeeding in applying a status effect. They might have a base of 100% chance of success, but with low intelligence, that might actually be 70%. How big the penalty is is based on how high a level spell it is. So you might have little penalty on a low level spell, but a huge one on a high level spell.

Do special arrows have any analogous effect? It would make sense that dexterity would affect the chance to hit the status effect. However, special arrows do not seem to have a level in the way that a spell does, so I am not sure how that would work. And i've been led to believe that special arrows are stuck at their base percentages, which would ultimately be bad compared to a mage's spells, but is something of a windfall for a character with low dexterity.

I believe special arrows scale as a % of your normal damage.
Dexterity does not affect your damage with bows. Your damage is determined by the bow you're using, +10% damage for every rank of Bow Skill.
Dexterity only affects what bows you can equip, and your chance of hitting with Bows (Perception can also be important for chance to hit with bows).
Special arrows don't do very much damage, period. You use them for their effects.

I'm not sure if special arrows' % chance of inflicting status improves with Dexterity. I do not believe so, but not certain.

I know most of them don't do much damage, but poisoncloud arrows can do a pretty large amount of damage, and you can essentially make an endless number of them if you have an ooze barrel. It's a shame that the normal damage likely affects the poison damage over time, then.

Overall, though, you are right that it is about the effects. And if the chance to create the effect is not affected by dexterity, then that essentially means that someone who put ZERO points in dexterity could actually use special arrows pretty effectively, no?

I suppose dexterity may affect the arrow's chance to hit at all (and if it doesn't hit then it cannot apply the effect), but my impression was that special arrows are essentially like spells; they don't miss; they just might fail to apply the effect.



In my mind, this makes special arrows a pretty good early-game option for any character. Early in games, the 100% chance of success special arrows have is still real good. Meanwhile, you won't have enough spells or other skills such that you aren't often on cool down with the CC spells/skills you want to use. And you don't actually have to invest any attribute points to be able to use them virtually as effectively as a dexterity-focused character. This is especially true very early on, where your inability to use anything but low-level bows is less bad since you don't have access to much better bows. Furthermore, early on, other skills won't have much lower AP costs yet, so the set AP costs for special arrows looks fine in comparison.

The only negative is that they cost a fair bit. But I find that money is not much of an object in this game, even early on, and you can craft a lot too, especially using barrels. For instance, at level 3, I was able to have 14 fire arrows, 7 slowing arrows, 5 Stormcloud arrows, 9 poison arrows, 15 silver arrows, 10 knockdown arrows, 4 poisoncloud arrows, 8 stunning arrows, 2 static cloud arrows, 1 water arrow, 3 smokescreen arrows, 1 freezing arrow, 1 cursing arrow, and 1 arrow of ignorance. That is 81 special arrows super early on.

You are correct.
The arrow can never miss. Hence it is extremely beneficial for Warrior/Rogue to carry a bow in early game to help out while the mages blow up stuff from 15m.

Even a few bosses are trivial once hit with Knockdown arrows!
Oh tip:
If you want to know the dmg of the special arrow.
Un-equip your bow and mouseover the special arrow on your hotbar.
It will show the % of Bow dmg it will inflict!
So crossbow users definitely have an advantage over bow in this dept!