Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Help/Tips/Tricks Wayfarer tips needed

Hiyas,

I could use help shaping my wayfarer lonewolf PC. I'm concerned that this build effectively has 3 main-ish attributes if I also want to make him a best possible spotter (dex, int, per). If I understand this correctly, If I sacrifice dex, I won't hit shit, If i sacrifice int, I will be restricted to low level buffs in its 2 schools (hydro, geo) and if I gimp perception, I won't spot everything. Considering I also want to make her a glass cannon, I would also need to invest in speed and con (was it 2 additional points in both these attributes or 4?) This makes me think whether this build wouldn't work better if I ditched marksman altogether and just focused on magic and perception. All combos could be achieved through my battle-mage (fire+air) so special arrows wouldn't really be needed. Bug ofc then I wouldn't take full advantage of that high perception...

In short, is it possible to build effective triple attribute wayfarer as described above who would have decent accurate, spot everything and could cast best spells in its 2 schools w/o huge AP cost?

And 1 more thing I noticed wayfarer starts with 1 point in blacksmith which I can't seem to be able to remove (no "-" sign) is that normal?

Thanks for your time!

First and foremost, did you check that wayfarer doesn't start with the Scientist talent? It gives +1 bonus in Blacksmith and Crafting, it doesn't give free attribute points.

Now let's take a look at what each stat impacts (I'm quoting divinity's wiki here):


Now that we saw what each attribute does, let's ask ourselves some questions:

Do you want to use weapons to attack or magic?

If you do want to use weapons, you want to use bows/crossbows? If you do, you will have to invest in dexterity and perception. And you will want to max Expert Marksman to get the talent Quickdraw which lets you attack with a bow using the same amount of ap that a 1-handed weapon uses.

If you want to use magic, you can ignore dexterity and str and will want to raise intelligence a lot, but you will still want to have good perception to detect things (I've read here that 14 perception is able to detect everything).

Constitution is mandatory since you're planning to use Glass Cannon, so we can't ignore that, at least 4-5 points will go into this attribute.

Maybe you could get Light Step to reduce the need of perception (it gives 2 bonus to detect traps and secrets, which means you need to spend 2 less attribute points in it).

Speed you can get away with speed 7 or 9 (Glass Cannon will give you a crapload of AP, so you don't need to spend too much here).

Finally, equipment. You can find lots of equipments to boost attributes on vendors or from looting.
Crafting can also help you a lot this regard.

If you don't plan on using Lone Wolf, turn Jahan into a crafter. He starts with Scientist and you only need to reach 3 in Blacksmith and 3 in Crafting (get to 5 using bracers and belts).

Buy every Tormented soul you can find, and craft it onto your weapons. Initially it gives +1 str and +1 dex, but later (lvl 14 if i remember it right) in the game the bonus doubles.

He can craft a belt and an amulet with a Magic Claw to get constitution bonus.
He can craft a Lucky Rabbit Paw Super Ring to get +1 Speed and +Movement.

I hope this helps. Also, stay tuned, more people will probably answer this.

Basicly I would not think to much in classes

From what I understand what you are trying to build is an archer which is able to cast magical spells aswell and will be a glass cannon.

Archers really need dex+per, spellcasters need int+speed and for glass cannon you will need con equal to speed.

It is possible to make this working however due to all the things you need you probably will see the results around level 14+ and a focused mage or archer would probably be a lot better then a hybrid.

From my point of view it is horrible to try and combine a caster with an archer due to the insane amounts of stats you need. So if you are looking for a build that would resemble an arcane archer you might want to consider some things.

Do you want to put the emphasis on casting spells? If yes? Then please make a mage, higher level spells work best with higher ranks in those skills, however when making a mage ignore perception, it is just to useless for them. And most importantly staffs gave high int, is huge spelldamage boost etc while your bow will provide no use whatsoever whenever you're casting a spell.

Do you want to put the emphasis on ranged? If yes? Then please make an archer, archers require a decent amount of dex+per and combined with glass cannon also con+speed. It is fun to play, has great versatility and provides you with a class that actually benefits from having high perception. (Read on as I have recommend a link to get a general idea about the archer.)

If you try to make it a caster archer with glass cannon you will need to maintain 5 out of 6 stat attributes, it is just asking to much if you also want a character capable of excelling at something, by the time it will start working like you want it to you are deffo 14+ if not higher.

Most conflicting thing is that archer benefits hugely from Expert marksman rank 5 ===> then he can buy the quickdraw talent, -1ap per auto attack, making bow attacks 3ap and crossbow attacks 4ap. Expert Marksman abilities aren't that impressive, however they are highly versatile. Thing is that using auto attacks is a very high damage after Act 1. As a caster you want to make sure you have higher ranks in the schools of magic as an archer you will rush to grab expert marksman to 5.

For a pretty versatile archer build I would like to recommend:

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=539712#Post539712

However you asked for a working "wayfarer" build, so I will do my best.

Assuming we are at character creation and the goal is to make a spellcaster with a bow I would recommend the following:

Take: Dex 8, Int 7
Take: Geomancy 1, Scoundrel 1, Aerothurge 1, Hydrosophist 1, withcraft 1
Take: Walk in shadows(scoundrel), Summon spider(Geomancer), Teleport(Aerothurge)
Take: Lone wolf, know it all(caster style), Bully(archer style), Petpal(rp sytle also a bit more xp)

Man, sorry... I give up... anything that I want to do from her on out leads to the character being an archer with a ton a rank 1 spells.

basicly the spells you would want if you did take 8 int are:

Geomancy, Summon spider, bless, boulder bash(bully)

Scoundrel, Walk in shadows, Fast Track, ... self medicate(7), cloak and dagger(10)

Aerothutge, Teleportation, farseer, blitzbolt

Hydrosophist, Rain(Bliztbolt setup for increased % of stun), minor heal, Slow current(bully)

Witchcraft, Oath of desecration, ... ... (take what you want, other stuff requires melee range so contradicting the idea of the build or costs tons of AP)

Pyrokinetic, small fireball, wildfire, flare/summon fire ele or immune to freezing

Most of these spells range from level 1-4 so can all be picked up fairly easily and early, making your character versatile, however you probably want more ranks in fire so small fireball will become better, also more ranks in water to pick up strong regenerate and (piercing) ice shard.

All in all what you want/need and what you can get is fairly hard to achieve and deffo requires the use of the teller of secrets selling you her books as soon as level 4-5. Otherwise your stats/skillpoints will not be able to keep up even with lonewolf.

I assume it was atleast of some help, so goodluck with your build!

With kind regards,

Rashar.

Thanks for your answers. Pretty much confirms my fears that if I want to spot everything, I will have to go either pure class or be limited to cantrips if I mix it up a bit...

I can highly recommend an archer. It is like being the A-team and MacGyver all in one. Not all the 23 different arrow types are good, but having them, crafting them, hoarding/collecting them and every now and then using them was great fun in my playthrough.

And I think I read that your other type of character would be a battlemage and that is imo the strongest character build in the game, so they would also greatly complement eachother. Battlemage is a hybrid class that literally can have the best of both worlds.

Enjoy your character creation!

With kind regards,

Rashar.

In the end I decided to give up marksman because I wanted to take advantage of all the magic schools so I rolled with perceptive witch with pyro/geo/witch to complement my hyro/aero battlemage but now I'm rethinking this. I learned that later on you can trade talents for stat points! Since there aren't that many talents I find useful for my witch, certainly less than for my BM, I could give up on 2, grab the + perception talent and with some gear I could get the needed 14 perception with meager 2 pt investment. So the full-fledged wayfarer is still on the table and it would have kick-ass destructive spells from fire-school, summons from geo and some witchcraft cantrips on top of it... The question is, how it would be best to develop it. I'm thinking about going as I am, train magic, hoard arrows and from mid game start investing into DEX and pick up decent bow. Would that work? Also due to reduced amount of talents, what would be the best picks for such char (considering I may be even convinced to give up glass cannon)?

Giving up glass cannon is most likely in 999/1000 situations the wrong thing to do.

Int users with perception are not very good either since it does not synergize very well, they require speed and later con equal to speed. Perception is a stat you should ignore unless you play an archer, the stuff you miss is not worth it and if you already know where the secrets are you can just sommon a spider (they have pretty high perception). Not sure what you expect to get out of perception 14 but other then thay you can find more rubies and diamonds it is not like you will suddenly find legendary loot. So lootwise perception is neglectible, with 2 characters you don't need more then 6 rubies either and you can find atleast 3 in chapter 1 which can be spotted with the summon spider.

However like I said before if you are an INT class then you want to have a staff since that is more INT which is more damage, lower cooldowns. Archer/Ranger/Marksman is just the worst choise to make into a hybrid.

If you want to get it to work you will need to grab marksman 5, because you want quickdraw, you will need to tons of points into your elemental schools.

If you pick up a bow/dex midgame then you will start of with pretty "bad" chances to hit and relative high costing auto attacks, making your spells 999/1000 allways the better choise to use.

However talents I would consider for spellcaster+bow are: Lone wolf, Bully, Glass cannon, Quickdraw and they all lead to being an archer with magic for backup, the other way is not impossible but just a lot worse. If spells are your main thing then there is no need for a bow since it makes your spells worse, with glass cannon as a mage it is highly likely that you get 18 AP/turn @ level 10. since all you need to spreat it out on is int,con,speed. 18AP with a mage means that stuff will get blasted to bits with a focused mage build, if you equip a bow, you have less int, which means less damage and without quickdraw 2 auto-attacks cost 8AP which is 2AP more then the 6AP costing "standard" caster damage spells like blitzbolt,flare,ice shard,posion dart. A focused archer uses 3AP per shot and can therefore rival a mage in terms of damage around level 10 and a few levels later the damage from the mage does not even come close to that of an archer.

Basicly what I am saying is Archer with backup mage spells, yes it is ok, Mage with a bow is a nay nay imo, because of the immense anti-synergy between the goals and aspects of the two "classes". IF you spread it out over 5/6 stat choises you end with a mediocre character being able to pull of a lot of tricks where a focuses archer or mage would just excell in there area of expertise.

You are thinking of dropping Glass Cannon and that make the character even more out of sync. since then it has a pretty small AP pool and once again when comparing it to a a focused build would mean the focused build would end up obliterating the hybrid. As a "mage" you use Glass cannon for setups that will have it's use in the same round, like rain+blitzbolt+lightingbolt (or frost spells that freeze) or you start of with oath+wildfire on your melee or archer. As an archer you would just CC the whole battleground with an array of special arrows, or you end up killing eveyrthing in sight by sneaking+auto-attack (assuming you have oath of descration+Guerillia, there is not much that does not feel the pain...)

You just want to much on 1 character, if you really want it, use a cheatengine or watch a video of how to unlock teller of secrets @ level 4/5 so you can grab more stat books. But understand that if you spread it to thin, you will become a jack of all trades, master of none, which in real life is a good thing, in the videogames it rarely is.

If you like the spells then stick with a mage and ignore perception, otherwise grab an archer, throw him full of spells and 8 int and enjoy.

With kind regards,

Rashar.

Here comes Rashar to burst my bubble yet again. No really, I'm glad that you (and others) take so much time to explain to us newcomers all the pitfalls. I know for fact that you and everyone else who warns against spreading the stat points too wide is right and I'm wrong to try the exact opposite but we are who we are. I'm a completionist, not a power gamer. I want to use everything, see everything and miss or waste nothing and if I have to make a sacrifice along the way, so be it. That's why I'm so obsessed with perception. That said, naturally I want to gimp myself as little as possible. I was perfectly happy with my witch as a second... yes, I know the high perception doesn't benefit her besides detecting abilities but at the same time it doesn't really gimp her all that much being otherwise pure class, certainly less than it would my battlemage... until I started collecting all those special arrows parts. That's when the wayfarer idea started growing on me again I assume I would have to respec anyway when trading the talents for ability points so when that happens I could reallocate more points into dex. The question is what kind of late-game stats I could realistically expect to have after trading some talents (lonewolf, pet-pal, glass cannon, quick draw and Light Stepper are keepers) I already have bully on my battle-mage.

Skill-wise I would only need to max 2 schools with single point in witchcraft so there would be plenty points left for maxing marksman and even putting a point into scoundrel for some shenanigans. Stats are really my only concern. Certainly I want to hamper damage of my spells as least as possible by not having enough INT. Is there such a thing as primary damaging school? Maybe I could swap the schools around a bit, passing pyro to my BM which would also allow me to abuse self immolation/explosion and let the wayfarer handle healing/summons (that presumably don't get weaker) with hydro/geo. With this school distribution the characters would also synergize better. Only problem with this is that hydro and ranger have some curing spells with same effect that would be kind of nice to have on each character but I guess I could live with that... and it would be also closer to the vanilla idea of Wayfarer. Would this work better than my original idea?

The game is so easy that it basically doesn't matter how you build your characters unless they are just plain terrible. Min/maxing is fun, but hardly even remotely necessary, especially for the second half. So just do whatever you want.

That said, I played a wayfarer mostly focused on Witchcraft and Expert Marksman, with glass cannon. I tended to use spells for buffs, utility, debuffs, and summons ,and I used the bow for damage. There's plenty of non-damage, mostly low level and AP, spells that don't really get much better with more intelligence. So you can throw most points in dex, con, and perception and 3 or 4 in int and you'll be more useful than a plain archer overall. With slows (midnight oil is incredible for that), bully, and oath of desecration, you'll be able to do more damage than a regular archer as well. SUre, you could have another mage do that, or you could have two wayfarers and do more damage.

Well his idea is having a caster with a bow, not an archer with spells Baardvark.

Well gamewise you can practically do anything, you can play a dex 5 archer if you wanted, and yeah from level 14+ wayfarer will be good enough to pull you through any combat. Just make sure to buy all the skillbooks and attribute books from the teller of secrets every level up and preferably get her before you turn level 6.

I am a min/max type of player upto a certain point.

If you want to play a wayfarer regardless of how good/bad it is, then I would say just play it as you want it. I'm not trying to burst your bubble, however you ask for advice so you can get close to the perfect character you see fit, maybe just maybe... you should just play and experience. It's not like I had the perfect setup, talents and everything on my first playthrough. On the first playthrough I played on easy and took what I thought was good and just did my thing. After 3 playthroughs I'm kinda done with the game for now, so im trying to keep en eye on some keen mods.

So yeah if you want the wayfarer just grab what you think is good, and use your stats to fix up "holes" that your equipment can not fill, you will find enough rings and amulets (way too much even imo) that will have a ton of +1 stats on it, like con speed perception and some random other stuff, or amulets with dex int str per etc... so you can close to the gap enough to make it work for sure.

Just make sure that plan out what talents you want and plan accordingly to grab the prerequisites in time. Talents come on 1 3 7 11 15 19 (23) most likely you will grab 7 talents in total.

And you will have a total of 68 points to spend on abilities with lone wolf (49 without) and can devide 15 attribute points from 1-20 (you can get more if you go over 20, but roughly you will reach 20ish on your 1st playthrough, you will miss stuff even with perception 14, I am sure that you will forgot to look at a place here or there unless you use a walkthrough.

However just for completing the game and going 100%, yeah man build that wayfarer if you are fast and get teller of tales @ level 5 then you can even spend an extra stat point and 3 ability points every level (you do have to buy these books for roughly 12,5k gold each, lower if you have better bartering attitude charisma) However without rushing to it, you will be level 8-10 before reaching it still plenty of books to buy to grab the extra stats. You can trade in a talent for 10 ability points and 10 ability points for 2 attribute points. So with this info you should be able to do the math accordingly to what is appropriate for you. On average you probably use 5 talents, get to teller @ level 9 so you can expect to get atleas an extra 12 attributes for roughly 12x12,5k spread over level 9-20 and trading in talents will cost you the talent for the whole game but gets you another 2 per talent. so if the books all go to the wayfarer then he get an average of 16 attribute points more.

I'm pretty sure you liked this answer much better, you might have to do some math yourself and ofcourse try to synergize stats on items with how you are dividing them. You can craft some belts and rings that might be pretty decent till midgame and once you reach level 17 you can even craft rings and belts that grant +2 stats (although at that point there is pretty decent chance you're wearing better.)

Happy building!

Rashar.

I assure you it has never been my intention to build a bow-wielding mage, more like good archer with potent spells. I wanted to max dexterity along with marksman in shortest possible time, ie. through respec and if I had to sacrifice something, it would have been int. That's also why I switched the schools and gave my wayfaress geo and hydro schools which looked more utility oriented to me. But in the end I started building dex from the very beginning. So far it's working fine. Up until now I never lost more than 20% of health in any fight but I imagine it's going to get harder and harder until the lonewolf bonuses truly start to show. As for Teller of tales, that's just seems too cheesy hopefully I won't have too much money so that it doesn't tempt me to deviate from my plan to buy only the 2 books she originally offers.

Now I'm wondering, if it wouldn't be better to pass the witchcraft school to the wayfarer, being it mostly buffs... Maybe I could even teleport some lackeys to her with BM for death-punching... Looking at the abilities, it seems that my BM already has few too many of them to either max or boost very high... armor, bodybuilding, willpower for comeback kid, 2 schools, master at arms and some personality skills while the WF only needs marksman, 2 schools and some crafting/lockpicking... However, I recall reading something about mages with witchcraft being bad choices for crafting... something about a chance to make magical unlock scrolls... so I'm a bit hesitant. Any info regarding this?

Cheers

I don't see any reason why witchcrafting would be bad for crafting. It changes (reduces?) their chance to make magical unlock scrolls? I have no idea if or why that would be the case, but I doubt it. And even if it did, it's not like there's very many things that are hard to unlock. 98% of things can be bashed or have keys lying around somewhere nearby. For that reason, lockpicking is basically useless too. I can think one one chest I couldn't bash and could open with 4 or 5 lockpicking (I think I found it in a dirt pile). Too bad I got crap out of it.

Here's a hint about how to use magical unlock.

If you have intelligence of 8 (or higher) then I would recommend using the withcraft school, oath of desecration is completely insane. Infact with an intelligence of 8 (or higher) I would highly recommend atleast 1 point in every school just for all the great low level spells.

With regards to your crafting and witchcraft question, I do not fully understand. If your desired answer is not present then please ask it again.

As far as crafting goes, witchcraft does not interfere with crafting, however magic unlock is only craftable on scroll since there are no books for it. Personally crafting witchcraft scrolls is pretty great as you can get oath, drain willpower, magic unlock, absorb elements and many more great scrolls like invulnerability.

With kind regards,

Rashar.