Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Unbalanced classes

Hi, i am playing the game on ps4 on local splitscreen and it is a great game, except that the meele classes are not as powerful as the magic ones it became really notorius on the local splitscreen. I have played rpgs my whole life and this is an amazing game but i would like to use a meele type class and not feel useless. Hope you can check it.

Hi Driarenem,
What kind of classes do u play? And how many times did u play on the game (level and stuff)? And what others classes did u play with?

I can maybe give you some tips for it.

Its kind of interesting how you describe it as "classes". There are not really any classes in this game. There are skillsets that mix better together than others, but character creation and progression is very flexible.

I'm pretty sure it's not available on PS4 yet. Are you playing the first one? This forum is for the second one.

Magic classes have a lot more room for overpowered power combinations whereas melee don't.
Magic classes in the current design will always be much better.

You could argue that a fighter with rogue skills could do some serious damage, but for that you need both STR and DEX, while for combining all kinds of crazy spells you still only need INT. So, much more efficient.

A solution should probably be multilayered, but one thing you could start with is to make magic schools incompatible like in D&D (like opposing spheres etc. Water/fire and so on), trying to make sure one lone wizard can't use the best combos by himself

Actually, many scoundrel skills require no FIN to work as intended (ie Adrenalin or Sleep).

In fact, the strongest hitting melee fighter would be pumping STR, two handed, and scoundrel for movement speed, damage bonus, and crit muliplier.....with like a point in Warfare to unlock skills. Then one can just crit with rage and Warlord kill everything

EDIT: Considering ability level only grants increasing bonuses of a certain type and level 1 unlocks ability to learn skills, there's no good reason to not just ignore Warfare on a melee character or be predisposed to scoundrel skills cause you pump the ability up.

I think the main issue with melee is the huge spread of builds that can come with them, and in general the heavier reliance on itemization, when it is a finite and randomized resource.

As an example, you can be a dual wield fighter who uses one handed weapons, and end up with only one handed weapons that give bonus to one handed rather than one handed and dual wield, along with the possibility of the weapon having a bonus to strength, or finesse, which are generally two mutually exclusive attributes as well as getting melee weapon of a type that nobody in the party is specced to use.

Meanwhile magic users only really have to worry about intelligence and memory more or less and will almost always get items that work for them in every situation through the random generation.

Armor choice is also straightforward, as there does not appear to be much of an incentive to use only medium or light armor over heavy armor for melee types, and magic users can just stick to anything that gives magic bonuses.

Well there are a few other issues. The fact that melee characters tank just as well as everyone else (thanks to the fact that armor has no stat or level requirements)... and the fact that being in melee range puts you in perfect range for enemy environmental hazards, Enemies who explode, and other good stuff.

This as well. The itemization...I don't feel that bad about; A correctly geared warrior can train wreck more than a wizard since they're the damage dealers and tanks. But the fact that anyone can use any items detracts alot from the game. A wizard shouldn't be able to tank as much as a warrior...ever, but there's no system in place to prevent it.

Making a tank character is about choosing appropriate talents and equipment. I wouldn't do it in this game, since there aren't any taunts, but that's how you'd do it. Classes are not cookie cutters. This isn't WoW. In fact, classes aren't even real. There are different specs, and the premade ones are named, is all.

I don't know how I feel about class balance right now. Sure, anyone can use any armor. But I feel that that just allows for more diversity. I don't see much problem with a mage wearing scale mail. If he/she wants physical armor for some reason, then that's his/her prerogative, and I don't see much of a reason that they should have to invest in strength or finesse just to be able to use an entire armor type. That would be far too limiting if being a mage meant absolutely no physical armor. As far as mages being overpowered... They can't crit on their spells without Savage Sortilege, meaning no rage benefits for them, they do less damage on their strongest spells than a warrior does in a single click (including Savage Sortilege), and they don't have as much range (or damage potential, for that matter) as a huntsman/marksman. Sure, they have CC. But they have to go through magic armor to do it, and in my experience, that's a lot harder than going through normal armor. Hail Strike, with maxed intelligence and intelligence giving items, with all strikes hitting, is definitely the highest damage skill mages have, and is undoubtedly broken. But it is the only one I can think of, barring source skills. And even then, it only hits for around 400 with rage+savage sortilege+flesh sacrifice and maxed intelligence. With the rage and Savage Sortilege setup, in order to match that you would need impalement+fireball+fossil strike, and that's using 3 memory slots, 6 AP and 3 cooldowns, so you can't even do it with any consistency. I've seen warriors do 50% more than that, in 2 AP, without any special talents, using a single cooldown and rage+flesh sacrifice. The only thing that mages have going for them is that their CC is truly broken right now, once they do get through; Winter Blast has a 2 turn duration and a 2 turn cooldown, is AoE, and cannot friendly fire. But compare that to whatever they want to CC being already dead if they had instead been a warrior (rage + crippling blow), or a ranger (guerilla + snipe), or a rogue (guerilla + backstabber + vault, probably the most balanced in terms of investment and return). Mages simply cannot compete in soloing capability because no build you can give them has the firepower, and they lack the mobility skills (Phoenix Dive/Cloak and Dagger/Tactical Retreat) to tactically position themselves and keep themselves alive. That's not to say that a mage cannot solo the game in its current state. But I have beaten Act I with a warrior solo, a scoundrel solo, a huntsman solo, and a mage solo, and I can say with utter certainty, that the rogue solo was by far the easiest (stealth is broken right now, will hopefully be fixed), the warrior solo was next (cannot die, cannot not kill whatever it touches), the ranger was third (actually had to try, used items, loaded a few fights and did them over, died a bit), and the mage was leaps and bounds harder than the others, to the point where I had to resort to items, cheese strategies, and even splashing into hunstman/scoundrel/warrior for self teleport abilities (and Battle Stomp). If anyone has had a differing experience, or has a different perspective on this, then please, do chime in. But as of now, I think it is very safe to say that with cooldowns limiting what little a mage can do, and AP being so abundant due to Warlord/Flesh Sacrifice/Adrenaline being in the meta, mages are simply overshadowed by the damage and mobility potential of the other classes. There are exceptions, such as one of the final bosses being easier, but the other one was exponentially harder due to my limited damage potential.

Lolz.

I dunno' man, I kinda' like jizzing on the battlefield as a wizard main.

Savage Sortilege + Rage + Sacrifice + Spores + Epidemic of Fire. Sure, it's all sourced out but man does it look like hell after you're done and that right there has a lot of alpha strike potential which means you'll proc warlord anyways.

You are, just... My favorite person. Omg! That sounds awesome! I'll have to try it. What stats do you get on your wizard main? I usually do nothing but memory, but do you get intelligence at all?

I ended with about 25-30int depending on what type of load out I actually wanted and 28 memory.

The damage is pretty good considering that I ended up somehow killing the Magister Ranger at the Worm encounter.

The thing about Mage DPS is that you're generally laying down sustained damage, terrain changes, and also you have a wider influence in terms of damage too - Epidemic of Fire, for example, can fork off against 5 enemies and that stuff spreads everywhere.

But yeah, it's still a Source ability which means Wizards can take more of the traditional D&D role where they are often holding back resources till a critical fight.


My gear ended up giving me 8 int / 12 memory on that run.

Question for the masses:

For a mage what's better elf or lizard:
One hand we get sacrifice for +1AP and +20% Damage
Other hand we can have +2 INT and Fire breath cone

Now consider for a moment a fire specialized mage.
With the lizard you're getting stat bonuses and a free cone spell that does good damage
With the elf your getting free 1AP and some extra damage

Seems to me though that the stat bonuses from focusing INT make the initial +2 mitigate the damage from the elf somewhat and the free AoE spell doing good damage is much more important than adding damage to all my other spells. More spells > slightly bigger numbers is how it looks me.

4% damage versus 1A + 20% damage.

Int can hit soft cap. AP is limited. Lizard racial has limited range.

Yeah, that damage means that in four spells, you may as well have cast an extra spell. And if you're using Source skills, then that extra damage becomes the equivalent of several extra spells. Not to mention, the extra AP, which is basically the limiting resource on your first-turn damage. I think it's too valuable to pass up over another CD that has very limited range and not-so-strong damage.

Mmmm, that's certainly a good point. I just wonder about the fire cone though. Seems like it could be a very powerful thing to have handy when you're limited on options for fire attack spells in game and don't feel like always having to rely expanding into more memory to stack higher level fire spells and the AP costs to use them in combat. Could be the difference between making one attack or two. And the only time the 20% makes up for an entire other attack is on the really high spells.

Depends on your game plan. You can probably make it work to the same efficiency, but Elf is plain generic and lazy when it comes to encounters so it will cover situations better. Work vs Reward.

lol that's true. But the whole breath fire compels me to make a fire lizard mage. And the wasted points in FIN on a mage is is like a small poke in my sides when I consider making an elf mage no matter if I know that gear I'd more important and that the +2 means little in the log run in the current system

Edit: I had semi convinced myself that lizards must be better so I wouldn't think about it much but I wanted second options since I was clearly being biased to my Godzilla wannabes