Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Did mage just become even weaker on release?

I agree, that Int should atleast reduce cooldowns (like every 3 int reduce cd of spells by 1 turn) or something along those lines. And int buffing mage armor was good, no idea why they nerfed it.

As for scaling - spells should either scale with 10 percent per int and keep warfare at 5, or spells should scale with level and int, and warfare should scale with weapons and int.

BUT guys, it seems you still forget that mages are not damage dealing class... Mages are your versatility class, mages are there for creating surfaces (no other class can do that so easily), combining them, they are there for buffs, heals, teleports, swaps, debuffs, invisiblities and clearing buffs, dont forget summons... Mages do EVERYTHING, so they really shouldn´t be top single target damage... And keep in mind, that almost all mage attacks are AOE of some sort, it would make no sense that mage can do 100 damage per cast in aoe AND set status effect, while ranger could do 90 damage per bow hit...

And from my experience, sure, warfare can do 80 damage per hit very soon, while wizard does 40 per spell cast.. but this spellcast also does burning, it goes in aoe, it ignites surfaces, and prohibits some areas, and when you hit burning target with poison wands, it gets almost comparable...

As I see it, warfare is here for tanking+medium damage and crowd control. Rangers are top ranged single target dps, rogues are meele burst damage for dealing with high priority targets, and mages are support+aoe damage+control of battlefield (not neccessarily crowd control!)

Mages can do everything but they're also poor at everything. The game is so limited in AP that what are you going to do after you buff and use teleport?

You can deal damage and burn but those does nothing because they still have to go through magical armour.

You can't CC either until the magic armour goes down.

The flawed armor system completely prevent a role from doing their jobs because no one is there to break the shield for them and if you spec into magic shield break, then you can't deal physical damage. All they can do is heal and buff which doesn't require you to spec a single point into int, maybe 1 into Pyro for Haste and 2 in Aero for teleport.

Mages are the "Crap of all trade, didn't even learn a single thing in school" class of the game atm and only enemies can play them because they get extra free bloated stat that applies to their magic. (*Cough*, +50% Tactician damage on mage AoE while you barely have magic armor unlike them)

As for magic armor there are now 2 rogue skills to take away magical armor.

I wonder if the game would be drastically improved if there was a resistance to physical attacks.

Not to attacks that hit physical armor... just weapon attacks (maybe even split between piercing and slashing)

One thing to be sure, enemies resistance got ridiculously buffed. Im curious if anyone beaten alexander voidworm combo with just mage team without spamming 10+ reviving scrolls

Not really because it requires rebalancing the combat as a whole.

I will say the flaw exists because the game has been simplified to the point there's almost no strat to the game combat. Nearly everything can be solved by brute forcing with more damage and that's sad for a turn-based game.

at least you dont have the turn 1 i win button anymore, buffs and heals during combat actually matters now.

I agree, i thought mages were OP as fuck before, now the feel quite ok... They still have majority of CC, you just can´t go for full mages and expect to win everything, mages now need to plan ahead, prepare and use all their tools, which is not bad thing imo.

well you can still go full physical excutioner route and still win everything?

I cant play myself yet so i can only try to judge indirectly, but it looks like i was too optimistic at first.

It may be they need to balance the whole tactician difficulty much more.
By the sounds of it, the game plays as the early ea version where all enemies were several levels worth of stats ahead of you - at seemingly similar or same levels.

And since the new armor mechanics are too simplified themselves, it all ends with a larger negative feedback effect in the gameplay itself.

If only mages were actually that great to begin with.

Took 3 turns or longer even on classic mode to beat a fight I could wipe in 1 turn with Warfare ridiculous damage with knock down in case it goes longer.

Well to be honest, one exceptionally overpowered build doesn´t justify more overpowered builds They luckily nerfed scoundrel+poly as it was absolutely ridiculously fucked up, and they probably should nerf twohander warfare+executioneer aswell, but that doesn´t mean that mages didn´t need nerf (ESPECIALLY stunlock aero mages).

Maybe warfare also needs something like shocked->stunned, probably disbalanced->knocked down?
This system would imo worked best if it could be combined with spells from different schools tho, for example fireball, oil bomb, impale and such could also do disbalanced... same for stunned, as it would allow for multicharacter cc combos, which is more interesting that aero+aero to do the trick

This isn't a matter of "Physicals need a nerf" anymore but more of a "Mage are so useless to have around you better be playing Explorer mode to enjoy them as damage dealer because you're not gonna break that 200 magic shield even with 3 of mages shooting at it".

Every issue with mages start from the same reason. "They can't deal enough damage to break the bloated magic armor enemies have even with a whole team of them"

Right now, the only one allowed to play mages are your enemies because the source of magic armor for the players is scarce compared to physical and they still have that +50% damage on tactician allowing them to just break your armor in one spell and start CCing you right away.

Sounds like you're brewing a mod idea to revamp mage gameplay.

Bloody armor mechanics.... and i told them, i told them - make armor a percentage based damage and other effects defense. Not a hard defense that works at 100% even if you have one single point of armor.

If it was percentage based defense then you would be able to deal at least some damage and have a chance to cause status effect - even if you take down only 10% of it (or any amount)

But no - que crying how thats "random", ffs...

I'm not surprised. I have expressed my concern about this armor system during EA. They had the chance to remove it and change for something else. They didn't, and here is the result.

I dunno the problem is they didn't really do anything with it.

If magic was based around CC and status effects that ignored armor (and that had additional affects once armor was gone like we currently have) that could have worked well also.

So you have slow, shock, poison, fire, and chilled affecting enemies even while they have armor up.

But only a few affects apply.

Anyhow I'll chalk up the wonkyness as a good first attempt. The reason they didn't change it is because that would require changing the entire game on the fly. Not every game can get everything perfect the first time around.

I actually finally found way for mages to be useful.

Keep them outside every battle and outside combat range. In combat, unless the players or the enemies move, the buff counter won't go down.

However, if you're not part of the battle, your cool down will count normally.

With all the buff skills, slowly buff everyone from the side line. You can get your whole team hasted and fortified before the first turn even begins as long as you stay out of the combat trigger range. As long as you don't heal or deal damage, you can keep on cleansing the enemy CC while keeping you whole team buffed.

Yeah, it's sad you have to exploit the game for them to be useful.

That is a pretty hefty exploit

You mean
Tactical exploit