Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Warfare skills should alternate resistances

Right now you can almost make a battle mage by equipping a staff and using warfare skills. The problem this presents is that you have no way of lowering the target's physical armor to enable Warfare's knockdowns because the knockdowns still key off of the target's physical armor.

If there was a huge benefit from using a staff, the loss of knockdowns wouldn't be so bad. But as far as I can tell there's no schools of magic that synergize effectively enough with the damage potential of warfare to make equipping a staff worth it.

I don't even want Warfare w/ a staff to be as viable as Warfare with any other melee weapon. I just think it's a neat thing and would like to see it be more than a sacrifice in the name of style. My solution would be to change Warfare skills' resistance targets to be Magic Armor when wielding a staff.

It is good for a full mage composition, because that way with rage crits you can knock down magic armor even faster thanks to Warfares AoE attacks.

[quote=Kalrakh]It is good for a full mage composition, because that way with rage crits you can knock down magic armor even faster thanks to Warfares AoE attacks.[/quote]

But that's not really something the setup is good at, it's just something that it's capable of doing. You could get a nearly identical effect by simply using two wands instead of bothering with warfare at all. Except, the advantage of the ladder is that you're also getting the passive benefit of whatever you put the combat skill-points into instead of Warfare. And since in the ladder example you're not using enrage, you also get to keep using your magical skills in the following turns. Heck, you could even just use more aoe magic from a school like Pyromancy to mimick the aoe magic armor damage you were talking about.

The problem isn't that there aren't things you could do with Warfare + Staff, it's that they're all pretty much objectively worse than the competing choices and require comparable amounts of specialization so it's not like you're gaining versatility in exchange for less stat-point efficiency.

I realize that there's got to be some amount of exchange involved or else Warfare + Staff would essentially be a caster with many of the vulnerabilities removed. But at the same time, it's currently just a neat quirk of the system more than a real option. Every point in Warfare as a Staff wielder currently represents a sacrificed passive bonus, sacrificed skill effectiveness (knockdowns), lost carrying capacity (because in a traditional STR build you get carrying capacity), and doesn't provide any significant gains in other areas to adequately balance those shortcoming. Heck, you could make it so that Staff + Warfare changes the saves from Physical to Magical but make every skill vulnerable to being mute and it would be better than the current arrangement.