Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Are mages a bit...weak?

So first off..I had a blast playing mages during EA. It didn't seem so bad (with physical damage dealers still being much stronger, however), then again it was only the first act, so it could've been that.

Now, I was really looking forward to doing a Pyro playthrough, but it's really not that fun...

The spells are so weak that you can barely scrape the magical armor, while melees and Rangers just tear through their targets like it's nothing.

Can't even CC properly, because it's all blocked by that ******* magic armor.

Kinda hoping for a mod somewhere down the line, that fixes mages.

Mages just need a better level 1 to 6. Current scaling and lack of item is why they seem so weak atm. They really need help in Act 1. It's different when you get to Act 2 and 3 though.

Once you unlock source spell like Chain Lighting and Epidemic of Fire, they become much stronger while being tanky since you don't need a weapon so you can always go wand-shield for increased int while having tons of armors and magic defense. Because of how the scaling kicks up, those two spells can easily wipe a team in 2 casts with the jump from target to target. It also helps that 1-source spells like Arrow Spray is just lolololweak.

And when you unlock 3-source spell, Meteor Shower and Hail storm can easily destroy the game as much as Arrow Shower does.

I mean, that's absolutely true. The mage source skills rock. But that I have to use source skills to be a "competitive" or rather efficient damage dealer...seems like a flaw to me.

Especially when Ranger can just strip away armor with 1 or 2 hits.

The game has infinite source pool on Act 1 2 and 3 once you find the location of the source fountain, and all of them can accessed really early.

When the game gives you infinite source, you really can't balance them around not using source spell anymore. At this point, the cost are just there so you can't use MEteor Shower AND hail storm in the same battle on the same char without drinking source potion or being in a certain fight.

"Infinite Source" is a bit strong. If you run out of source/source potions, you cast that spell and then your mage is useless for the rest of the fight because the physical damage dealers will run circles around him.

The tediousness of always draining corpses, making potions, or looking for fountains ( to even be somewhat efficient once your mage got his buffs out) doesn't make it better.

I run a staff battlemage on clasic as my avatar and overall I am happy with my ability to cc them. On clasical at least they seem to stereotype the non monster enemies by making it so that the ones who need to come in melee range to damage you have high phys armor and low magic armor while the backrow guys are the exact oposite.

That may be true for about the first quarter of the game. Then enemies start getting more and more of both armor types until your mage is just uselessly standing around until that one buff is back off cooldown.

mage is a bit crap in this game. Pyromancer so far has only a strong skill is fire ray which deal HUGE damage, other skills is more like CC version like anything. In fact, most of mage skill is all but cc skill one way or another.
Even pyromancer which supposed to be pure damage has most of its skill for area denial. Fire ray cost 3 ap, so if you cast one, you're left with using haste or clear minded than anything.

Considering the current strength of 3-source spell now, I gaurantee you that outside boss fight, you only need to cast them once to win the fight.

I played through the game twice. Once on Classic (Summoner), and once on Honour (Pyro/Geo).

The 3-pointers aren't nearly that strong.

And don't get me wrong..I'm actually one of the minority in that I really like the armor system. The thing is that mages, right now, just completely and utterly get overshadowed by physical damage dealers.

The main reason for the overshadowing is due to the lack of physical resist. The only good 3-point magics are Meteor shower and Hail storm and if you run into one that blocks fire or water, you're screwed. All the other 3-points try to hard to have utility or take too longs to deal damage that they fail to do both.

Most spells in this game try too hard to do both of them instead of just being situational but good. That's why over 70% of the spells are disappointing to use.

Guess I'm stuck waiting for either Larian to read the magic feedback, or a mod that rebalances the whole game :c
I really want to do a proper mage playthrough.

We need spells that really make use of the surface, like a spell that consume all the surrounding water to shoot one giant water bubble with ridiculous damage and CC if the entire area is covered and so on. We just have "Absorb and recover X". That's boring as hell.

We can't even alter enemies resist outside "Make them wet with rain" that goes through immunity. It's always the enemies using some move like the last boss and the zombie guy with his plague.

That's actually a really good idea. Spells like that would be totally awesome. Maybe even make source versions of these for additional (or cursed) effects.
Anything that lets mages burn through armor quickly would be welcomed. The only thing kind of doing that right now is Laser Ray, but the cooldown is shit :c

I will agree that fire spells are stupidly weak outside Meteor and Epidemic of Fire. Just look at fire ball damage. 2 AP and it barely does more than Masterrace Lizard breath unless you can get highground bonus and crit going.

Haste also got nerfed to 1 AP cost from 0 so using it in combat is almost no longer worth it unless you're the support char and just using it on someone else to make them deal more damage.

I will probably ignore fire spells in general for combat and just go for something like pre-haste -> combat Rain -> Elemental Affinity Hail -> Elemental Affinity Ice shard for a 1 + 3-1 + 3-1 combo with 5 AP if that's how ElA really works.

I actually wish ElA isn't a thing and that they just reduce those 3-cost spell to 2 cost again. The "Less AP cost" stuffs always make it impossible to balance and you either use it and be average or not use it and feel useless. It also forces them to balance 2 AP cost as if they are 1 AP spells (Ha, fire ball).

Just make talents like "Demon" give you fire resist penetration and so on so people that want to specialize in a certain element can take those instead.

Is it that bad? Urgh.

I was planning into respeccing Red Prince into a Pyro mage with a staff that does Phoenix dive for fire surface, and try to get 2H stuff for crit, but I'll see how bad it is

Don't. Do yourself a favor and stay physical.

As a mage, either spam source skills and hope for the best, or be a glorified buff-machine.

Why is everyone ignoring Pyroclastic and Thunderstorm? Both are 3-point mage spells that on a hybrid huntsman/specified element build do insane amounts of damage?


Mage builds are meant to be back line, so why people dont treat them like they do their rangers to me is just, quite frankly, inane. high ground is a core mechanic for mages, and even with the stat inflation issues for armor/damage, i manage to wipe out all magic armor for a boss fight for all enemies involved, and either chain cc them to death afterwards, or outright kill them.

Take thunderstorm for example. Pop that, toss out a charm grenade. Call it a day. meteor shower and hail storm are good, but not the only viable spells. dazzling bolt from aero, to impale from geo, even eldritch storm has its uses.

Probably because I don't want to play as a hybrid, rather as a full mage. Pyroclastic IS an awesome spell. But, like I said, to be dependant on source skills to be useful is just bad game design.

I, personally, found my pyro lizard to be really strong come mid to late campaign. I equipped with a wand and shield for the ability to survive on the front line, and With "elemental affinity" and "the pawn", AP costs easily became negligable. Add that to the fact that I was almost pure INT and Pyro for my points

The first turn was often:
Use half of free movement to reposition for firebreath, preferably to hit at least two targets.
Use other half of free movement to walk into the fire you just made.
Fireball for 1 AP
Laser Ray for 2 AP

Now, it never outright kills anyone at-level, but that's okay. What it does do is annihilate all their magic armor and bring them to 75 or 50%, where my support magician can bring in some pain or crowd control.

Yes, it's not as much single target damage as an elf archer using flesh sacrifice into elemental arrowheads on the blood you just made in order to try and annihilate one target, but it's most definitely more damage in a single turn than my ranger ever managed. I'm starting a new campaign (gotta see the stories and personalities of the 3 origins I missed) and I'm definitely going to be using a fire lizard again among the the other new builds I want to try.