Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Hybrid viable now?

With all the talks about the armor system, it seems there are more negative aspects to hybrid than split stat penalty.

For roleplay reason, I'd like to use Beast and leave him as battle mage. Just want to know if hybrid that has damage divided between magic/physical a viable option in later games?

Just cross my hands that Larian has not created a companion to make him suck.

Hybrids are more viable, but in a different sense than D:OS 1 thanks to the armor system. It's inefficient to split your points between primary attributes, because you can only use one weapon at a time and hit only one armor type well. Plus you'd still need to spend points into Memory to boost your slots for the additional skills.

Instead, Hybrids are less about splitting your damage skills and more about selecting the SUPPORT skills your Hybrid uses. A lot of classes have support skills which can be very handy, and importantly, do not benefit from points into a primary attribute.

really depends what you imagine him to be.

I suppose you could give him 14 str 14 int for free gear choice between the better of heavy armor and soft armor and all kinds of melee weapons / staves.

idealy wear a heavy breast plate with masterwork rune.
and rest of your gear should be mage robes with as much crit and wits as possible.

scale damage with wits + savage sortile + hot head + scoundrel/ two handed mastery?.

pros:
- extreme high flexibility as you only need to put points into schools to learn their skills, a jack of all trades.
- crit is a great late damage scaler for spells

cons:
- sometimes you need to sacrifice armor for that 2 wits 2% crit glove
- the big payoff will only arrive once you get a 2 socket crit rune amulet + 10~20% crit weapon

A hybrid can be an asset to the team. For the price of doing less raw damage and potentially having to invest a few more points in Memory attribute, they have the ability to attack the opponents lesser armor value, regardless of what type it is, or otherwise bypassing the remaining armor and attacking their health pool. They also don't need to worry about position as much since they typically have melee+ranged options, have more choices in equipment, and can also provide more CC opportunities.

Edit: I should clarify when I wrote this that I was thinking of your Battlemage scenario (STR + INT). FIN + INT could work well too. I don't see any advantage in a STR + FIN character.

I prefer to hybridize my characters by finding ways to let a focused character deal with the other armor type... or bypass it.

For example: Warrior types can invest a point into polymorph and take bull rush. Now you have a spammable "bypass armor" that you can use to help your mages out.

All of my casters like one or two points into necromancer for locust swarm and decaying touch to help the physical guys out.

If I chose wand + shield, I find it worth investing a point into warfare later game for shield lob.

Archers, of course, have the piercing shot.

There are ways to hybridize without breaking things or splitting damage.

For example, a str focused melee fighter can also use polymorph which has skills that scale with strength.

This allows you to do things like have wings to quickly cover ground, charge to knock people down, etc.

It's overall a pretty good combination that goes well together.