Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Savage Sortilege & non-damaging magical abilities

Summary:
The talent Savage Sortilege does not give ALL magical skills a critical chance equal to your critical chance score.

Steps to Reproduce:
Talent Savage Sortilege, stack critical chance score through Wits, gear or the Hothead talent. Cast any non-damaging but scaling skill like; Blood Sucker, Rallying Cry, Cleanse Wounds, Restoration, Soothing Cold, Healing Ritual, etc.

Expected Result (IMO):
Each of the aforementioned skills should see a chance to critical strike equal to critical chance score.

Actual Result:
None of these non-damaging spells can critical strike at all, regardless of critical strike rate.

Feedback/Suggestion:
While this could have been an intentional design to limit the scaling of support skills (which typically scale with combat ability level, but not attributes like Intelligence), it doesn't make a lot of sense when looking at the tool-tip of Savage Sortilege.

I would suggest either updating the tool-tip of Savage Sortilege to say "...all damaging magical skills...", or review the impact of and potentially allow non-damaging magical abilities to benefit from critical strike rate.

As a user, I would really like to build a Wits heavy Hydromancer... :)

It makes sense you can't crit with a heal. Last Rites can crit, which doesn't make sense as it does pure damage and is also a utility skill. Seems to be working as intended and as explained, wouldn't mind if Last Rites was reworked to not crit though; critting with a heal is sort of overall pointless as they already heal for pretty large sums.

Regeneration can be an attack though with undead or decaying.

Mind you it makes no sense to me you can crit with magic at all - except perhaps a staff.

I support this tooltip clarification even if it the talent remains unchanged.

I meant "sense" gameplay wise. Regeneration is a multi-turn spell to avoid the huge burst heal that would make any damage you did up until that point meaningless, because someone would just burst heal them back to full. It's intentionally designed that way, so I think critting heals (even though I am a fan of that in other games) wouldn't serve the gameplay. Maybe with a critical modifier nerf to them to only slightly increase it.

The tooltip could change to indicate it only applies to damage, they probably had that distinction in their mind during design.

Did you try casting the healing spells from hydro on undead?
Healing spells from Hydro deal damage to an undead's physical armor.

Hydro healing spells can indeed critical strike when cast on/damaging undead creatures. So I would hazard a guess that magical abilities have different damage and healing formulas.

But yeah it might need balancing in some way if implemented, because heals currently don't scale with attributes at all and introducing Wits/Critical Strike as a scaling factor could create some rather large heals.