Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks Magic damage on STR weapons

I know there are some STR weapons that do a little additional elemental damage, but is there a way to get one with only (or mostly) magic/elemental damage?
Does the magic/elemental damage on a STR weapon scale with your STR?

As far as scaling is concerned, all elemental damages scale with INT and the corresponding elemental skill - fire damage scales with Pyro, water with Hydro, and so on. Staves are the elemental counterpart of 2H physical weapon, if you really want to use a melee elemental weapon, but you know they require INT.

If a STR weapon does only elemental damage, that damage would scale only with your elemental skill and INT instead of STR. So it's kind of pointless that it would require STR to wield, because you would need INT to increase your damage output.

Physical weapons with elemental damage are pretty pointless in this game thanks to armor system.

Thanks a lot for the answers ;)

However I don't understand some of the Polymorph skills then. My goal is to make a 'tanky' melee character for a magic-damage-group and Polymorph seems to be the way to go, because it has magic damage that scales with Strength.
But how do I make Medusa Head or Flay Skin (both scale with STR and deal magic dmg) work if I can't use a STR weapon? Are they ment to be used just for the effect and not for damage?

This game is not about auto attacks if you wanna play it optimized, but about skills.
Medusa Head's strength is a 3 turn !!!) petrify cc which only works if opponents are close and don't have magic armour.
Ideally you use an Aoe like Earthquake to remove Magic armour, fly close to a ranged enemy, let all melees come after you and then Medusa head. (Or you just fly directly into a lot of enemies whho have no magic armour left and already stand close to each other and Medusa them.
The Medusa Visage ability is a nice little gimmick you can only use once while your head is active, but it has massive range.
You don't really use it for the damage but once again for the petrify which is only for one turn tho.

Flay Skin scaling of Strength is kinda dumb, you use it for halving resistances I guess...
(which is not bad at all, since resistances are a major pain for magic users)

Generally you don't wanna revolve a build around Polymorph, but build polymorph around an actual main build.
If you wanna be strength based use a phys build and don't use stuff like Flay and Medusa unless you remove magic armour with other chars.
If you wanna be Int based but use something like Necro that removes phys, Medusa still is not for you.

Only if you know their Magic armour is gonna go down medusa is awesome and Flay Skin can help you get there but not thru damage but halving resistances.

@Try2Handing: I tested it on another char, but what you said seems to be wrong. I have 0 points spent in INT and 0 points in AERO and my melee weapon does 29-33 phys dmg and 6-7 air damage in the tooltip. However when I hit an enemy it does 13+ air damage, so it seems to get the full benefits from strength and single-handed.

Thank you for your reply Victor_Creed. Yeah I know it makes more sense to use Polymorph just as support for another skill tree. Right now this character of me plays as Aero main/poly second, which is cool because aero has skills like Divine Radiance and Shocking Touch, which require you to be in melee range. they work well with Medusa Head.
But I'm really into trying new stuff. Once I'm on the ship and able to respecc I want to try if it can work as Polymorph main with strength and focusing on the magic damage abilities. The main problem is, that there are only like 4 abilities that scale with this idea:
Bull Horns - The charge scales with strength and does true damage
Medusa Head - Petryfing Visage scales with strength and does magic damage
Flay Skin scales with strength and does magic damage
Summon oily blub - The initial dmg scales with strength and does magic damage
---

The strength scaling should be rather high because I get one additional strength for every point I put in Polymorph.
So a secondary skill tree needs to be independent from attributes. Hydro for the heals would make most sense I guess, so the character can be a kind of 'paladin' tank for a magic damage group.Too it would solve the weight problem of such a group.

Do you guys think this build is possible? Or just a bad idea?^^ I dont know what the late late game looks like yet.

I once tried 40+ st + bull horns and it did 300 dmg (level was 14 or even higher) look at necro doing thousands of damage at that point and decide for yourself if it's worth. :P

I believe if the sword has an INT requirement, the damage will scale as such, but of course it will default to STR scaling. I had done this accidentally when playing with my holy swordsman class and noticed it definitely scales with STR regardless of element, but I didn't play with it often enough to say with certainty if the damage also scales with the appropriate elemental skill (hydro, aero, etc)--but there's a 99% chance it does, instead of Warfare. (warfare is the phys element basically)

I was talking about a STR weapon that does only elemental damage, if such a thing exists. You're right though, both the physical and elemental damage on a standard STR weapon scale with STR (and Single-Handed / Two-Handed / Dual-Wielding) rather than INT. Which makes me think, if there really exists a STR weapon that does only elemental damage, the damage probably will scale with STR due to game mechanics.

I believe the purpose of "STR skills that deal magic damage" is so that a STR char can do some significant magic damage now and then when the situation is right, instead of just pure physical all the time. And so there are not a whole lot of such skills. You're still supposed to be physical-damage-oriented when you're going with STR build.

Get Skin Graft, so you can reset all your cooldowns once. That way at least you can spam those skills one more time without waiting for cooldown.