Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Best character builds - for you (spoilers)

If we open that can of worms up, every build is fine and there's no sense discussing what's "good", really.

If a build is in the bottom, say, ~75% relative power wise, it's a mediocre or bad build. You can say it's a fun build, but that's far more subject to individual preference and it's likely fewer people will have fun playing bad builds than good ones.

Hybrids working well in other character building systems is irrelevant. There are games where hybrids are clearly the most powerful, there are rare games where it's balanced, and there are games where you're discouraged from hybridization heavily.

Divinity: Original Sin is somewhere between the latter two. You can certainly pull off certain hybrids but a 50/50 split will just be plain bad. It's a matter of action points.

To simplify it: If you can have four options that cost 6 AP and deal 20 damage, or two options that cost 6 AP and deal 30 damage, but only 12 AP per turn anyway, guess what? The latter is obviously better, and that's in a nutshell why hybrids suck. The game further penalizes hybrids in other was as well but that's the main factor I'd say.

You can afford to dip 3 points into one extra dmg attribute but you're almost never going to be better off splitting between two evenly. To even further emphasize that we have the secondary attributes that encourage focus in one dmg attribute even more. So in the above example, the hybrid may even have less AP than the pure due to less points to spend on speed.

And just to add even more to the downsides, we have CDs and AP costs being reduced by your dmg stat (str/dex/int) which means a hybrid is getting less effective skills for more total skills that they can use less often. After a certain point, you simply need stronger skills and lower CDs more than you need more skills.