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

Why is it that some people get down right personal on the relationship level so quickly, instead of staying objective and respectful on anonymous internet forums.

I can understand that it is difficult if you had never learned some very essential social skills and can only suggest you work on your behavior, perhaps a therapy. Life's easier less grumpy

I don't understand why are you still feeding that troll..

Anyway, personally, I've found many interesting things in this thread, some of them made me rethink my build strategy.
Actually, I'm just thinking about re-rolling again (4th time, 7th lvl atm) and I have to say, that this is the first game that made me create a spreadsheet.
My current game is 2 lone wolf, but next one i want to have full party. Taking in the account companions, i'm thinking about something like this:
comp 1 - 2h warrior, going for full str, some con/speed, MAA 5, some armor skills, BS/CR
comp 2 - water/air mage, full int, some speed/con, water/air 5, loremaster (currently I'm playing with 1+1 from gear and I'm able to indentify everything, but I guess I'll have to increase this later)
hero 1 - marksman (due to full access to all elements thanks to special arrows), full dex; some speed, marks 5
hero 2 - fire/earth mage, full int, some speed/con, fire/earth 5

Right now I'm running 2 lone wolfs with leech, I'm thinking about keeping leech as it's currently OP (I'm playing normal, curious about the story, not that much in min/maxing and playing on hard), sometimes it feels almost like cheating.
If i will keep leech, i need witchcraft (lvl1) on all, but I'm thinking about leveling it to 5 with hero1(marksman).

What i miss is social skills, maybe hero1 could be used for this (barter, one from intimidate/charm/reason), but I'm not sure if fe. reason would not fit better with someone with high int (maybe hero2?)

any thoughts about those builds are welcome (and without hostility )

If you are taking Charisma and pet pal, make sure it's only on your hero 1 or 2. Charisma affects your intimidate, charm and reason

There are few useful Talents that you can pick as a mage, just respec them and trade everything but Glass Cannon for an additional 60 Ability points / 12 Attribute points.

Also if you are playing with Glass Cannon, it is sometimes useful to not invest an Attribute point right away , because your maximum AP have to be >= your turn AP. With 7 SPD and 7 CON you have 14 AP but for the next bonus you need to increase both attributes to 9. If you save some points you can be more flexible depending on the gear that you will find until you can actually benefit from the attribute increase.

after much testing i think the best character set-up is using 2 lone-wolf backstabbers with high sneak.

you dont even need a high scoundrel skill level, level 2 or 3 would be fine. you just want to pick up invisibility and some of the other utility options. you will need to focus on Dex like normal for equipments obviously, however.

other skills will include things like 1 hydro for minor heal, 2 aero for teleport and invis, and 1 marksman for the retreat teleport skill.

basically you just do this: when the fight starts everything will be pointed at you in the vast majority of cases. use the marksman retreat skill or an invisibility skill and move to the back lines. backstab the farthest one away until low action points and then sneak.

if both characters are in sneak mode at the end of their turns the enemies just stand there and do not even try to fight back. if something comes up and you cannot sneak then you have a couple invisibility options and movement options to get out of the way as well.

with this type of play you just need dex to consistently hit with backstab and equip gears. you dont really have to care about getting 5 in any skill or getting those overpowered traits because most enemies will just stand there and let you kill them.

once in a while it may not work, but you should easily be able to stock up potions, scrolls, and whatever else you need for those rare fights.

Speaking of builds, does anyone know of an online character builder? Has one been made yet?

And to OP: you constantly whine about people being off-topic, but the irony is that apart from your first, none of your posts have talked about builds at all. You don't own this thread just because you started it, so just do us all a favor and STFU, mkay?

The double sneaking backstabers sounds interesting.

A little bit before reaching end game I decided to reset my mage and I abused the fact that you can easily go beyond 120% fire resist with high level gear to create a nice set up.

Basically the mage buff with haste/desecration whatever you wish and can implode every turn which reduces also fire spells cost and heal other characters if nearby as well as destroy enemies coming to close combat.

In case of fire resist I picked in geomancer boulder, petrification and the spider (which was so useful for me in early game but is sort of pointless now).

I run some water as well for the heals and I have some percing ice shard on a ring for variation and possible freezing. I also have ice wall for freezing but I have not used this one much.

I took some air for the teleports, i do not like the other spells much as the collateral stun effect is annoying and I have not tested if it could be avoidable for the other characters.

I am now thinking that I could raise witchcraft to combo fist with teleport but I am already passed enemy level so there is not much use to try doing more damage now.

Maybe it is possible to start this set up early in game by abusing rubies and fire essences, I do not think someone documented the scaling of fire resistance depending on item level but I guess it goes by 5% rank so granted you can enchant 5 piece of equipment it might be possible to pull it off as soon as the bonus is 10% but that would require additional fire resist with rings/amulets and bonuses on the different item parts. Possibly running man at arms 5 with the element resist skills for the extra 25% which will then means you only need an extra 45% fire resist on your equipment so an average of 5% fire resist on the 9 pieces of armors (including boots that cannot be enchanted).

I would be curious to see videos of crazy min/maxer if there are any.

Maybe another powerful setup will be crazy mages running lightning strike with something in combination for resists. It will still require 22+ int for 1 round cooldown though and 20 for 2 if you would alternate between two spells.

I'm really enjoying my current setup. I started with a wizard and ranger but I was so disappointed with the straight up ranger build that I rerolled a Rogue and a Wizard for my mains. I've been much happier since. Rogues are fricken awesome (eventually)!

So my current group is the following...

Main 1: Glass Cannon Rogue (face char)
Main 2: Glass Cannon Wizard (Geo,Hydro with some WC)
Jahan: Glass Cannon Wizard (Pyro, Aero with some Hydro for heals)
Madora: 2H Warrior/Tank (MAA, WP, BB, Leadership)

I think a Rogue makes for the perfect face character because you only need to dump points into scoundrel and sneak to make for an amazing backstab damage dealer that will outdo everyone on the team for single target damage (with the right traits and GC). That leaves you with you plenty of ability points for things like lore, charisma, telekinesis, and other face char skills. You could also put some points into Marksman just to make use of all the arrows the game throws at you if you so choose. Having early invisibility on a face char also makes stealing items a breeze... which I much prefer to using other characters to distract npc's with conversation.

One more thing about the Rogue: it's run to play! Once I picked up Glass Cannon I didn't feel even remotely restricted by being a melee character. I can usually run all the way across the field of battle with plenty of points left over for multiple sneak/backstabs, and the tactical nature of maneuvering keeps the character interesting.

Why go for speed if you can use multiple haste sources with a second primary?
Why go for con if haste increase your max AP and healing becomes a non-issue because of several sources for healing, etc

Your so sure that your numbers add up right? Because I am not so sure that speed is useful at all for glass cannons for example. You hit 20 AP per turn anyway quite easy. Furthermore there there is a decent amount of enemies that have above 100% elemental resistances or which have very high armor values and magic resistances. There was a fight when my mages started to stab an enemy with a pickaxe because it was the most sensible to do. (After that I gave them much more buffs, so they could stay quite useful in the future, which worked like a charm later in the game)

But I think that instead of giving them buffs, giving them some strenght and men-at-arms 5 would have worked out just fine too. Permanent inspire in your party sounds btw like a nice compensation, those two points to all attributes alone compensate a lot for hybrids.

Mixing a dex/rouge/ranger sounds not so good with elemental mages, but witchcraft and some level 1 elemental sounds like a very good combination with those skills. Air/Water for example are very useful even with just 1 point in it, if you skilled up int at least somewhat.

One-trick Ponies have one problem in DOS: They become none-trick ponies against some enemies.

Old post in a necroed thread. Anyway, my feeling on this currently is slightly different(now that I've reached higher levels) but stacking one primary is still the best option for the early-mid game.

There is no none-trick pony. There's pretty much nothing physical damage won't kill, and mages can use summons for that.

The main thing you need is enough of your primary stat to equip the best gear for your first "class" or main source of damage.

After that, constitution 7 for glass cannons, speed 7 if you're not lone wolf/glass cannon.

Then if you have points to spare in other primaries, go for it. At higher levels hybrids can come into their own especially with so many extra attributes from gear. Generally I'd say for int + str or int + dex are always better than str + dex though. And you should still stay away from an even split. For a mage you want enough str to wear decent armor and use lower and/or nullify resist maybe, and for a warrior or scoundrel/marksman you just want enough int to cast your important buffs @ 100% chance to apply.

The "best builds" metagame is very different between Normal and Hard. In Normal you can go Glass Cannon with virtually anything and have it work; you start with +15% Vit and GC drops you to -35% Vit. In Hard GC takes you from -25% Vit to -75% Vit, which is way too much unless you're also going Man-at-Arms for Picture of Health. This doesn't necessarily mean you can't go "Glass Cannon mage," but it does mean I have absolutely no idea how you'd pull such a miracle off.

I like playing Hard. I am using one Glass Cannon (Madora, doing pretty much the standard warrior thing she does but with Picture of Health and stacked Constitution for a very high max AP), and she's very powerful, but I don't think I could get away with it on anyone else.

Really? Sounds deathly dull to me. Other than as an experiment for a couple of fights, double sneaking backstabbers sounds like a repetitive cheese-fest.

saw this post while searching Char builds, and decided to drop in and tell the Nazi that started this thread to calm down take a deep breath relax and understand that people have fought and died to keep the IDEA of FREE SPEECH alive, I do not know from what country you hail from how ever IT IS THE INTERNET, and there really is no need in insulting people who come on this thread and express his/her ideas, from what I have read on most of these posts no one (other than perhaps myself) is being rude or cruel or mean to anyone else they are at most expressing in an informitive manner on what builds and or stats have worked for them as well as expressing his or her thoughts behind why the builds have worked as well as the stats and ability points on what works and doesnt work so well. pretty much why you started this thread, so instead of whining and crying because people are using FREEDOM OF SPEECH on a thread you started and refuse to conform to your NAZI ideals over the internet I suggest you roll with it hell it may give you some insight into the game and a better understanding of it...... friggin internet police really irritate me




TO THE REST OF YOU, you have all been very helpfull and I thank you as I now have a better understanding of the game and do's and do not's of it as well as some other information as I am new to this game, but not so much to the D&D Universe but I do notice allot of big differences between this and D&D as well as why a battlemage class worked great in Dragon Age but not so much in D:OS so thank you all and reguardless of what this thread starter says yall rock and keep on keeping on because honestly who likes a communist

Ive been playing with 3 wizards and a axe and shield tank. I have jahan for air and water magics and crafting and my 2 mains guys one has fire and earth and a little air magics and the other has fire and witchcraft with some water and earth magics. Im level 14 so just made items with +20% elemental resists so don't take much damage apart from poison. Need to make some poison resist rings at lvl 16.

Hi Everyone,

So after playing a fair bit with a few different builds and experimenting etc. I saw this thread and though, given the opening request for us to post actual builds we are using and happy with, I would throw in my two cents on what I have found useful and what I have decided to actively avoid in ym playthroughs so far.

Currently I have two separate games that I have continued playing through the game (I have started the game over at least 6 times now and found the following two builds to be very viable right the way through the game).

First off, there are a couple of contingent "events" that I would consider important but I don't want to spoil anyhting for anyone so I will be very vague on these points: first, although lockpicking is very controversial in terms of its usefulness I will just say that are one or two points where lock picking level 5 is CRUCIAL if you want to be able to gain extra ability and stat points and gain access to the well-known ability to trade out unspent talent points for abilities (1 unspent talent can buy you 10 ability points, 5 unspent ability points can buy you 1 attribute point) so, if you can find bracers, belts AND BOOTS with lock picking +1 (i know they exist but I have found boots with lock picking very rare) KEEP THEM so that you don't have to spend too many points in lock picking.

Anyhow, on to my builds>

1. My first very fun and viable build is centred around a synergy between a two-handed knight and a Mage with witchcraft for buffing and debuffing that also has geomancy and pyro (to make sure I have all 5 schools of magic with Jahan in the party).

-Knight character (Beatrix):
-obvious things are Man-at arms (getting to level 5 by around level 10-12, depending on when you unlock the trader of secrets) - also get willpower up fairly early so you can get comeback kid talent mid-late game. Don't bother with any crafting or nasty deeds, but it can pay off to spend a few points in leadership given that this chatter will almost always be visible to the rest of your party. Talents are the really interesting thing to experiment with; my favourite combination for this kind of knight build (one buffed from the back by witchcraft) are: Bully, Opportunist, Leech, Weather the Storm, Thick skin (least important but still viable), Picture of health, comeback kid. These talents really maximise your tanking ability whilst also giving a good bonus to damage dealing: I was taking out bosses solo with my knight with all other characters only casting buffs and control spells mid-life game. Plus, with leech and comeback kid it is quite difficult for enemies to kill you outright in a single turn, especially if you have buffs like fortify and elemental shields casts. Anyhow, overall this is quite a simple build, but I have found it very effective. (At character creation i gave this build +1 in leadership for that annoying ability point you have to spend).

Attribute points: I got strength to base 12 ASAP and then invested the rest in speed and cons for extra action points (str at base 12 allows me to use items to boost it to 15/16 easily by mid game) at level 12 my str was 15, speed 11 (base 8/9) and cons (base 8) 10.

Witch Mage (Drizzt): as long as you take Jahan on in your party this mage really is hub of this build in terms of dictating the battlefield (I also use this character as my main interacting character, so in counterpoint to my knight, who got +1 in leadership at CC, I gave this character +1 in charisma with that surplus ability point in CC).
- Anyhow, this build was a little more fiddly when experimenting with talents etc. as there are not (on the face of it) a lot of very useful mage talents. Firstly, I focus on the three schools of magic (pyro, geo and witch), with a very good stating combination of skills being midnight oil, flare and oath of desecration (MO and FL combine beautifully in early game). I did also place a couple of points in willpower, just to be sure. As far as talents go, I started with far out man and pet pal (for the fun and extra XP you can get for doing animal's quests etc.), after that the only really viable talents I took were glass cannon, picture of health (yes this requires 3 points to be spent in Man at arms, but trust me I was drowning in ability points for this
character by level 11, and this talent negates some of the negative effect of GC) and weatherproof (this leaves two talent points unspent which can be traded in for 20 ability points in total, allowing me to max out all three schools of magic and place some extra points into man-at-arms to get some more vitality bonus to negate GC as much as possible) - as far as I can remember, the two talent points i traded in for ability points were at level 11 and the last one (level 19?) weatherproof was the last talent I took.
- Overall, this character is an absolute monster at both dealing damage and buffing/debuffing.

Attributes: Intelligence to base 11/12 asap and then cons privileged slight over speed given that GC negates some of the positive effects of speed on ability points whereas cons maxes out your OVERALL action points. by level 11/12 this character had int 15 (base 11), cons 11 (base 9) and speed 10 (base 8).

I decided to take on bairdotr with this build too and have her be a mix between marksman and rogue with decent sneaking, lock picking (for above reason). Jahan is my go to craftsman seeing as he starts with scientist so it makes sense to invest a couple of points in craft and blacksmithing (also he only specialises in two schools of magic, giving a little more freedom with ability points). It is worthwhile trading out at least one talent point with this character I must say, in order to max out both Aero and hydro with a few points to spend in willpower.

Overall I have found this build to be very well-rounded in terms of both combat and getting as much out of crafting etc.

I have run out of time now so I will post my second build I like at some other point - its a rogue lone wolf combined again with a witchcraft mage and, contra to what someone previously said about rogues being lacklustre, THEY ARE AMAZING IN COMBAT AND OFFER SOME INTERESTING WAYS TO MAKE MONEY/GAIN CERTAIN ITEMS!!!!

Let me know your thoughts,

You are a jerk. You've turned what could have been a helpful thread into a thread all about you

For me I prefer specializations with minors like teleport that are really really nice. So usually something like ranger/rouge/warrior with aero/witch. As for mages I prefer the witchcraft/geomancer schools as they tend to scale well into late game with a point into fireball and teleport.

A favorite of mine is Lyralei the Ranger, it's a marksman/scoundrel build with aero tacked on. The focus of the build is mobility , versatility, and assassination. The build works well in the early game where you can whittle down poisonous zombies at range but yet still close in for eliminating key targets. It gives a ranged hero two extremely useful skills at the start of the game: teleport, invisibility, and fast track. Invisibility is just so useful early game to sneak around, setup barrels, and steal, fast track amplifies your ranged damage output, and teleport is useful in general.

Come mid-late game with tactical retreat and smoke and dagger you are virtually everywhere and in the worst case you can teleport someone to you, with backstab you can kill off key targets quickly and escape. Also since scoundrel and ranger are both DEX based nothing is lost from a ranger>assassin transition except for some weapon skills. The other thing is the charm, combined with witchcraft support and melee abilities you can lower enemy willpower to the point of charming them, even in late game. I don't really bother leveling weapon skills much, since Tenebrium makes it kinda useless; a big pet peeve BTW Larian games. I tend to use her to craft since as games go rangers are more about control, assassins burst damage, but neither of them are sustained DPS.

For my second character I prefer the Aerie the Archmage, it's a multi-caster build specializing in witchcraft/geomancer. The gist of the build is to diversify at the start and grab the few good spells from all the schools. I personally prefer to start with teleport, spider, and heal (why heal? Cuz I don't like Johan). The spider is a great early summon, the heal eliminates the need for Johan, and the teleport is good on anyone. You should try to get fireball, fire elemental , oil, oath of desecration and rain by level 4 since they are so useful in the early game Especially vs the first witch boss. Furthermore a simple oil and oath of desecration worth 6 ap total is enough to give 2 50% bonuses on a character with bully at the early game, add backstab and guerrilla on top of that and your hitting for 150%*150%*200%*200% at the lowest level possible. Come mid to late game your geomancer/withcraft skills are really the only one that scale, sure you can lower resistances but that's very chancy.

All my characters have bully, a 50% increase in damage is too good to pass up for something that is so easy to setup.

I tend to put leadership on my melees: the rationale being that since leaders don't get the initiative bonuses you would want them to go last so that your team has the time to buff up and such.

Crafting is a must. doesn't matter where but you can get warriors with near immunity by mid game given crafted and upgraded gear. A ruby armor+gloves+a warrior with weather the storm gets around 25%+30%+30% resistance to elemental and poison damage.

Also I tend to get some points in lucky charm, the rationale being that since resources are limited and since you can swap equipment before looting you can easily get a high level in lucky charm to boost the total amount of resources you get in a game. A bit tedious to swap equipment every time you loot but we hoarders/power gamers love it. Is it necessary? No, but it is good ol' corrupting fun of gambling and it's raising your maximum potential resources.

Personality-wise I tend to give Lyralei pragmatic, cautious, and renegade and Aerie the righteous , romantic, and bold. Why? the skills work well to augment the crafter/rouge plus it seems thematic to team up the idealistic and righteous bookworm with the street-wise, selfish, but forgiving rouge.

Archer

Abillity Points:
Equal Dex and Perception

Essential Skills:
Max Tenebrium
Max Expert Marksmen
2 Scoundrel
5 Hiding

Optional Skills
3 Crafting
Max Lucky Charm

Essential Talents:
Quickdraw
Bully
Guerrilla

Optional Talents:
Glass cannon
Elemental Ranger

Ability Points: Equal Dex and Perception because Dex doesn't actually increase your basic attack damage. It increases your chance to hit more than perception does, but perception gives your more crit chances which is what makes the archer so damage strong.

Warning: in my hard playthrough, I found myself having to use bless or the Accuracy stance a lot until the last 1/4th of the game.

Skills:
When you start, make sure you have 1 point in Scoundrel and pick up Fast Track and Walk in Shadows. Max Expert Marksmen as fast as humanly possible, or delay it a little bit get 3 in crafting; crafted arrows and crossbows are really good until about mid way through the game. After that get your 2nd point in scoundrel. You get 2 points in Scoundrel to bring the Scoundrel charm skill down to 6 AP, I haven't tried the newly patched Trip (no longer requires a dagger), but it also fits perfectly in this build.

Optional Skills:
I decided to make my archer my crafter because crafted arrows are awesome in the first half of the game. I also opted to max out lucky charm to help counter the lower hit chance of hard mode.

Essential Talents:
Quickdraw is essential; 'nuff said. Keep in mind though that if you follow my advice and use a crossbow in the beginning of the game, getting Quickdraw is about the time you want to drop your crossbow for a a bow. Bully is awesome for your archer, buy every antler you see and craft knockdown arrows for the enemies that get too close. Also, Boulder Bash is a skill I'd suggest you teach your mage because it is seriously OP. Guerrilla is amazing late-game; doubles your damage for 1 AP. Also, always end your turn hiding; the 1 AP that you're already using to double your damage increases your damage even further by reducing the amount of AP you have to use to move away from enemies/fire/etc.

Optional Talents:
I played on Hard and I didn't want to risk Glass Cannon, you will literally get 1 shotted by anything and everything. Definitely take Glass Cannon on normal. Take Elemental Ranger! Most people will tell you not to because they don't like seeing the light blue number when they're trying to damage their enemies, but in the long run this damage will deal more damage than it heals so it is worth it.

After you get all of your essential skills and talents and the optional talents of your choice, don't even think about picking getting anything else up! From Here on your visit the Demon and trade in all your Talent and skill points for more dex and perception. If you ever make it to a point in the game where you always have 90+ chance to hit at all times, stop putting points into dex and just since them into perception for more crit.

Playstyle:
The first half of the game, you want to spam Poison and Fire arrows for huge AoE damage, and static cloud arrows for aoe stuns. When you get quickdraw and Tenebrium weapons, your ability to crit with basic attacks and the 3AP cost will pull ahead of elemental arrow spamming. When you get max hide, your damage skyrockets and you require 0 babysitting from the other 3 members of your team.

The point of this thread, as the title said is for players to write what builds were best for them, not actually the best .... since that cannot exist. Every player will dabble and experiment and find a build thats working for her or him.

- I said this exact thing several times over already in this very thread. -


I tried to make a thread where posters can post their own builds - TO SHOW THE DIVERSITY THE GAME ACTUALLY OFFERS - NOT TO FUCKING ARGUE WHICH ONE IS BETTER THEN THE OTHER, or even more idiotically which one is "the best".


But several posters are just too fucking stupid to understand such a simple thing and they just went on arguing which builds are better then the others or which one is "teh best build" - which is idiotic. And off topic.

Not that that would bother any modartor around here.
or any of the subsequent screaming of the lambs that got soo angry that someone told them that.

And some dare then make several posts accusing me of being rude....? A Nazi? A jerk - because i ruined what could have been a helpful thread? I ruined it?

:lol: :lol :lol:



-

oh,hey, moderators... following me around other forums and only then deleting insulting inflammatory post or two, so it wouldnt be too emabrassing for you, eh?

gee thanks,
applause.
you cheap hypocrites.






- posts by Fronkles, jack177, Ludicity and theFlayedMan are ones made by actually sane, normal people who of course understand whats the actual and very simple purpose of the thread.

People posting in a public forum and not exactly sticking to the original intention of the original post? If that bothered me then there would be a problem with half the topics in the forum and almost every topic that gets over a page of posts.

The only possible way your idea of a topic could work is if all posts required moderator approval, and people could moderate their own topics. Of course you have never, ever posted in a topic yourself in a manner not specifically prescribed by the original poster...

I have no idea what you are talking about with other forums or deleting posts after the fact.