Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General What determines special arrow damage?

So I am trying to make a build that uses special arrows but is not actually an archer. Basically, it would be a mage who uses special arrows for extra CC/elemental damage options when the relevant mage spell is on cooldown. I imagine this would be less of a problem at the end of the game, but I find it tough relatively early on to constantly have a good CC/elemental damage option at my disposal when I need it.

This would not be a particularly viable build if I needed to splash a ton of points in dexterity to make if effective. However, I was thinking that I do not really need to a for a few reasons:

- It seems to me that special arrows always hit. I might be wrong, but that's what it seems like. Moreover, even if the targeted ones do not always hit, many of the best ones will be aimed at the ground anyways, so accuracy is not an issue.

- The AP cost of special arrows does not seem to be affected by anything. Thus, you don't lose anything by not having high dexterity.

- One aspect of special arrows is sometimes that they do a certain percent of normal damage. Dexterity does not directly affect normal damage. Instead it seems that it only indirectly affects bow damage by determining what bow you can equip. However, that initial damage is not really the main point of special arrows; they only do a percent of normal damage, so the overall effect of using a worse bow is lessened.


This leaves two big questions though:

1. What determines how much elemental damage an arrow does? For instance, a fire arrow has a burning effect and a poison arrow has a poison effect. What determines how much damage those effects do each turn?

Is it based on the original attack's base damage? Is it a separate calculation just based on your dexterity? Is it based on your crafting level when you made the arrow (doubtful)? Is it based on your character's level (also doubtful)?

I imagine it is probably based on the original attack's base damage. In that case, using special arrows on a low dexterity character becomes more harmful to damage.


2. How does dexterity affect status effect percentages. For instance, if you have a low intelligence, your spells will have a lower chance of succeeding in applying a status effect. They might have a base of 100% chance of success, but with low intelligence, that might actually be 70%. How big the penalty is is based on how high a level spell it is. So you might have little penalty on a low level spell, but a huge one on a high level spell.

Do special arrows have any analogous effect? It would make sense that dexterity would affect the chance to hit the status effect. However, special arrows do not seem to have a level in the way that a spell does, so I am not sure how that would work. And i've been led to believe that special arrows are stuck at their base percentages, which would ultimately be bad compared to a mage's spells, but is something of a windfall for a character with low dexterity.