Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks 2 handed weapons and warrior

As a warrior hybrid character, how do I use spear and staff effectively? Does the damage scale with their respective stats requirement? Does warfare skills only support str based characters?

The wepeon requirements will list whether they are based on Strength, Finesse or Intelligence; each gets a bonus from the applicable attribute.
If you are using a spear, Warfare skills receive a bonus from Finesse, rather than Strength; it should say in the tooltip when the damage is based on the weapon (in the Special section).

Whaaat? So a mage can do Whirlwind with a staff and get Int bonus?
I have noticed the note in skill and book description, but I thought its a bug in the description.

Yes, all the warrior skills are good for inquisitor. It is fun build.

Unfortunately the dps on staves are painfully low, so you hit like a wet noodle. On top of the fact that even with Aerothurge, trying to get through Magic Armor is a pain due to said poor weapon dps and also because of enemy elemental resistances causing you to do anywhere from 20%-100% less damage or perhaps even healing the enemy.

Hybrids are sub par at best right now.

My understanding is that Staves are actually doing fine in melee.

I put together a list of the average damage per AP for each of the default "white" weapons at level 8.
Ranked highest to lowest we have the following:

Weapon:Damage = Average(min, max)/AP
Mace:15 = AVG(29, 31)/2AP
2xSword: 15 = 1.5*AVG(19, 21)/2AP
Staff :13.5 = AVG(25, 29)/2AP
Bow:13 = AVG(25,27)/2AP
Spear: 12.75 = AVG(24,27)/2AP
2xDagger:11.625 = 1.5*AVG(15,16)/2AP
XBow:11.5 = AVG(33,36)/3 AP
2xWand:8.625 = AVG(11,12)/2AP

If we normalize the damage against the highest (15), we get the following for comparison:
Mace:1
2 Swords:1
Staff: 0.9
Bow: 0.867
Spear: 0.85
2 Daggers: 0.775
XBow: 0.767
2 Wands: 0.575
I only considered dual-wielding for 1-H weapons as the damage is strictly better than mono-wielding.

Most weapons have at least a useful niche, with Wands being inexcusably lower than everything else.

So, it appears that Str weapons are the top DPS, with Staves as a close second and with the option of a ranged shot and 4 different elements.
Bows are respectable, but have increased range.
Odd that Spears do less damage than bows and less range while using the same Stat, seems bad.
Daggers are poor, without help. However, if one has Backstab Talent and always uses it, that goes up to 1.1625, or 1.55 if using 2 200% crit damage daggers, which are not uncommon. This does prevent regular crits, however, which other weapons will still benefit from, and imposes an extra convenience cost to get behind targets, which will likely cost some amount of DPS in extra movement AP, and also costs one of the few Talent points characters receive.
XBow is 2nd lowest. It does however fit the niche of highest damage, giving it some synergy with Snipe/Guerilla or other Active Bow Skills. Not worthwhile for basic attacks, however, and Guerilla was nerfed too hard to be desirable.
Which leaves wands as being unacceptable garbage DPS. They take a hit for being ranged, and take another hit for being able to apply statuses. However, due to Magic Armor, the statuses won't get applied until as much as half of the target's effective health is gone, so these weapons are quite poor.

Back to the point I'm addressing, Stave damage is actually nearly the highest, only beat by Str Weapons, but they also maintain a ranged option.
Sure, enemies will have elemental resistance, but enemies also have elemental weakness. Attentive players using Staves can swap to the appropriate counter and actually end up doing more damage.
Lastly, melee-staff is in no way a hybrid (aside from possibly 1 point of Warfare for access to those skills). All staff damage is buffed by Intellect, and weapon-based skills now solely scale off of the weapon's damage (no more Str double-dipping), and there are also multiple skills to buff staff Damage, including Two-Handed and either Pyrokinetics or Geomancy if using the appropriate element. This difference will become much more pronounced once more content is released, as the 10 point skill limit will be reached, but Staff users will have another skill option to max that stacks multiplicatively with the other. E.g. 10 points Two-Handed and 10 points Pyrokinetics means a Fire Staff gets (1.5*1.5) = 225% increased damage.
Furthermore, staff users have the added benefit that Intellect will also buff almost every ability in every Magic School while equally increasing Warfare ability damage as much as Str would for a traditional fighter.

I think for bow and wands you must also consider possible bonus damage through hightadvantage, similar to backstabbing for daggers.

This is true; some of the time you can get high ground, which is a nice 20%. It doesn't do much to change my analysis for either though, as bows are already good and for wands a 20% bonus on an unacceptably low number is still the lowest by far.

Of note, the staff ranged shot can get the high ground bonus too, but the ranged shot is only 90% of the damage of the melee portion, which is still nets a slight increase. (.9*1.2=1.08)

Yeah, but Wands have anyway the 'mage' problem. Because they can cause 'effects' their pure damage is of course lower. But because of magic armor effects can only be caused after removal. Also there are most of the time some resistances.

Also ranged attacks have the range bonus, you need to invest less to be in attacking range, even more on high ground.

So what benefit does the spear have over 2-handed sword?

Wow, I wish the Larian's item master has same skill as you.

The 2H Sword has 1.5m range vs 2.5m range on the Spear. Considering this, the damage trade-off seems fair, until you realize Bows have much more range than the Spear and still more damage.
There also tend to be more 2H Str weapons, so those using them will get more-frequent upgrades as drops.

Comparing Bows to Spears, bows have >5x the range, ~2% more damage, the potential to benefit from high ground, and a plethora of elemental arrows.
Spears have Warfare Skills, but Bows have Hunstman Skills.
It makes Spears seem kinda bad, but since the available Skills are different the comparison isn't as straight-forward.

I've been doing a bit more experimenting on this, and in-practice Warfare with Staves isn't doing as well as I had theorized.

A couple of reasons:

1. The statuses applied by Warfare Skills are all blocked by Physical Armor, and most damage being done is Magical so enemies never get Knocked Down or become Crippled.
2. Enemy resistance proved more troublesome than I thought. Some enemies have resistance to every element, few enemies have any elemental weakness, and enemies often have one or two high resistances or an immunity. Mage weapons are double penalized here as they can also be dodged. If using Staves for your damage, be sure to have 2 or 3 different elements you can swap to as-needed.
3. My favorite Warfare Skill, Battle Stomp, isn't very effective for Staff users. For a regular Physical Warrior the damage is High, long range AoE, and usually applies Knockdown to a couple of enemies. For a Staff, the damage is still all Physical (even though its based off the weapon's damage, it gets converted). Since it's the only attack a Staff Warrior has to hit Physical, it is likely not enough to remove the Physical Armor entirely and then all follow-up attacks will hit Magic Armor. So you either use it and hit both types of armor, or you avoid it and lose one of the best Warfare skills.

The option of the ranged attack has been nice. It makes kiting a lot easier. However, I have to kite more than if I was just stronger or could Knockdown.

It's the main issue, that magic is far to weak, mainly because the armor system screws mages far more then warriors. Because of their elemental effects magic deals less pure damage, but elemental effects are hardly important, as long there is still armor left. Also only magic is at current state ainfluenced by resistances. That is why a pure physical team will have less problems in fights than a pure magic team and I guess polymorph made this imbalance even worse.

Does not sound as if they changed Battlestomp. As far as I remember Battlestomp was never affected by weapon only by level, STR and Warfare, because the attack gets done with your foot (stomp). And that is why a staff won't change the type of damage.

Yeah, I am in agreement that Magic users need a little love. They are being punished more from armor, resistances, and lower base damage than Physical is.



This is the case for abilities that do not require a weapon, but Battlestomp requires a melee weapon and its damage is directly proportional to the damage of the equipped weapon. E.g. when using a staff, Battlestomp's tooltip states that it scales off of Intellect, and equipping a more-powerful staff will increase the damage.
However, unlike most other weapon spells, all damage is converted to Physical, instead of using the Weapon's native damage.
It is odd that a Battlestomp requires a melee weapon, but I guess they didn't want bow users getting a long-ranged AoE Knockdown.

Pure warfare with a staff is pointless, but hybridizing with aerothurge or another tree is effective. Use the mobility and AOE of warfare to position and get enemy armor down, and use aerothurge for stuns/blind. Unless you have spare skill slots, ignore the physical damage abilities like battle stomp

The thing about elemental resists is that while they can reduce your damage dramatically, it can also go the other way for enemies with low resists to certain elements. This means always keeping several staves handy, which is definitely tough sometimes.

No doubt magic overall seems weaker than physical, and focusing a party on physical or magic only tends to have better results. I could definitely see tactician mode punishing all magic or all physical groups though. Things like enemies with a 50%+ dodge aura, magekiller groups of enemies (lots of use of mute and high resists), enemies that are stronger the more characters are near them (to punish grouping them all up for AOE, or all melee groups) etc. All mage/all phys groups should be able to beat the game, but there should be times where their weakness can be a huge detriment.

An especially good place to do this would be with tough optional bosses that drop really good loot. For example, you could have a magekiller group that drops a really good wand. A more balanced group would be fine, but an all mage group might not be able to deal with them to get the wand.

So I guess, they changed it quite a bit. At least I remember it different. ^^

They main problem will be, to get staff of every level and keep finding more according to your level increase. probably pretty impossible.

This is true, in theory.

But, in practice, how many enemies actually have elemental weaknesses? I noticed 2. Fire Slugs are weak to water (-50%), and some skeletons are weak to fire (-10%), but nearly every enemy I saw was either slightly resistant (10-20%) to some or all elements and possibly highly resistant (40%+) or immune to another. All undead are immune to or healed by Poison, Warriors constantly go Immune to Fire, there's a new Water-Immune skill several enemies use, and lots of guards have a flat 10-20% resistance to everything.
Staves (and especially wands) already have lower base damage than their physical counterparts, then they generally get reduced by resistances (or at least have to jump through hoops swapping weapons), and then their built-in statuses are blocked by armor too, and this assumes you'll have same-quality and different element weapons to even swap to, and that you take the effort of inspecting every enemy to see their resistances and swap weapons often.
It just doesn't seem very appealing to me. There's no reason not to just go Physical for better damage. Physical damage parties still have Crowd Control and utility without having to do any Magic Damage.
Sure, Larian could introduce some enemies with very high Physical armor, or very high dodge (this still affects Staff and Wand attacks) to try to make Magic users appealing, or force more-varied parties, but I still think the Magic drawbacks should just be addressed. Otherwise taking a token mage will feel more like a requirement than a fun choice.

You're right, there could be a bit more variance in elemental weaknesses. And weaknesses are often fairly minimal (-20 is the typical lowest resist) compared to high resistances (50+ frequently). Several enemies could gain more significant weaknesses. Like, the frogs have -20 earth resistance, and that could probably be at least -40 (assuming more earth dmg skills to make that useful at all.)

I agree that the staff-warfare build is pretty much more work for less effect than a standard build, but it's alright and fun imo. By no means in a perfect spot but it's a start.

And I want magic/physical resistant enemies not just as gimmicks in themselves, but in addition to magic buffs and tweaks to the armor system and whatnot. More overall skills will help. Magic should provide more utility (buffs, debuffs, movement, etc) than physical in general, but right now there's simply not enough skills to showcase that aspect.

Personaly I think the presets need an update,because some of them are obsolete ,Inquisitor is good example here because necro now targets phys armor instead of magical and while he has a staff equiped his warfare skills will never damage physical armor.

For Inquisitor I believe it's best to swap out Necro for Aero and then do the opposite for Battlemage (swap Aero for Necro) because for the purpose of shreding magical armor an Inquisitor that starts with Charge,Cripple and Lighting Discharge will be a very potent mage slayer as oposed to Battlemage who has to spread his stats thin.

Recently I started a new game with a thieving Dwarf Inquisitor (warfare+aero combo) and Sebile as a Ranger.

Afterwards I had my Dwarf steal calm mind for Sebile and the oranges,then had Sebile kill that reptile before he could rat me out.

Inquisitor and Ranger work really well toghether,especialy in this format I run,where Sebile can provide support for me with her Pyro skills while I burst down mages with Inquisitor and vice versa where the Warfare skills on the dwarf can CC the Ranger's target.

I think Inquisitor and Ranger (and wizzard with access to the 2 buffs from Pyro) were meant to be played in the same team comps, even with Necro as part of the preset, but as it stands, Necro on staff wielder is not worth it (at least not at lvl 1)

Also the description in Inquisitor is not representative of his playstyle, I would go with something like "A prodigy in the use of magical weaponry, he decimates his opponents at both range and in melee" because he is to squishy to be worth charging with.