Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Improved ideas for Summoning

In general dimensional bolt is best when your enemies don't have any significant resistances, and there's no chance it will set off some chain reaction that will hurt your allies.

But I could see dimensional bolt getting a slight damage buff. If something is unreliable, something else needs to compensate for that randomness. To extent the fact that you can potentially access every surface through that one ability helps that, but the low damage for its AP cost makes its versatility fairly costly. Generally you'll be better off spending that AP any other way, unless you DESPERATELY need to bank on stunning an enemy and have no other options to do that, but that's more bad preparedness than anything.

I don't feel like the basic attack the summoner starts with should feel like an "emergency button." It's a fun ability, so its too bad it's mediocre. As far as scaling with intelligence, I'll say I like how summoner overall doesn't really depend on intelligence, but I'm not if any other stat would make sense to scale dimensional bolt with. It could scale with the summoning ability if you could argue it counts as "summoning" an attack from another dimension, but that's quite a stretch.

That's a good point. Oil is pretty great utility; it avoids the blocked status drawback the other elemental sources have.
I'll have to try using more of it in conjunction with summons.
It's certainly a better tradeoff of damage for utility with Summons than the other elements.

However, you have to have a source of Oil to use it for Summons, and so you could just use that source for the debuff and keep your summons on Blood for their increased damage/health. It's not like you can stack the Oil debuff.



Sometimes enemies have a disparity, and this can be used a lot better if your party has high single-target damage sources (Warrior bursts the Mage, and vice versa); but if you're a mixed party using AoE you'll just end up eating through both armors eventually, which is just giving the enemy more effective-health.
It's harder for the whole team to gang-up on one target if they're collectively hitting different armor sources too, especially true with bosses, as you all likely will be fighting the 1 target together. I tend to favor "Piercing" weapon enhancements over elemental because of this.
In these cases where it's not-so-helpful, using a single and higher damage source is preferred. It's not like having all Physical is particularly bad at killing any current enemies.

When I first tried summons I used the elements and I constantly would have summons hitting enemies with no remaining Physical and lots of remaining Magic armor and I couldn't get through. The rest of my party just removed the Physical Armor much easier. I felt like I had a mixed damage party too. Mileage may vary, but that was my experience.



Perhaps the bolt could be smarter about the element it chooses. Lowest enemy resistance would be a nice touch.

I'm making a party of 4 Summoners right now, which should be pretty interesting. I'm also taking a gamble and picking Glass Cannon on my main character.




Your point about the AP cost is fair. I think Dimensional Bolt could probably go down to a 1 AP cost. That would make it more flexible, letting you place a surface and then either a totem or an incarnate.




Because it is not supposed to be a reliable or strong dealer of direct damage. Remember this is the summoning school.




Most of those also generate LARGE surfaces, which you may not always want, as large surfaces are more likely to either hit or interfere with other party members, and have unintended spreading of effects and explosions.



So be careful placing it so you don't do that, just like you would be careful aiming lightning at a spot.



So don't shoot it at enemies.



So don't shoot it at enemies, but at an empty space. That will make a large enough surface to place things on.




It sounds to me like you aren't using it properly.

I think we agree, using Bolt against enemies is unreliable crap.
But using it against the ground isn't much better, you said yourself 2 AP is a bit much, considering we have so many alternatives.
IMO, the best use of a Dimensional Bolt skillbook as it exists is selling it to a vendor.

The ability has scaling damage, clearly Larian wants its use as an enemy targeting ability. I'm just saying it needs a bit of a buff to realize that use-case.

I love the idea of Glass Cannon, but whenever I've tried it I find it underwhelming. The AI is smart enough now to go out of their way to CC and target Glass Cannons. You've gotta have a non-GC character with initiative right before them ready to remove the CC or you'll lose more actions than the extra AP nets you.
As a Summoner it was even worse. A lot of times I didn't have anywhere good to spend the extra AP (after the 2 per-turn for totem). If you've put a lot of points into Summoner your basic attacks and abilities are weaker than classes with other Skill passives, so the extra AP doesn't necessarily have as much punch on a Summoner. Using a bow on this character can help a lot. Special arrows give lots of options and the Dodge from Finesse can help you entirely avoid hits that would CC you (not to mention much better damage than Wands).
Be sure to go Elf, as the buff from Flesh Sacrifice increases max AP, so the GC character earns 7 per turn! GC synergizes well with Adrenaline Rush too, the drawback is ignored for GC characters due to the Max AP increase.

The question I ponder is...

Is Dimensional Bolt an acceptably bad skill meant to be replaced with synergy...

OR if it should be good in its own right.

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The other issue is how EXACTLY do you "fix it".

1) You could increase its damage and make it a sort of gamble whether or not it will use an element that is useful.
-This is an acceptable change to an extent.
2) You COULD make it so you can chose the element
-This is unfortunately not a good idea as it will clog up the interface... AND it sort of steps on other skill's toes to an extent.
3) It could have a secondary use if it hits an incarnate/totem/summon such as healing them.
-Depending on how strong this is, it is a decent idea.
4) It could do bonus damage against other summons.
-Very useful in the long run, but people on this forum would complain about it due to the lack of summoning enemies early on and not see its long term use.
5) It could ignore friendly fire and get a slight area boost... Its surfaces might not even hurt allies.
-Possible?

Thinking about, maybe just dropping it to 1 AP would be sufficient. As Stabbey said, it'd synergize better with summoning an incarnate on your first turn. Possibly in that case it could even do slightly LESS damage, but not sure if that's needed. It'd stay a fun, versatile skill that you could use nearly every turn if you often use other 1 AP skills or move. I don't think there are enough 1 AP attack skills in general.

There's no need to over complicate it with other side effects. Dealing extra damage to summons is the most plausible of your suggestions Neo, but probably more effort to program in than it's worth. Another idea is it could make the target vulnerable to whatever damage the bolt deals, but that might fit another skill better.

There could be more skills that negate it's downside, like decaying touch, which makes enemies take damage from elemental healing if they have 100%+ resist. Other skills that disable elemental healing, or just lower resists in general will help. How about something like "Equalize," which averages out a character's resistances, so if a character had 100 poison resist and 0 in everything else, than it would change to 20% resist in all 5 resists.

I'm honestly kind of disappointed it seems so far to be limited to the Incarnate as a mostly catchall summon. I imagine there should be higher level abilities we haven't seen yet, at least I hope so.

One of the first things I had hoped for, was being able to summon a Voidwoken Deep Dweller as soon as I saw that enemy in the game. Maybe even the ability to use old weapons to animate them into living weapons, instead of selling or discarding them.

Dimensional bolt as one of their first abilities, had me really hoping their skills would deal more strongly with tapping into otherwordly powers.

I also agree with Stabbey that Dimensional Bolt should only cast 1 AP and I encourage Larian to let us test it with just 1 AP and it's current scaling before nerfing the scaling of the skill.

I also believe that the current pre-set,Conjurer, is a joke. Inteligence isn't worth having on this Mage class and this goes double for Finesse.

I think the new preset for the Conjurer class should have just 1 point in Intelect and 2 in Wits,the reason being that this is a spellcaster preset and that you should be able to get out your summons out as fast as possible.