After completing first Divinity OS in tacticial difficulty multiple times with different comps i'm quite dissapointed in magic combined with new armor mechanics combined with new tactician mode in second game.
With removed intellect cooldown simple buff/heal/damage spells cannot be casted constantly so mage becomes bad character for supporting(not like support spells became useless, but now it's useless to have only one character with them as universal support).
Secondly, combat interaction between mage and other classes was greatly reduced-mage cannot stun surrounded enemy without breaking his magic armor, which physical damage classes cannot hit. Instead, dealing both types of damage to single enemy just increases his effective health because both magic and physicals armors are in use.
Furthermore, the damaging and CCing part of mage was significantly nerfed. You cannot chill/burn/charm/etc an enemy without breaking his magic armor. Somewhy, even in Act 1, any single mindless zombie/ordinary soldier has huge amount of magic armor that usually exceeds [b]whole vitality[/b] of your heroes.(for example, my lvl 4 tank character with spending half points into vitality has 100 vitality health, when all lvl 3 'silent monks'(mindless zombies) have at least 80 magic armor, this number raises to 200+ for lvl 5 enemies). So my mage with average of 30-40 dps per turn must focus an ordinary enemy of same level for at least 2 turns to become able to damage and CC him.
Somewhy almost any single enemy(including goddamn 'mindless zombies', ordinary rangers and knights) has HUGE amount of magic armor. So without any outside support, mage is literally useless most of the fight. You cannot constantly heal or buff allies, you cannot damage or CC enemies(only if you have full team of mages that can quickly break magic armor), only slow, since oil ignores magic armor. Summons got nerfed aswell, fleshmonster and cat have laughable combat performance and cannot be quickly summoned again(no cooldown reduction). Skills scale into lategame mainly from leveling up, intellect and other scales are tiny.
Only way for spellcaster to be useful i found is to abuse puddles of oil and ooze by literally flooding whole battleground with them before fight begins and burning them at first rounds. In this case, enemy magic armor is being halfly damaged when they reach melee range, but this gameplay is sort of abusing just like bug-using and is extremelly boring to repeat in every single fight.
My suggestions:
-return armor system from DOS 1(wont happen sadly);
-transfer most part of magic and/or physical armor into vitality(its just absurd when ordinary peasants have magic armor exceeding health of your tank of same level so your ancient mage cannot put a single spark on them);
-rework tactician mode(+50% damage, +50% health AND armor looks like bad Oblivion difficulty slider and is far behind than increased enemy count and other features from first DOS);
-return cooldown reduction, just reduce cooldowns and/or increase spells damage and/or scales;
-add certain spells and effects ability to ignore magic armor(not only oil slow);
Yes, sorcerer with AoE permastun from first game is quite
toxic mechanics, but now any kind of sorcerer does almost nothink in fight. You either pick full magic team to break enemy magic armor to let your spells be useful or waste your damage and effects into enemy barriers you can't break alone and wait for cooldown on supporting skills. Pure mage is literally burden for his team in Tactician difficulty now.
Sorry for my bad English.
