Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Useless magic in tactician difficulty.

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.

I have been melting through Tactician with my mage. Not sure what you're talking about.

Eh, looks like you need to set the party up in tactician to do one type of damage. I got physical damage dealers that complement each other and have phys-armor check debuffs. The mage can be a summoner, necro or hydro healer in that kind of composition. I haven't done a mage party but I assume you wanna go heavy on magic damage so you crack their magic armor in the first few turns then CC them afterwards.

Boomp

They become a lot better after level 5.

Wait until that. Level 1 to 4 is all about having ridiculous items and sadly, mages don't get any. (warfare gets ancient sword + whatever other weapon you want to use, bow gets houndmaster and rogues can try to go for Knilles knives if they're strong enough).

After level 5, magic scaling goes up the roof along with the amount of Int you will put into the char. They are really good to have around with Mending Armor (level 2 GEo) and Soothing cold/mist (Level 2 Hydro) for ridiculous armor regen with decent magic damage. If they dual wield a unique wand then they really start to deal damage, although sadly not as good as physical dds so don't build them with pure offense in mind. Instead, build them for their versatility because their heal and shield spells are really strong thanks to the int scaling and you can use spell scrolls while the actual spell is on cool down too.

mages gets good with sacrilage talent that turns your weapon crit into magic crit, which makes your aoe fireball/impalement hurt a ton.

I have not noticed any tips about heal and shield spells scaling with int. Are you sure?

That is kind of what this kind of armor system causes in pretty much every difficulty, you just feel it more in Tactician.

I should have worded it better and say int along with skill tree scaling with the tree for shield/heal and int for spell scroll and other spell. Heal/shield don't scale directly with int.

Some of the tooltips are bugged right now though so evne if it appears to have really low value, like "Mending armor", the bonus is applied once you actually use it. It currently gives me 26 armor per round (and on cast) although it says 21.

So what mage build would you recommend to create? For example let says I want to either create strong CC mage, or Healer or Damage Dealer.

What abilities would you recommend and stats?

Damage dealer fire and earth, CC water and air, healer/support probably a bit from everything but mainly water.

There are many, many possibilities. The most important thing is to determine the best order of encounters and for each encounter the order in which you focus targets. This is based on the strengths/weaknesses of your party, so it's better (though more complicated) to talk about a party's build rather than an individual character's build.

In a particular encounter, you will have some enemies with high physical armor, some with high magic armor, etc. Suppose you decide to roll a 100% physical squad. Initiate the encounter by targeting low physical armor enemies. In general it helps to have at least half of your party with high Initiative so that you get 2 consecutive turns to deal serious damage to one target before they can do anything. If you are able to CC that target first round, and you've positioned your squad in such a way that you're not particularly susceptible to AOE, you will mitigate the damage enemies will do to your squad in the first round. There will be enemies wasting AP trying to support their downed ally, meaning less enemy AP spent doing damage to your characters.

This general strategy applies to all kinds of party compositions based on their strengths/weaknesses.

At the moment, I have Lone Wolf mage with Far Out Man, points in each elemental school, and summoning. Wits and Memory are my highest stats, then Intelligence. Having the summon allows you to help your Physical buddies with their targets, and also waste enemy AP. Having access to all schools allows you be extremely flexible in all encounters, and you'll often find yourself trying out different combinations of skills for different battles. On the other hand, having a Huntsman with the new Elemental Arrow skill helps your mage buddies with magic armor while still primarily being a damage dealer.

The moral of the story here is that strategy and preparation rules all. Magic, in my opinion, is not weak. It's about having a balanced party composition where your physical mains can help with a little magic damage and vice versa. Hope this helps.

Side note: there are some cool little tactics which might help you out as a mage. Say you start out with dual wands and an enemy manages to get close to you and bring down your armors. Switch out one of your wands for a shield. This will help massively if your other buffs are on cooldown.

Earth is ridiculously good right now along with water.

Earth: Mend armor + Fortify for huge defense. Oil field can go through CC immunity and apply slow which is awesome for controlling how your enemies move.

Also, Earthquake (Geo 2) in a game winner. IT's a massive AoE that only hits enemy around you (like, rain size?). The best part is that it inflicts knock down! Starting at act 2, with a 3 physical damage team, I actually start to break all the shield first if the enemeis are too tanky and just use the Earthquake to get me another free turn by knocking down the entire group again.

Hydro is always useful. However, healing ritual has been nerfed (from full heal to loldecent AoE heal since it only applies around 0.9 ticks of recovery to everyone in the area. Frost armor and soothing cold are why you want it. Also, there are enemies with insane physical but no magical armor as well and water is the only one that can apply instant hard CC using Rain -> Hail strike because it will apply wet, chillden and then frozen right away.

Fire is... meh. Don't like it. Rarely even get to use it.

Necromancy is actually only decent. You mainly use it for the summon and death wish when you want a huge damage burst before using Evasive aura to keep your damager as he continues to rekt at 10% health with that 90% missing health damage bonus boost.

Aero is nice for its 100% self dodge buff for only 1 AP (really good to make you almost unkillable).

So if you want to make a good make.

For all of them : Include Geo. It's too good with every build, physical or magical.

For healer:

Get Hydro to go with Geo. Also grab 1 warfare and get a good shield and learn Shield bounce. Shield bounce scale with how much armor the shield give so not only are you really tanky, the 2 CD shield bounce also give you ridiculous damage. (It does like 170 per bounce while my necromancy with pure 22 int does 89 at level 11, ha)

For damage:

Get fire as well. burning field does quite a hefty damage later but if you really want to go damage, dual wand is way better than using spell because of how good it scales with item and that items power really jump after Act 2 where npcs start selling riduclous legendary tier gears every hours.

For CC :
Get all of them, get mem and use spells accordingly.

The thing is, pure CC mage suck if you're going to rely on just hard CC from dealing damage. If you want to play a CC mage, you have to manipulate the field effect.

They have ranger? Create steam with Rain -> Fire and cover yourself so they can't shoot.

They have warrior? Oil. RIP

And then you either use stuff like Earthquake as mentioned above to help your physical teammate CC even harder or just use whatever synergize with your friend and try to go for a shock-stun or chill-frozen.

Stat is Int > Mem > con. Just get enough con so you can wear shield all the time. Easy is to keep it +1 above your current shield (so 12 con shield, get 13 and keep it at that). You can respec as much as you want anyway after Act 2.

Here's my fane build atm as support healer GEo-Hydro with most gears focusing on making him tanky and giving him more Geo/Hydro.

https://i.imgur.com/AUOcLCP.jpg

Stat at level 11 is 13 Con, 23 Int, 17 Mem. No point in wits, using the +2 ini from his undead human racial to make him go 3rd.

He's the team tank with insane healing and armor recovery. Shield bounce gives him enough damage to help break physical shields while I wait for a good earthquake. Chain lighting and ice shard are always there to help CC low magic armor targets.

There's a bug where if you use the reset mirror while using the mask illusion, it gives you their original racial to go along with the lizard look and racial until you revert their form.

Kinda useless anyway and normal hats give far better stats. I mainly use it because the bug allows you to customize how you want the illusion to look until they revert. (the bug saves how they will look so you just talk to the mirror and exit for the new look)