Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Are mages a bit...weak?

I know this seems to primarily be focused on elemental damage casters, but Summoners are stupidly strong. They can be stupidly boring too if you are trying to use them as a buffer, and their spell damage will generally be weaker too for a while since your goal is to rush Summoning to 10.

Rangers are easily the strongest class in the game. The main downside is finding 3x - 4x bows of comparative damage every few levels. Otherwise, they don't really have any downsides as a class, and I know two-handed gets mentioned a bit, but two-handed has nothing on what Rangers can do.

1. Start leveling up Summoning.
2. Raise Finesse and use a bow. Summoning exists on Finesse gear. There's even Int + Summoning on Finesse gear.
3. At some point early, put a single point into Huntsman (or get it through gear).
4. Profit.

It's not initially going to be as strong as a Warfare focused Ranger in terms of the damage you personally do with a bow, but you end up with a "caster" that can do significantly more single target damage over time compared to wands, and you also end up with a giant ass pet that can learn spells that do more damage than a dedicated elemental damage dealer for a very long time. It also doesn't hurt that you need 3 in any given school at some point if you want to buff the pet to the (insanely strong) source versions either, so you can still use all of the non stat, level only scaling abilities. And of course Teleport...