I've looked at some other threads on this forum and the word "hybrid" tends to pop up quite often. However, I haven't seen a single post whose author actually understood the meaning of the word (not trying to be condescending or anything).

Thing is, as it stands now, the only DOS2 skills that could be considered somewhat hybrid-ish are skills that scale with just char level and/or char level+their related ability.

A skill could be considered a hybrid only if it scaled with at least 2 separate attributes AT THE SAME TIME, which is not the case here. If we had that, then playing a class that for example invests equally into strength and intellect wouldn't feel like you've wasted half of your attributes. Such true hybrid skills would actually make people want to play a hybrid class for their combat performance instead of just role playing value.

And, July_chang, my argument about warfare with a staff...you just kinda confirmed it - see, warfare right now is nothing but a fail bait because it's scaling depends on the weapon type. So people get fooled into thinking it's the way to go to make a magical beat-stick character, but what you've failed to notice is that warfare ability gives you 5% extra PHYSICAL damage done per level invested into it, which is completely useless for the magical beat stick build.

So to build a magical beat stick char, you have to max out 2handed ability and one magic ability (aerotheurge for example) and then pray to the RNGesus to give you a usable staff of the same magical element so that the weapon actually benefits from your points invested into a magical ability. And spend what remaining points you have for grabbing more magical utility - I don't know what is the achievable max char level in the game at the moment so I'm working under the assumption you can max out 2 abilities (20 points) and that you are left with 5-6 points after that - someone correct me if I'm wrong! Lone wolf characters are different for obvious reasons as they have a lot more leeway in their builds.