I'd like to share some of my personal guidelines when building characters. This has served me well for the past 4 playthroughs.

Attributes are fairly straightforward for most builds.
--Max out your main statistic such as strength, finesse or intelligence. Overcap with stuff you get from your gear
--Casters need 18 memory, including what you get from the Mnemonic talent. This should give you more then enough spells to memorize. If need... well you need to learn to prioritize which spells to memorize. You don't need all of them. For melee I usually have around 14-16 memory depending on what kind, theme, of a build I'm going for.
--Constitution for most builds is around 16 at most. Only a few exceptions in melee go higher, especially with bonusses from gear there is one that ended up with 22-24 constitution if I remember correctly.
--The rest goes into Wits. It isn't just about finding secrets and initiative. The critical% goes up quite nicely as well. So you can almost max this out by the end quite easily as well.


Skills you usually have around 20 points to spread around. Which isn't a lot, but you don't want to put too much in just one. In fact going to max level is rarely a good thing. I usually have two classes to 5, with maybe some extra from gear. You can get a few at 2-3 in order to get some usefull skills as well as the bonus from the class description. If you're a mage, and you find yourself on high ground a lot...then huntsman is not a bad investment for example. Plus you can learn Tactical Retreat which is helpful. Some classes give damage boost to all damage types making them more interesting then just specializing in that hydrosophist or something that only increases skills from that class. In short getting 5 points in 1-3 classes and spreading the rest around at 1-2, in order to get access to usefull skills, is a good thing to do. Which was awkward at first since I'm used to specializing in RPG's. But specializing in DoS2 is actually a waste of points.

As a mage you might want to go dual wand and put some points in dual wielding as well. Gives overall damage% and chance to dodge/evade. Staves rarely are interesting enough for what they give, other then looks of a traditional archetype.

Going tank in DoS2 is a waste of time and effort in my opinion. You can't taunt or provoke or do anything worth while due to the Armor mechanics. You need to take them down before your CC abilities actually do something. You want to do damage instead of trying to tank damage. Your better of just going offense with big physical damage output. That way you can take down opponent armor faster and actually start using your CC abilities. By the time you get to that point of combat encounters most fights are pretty much over anyway, making tanking useless for the short period of time it is somehwat used. And that also explains why sword/board builds are just...not worth any time investment at all. One handed weapons just don't do sufficient damage. Only time I used a shield was with my summoner. She was just super tanky and stood in the middle of everything buffing/debuffing everything while her minions rekt stuff. She did use shield toss whenever she didn't had anything else to do and still contribute to the party.

"Hybrid" teams work just fine. All you need is 1 person that does lots of physical damage, 1 that does massive magical damage and 2 that do whatever and you'll be fine. The whole thing about "hybrid" teams being bad is just bullshit. In fact, non-"hybrid" teams are much more limiting.

No idea how it works on lower difficulties. On Tactician you can't keep your "squishier" characters at the edges of the battle field. The AI always ignores the heavier armored ones and goes for the casters as soon as they can. Giving those characters mobility and ways to cope is important then. Flight from Polymorph helps, uncanny evasion helps, Tactical Retreat helps... Other then that focus on damaging and taking their armor down so you can use accordingly CC options.

Last edited by Giblix; 08/10/17 06:15 PM.