Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General questions about a few builds

On which difficulty are you playing? You can relax a lot more on Classic than on Tactician.

Generally, the DOS2 combat system offers a lot of possible ways to achieve the goal. You have three dedicated physical damage dealers and one magical, and I don't like such combinations. But they can work, surely, don't care for my personal bias.

A "standard" combo for mages would be Pyro/Geo or Aero/Hydro. The former is the max damage variant, the latter is more about cc but can also generate big damage. Pyro together with Aero/Hydro can of course work but is not ideal in my opinion as you lose the explosive factor from oil + fire and some conditions ("wet" for example) are not the best for applying fire spells. But as I'm not an experienced elemental mage player I let more detailed answers to others.

For the "death knight", I don't know what this actually means, sorry. But you have Necro skills in, ok. Necro skills are not for big damage, they offer however a nice self heal and summons. Good for a tank. Mosquito Swarm is a decent damage spell. The biggest damage you do with Decaying Touch + healing. So you could combine it with Hydro, although that would be more a "Cleric" (my main started as such).
A knight is a weapon guy for me. Twohanded is big damage, so it is always a good choice. I have some Necro skills on my twohanded warrior but it is more a side effect. A Bone Widow here and there and some blood sucking can help to win. You could also use onehanded and shield, to profit from the huge benefits of a shield; onehanded is however meagre damage and unfortunately not worth it on higher levels and difficulties, but you had your Intelligence based Necro skills for damage. As weapon based points are multiplicative, put all points into Warfare. I would raise Intelligence more then Strength.
I really don't like dual wielding (which sane person would go to war with such a movie garbage?), but it may be also good for big damage in the game. Never tried it.

An archer/summoner combination is ok, but not the best in my point of view. You need all points in Summoner to make the pet really strong, so bow damage lacks a bit. Or you have bigger bow damage and a weak summon. I have a summoner in my party who sometimes uses a bow, sometimes shield and onehanded to be more resilient. But mostly she heals and is anti-cc, besides summoning.
As you lack magical damage in your party you should concentrate on summoning and let the summon do magical damage, to assist your mage. For me this seems better than to distract your warrior. Of course you then lack big ranged physical damage which can be bad in some encounters.
Edit: then you could also use your summoner with wand and shield, for magical additional damage and good protection.

A warrior with polymorph is straight forward. I would go with twohanded for big damage and nothing else. My twohanded warrior (Warfare/Necro/Poly) is my best damage dealer, with 97% crit chance or so, as far as I remember.


Some remarks:
- I use a purely physical damage group (twohanded warrior, rogue (my main, prior Cleric), ranger and summoner. This comes more from my general dislike of mages (in any game) than from cunning thoughts about the DOS2 damage system, but it fits. You need to get rid of physical or magical armor, not both on the same target. Therefore I would go two : two or pure damage in a group.
- In my opinion movement is perhaps not everything but quite a lot in DOS2 combat. Therefore I have such skills on all my chars, two at least per char.
- Healing comes in handy. My summoner has the most healing spells, but any of my other chars has at least one healing spell, too.