Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Save bow and staff

Upon current release, there is no obvious reason using bow over crossbow and staff over wand.

Crossbow movement penalty is almost negligible with all the movement utility skills later in the game and Crossbow already have accuracy bonus; there is really no need to make bow damage inferior.

And for the staves, ever since the Dev introduced wands in dos1, I can't see the reason to use them anymore. To my surprise, they still let the difference stay where it is in DOS2.
Any chance the staff get some nice bonus like elemental synergy, which add 20% damage and -1 cooldown to corresponding elemental skill? This way, wands still get those nice bonus from welding two weapons and staff become more favorable to mage focus on one elemental skill.

Would be cool to see some changes made in future patches.

i do think staves need to be better

they tend to offer better stats but it'd be nice if there were incentive to use regular attacks

to be fair, later in the game you don't use regular attacks with wands either

It was already in the first game quite an issue, that two wands were better than one staff. The offer range attack instead of melee and in combination better stat boost than one lonely staff tends to over. Though in D:OS2 wand + shields often is even better, because of Shield throw and armor replenishment.

Many of the issues regarding items carried over from the first game or even got worse sadly.

Only purpose now for a staff could be full magic setup with a warrior who uses a staff for close combat magical damage.

Doesn't using Staves technically allow you to utilize the 2handed combat ability, to increase the critical damage multiplier? Granted, probably not exactly worth it in most cases.
Wands also allow you to use 2 runes, instead of 1.

As for bows vs xbows; It's just as people said before. The movement penalty is next to nonexistant. I usually use a single Tactical Retreat at the start of combat (or just position myself before combat even starts) and don't move from there in 90% of the cases. There simply isn't any incentive to actually try to kite enemies using a bow, when you can just chain cc enemies in most cases. Or outright kill them before they get to do stuff, for that matter. The only times I actually move and would consider using a bow are during early to mid act 1 and very rarely during bossfights, when I have to move out of range of a silence for example. Unless I just kill/chain cc them before, of course.
The added accuracy bonus on xbows is simply the added bonus, which allows me to use a +crit rune in my amulet, instead of +accuracy.