My gut reaction to this is: Because it is fun? But of course what defines fun can be very personal.

For me the fun comes from making things work and not from going for the approved most powerful builds - I often find those a little boring to be honest. (Gloomstalker Assassin feels too little like Deadly Shadows for me. XD ) But I also never got the impression that the game is so difficult that you are forced to min-max your group. Maybe if you are on a solo honour mode run? I don't know. I also feel no attachment to Durge. Maybe they are the mastermind behind the plot, but the haunted one didn't manage to feel like a captivating narrative for me, so I rather make one of the other Origins the main character of my game and take their struggles as the motivations to be my main story.

My Avatar-Shadowheart with her incredibly low Charisma (I granted her two additional points to get out of the minus) lets Astarion, Gale or Lae'zel do the talking for her, depending on if we want to deceive, persuade or bully, (though it has become somewhat harder through the forced player interactions) which makes the gang feel much more like a team, instead of the groupies of the main character, which I enjoy a lot.

Wizards are great. I love their dialogue options, half of which backfire in some way. The subclasses, I have tried, have some unique charm to them which makes them desirable to play while feeling thematic. Divination might be my favourite due to the way the portent dice work. My main issue with wizards is, that I often don't know what to do with my bonus action. So I like a two level dip into Wild Magic Sorcery for the added chaos (or Storm Sorcery for less Chaos and bonus relocation), meta magic and some bonus action action.

I also feel that with magic, raw power often isn't its main appeal. Like to me the main appeal of ice is that I can make a very big slippery surface so the surviving enemies are either slowed or loose their turn. Lighting on the other hand is more of a death by a thousand cuts approach due to wet + electrocuted and the whole lighting set being build around this. But like you said, they synergise very well with each other giving the dual effect of incapacitating more durable enemies while instantly deep frying the smaller ones. So having an ice and a lightning based caster on the same team can be quite spectacular. (Electrified Steam is also just very pretty.) Fire is for people with a death wish due to how heat works, but it is also fun, I just never found it as compelling as a group set-up. Which is maybe another point, I don't really build my main character, I build my team.

I could go on, but I feel, I have been rambling already. So I hope this could at least show why I would play other things than ice sorcs. =)

Last edited by Anska; 05/03/25 02:31 PM.