I just kind of realized that I played the entire start of the game... without really using any Sourcery and really didn't care much for it due to its very limited use.

I am wondering if this is an issue and that people, like me, largely ignored it.

There is other ways to get source and later on it will probably become rather plentiful. Chain Lightning and a few others are extremely powerful.

They're mostly fairly lackluster, though source points aren't quite as rare as I expected, with each purging wand granting 10 possible source points. There obviously will be way more source skills, so I'm not too worried yet, but existing skills could use some work.

Infect seems like one of the worst source skills, though maybe I just need to give it a chance.

Steam Lance is a great concept, but I wish it could did something like damage enemies and heal allies, given how hard it must be to line up all 3 allies. It basically seems like a harder to use healing ritual that heals about the same only over 3 turns.

Overpower is confusing. Does it work if your max armor is higher than the enemy's max armor, or use current armor values? I assume the latter, but haven't tested. My warrior doesn't seem like he has much physical armor, so it hasn't seemed particularly useful to me, but maybe when better geared it'd be better.

Electric Fence doesn't seem very good on paper and hard to use. Or at best, Chain Lightning is better. Maybe if the air immunity was two turns it'd be a nice aggressive attack that wouldn't be extremely dangerous after the first turn.

Dunno about Arrow Spray.

Acid Spores, Chain Lightning, Mortal Blow, and Infectious Flame and Epidemic of Fire all seem really good from my impression.

I find them very useful, but of course they are not all perfectly balanced. My issue has been that i have not really felt a need to use them as i can often get throu the battles without to much struggle, altough i have yet to fully complete the act again after latest patch.

I just realized it SORT of creates an obvious problem...

The "Fallout 4 Power Armor" Claus.

BECAUSE the game is designed so that you can win any encounter without power armor, all encounters thus must be easy enough to be beaten that way... So with power armor all encounters are thus too easy.

I kind of wonder if, IN DA FUTURE, that encounters will be designed to account for source point use... Then again Source Skills are 2x-3x more potent then non-source skills right now.

I don't like 90% of the skills in general, especially after the latest patch.

It feels like they're trying entirely too hard to make everything seem "epic" and let you feel powerful from the get go, which ends up offering little in terms of progression(big reason why source powers don't feel very good) and often leaves you in a position where it's either a basic attack or complete overkill.

I'm also starting to see more and more glaring holes in the new AP system, which for all it's flaws the old one didn't have.

From the skills I've personally used my impressions are as follows!

Arrow Spray is very useful, perhaps not for it's intended purpose but... if you use it like a short range 'shotgun' of sorts you can unload all 16 arrows into the same target pretty much instantly killing any target.

Overpower is also quite damn useful on a tank character, means you can instantly strip all armour and knock down pretty much any boss in this version of the game (Bishop may need a melee or two before using it since he has tons).

Infect is terrible, even with a ton in int for bonus damage it very rarely becomes worth using. You might as well just use the source point on something like Acid spores to destroy their shield AND deal damage if not outright kill them.

Steam Lance CAN be useful but requires set up (Which is honestly how all these source skills should be, as a few of them are far too powerful for fire and forget spells) *Looking at you Acid Spores and Chain Lightning*.

Out of all the source skills I would say Overpower, Steam Lance and Arrow Spray are the only ones that are fine. They have their uses but require certain situations or setups to feel powerful, which means you probably don't want to spam them.

The rest are either very pathetic in comparison (Infect) or just outright too powerful for requiring minimal or zero setup (Fire skills, Acid spore, Chain Lightning). You can throw these on multiple characters and spam as their turn pops up to make all fights trivial, (Even in this alpha stage in the first act there are more than enough source points for grabs to make sure a party of four can devastate ANY major encounter with the use of nothing but source skills).

An easy fix for this is to simply make source skills cost 6 AP to use, then buff the lackluster ones to the same level of destructive power. This way they remain a powerful skill that changes the field of battle but now characters cannot use multiple source skills per turn (two since they currently cost 3)'.

Not sure I like that idea. If a skill was 6 you couldn't move or heal...

Not all are 3 AP incidentally - Infect and chain lightning are 3 AP but epidemic of fire and electric fence are 2. There doesn't seem to be a correlation between number of memory slots and AP required either which is odd.

Infect is excellent for removing magical armor so other spells work. It does double damage compared to chain lightning for example.

Arrow spray has always missed for me for some reason but Mortal blow is a nice skill also.

To admit with the Memory upgrade and the fact that Source points aren't THAT rare...

I am starting to see why 2 or 3 memory points might be necessary...

Ehh sort of... The early summon that costs a source point for 3 memory was the one I always felt justified the cost (summons are a HUGE advantage and are useful for the entire game)

The rogue skills are incredibly strong, and the geomancer skill is really good (as it was in the last divinity game before it was a source skill). I haven't personally tested many other classes yet

I'm also no fan of the source point stuff tbh. Mostly for the points Nagel already pointed out. This stuff makes balancing so much harder, it's like selfflagellation for Larian, especially looking at how bad the balancing was in the first game already without source skills...

Btw. what summon do you mean Neonivek? (I have a guess, but it was most probably bugged for me then)

The only thing I don't like about them is the flavor, in that it seems like it kind of IS evil to use source, since there is not much lying around in a "natural state", so using it with any frequency requires sucking out people's souls... and yet, even that sounds evil, but has no impact on the game, seemingly. Natural source being like "water" lying around feels hokey too.

As for the skills themselves, and not "liking" them, if from the perspective that they are too weak, nope, they are plenty powerful. Steam Lance and Infect do kind of suck, but the rest are pretty great. In my first playthrough I beat the act boss without even realizing that's what it was (I thought there'd be one more fight leaving the area, so to speak to say it vaguely without spoilers). I didn't even have help from a certain NPC I accessed after the fact just to clear the map.

Laying down Infectious Flame and Chain Lightning basically filled the whole battlefield with nasty cursed floors that kept propagating outward from other effects, while I kept the high ground and mostly avoided them. It was sad, actually. But, no one wants to talk of nerfing anything, and I'm sure honour mode will be so deadly no one will complain about their own skills being OP.

This is the problem with a game like this, the experiences that people have vary so wildly, and even the same person can experience such different results on different playthroughs, that "balance" is virtually impossible. The same skill one person might find overpowered or use with great success, another person might find useless or hard to implement effectively.

On reconsidering the issue, I have to say, Larian really did open a can of worms with source skills. Any time you have a limited resource that is very powerful, then you either have to balance the game with their use assumed, or not. But since they can't assume you'll use source on any particular fight, then every fight will have to be beatable without source.

The power armor conundrum as Neonevik says.

At most, they can balance Tactician mode so that fights are extremely difficult without source, and still hard with source, so every fight makes you question whether you should use source. But if they're going to go for the route that in general collecting source is somewhat evil except a few situations, then being good will be hard. I kind of like how being good might be difficult and involve sacrifice, as opposed to the opposite in most games, where being evil is difficult, but don't know if it will be too much to limit source by good methods too much.

I want to like them. The idea of a high powered skill with limited use is cool. But the hard cap and high memory is a little of putting. I just never end up using them because I feel like it would be a waste.. if I can play hardcore and never want to die or reroll I would probably use everything I have.
Other than the above reason I don't know what the main purpose is but I'm sure more is to come in due time

Hardly cared about source skills before and after the latest patch. But so far mages feel extremely underwhelming since the latest patch.

I'm of the same mind as Neonivek regarding Source Spells. Of course this is on Classic difficulty and is yet to be seen on Tactician where Source Spells might become mandatory for certain fights, and is my personal opinion.

Having completed the first act over 10 times, completing everything there is to do every run, I realized I NEVER use Source spells. The only times I remember it's a mechanic is when it's needed to open a door, activate a shrine or when I see a source spot on the ground, but then forget about it immediately after.

While the lore behind it and concept are cool in theory, being limited use (even though you can get 5+ from natural sources and 16+ from source vampirism) means you keep them for the next boss fight you can't win without. But since that never happens, you finish the act without even memorizing a single one of them, keeping the wand/helmet charges and source points for the eventual future acts where it might become needed (Which I doubt considering how the first act has panned out, and even if such an encounter should come, there are so many source points available that I doubt using a few/all of them in act 1 would become a problem). Therefor making us never use Source spells ever.

I feel like they are only used by people who either force themselves to use them because they know they will have plenty of source points to spare later, or people who somehow get into a situation where they can't win the fight without pulling out a trump card in the form of an overpowered spell to turn the situation around.

You can compare this mechanic to having a 1 time use unique item at level 1 that instantly kills an enemy when used. You would carry it until the end of the game because you didn't want to waste it on anything but the final boss, which you still wouldn't use on because you'd want to experience the final battle like it was intended. Of course this is different because you can recharge the spells and they aren't instant wins, but the feeling of waste is kept because of the limited "charges" mechanic.

TLDR. You never need to use Source Spells, and it feels like a complete waste if you ever did.

A lot of this is just a mentality problem, not an issue with the actual mechanic. Saving special, limited use items/resources for the whole game is just something you have to get over. It's not a waste if it helps you beat a difficult fight that might've taken tons of preparation or specific or cheesy tactics to otherwise beat. I mean, invariably every fight will probably be beatable somehow without source points, but if it takes you 5 tries to beat a fight without a source point, and 2 tries to beat with using source points, then that source point just saved you a whole lot of time.

Of course, they shouldn't be so powerful that they're basically "I-Win" skills, which to a certain degree they are right now. I think many of them could be toned down, while perhaps giving you a few more source points (not requiring vampirism), so using them on non-bosses feels less "wasteful," nor as OP.

Another thing I think would help a lot is if fight win conditions were less binary. You either win your lose, and it doesn't really matter how well you did, barring costing some resources/gold if you use several items. But if there were more fights kind of like the Paladin one in fort joy, or Gareth, where you have to protect them, where there's more nuance to winning the fight and losing. Saving the Paladin/Gareth obviously are a better results than letting them die, so you'll want to play better and perhaps use things like source points to win the fight if otherwise they'll probably die.

But I think some fights could be even less binary. Like, for example, you could defend a farm from voidwoken who are destroying the crops. The more crops you save, the better the victory, and it should be very, very difficult to save 100% of the crops. And this should have RP effects, too, depending on your success, where food prices in the town would go up, and maybe some characters would starve or resort to violence for food.

Or there could be some kind of endless arena fight with repeatedly spawning monsters that only ends when you hit a lever to close the gates and kill the remaining monsters in the arena, and the longer you last, the more reputation and rewards you get, and plus it would be a nice way to compete with your co-op partners to see who could survive the longest individually, for example.

These sort of things would encourage the use of source points even in fights you could otherwise win without them, because you could win them even better with the use of source points.

I love the non mage source skills like mortal blow, but i find the elemental ones, sans steam lance, underwhelming. I'm sure when the other source skills that are already available in the arena mode, like meteor strike, are put in the campaign they will be a lot more valuable.

I think the problem lies in the fact that all you can play is the first chapter. Outside of the last fights, there's not really much access you have to source point skills seeing as you just get the collars off at the end.

You can get one collar off in the fort or could leave the fort immediately, get all your collars off (at level 3) and play the game in that order. You need to be level 4 to buy any source skills though.

There are plenty of source points to be had. 15 from source vampirism and 2 from each puddle if you bless them. I guess you could run out but you'd have to try...

To the OP...

Well, I like Steam Lance. Even if it's a bit underpowered.

Having used source skills only 3 times, mostly to test them out not out of need. I felt they were bad for the amount they require in AP+SP, some of them even require specific placement or armor on unit and they also require memory instead of putting points in other stats. They arent useful enough in my opinion, I simply destroyed everything without using them and I think it was best that way.

The funny thing is that the point of the source points has become completely irrelevant.

The original reason why Larian introduced the source point system was so that they could include some later game cool spells much earlier in the game instead of much much later.

We are already, as players, being drowned in amazing spells and abilities that are not source abilities fairly early on.

Huge, high damaging, CC, and flashy? Yep we got those... and a lot earlier this time too.