Mages are garbage in this game. I do not think this is necessarily an issue with the dual armor system but rather encounter/enemy/skill design.

1. Magical damage is for the most part AOE damage. However, the game hugely favours single target damage due to the round robin Initiative system and encounter design. Unless you know the encounter beforehand and go through the trouble of setting up, the starting position is that your party is clumped together and gets AOE'd down while the enemies are all seated in four different corners.

2. Leaving aside the fact that enemies spawn in different locations, targeting a particular enemy down is really hard. Your best single target spells are usually also your best AOE spells. A Fireball on four enemies can be awesome, but a Fireball on a single enemy is usually underwhelming. So, for example, let's say that a physical damage party of 4 against an enemy party of 4 kills one enemy per turn. Meanwhile, the magic damage party will kill all four enemies on turn 4 but will suffer heavy losses while doing so.

3. Magic AOE deals damage to friendlies while physical AOE does not. Fireball deals damage to your party but Whirlwind does not.

4. Mages have severely reduced mobility by contrast to physical damage dealers. Physical damage skill trees have a ton of mobility skills, e.g. Phoenix Strike, Cloak & Dagger, Backlash, Blitz Attack, Battering Ram, Tactical Retreat, etc. Mages do not have these. So the usual outcome is that the enemies teleport on top of the mages and the only option for the mages is to AOE themselves down while boosting magic armour (whereas for a melee character having enemies teleport on top of him is a blessing). This ties in with #3 - by damaging enemies you are damaging yourself and your party. As if this was not bad enough, almost every melee enemy in the game has Attack of Opportunity, meaning that there is really no point in trying to reposition as you will be taking extra damage.

5. Magical armour tends to be a lot higher than physical armour. You are facing reduced single target potential with increased magical armour.

6. Resistances. Physical there be none. Every other enemy in the game has some kind of a magical resist. Most importantly bosses. You take an encounter that is meant to be challenging and then add another layer of difficulty to it by ensuring that you only deal 30% of your damage to the enemies. The way that the game works is that you tend to specialise in 2 skill schools - let's say Pyromancy and Geomancy. But then you present an enemy that either has ridiculously high resistances to both schools or make you heal him outright. This makes your party member an outright liability in a fight, or at best a meat shield.

7. Cooldowns. Ties in with 6. Your elemental nuke deals as much damage as an autoattack by a physical DPS. Except that you cannot use it for another 3 turns while they use theirs 3 times per turn. So your mage is sitting with their pants down for all of these rounds - hopefully not attacking lest the damage type from one of the wands / staff heal the enemy.

Most importantly - how to fix this?

1. Meld physical and magical armour into one. No CC until you blow through the armour but there is only one type to get through. Make the armour threshold high and HP threshold lower.

2. Remove Attack of Opportunity from most enemies. This is crushing for casters but irrelevant for melee/rangers because of their movement abilities.

3. Remove resistances. The concept that certain characters/builds should be outright locked out/be detrimental in a fight because of their build type is silly. Find another use for runes.

4. Nerf physical. Nerfing is never a pleasant process, but this damage type is far too strong. Killing the final boss in one round is unlikely to be desirable.

Yep. The encounter design (you barely ever see enemies in larger groupings than pairs. Typically they are all spread out.) greatly favors single target damage, in which elemental casters are inferior in almost every way. Lower base damage and they have to contend with resists on top of that. Magic armor does always seem to be higher than physical too, so what is going on with this? It's like a triple penalty for no good reason.

To add insult to injury, the physical forms of CC are better than anything elemental.

It's almost like elemental damage is gutted so hard because Summons exist. Summoning 10 is strong early and up to a bit beyond mid game--where your summons start becoming nothing but a beefy ally that does grossly inferior damage compared to the rest of the group. A full physical group is always the superior choice right now in every single encounter.

Nerfing physical isn't remotely the solution either, because making them deal less damage doesn't magically improve the performance of casters. It makes them closer, but all you're doing is lowering the effectiveness of physical, trying to make it as crappy as elemental instead of improving elemental, which is the issue in the first place.

Also, I don't entirely agree with removing enemy Opportunity. You shouldn't be in melee range with your casters anyway other than when a Warrior decides to Phoenix Dive inside your party. It's also not really a waste to invest two into Hunstman for Tactical Retreat. Casters get the elevation bonus too...

I've not played physical damage dealers enough to know whether they need nerfing or magic just needs buffing/reimagining. Both should be balanced against the encounters in the game and offer roughly equal challenge.

If summons are a factor in balancing casters, their damage certainly ought to scale with int. As it is, there's no real barrier to summoning by non-mages.

Yep - you have it in one with the 'encounter model' primarily used in the game - hidden model ambush.

This system was old on Space Crusade the Board Game, or Ice Wind Dale 2 on PC - by now, every time I see 5 extra wolves or skeletons pop out of the ground because I talked to some random solitary power figure *I just feel embarrassed* for Larian Studios.

This game has nothing on Baldurs Gate 2, Wasteland 2 or any other game where you can see your enemy ahead of the battle and plan accordingly in a non cheesy manner. (i.e.: don't carry 4 oil barrels and drop them using stealth before battle)

In all honesty, I think Larian should go back to single character full 3d RPGs.

What if you're just bad at the game?

Mages can do so much more on the battlefield than any physical class. It's harder to quantify than hitting with a sword, but there's so many ways they can mess with things it just smacks of ignorance in your end.

You might want a point or two in scoundrel/huntsman/polymorph just to get some mobility options. You might want to get a shield. You might want some memory so you can remember more than 3 spells. You might want to remember staves have a 1 per round stats. You might want to remember elemental vulnerability exists and you can exploit them. You might want trio think about positioning and tactics.

The only problem I see is that earth is the only magic skill with different damage types and thus the most flexible. Ignoring the transient nature of summoning

i don't really agree with the mobility issue, spread your wings has an ap activation cost but then allows you mobility for 3 turns in a row, no warrior/rogue mobility skill allows this

it's only really an issue in the earliest part of the game when your team in general is less mobile

Polymorph is not a magical skilltree, it is a physical skilltree at core.

I agree with most of the problems but not with the suggested fixes.

Resistances - I would advocate for adding physical resistance and very high dodge to a number of mobs instead. They should be pretty common (as common as elemental ones). You should not be able to fireball or chop everything to death maxing 1 skill and stat. If you don't have the tools, your fault. Add physically immune enemies as well (on tactician at least).

Attacks of opportunity - tbh never felt like this way a problem and mages also have some positioning tools like teleport or netherswap (or you can spare a couple of points and learn anything you want from physical schools)

Nerf physical - very much agree, the damage stacking on physical is obscene and while it's ok earlygame, scaling needs to be adjusted

Meld physical and magical armor into 1 - tbh I'm not a fan of how current system ended up in general, but merging armor types is a very radical change, so highly unlikely, and I doubt it would solve actual problems. I'm ok with having mobs that are better to fight with elemental and mobs that are better to fight with physical, as long as mobs also have physical resists, beacuse currently due to resists physical is often massively better even against mobs with high phys armor anyway.

Actually, the only real ignornace here is coming from your own inexperience. The amount of options that exist in any given moment don't really matter if there's always a single, superior choice that trumps them all; killing them outright.

Replay the game as an all physical team (that has at least two Rangers and one Rogue. The third can be whatever) before commenting.

I'm actually currently almost through Act 2 with a four elemental caster group, and it's been absolute hell compared to my previous two playthroughs (Warrior, Ranger, Summoner/Buffer, Geo/Pyro and 3x Rangers with one Rogue), so it's not like I don't know what to expect with the encounters.

You could try to argue that the game was balanced around a "balanced" group that includes at least one caster, if not two and two physical damage dealers. Maybe that was their goal, but if it was then they failed horribly. The only reason such a team "works" comparably easy through the game is because of the two physical damage dealers, not the casters. You don't need them for anything when potions exist too.

Now maybe things would look different if encounters hosted either more enemies, or tighter clusters of enemies so that elemental AoE could shine, but right now it doesn't.
Gee, do I want to hit 2-3 enemies for 125 damage each, or do I want to hit one for 500? Boy, those options have me on edge, I can't decide!



Sure, but that kind of doesn't matter for the skills that don't actually scale with anything or require physical armor to be gone like Chameleon, Spread Your Wings, Spider Legs, Terrain Transmutation (if anything, this is in the "magic" purview), Equalize, Skin Graft, Apotheosis and Forced Exchange. I use that tree with everyone, but I don't go beyond a single point for most until I want Aptheosis.



It also stalls your first turn, and isn't a better option than the Cloak and Dagger + Phoenix Dive/Tactical Retreat combos unless the fight drags out and you can actually get to the enemies you need to get to without wasting more AP. It also requires a two point diversion into another tree, so unless you're picking up Chameleon with your casters, it's better to go through Huntsman anyway. Tactical Retreat is essentially free by the second turn since you get your AP back, and a movement bonus on top of that.

It's armor. No two ways about it. You can't balance a game where enemies have two CC immunities you need to drill down to CC anything. This means a straight murder group all phys is the clear winner on every encounter.

I'm not even sure consolidating the two walls is going to fix anything. Maybe consolidate the physical and magical armor armor into a willpower meter. When the meter is drained you become more susceptible to CC. But CC should work at full willpower, too. I would say rolls against willpower should get better when the enemy has 0 willpower remaining. All attacks would get a willpower damage number with magic attacks possibly being higher damage to willpower.

This way armor could return to a physical damage reducer and shields block again.

Then the game is much closer to the original and far less build prohibiting.

http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=605011#Post605011

This was my solo mage guide in early access, a lot of the stuff mentioned is nerfed but I still consider mage to be stronger, try reading this and see if it changes your mind. I'm currently level 5 in my new solo run, and things are working out pretty well.

I don't know why Lone Wolf builds keep being mentioned, as if the majority of players are going to want to solo the entire game with one character that has comparatively inflated stats, damage and AP that can also do more in the first turn than the group can combined. You can do similar things with a Ranger abusing Chameleon and Sneak.

The game is clearly designed around a four party group, knowing that many will choose to duo as well. Also, Skin Graft is what made your run as strong as it was, and that's no longer valid. You cannot have Time Warp with Flesh Sacrifice either normally. You can do this with Fane, but you have to essentially give up your helmet slot to do so. Another thing is that you don't have access to the same spells at the end of Act 1 that you had when you did that fight.

Also, some fights seem to be hard coded to not give a shit about your initiative. The boss will always go first, or at least if that's not the case, then they have 60+ initiative. Good luck with Glass Cannon during those encounters.

A non LW Rogue can take out the non weakened Doctor before it even gets a turn.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. As for background, I am on gardening leave and have been caning this game like an absolute fiend - 171H clocked so far. I have finished the game three times now - first time with a standard non-synergised party of four on Classic, second time with a Lone Wolf physical duo on Classic and third time with a different Lone Wolf physical duo on Tactician. Also tried and dropped a couple of other builds. I much prefer Lone Wolf because for me it turns combat from tedious to fun.

I am currently playing a Lone Wolf wizard duo and have just encountered Mordus. With my physical teams I would just cut him down in the first round of combat and that is that. With my mages, this is simply not possible because I lack the direct damage and his resists are way too high.

Mordus phase 1:
https://i.imgur.com/k8zrgQk.png

On turn 2 he goes into phase 2 in which he has 945 physical armour, 504 magical armour and 5,628 health:
https://i.imgur.com/XbzCtz1.png

His resistances also get boosted so that he is not only immune to poison but also earth and his fire res gets a boost, putting him at 60% for fire and air:
https://i.imgur.com/048h8RM.png

My Laser Ray does 103 damage to him:
https://i.imgur.com/6y8ourf.png

On top of that, he has Perseverance in both phases, meaning that he restores magical armour off your CC. The earth and poison immunities mean that the caster adds literally wand him to heal him back up if he takes any damage.

What the fuck? Who thought this was good design by any stretch of imagination? Elemental damage is already stretched across various schools, meaning that you cannot really focus on more than two without tradeoffs. One of my wizards is Geo/Pyro, meaning that he is essentially locked out of the fight as far as the main boss is concerned (he can deal with the adds). The other one is Hydro/Aero. These spells do some damage to him but obviously the cooldowns are too long for the damage to be meaningful. Why would you just lock certain builds out of fights altogether?

Look, I appreciate that nothing is unbeatable in this game and the reason I love this game is because of the freedom of approach it provides. My builds are not perfectly optimised. I could go back to the ship and reallocate some skill points, buy some more skill books, upgrade some gear, get another level or two and then return and beat his face in (by the way, good job on the voice actor, Mordus is one of my favourite characters in the game). However, I should not need to do this. The difficulty of this fight is simply brutal by contrast to anything that comes before and after it. It is, flat out, a very poorly designed encounter.


@Sanctuary - broadly agree with you on most points and appreciate the comments. However, I know that I can invest points in other schools for more mobility. The point that I am making is that the physical classes do not need to do dilute their builds for these tools. All physical classes use Warfare, which provides flat out the most outrageous amount of mobility in the game. Combine this with Scoundrel or Huntsman and you really are spoilt for choice.

Also, I am not suggesting that physical should be nerfed to make magical more viable. Rather, independently, physical is simply too powerful and trivialises any challenge. You should not have to artificially increase the difficulty by playing a sub-optimal build.

combat-wise, sure. but it has uses for each class, both in terms of skill and the fact that it grants +attribute. you could say the same for huntsman, since high ground damage boost helps mages too, but polymorph feels like a more well-rounded tree for any class to dabble into

it also just depends on preference; tactical retreat gives you haste and is 1ap, spread your wings + flight is 2ap and doesn't haste you but allows you to reposition several turns in a row. it's a trade off, i think both are good

The single largest problem with elemental damage is that it doesn't scale with your weapon. That is the biggest benefit physical classes have, not any school division. Resists are stupid and a secondary problem, but not the biggest. Usually.

All physical classes want to invest 10 into Warfare.

An elemental caster can do similar by dumping 10 into their school of choice. I'm not clear on whether or not elemental schools are additive or multiplicative though (not like it really matters in the end). Problem is when you come up against those 50% - 100% resistances that you know full well about. Physical has nothing comparable to deal with.

Physical classes DO need to invest in other schools too for better mobility options, especially Warriors. Scoundrel builds do by default simply because they are going to need at least two into Scoundrel for a while for skills anyway, but their primary way to raise damage is through Warfare (plus they have the advantage with not only Backlash, but their AP to damage conversion in general seems way more efficient throughout most of the game). Same thing with Rangers and Huntsman.

After maxing 10 in Warfare, with 2-3 (depending on the build) in another school for skills, the physical builds can focus capping either Scoundrel, Huntsman and Two-Handed; or in the case of the Ranger, a mix of Huntsman and Ranged due to all of the flat footed encounters.

After maxing any random element, a caster can max out Huntsman or go for a mix of Huntsman and Scoundrel (once you hit around 50% critical chance) for either the elevation bonus (which becomes useless for many fights) or critical damage bonus with some extra movement.

Again though, physical classes have the clear advantage because of how their weapons affect all of the damage they do. For whatever inexplicable reason, aside from a few stat bonuses, casters don't get the same benefit, and there's no logical reason why.

Here's a comparison of end game damage. Simply looking at this makes it seem like casters are actually in a good spot. What it doesn't factor is resists, which may as well slash all of those figures in half. On average, and sometimes damage is nullified entirely.

http://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Divinity-Original-Sin-2/fO6mOM3.jpg




This wouldn't work on Tactician at all. Instead of simply making physical damage "worse" in general, it would greatly favor Rangers even more than they already are.

Inflation is a problem, but it doesn't actually feel bad until Act 3 and beyond.

Edit: However, if you really want to "be all that you can be" with a caster, you can now take advantage of the properly scaling scrolls. This ends up requiring a lot more busywork in regards to crafting (more expensive as well as simply finding or buying the necessary materials), similar to grenade use. With the proper scrolls, since they are actually cheaper to cast than the spells are normally, you can wipe out quite a few fights easier that way than you can with an all physical group.

Of course this also requires the perfect scenario where there are no immunities or even high resists against the scroll element you want to use in the first place. Does that make them balanced? I'd say no, but you do now have the option to make them somewhat closer sometimes. It's just a matter of how much extra effort you really want to put forth to make it happen.

Just my 2 cents as someone who also thought mages were weak. In my second playthrough on tactician mode (2 char lone wolf) my mage is just destroying everything eith thunderstorm. And I really mean destroy all enemies in 1-2 turns...so I dont know. My warrior just watch the dead bodies...

Okay. So you're "destroying" encounters using a spell you don't have access to until level 15 - 16 that also requires three source if not using the scroll? You can get similar results with Hail Storm and Meteor Shower. So? Arrow Storm does about the same, but without the stun.

Again, you're using Lone Wolf, which is known to grossly inflate damage. This doesn't work in a normal group, and you normally can't even use the skills in the first place before close to the end of Act 2 (which is already over half of the game).

The scaling point is an important one. I do not think it is an issue right now because the lack of damage situation can simply be remedied by cutting enemy resistances (going back to your chart now). The lack of scaling will be a major issue going forward if there is an expansion/DLC raising the level cap because casters plateau when the key skills are maxed out. This means that the only way you can improve your Fireball damage after maxing out Pyro is investing into ancillary skills like Two Handed and Huntsman, whereas physical classes get the benefit of the ancillary skills AND weapon scaling.



So my latest playthrough was a Lone Wolf duo of a Ranger and a Warrior with 2H. I went the crit route so I did have points in Scoundrel for C&D but this was just a cherry on top of the cake (mostly used outside of combat) because Warfare already catered for all of my mobility needs. Phoenix Strike for instant reposition, Blitz Attack is essentially a ranged attack with repositioning, Battering Ram for reposition with CC as an added bonus, Battle Stomp is essentially a ranged AOE attack with CC to boot, Crippling Blow as AOE to make sure you don't need to chase. All of these skills provide the required mobility and the fact that they do damage AND CC to boot makes them insane. I hardly ever needed to use my AP for moving and this was usually at the end of a fight to pick off stragglers. AP is obviously much more valuable in the beginning of a fight than at the end. Add in Attack of Opportunity often finishing off enemies before they can get away. Just nutty. By contrast, I would say that my Ranger was spending more AP walking to reposition because of line of sight issues (even with a proper pre-fight setup). My Rogue in an earlier playthrough was spending more AP to reposition for backstabs. So I do disagree that a warrior needs anything other than Warfare for mobility.

Options for mages are laughable by contrast.



Look, it's good that you can make it work, but as Sanctuary pointed out, this is late game stuff and most properly built characters breeze through everything post Driftwood. I am playing the game for the fourth time right now and there is a marked difference in difficulty between physical and magical damage builds for the reasons set out in my original post.

I have also been pondering Flay Skin, but: (i) scales with STR not INT; (ii) requires 3 in Poly; (iii) 5 turn cooldown; (iv) 3 AP. Does the nullify effect penetrate Magic Armour or do you need to burn it down first?

Thats true that ita post lvl 15. But I am just stating what it can be done in late game. It is still a new game and changes mifht comr. Just wanted to add something to the discussion. In the early game warrior was way better than my mage. My next run will be without lone wolf to see how it goes. BUT I rrally think testing more is still a valuable fact.

Dunno what to tell you. Rogues can use all of the same mobility skills that a Warrior can, but on top of that they not only get Cloak and Dagger earlier than Warfare gets Phoenix Dive (moot point if you simply dump two into Scoundrel with the Warrior, but early on it's harder to justify) and they start with Backlash, which is dagger only. That's 1 AP for moving 8m as as well as it giving you a backstab.

Warriors do not have anything remotely as efficient aside from hitting a row with Battle Stomp. Blitz is only really comparable when you hit more than a single enemy. Otherwise, it's effectively half as efficient for the same damage (less in the case of a Rogue). Battering Ram is okay, and if nothing else at least better to use for moving around than simply walking for a while. Barely. Also, Warriors had absolutely nothing comparable to Backlash > Rutpture Tendons > Chicken. Nothing. That's been nerfed now, and I haven't tried it out to see how much of a difference it makes, but from the point you could use that previously, it took out any non boss in one turn without fail. Later on it became less useful, since other options unlocked that allowed you to simply kill them directly on that turn, but it was still one of the most broken combos in the game.

I don't understand why you would be having so many line of sight issues with the Ranger either, when not only do they technically have just as many mobility options, they also need to move less overall most of the time. Warriors in general suffer an AP tax on everything they do, which makes them the most inefficient physical class until late game.

Casters don't need a bunch of extra pseudo movement skills from Warfare similarly to why Rangers don't. Early on is the worst for them in that regard, but eventually they can have both Tactical Retreat and Cloak and Dagger, although grabbing more than one is hard to justify due to memory slots. You really cannot afford to invest in MEM with a caster you want to deal damage with. It's all INT and then WIT.

Also, until it gets hotfixed, enjoy the new and grossly overpowered Reactive Shot. It was supposed to work like the Overwatch skill from XCOM and Shadowrun, but almost never did anything. Now it basically kills anything you target for 2AP on top of killing whatever moves inside the area on the next turn.

One of the problems is that both schools and attributes were seriously gutted in OS2. In the transition from OS1 to 2, Necromancy lost its niche as the buff/debuff king, and in addition to the loss of Lower Resistance, Oath, Malediction and Drain Willpower (which would have been wonderful to strip MA off mobs), you also lost a pair of decent summons, Vampiric Touch and Death Punch. The 5th level skill for Necromancy is horrible and scales with Summoning better than it does with its parent skill.

Intelligence in OS1 lowered cooldowns of Int-based spells, and in addition spell slots were tied to your school, not yet another skill.

That's not getting into the source skill nonsense, which means you have to spend trips back just to refill so you can cast another master spell/Bless.

necromancy has been reduced mainly to a support tree now, which befits melee fighters better due to its physical damage scaling, which is disappointing

All the spell schools got gutted. Necromancy's just a lot more glaring, since it can't really stand on its own feet anymore.

I suppose we'll just have to wait for an Epic Encounters mod.

That sort of says it all right there. Having two spells (Bone Widow and Bone Totems) that don't even scale with the school itself is pants on head levels of not doing it right.

MadDemiurg mirrors my feelings exactly. The problem is the lack of counters used against physical damage in the encounters. That and the multiplicative scaling of warfare make physical characters vastly more powerful in virtually every encounter. Some characters should be knockdown immune and many many more should have some amount of physical resistance (ghosts, slimes, heavily armored, etc)

Adding friendly fire to some or all of the physical skills should also be considered. It doesn't make any sense that smashing an area leaves friendlies unscathed.

By contrast, the enemies should almost always have an elemental weakness that gives someone on your team a time to shine. This comes up occasionally, but infrequent enough that going pure physical is clearly optimal.

I'm a bit into act 2 now, so that is as far as my experience goes but i have noticed a trend of issues surfacing while playing my mage character. Especially in contrast to my party (playing 4-player coop, the hardest part is organizing a time when we can all play).

To start off it would appear that spells scale very poorly. Physical build scale well with weapon, with their stats, with skill schools (especially Warfare for double dipping it seems), and Critical chance. By comparison my spells only scale with Inteligence and the Skill points, and no such generous scaling as with Warfare. My spells cannot even natively crit!
In top of that every single enemy encounter we run into the enemy seems to have a resistance to atleast one of my schools, often several and fairly high. We're just playing Classic mode here, why are there so many enemies with 40%+ resistances? Seeing physical resistance is exceptionally rare, the one time i did the enemy also had even higher magical resistances.
My spells already scale poorly, why are they then punished extra hard with constant heavy resistances they have to try and punch through?

The next issues is the cooldowns. My god are the cooldowns long. Fireball, a fairly basicly, early-game, straight up damaging fire skill has a 4 turn cooldown. It doesn't even compare to a regular attack from either the Ranger or the Rogue in our party, and even the Tank deals more damage with her physical abilities.
Pyro has only a single damaging skill with "just" a 2 turn cooldown and that is Ignition. The other spell schools don't have any at all with less than 3 turn cooldowns. Especially daunting when enemies have such high resistance to one or more elements that those skills might as well not even be on my bar. Which happens quite often i have to say, in particular Fire seems very commonly resisted (to the point of healing enemies even).
To compound this the AP cost of spells also seems way to high. Without any extra AP generation from Haste i can sometimes do little more than throw out one spell in a turn. Which then gets put to shame by our Ranger or Rogue, who happily keep throwing out that kind of damage every turn.

Our Ranger can throw out Reactive Shot. Let's compare to Fireball. Both req. 2 in their respective skill trees. Both inflict AoE damage upon cast, both cost 2AP, both are Ranged. However Reactive Shot does more damage, has only a 2 turn cooldown, targets enemies for more damage if they move (vs. Fire field), as a Physical skill doesn't have to worry about resistances, and is smart enough not to hit allies.
Basicly a much better version of Fireball outside of very specific situation where enemies are desperately weak to Fire or you need a Fire field for some reason.

The fact many spells can be a real liability, or have mechanics complicating them further also doesn't help. For instance Laser Ray, nice spell but its outright unusable when i am on an elevated terrain. Which is where a ranged caster is suppose to be, right? Nether Swap, nice utility, if it works. Which it often does not. Fireball, mediocre damage skill with some AoE fire field. Goodluck not hitting more of your allies than your enemies. Rain+Electric combo, water spreads where it wants to and you just don't know ahead of time if you end up accidentally with more of your allies standing in water.
This doesn't exactly help trying to strategically plan your actions ahead of time.

I think Warfare needs to be fixed, physical damage is far to powerful as it is. Savage Sortilege should be a baseline Talent, spells should crit natively. Maxing respective skill trees (i.e. 10 Pyro) should reduce the AP cost of the skills within that tree. Cooldowns need to be reduced for many of the damaging spells. Something needs to give penetration for resistances, perhaps as a stat always present on Staffs. A weapon that currently feels very underwhelming for Spellcasters. This helps Staffs be more usefull, and helps Spellcasters with their problem of benefiting very little from their weapons. Point in case, im still using a lv8 staff because it has 20% crit chance while i am actually level 13. Simply haven't found anything better yet as Weapon damage is inconsequential to me.

I don't know where to begin.

1 magic scales with level, intelligence and skill. Getting items that boost those is way more important.
2. Mordus is undead, of course he has 200% resist to poison. Every undead does. They also take piercing damage from healing.
3. Mages do continuous damage through surfaces. If you're upset fireball does only 100 damage, but ignore people took 70 from walking out of the fire and applied burning which did more. You're not doing proper analysis of mage contributions.
4. There's so many ways to utilise environmental interactions, like using smoke to block los, oil, frozen terrain, etc that mages can be hard to quantify for value.
5. A caster only party will likely want a summoner to do physical damage with
6. Ideal party is 2 casters 2 physical look at armour values and priorities targets. It may actually be best to have 4 character's who do a bit of both to some degree. E.g. support mage who summons. Battlemage with physical and a backup school. A huntsman with elemental arrows and some magic and an offensive mage who can poly or whatever. Just so you can consistently distribute damage to targets.

I'm constantly annoyed at how the only pure physical character on my team can't do damage to characters with stripped magic armour likewise, when my dedicated offensive mage can only explode someone who's got an exposed physical armour.

People who don't run balanced teams must have huge issues with tons of gear they just can't use. I imagine they'd be constantly complaining about how they need to spend ages on itemisation and gearing people up to get better gear.

Idk about you guys but I just soloed the ship fight on tactician with a lvl 8 mage using pure unique gear, and on first glance this fight seems almost impossible to solo for a warrior, maybe a rogue can dps the mysterious figure down before Malady dies? But he has like 3k hp lmao.

Ok, I think we are talking past each other here. I am not saying that Warriors have more mobility than Rogues - this is not the case because Rogues get both Warfare and Scoundrel, but what I am saying is that all of Warriors' mobility needs are covered by Warfare. Battering Ram might not be the tool for each situation but it is a tool for a situation, just like all of the other abilities I listed. Furthermore, 2 Handers have more range than daggers and there is no need to reposition for backstabs (which also annoyingly leaves you open for Attacks of Opportunity requiring further repositioning).

As for the Ranger, the concept is that IF a Ranger needs to reposition they need to waste AP to do it, whereas a Warrior's repositioning skill also deals damage - this is not wasted AP. The reality of it is that if you are using your AP for movement as a Warrior then you are doing something wrong because there are so many tools in the repertoire for changing your position.

Anyway, we are getting sidetracked here.



Hey man, I am not going to lie, I find your posts a bit puzzling. I made this thread because I believe that magical damage based classes are significantly weaker in this game than physical damage classes. I have played this game ALOT (misspelled for emphasis because this is what the cool cats do nowadays) and I find this notion difficult to disagree with. The reality of it is that physical classes do everything that magical classes do and more.

I have spent some time on this forum and I have come across various posts by different people complaining about different aspects of the game. Some people have their knickers in a twist about round robin Initiative. Is it perfect? No. Do the developers think it is perfect? No. Does it matter? No. It is a policy decision and the game works absolutely fine with it. A DOS:EE system is arguably worse. Other people complain about gear scaling. Again, is it perfect? No. Does it really matter? No. In my latest playthrough (on Tactician) I was in Arx and I realised that one of my characters was still wearing a level 3 Migo's Breastplate. The only items that actually matter in this game are weapons for physical damage dealers - for the rest you might as well be running naked so long as you have a proper build.

And this is the fundamental notion that I am getting at. Here are some basic premises: balance is good. Balanced difficulty is better than spiked difficulty. In this game, magic is strictly worse than physical. You may disagree with this, but in doing so you have to acknowledge that you are in the minority and fighting an uphill battle. So far I have not seen you put forth any credible arguments to support your position. Yes, magic scales with level, intelligence and skill. But so does physical, AS WELL AS with weapons. Yes, Mordus is undead and heals from poison. And from earth damage. It's cool for lore but shit for mages who deal poison and earth damage. No such issues for physical. Yeah my Fireball does 100 damage and an extra 70 tick for every step. Meanwhile, my Ranger does 1,000 physical damage. Terrain interactions are fun - this is why I am playing mage - but in a battle where the point is to eliminate the enemy, the ones who deal actual damage (physical) are better.

An ideal party is not two casters and two physical damage dealers. An ideal party is two/four physical damage dealers. How about this: I will do an Honour run with a physical damage team, you do an Honour run with a balanced team of two physical damage dealers and two mages. Let's see who gets further. Challenge accepted?

I have not yet mentioned the imbalance in talents. Magic damage dealers scale better with talents simply by the notion that they are crap in contrast to physical damage dealers. Savage Sortilage is great - but physical damage dealers already have it by default. Far Out Man is very good - again irrelevant for physical damage dealers. Picture of Health is insane - but only of value to physical damage dealers who scale with Warfare anyway. Elemental Affinity is also really good - let's be frank, every fight in a magical damage dealer party ends with the mages standing in a pool of fire. Mages need talents to be good - this is not achieved until the late game when everyone is good anyway. Physical damage dealers just need Executioner - the rest is irrelevant/cherry on top of the cake.

The earliest proof that all is not right is the very first encounter in Gargoyle's Maze.
100% Fire and Poison immune. Have fun with that with your 2x Pryo/Geo and 2x Hydro/Aero team, even on Classic. You end up having to wait on cooldowns and on top of that, skip the turns of the two Pyro/Geos so that the other two can wand them to death.



I just can't agree at all with this logic. You should have The Pawn on the Rogue, and repositioning is never a problem, especially for the very first thing you target since you automatically get placed behind them anyway. Warfare skills that move you and deal damage aren't really much of a factor either because the damage on those skills is very low comparatively AND they cost 2 AP. Rogues are simply more efficient at killing until near the end of the game. Warriors only truly shine in those very rare scenarios where you can hit a group with anything other than Battle Stomp.

Far Out Man is moderately useful on physical damage dealers BTW. Not only for Rangers, but it affects teleporting skills like Backlash, Phoenix Dive, Cloak and Dagger and Tactical Retreat. Affects grenades too. It's not a talent that you would pick up early for melee, but it is something you'd pick up right away on Rangers. The description is deceptive.

Oh yeah, I remember that. I think I ended up staffing the fuckers down - in my dual LW run one mage uses dual wands and the other one uses staves because I wanted to see the difference in action. One observation is that you really do not want poison damage wands. The Fire / Poison combo is great when it works, but there are simply way too many undead enemies in the early acts and this is where your weapons become a liability. Melee does not work for Mordus, though, his health pool is simply much too big.



I appreciate that we disagree on The Pawn / Executioner. I have not done a four player Tactician run, but in my Classic run even my poorly built Rogue was getting a kill on every turn - making Executioner strictly better than The Pawn. There isn't a universe where I would pick The Pawn over Executioner but, at the end of the day, both work just fine.

Also, I agree that Rogues are superior to Warriors but, again, this is deviating from the point. My point was that Warriors get all their mobility needs from Warfare. Yes, Blitz Attack damage may not be great in terms of dealing damage, but using two skills that deal damage AND reposition (2+2 AP) is always better than using one skill that repositions without damage and a damage dealer (1+2/3 AP). Even in the worst case scenario, it is autoattack+.

i think there's something to be said about how underused staves are due to wand + shield on mages being so much better. the staff skill (i forget the name) is underwhelming and is something i would use only if literally every other offensive skill i had was on cooldown, and on tactician difficulty i find myself needing a shield due to the sparse physical armor given by mage armor. i could invest a couple of points in strength to wear warriors armor, but that feels bad when i'm already putting a ton of points into memory and robbing my int each level

My 2 cents.

I am currently runing a team of 3 hibrids(battlemage,cleric,wayfarer) and 1 rogue.

My battlemage has a good mix of aoe and single target skills as well as some mobility skills from poly. So far I am at act 2 and I feel my battlemage is rather slugish vs voidwoken. I believe that having resistances and magical armour is too much and that the resistances should be removed from the game not the armour system.

I like the armour system very much but it makes encounters vs magisters very predictable: give your battlemage a wand and shield or a staff and he can kill magister knights,fighters and some battlemages with little resistances, if necesary switch your staff for a 2h axe to gut rangers and rogues if they have high magic armour.

I feel Warfare is a decent talent tree but I dislike the fact that Blitz Attack and Whirlwind require 2 points into Warfare,making staff warriors/battlemages a tougher sell than it already is.

It actually all depends on item choices.

Sacrificing 2-4 int may be worth it depending on what armor is available and Alexander's staff has 3 slots in it which makes it competitive.

You shouldn't be putting in so many memory points where your damage no longer becomes competitive; it may happen with Wits but that's a diffferent story because you're sacrificing damage to go first.

You also don't need a shield on tactician difficulty.

2 points into a skill tree is nothing to have access to higher skills. In D:OS1 you had to invest far more to have access to higher Tier skills. It's part of the 'dumbing down' of everything. Having only a third of the knowledge of a skill tree but already being able to master even the most fierce skills just sounds odd. It also means that 5% more damage is pretty everything you will get for leveling up your skill trees even more which sounds pretty uninteresting.

Maybe we need a Magefare tree that would increase all magical damage passively and offer magical utilities, such as weakness to fire spells (single target and AoE and spells of increasing magnitude) and ally-protection spells that would prevent friendly fire from harming party members. Alternately, percentages of spell penetration and party protection could be added as passives with each point invested. After all, resistances and friendly fire are currently only significant issues for mages. At least I've not seen a lot of mobs immune to physical damage or seen physical abilities inflicting friendly fire.

While I find the idea of a Magefare tree intriguing, it would be similar to the crit issue. Spending points and skills on something that physical characters get for free.

I don't think magic is vastly underpowered. It's not that hard to bring into balance:

-Add serious elemental weaknesses to all the enemies with strong resistances (ie: anything with +100% fire should have -100% water).

-Heavily armored troops should have phy resistance and should be weak against magic (ie: no 40% resistances across the board, which is often the case).

-Remove the damage scaling from warfare. It makes no sense that putting points in warfare is more beneficial than spending points on the specific weapon type (2h, dual wielding, etc).

-Add a benefit to using staves. Having a global -1 to cooldowns while wielding a staff would be a pretty cool one.

-Allow crits naturally for spells.

You have to be careful with comparisons to other titles. Yes, D:OS1 did things differently, but it does not mean that it did it better. Neither is "dumbing down" an issue per se. Some systems are simply too complex to appeal to anyone but tiresome obsessives. If that is your target then fair enough but you are locking yourself out of the broader market. The reality of it is that, regardless of how sophisticated something is, the question to answer is: does it work? In this game, for physical, yes, it does. For magical, yes, it does, but just about and far less than physical. It doesn't really matter if you have A points in B or X points in Y - so long as a character is well built it should be optimal. The reality of it is that in the current state a well built magical damage character does not even near the effectiveness of a well built physical damage character.



Being frank, 2H has their use in crit builds so it is not a redundant skill.



Bravo - give the man a medal. I think some of your suggestions are really, really good. As things stand, the present encounter model is that you have 2 melee enemies with high physical resistance, 2 ranged enemies with high magical resistance and 2 caster enemies with high magical resistance. This means that a physical party is always going to be much more effective against four out of the six enemies.

If you add 50% physical damage resistance to the melee dudes and provide a negative magical damage resistance to some enemies it would mean that you actually have to pick your targets instead of just picking them off one by one. Rock, paper, scissors. Under the present system, magical provides for one while physical provides for all three. This would also restore the capabilities of a diverse party.