Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Cleric

Hi !

I'm trying the cleric archtype in the beta version and i've got a few question

Is there any "cleric specific" skills like the divine light (starting skill) ?

How do you build a good cleric ? Strength and intelligence mainly ?

Loug'

I've build a cleric as second main character, and have to come to the conclusion, she's not very good in melee nor magic.
Probably best to focus or one or the other instead of mixing it up, and being very weak because of it

Only Divine Light, probably. It's a Warrior-class skill, and I've seen no other Cleric-y skills for sale by Aureus.

I made a cleric in the alpha, and it was mostly a wizard who could cast a couple buffs and heal. I had spells, so I didn't hit many things with my stick.

I built the cleric as a warrior first, for better armor and melee damage, then went for the warrior must-haves such as phoenix dive and bull rush for mobility. Brought strength up to 10 for armor and weapons and then went towards intelligence, water and earth spells mostly. Upgraded the heal, got fortify to pair it to the warrior's rage skill, various elemental protection that didn't work, and then went to get some points in witchcraft so I could finally learn resurect.

I dumped the starting talents to grab "All Skilled Up" to balance the fact that I would probably have to juggle between Warrior and Mage abilities, and "Lone Wolf" for the extra health and ability points, again, to balance ability juggling. I'm guessing hybrids will direly need Lone Wolf because of that.

Spells being mostly buffs, I went for str/con gear. I kept the + elemental spell + way of the warrior items in my bags to learn skills/spells that required more than 3 so that I could dump points in 1-handed and shield proficiencies, as well as leadership, although I'm not sure it does much.

Worked fine honestly. Felt like just a warrior with heal for a while but eventually it became a good and sturdy buffer/healer/melee, and that's considering the elemental protection spells did not work. I wanted to grab the shouts as well, but by that point we were mostly done with the content of the beta. In the end it felt more like a paladin than a cleric, but it got the job I wanted done.

EDIT: forgot to mention I grabbed Rain soon as I could, just because I love it, and it turns out to be one helluva player quality of life spell.

Skip weapon proficiencies in this build, they are worthless and add pennies on the dollar in terms of weapon damage.

Yeah, if I had to pick something out it would be that. It kind of happened naturally too. I'd keep the shield proficiency though, it scales pretty fast. 2 points will give you +10% which is good considering shields get higher block % too as they improve.

Honestly that build looks really weak. Were you really taking all of these?

Way of the Warrior
Single-Handed
Shield Specialist
Armour Specialist
Water Elementalist
Earth Elementalist
Witchcraft
Leadership

No wonder you're low on ability points, that's really trying to be Jack of all Trades.

Way of the warrior 3
Single Handed 1 (or maybe 2)
Shield 2
Water Elem 3
Earth Elem 2
Leadership 2

Str 11
Dex 5
Int 9
Con 7
Per 5

More or less, final stats, on whatever lvl we were when we stopped.

You can call it weak, I never died (except that one time I blew a mine and 2 oil barrels at my face out of combat), almost never was close to dying, and dished out fair amounts of damage. I solo'ed the bandit camps on the beach while my co-op was AFK. I think I was around lvl 5. It has room for improvement, that's a given, I was mostly trying out stuff see where it got me.

Skill combos make for efficiency, and skills are "unlocked" with ability and stat requisites, so I just spent points to unlock the skills I needed, and stats to equip the gear I wanted. Worked perfectly fine. As a matter of fact it worked better than some of the previous builds I had tried.

Considering getting an ability to 2 requires 3 ability points, Lone Wolf goes a long way. Add to that the +WotW/+Elem gear mentionned before and you can quickly learn a lot of things.

Fortify + Rage is +50% dmg +5% crit chance -2 (yes 2) armor/ 3 rounds (8 AP total).
Phoenix Dive and Bull Rush will get you in and out of melee on demand with low AP cost and low cooldown, decent damage, ignoring all ZoC and providing the occasional knockdown which is always good, even better with Bully.
Lone Wolf + WotW + Con will give you tons of HP.
A good shield and shield specialist as well as a good plate armor will mitigate high amounts of damage.

Melees are getting a lot of bad rap. I played a melee of some kind at every stage of the alpha/beta and never had to complain. A lot of their capabilities and the buffs I use are % based, so scaling goes wild as better gear is obtained.