Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Are mages a bit...weak?

The reason anyone can do it just fine with mages is because the game itself isn't difficult as long as you have the right gears and run on the right tracks. This is caused by the fact that 95% (or somewhere around that) of the encounter in the game can be beaten through sheer power.

That's why Mages, even in their current stat, can perform as long as you stack a bunch of stuffs that deal tons of damage that instantly kill the target in a single round of action or at least leave a bunch half dead and disabled for the next person to clean.

With how mages are played, they might actually be considered the more "balance" choice atm. The problem is that the average power level of physical builds is higher than even the power of the best mage builds, making them seem weak. No matter how well they perform, mages will always feel like a weaker ranger atm since they can bounce attack with ricochet, deal as much or more damage with highground crit with any CC and element as long as they have the arrows along with the best AoE in the game while also having a mobility skill. If it wasn't for the game lack of high level crossbow, offensive mages would never be able to catch up at level 20.

You keep saying this, are you sure you haven't just gotten a weird distribution of random loot/store rolls?

I spent like 5 hours shopping everything as I ran around being level 21 and doing stuffs + afking for shops to restock.

Had to go for a 319 -334 + 56-59 water level 21 epic crossbow from the ranger store. An epic, not even a legendary because the npc refuses to sell it and the ship Fletcher keeps selling me divine armor.

So if that's a weird distribution compared to what you get from shopping at level 1-20, the chance for the crossbow to appear must be really low.

Yeah, this again. You mean late Act 3 or Act 4 when the game is about over? And you don't use the Incarnate just for its melee attacks. They can do whatever you need them to do and have extremely strong hitting spells too. Good luck doing 1200+ auto attacks before then. Besides, you aren't just limited to the Incarnate with a high Summon skill anyway.

This isn't all that different from the Widow vs Incarnate thread either where some are complaining about how much more damage the Widow does. Yep, it does more physical damage and has a teleport by default. It also has zero magic armor and gets CC'd like no other and cannot launch 1K+ AoE spells or stand in cursed fire getting healed.

My post wasn't about a Summoner exclusively you know? Since you're so focused on end game anyway, by the time a specialized melee character is hitting that hard, a Summoner/Ranger will be doing way more damage overall per battle.

Prior to end game yes, they really are very strong. They just don't scale as well as gear does for melee attacks at the end.

But look, I hear what you're saying in your first post. The armor system really screwed up the classic Mage gameplay early on, and the best thing they have going for them is Fossil Strike (later Impalement), Teleport and the occasional oil + fire combo. Both Hydro and Aero are terrible for setting up combos, and both are weaker than Pyro for damage. Pyromancy Mages scale pretty well though, and Ellezard already hit upon how Mages are probably the most balanced baseline. It's the other stuff that's out of whack. I already realized from day one though that physical damage dealers were simply better in general anyway though, but I didn't want to play that way for a first playthrough.

This is weird for me, because from my playthrough, I always get annoyed how long it takes to ranger/rogue to wear down enemies compared to mages... Sure, they can almost take down 1 enemy per turn, finish him off and start with another in turn 2...

But compared that to my mages, take can take down armor and half HP of 2-5 enemies per turn, while priming them for death in turn 2 thanks to fires and all that shit. The thing is, the more mages you have, the merrier it gets. Because when you set up your enemies for combos, its better to combo them with 2-3 characters, not just 1 mage. And so when I set up poison/fire for my elemental proc, I use it by 2 persons atleast, a fire two fireballs, 2 rays, 2 earthquakes, 2 impales...

And absolutely amazing combination with that is medusa head from polymorph - for some reason, it seems to scale with strength, while being magical earth damage checking magical armor - and it hits HARD. It can CC whole map at once after mage combo, and with proper use of initiative my poly warrior always goes after my mages, so the CC chain just goes on.

And please bear in my mind, that I play hybrid team, warfare+poly+summoner, rogue, and 2 mages (but one is running with crossbow and arrows in case I need to take down some more phys armor).

That. Also I would say that summons and totems are created from the surface element so they should consume the surface.

Back to topic. what I see is Everyone is a mage now. Even "Fighter" is a mage with a sword. Game says its classless, but here is just one class, its mage. I cant play a barbar Conan/Gottrek Gurnisson archetypes. Game do not offer me a brute brawler, just different types of mages.
Just look at warrior skill set its AOE/ ranged / buffs other collection. Its a mage.

Say that mage is weaker, is nonsence. There are only mages. So for me, refresh warfare skill set to be brute melee range skills / melee range debuf / self buffs. After that we could talk about difference warrior vs mage.

Now its mage vs mage.

Mages are weak? Yea, right! I started off playing a backstab character (till Act 3)...until I started playing around with pyromancy. I do agree that in starting off as a mage (especially as lone wolf) can be challenging, but as the game progresses you just get stronger and stronger.

Using just necromancery and pyromancery I lone wolfed the entire game on classic mode. Once my build hit its peak (around act 2), I pretty much started 1 shotting everything. The most important thing for me besides mobility, was making sure I went first. So I made sure to toss a couple points into wits, especially after maxing int.

My tooltip damage for spells like fireball was about 3-4k, though my crit chance with it was about 65% (Savage Sortilege ftw). So most of my spells hit for about 5-6k, and the big ones crit could crit as high as 12-18k (avg, have crit even higher). The most insane part was most spells were either AOE or a cone. Keep in mind fire also does burning damage on top of all of that....

My personal combo for starting fights was flaming skin + peace of mind + supernova. If you can line yourself up to hit as many around you as possible, this combo is golden. Normally I had enough AP left over even after it to do another spell like laser ray or firewhip (depending on the situation).

If I was using this on a boss, I would use gap close (phoenix dive or cloak and dagger) + flameskin + peace of mind + adrenaline + supernova + haste + flame tongues (if anything survived or melee was still on the battlefield) + chameleon cloak. Keep in mind I probably opened with laser ray.

So with this setup if any enemy survived and tried to walk out of the fire I put all around me, they would get hit by flame tongue (which hits super hard lol). Otherwise, I would sit there for 2 turns building up AP and waiting on cooldowns.

Since I was playing lone wolf on classic, my build was using sword/board (happened to have a sword with +25% crit bonus and some nice stats). To do more damage I could have dual wielded weapons for higher crit, but I got to addicted to shields up for harder fights.

I also suggest always using necromancery as a backup to deal with anything "immuned" to your primary spell damage type. Since you still get the scaling bonus from your int for necromancery, it can still do decent damage. Its also handy at lower lvl when some mages have extremely high magic armor, but low physical armor.

There are some spells that can be casted from stealth that are great openers for combat, and others that will get interrupted before you finish (due to dialogue). I also agree that from my testing so far, pyromancery spells seem to do the most damage out of all of the other elements.

I will have to do more testing on this, as the stats on my of my gear late game was all pyromancery. In fact that's yet another insane part of mage, I wore boots through the entire game that had 20 physical defense on them. I used them purely because they were a unique that gave +1 to pyromancery. I was looking for a replacement...but never found one lol.

If you choose to use supernova...keep in mind without flameskin you will need to have more magic armor than the damage you deal with supernova. Otherwise its possible to 1 shot yourself

Hi can anyone advice how to build a high damage pyromancer and what other schools pair well with it? I know there's other builds that do more damage overall but I like caster and would like some advice to playing one.

you are overthinking this...

start game, give points to intelligence, pyromancy, geomancy.

add points more or less evenly to these skills, and if you run out of memory, add memory.

tadaa