Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Help/Tips/Tricks Benefit of dual wielding str 1-hand and need tips

May be its still too early in the game, but I feel like dual wielding weapons is pretty good and with at least 40% dodge i feel my character is quite sturdy. However, its seems that a lot of tips says that its better to switch to two-handed weapon for melee. Is dodge irrelevant in the end game? Is 100% dodge not achievable?

First playthrough I had a 2h, he performed excellently in act 2 and 3. Trying a dual-wielder now and I don't think the basic attack damage changes much, I'd argue it's slightly higher; but with a much lower average damage because of the crits. The dodge is nice, sitting on 30% helps a lot with survivability, but what I find is that you die just as easy because many of the big bads in the game have powerful magical nukes. About towards the end of act 2 and I can't say it outperforms 2h, but I'm enjoying it and it's not falling behind. 100% dodge is probably super unrealistic, unless you get mass evasion which situationally way better anyway.

Dual-wielding isn't useless, but if you want to minmax 2h is probably the better pick.

Thanks for the info. At first I thought of dual wield + blinding moves to increase the chance to dodge, but i think the damage of the weapon is the deal breaker. I guess killing them faster is much more favorable then dodging stuff like a martial art master lol.

Dual-wield is between Shield & 2h, it's a mix of damage and sturdiness through dodge. It's viable but not optimal, especially since the current "meta" (if that term can be used in a solo RPG) is more inclined toward max damage to kill priority target as quickly as possible.

Anyway you can do it if you like it, it works pretty well. Try it with a heavy Leadership character as a combo for stupidly high dodge value ! Leardership also helps mitigate the magic nukes that ignore dodge. Not a minmax build or setup by any means but you can beat the game just fine with it.

The only reason I would go for a dodge build is that i find Int armor looks much better than str armor, so I think that to compensate for physical armor bonus from str armor, use dodge from dual wielding weapon. However, it seems like with a lot of dodge, the enemy unit just try to go for my range units and eating all the opportunity attacks+ flame totem

Building a defensive character in this game is a bad idea when in a group, as the AI will just ignore him and focus on the squishies.
Unless you are soloing trading dps for dodge is therefore just a net loss all around.

Tried running a retaliation tank and the ai would actually walk through half a hp bar worth of necro fire and an attack of opportunity in order to avoid him and hit my ranger.

I did made my melee character squishy by putting a whole set of int armor, but I guess they put into account the chance to hit too? its like I examine and saw the chance to hit is around 50%. Don't know if it factors that in

If you're going for raw damage, then 2-Handed is the way to go. But if you're less concerned, there's no reason not to go dual-wielding one-handed weapons. One other benefit is that 1H weapons are much more plentiful. I've had to sell a LOT more 1H weapons on my 2H and Rogue playthrough than I've had to sell 2H weapons.