Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General I feel so useless as an elemental mage :/

Lol, if most people are as stupid as yourself, no wonder there are whinning tactician is too hard...
Every characters need to have the min STR and INT value to wear plate and robe armor, because if you don't mix them up, you won't get the best of physical armor and magical armor, also you'll miss all those armor with bonuses good for some characters.



What??? if you're using wands with your mage, than you failed to understand the value of the mage... unless you have specific wand warrior build (which isn't great imo).

All mage need to focus on 2 magic skill to maximize (+plus 1-2 points in other for utilities if needed), need Savage Sortilege talent, weapon with crit (any weapon, cause you'll never use it), gear with crit (obvious), Hothead talent and Elemental Affinity talent. Also wearing a shield is better, for survival, you only sacrifice 10% crit for it.
Putting 1pt in Scoundrel (or from gear) for Adrenaline, is always good for any char.
Having 2pts in Air on all mage for Teleportation, is also a good idea (best utility spell in the game).
And getting a self teleport like from Hunstman, Scoundrel might be useful.

And if you want some OP mage, you go 5pts in Polymorph, use Apotheosis (no more source pts needed to cast source skill for 2 turns), then Source skill, then Skin Graft (reset all CD), then Source skill, and repeat each fight. GG easy win. (which I don't use, because it's too OP)

Focus on one school.
Run into enemies with 40 - 200% resistance to that school.
Sit on the side lines as you are utterly useless that fight

You need to spread yourself around when it comes to Elements. There is so much resistance on enemies that you to easily run out of viable moves if you only have 1 school. Especially with Spells having such long cooldowns as it is.

Better to do 80% damage all the time, than 100% damage 80% of the time and be useless 20% of the time.

Fly! you fool.

Anyone who build hybrid mage - support should never expected to deal the amount of damage dedicated mage do. My mage hit for 600+ with laser while having 400/900 armour. That is w/o a shield.

And you need at least 3 school. 1 for utility (mainly geo) two for damage.geo you can get to 5 if you want and focus other. At about 8 for each damage school is enough (for me it's air and fire).

Nah, he has a lot less. Only 350ish or so. Disclaimer: I am using a glass cannon with medusa pre-casted at level 8.

Stop with the LONE WOLF guys. Do it with a mage in 4 man party. Not everyone want to be a Lone Wolf.

Basic math.

And reading comprehension.

this is wrong, and nowhere did i say that tactician was too hard

you should read posts more carefully before calling other people stupid

... or just not call people stupid at all. Play nice please, everyone.

A lot of the posts are missing the problem.

The problem is your team is essentially 3 physical damage dealers and 1 magic damage dealer. Though this is manageable, its not optimal if you want your team to do magic damage. You need to consider that this game is much easier when your entire team does one damage type (physical or magic). Mixing the two actually makes you weaker in a fight. Also, physical damage greatly out-deals magic damage (its not even close) however magic does have more utility if you can punch through magic armor, which also out-scales physical armor by end game. So not only does magic do less damage, but you also have to deal with more defense.

That does not mean magic is bad but as you can probably guess, you would be doing much better if two or more of your characters were int based magic damage dealers. As for single magic dealer focus, I dont recommend it. Being versatile is actually a good choice because you can always hit an enemies weakest point. That alone will more than make up for any sort of focus you attempt to do. Its true that every now and then you will put up big numbers if you are focus but you will also do poorly when faced with any sort of resistance. In this game, elemental resists are very common and so are immunities. Specialization is not a good idea and further, your bread and butter as a caster is control, not damage. If you want a damage type team, just go all physical on everyone. There is no point to mixing. There is only one enemy in the entire game that poses a problem to physical damage dealers and she is optional and not important to the story at all, and you can still hit her at about 50% rate so she is not a big problem.

In my experience with mages, they are very auto attack centric. You need to shoot a lot with double wands from a distance to shred the magic armour to a point where you can nuke it in one blow and apply conditions.

Torturer and Salvage Sortilage are must have talents to be a good elemental mage, because critical strikes are more likely to happen than you being positioned on high ground while the oponent is positioned on low ground.

It would also be a huge advantage if you can wear a suit of hulking plate armor and a staff overchared with great elemental powers...but that is not mandatory....you could probably make do with wearing a stilish gambeson or leather jacket (both are medium armours,got it?) a couple of wands and start altertaining between auto attacking, healing and throwing huge rocks covered in oil.

If you get wands with rune slots as well as oil and frost runes,you should be the happiest man.

Then I suggest that you're using your mages wrong. That is only correct in the early game, up until maybe level 5 or 6.

Once you get a certain number of skills, and enemy armor increases to the point where it's not easily taken out in two turns, it starts becoming more efficient to use your powerful skills, knowing that they'll be back off of cooldown by the time the armor is gone. You'll get the armor down much faster, and be more effective by using skills than without.

I like to start off with auto attacks so that my powerful skills can also do some health damage on top of magical armor damage, that way next turn I have more chances of applying a cc or a dot.

If I were in a position where my fire whip/ice fan couldn't wipe out all of the magical armour to apply it's dot's/cc I would simply auto attack and chose to cast those later.

Also I would never waste a fireball or hail strike to deal damage to just 1 target,a radious that large has to hit at least 2 so I can feel I got the most value I could get from casting that.

I admit that filler spells like fossil strike and searing daggers are a good substitute for an auto attack as they deal more damage, but the problem is that Aero and Hydro lack such filler spells with only auto attacks as the main mechanic to shred some magical armour.

So if we are going to continue excluding the posibility that an elemental mage can team up with a summoner to bring about havoc and elemental devastation I would say any elemental mage which does not have access to fosil strike,impalement fireball, searing dagger and grenades/elemental arrows that have synergy with the mage's chosen elemental class or the aid of a summoner will rely on their auto attacks the same way Necromancers rely on Warfare to deal good damage

Ariel,
This may help.
There is a guy on Twitch named Kaen who has a channel called kaen_sg and is doing a solo honor mode elemental mage playthrough. He accepted a $500.00 US dollar challenge to beat the game lone wolf using no melee damage skills...
Check it out. He is a great player and prior to accepting this challenge from one of his viewers was well into completing the last fight of Ft. Joy with a totally naked (no armor, no weapons or rings) mage.
Either way you can learn a ton about game mechanics watching his stuff.
Hope this helps.

Also: As part of the challenge he is not allowed to play as Fane, and is only allowed to have Summoning at a max lvl of 6. He is allowed to wear armor.

To be honest, if you can't shred all magic armor in one and a half turn, you're doing it wrong. Mage is not a class that can waste time to doing jack damage on high armor like 2h. Most of the time bruiser/archer is your target and they have low to almost zero magic armor in most case.

Why as a mage,would you target the other mage when bruisers (the easier pray) are alive and well?

Yeah, if you can't break magic armor on at least 1 enemy per turn you're doing something wrong (apart from very earlygame or some specific encounters).

You can shred almost everyone's magic armor in one fucking turn at level 8+ unless the AP required to move them into position exceeds your allowance.

They CAN do health damage on top of armor damage, because by the time the armor is down, the spells will start to be coming off of their cooldowns.



The idea is that using the skills now will wipe out the armor faster so you can apply status effects a LOT sooner than the weak wand attacks. You're not saving any time by not using the skills from the start.

Level 14 Legendary Wand: 41-48 damage (Water). So 82-96 for a pair at 2 AP. (164-192)
Winter Blast: 202-224 damage (Water) for 2 AP with a 3 turn cooldown.
Hail Strile: 73-81 * 3 damage (Water) for 3 AP with a 3 turn cooldown.
Blinding Radiance: 159-175 damage (Air) for 2 AP with a 4 turn cooldown.

Some enemies of level 14 can have in the range of 746 to 1044 (maybe more) Magic armor.

It's significantly faster to use skills to rip the armor down than to use auto-attacks, and it doesn't really cost anything because by the time the armor is gone the first skills you used will be off of cooldown again.




I never said to use AoE spells on single targets. Aero and Hydro have plenty of damaging spells, although yes, Hydro tends to be weaker.




I am playing a Water/Hydro mage, and I do not use normal attacks to deal good damage, I use skills.




How many mages do you need for this? And do you mean shred the magic armor of ALL targets in one turn or just one target? You're going to need to be more specific about your example.

At the very least, if I am doing something wrong, it would be helpful to know.