Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Feel punished for mixing my classes Magic/physical

Hey guys Love the new game the story is really engaging and the combat is challenging.

I just have a bit of an issue with how the Magical and Physical armours are seperate. It feels as though once your rogue and warrior have been hitting a mob for a turn, it comes to you mage and cleric and its like you have to start over.

I tried to build a party with full physical damage and found it to be a lot easier to kill mobs. I imagine a full magic team would be even nicer as you wouldnt have to deal with those annoying saving throws on full magic armour targets.

Perhaps an idea would be for targets with 0 physical armour to degenerate magic armour per turn while in combat. and vice versa. but I dont know how that would affect your party's survival.

I dont totally hate the idea. i think its a really cool take on the defense mechanics. i just feel punished for using spell casters and physical attacks on the same team.

Anyone else feel this or am I being dumb?

I think there's a subtle benefit to having damage for both types in the form of resistances. If an enemy has high resistance to magic, physical is obviously going to shine. Likewise, some enemies have negative resistances to certain elements, and will die way faster if you focus on hitting them with it. Also, some enemies have way less physical armor than they do magic armor, or less magic armor than they do physical, and having access to both damage types can help if you split up the fight.

Maybe a good solution would be to introduce more enemies that have strong resistances to one damage type over the other, to make it more difficult if you focus on one damage type. Like if you go all physical, and an enemy not only has high armor, but has fortify, a shield, and maybe even some physical resistance (if physical resistance became a thing), then having a magic damage character would be beneficial.

At the beginning of the game, it does feel like you are being punished for including a Mage in the party. However, after saving enough money to get my Mage some nukes, mostly fire/ earth spells, my Mage has become one of my strongest members. The advantage of having a Mage:

1. Can be very tanky because you can equip a shield without sacrifing damage
2. Grab a cheap poison wand, like the turtle wand. If the enemy is on fire, even a tiny bit of poison damage will trigger an explosion that deals tons of damage.
3. Instead of focusing on one dude like the rest of your physical members, focus your spells on enemy archers. Their magic armors are easy to take down. Then you can do AOE explosion damage. With CC. At range.
4. Enemy archers would be taken down in 1-2 turns.

I completely agree with you Chakk88. Mixing damage types means you have to eat through 2 armor types, and since Magic is performing poorly this patch it means all-Physical parties are quite strong by comparison.

I'm not sure if an armor degeneration scheme is necessary, I think magic damage just needs a buff across the board.

@LaughingLeader
While some enemies have Magical weakness, the vast majority do not and even when they do it is often pretty minor. In the current content there are far far more cases of enemies with multiple large resistances, immunities, and some even have resistances to all elements. For the most part, Magic Damage is at a reduction, sometimes small and sometimes large.

This is in addition to the fact that Physical damage users are spitting out far more damage than what Magic users are doing. Wands have the absolute lowest damage per AP by a large margin and Staves are beat out by Str weapons by reasonable amount. Even spells have low damage when compared to weapon abilities.
Another large hit to using Magic is that they lack a solid passive skill to increase their damage.
Weapon-based skill trees can stack points into their weapon, which buffs all auto-attacks and ability damage by a solid 5% per point (this is multiplicative with the stat increase).
Magic users on the other hand have no equivalent. They can do Aerothurge, which only adds an increase while the enemy still has armor. They can go Pyrokinetics, but this will only buff fire spells. They can go Dual Wielding or Two-Handed but this will only buff damage from the Wands/Stave, respectively. They can go Huntsman to buff all damage, but only when you can get a height advantage. There's no reliable equivalent.

This is the problem with Magic in practice

In theory, there could be more enemies with large weaknesses.
There could be enemies with significant Physical armor with low/no Magic Armor. (this mostly already exists)
However, without a buff to put Magic damage on-par with Physical, it's a tough sell. It's just a lot simpler to have the whole party doing larger amounts of physical damage than to worry about breaking through armors a lot of the time.

I'm not saying Mages can't do fine in the game, I'm just saying they often feel weak when compared to Physical.

I agree. I can only think of a few encounters where an enemy has a negative resistance (I think there's skeleton near the blind man that has 200% fire res, and -50% water res). He got melted by my enchanter, but he could have been easily solo'd with my rogue.


I believe wands/staves do less damage compared to physical weapons, due to the fact that they trigger secondary effects. An air weapon hitting a guy standing on a puddle can potentially stunlock him forever. A poison element weapon against a guy on fire will trigger explosions, which will scale with Pyrokinetic. When you mix oil into all of this, the cycle between poison->fire->explosion->oil->explosion will rack up a great deal of damage.

My last playthrough consisted of the cheesy OP scoundrel/polymorph rogue elf (who could solo groups by himself, but that's another topic), and a pyrokinetic/geomancer wizard. The rogue far outdamaged the wizard of course, especially early game, but after a few levels, my wizard was able to routinely handle groups of enemies himself. So while I think physical-based damage could use some toning down, magic damage is still powerful in its own right. He never felt like a liability.


Oh definitely. Scoundrel in particular is very powerful right now, and the advantage of focusing on one damage type is apparent when you face some of the tougher enemies like Bishop Alexander, who has physical/magic armor in the hundreds. It's much easier to just burn one armor type down and stunlock him.

Well ONE problem with Magic Combos is...

I agree Earth + Fire has amazing Synergy that does disprove the whole "Magic is weak" statement.

However... That is the only combination that works to seriously rack up damage.

Mind you Water and Air have interesting combos that are potent, but they don't as readily rack up.

Right. They feel more like a "CC" combo, with the Rain + Shock stun, which can be super effective. Hydro feels a little awkward in that mix though, since there isn't a pure water spell that leaves a puddle on the ground. All the water spells seem to be about leaving behind ice, which doesn't really combo with shock until it thaws out.

Honestly I wish all four of the elements comboed readily with eachother. Perhaps in different ways, but still.

Fire and Water TECHNICALLY have a combo... but it needs Air or Earth to do anything.

If i remember correctly you can electify steam clouds created by fire + water but its annoying to do since as you say most hydro skills create ice.

I Agree with Error3's early reply.
Magic damage seems pretty weak currently. only played the game in Multiplayer playthroughs as Mixed classes.

So far I've noticed that
1.) 1hand+Shield does absolutely 0 dmg can't cc since can't break armor unless you use overpower. ( Can't even block with shields....)
2.)Rangers can do crazy damage with a well lined up marksman's fang.
3.)Elf's Sacrifice Flesh + Adrenaline becomes a must have because of the lack of any way to increase AP.
4.)Summoners feel very weak the further your level up( I don't believe Summoners scale with attributes like intelligence which makes them awful for anything but decoys unless you are using totem bug from high ground.)
5.)Physical Damage characters that focus on straight damage seem to just burst everything down with raw damage numbers without the need of cc or another character to even help damage the kill target.
6.)Chameleon Cloak is just to strong in general since AI don't try to pull you out with rain or massive aoe type spells(Combine it with glass cannon on phys damage characters and your ending most combats within 1-2 rounds add Sac+Adrenaline for the extra icing on the cake.)
7.)Peace of Mind is a must have on all characters whether you get it from being a elf or not.

The reason for this disparity between Physical vs Magic is what Error 3 said with the lack of magic combat abilities scaling damage wise per point spent. added onto the problem of running into things that resist that damage type (lava slugs) and unable to apply cc until magic armor is broken. your really forced to mix the skills you use forcing you to spend points in so many combat abilities while only really wanting to skill up Aerothurge and Polymorph past 1 point.
(When spending points in Polymorph as a Caster to get more attribute points to spend in (INT) and retain good wits + memory is your best damage option for Combat abilities there might be a problem....)

on side note Necromancer really needs a Soulsap / Lower resist spell equivalent like in DDOS EE.

A little elaboration on this, as you picked up Incarnates/Totems do not scale off of Int/Str/Finesse.

Summons scale off of character level and points in the Summoner skill only. At 10 points your summons will have double health and damage and receive double the Magic and Physical shields from all buffs.

You also gain access to summon-specific buffs, E.g. Farsight/Power Infusion which each add a 15% stacking damage buff to the Incarnate, a large Magic/Physical armor, and unlock new abilities for it.

Therefore, whether summons fall off mostly comes down to whether you're going full Summoner (with most points in Summoning and using the Infusions) vs 1 point and just the Totem/Incarnate.

A character with just 1 point in Summoning will find the value per AP decreasing in comparison to their other abilities, whereas a full-Summoner will prioritize the use of Summon skills.