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Having played through the beta so many times, I decide to jump right into the game on Tactician mode.

To make it interesting, I decided to go Ranger-Fighter-Mage-Mage so I can do both physical and magical damage.

The mages were absolutely useless even against low magic armour team. Nearly every fight, it was just my Ranger and Fighter taking turn dealing damage while keeping them knocked down forever and getting 3 turns of free actions in a row.

With the extra level requirement to learn stuff like teleport, they become even less useful when it comes to damage as learning those skill force them to allocate skill points into area that won't even synergize with what they're using because of changes made to each school so that they only work with their specific element.

And their damage are still so low compared to warfare even with the nerfs. Just look at warfare bonus. It now gives "More physical damage" in general. Physical also scale way better with weapon and stat. By level 4, I got the ancient sword and a green one-handed hammer from a random box and my Red Prince was dealing 70-80 damage a turn without rage while both of my mages were struggling to go past 40 with explosive synergy on every attack.

Same goes to my ranger who got the houndmaster really early and with the 2 AP cost instead of 3 changes, completely left the mages behind and those 2 were killing everything in fort joy with the mages just leaving oil trail for the slow that goes through magic armour and bug the crap out of the enemy AI in Tactician mode, making them end turn randomly without doing anything.

Half way through clearing fort joy and getting to almost level 5 on Tactician, I decide to give up and reroll because the 2 mages aren't showing sign of getting better even with the level 2 skill box showing up on the shops.

Unless they suddenly get a super strong nuke-like magic armor piercing spell on T3 skills, it's really disappointing to see a weak role becoming even weaker while Warfare still rekt the crap out of everything even on Tactician.

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Sadly I'm not surprised, that my prediction was not wrong. Physical damage mostly depends on weapons, so good weapons can improve damage heavily, while magical damage hardly grows and the armor system makes mixed team still not really usefull.

All skills with T2 and higher will need source points anyway.

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Quite a lot of skills that can be checked out in the GM mode.

Sadly, outside necromancy, everything get rekt my magic shield. At least necromancy decaying touch can be used now if they have no physical armor and all the healing damage are also converted to piercing. That's like the only way to make mage useful, go pure support and have decaying touch around in case they want to deal damage too.

And hoo boy, at least they made Rage silence the user now but the new skills like Balistic shot, if it has enough base damage, will make mage cry even harder. I can probably abuse double or triple shot on bow with rage and when my turns begin at the start of the fight, rage will run off and I can just use Balistic to gip anyone. Meanwhile, mage will probably get off 15% of their magic shield.

Last edited by Ellezard; 14/09/17 11:55 PM.
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Yeah mages are heavily nerfed. Act 1 source point skills got deleted so you cant do difficult optional fights (like dallis) anymore with mages. The damage is also absolutely pitiful without min-maxing, even then your damage is lower than archers.

Also the surfaces got nerfed which is actually great since turns after first turn matters now, but at cost of making mages have virtually no disables.

2 archer/2 warrior or 3 archer/1 warrior is prob optimal build. that melee for first aid/decay combo, if is still doable.

I'd say buff the mage's damage abit and give us back the source point skill books act 1. Also the new supernova skill is a suicide button, please make it doesnt effect self.

Last edited by Cyka; 15/09/17 04:03 AM.
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Good.

Mages should not be main damage dealers. And they certainly shouldn't be powerful at the very start.


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Mages were overpowered before and took away from a lot of elements of the game (mainly too much CC, too much AoE damage and surface spam, teleportation). I haven't played one yet now, but I will soon enough.

I'm not sure I like the concept of armor and magic armor being separate things. It punishes you for having a diverse party. I think they should be the same armor that acts a buffer against CC, but it might be too late for that now.

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Originally Posted by Hiver
Good.

Mages should not be main damage dealers. And they certainly shouldn't be powerful at the very start.



There is a difference between making them utility/support and making them practically useless in a game centered around strategy based combat

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My fire mage at 20+ int just delt 5 damage on windigo, brb rerolling an archer/warrior team.

No not rogue cus thats gimped too.

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Best comp right now IMO is support caster (heals, surface effects, buffs), warrior, ranger and probably another warrior or rogue. Problem with another warrior is a conflict of gear.

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Originally Posted by YOGZULA
Best comp right now IMO is support caster (heals, surface effects, buffs), warrior, ranger and probably another warrior or rogue. Problem with another warrior is a conflict of gear.


you can just have the 2nd warrior be pseudo ranger. Spear turns warfare damage into Finesse anyway so you can have them continue to rekt with spear if you need another AoE CC.

Which is another nerf to talk about. Most basic mages spell that are single-hit will not CC the enemies now because they have to go through a weaker debuff first (like wind Stunned starts with shock). Now they can't break magic shield (low damage) and if they do, they have to spend more AP than physicals on most spells to CC as well.

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Maybe they need a few level ups to really get going.

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interesting to people on here really think that warrior is stronger than rogue now?

As for mages becoming stronger in late game, I actually think that rogue/warrior/ranger scale better each lvl with better weapons.

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Originally Posted by Hiver
Maybe they need a few level ups to really get going.


Go on game master mode and look at the skill and items you can get with level. None of their stuff are interesting and since they only scale with stat, you either deal some damage and die before you get to act or just deal no damage act anyway.

The only time you will deal damage with magic is that you go necromancy because it deals physical damage.

Originally Posted by Irons
interesting to people on here really think that warrior is stronger than rogue now?


Warfare was always stronger than rogue when it comes to brute forcing on Beta especially before the executioner nerfs.

And even with the recent nerfs, Warfare is still ridiculous simply because it has all the AoE knockdown CC you need to abuse the game poor armor system even on tactician, something rogue can't do. You can easily keep an entire group of enemy down for 4 turns straight if you have multiple warfare as you beat their bloated health down to 0.

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Thanks for the explanation.
Personally i play rogue (1dagger + dagger/sword) with some warfare skills + 1 point in huntsman and 1 in polymorph.

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Originally Posted by Irons
Thanks for the explanation.
Personally i play rogue (1dagger + dagger/sword) with some warfare skills + 1 point in huntsman and 1 in polymorph.


My main physical team used to have Ranger+Fighter+Rogue for the damage during beta. However, even with the ridiculous backstab damage with 2 good knives, I started to notice that the usefulness of rogue was really limited because of the range. The damage was also not that high compared to ranger and was even below rage warfare.

Now, for my tactician run with all the nerfs taken in account, I'm replacing the Rogue with a Finesse fighter who can also go bow if needed. With crossbow now using only 2 AP, it's very easy to get all the unique/purple ranged weapon to use at every level. All the extra damage skill huntsman got also make their damage dealing life even easier.

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Originally Posted by Hiver
Good.

Mages should not be main damage dealers. And they certainly shouldn't be powerful at the very start.



Well technically (at least, that's how it's done in other game), since they're the weakest in terms of hp and such, it's only fair that they do more damage than a warrior. A warrior can both do damage and tank damage. A mage should at least do the same amount of damage if said mage can also apply effect, otherwise it's pretty unbalanced.

I'm sad to see that this armor system is still not completely effective. The idea could be good if there actually are monsters with either one or the other. If most of the monsters have both equally, I don't really see how the system can work, because if so, there's indeed no need to have a mix party, where the game should point you that way, and reward diversity...

Meh.

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Originally Posted by Linio
Originally Posted by Hiver
Good.

Mages should not be main damage dealers. And they certainly shouldn't be powerful at the very start.



Well technically (at least, that's how it's done in other game), since they're the weakest in terms of hp and such, it's only fair that they do more damage than a warrior. A warrior can both do damage and tank damage. A mage should at least do the same amount of damage if said mage can also apply effect, otherwise it's pretty unbalanced.

I'm sad to see that this armor system is still not completely effective. The idea could be good if there actually are monsters with either one or the other. If most of the monsters have both equally, I don't really see how the system can work, because if so, there's indeed no need to have a mix party, where the game should point you that way, and reward diversity...

Meh.


That's it. Too many monsters have both physical/magic armor equipped is the problem. Imho, there should be less creatures having magic armor, even peasants on the street having magic armor just don't make sense.

Last edited by Oakleaf; 15/09/17 08:32 AM.
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NPCs have most of the time unequal armor. Mages have few physical, melees have few magical armor. Rangers are in between.

When it comes to mages, you have to take into account their ranged damage. They should not deal as much damage as melee chars. Look at the turtles on Tactician, they explode in fire and can easliy kill melee chars. Who knows what comes later?

Mages should however not deal lower damage than rangers, now that the silly magical CC got fortunately nerfed.

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Originally Posted by Oakleaf
Originally Posted by Linio
Originally Posted by Hiver
Good.

Mages should not be main damage dealers. And they certainly shouldn't be powerful at the very start.



Well technically (at least, that's how it's done in other game), since they're the weakest in terms of hp and such, it's only fair that they do more damage than a warrior. A warrior can both do damage and tank damage. A mage should at least do the same amount of damage if said mage can also apply effect, otherwise it's pretty unbalanced.

I'm sad to see that this armor system is still not completely effective. The idea could be good if there actually are monsters with either one or the other. If most of the monsters have both equally, I don't really see how the system can work, because if so, there's indeed no need to have a mix party, where the game should point you that way, and reward diversity...

Meh.


That's it. Too many monsters have both physical/magic armor equipped is the problem. Imho, there should be less creatures having magic armor, even peasants on the street having magic armor just don't make sense.


Reminds me of ES:Oblivion where the world leveled with you and you had bandits running around with full sets of glass Armour.

Last edited by Yegodz; 15/09/17 08:40 AM.
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Originally Posted by geala
NPCs have most of the time unequal armor. Mages have few physical, melees have few magical armor. Rangers are in between.

When it comes to mages, you have to take into account their ranged damage. They should not deal as much damage as melee chars. Look at the turtles on Tactician, they explode in fire and can easliy kill melee chars. Who knows what comes later?

Mages should however not deal lower damage than rangers, now that the silly magical CC got fortunately nerfed.


If we have to cheese to deal with physical, it doesn't show that the game want you to adapt have new strat. It just highlight the major flaw the game has when it comes to its combat.

The thing about that kind of cheesy difficulty is that it's
only difficult when you don't know it will happen. Now that you know about the exploding turtle, melee just have to keep their health pool above the surprisebuttseck range and no longer is it threatening.

If they really want mages to do well again without overbuffing the enemies that can actually play mage with their +50% damage and +5 ini, make it so that increasing int actually does something else outside "More damage". Something like "Every int invested above 10 also grants 2% magic armor piercing" or something so I don't just press the skip turn button when it's the mage's turn to move and teleport is on CD.

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