Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General You can build good mages that can outdo 2H Melee

They're in two separate categories, and you have plenty of crit starting at around 16 or so once you have access to frames.



You don't need that much wit, there are breakpoints, and again the multipliers don't matter as much till later when the base damage has scaled high enough.



So you're saying that you're incapable of dealing 300 magic damage in one round at level 7/8?

Pre-Level 8
2 Geo, 2 in Poly, 1 Scoundrel, X in Pyro.

You need, at minimum, 8 slots. So one point in Memory.

Impalement - ~61-68
Flesh Sacrifice
Fireball - 75-83
-Environmental (double surface proc, once from fireball, once from oil) - 36
Nova - 131-145
Adrenaline
Searing Daggers - 21-23
Medusa Active - 46

So you're saying the above has no chance of CCing anyone? And that it isn't possible at level 8? And that it requires too many points? That's, by the way, a Glass Cannon build. Medusa active could be replaced with a grenade or sleep or whatever you want if you don't want to pre-cast it.

You do realize that Int, while valuable, isn't that big of a deal in the early levels? In order for Int to surpass Glass Cannon with Wits, under many circumstances, you need to first and foremost already have a character who is designated to go first. Second, you need to have enough of an Int difference that 2AP under any circumstance cannot cover the damage difference.

If you look at your own observations you'll notice that pumping Int and dumping a shitload into Pyro doesn't make for that much of a difference early on. Later on, the Int you have will compete or surpass Glass Cannon until you reach the point where you're using Savage Sortilege. Again, though, you only need enough Wits to match certain break points so the difference does grow over the campaign but it isn't linear so depending on where you make comparisons you'll have differences in how much damage the Int difference is leading by.

As for your comments in regards to the other combinations... I think you're just being dishonest. Laser Ray and Phoenix Dive are available at the start of Reaper's Coast. Dive is possibly available at level 8 if you happen to RNG into it. That doesn't really feel like 'until much later'. It's literally two encounters off and a possible respec.

Dive -> Ray + Nova alone will strip most mobs of their Magic Armor, some times you need to throw in a little extra like Searing Daggers / Combust.

You can't just assume that everyone who's not complaining on the forums is satisfied with the difficulty. They just don't bother with the forums. Out of forum posters, a fair number has these complaints. Out of overall audience... well maybe Larian knows if they gather stats like tactician completion rate. I've seen more people complaining about balance on tactician that people complaining that normal is too hard for sure. Besides, why normal being too hard complaints should affect tactician? Make an easier difficulty. Although I find it silly to complain about high difficulty unless you're playing the lowest one or the available ones all are either too easy or too hard for you.

When all else fails, get a staff with at least 1 rune slot and put a physical rune on it. Then respec all your points from Huntsman into Warfare and laugh out loud as your ELEMENTAL STAFF gets hillarious bonuses from warfare towards IT'S TOTAL DAMAGE. You might also want to bump your strenght to 12 and get as many + int plate armours you can find.

Edit:I am upset I can not post a photo of this right now because I can't take screenshots in game for some odd reason.

I have a staff whose base damage is 46-65 fire and with a rune I added 6-7 physical damage,acoording to character page my base damage with these 2 elements is 52-62. My overall damage is 92-113 per attack.
I get +50% damage increase from intel, +30% damage increase from WARFARE (which is at 6) and +15% from Pyro (which is at 3).

Edit:screeeenshoooots

https://docs.google.com/document/d/...Tfl-qqEe7XQI9ZSFOGdsvGWqaLk0dqeh0b4x/pub

Funny how you first started your claims with "midway to late Act 1" when you won't be higher than level 8 at the end of Act 1.

It's pretty clear that you either don't play the game, don't read what is actually being written before spitting out hypotheticals, or you don't even actually believe your own words.

It's been well established by practically everyone other than you for some reason that non Lone Wolf elemental casters aren't in a good place at all early on, and they don't start to feel anything other than weak compared to the other builds until midway through Act 2.

You then proceed to try to explain that everyone is wrong and should just "git gud" and draw out your flowcharts for early game that don't even work for the early game and then backpedal that you meant later on anyway.

This for example:



Doesn't happen in a single turn before level 8. It doesn't even happen closely after level 8.

Good luck doing even 75 damage with your Fireball at level 7 with only 2-4 in Pyromancy and 20 INT. Supernova doesn't hit remotely that hard either at that level and neither do Searing Daggers. On top of everything else, that entire sequence costs 11 AP without precasting (which again isn't reliable at all due to spacing) and the max you can get with a non Lone Wolf character is 7 AP without Glass Cannon (which is way more risk than reward at that level). You still can only even get 9 AP with Glass Cannon.

Does this include you casting Fireball on top of yourself to take advantage of Elemental Affinity? Or does the "real single turn" happen on the second turn once flames are on the ground and you spend AP to move on top of them? Oh wait, that's right. You have The Pawn, to go along with Elemental Affinity and Glass Cannon by level 7. My bad.

Finally, even if this hypothetical and wholly unreliable and unrealistic sequence works, you have zero left in the tank to do anything for many turns after. This is your proof that everything is fine, and that elemental casters are comparable, if not superior?

OK.

Do us all a favor and go play the game to see that this doesn't work in a non Lone Wolf build. Lone Wolf seems to be the panacea logic behind X build being fine around here, while simultaneously dismissing what other builds can do with it as well. Lone Wolf may as well be an easy mode buff.

But not crossbows and double daggers by a long shot :^)

I'll just begin by saying that this isn't a lonewolf build, and if it was the damage numbers would be a lot higher than that. It appears you really don't know your damage ranges, or really understand AP values. So we'll move on.

Let's address your actual criticism since you're unable to extrapolate basic numbers to match scale to see if my statements are correct, and if they're wrong where the missing values are. So, we'll go with the more conceptual ones.

The main concern is what use is a mage after they've expended all their cool downs? For now, let's disregard moving the goal posts from 'is it even possible' to 'what happens afterwards'. Honestly, the only thing that you can do from there on out is use consumables and attack.

That seems pretty discouraging right? The only way to make this worth it is if every elementalist nabs 1-2 targets either in CC or kills. This also means there will be an upper limit to what you can do in certain situations, and in others you will have to rely on luck to proc certain effects like shocked into stun. However, most situations you'll not really run into that issue; the first mage will expend most of his or her cool downs but the rest of the party should be relatively full in the tank.

When you do face that upper limit and beyond, it's when you resort to using Source powered spells and abilities. Be it chain lightning, or simply Time Warp to use AP to re-position your enemies so that your spells can hit more than 1-2 targets.

Your melee attacks with a staff isn't that far off from a 2H either, but because of how itemization it can be pretty hard to reach parity and more often than not you're behind by 15-20% damage which, depending on your game plan, might be questionable.

So, I saw someone above state that if you add a second element as a rune, you get the multiplier to the WHOLE DAMAGE? This is game altering for so many potential builds, and frankly puts wand attacks as an entirely viable attack method if true. Has anyone tested this? If so I need to overhaul the calculator.

Wand attacks are pretty decent anyway tbh, the thing that makes then inferior to physical is immunities. Otherwise fire + poison wand + venom coating do pretty ridiculous damage, at least early on... until you run into undead... or fire slugs... or... you get it.

You can also poison your staff with an ooze barrel btw, meaning that you can get 3 types of elemental damage with just 1 rune (and you can use venom coating with it as well).

Yeah that was me,I put a physical rune on a fire staff, and I got hilarious results. I have not yet started to mess around with this concept in game editor due to lack of time so I can get concrete results as to how broken this can get.

What I will say is that elemental arrow head can be cast with any weapon equiped (wand included last I checked) so it is possible to abuse this flaw like crazy (especialy if you can get your hands on a +1 to necro and hydro ring so that you can maintain access to rain of blood) to do mix damage with blood infused wands.

http://s347.photobucket.com/user/dr...tlemage%20extravaganza?sort=3&page=1

As we currently understand it, the warfare will affect the physical damage you added with the rune....but it doesn't affect the fire damage. I'll have to play around with this, to see. You could seriously crank out some ridiculous numbers if this works as I think you are implying. What was the fire damage before adding the physical rune?

LOL:

Basic Fire Damage 46-55 (Average 50.5, Round up to 51)
Basic Physical Damage 6-7 (Average 6.5, Round up to 7)

Increase from Int = 50%
More Fire Damage from Pyro = 15%
More phys Damage from Warfare = 30%

Fire portion = 51*1.5*1.15 = 87.975 (Round up to 88)
Phys portion = 7*1.5*1.3 = 13.65 (Round up to 14)

Total Average Damage = 102, it is very close to the tooltip (101.5 average).

If Warfare applies to overall Damage, it would be
Fire portion = 51*1.5*1.45 = 119.625 (Round up to 120)
Phys portion = 7*1.5*1.45 = 15.225 (Round down to 15)

and the total average damage should be closer to 135 instead.


TLDR: Warfare applies to physical portion only.

As far as I am aware, these are all of the negatives of Magic users:

1. Spells don't scale with weapon damage, meaning they will get outpaced @ 40 Int / 10 Pyro vs 40 Fin / 10 Warfare

2. AoEs have friendly fire, whereas Warfare ones do not

3. You need to match up weapon magic type with the combat ability skill line that you've chosen to put points into. In other words, if you get a really good Air wand on your Geo/Pyro, tough luck.

4. Enemies have resistances to magic attacks, but none to physical attacks. While enemies are capable of being weak to certain types of magic, this seems to be uncommon. Even if it were not, this merely introduces inconsistency to combat, and that's not something positive magic user's favor.

5. No Weapon skill line affects staff or spell damage. Whereas a Ranger can go 10 Warfare / 10 Ranged, or a Rogue can go 10 Warfare / 10 Scoundrel, or a Warrior can go 10 Warfare / 10 Two-Handed, etc., each getting more damage out of every point towards every skill they have, a magic user has only the 10 points in single magic skill tree for a single set of skills.

Any others?

Any explicit pros to magic users?

Without the physical rune the numbers on display droped all the way to 80-96. (46-55 weapon damage +50% from intelect +15% from pyro).

Edit:after doing some tests hiting my Sebile who has 23% fire resist

I tryed hiting Sebile with my physical rune enhanced staff so I can check the damage and after a couple of hits I dealt 62 to 74 damage per auto attack with 1 crit of 114 and between 12 to 23 physical damage. I think we can get similar results if we combine magic elemental runes.

Sadly I have yet to come accross any wand with rune slots,but I can confirm that as of 12.10.2017 elemental arrowhead still works with double wand equiped,so if you want to make a double elemental mage,gear with +huntsman is a must have as it grants access to height damage bonus,elemental arrowhead and tactical retreat.

Staff of magus seems to be a good indication of what rune enhanced staves's auto attacks are likely to look like.


Staff counts as two handed weapons,single wand counts as one handed and dual wand counts as dual wielding.

Rayner,please double check your facts before you post something not true again.

I will also give you a free tip,you can cast elemental arrowheads with double wand equiped,so in theory you could set up some nasty combos regardless of the kind of wands you get,just as long as you can create a surfaces that matches your highest elemental school.

This seems overly hostile.

But you really should double check it though.

You're right, we barely avoided a catastrophe. I'll be more careful next time.

Fix your other post too while you're at it.

Wands don't benefit from elemental arrowheads. You can cast it with any weapon equipped and get the buff but the bonus damage is only applied if you have a bow or a crossbow.

That been said, warfare bonus to wand damage is of dubious value since the majority of your damage is still elemental and you're also wasting a rune slot for a damage type that won't affect magical armor, probably not something you want. If anything, it means you want to put in a 2nd elemental rune and then maxing 2 magic schools becomes pretty viable for weapon damage. It would still be an inferior approach to boosting crits for spell damage though.

The only case where I can see physical rune on wand/staff useful is if you're doing some kind of int based necromancer and boosting warfare.

The builds benefitting from this the most however would probably again be physical though, since if putting say a water rune makes hydro affect physical weapon damage then warfare/hydro would be pretty viable and boosting hydro would be more efficient than boosting crits.

You're just better off using a 2H or some other weapon and doing a weapon swap when your Necromancy spells are on cool down; you can't justify slotting a 3 Rune Staff with anything other than Int which is elemental. With a physical weapon you can slot it with either Wits or Strength and it'll be fine.

Losing 9+ int so you can do mediocre physical damage when you can just use some AP to convert doesn't really add up.

That being said though, I guess you could pick up a Crossbow as a Pyromancer and just use fire arrows all day long when your spells are on cool down or use it in lieu of a staff. Nevermind, the tool tips lie.

You only need 1 physical rune though. The remaining 2 can be elemental.