Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Use more elements than Captain Planet!

To be fair, the troll is level 18 and you can take him down early (I did it at level 11) if you stagger your CC correctly and never let him get a move in (also have to stagger his elemental effect to his weakness otherwise he heals for 6K/turn).

West and the immediate north of Driftwood are the easier locations I think. L10 into L11 compared to L12+ going east.

Basically levels. Seriously, levels and level-appropriate gear are stupidly stupidly important. Of course, you’ll likely never reach AI levels of armor stacks, but you can strip them far more effectively than the AI is able to.

I have read some stuff on making warriors power-houses. What about mages? My party is magically inclined, I have my elemental warrior type, who is quite diverse and has split his points a lot between int, con, memory, finesse, and wits. His fireballs only do slightly LESS damage than a mage who has been nothing but int and con for the most part. It seems that stacking INT isn’t all that important for a caster type, so how do you crank up the damage?

The actual Pyro skill boosts fire damage.

Stacking int improves your spell damage by 5% per point.

I know that, but not very much compared to my elemental warrior vs a pure mage, although my mage has not stacked her skills very much. IE: Both fire and water are on skill level 3. Maybe I am too diversified. I just don’t want to get into a situation where I can’t do much because I am all fire based and the mobs are immune to fire.

I am also kind of having my mages spending a lot of points on summoning too, which maybe I shouldn’t do.

I have an idea for another playthough which will be a physical damage party, no elemental stuff at all. That would mean earth magic because it is physical, and a bit of water for the healing / buffs.

My current party is all about the elemental damage with very little skills in the way of physical damage.

You want to hit level 10 summoning (either base level 10 or with gear) as quickly as you can. I won’t ruin why though.

Int is a flat bonus to your damage with all elemental spells (and weapons, like wands) so it’s worth jacking up every chance you get (I do 1 point almost every level). At 30 INT you are getting double base spell damage, or thereabouts. If you also have 10 points in Pyro that’s another 50% bonus damage.

However, most of the damage is coming from level scaling, so you aren’t neutering yourself by NOT investing in a single skill, it’s just that you do get some extra damage when you do. Right now my Fireball (at level 19) hits for around 1100 damage. When I put points into INT that level, it went up around 80 points of damage with those two points, so it does help.

You can either be diverse or you can really hit bigger numbers by specializing, and either way is probably fine. Int is more important for diversifying though, as like I said it gives a boost to everything elemental you are doing (damage wise). You can only go to level 10 in a given combat skill, too, where as there seems to be no real limit on INT.

Same here. I’m enjoying the game but all the micromanagement is once again (just like in the first game) getting to me. This is made worse in act2 when any sense of balance goes out the window and item stats start doubling every level so you have to constantly go to traders to see if they have any new equipment. I’m really glad I switched to dual lone wolves because I don’t think I’d be able to handle it with a 4 man party.

Fantastic, encounter with the prostitute in the tavern completely ruined my hotbars by stripping me of all the gear. I just love when rpgs pull shit like this.

I am still in Fort Joy with a level 5 party, so very early. But with the way armor works in the game it really seems like you want either an all physical damage party or an all magic damage party. Because to me the way to win battles is to strip armor ASAP and then use status effects like knock down, freeze, chicken form, whatever. I am playing on Classic.

So this has lead me to roll with a primarily physical party. I took all the NPCs as their native classes. I have my character, Sebille as a Shadowblade. The human lone wolf guy as Wayfarer, Beast as whatever his native class was but who I gave a lot of Warfare skills too as well as sword and board. And Lohse primarily focusing on her water stuff for heals and buffs and AE rain/whatever.

Nah, half and half seems the best imo.

Some enemies have a metric buttload of one type of armor and almost none of the other, so having both means you can pick your targets. It’s always nice to have an option for those rare moments where everything is one type or you have something near dead that you can pick off with a “magic damage” character, like a bow or mosquito swarm or something.

I mean either way can work, but when you run into a dude with 2k physical armor and like 300 magic armor you might regret not diversifying.

Summoning is nice because it can so easily flex to either role. Toss a totem/incarnate on an elemental spot if you need magic or blood/ground for physical.

I initially thought like ShivaX and was half and half, although since part of the magic half was a summoner I was leaning physical. The farther I got, the more I liked specializing as my physical damage numbers started to get so ridiculous. Like many things in this game, I think it’s going to depend largely on party composition.

My rogue deals so much damage and is so mobile that he wipes out anything low on armor quickly, well before the high armor targets have all died, and then my choice becomes equip a bow and use an elemental arrow to chip in a bit or just keep going with the daggers which is becoming the choice almost all the time now.

If my mages were more mobile elemental stuff might work better, they do plenty of damage with touch range spells, but for now I almost always just summon a physical incarnate, toss necromancy spells to deal physical damage, and only use elements for the occasional freeze/shock.

I am looking forward to playing a much more magic oriented party next time through to see how that will compare. The rogue is just completely skewing this playthrough. It makes me wonder how well huntsman works since the bows are all physical, but then the arrows are mostly elemental so you’re hitting both sets of armor. Are folks playing huntsman characters just using the arrows as occasional cc/surface triggers or can you do some proper magic damage?

It’s 90% physical for my hunter. I gave her glass cannon and she does OK, but my 2H warrior is king.

Are there any other skills that get special benefits from getting to level 10 (or some other level) other than summoning?

As far as my earlier problems, I think I was just entering the end game area, the way to the black pits which I was meant to be doing last, not first. I am finding plenty of mobs elsewhere I can handle quite easily. I once again have a boatload of quests that I have no idea what to do with. I would prefer a lot more hints then you get now. IE: I have a quest log. “I found a diseased chicken”. That’s it. No more clues. I of course tried to bless him, which momentarily cured his disease, but that didn’t work very long. I also keep forgetting to cast spirit vision in areas I know I should. I think the power should always be on, or you should get some notification that you should cast it here.

This has repeatedly been a problem for me, I also wish the spirits just stayed visible.

Act 2 is completely bonkers. Dungeons, dungeons everywhere. I haven’t seen level design like this since BG2. In fact, it blows BG2 out of the water for the most part.

If they manage to tighten up some of the game’s systems it’s gonna become an all time classic for sure.

I am still at Fort Joy but completed Barracus Rex dungeon and I was instantly transported back to BG2. It just has that feel it was like Deja Vu.

Loving this game

Holy crap.

  1. Cast Shackle of Pain on a boss.
  2. Cast Living on the Edge on your character that’s linked to the shackled boss.
  3. Cast Rupture Tendons on shackled character as well.
  4. Have ruptured/edged/shackled character run around through fire, poison, or whatever.
  5. Boss dies.

Alternately:

  1. Turn enemies into chickens.
  2. Cast Rupture Tendons on chickens.
  3. Cast haste on chickens.
  4. Let them run around randomly as chickens on their turn, killing themselves.

This is why I love this game. I would never come up with these combinations but it is great you can do that.

I have 40 hours into the game now, and most of what is being said on Larian forums I largely agree with.

Source system is just -really- poorly implemented. In what game design theory do you keep one of the primary resources of the game gated behind 20+ hours of gameplay? Non-sensical.

The higher level skills are already prohibitively expensive due to book cost, rarity, eating up 2-3 spell slots, and long cooldowns. To drop this huge resource requirement of Source which is extremely rare even through act 2 into the mix is comically bad game design. If you don’t have a mod to modify Source points I highly recommend one because SPOILER: It doesn’t get any better later.

The writing, voice-over, and general turn-based D&D rip-off is phenomenal. Waaaay too much emphasis on the mixing of elemental surfaces thus turning the game into an AoE spamfest. And the JRPG style number inflation to stats is also jarring.

I started off doing 20-30 dmg lets say on an attack against an enemy with a hundred or so hit points. By mid-late game the enemy has 5000 hitpoints, 1000 Phy armour, 1000 magic armor, and I’m now doing several hundred dmg per hit. Why? This could have been put on a more linear curve in actual D&D style instead of the “over 9000!” system in place now.

Quest log sucks, inventory is a disaster, but all those negatives being stated I absolutely love the game because it is different and takes risks. Both of which are rarified air these days in development.

If they can mange to un-f-ck their weird source/skill system and streamline some of the stuff above this game will have long legs in the way that Neverwinter Nights did back in the day.