Yeah. The two handed weapons I’m seeing are a LOT of damage - my weapon right now is like 160 physical + 30 Poison or so and it’s actually a level behind me. We just found a named one-handed legendary sword that did up to 79 physical and had 14 air on it, so almost exactly half.
Mobility I have found is key, since that can save AP, which is usually the most you can hope for with so few AP manipulations. My only character that doesn’t have any normal type of movement modifier is my summoner/necro and he still has a source based skill to use in a pinch or can be saved by Aero.
The rest depend on combinations of Warfare for Phoenix Dive and Battering Ram, Polymorph for Wings, Scoundrel for Cloak & Dagger and Backlash, Huntsman for Tactical Retreat, and Aero for Nether swap and teleportation. There are more but those are what I have been using mostly.
Poly is the cheapest investment skill-wise and is very reusable. Lot of good Poly skills for a warrior imo as well.
Tact Retreat is the “best” of the bunch since it also gives you haste, but other than it and First Aid there isn’t really anything else in Huntsman for melee fighters, though First Aid scales off of… something. With 2 points in Huntsman and basically no finesse my mage is dropping them for like 800+. It scales purely off level as far as I can tell and the scaling is bonkers.
I feel like the Wings skill may be the best of the bunch because it keeps you from being affected by surfaces, and more importantly it comes with a 1 AP fly skill that lasts pretty much the entire battle. The other skills have a cooldown after one use but this one you can use every single turn for something like 6 turns. It’s great.
Also, don’t forget that once you start Act 2, you can go back to the boat and respec for free. The only real hassle is gathering and buying skill/spell books to take advantage of your new traits.
Knockdowns are key, imo. I’ve made sure all my chars have access to at least one knockdown ability. Once you drill through a boss’ armor, their ass is toast. I have two characters with warfare with both knockdowns and Phoenix jump.
It’s great, but it does have a negative in that the flight path has a vertical arc which can limit its use if anything is overhead, like indoors. Also it can block out other polymorph skills but that’s even more minor of an issue.
Yeah, I use it on my Shadowblade and she also has tactical retreat so has several mobility options to choose from.
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?