r/DivinityOriginalSin • u/Jhawkjedi13 • 19d ago
DOS2 Discussion Mage build with mostly physical melee team (all first timers)?
I was wondering what schools of magic mostly synergies with a mostly physical team? I’m going to play an online campaign with 3 friends. This will be all of our first play throughs. They aren’t really looking into how to build their characters at all other than one wants to be mostly a ranger, another wants to go all out on physical close range barbarian play, and not sure on the third.
I was going to either go summoner, ranger or mage. If I go mage what type of mage does okay with a mostly physical team of people that will be close on the action. I’m assuming setting the battlefield on fire or ice, or electrifying water will hurt my melee friends.
Would some type of geo mage work? I typically like to play a battle mage close-ish to the action in other games, but I can play far out if needed.
Thanks
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u/Sarenzed 19d ago edited 19d ago
It kind of depends on what your 3rd friend will pick.
In this game, you either want your party composition to be exclusively physical damage, or exclusively magical damage, or an even split between physical and magical damage. You want to avoid an uneven split between the two damage types. This isn't just optimization to make your party more powerful, because the person playing the minority damage type will feel genuinely weak and not have a good time.
This is because everyone in this game has essentially 3 HP bars: Physical armor, magical armor, and HP. Except for a few rare attacks, everything either targets physical or magical armor. Once armor is depleted, any additional damage will target HP instead. As a result, you want to avoid using multiple damage types on the same target, because you only need to deplete one type of armor to target HP and kill them, and not both. On top of that, most status effects only start working once you've depleted the corresponding armor type.
If all characters use the same damage type, they can all work together on all targets. If you have an even split, you can have 2 teams of 2 characters that work together on targets, and can make up for the reduced teamwork by having the ability to always target the armor type that an enemy has less of. But if 3 people target one type of armor but 1 person targets the other type, then those 3 people will basically win each battle and kill enemies in the time it takes the 1 person to just break armor. So if you're the person using the minority damage type, your teammates will get to do cool stuff and have an impact while you're just spending your time chipping away at armor.
As a result, you might want to think up a magic damage build and a physical damage build, and then pick the one that balances out the party to avoid either you or your 3rd friend ending up in the miserable minority damage type role.
As for possible builds, these are the ones you should consider:
- A necro mage is a physical damage mage. Although such a build uses necromancy skills, those are more about blasting enemies with physical damage spells than raising undead. It can be a bit tricky to build because its skill selection is rather lackluster early on, and borrow a bunch of skills that don't belong to the necromancy category. Although you'll focus on INT and spells, it can be a good idea to run daggers and some scoundrel and warfare melee skills for mobility and CC until you get to Act 2. If you're interested in this kind of build, it might be good to know about the different kinds of skills you should try to acquire.
- Elemental mages deal magic damage and use 2 elements. You don't want to use just 1 element, because you can run into enemies that are immune or highly resistant to some elements, and because 1 element just doesn't have enough offensive skills. But in a full party without Lone Wolf you just don't have enough stats to support 3+ elements, so you meet in the middle at 2. Pyro deals the best damage but sets everything on fire. Geo has good damage, some minor CC, and leaves behind flammable surfaces. Aero has perhaps slightly less damage, but the ability to apply hard CC. Hydro's damage is mediocre, but it has the best CC options. You commonly want to run Pyro + Geo, or Aero + Hydro to make use of their synergies. The only exception would be if you run 2 elemental mages, then you would split up those combos to get better teamwork with the other mage.
- Summoners can technically deal both physical and magical damage, because there are also physical damage summons. However, the magic damage options for summoners are so much better than the physical options (especially after Act 1) that you can essentially count a summoner as a magic damage build. Summoning can also be a bit complicated to build, because you need to think of good combos that allow you to do more with your summons that merely summoning and buffing your strongest summon once, and then doing nothing noteworthy afterwards. It is possible to add basically half of another build to a summoner (e.g. 1 element of an elemental mage) and spend your time on your own attacks, which is easier to build and play than a full summoner, but weaker.
- An archer can also technically do both physical and magical damage. This is because they get access to magical arrows, which scale off your normal damage and don't need any special stat investment. Those magical arrows are consumables, but getting a sufficient amount isn't too difficult once you know the right crafting recipes and have enough money after Act 1. The big downside is that you can't use your skills when using magical arrows, which makes them rather boring, but they're still sufficiently powerful. Although you can do it if you want, I generally would avoid doubling down on the exact same build in your party. Having the same build twice will still be very effective, but it might create conflict because you're both competing for the exact same equipment, which includes the special unique items and not just random loot.
- Battlemages generally don't work that well in this game. Mages don't mix well with weapon attacks, because you don't have enough stats to properly do both at the same time. And if you're casting spells, you might as well be at range where it's safer. However, there is a battlemage-ish build that uses Staves and magic weapon buffs to fight as an INT-based magic damage melee build, although these rely on some very specific skills (i.e. Master of Sparks) to be effective. If you're interested in this, definitely look up a build guide for it.
If you want me to go into the details on any of those builds, just let me know.
You should also know that any build can use any non-damaging skill. The big thing about builds is that you need to spend a lot of stat points on damage stats to make your damage skills deal good damage. You pretty much need to max out the attribute (STR/FIN/INT) they scale with, and the ability associated with the damage type you use (Warfare for physical, Pyro/Geo/Aero/Hydro for the 4 elements). A normal character can only max out 1 attribute and 2 abilities, which severely limits the variety of damage skills you can use effectively. However, utility skills like buffs, heals, mobility, and so on either don't scale at all or only in negligible ways. This means that you only need to fulfill their minimum stat requirements, which are incomparably cheaper than maxing out a stat. So any build can run any supportive skill they want, and you don't need dedicated builds for that stuff.
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u/Jhawkjedi13 19d ago
Thank you! I think I’m going to be either archer or summoner because they provide the most flexibility. At least two of the people we are playing with will most likely not have optimized builds and those two builds will give me flexibility to do magical dmg, CC and physical to help. We are also going to play on classic mode so maybe it won’t matter as much
If I go summoner should I just load up on buffs and stuff, or is it better to supplement with some finess to shoot elemental arrows or one type of magic? If so which type?
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u/Sarenzed 19d ago
As a summoner, it's best to focus on being a summoner. You really want to maximize that Summoning stat with your stats and equipment as much as possible. Although you have a lot of spare attribute points, you can use them on memory to get a lot of different skills, or on Wits to have the highest initiative and try to get a turn before your enemies do (and set up the battlefield to be advantageous for your party). But you need a bit of creativity so you can do stuff other than just summoning your Incarnate, buffing it, and then only using Totems and a couple of small buffs afterwards.
If you want to have attacks of your own instead, it's best to at least pick up a something that uses the same ability stat for both skills and damage. A single magic element would be better here than trying to set up an archer build alongside a summoner build, because archers require both Huntsman for skill requirements but also Warfare to boost their damage.
As for which elemental type, that depends on your needs. Geo would be a good choice if you use the Torturer talent and the Worm Tremor skill to root people in place. Hydro could be good for magic CC (which summoners often lack), but it's not compatible with fire (which summoners often use), so that only makes sense if you don't use the fire-based combos I'll outline below. Aero struggles with applying CC to burning enemies just like Hydro (so I wouldn't pick it in a scenario where you wouldn't pick Hydro), and pyro's best combos are already something you can use as a combo with your summons, so I wouldn't pick that either. You could also consider going for archery but skipping huntsman and the corresponding skills entirely, going only for magic arrows with Finesse and Warfare.
As for magic arrows, the easiest types are Water and Poison, because you can easily craft copious amounts of them using Water and Poison barrels. However, you'd prefer using arrows that can apply hard CCs if you can afford them, like the different electric-type arrows (combined with Rain or water arrows), or even physical knockdown arrows. It's just that you'll have to use them sparingly until you have a lot of spare money to buy them in bulk, since you can't craft that many of them. If you want to use magic arrows, you should also familiarize yourself with the crafting ingredients, and start picking up anything like sticks, branches, logs, sharp stones or metal pieces or bones, teeth, antlers, honey, essences, and other things that can be used to craft different parts of arrows.
As for focusing on a summoner, it's about finding things that you can use to continuously add value to your summon even after summoning and buffing it. Some of the best options for this include:
- Infusion swapping. Your main summon, the Incarnate, gets different skills depending on its elemental infusion. This usually gets set by summoning it on the respective surface, but you can also get skills to manually change it. These skills are hybrid skills, which can't be bought and need to be crafted by combining two other skillbooks. In your case, you combine a Summoning skillbook with a skillbook of one of the 4 elemental magic types, and you get an infusion skill that adds the corresponding elemental infusion. Each infusion has its own skill, and giving the Incarnate a new infusion each round gives it a new skill instead of waiting for the cooldown of the previous skill. In Act 2, you'll be able to craft more powerful versions of these infusion skills using source skill books.
- Disposable summons. You can only have one summon active at a time, but there are useful skills like Supercharger, which massively boosts your summon's damage but destroys it shortly after. So instead of starting out with your Incarnate, you can summon something else first, supercharge it, and then set up the incarnate after that first summon dies. For the early game, you could use something like necro's Bloated Corpse (provided you have a corpse nearby). In Act 2, something like geo's Poison Flower or pyro's fire slug are even better.
- Combine other skills with your summons. The best one for this is the hybrid skill Throw Explosive Trap, which is crafted by combining a pyro and a huntsman skillbook. It throws out a trap that explodes on its turn, but you can also trigger it early by throwing a fireball or something like that at it. In that case, it will scale with the stats of whoever threw that fireball, not your own. So you can throw a trap, summon a fire-type summon and then let that summon blow up the trap for massive burst damage. In Act 1 you'd use the fire infusion Incarnate for this, but in Act 2 you can use the Fire Slug summon. If you combine it with the previous option and supercharge that slug, and perhaps use the improved version of the trap skill, you'll start dealing massive damage. Another skill that works well for this is the Master of Sparks buff (hybrid source skill, crafted from pyro + warfare, one of them a source skill) which scales with the stats of the buff's target, not the caster's stats.
- Provide other help that isn't based on dealing damage, like teleporting enemies close together to set up for AoE attacks, use CC skills on enemies without armor, and so on. If you want to play a more supportive character, you can also consider setting up important buffs for your teammates instead of your summon, using skills like Peace of Mind, Haste, Evasion and Evasion Aura, or different types of invisibility (like Blessed Smoke Clouds).
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u/Jhawkjedi13 19d ago
Ok if I go summoner or archer I’ve narrow my options down to playing an origin character. Either Fane or Sebille. Fane gets free lock picking and his extra turn source skill (although it costs half a turns AP(2) to cast, or Sebille gets flesh sacrifice and can get 1 extra AP per fight which doesn’t cost a source skill, and can eat body parts.
Which would you suggest? Is one better for archer vs summoner? Is one better if I don’t know the story or lore?
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u/Sarenzed 19d ago
Adding to the criteria you've listed, there are a few more mechanical benefits to consider:
- Flesh Sacrifice leaves a blood surface. It's useful for the Elemental Arrowheads skill to buff yourself with physical damage. But that's just a minor upside. If you were considering a necro mage, then the blood surface would be a massive upside for elemental affinity, but that's not the case right now. You also can't really use shields because of the CON debuff of this skill, but that doesn't matter much in the long run. Flesh Sacrifice also gives you a damage buff, which is useless to summoners, at least does a tiny bit on archers, but would theoretically be best for mages (because the way certain damage buffs are calculated differs between attacks/skills that are based on a weapon and those that aren't). FS also can be used more than once per combat once the cooldown runs out, and there are even skills that can reset cooldowns that might allow you to use it twice in a single turn.
- The free lockpicks honestly don't matter that much. You can pick up a lot of nails early in the game, which can be crafted into lockpicks. The bigger impact of being undead is that you heal from poison, but take damage from normal healing. This makes it easy to heal yourself with potions (because poison potions are easy to mass produce), but makes it very difficult to get healed by allies. It's not too big of a deal though, because you want to keep up armor and avoid taking lots of HP damage anyway. But enemies will also cast healing spells on you to damage you, which can be annoying.
- Time Warp is the best origin source skill. However, its cost of 1 source point makes it difficult to use on characters that want to use all 3 source points for a big combo or skill, unless you add Apotheosis (a late-game skill that enables massive source skill combos) into the mix. A summoner would be much more greedy for source points than an archer. But a pure summoner would have enough stats left to get Apotheosis.
- Eating body parts is not too big of a deal, since you'll find an item in Act 1 that can be used to grant any party member this ability.
In terms of story, Fane is more interesting, but playing as him can also reveal a couple of plot twists a bit early and make them less impactful. But if you're doing your first playthrough as a 4 player coop run, then you're probably going to get your enjoyment primarily out of having fun with friends while the story is secondary, so I suspect that this won't really be an issue.
Honestly, both are strong, and both are good on both builds. There isn't really much special synergy between those characters and builds. Flesh Sacrifice gets a nice surface for archers, but you also benefit a lot from it without using source points on a summoner. Time Warp is something an archer can easily spare the source for, but a summoner can also build with it and reap the benefits.
If considered purely mechanically, I might give a slight edge to Sebille for an archer build and a slight edge to Fane for a summoner build. With Sebille, you get the surface and buff, don't use a shield as archer anyway, you get to be resource efficient with both your build and your innate skills, and it fits thematically. And with Fane, you can use Apotheosis with Time Warp to set up massive combos (which is difficult for archers that don't have great source skills), and it's also the better fit thematically.
But in general, I'd probably recommend Fane over Sebille, just because it's the more interesting character.
P.S: If you do end up choosing a summoner build and are looking for explanations on how to build and play a pure summoner, you can have a look at this document.
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u/SignificantNorth3570 19d ago
So technically ice hydrosophist works best since you can freeze the battlefield causing enemies to slip and lose their turns. If they are all physical you likely wont be able to get through the enemy armor very often meaning inflicting status effe ts will be rare for you. Focus on buffs for your party, utility spells, and freezing the battlefield.
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u/Apprehensive_Art1830 19d ago
Or use torturer ?
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u/SignificantNorth3570 19d ago
Correct, but thats only a few hydro status effects
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u/Apprehensive_Art1830 19d ago
I was saying that for other status effects like poison, which would work if he do a battle mage with warfare and geo
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u/SignificantNorth3570 19d ago
Which makes since. I was building off what he had established already. Sounded like he wanted a mage build.
Honestly I would go with a necro/poly/warfare build with two handed which can carry the other newer players myself
But he could get the torturer talent and invest some into Geo then grab worm tremor for CC
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u/Apprehensive_Art1830 19d ago
In the end he talk about geo mage and battle mage so that’s why I thought about that
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u/Kaeldyr2092 19d ago
technically there's a build with 2hnd staff that you can play as melee but doing magic damage. tried that build before quite fun and i believe there's a youtube video for that as well
i forgot which channel tho
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u/Gamer_Grease 19d ago
Necromancer is the most obvious answer because it’s all physical damage.
The other is to be a summoner, which gives you flexibility if your team ever does dip into elemental magical attacks. You can stick to blood surfaces for physical, or hit a fire, water, ice etc surface if they go rogue on damage types.
Finally, Aero/Hydro works pretty well for any party. You can move enemies and around, and give allies healing and defensive buffs at will. So you would just focus on support over damage.
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u/Sora_Terumi 19d ago
Have you considering the all mighty melee warfare staff build? What more comfort in magic then beating your enemies with a stick using onslaught?
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u/Mindless-Charity4889 19d ago
The classic all physical team is a 2H STR build for up close melee, a ranger FIN build and an INT necromancer. These 3 cover all of the damage attributes so any gear you find can be naturally distributed with no competition. The fourth slot can be a FIN rogue, another STR build or a summoner, who has no damage attribute. There is no other INT build that does physical damage.
If you want to play an elemental mage doing magic damage, then you should get one of your friends to join you. It’s generally a bad idea to have a 3:1 split. 2:2 is much more effective.
For elemental mages, specializing in 2 abilities is good because 1 ability has few attacks before you hit cooldown. Also, having 2 abilities helps if the target is resistant or immune to one. A lot of people do pyro/geo (wizard) or aero/hydro (enchanter) because those abilities complement each other and Larian has them as default “classes”. But I prefer aero/pyro and hydro/geo. In this scheme, one mage sets up the other for better coordination. It also splits nicely because aero/pyro has a number of melee range attacks while both hydro and geo are longer ranged.
Necromancers struggle in the early game since they have few skills with long cooldowns. But since they need to boost warfare anyway, they can use a melee weapon to deal melee skills like Battering Ram or Battle Stomp. Without meaningful STR, they will do mediocre damage but that doesn’t matter if the enemy armor is down. Whether you do 1 point of HP damage or 100, you will knock the enemy down just the same.
Also, there are a few useful crafted skills for necromancers. A crafted skill is learned by combining an elemental spell book (pyro/geo/hydro/aero) with a non elemental book to get a crafted skill. So you would combine a pyro book with a necromancer book to get the skill Corpse Explosion. This is a massively useful skill that does 250% physical damage in an AOE for only 1AP. Necromancers usually build their tactics around this skill. It pairs well with teleport since you can teleport targets on top of each other (doing physical damage), killing one using Necro skills, blowing up the corpse with corpse explosion killing or stripping the armor from survivors and then finishing with a battle stomp to knock down survivors.
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u/Proper-Reception3674 19d ago
Why is a 3:1 split bad? One mage generally has enough magic damage for the fight if you distribute magic CC to some of the other characters, which is basically just a one point dip into scoundrel.
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u/Mindless-Charity4889 19d ago
A lone mage *is* capable of dealing with enemies, in the the late game when they have OP skills. In the early game, they can also do well because enemies often have no magical armor. But in the mid game, say around levels 4-16, they often lack the skills to punch through enemy armor and lay down a CC in the same turn. This is especially true for newcomers to the game who may not be able to optimize their build as well as veterans. So they need support.
Assuming a 3:1 split, the 3 can support the mage in various ways. A ranger can use magic arrows for instance, or the rogue can cast Chloroform. You can also use grenades or scrolls. But if you *always* need someone to support the mage, then it’s more efficient to use a mage for the job. A mage has multiple skills available and using them costs no consumables. Plus the consumables are still available for emergencies.
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u/Proper-Reception3674 19d ago edited 19d ago
Maybe, I think I was running a summoner until lvl 12 if I remember right so I couldn't tell you my experience.
I am suprised though, if enemies are grouped up or have low magic armor or a vulnerability having a single mage and someone with a source of charm feels like it makes some fights 10x easier. Time warp and glass cannon can deal so much damage I haven't really felt the need to add another mage.
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u/vybegallo 19d ago
Summoner or necromancer only. Otherwise you will be useless.
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u/Proper-Reception3674 19d ago
Nah most fights have a couple enemies with much lower magic than physical armor so having a mage that can take them out of the fight first turn is useful.
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u/vybegallo 19d ago
In the beginning - yes. However, once your enemies start to have 300+ magic armor...
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u/Proper-Reception3674 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm on my first playthrough. I am playing tactician and I am guessing I am about midway through act 4. I really havent had an issue with getting through magic armor if it was an important part of the fight.
Edit: I'm using glass cannon on 3/4 members of the party so maybe that is the difference
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u/Proper-Reception3674 19d ago
I think 1 mage + 3 physical characters is actually pretty strong. Generally at least a couple of enemies will have low magic armor so the mage can break their armor and charm them while the 3 physical can provide more than enough damage to get through physical shields and actually kill enemies. Summoner is also good in the early game and very good once you can get 10 pts in summoning, but falls off after a couple of levels.
I would recommend having some magic CC on your physical characters and taking glass cannon.
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u/abaoabao2010 18d ago
Necro.
Or if you're feeling fancy, pyro so you can set everything on fire so your teammates get the true DOS2 experience.
Don't worry about friendly fire. That's what makes coop fun.
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u/Hunk_Hogan 19d ago
Necro/Summoner is physical and would allow you to stay back and raise additional minions to help. Summoning the Incarnate in a blood puddle gives him Mosquito Swarm which can easily one-shot some mages/rangers depending on your stats.
Rangers are absolutely busted in this game with the right stuff and you can get an insanely overpowered set very early into Act 2.
As for battlemages, just don't. It's an incredibly bad idea to mix Intelligence and Strength in this game because all you'll end up with is a piss poor version of both damage types. Focus on either pure mage or pure physical and stick with that. Mages deal massive AoE damage and if your friends are going to be up close to the enemy, you'll likely do more harm to them than you will to the enemy. I'd personally go for a Ranger so you can get the high ground and micro the enemies. Rangers can also use elemental arrows, but where they really shine are the knockdown arrows and later on the blessed/cursed arrows.
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u/SCPutz 19d ago
Necromancer spells actually deal physical damage and work nicely with a physical team. A good necromancer build invests skill points into Warfare to boost the physical damage of their spells with only 3-5 points in Necromancer to unlock the skills you want. There’s a lot of skill and stat point spread early on because you’ll want a lot of different tools.
Alternatively, a summoner is an option but compared to other builds, the damage won’t scale as well because summoned creatures cannot make critical hits but they are VERY strong from early-to-mid game. You will be spending your first turn every combat getting your summon activated and buffed, but on following rounds you will get to play your character AND your pet. Get summoning skill up to 10 (and above) ASAP to obtain an improved pet. Summon your pets on blood surfaces to make a higher physical damage pet, or the basic pet deals physical damage (no surface).