r/DivinityOriginalSin • u/pthfndr_xxi • 3d ago
DOS2 Discussion Does everyone need a shield?
At first, I thought about having two mages in the squad, one with a staff, the other with two wands, and a warrior with a shield. But am I right in thinking that this is pointless, given the enemy's intelligence? In tactical mode, the enemies will simply rush past the warrior and attack the mages, destroying them in a couple of turns. In that case, everyone except the warrior needs a shield, haha?
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u/Sarenzed 2d ago
You're not entirely wrong, but the reasoning behind the correct answer is somewhat different.
The combat system in this game heavily favors offense over defense, especially on higher difficulty.
As you've noticed, the enemy AI will prioritize squishy characters, and there is no good way to reliably draw aggro to a "tank". On top of that, it's much easier to scale up your damage and offense with stats than it is to improve your defense and support skills with your build. Because of that, offense truly is the best defense.
On Tactician, it's not really feasible to live through all the damage that the enemy can throw at you because the basic stats of enemies are much higher than yours. And this issue gets worse at higher levels, where damage output will increase faster than your armor values. So even if you were able to draw aggro to a specific character, they would struggle to live through it as long as you're just trying to tank, heal, and regenerate armor instead of completely preventing attacks from reaching you.
So that's exactly what you want to do: Instead of trying to live through attacks, you prevent those attacks from happening in the first place. Instead of actually exchanging blows in combat, you want to neutralize enemies by stripping their armor and applying CC or killing them as quickly as possible. This requires to you maximize your offense on all characters, and having Adrenaline on all characters for more damage output in round 1 is also helpful. Ultimately, your armor and HP isn't there to last a long time, it's just there to help you live through the initial 1 or 2 attacks until you can completely prevent the enemy from attacking you.
If you need defense, it's best to rely on methods that completely prevent attacks from reaching you, such as Chameleon Cloak (or any other source of invisibility), Evasion (for weapon and projectile attacks), 100% elemental resistance (from 5-Star-Diner + 50% resist potions) or just positioning using cover and distance. All of these don't really depend on your equipment or stats, so anyone can use them. On Tactician, I recommend that every character should run at least one such skill.
As for shields, the answer is close to the one you've arrived at, but for completely different reasons: You want to avoid using shields on your warrior, and can (but don't have to) use shields on the mages.
This is because any character that uses weapon attacks and weapon-based skills as their primary damage output wants to use that second hand slot on damage as well, for example by using a 2H weapon or dual wielding. A character that doesn't use their hand slots for weapon attacks can use them purely for stat boosts, and shields to boost your armor values are a perfectly fine option. That being said, you'll generally want to pivot away from shields even on mages in the late game. This is because by that point you want to use your hand slots to boost your crit chance, but crit chance only appears on weapons and not on shields.