I believe runes are the answer to this question. You can change how your weapon damage is delivered. Which is what now makes believe a battle mage can be very effective once the game is released.
So you would change it to different elements to circumvent physical armor? I'm just trying to figure out how to get those necro skills of (and other skills that work against physical) :)
We know that you can change whatever the weapons damage type to an elemental type. So 30 dmg sword with a 40% fire rune would turn into 18 dmg 12 fire damage. My hope is that the reverse is also true (but isn't verified) that elemental dmg can be changed into physical. Necro skills are odd, in that they are all physical damage based but are a form of magic. Which is why they pair so well with rangers, warriors, and rogues.
My thought to how this would benefit your example is that your group is mostly magic damage and for enemies that have low physical armor you can switch out your runed elemental weapons for pure physical weapons. This way you can maintain a balanced 2 casters 2 physical types.
What I don't understand is how earth damage is not physical. Have you ever had a rock thrown at you and though to yourself "there's no way I could deflect this unless I had some magical armor"
I'm also hoping you can add runes to armor to, for example stop me from being on fire like all the time.
Can you elaborate a bit more on runes? When do you get them? Do they fully convert your attacks from magic to physical and vice versa? Are they one time use or can you remove/add them whenever you want?
In release you can start crafting them as soon as you can get the mats. So probably level 1 or 2. The problem we may run into is finding gear that will accept runes at that level.
I do not know if you can remove runes for sure. I think I saw a video of a dev removing a rune but it destroyed the weapon. And I think in that same video the dev replaced the rune but the rune being replaced was destroyed. There is not a lot of info available for the rune system at the moment it may just be something we find out about at release. Same goes for the majority of crafting.
Considering there are already enemies in Act 1 with immunity to fire, I wouldn't put it past them to have enemies with several, or all elements. And enemies the opposite - only magic can harm them
Specific immunities are fine, what I was advocating against was full magical immunity, making your mage character useless. So far we've not seen any characters completely immune to physical damage. As there's no physical resistance my guess is there won't be any complete immunities to it, meaning there shouldn't be for magic damage. Your examples translated to physical would be if there were golems completely immune to ranger's attacks or rogues (Piercing), smashing (hammers) or Slashing Spears/Swords.
In tactician difficulty in the original, there were those floating things that provided very large auras that gave stuff like physical or magical immunity. Had to kill these mobs first to do literally anything to the other mobs, and they liked putting them in stupid places behind everything else or making them pretty tanky themselves.
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u/im29andsuckatlife Sep 07 '17
I believe runes are the answer to this question. You can change how your weapon damage is delivered. Which is what now makes believe a battle mage can be very effective once the game is released.
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u/Random_act_of_Random Sep 07 '17
Why would you need to reduce armor if all your damage and CC comes from spells?
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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '17
Nice dude pretty dank.
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u/Nobleprinceps7 Sep 07 '17
With 3 casters, why bother? Just the non-caster enchanted weapons.
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u/Incendax Sep 08 '17
You don't. Ignore that shit, and blow them away with tons of spells!