This is something that I've talked about with a few people trying to get a good understanding of different playstyles and builds, but even after doing a fair amount of research I can't find any mage build that does damage to rival any of the physical damage dealing classes, both single target and as AOE.

For those that have not yet played the game, armour has been split into independent physical and magical types. This means, effectively, if you're hitting an enemy with both physical and magical attacks, neither will deal damage to HP until their respective armour has been chipped away. As CC can't be applied until armour has been removed, it's almost always beneficial to have all the damage dealers in your party doing the same type of damage.

Honestly, on harder difficulties it seems like mages are pretty much useless unless they're in a support role. I haven't spent much time messing around with every school of magic but it seems the best are those that deal physical damage (Necromancy, polymorph, and summoning). Being a traditionalist I'd have assumed that pyromancy would be the big damage dealing build, and when combined with geomancy to create pools of poison and oil you can make some pretty great, albeit still not particularly powerful, aoe explosions. They are undermined by the ridiculously long cooldowns of the most effective spells (4 turn cooldown for a firebloy fireball basically means you can only use it once or twice a fight) and is made redundant by the fact that your physical-damage-dealers are doing twice as much damage in half the time, and with shorter cooldowns.

This is further further compounded by the fact that there's limited aggressive spells in each school of magic. I've heard that one of the few legit ways to play a mage is to invest heavily into memory, so instead of having a few spells that deal big damage you have 20 spells that each deal a little. This solves your cooldown problem as you always have something else to cast, although the spells will still clash; for example if you use a hydro spell on an enemy you make him wet, which gives him a greater resistance to your fire spells. Rain and tornado will remove the pools of oil and poison you drop, etc. And again, as physical damage is all one type, while you're rotating through these spells your Fighter/Ranger/Scoundrel has already battered through the physical armour and has used his own set of much more versatile CC to disable the target anyway. And will probably finish them off before you even get through the targets magic armour.

I'm about 20 hours in, level 10, and I've been playing predominantly as a party of two and using the Lone Wolf talent (For those unfamiliar Lone Wolf doubles your stats so that two party members can do the damage of 4) and even with double the stats the damage that a mage puts out isn't enough to compete with the enemies we're running up against. Meanwhile my Knight (points pumped into warfare with a few into polymorph) is absolutely decimating everything, even characters that are higher levels than my own. Finesse based characters are even more ridiculous, to the extent that in my co-op run we're actually having to increase the difficulty to keep us engaged in combat.

My conclusion is that mages are only really useful as a very situational support class in a full party. It's a little disappointing, as magic has much more by way of creative solutions for handling enemies as a result of their different elements. But, for now at least, the best damage is being done by pointy sticks.

By way of a short term solution there's a couple of mods available that lower the cooldown of mage spells and also make status effects penetrate armour (so if your enemy is standing in fire he'll actually have the burn debuff instead of just tanking chip damage on his magic armour). However i'm hoping for a more permanent solution from the devs, because it seems very one-sided currently.

I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who believes they've found a good core caster/wizard build, especially for Lone Wolf.

Try to keep it spoiler free though please!

Thanks. x

Although physical damage dealers are more effective against most enemies, there are enemies that only have physical armor and in those case magical damage is more effective. You will find more powerful spell later on as well. I just bought a fire laser spell that burns trough most magical armor pretty quickly. Also some enemies are more vulnerable to certain elements then others so fire may seem ineffective in some fights while it completely destroys enemies in other fights. For mages it's super important to invest enough points in memory, if you have enough spells at the ready the cool down times become less of an issue. I would like to see them buffing mages a bit in the early game though as it takes a while to get the most out of them and they do seem like a burden in the beginning.

@bdead: Sure, but it's rare that enemies have no physical armour, and it doesn't seem beneficial to keep magical users with you all the time on the offchance that you find an enemy for them to kill. As I pointed out in my original post, the different schools of magic often clash with one another, which means if you're trying to chip away at an enemy who is weak to water damage then your fire skills aren't going to help much. Even with 20 memory slots you're still going to run out of effective spells pretty quickly.

And yeah, the laser ray is pretty good, but it's got a cooldown of 3 turns and you're often fighting groups of 5 or 6 people. I still believe even if you have to chip away at physical armour it's still going to be quicker to have 3 or 4 physical damage dealers than mages in that instance.

I feel like magic can be extremely powerful but they often design encounters that limits that a great deal.

Like in the rare instance of a good grouping of enemies my mage can wreck house on his first turn but usually he's got like a target or two at most to focus that on at first and then he's just done for most of the fight. I suppose I could delay their turns waiting for that golden opportunity but that's not very much fun.

My magic caster is great my archer, on the other hand, is always the first one to die. He's a respec so maybe I didn't allocate points correctly but he is more or less glorified fodder.

Most of the magic builds I’ve seen revolve around rain and lightning or rain and contamination to turn it to poison. The poison does decent initial damage and also puts the dot obviously which helps chip away that pesky magic armor. Then once all that’s done you can come in with the big fireballs and such dealing that massive dmg your looking for.

Sweep's co-op partner here. My experience was more or less the opposite. My caster was garbage and I couldn't find a build that did enough damage to matter. Fights were going on way too long, and my caster was relegated to more or less buff and heal duty as Sweep went around and killed everything. At level 9 I changed to a Warfare Huntsman build and my damage went through the roof, and I have virtually the same HP & armor as Sweep's Warrior. With the only change being forsaking magic for pure physical DPS, the game went from challenging to trivially easy.

I'm playing the shadowblade starting build and it's super fun! Physical damage does seem very strong.

On a Lone Wolf character I just don't think you can touch the effectiveness of physical dmg dealers and CC in a mixed party. Not unless something drastically changes way later into the game.

I've broken down the math in a different post already and Sweep had said pretty much the same thing here. Because of the way armor and shielding now works in this game as a damage sponge that has to be chipped past to get to be able to CC and debuff enemies, focusing on one type of damage is going to be way more effective in almost all cases. With super rare exceptions when in large fights some enemies have 0 magic armor to start with (ala the fight between the 2 main acts). Focusing on one damage type for the party is just more efficient in the long run.

At least in the first game when the magic users fell behind in damage they made up for it with incredible CC potential compared to their less intelligence inclined party friends. But now physical classes get easy access to a variety of efficient CC and debuff options at the very start of the game too!

Also because of this armor/shield system the ground effects and combos likewise become more of a gimmick then an actual threat they were in OS1. You set the oil on fire or exploded a poison cloud? Congrats you get to do a little bit more damage and if the enemy is still shielded they still don't give a fuck and won't be debuffed. One only has to look at the difference in lethality of traps in the two games to see this huge difference.

Now combine that with the fact that Larian has decided once again just like in Original Sin 1 to make spell damage not scale off your weapons like staffs or wands and instead only off of level + intelligence. Unlike all the physical melee and ranged skills of rogues, archers and warriors. This is questionable design 101. Why!?! There really is no good reason to do it this way. It only serves to create a new balancing problem that is frequently bungled as a result. Sure early game it feels like spells can keep up damage wise. But even going into the midgame I can already feel the disparity start creeping in as weapons get more and more powerful and can be runed to be made even more powerful. While adding dmg runes on wands or staffs doesn't affects spells at all.

The final nail is the spell cooldowns. You want to invest into memory for mages for them to be more useful? Great. That's points they're not spending on buffing their damage or survivability. You want to properly invest into more then one school of magic if you want to do more then support with it? Great. That's more points that are not being used to focus on damage or survivability yet again!

Sure mages are playable with a standard 4 party setup, they even do just fine on regular difficulty if you have a 2 on 2 party split. I'd even say that a 4 magic damage user party could be fun to play as, since then they will be all be able to focus on their respective schools more and also focus damage. But in the particular case of a Lone Wolf duo setup the problems with the magic users and splitting damage types gets even more prominent. And amplified even more on harder difficulties as well.

Hey guys, I think I might have a good elemental caster core here.

I played Fane and Sebille taking lone wolf talent.

Fane is my elemental mage. Core talents are:

-lone wolf

-elemental affinity

-far out man

-torturer

In order of priority

I take a few skills in pyro and geo, maxing summoner first.

I think elemental affinity is the talent that potentially doubles an elemental mage's dps. Elemental affinity gives -1 ap to elementa spells when standing on said element. With minimum ap cost still being 1, 1 ap spells remain 1ap, 2 ap spells become 1 ap, 3 to 2 and so on.

My usual battle goes like this:

(Fane starts as an elf using his mask, so he has elf racial innate spell flesh sacrifice)

1. Flesh sacrifice (create blood puddle on ground) then clear minds for the extra int

2. Contaminate (transform blood into oil and damage surrounding enemies)

3. Summon incarnate (on blood for good phys dmg, or on any elementals for good magic damage)

4. Spam poison/earth spells for -1 ap (fane is immune to poison, but not earth)

Notable earth/poison spells:

-poison dart

-impale

-fossil strike

-poison wave

-earthquake

Next turn:

1. Ignite(turn oil/poison into flames, good aoe)

2. Spam fire spells for -1 ap

Notable fire spells:

-fireball

-laser

-spontaneous combustion (with torturer, it deals alot of damage)

-searing dagger (only good to set enemies/surfaces on fire)

Next onwards:

1. Elemental totem and save ap for next round when cooldowns are up.

2. Can also cast fortify/haste, use scrolls, or potion. Don't waste ap doing basic attack.

I focus attribute on int, having abit of points in STR to get to wear better armor, and CONS to wear shield. I also try to get as much fire res as possible. The reason why is because some powerful spells work best when enemies are close by, like supernova, contamination, poison wave, earthquake. The reason for focus on int is for damage output.

I have been wiping out magic armor enmasse with this build.

Do tell me what u guys think of this!

That jives with everything I’ve done/seen. Magic in this game is all about setting up and kiting. I messed with an undead poison slinger but the heal isn’t enough, you really have to put a lake of fire/poison between you and your enemies

Similar situation. Been rolling with 2H Knight, 1H Cleric, Geo/Pyro Mage, and Summoner.

The Knight and the Summoner CLEAN UP and lately I've been feeling like these two really are carrying the party. Despite having very good gear and min/maxed INT, the pyro seems to put out little effective damage. They get 2-3 good combos off at the beginning of the fight which are swallowed by magic armor. By the time those abilities come off cooldown again most enemies physical armor is in tatters. I rather feel like I should have taken a Huntsman instead as you get a much better balance of physical and magical skills. Also more defense would be nice as the supports tend to get focused hard. I've definitely had enemies blow multiple turns trying to chase by back line.

@renegadedoppelganger: I highly recommend a Huntsman with Warfare. The damage is insane. Take a point in Polymorph to get Chameleon Cloak for an aggro dump, or 2 points and you can get Spread Your Wings and Terrain Transmutation. With Wings then your Ranger has at least two methods of getting into position or escaping along with Tactical Retreat, and then if you get in trouble with enemies focusing you down you can just go invisible with Cloak and reposition.

If you want to make things really silly, you can take Phoenix Dive from Warfare for yet another movement ability. Basically what I'm getting at is Warfare Huntsman is busted.

@tomitomo: Interesting, I hadn't really considered how skills like Elemental Affinity could help. That's making your spells cheaper to cast, though it sounds like the cooldowns are still pretty long. I hadn't thought about using scrolls and potions either - do you have to invest a lot more time into crafting so you have a decent stack of offensive spells to use while your natural spells are on cooldown? That seems quite expensive to prepare.

Nice to finally see someone with an effective magic build! I guess if you have Lizard racial you get an int buff as well.

Also, don't know how people feel about this, but there are mods available that both lower the cooldown of spells and that apply debuffs through magic armour. It feels kinda cheating to use that kind of workaround, but it's also stupid that a lot of the CC is useless until you've got rid of the respective armour. If an enemy is standing in fire he should have the "Burning" debuff applied, and even if it's chipping away at magic armour it should still not just stop as soon as you walk out of the fire. Same goes for things like wet. Why would magic armour protect you from rain? That's stupid.

In the first game I ran with an Enchanter and Wizard, but this time around I'm finding that a lot less effective. The Wizard mostly pulls his weight with a bunch of different AoEs and healing for Fane, but I feel like all I'm really getting from my Enchanter is healing spells. Her spells do less damage, and feel like they have less utility (right now at least). I might just switch her for a Metamorph or something.

I almost ended up with a full caster party before I dismissed Lohse for a bit and she disappeared off to some other part of the game. I've still been using Beast because I like his design, and I stuck with his default "battlemage" class which is basically worthless since his AP is too low to get up on enemies and all his default spells are all close-range.

When you can respec characters later in the game, is it just stats or can you switch the classes too? If not I'm gonna have to drop Beast for the Lone Wolf dude because archers seem more useful and I keep finding crossbows. And that'd suck because I already have the Red Prince in my party and those two are the least interesting characters so far.

@sweep: Yeah, I don't like how basically every spell/system in this game is debuff/terrain based but then for more than half the fight you can't really utilize any of it (since enemies seem to drop way faster once you've got the armours down). Still enjoying it but I preferred the first game's balancing; I barely even pay attention to the debuffs anymore, and while I used to always set up water/electric and fire/poison combos before I haven't done it on purpose a single time in this game.

@teddie: You can change everything except your race. "Class" is kind of meaningless, those are only the presets that the game starts you out with. You can put points into whatever you want and that will be your class, and you can freely change those around at any time after you escape Fort Joy.

Are you calling magic stupid? ;)

Mages are great with their CC, aoe and support. I have my rogue focus fire down the most important targets and meanwhile the mages CC and covers the entire field in AoE that wears down the grunt enemies slow but steady. As pure dmg dealers they probably do less dmg than my rogue but they still are just as important. The real useless one in my party is the warrior because i find that he has no action points to go or do anything, theres alot of turns i just have him wait because he can do nothing useful at all.

They are however alot more situational and you need great combos to unlock their potential, and yeh memory slots get quite important but i find they are important for my rogue aswell.

I play rogue Sebille, warrior Beast, firemage Fane and watermage Lohse. Not exactly meta but i just went with the 4 origin guys i liked most and their default builds.

Update. Previously was having some real issues with underpowered mages. After investing heavily in Memory and loading up on skill books, I can report the mages are much more effective. A full skill bar means relying less on the same 5 or so abilities comning off cooldown. Also the tip about using Elemental Affinity to rattle off a bunch of cheap combos helped immensely, especially with the fire mage's tendency to for self-immolation. I decided to take Glass Cannon as well to really maximize the amount of harm the mage does every round. Full AP every turn is absolutely worth the occasional status effects as silences are rare and most other statuses can be cleared in the same turn by fortify or magic shell.

The one issue I'm having now is my physical defenses are in shambles even on characters who're wearing the heaviest of heavy armor. In act 2 The amount of damage the opponents put out is staggering. Even after stacking hundreds of points of physical armor, one good Backslash will reduce it to near zero. Speaking of Backslash, it seems like the most broken of ability in the game. It's does a truck load of base damage, it backstabs(!), it teleports(!!) behind the target (!!!) AND it only costs 1AP(!!!!). That last one is what baffles me, sure there are source skills that have more devastating effects but combining a deadly attack with huge utility for a single action point and giving it to scoundrels who naturally build into crit, seems too good.

I'm not playing lone wolf but I felt like my mage wasn't super effective either, but then I got a bit further into the game, picked up additional skill books in my Pyro/Geo schools, and then re-spec'd into Glass Cannon + Stench. Now my Wizard has 6 AP every turn, the ability to cast tons of spells and single-handedly shred most low magic armor enemies, and on top of that I never really get touched by anyone due to Stench so the weakness of Glass Cannon is negated.

I'm on Classic, not Tactician, so your mileage my vary though.

It should be pretty easy to guess how well you would do with your current party on Tactician. Just add 50% to enemy armor and HP values, they do 50% more damage, and start with more AP.

Bursting down enemies fast or using CC becomes way more important on Tactician. Enemies can pull off some crazy turns due to the extra AP and damage.

Stench! Pairing it with Glass Cannon makes a lot of sense. Question though. I've read that stench only affects enemies in an area around you. Does this mean ranged enemies are unaffected?

@renegadedoppelganger: Put your backs against a wall and its no problem ;)

I know this is old but I'm currently playing through this game, about 55 hours in, halfway through act 3. And I very much disagree with the OP. Caster are fantastic, probably more powerfull than melee providing you know all the combos. The CC ability of mages is simply unmatched. Battlestomp/Battering Ram is great don't get me wrong but the breadth and depth of magic CC in my experience has been unmatched. Running 2 Magic + 2 melee.

@frodobaggins: I agree. Although, I'm curious more what you think about the story in Act 3. I feel like it sort of falls off of a cliff which is a bit of a bummer.

@sethmode: I must admit it's losing me a little. I'm not sure how far into the act I am or how much I have left to do but this whole third act and map feel very underwhelming compared to the first two. Almost like they were running out of time/budget.

@frodobaggins: I'm hoping that it picks up again with this Dwarven underground city and the espionage involved with that subplot but it just feels very abrupt in general, for lack of a better word. The other areas were so diverse and sprawling, this just feels very slapped together so far.

Seeing as this thread has been bumped up again I should point out that my original post was made over a year ago, and I fully expect there to have been balance changes and updates to the game that have addressed this issue. At the time of writing it did feel as though magic users were underpowered, though if this has since been remedied then I'm happy to hear it!