I've been dicking around with Act II respecs a little bit since I got here and have kinda-sorta gotten my characters down but I'm curious if there are any other ways I should be taking these people. I'm probably going to get Ifahn out of Necromancy (tough to make much use of it at range) and get him some Hydro points to also make him a healer, but apart from that I'm curious if there's anything else anyone would recommend. I played Act 1 on Explorer and did a couple of Act II fights on Normal until I got into it with some animated scarecrows that absolutely fucked me up, so I'm kind of flipping between the two difficulties as I go at this point. (I've noticed that Act II is so big that it's easy to wander into high-level enemies, which doesn't help.)

Erk, I haven't played since launch so I'm not sure if the way armour works is still the same, but is it still the case that phsyical and magic armour are completely independent?

Also do you have any mods up that would affect combat?

From the looks of things you've got:

• A necromancer (physical damage)
• A mage with fire and polymorph? (magic and physical damage respectively)
• A water mage (healing/support)
• A warrior with polymorph (100% physical)

The problem that we (I played coop) ran into repeatedly was because the way shields are split up it makes it incredibly difficult to ever focus down a single target. With your current team composition it seems like your dps is roughly 70% physical and 30% magic? I'd be tempted to just say swap out your fire mage for a ranger/archer and go full physical, so your entire team is invested in taking down a single shield type. This will increase the speed you can take enemies down but also the speed with which you can apply debuffs and status effects (which wouldn't penetrate shields last time I played).

I'm not sure if the game has been patched since I last jumped in, but I remember fire magic being very weak unless you want to go completely magic, both because of the shield thing and because the cooldowns are so long. We found with our party that our physical fighters were killing enemies before our mages had even burned through their shields, so eventually just swapped to full physical. If you don't want to go the archer route you could swap to summoner and bring a load of demons into play, which will do physical/elemental damage depending on which surface they're summoned on.

Hi Matt!

It's been a few months since I've finished the game, so my apologies if this isn't all too specific.

First off: The Scarecrows. If you've just gotten to Act 2, I'm assuming you're somewhere between Level 9 and 10 (if you're lower, good luck!). The Scarecrows are level 12 if I remember correctly. You can leave them be for now. Generally, if you see anything 2 levels above your characters, I would turn around and find something else to do.

Act 2 is where you will really cut your teeth for the first time, especially switching from Explorer to Normal. I'm pretty seasoned with RPGs, but not a die-hard, and found the jump in difficulty from Act 1 to 2 quite big. Since every encounter and most resources in this game are finite, you can't really grind levels anywhere. You have to find some sort of progression between all the encounters and the attached quests that are available in your level range. I used a comunity-made map that divides the island into regions by encounter/NPC level and found it difficult to play that act without it. I also used a ton of quest guides, but that's up to anyone's personal preference of course.

As far as your character builds, they look okay. Except for Lohse, you're not going "all in" on one class, which is good. A mix of two or three abilities is mostly what you want to go for. Once you've got your head around all the systems it's really fun to just experiment. I used the re-spec mirror a lot. Elemental- and damage synergies are key for disables (via stunnded/frozen/etc statuses, that chicken spell, and knock-down). Once you've figured out how to do it, stun-locking key targets will become a game changer. That and mobility skills (Spread Your Wings, Tactical Retreat, Cloak and Dagger/Backlash...) I found really strong in this game.

Also build a full-on tank - heavily prioritise the Constitution stat, Warfare skill and one magic school (I chose Aerothurge), plus a point in Polymorph here and there for more stats and some sweet utility skills. I don't know if it's just me, but building a tank was very effective and also a hell of a lot of fun for some reason. Finding a new, better shield became a top 3 loot highlight for me. The Bouncing Shield skill lets shields deal damage based on their armor value, to two targets no less. The damage became insane later in the game. Put points in Dodge and Retribution if you're feeling fancy.

By far my favourite build happened on my (non-Origin) player character. Maybe a breakdown of that build (spotty memory notwithstanding) will help you somehow.

The character was a Warfare melee fighter with two-handed weapons and a heavy focus on Pyromancy, built entirely around critical hits. The primary stats were Wits (to increase crit chance and intiative) and Strength (to boost weapon damage and meet equip requirements). Constitution and Memory were second priority. The build needs both, so it's a fine line to walk. Intelligence is sort of useful, but putting points in Pyromancy also raises that damage output.

The Talents are were this build comes together: The core Talent was "Savage Sortilage" which gives your damage spells (sorry, "skills" in this game) the same critical chance as your basic attacks. I tried a bunch of different combinations with other talents and had some favourites. Mnemonic saves you a couple of stat points that would otherwise have to be be spent for memory. Same with Picture of Health which saves you some constitution points. All the saved points went into Strength and Wits of course. Hothead is also amazing, because 8 out 10 times you will be on top of the initiative from your high Wits score, jumping into the fight with 50+ % crit chance later on. It's crazy. Opportunist talent is a super dirty combination for the same reason. The Demon talent seems like a good fit at first glance, but every time I got to spend talent points, I found better options.

The skills I used in this build were badass. Some examples are Phoenix Dive to get in and out of position, Blitz Attack and/or Battering Ram to quickly switch targets (and knock-down disable with the latter). Good old Fireball for some range, as well as Fire Whip and Laser Ray (the shit you can pull with with that spell from a melee position is insane). Not the strongest skill by a long shot, but my secret favourite, was Flaming Tongues, which creates flames around the character that auto-attack enemies that move in and out of melee range. And just like the other fire spells, those flames can crit! Putting out tons of damage by just standing there. Hilarious. There's also a skill that buffs your weapon with fire damage, but I found the more "active" skill more fun.

I might have put some points in other skills than Warfare and Pyro, don't remember, but that's the build in a nutshell.

As I said, experimenting with builds is fun, and and a core part to this game. If something doesn't work out as you expected, fuck it, go use the mirror. It can get quite pricey buying all the skill books you want, depending on if you're just modifying some things or completely scrapping a build for something else entirely (which is totally doable).

I'll post here again if I have more thoughts. Cheers!

@sweep: Sorry I should've been more clear; I was doing this from my laptop and didn't have a huge amount of time, the classes now break down more towards:

• Heavy Tank w/ splash of Polymorph and Geomancer
• Summoner with Incarnate/splash of Hydro (for heals) and Aerothurge (for teleport)
• Pure Ranger/Crossbow lady w/ splash of Aero for teleport
• Pyro/Necro with splash of Polymorph.

I think it's the last character that can really change the most as I've been noticing what you're saying about Pyro not being great, and it's difficult to get a lot of the spells off without hitting your own characters. And Polymorph seems kind of useless as a magician character. So I probably need to shift him to something else. Might just do daggers or have another archer character to spread the party out a bit. I find summoning still useful at the moment to give the enemies another target or two but I hear it doesn't scale too well, so that might be on the docket too at some point, but I only have 5k or so gold. I might give up on crafting at some point and start selling mushrooms and plants as I think I have a bunch of money tied up in them.

@fr0y0: Thanks for the suggestions! I just fought the voidwoken at the beach with the dude who lost his ring and I'm losing people on Explorer mode now. Definitely need to respec the Pyro/Necro dude. I'll look over some of your recommendations!

Change the summoner to pyro + hydro. Invest more heavily with your tank into geo. Invest more heavily with your archer into aero. Change your necro to heavy invest into consitution + stenght with heavily necro + 2 handed and thank me later.

I had this EXACT problem Matt myself, and came to a few startling realisations that CHANGED the game for me.

-If it's possible, get a summoner up to rank 10. The big boy you can summon, along with the "infusion" spells are a real game changed. They all have opportunity attacks, and their ranged damage/knockdown is insanely strong. It looks like you already have that covered though.

-Spec your MAIN phys damage dealer with Necro (I think that's heal on hit?), because the amount you'll heal extra really starts to add up.

-This was the big one for me though. Spec one, if not MORE of your guys into "Polymorph". Like, more than you already have. The spells that stand out are:

Flight (You can grow wings and fly a LONG distance. Useful on both combat scenarios and getting to out of reach places when you're exploring)

Medusa Head. The real MVP of Polymorph. You take out a...Medusa's Head, and everything that doesn't meet the check is immediately turned to stone. To start off with, it does signficant magic damage, but anything that breaks is immedaitely turned to stone. Oh also, it STAYS in your hand for 2/3 turns IIRC. You just have this mad AOE CC for a few turns, and it's kinda broken

I can't remember what it's called, but the tentacle that Atrophies enemies. For one full turn, if they don't meet the check, they can't attack you at all. Really strong, combined with Chicken Form which turns an enemy into a chicken.

- I'd also recommend, if you can fit it in, some points in "Scoundrel". The CC in that tree is really strong.

Basically, what I'm saying is that CC is the absolute DADDY in later acts. You don't necessarily wanna just whack a guy down, you wanna control him till you CAN whack him down. Scoundrel/Poly are the KINGS in that regard :)

Wait until you get to that oil fight in act II. I really hated that part for the difficulty spike.

@rorie

Sweep mentioned that him and his co-op partner just went full physical at some point. Early on in my playthrough, on the game's subreddit I read something about physical damage being op. I dismissed it at first for a couple of reasons, but it's true and becomes pretty obvious as the game progresses. A lot of balance changes went into that huge re-work update last year and while I think it's not as bad as it used to be, physical damage is still really, really strong. I mentioned the Bouncing Shield skill in my post - it does physical and actually became one of my biggest damage sources late game, albeit on a fairly long cooldown. My tank would reliably destroy anyone's physical armor in one go, if they weren't heavily armored themselves; two at the same time with a good bounce. When I played my cards right, enemy casters became a non-issue in a lot of fights.

Anyway, I probably made it harder for myself this way, but I decided to stick to builds I want to play instead of "breaking the game" if you will. All the magic and elemental synergy stuff seemed to cool not to explore.

High-level Summoning has also been mentioned. I highly recommend it as well. The big familiar is really strong and super versatile thanks to infusions.

I have a mod suggestion as well. I had a few mods installed, most of them QOL or UI stuff. This one I can't recommend enough: https://www.nexusmods.com/divinityoriginalsin2definitiveedition/mods/35 It recharges your party's Source points when you use the bedroll and also revives dead party members. Both features save a ton of time and some resources.

Recharging Source points is especially nice because those skills are The Shit. Use them as much as you can. Some of them require a bit of setup to get their full potential and it's so damn satisfying when it works. Additionally you should have at least two characters with the Bless spell prepared. Ideally one of them has the Far-Out Man talent to get you out of potential tight spots, although that's situational (really good talent to have, regardless).

Summoners are really good because you can summon them on top of different elements and do physical or magic damage. make sure to take advantage of that.

Also, if you haven't kissed the spider lady, do it with all your characters and choose the Transparent Chrysalis option. You get an idol that you can revive you instantly. You can recharge it by combining it with resurrection scrolls. This effectively gives everyone two lives or you can put multiple on one character.

These builds are fine - not outstanding, not bad. I noticed a couple of things:

• Almost all these characters need to splash into Adrenaline and Skin Graft (though if you just started Act 2 this can still be an ongoing process)
• Every character needs at least 1 mobility spell
• You're not utilizing magic synergies well (Hydro + Aero for massive CC power or Geo + Pyro if you just wanna see the world burn). So either get out of magic damage, for example with a dual dagger rogue for severe single target damage and good CC or fix your casters.
• On that note: your CC capabilities seem lacking. Your losing people because you're not able to withstand the, admittedly, occasionally shocking amount of opposing alpha strike damge. Act 2 punishes you for that! So either "cheese" the game with setting up barrels - blocking choke points and setting up explosive surprises or if you, like me, don't enjoy that playstyle optimize you party for nuking shields and CCing the leftovers. Once you party becomes efficient in the lategame you'll often just steamroll opposing groups without much need for CC

In conclusion: DOS2 is not as intricate as you might think. Builds generally focus 2-3 skills supporting damage output, splash critical utility skills (Mobility, Adrenaline, Skin Graft, Teleport) and buy relevant CC abilities. Other than that you can become the master of barrelmancy if you're into that sort of thing.