Poor Synergy between Schools of Magic make some Specs pointless

[Ka'shurio]

There are some specs in this game that work very well. For instance:

Hydrosophist + Necromancer + Warfare "Blood Mage" or "Death Knight"

This spec works super well, because if you equip a Staff, your melee attacks scale with intelligence. Also, Warfare buffs Necro damage, together with intelligence, making your necro spells hit super hard. Some hydrosophist scales well with int, and having some abilities some winter blast makes for a superb death knight build. Your melee also heals you for a ton from necro. Necro and warfare and your melee also all do physical, which is useful for CCs.

Also,

Polymorph + Warfare "Druid Warrior"

This is good, as you will be using a strength-gearing 2-handed, which scales well with warfare. Your warfare + strength also causes tentacle lash and some of the other poly spells to scale remarkably.

In the above 2 specs, they work, as there is synergy between the magic schools + you only have to focus on say, 1 stat, like INT or STR, for you to do awesome damage.

However, some specs like the following:

Necromancer + Huntsman "Death Hunter"
Pyrokinetic + Strength-based Warfare build "Knight"
Scoundrel + Geomancer "Shadow Rogue"
Huntsman + Aerotheurge "Wayfarer"

All of the above specs are not very good, as you have to split up your main stats into normally, 2 instead of 1 (like needing INT for necromancy spells to hurt, while needing Huntsman for ranged weapons to hurt, for the "Death Hunter" case). Also, their schools of magic don't synergise well with one another (like Geomancer + Hydrosophist = the elements don't interact as well as say, Geomancer + Pyrokinetic).

You end up doing less damage, compared to one of the more synergistic specs.

This profoundly limits the actual number of choices. Even though, one can theoretically have hundreds of different combinations, some builds are so much more efficient, that having a non-synergistic build is pointless.

Unless, Larian makes some new changes, like having the person choose if INT, STR, or FIN should scale with their weapons etc.

[Bastila Shan]

How does Warfare benefit necromancy? Intelligence is the only thing that benefits necromancy

[Detective]

Speaking strictly from a full wizard/mage perpsective, having multiple specs can be more useful if you consider them different options, rather then direct comibinations. I am currently getting Fane's air spec to the minimum of 2, simply so that he'll have access to teleportation and other damaging skills, in case he'll ever need to use something else instead of poison and fire (case in point - Undead...)

[Brybry]

iirc Warfare increases all physical damage, and Necromancy spells tend to deal physical damage.

[Ka'shurio]

Yup, that is why many players who play Death Knight or Blood Mage will go for 3 base necromancy (for 30% damage self-heal), then put everything else in Warfare to max necro spell damage.

[Detective]

Wait, what are the necromancer spells that cause physicial damage? You caught my interest

[Fendelphi]

But there are several skills within each school that has an impact even without stats. Stuff like "Haste", "Flaming Tongues" and "Bone Cage" dont care about your stats.

Certain skills simply is great as CC/debuff, if you manage to break the right type of armor, even if they do scale with Int(and you focus on Strength).
Abilities like "Decaying Touch" can have an impact, even if the damage is low, due to the debuff effect(in case of your "Death Hunter", you can pick various buffs/effects that dont scale on Int, and pick a few debuffs that do scale on Int).

You might end up doing a bit less damage than some of the more "streamlined" builds, but it should be doable.

Not everything will be "just as good as..." when you mix 2 opposing playstyles. Take a look at DnD classes and you will see the same thing.

[Fendelphi]

Originally posted by Detective:

Wait, what are the necromancer spells that cause physicial damage? You caught my interest

All of them. They all do physical damage. Necromancer is a semi-close range, physical spellcaster.

[Detective]

Ah... Ah... Go figure. So far, I only have one point in necromancer on Loshe for blood rain, still thinking what kind of spells exactly would fit for her at the moment.

[Nyrue]

i personally think larain should remove/repurpose certain attributes str/int/fin, if mage weapons were any kind of useful i would say the main 3 attributes should only govern weapon damage and skills should scale ONLY off of your level of said skill, but that seems too simple a solution maybe

[Revolucas]

Hybrid Physical/Magic is pointless in general. The only reason you would hybrid is for the support skills that do not scale from a main stat but scale from skill rank; there are quite a few. With that in mind, Magic can have High Ground bonus and Crit Damage bonus from Huntsman and Scoundrel. So its' perfectly viable to rank Scoundrel and/or Huntsman for their support skills for any caster build. In fact as far as min/max goes it's optimal to wear gear that has +magic +scoundrel +huntsman all at once.

[Ka'shurio]

I'm still trying to figure out which are the different 'synergistic' builds, that are unconventional (not part of the 15 or so 'default' specs like Wayfarer in the game).

So far, the following seem to work quite synergistically:

1) "Blood Hunter" Huntsman + Necro FIN build (use bow/crossbow to do damage, use necro to heal oneself, and invest points in the necro death wish, resurrect, bone armor, bone widow, black shroud, on the edge spells for utility)

2) "Frost Death Knight" Necro + Hydro + Warfare Shield build with wand INT build (with bouncing shield defelct shield, phoenix dive, all of the hydro healing spells, the default necro damage spells ... if you invest in enough intel, your necro + hydro spells hurt like crazy).

3) "Enhancement Shaman" Warfare + Summoning STR build (max points in summoning + all warfare skills. Since summoning and your physical damage scale independently - one needing summoning, the other strength, you don't have to split stats into INT or STR)

4) "Arcane Rogue" Aero + Scoundrel FIN build (pick all of the utility aero spells like erratic wisp, evasion, nether swap, teleport, favorable winds for insane mobility and evasion)

5) "Discipline Priest" Geo + Hydro (pick all of the healing, buff magic and physical damage spells. If you are a human, pick that shield dome racial. You are the team's main support in this spec. Pick Cleanse wounds if you can, and mass cleanse wounds)

6) "Blood Death Knight" - same as (2), but wielding a staff for INT scaling instead, with all of the warfare spells for 2-handed).

7) "Frenzy Druid" Poly + Warfare STR build (pick all warfare 2H moves + Poly for utility + Tentacle lash and all mobility spells = insane warrior with lots of mobility and support utility like spider web etc.)

8) "Battlefield Manipulator" - Pyro + Hydro + Necro + Aero + Poly INT build (this one is special - use rain + fireball to create smoke. Also use steam cloud hybrid spell + necro smoke bomb + steam lance + smoke grenades + poly terrain swap = create lots of smoke, and use poly terrain swap to manipulate smoke for defense, and to force enemies to move into LoS)

I'm still experimenting.

[Detective]

I believe I am going to do a poly + warfare build as well, but have the character use a shield instead - With my current group, he is the designated tank/Front line CC guy at the moment. The frost death knight sounds interesting, how does it work exactly?

[Ka'shurio]

Originally posted by Detective:

I believe I am going to do a poly + warfare build as well, but have the character use a shield instead - With my current group, he is the designated tank/Front line CC guy at the moment. The frost death knight sounds interesting, how does it work exactly?

I have one Frost Death Knight build at the moment:

Pick all necro skills, support with winter blast + 1 or 2 other offensive hydro spells, then pick almost all of the buff frost armor spells.

Put all points in INT and CON, then max warfare, but put only 3 base pts in Necro, the rest into hydro

Your INT and warfare will cause necromancy spells to hit like a truck. At level 14 now, but my decaying touch, mosquito swarm, and infect do like 500 damage each. Grasp does 1200 damage AoE, which 1-shots many people in an area). I can't wait for Blood Storm. You have shield bounce + bone widow + scourge + wand + hydro spells to use in between necro spell cooldowns.

You also get lots of utility for your team - resurrection, on the edge, death wish, buff armor, 3-4 kinds of heals.

If you like the lore of being a Death Knight, do the God King quest to turn your Bless into Curse.

Or for alternation, you can use 2-handed and give him a staff to scale with INT.

But note: the reason why I'm doing so much damage at level 14 is because I'm using the Cheat Commander mod to give myself all legendaries. But as a comparison, my identically-geared "Shaman" does 300 damage with Battle Stomp, so you can see this spec does lots of damage. My Wizard does 500 damage for fireball, while my Huntsman auto-attacks for 200 (around there).

However, the bad thing about this Death Knight build, is that between Source spell uses, your DPS is considerably lesser, since most of your damage comes from Grasp + Bloodstorm. If you are lazy to replenish source, just get the Bedrolls replenish source mod.

[Hobocop]

2h Warfare build using a Spear. More for flexibility than straight killing power, dip into appropriate schools like Scoundrel for utility/buff spells and can easily swap over to using a bow/crossbow if melee combat is too dangerous.

Warfare+Hydro 'Frost Paladin' is quite good as well with any combination of weapon style and concentrating on the support and healing spells to make up for their lower magic armor, and can leverage Rain+Global Cooling+Ice Breaker later in the game to freeze enemies and deal significant magic damage without needing to build Intelligence.

Also, weapon buffs. Use 'em. Elemental Arrowheads, Sparking Swings, Firebrand, Venom Coating, etc allow you to deal significant magic damage without needing to split mainstat points.

[Cruul]

I'd say it is inevitable that some combinations have better synergy than others. If all combinations were about the same effectiveness there would be no interesting strategic choices to make and it would probably be a boring game. Finding good synergies is half the fun of creating effective characters. And there is usually a trade-off between having strong synergy versus having flexibility for different situations so less synergy isn't always bad.

So when it comes to synergy, for magic damage focus it's clear that fire/geo work well together and hydro/air work well together, but these two groups tend to interfere with each other when mixed. I can't decide if my party mages should focus on air/water element, or oil/fire element, or a bit of both to handle different situations.