How viable is focusing on one or two magic types?

[Aerius]

I just finished DOS 1 - I chose a party that covered all the magic types but found that they actually kind of conflicted with each other (ie, Geo and Fire seem to go well, water and lightning as well). However, if you want to use all the schools it is just chaos since your ground effects are getting altered and you are unfreezing or unwarming enemies, etc.

For DOS 2 is it viable to go like, only geo/fire or ice/lightning? For instance, in DOS 1 that ice area would have been big trouble without fire spells and I don't want to get stuck in the same way in this game. I was thinking of going with a fairly pure warrior/ranger/ice+lightning/necro+something else (maybe summoning and utility spells from geo/fire). Elemental arrows for the ranger will work in a pinch I assume.

I'm actually just trying to stay away from fire since it is kind of unpredictable and sometimes you hit the wrong barrel and the entire screen is on fire. Thoughts?

[Senki]

It's not only viable it's the best way to play the game. Having both fire and ice only messes with each other with no actual advantages. Fire melts frozen enemies and they get out of the cc, enemies on fire take less damage from water based spells and they can't become wet until the fire is out. Nothing good comes out of having both of them other than the occasional enemies that are weak to one of them.

[Kurosu]

Like Senki already mentioned , they rule each other out. The combos are air/water and fire / earth.

Air/ water in my opinion are vastly better than fire / ground . But I am a bit biased because hydro is my favorite spell tree out of the 4 . Great combo with blood mages as well.

For the setup that you mentioned, I think some builds from Fextralife would work nice for you. In particular 1) Eternal Warrior 2 ) Ranger ( keep elemental arrows on him for something extra ) . 3 ) Tidalist 4) Stormchaser . If you absolutely want a necro character you can " mix" tidalist with stormchaser to the " Enchanter" build and get a blood mage as the 4th character. This will make your party slightly pushed towards physical damage but that is not a bad thing ( physical doesnt have recistances like magic ) and can be helped out through magic arrows from ranger . A very versatile setup.

[Chaoslink]

If you plan on playing a hard difficulty, I’d recommend against mixing summoning with anything. It doesn’t hybrid too well since you really want to focus your points on just summoning until it caps. Necro is also something that doesn’t hybrid too well as Warfare is what you want to focus to increase the damage the spells do. (Warfare scales physical damage better than any other point investment, this is true for your archer as well)

I’d recommend having two magic damage focused builds though. Geo is probably the most powerful school, and you might want to have it on one mage for the physical armor spells and having a way around air/water resistance. I’d recommend a Hydro/Aero build and Aero/Geo. Just take a little Hydro on both of them to have more Rain cooldowns. You want as many as you can.

[Aerius]

Thanks for the suggestions! I sort of wanted to try out the new classes, but maybe I'll just stick with the standard ones for now.

With Geos, will the oil pools not overwrite the water pools or is it not as annoying as it sounds?

[Chaoslink]

They do, but you’re not going to be using it too often, focus more on the Aero magic and use Geo as a backup or finisher when you don’t need the water anymore.

[Stiven]

Първоначално публикувано от Aerius:

focusing on one or two magic types

Unless you have something very specifil in mind, its useless. For one, you damage with spells scales with your char lvl, and int, so there simple no point to waster skill point for another +5% of dmg increase. The gold standart of 4 casters party on tactical/honor run, is to lvlup skills just enought to be able read the skills books, and all left-overs skill points should go into polymorph, which gives you 1 free stat point, which you can put into int to gain +5% dmg to ALL skill int-based skills. Even more so, since if you want build strong party you need to cross-skill into non-casters skills. For example Adranaline, blink from rogue/fighter skills, hybrid skills like fire-traps which is crafter with pyro+ranger skills books.

Also, also the only skills which doesn't work with each others very well is pyro+hydro, you can combo Aero+Pyro+Geo, just fine. And arguably even Hydro+Pyro has no problem at all, if you want try out to use electric clouds.

[jkaplow21]

The key with fire/geo are instant CC skills. Chloroform, Dominate Mind and Medusa Head are all magic based CCs that require no set up other than no armor. I find that these are almost the most important spells for everyone to have (medusa head less so due to distance).

[Chaoslink]

Първоначално публикувано от jkaplow21:

The key with fire/geo are instant CC skills. Chloroform, Dominate Mind and Medusa Head are all magic based CCs that require no set up other than no armor. I find that these are almost the most important spells for everyone to have (medusa head less so due to distance).

Definitely good options, though I wouldn’t invest summoning just to get dominate mind when charm grenades do the same thing but better. Terror grenades work in place of them as well, especially if you’ve rooted them so they can’t run.

Medusa is probably the best of them due to the AoE. The activatable has great range, the passive helps for melee range when you get up close. Good on those melee builds that find themselves less useful in the later game.

[Leland Gaunt]

earth/ water as undead priest, was sick of that necro stuff, it appears more valuable for a melee char. fane does summon things from elsewhere, beast is beast and that elven savage turned into a shape shifting rogue. playing on hard and i made half of fort joy so far

[Chaoslink]

Първоначално публикувано от Leland Gaunt:

earth/ water as undead priest, was sick of that necro stuff, it appears more valuable for a melee char. fane does summon things from elsewhere, beast is beast and that elven savage turned into a shape shifting rogue. playing on hard and i made half of fort joy so far

Necro is more of a mid-late game build and requires full investment because you need to cap Warfare for it. Its a very standalone build by then though, no melee needed.

[Stiven]

The only cc you need in this game is roots from geo with torturer perk. Standart 4 casters party can cc whole battlefield forever.

[Seven of Nine]

Geo / Aero can do surprisingly well. Looking at that famous Swap + Teleport + Geo ultimate skill. That thing basically is a MIRV, with an awesome shotgun spread. If you gather up your enemies well, 3-4 enemies can be hit by one spell with the combined effect dealing far more damage than most of the Total Health Values out there. Anything that survives the initial explosion will be low enough to not cause too much problem. I think the spell's nme is Pyroclastic Eruption, but be mindful : it is a 3 SP skill. Still with its Shotgun spread AoE damage it works just fine if you gather your enemies up (which is easiest with Aero). I found it to be the best capstone spell out of all the mage spells, with only Ice Breaker from Hydro being comparable.

Frost/Aero/Fire can also work well : your frozen puddle is still up but your enemies have defrosted themselves and are now rampant... well toss a fire spell if they don't die but the ice below them melted, you can still give them a shocking surprise...

With that said I almost always had a Hydrosophist (as a dedicated healer) and that healer was either specced to Aero (for bit more offensive potential) or Geomancer (for ultimate support build). Those two normally don't get along very well with each other though.

Първоначално публикувано от Stiven:

The only cc you need in this game is roots from geo with torturer perk. Standart 4 casters party can cc whole battlefield forever.

With a party of 4 you can make quite many CC heavy parties. Aero can dish out high damage and tons of proper hard CC.
I had a double warfare based tact playthrough (both LW) and I was basically chain CC-ing most of Rivellon.

[LukanGamer]

I mean there is some that make a cc build character, that uses many magics / skills.
2 is perfectly fine and so is 1 so long as you not solo.

[Elrodeus]

I try to keep most of my characters pretty focused. I feel like it usually works to your benefit. I did have an encounter a couple nights ago where two creatures were getting healed by Lohse though, because not only did I have all her points in Hydro but I had a Water based staff as well. So she literally couldn't do anything except buff and heal during the encounter.

Afterwards I went ahead and put like two points in Pyro just in case that ever happens again... but I feel like it's pretty rare to be in that situation. Not to mention it really only lasted like two turns and my other 3 characters were stomping the ♥♥♥♥ out of the guy with all the hydro resistance anyway.

Not to mention when the opposite happens and you get into a fight with someone that has no resistance (or is vulnerable) to the magic type you focus on... man the amount of damage you do is so satisfying.

[Sardaukar]

Its good until you run into someone that heals from said elements.

Then variety becomes a must.