Polymorph build help

[zmanbuilder]

I think spears are nice and so is heavy armor, my plan for the build is to put most of my points into finesse and just enough strength to use heavy armor. As for abilities, i wanted to focus mainly warfare, enough polymorph for all if its skills and a couple points in scoundrel to take advantage of my high finesse, for like Chloroform and Gag Order.

Is this a good build? Its mostly based off the Polymorph preset.

[Arroba]

dont worry , you can change the points and class in the mirror of the ship lady venganza to part act 2 . Dont worry for take and one o other skills and points in the profile .

[failsafe]

Actually best way to test builds seems to be just gathering every valuable piece of equipment (in certain range of levels and power) - if necessary storing it on the ship and then just changing skills, perks together with equipment depending on needs. Books with certain skills come in dozens during the game, so in many cases there is no need to buy those... though if you really want to do a certain build, you may need to hunt for certain books.

You play on tactician or do a solo play?

[Spawnling]

Problems I see are:
All offensive scoundrel skills need a dagger, except for Chloroform.
Except for Bull Horns all Poly skills scale with Str

The upside I see is that you can change to dual daggers and learn some scoundrel skills if you ever feel unhappy with spears.

[Chaoslink]

The trick to spears is abusing the melee range you get. Ever since the nerf to Spider Legs, the default root is now the Worm Tremor + Torturer combo. You want a root so you can engage melee enemies without being in their range. You want access to that. Though I’d still recommend dumping the strength and just using Finesse armor. Since you should be outside the melee range of your enemy, physical armor shouldn’t be as important, so the more balanced armor values of Finesse armor should prove better. Plus you can get Heart of Steel and Fortify to help your physical armor if necessary.

[Spawnling]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Ever since the nerf to Spider Legs

Out of curiosity. what was the nerf?
(You know I only know the DE version and bought the game relatively late ^^)

ps:
I created a strength poly supporter in a game with a friend of mine and chose as core abilities: medusa head, spider legs, worm tremor + torturer, teleport, nether swap, adrenaline, terrain transmutation.
This allows me to hold 3+ enemies in place for up to 7 turns and terrain transmutation is used to remove burning ground before the spider web cast.

After writing this I'd also recommend Geo 2 Worm Tremor + Torturer combo (and Fortify, Mend Metal)

[dan.w]

One of the best things about spears is the absolutely massive range you get on Whirlwind in the warfare tree. I'd also dip into the pyro tree and do master of sparks shenanigans there. Whirlwind & sparks will do a ton of damage when enemies cluster.

[Chaoslink]

Spider Legs used to offer the web ability for 1 AP and it would be able to be cast every turn. Now, I believe the cast is a higher AP cost and the cooldown is long enough that you only get it once per cast of the main spell itself. You’ll have to cast Spider Legs a second time to get a second Web spell.

It doesn’t make much sense to me since the total AP cost compared to Worm Tremor is the same, but webs are able to burn, removing them entirely and the burning status effect removes the root. Worm Tremor is clearly the better option by comparison for an armor ignoring root effect, yet Spider Legs was needed and Worm Tremor buffed to take its place.

For additional reference, the old Torturer talent only made the damage over time status effects, bleed, poison and burning, last one additional turn. It didn’t have any effect to make those status effects ignore armor.

So… they just made Worm Tremor overpowered and nerfed a weaker version of it to the point of irrelevance. There’s not much reason to use Spider Legs anymore.

[zmanbuilder]

it seems Polymorph has only 2 skills that scale with strength, and the one is mostly just for stripping, so can i use Flay Skin on a finesse build?

As for the Scoundrel skills i want, they are Chloroform, Cloak and Dagger, Adrenaline, and Gag Order.

my plan was to get Polymorph to 5, Scoundrel to 2, then max out Warfare and two handed.

[Spawnling]

Poly has Tentacle Lash (Str, Lvl, Warfare), Medusa Head (Str, Lvl) and Flay Skin (Str, Lvl)

According to the wiki Gag Order [divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com] requires a Dagger to use

Poly 5 sounds always good with Apotheosis, Adrenalin, Skin Graft, Adrenalin combo

[zmanbuilder]

As i suspected then, it is better to use a two handed sword instead of a spear and just focus strength, i can skip Chloroform and Cloak and Dagger and just pick up Adrenaline from Scoundrel.

[Spawnling]

Cloak and Dagger is always good to pick up.
1) you can get it by level 4 vs lvl 9 with Pheonix Dive
2) Two movement abilities are minimum for melee characters. If you get teleported during a fight after your first jump you're out of the combat for a few rounds
3) Scoundrel passively increases movement speed.

Now Two handed vs Spear was talked about by Chaoslink above.
Spear has the upside of having the highest attack range, allowing you to immobilize enemies with Worm Tremor (+ Torturer to ignore magic armor) and attack them for 3 rounds without being hit back.
Two handed str weapons have the upside of str scaling with poly.
And that's one of the reasons why the metamorph is a silly archetype ^^.

[zmanbuilder]

This help has given me a lot to think about, thank you all, for all the help.

[Spawnling]

To be fair a lot of the starting classes are silly.
- A Rogue without Thievery
- The Witch starts with a talent that can remove the blood beneath her feet, while necro spells are on the more expensive side, because the of elemental affinity synergy
- Fighter doubles down as tank with shield and fortify while the Knight has no way to restore physical armor
- Enchanter (Hydro/Aero) without elemental affinity
- Inquisitor starts with dual wands (magic damage), I think, but has physical damage spells
- And finally Metamorph starting with a spear, while poly scales with str, invis is more useful for dual daggers and the elemental skins are nice for combat mages that stand in their own spell's AoE

[Chaoslink]

To be fair, while things like Tentacle Lash scale with strength, they're still very viable attacks on characters using Finesse. Tentacle Lash hits like a truck with strength behind it, but it still deals pretty high damage baseline and wills till scale with Warfare to some degree. If you use it with a bit more focus on the disarm effect it has, its still a very good ability to have, even without strength. Medusa Head scales with strength, but the damage is pretty mediocre either way. You don't cast Medusa Head for its damage, you cast it for the CC, so I'd argue the strength aspect here doesn't matter at all. Flay Skin is similar. The damage isn't the focus, the effect is. As long as you're dealing the damage with other things, then using it for the effect, it'll still be a useful spell to have.

I wouldn't drop the Poly and spear idea just because of some mismatched scaling. I've actually done the build myself and it worked just fine.

[Tegridy Farms]

Originally posted by Spawnling:

To be fair a lot of the starting classes are silly.
- A Rogue without Thievery
- The Witch starts with a talent that can remove the blood beneath her feet, while necro spells are on the more expensive side, because the of elemental affinity synergy
- Fighter doubles down as tank with shield and fortify while the Knight has no way to restore physical armor
- Enchanter (Hydro/Aero) without elemental affinity
- Inquisitor starts with dual wands (magic damage), I think, but has physical damage spells
- And finally Metamorph starting with a spear, while poly scales with str, invis is more useful for dual daggers and the elemental skins are nice for combat mages that stand in their own spell's AoE

Damn that's crazy. I never noticed how bad the starting classes are because i always make custom characters.