What stats am I supposed to be upgrading as a battlemage?

[KFCBUCKETS9000]

I picked this class because it's different than what I usually play in rpg's.

[Nibbie]

Classes are just preset starting builds, nothing about them is fixed, even the starting skills of them can be changed. You can use any weapon or spell with any character as long as you meet the prerequisites.

With that out of the way, battlemage is a combination of physical and magic damage, right? It is generally a bad idea to split a character between two types of damage, especially if you aren't using the Lone Wolf trait, you simply don't have enough points to make them both good. You can make it work of course, especially on lower difficulties, it just isn't very good compared to other builds. You'd probably want to decide on either physical (warfare/strength) or magic (whatever magic schools/intelligence) to focus on, using the rest of your party to balance the two types of damage.

If you really want to go battlemage, I think I read that you can use a staff to do physical skills or something. Never messed with it myself so I don't know the details, but it could be worth looking into.

[Pyromus]

I'll clarify some stuff on the post above me. The battlemage is not a good class if you stick to the preset version of what a battlemage is. The clarified part is that splitting damage is fine, but the battlemage suffers because it splits attribute points. It uses skills that scale off of strength, and skills that scale off of intelligence. This means either one is good while the other is bottom tier damage or they are both just low enough to get you killed.

If you want to play a "battlemage" then you either stick with melee weapons for damage and use support spells like teleport, haste, armor of frost, etc, OR you throw on a staff and go full intelligence and smack them around with your magic stick. But playing with strength weapons and using damage dealing spells will only cause you frustration.

Quick end note that this mostly applies to classic and above. Story and Explorer modes can be beaten with basically any nonsense thrown together, so if you are on these difficulties, don't worry about it, just put points into whatever you want to smack people with at the time.

[Chaoslink]

As mentioned above, battlemage is by default something to avoid. Though there are two iterations.

If you want the physical focused one, invest into strength and focus on the melee aspect. You’ll want Warfare as high as possible but also invest into Pyro to get Sparking Swings. You’ll need to craft that spell using any Pyro and any Warfare skillbook. This will cause all melee strikes to send fire damage sparks at nearby enemies. Take Torturer and use the Ignition spell to light enemies on fire for damage over time and a slightly lower fire resistance. Aside from that, use dual wielding to get more hits per attack (thus more sparks) and cleaving ones if you can find them. You can also dip Geo and Scoundrel for Venom Coating for poison damage too.

If you want to go the caster version, just stack INT and use a staff. Take a point or two in Warfare for the melee skills but otherwise you’re just a caster. You can use the above mentioned Sparking for your weapon, but chances are you’ll just default to being a caster.

If you’re the strength version, just invest enough in the magic skills to learn spells, don’t worry about stacking them for extra damage. For the magic version, pick two magic skills, cap one and use the other at just 2 for utility and synergy with the other. Don’t stack both until you’ve capped the first.

[Starving Virtues]

I found that Sadist (talent) and Inferno (name? staff that applies Flaming Crescendo) really add the necessary power to Battlemage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DivinityOriginalSin/comments/9xx0jr/so_we_found_that_staff_that_sets_flaming/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DivinityOriginalSin/comments/9kx7fi/flaming_crescendo_ill_get_you_for_this/

I mean there tons of ways to play Pyro, from traditional caster, to "heal via fire" resistance stacking, to Battlemage. You can't go wrong with Pyro because its so damn versatile and strong with just a little creativity and willingness to step outside the mold.

Or you can just shoot two epidemic of fires and set 10 fire traps and blow the hell out of everything. That works too.