16 réponses à ce sujet

[Mike3207]

Depends. Is SH Spirit Healer or Shapeshifter? Either way, IMO Arcane Warrior/Shapeshifter is the best.

[Elhanan]

My preference was Arcane Warrior/ Spirit healer, though the AW/ BM was also effective. I used a staff in the main slot, with S&S in the secondary slot for Regeneration and armor.

[Blazomancer]

For folks who need extra protection, melee, either AW-SH or AW-SS; for raw power, AW-BM Caster.

Spellcasting without melee weapons or fangs and claws is my favorite way of doing it.

[Hydwn]

The most common answer from the peanut gallery is always Arcane Warrior plus Spirit Healer for healing (replacing Wynne or even Alistair), and Arcane-Warrior plus Blood Mage for nuking. 

 

The truth is, you can make anything work if you spec it right.  I really wanted to go Arcane Warrior/Shapeshifter for an Elven mage, for roleplay reasons.  Everyone told me that Shapeshifter is completely useless, and I should avoid it at all costs.

 

I made it work on hard mode - I never play nightmare - and found it actually had some decent strengths.  You're never going to be DPS on Shapeshifter, but with Arcane Warrior armour, a bear is a nice mega-tank that can outclass Alistair.  And the upgraded swarm is the best way to deal with archers, bar none.  No arrows can hit it, it's immune to them.  

 

It's not immune to spells, but if your mana clash is on cooldown and you can get close to a mage, you can continuously interrupt them.   It can also do quite nicely against melee.  The continuous regen is quite nice.

 

I had a lot of fun with the swarm, and in the end that's what a game should be about

 

The point of this is, I think it's best to go with roleplaying, and find a way to make it work

[rayzorium]

If you have no problem with the lore stigma, I think Blood Mage is easily the most robust specialization. Blood Wound is borderline broken, and I hate potions - they just feel cheap to me, and it's nice playing a class that can more easily do without them. I have no real preference for the second specialization; I actually like the regular Mage spells so much that I often don't even have skill points to spare.

 

And personally, I would never go melee AW. The appeal, I guess, is that with all the massive armor and sustains, you're invincible. But you lose much of your casting ability, and your damage output is atrocious. Even with all the passives in the world, you're still auto-attacking with no weapon skills. I'm not saying it's bad overall, but the damage output is unequivocally bad.

[DarthGizka]

Straight caster (CC/nuker) for me; most powerful, most interesting to play, but a bit of a glass cannon when fighting hard melees who roll lucky on spell resistance (think dragons, or bossy Piotin with his elite entourage).

 

Specialisations don't matter much. Arcane Warrior can be nice for the ability to wear fire-resistant work clothes (Wade's) for avenging Ser Otto, or the Corruption helmet at Archie's do. Blood Wound can be extremely useful for getting a perfect score - no friendlies lost, all kills bagged - in situations where you have to bail out groups of friendlies, e.g. Civil War or Sgt. Kyle. It is not indispensable but very, very nice.

 

For survivability and versatility I'd go Arcane Warrior (passive) and Shapeshifter. However, during the first twenty levels or so it is difficult to spare any spell points to invest into Shapeshifter...

 

And personally, I would never go melee AW. The appeal, I guess, is that with all the massive armor and sustains, you're invincible. But you lose much of your casting ability, and your damage output is atrocious. Even with all the passives in the world, you're still auto-attacking with no weapon skills. I'm not saying it's bad overall, but the damage output is unequivocally bad.

 

An Arcane Warrior on auto attack can have much higher sustained DPS against any single target than a caster, especially if you factor in the effect of spell resistance (e.g. hexes not sticking, combos failing and so on). I've played only caster mages for most of this year and I know...

[rayzorium]

I can definitely see where you're coming from. It feels devastating to have something with a cooldown get resisted. Similarly, it's easy to not care when AWs miss because they're basically invincible and you're in no hurry. But you really don't get much in the way of resists except against bosses, and melee misses a lot more against them too - I don't think it's enough for melee AWs to pull ahead.

 

If you approach it experimentally and time boss kills, however, it becomes clear that AW melee damage is really, really bad - among the worst in the game - and the proof is recorded all over Youtube. I looked around for mage Loghain duels on Nightmare as it is a forced 1v1 fight, and here were the first few I found:

 

Caster:

 

https://www.youtube....1pNzLk-_p8#t=16 - 30 secs

https://www.youtube....YxhgmH0cU#t=237 - 22 secs

 

Melee:

 

https://www.youtube....z5yJUXEm0g#t=11 - 1 min

https://www.youtube....5wmeN-qc8#t=381 - 1 min 10 secs

 

No resists, but that's normal for a lieutenant rank enemy. And a few here and there wouldn't have doubled or tripled the kill time.

[Mike3207]

I'll be the first to admit a shapeshifter is one of those slowbuilding mage types. You really need to pick up the attack boost at Level 14 before your mage can make up for the misses you get with using a regular weapon for critical chance/damage. It's really noticeable if you go with Shale for the crit chance boost over a healer like Wynne for the Heroic chain.I'm not a min/maxer, so I have no issues as far as finding the necessary spell points at level 20 or any level long before that.

 

On the claim that AW doesn't do much damage-how much are you putting in magic and spellpower? You get 1 point of damage for each point of spellpower, so all I can think is the person there is not building your magic score properly.

[rayzorium]

1 point of spell power is equal to 1 point of strength, which is closer to half a point of damage. One also has to consider how low an AW's attack score is, which translates into a lot of misses. If you put points into dex to compensate, that's fewer points you can spend on mag. There's just no easy way around it.

 

Note that I actually linked two separate people playing AWs that ended up with similar times. It's possible that both of them really messed up their builds, but the more reasonable explanation is that AWs just don't do a lot of melee damage. If you can find a Nightmare recording with a notably better kill time, I'll happily eat my words. I just don't think there's much more damage to be squeezed out, though. 

[Dabrikishaw]

Spirit Healer/Blood Mage for pure casting. Arcane Warrior/Shapshifter for melee.

[Gtdef]

The most powerful caster build is Blood mage with 1 point in AW (without actually activating the sustain). Basically caster with wade's superior items. BM and SH counter each other, no synergy. The passive bonus of picking SH is negligible.

[Kierro Ren]

I'd rather jump on here asking, than make a new thread. But. Tho BM is supposedly great DSP. What if someone, like moi, doesn't want to be a BM caster? In other RPGs like "Skyrim", I was a Battle Mage, a mage that has armor, a sword in one hand a spell in another. AW to just didn't feel the same, so I'd rather stay in staff an robes. Reaper's Vestmet, seems to be the best I've seen, plus styles looks awsome.

 

But yeah, what's better if I want to be a caster, but not a BM? (Yes I got a stigma, except for a BMHawke.)

[Dabrikishaw]

Spirit Healer would be the only one left to recommend.

[Ferretinabun]

Remember you don't HAVE to pick any specs at all. There are plenty of vanilla spells to load up on.

[Mike3207]

You do get the specialization passives for picking specializations. Whether you think that's worth giving up the spell points-that's up to you.

[luna1124]

Arcane Warrior/Spirit healer with dual or two handed weapon. I am going to try arcane warrior/blood mage this time around.