Divinity Original Sin 2 Classes: What Class Should You Play? (2024)

Divinity Original Sin 2 Abilities

Divinity: Original Sin 2 hosts ten unique ability schools from which to draw forth powerful attacks and devastating magic. Some abilities are individually stronger than others, some work best when combined with other schools, and some require excellent foresight and tactical awareness.

1. Aerotheurge

The Aerotheurge school focuses, unsurprisingly, on air magic. As you advance through the twenty-four spells and abilities in this school, you will find yourself throwing a lot of lightning bolts, manipulating your movement speed, and blinding your enemies.

Aerotheurge works extremely well in concert with Hydrosophist, as enemies who have had their magical armor stripped away and are standing in water, or have been given the status effect “wet” are susceptible to being stunned by the deadly bolts of electricity you will be hammering them with.

2. Geomancer

Geomancer, again unsurprisingly, focuses on ground or earth magic. In this school you are going to find a considerable amount of oil and poison based abilities, armor fortification powers, and (to be honest) some of the worst Source skills in any school.

That being said, Geomancer is extremely powerful in combination with the Pyromancer school. The ability to create oil pools and poison clouds which can then be set on fire or detonated in a deadly explosion, is one of the most visually pleasing and effective ways to dispatch your foes.

3. Huntsman

I am going to be completely honest here. While Huntsman is a powerful school, I am not particularly fond of archer based classes. I like my heroes to be firing magic or swinging melee weapons. That being said, Huntsman has some pretty good abilities even if you aren’t peppering your enemies with arrows. Let me just clarify that Huntsman is first and foremost a ranged combatant school. Most of the abilities revolve around dealing damage with, or causing status ailments with, arrows or quarrels.

It is sometimes worth grabbing a point of huntsman to pick up some disengagement abilities like Tactical Retreat, but other than that unless you are an archer this school is not for you. Oh, and one more thing, it has one of the most powerful source abilities in the game against large creatures, so long as long as you are standing right next to it.

4. Hydrosophist

When most people hear water magic I imagine they think about torrential rains, floods, blades of ice, or protective spells. If you thought that too, you are only partially right. Hydrosophist is almost a requirement for the game.

Most of the healing magics available are in this school, along with most of the magical armor fortification and protective spells, are only going to be available to you if you delve into this school. That’s not to say that this particular skill set doesn’t have a bite. You will also be hurling ice, making people wet and susceptible to lightning, and causing them to slip and fall. This school pairs extremely well with Aerotheurge.

5. Necromancer

Normally when I see that a game has Necromantic Magic I am 100% going to play that class. Unfortunately this school is a little bit underwhelming in the whole “evil undead army” department of gameplay that many associate with Necromancers. This school does offer some neat bonuses, like the ability to steal life when attacking, summoning a mosquito swarm, raising a corpse bomb, and even making a giant bone spider.

Unfortunately these abilities are largely overshadowed by the abilities of other schools. Summoner does summoning better, Geomancer/Pyrokinetic does explosions better, and relying on life leeching in melee combat is very risky. This is honestly a school that you should only delve into if you absolutely must be a necromancer, or if you need the relatively important Blood Rain spell. It also has a spell called bone cage which can be very effective in fortifying your defenses as long as there are bodies around.

6. Polymorph

Have you ever wanted to be a shape-shifter? I think most of us have at some point, unfortunately your dreams will not be made today. Polymorph in this game does allow a few parts of your anatomy to change, but you won’t be running around in bear form or singing broadway songs as a weird anthropomorphic nightmare feline.

7. Pyrokinetic

Pyrokinetic is one of the most important schools to put a point or two into, no matter what class you decide to go with. The reason for this is its two buffs, peace of mind, and haste, both of which are pretty vital in a lot of situations. Haste, as its name would imply, provides more AP each round of combat, which means you get to do more things and therefore dish out more damage or crowd control.

Peace of Mind protects and clears things like blindness, madness, enrage, charmed, and terrified. Other than those buffs, Pyro will allow you to hurl around fire like a boss. You will be hammering the enemy with fire lasers, fireballs, fire daggers, fire whips, you know… fire related things. This school pairs extremely well with geomancy.

8. Scoundrel

Rogues are among my favorite Divinity Original Sin 2 classes to play in any setting. Scoundrel offers you the rogue experience in Divinity, but I should caution that a little more care needs to be observed. Scoundrels can dish out a lot of damage really fast, but their damage really relies on proper positioning and careful rationing of AP to ensure they can either hide or withdraw after their attack run.

Scoundrel’s have a habit of getting turned into a fine red mist regularly. That being said, if you can master this school you can cripple your enemies and deal a lot of damage. This school pairs extremely well with warfare and polymorph.

9. Summoning

By far the most overpowered school in the game. If I were to suggest a school to new players looking for the easy button, this would be it. Summoning is not tied to any particular stat, which means you can pair it with literally anything. You can also summon totems that match any element you can target or physical totems if you target the ground or blood.

You will also be able to summon an incarnate, which becomes a ludicrously powerful death machine as soon as you get to level 10 in summoning. I could not recommend this school more for any player.

10. Warfare

Warfare is basically the fighter school of skills. Putting points into this school increases your physical damage, and all of its skills are built around physical damage or physical crowd control. It is a very powerful school, especially when it comes to taking down characters with high magical armor, but low physical armor.

The battle stomp and battering ram skills will be a staple of your crowd control rotation, and, if you use a shield, bouncing shield will allow you to Captain America your enemies to death. This school pairs well with Polymorph.

All Divinity Original Sin 2 Classes

There are fourteen base classes in Divinity: Original Sin 2. That said, there is absolutely nothing preventing you from making a custom class and building your character any way you want it. You are only locked into certain abilities until you leave the first Act and then you are able to change your attributes and abilities at will using a magical mirror.Some of the base Divnity Original Sin 2 classes are better than others, and some offer truly bizarre combinations that I would not personally recommend. I will rank all fourteen according to their general usefulness and then I will provide a few alternatives that I think offer better school combinations and will allow you to make a generally more powerful party.

NOT RECOMMENDED

1. BATTLEMAGE

While it sounds really cool, the Battlemage offers a bizarre mixture of attributes and abilities.With +1 Strength, +1 Intelligence, and +1 Constitution, it makes an attempt to bolster both physical and magical damage, but in Divinity, this rarely works well. In general you want to focus your characters into physical or magical damage in order to destroy that particular type of armor as fast as possible and to apply debuffs to the enemy like knock down, stun, confusion, etc.In terms of abilities, Battlemage will give you +1 Warfare, +1 Aerotheurge, and +1 Persuasion. The civil skills, like persuasion or loremaster, are important, but not the focus of this article. What is important is the mixture of magic and physical abilities. While you will definitely want to add in a few magical schools to your combat capabilities (as a physical combatant) or a few physical schools to your capabilities (as a magic combatant) trying to be a jack-of-all-trades does not really work well as a class focus.The pre-chosen skills are also a little bit weird. Battering Ram is undeniably a great skill, offering some damage and the ability to knock enemies down in a line if their physical armor is depleted. Blinding radiance, is a decent ability, offering an AOE blind if the enemy’s magical armor is depleted. But the really weird choice is Shocking Touch. It does a fair amount of damage but requires you to be standing toe to toe with your opponent. This sort of removes the advantage of most magics in the game, which is the ability to dish out some punishment to your foes before they get to you.Conclusion: Battlemage would work okay on lower difficulty levels where, to be honest, you can kind of play around with different combinations and still do fine. In higher difficulties you need to focus characters on either physical or magical damage. Hybrid characters perform significantly worse than their focused counterparts.

2. CLERIC

To assume the cleric is strictly a healer would be a mistake. I would describe this class more as a battle medic, offering some healing, but also being comfortable in the thick of battle. It does, however, include the most worthless (in my opinion) school, Necromancy.With +1 Strength, +1 Intelligence, and +1 Constitution, the Cleric makes an attempt to be a hybrid character in a game that punishes hybridization. If you are looking for a strong healer, I would commit to intelligence and focus on magic and forego the battle healer archetype the game wants you to try.I have absolutely nothing against the +1 Hydrosophist ability point in this build. It offers the Cleric the ability to take the vital Restoration skill, which will be your go-to heal spell for a good chunk of the game. The +1 Necromancer ability, however, is extremely situational and does not help your healing capabilities all that much. Necromancy allows you to heal on hit in combat, but as you will be splitting your focus between physical and magical damage, this will be situational and not as effective as it would be for focused physical damage characters. The +1 Bartering civil skill is fine, but you can decide on which civil skills are important to you and change it accordingly.The pre-chosen skills for this class are okay at best. Restoration, as mentioned above, is very useful, and will offer you the ability to heal your non-undead companions. Blood sucker is an extraordinarily situational skill for the beginning of the game, where you barely have any abilities to use. It allows an individual to use blood surfaces around them to heal their wounds, but this requires there to be blood surfaces around, which isn’t uncommon, but adds a strategic requirement to an already limited set of skills. Decaying touch can be a pretty useful tool. Along with it’s damage, it also sets Decay on the enemy, which makes healing spells hurt them, as if they were undead. In combination with your own healing magic, this can be deadly.Conclusion: Cleric is an attempt at a hybrid physical and magical character. It would work okay on lower difficulties, but on higher difficulties you are going to want to focus on either intelligence or strength, and not both. This means either your healing or combat prowess will suffer and your character will be less effective overall because of this. If you are looking for a healer that can dish out some damage, I would say lose the necromancy, pick up Aerotheurge, drop the strength, and focus on intelligence.

3. INQUISITOR

The inquisitor is another attempt at a hybrid character that offers a weird combination of attributes, abilities, and skills, that I don’t find to be that intuitive or useful.The attributes of the Inquisitor seem to follow those of other hybrid Divinity Original 2 classes. Mixing intelligence and strength at +1 each, and a +1 constitution to keep you in the fight a little bit longer. The problem with mixing intelligence and strength is that you will always be just average. You won’t be able to do great physical damage, nor will you be able to do great magical damage. This mixed style of combat is actually punished by the game, as some of the harder fights rely heavily on your ability to break either magical or physical defenses to apply debuffs.The abilities of the Inquisitor are actually okay. Warfare and Necromancy can be a decent combination, though Necromancy is actually a pretty weak ability school in general. Life steal can be useful if you build your character around high damage output, relying on Necromantic healing to keep you alive. The inquisitor starts with +1 in both of these schools, as well as +1 Telekinesis, which I find to be a truly entertaining civil ability.The inquisitor base skills are not the best. Battering Ram is pretty useful for damage and knock down. Blood sucker is not particularly useful and you will honestly probably forget all about it rather quickly. You would be much better off taking Battle Stomp. Mosquito swarm can actually do a lot of physical damage, but requires a high intelligence to do so.Conclusion: In the early stages of the game this class can excel in physical damage, but it will quickly become overshadowed by more specialized builds. Hybrid characters have diminishing utility compared to their focused counterparts and you would be better off either making a strength/finesse-based physical character or intelligence-based magical character than one that tries to do both.

4. METAMORPH

The metamorph is a truly bizarre class that has the potential to be good, but the preset stats are just not well thought out in my opinion.In looking at the attributes, I feel the need to point out that mixing strength and finesse is just a bad idea all around. While it is possible to make decent finesse/strength hybrid characters, it requires very careful character building, odd skill combinations, and advanced tactics and positioning. It also requires warfare and scoundrel to pull off effectively. The Metamorph has none of these things and puts +2 into both strength and finesse. Now this may offer some initial adaptability in which weapons you can use, as both finesse and strength based weapons are open to you, it also has the drawback of stopping you from being really good with one or the other. I would seriously consider either going for finesse or strength, but not both. Pick one and dump a couple points into your constitution to stay alive longer.The abilities of the Metamorph are actually pretty decent. +1 to polymorph gives you access to some pretty fun early game skills, and the +1 two-handed weapon skill will give you some additional damage. There are both finesse and strength based two-handed weapons, especially in the early game, but go for one or the other… not both.Two of the three pre-chosen skills are amazing. Chicken Claw has the ability to turn your enemy into a chicken for several turns (assuming their physical armor was depleted), and is one of the funniest and most useful crowd control skills in the game. Tentacle Lash sets atrophy on physical armor depleted enemies and does a lot of damage, making it one of your most commonly used abilities. Bull horns, however, are just okay at best. You can charge enemies and gore them, but I would instead go for chameleon cloak, which can get you out of some really dangerous situations.Conclusion: A really weird hybrid attempt. Pick strength or finesse, not both. Other than that, it is a very fun starting class, though it does require maybe a little more tactical consideration than some of the other Divinity Original Sin 2 classes.

6. Witch

The Witch is another hybrid class with some serious problems, most of which revolve around it being ineffective in battle.The Witch provides +1 finesse and +1 intelligence, splitting the character between two primary damage stats, and therefore splitting the damage potential. The +1 constitution is fine for survivability, but does not solve the problem that splitting between two damage types is not really a good strategy. Either dump the intelligence and go +2 finesse or dump the finesse and go +2 intelligence.Scoundrel is already an ability school that requires some care and attention, and combining it with the underwhelming necromancer ability school is problematic. Scoundrel is focused on high physical damage and debuffs for survival while necromancer is focused on debuffs requiring magical defenses to be depleted. The fact that you start with +1 in each of these abilities means you will be either hoping your teammates can lower the magical defenses of your enemies or that your scoundrel skills will be sufficient.In terms of skills, the Witch has three skills which don’t help it very much. Chloroform is a great scoundrel skill if you can break the magic armor of your enemy, which would be fine if your necromancer skills weren’t strictly physical damage. Mosquito Swarm and Raise Bloated Corpse are decent physical damage abilities, which would be a benefit if the Witch started with backlash or some throwing knife to augment the physical damage.Conclusion: This class is just a mess. It offers no focus between physical or magical attacks and ends up being ineffective at both. Choose almost any other class if you want to have a more powerful combination of abilities.

7Conjurer

Conjurer is the most powerful starting class, but it does something monumentally stupid with its abilities, which I will explain below. This is the summoner class and, as summoning is ruthlessly overpowered, expect to defeat your enemies with relative ease.The attributes for the Conjurer are just fine, +1 strength, and +2 constitution. Summoning does not benefit from any particular attribute, so having extra hit points and carrying capacity works great. Depending on whether you want to focus on magical damage or physical damage, you could drop the strength for intelligence, but to be fair, most of your combat capability is going to come from your totems and incarnate.The abilities for the Conjurer are mildly annoying to say the least. Leadership can be okay, but it should not be something you take at the beginning of the game under any circ*mstances. Quite simply I would recommend you edit out the leadership and place two points into summoning. Your summons are going to carry you through most of the game, and you will want to get to level 10 summoning as fast as possible. Don’t waste an attribute point on leadership in the early stages of the game. The +1 Loremaster skill is decent enough. If you prefer a different civil skill changing it isn’t a big deal.The pre-chosen skills for Conjurer are almost correct. Conjure Incarnate and Elemental Totem will be your most commonly used skills, and are basically the bread and butter of your class. The Dimensional Bolt, however, is practically worthless. Swap it out for Farsight Infusion and thank me later.Conclusion: Conjurer is the best starting class without question. I would make a few tweaks to improve its early game capabilities, but otherwise you could do a lot worse for a pre-made character.