Skills in Divinity: Original Sin 2 are actions or spells that are used by characters to cause a particular effect. Skills remain largely unchanged from the first game, with key differences to account for the changes implemented to the combat system, notably the introduction of Source Points.
Learning Skills in DOS2
In Divinity: Original Sin 2, skills are primarily learned by reading Skill Books, either purchased (or stolen) from vendors or found as loot throughout the game. Crafting books is now also possible, by combining empty skill books with skill scrolls or combining two books to create entirely new skills.
Characters can learn skills as soon as at least one point is invested in that school's corresponding Combat Ability, with the caveat that the number of usable skills on the field is dictated by the characters' Memory stat. Stronger skills need additional levels in their required Combat Abilities, and crafted skills need points in both of their component schools' Abilities. Note that bonus Ability points from buffs and equipment count, but skills will be rendered unusable should these bonuses no longer apply and fail to meet the requirements. Skills are no longer tiered by difficulty; the more powerful they are the more Memory slots they occupy.
Skills can also be found in equipment, some of which are unobtainable elsewhere. Elves, with their exclusive Corpse Eater ability, can also acquire skills by reliving the memories of specific corpses. Pet summoning skills are rewards for fulfilling that pet's side quest, one that is exclusive to the Red Prince.
Source Points
Aside from higher Ability levels and more Memory slots, the more impressive Skills found in Rivellon demand "Source" — spiritual power made manifest. Source is rare and limited — obtained by consuming souls or stepping in seldom seen pools of it — thus skills that are fueled by Source points can only be cast a finite number of times. Characters can only hold a restricted amount of Source points, which increase to a maximum of three points by completing story objectives. Books that house source skills are identifiable by the teal glow surrounding their icons.
Skill Crafting
In addition to converting Skill Scrolls into permanent Skill Books, Divinity: Original Sin 2 provides the means of creating entirely new skills. Crafting a new skill is done by combining a Skill Book from one of the elemental schools (Aerotheurge, Geomancer, Hydrosophist, and Pyrokinetic) with one from a non-elemental school; for instance, combining a Hydrosophist book and a Necromancer book will yield the skill "Blood Rain". More powerful versions are craftable if source skills are used as components in the process; the example above will result in the more potent "Blood Storm" in this case. Crafted skills are identified by their unique "sparks and anvil" cover. Please see Crafted Skills for details.
| School | Scales with | Bonus from |
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Level | Intelligence |
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Level | Intelligence |
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Weapon (Ranged) |
Finesse |
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Level | Intelligence |
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Level | Intelligence |
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Level | Strength |
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Level | Intelligence |
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Weapon (Dagger) |
Finesse |
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Level | Summoning ability |
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Weapon (Melee) |
Str/Fin/Int |
Differences to Divinity Original Sin, Enhanced Edition
In contrast to the first Divinity: Original Sin, the purpose of Skill Abilities is not to determine how many of the corresponding school's spells you can learn and how many Action Points it costs to use them. Instead, these Abilities provide a variety of innate bonuses for the character as a whole. For example, the Hydrosophist ability provides bonuses to all forms of healing, magic armour restoration, and water damage you cause; this bonus is not exclusive to Hydrosophist spells and will apply to skills from other schools as well.
Skills do not have recommended Attribute requirements that determine their efficiency. Rather, skill effectiveness is mostly based on either the characters' levels or the basic attack damage from their equipped weapons, receiving bonuses from the appropriate Attribute.
Skill Damage
Three spell schools comprise mostly of weapon skills, and derive their damage and bonus Attribute from their associated weapons. Huntsman and Scoundrel scale with Finesse, as they use ranged weapons and daggers, respectively; Warfare, which calls for melee weapons and shields, can scale with Finesse (daggers and spears), Intelligence (staves), or Strength. All other skill trees scale with the character's level and Intelligence (or Strength in Polymorph's case). Restoration and summon skills grow with Skill Abilities.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 categorizes damage and status effects as either physical or magical. Skills eschew traditional chance-based activation and deal guaranteed effects if the targets' physical or magical armour is diminished to zero; all negative effects are resisted and fail to trigger if at least one point of armour persists. Elemental damage (fire, water, air, earth, and poison) exclusively deal damage against Magic Armour. Piercing damage ignores both types of armour, wounding Vitality directly.
Damage Comparison
The following Image contains a general comparison of the damage of each skill of all schools around level 20.
Click to view in fullscreen.
Categories
All eight of the skill schools from the previous game return with new bells and whistles. Divinity: Original Sin 2 introduces two new schools, Polymorph and Summoning, with another one that is central to the game's story that becomes available as players progress. Special is the catch-all category for skills that do not belong elsewhere. Crafted skills fall under only one school despite their compound nature.
Divinity Original Sin 2 Skills
Sourcery
Special
Blinding Radiance
Vacuum Aura
AnonymousI really (wanted to) like pyro school of magic. Made me my personal Jaffa Build (Stargate fans get it). Str/Int mixed armor, fire staff. Everything was going good until Arx, the fire resistance of enemies there dismantled my build. I complimented with Geo, but meh (pyroclastic though, very strong). Not saying it not viable, Im just noticing the major increase in fire resistant enemies later on which hurt my damage, and my feelings towards pyro. To me, as far as magic goes: Necro, Hydro, Geo[T], Air[T], Pyro (best>worst). [T] Tied/interchangeable
Necro= havent heard? must be living under a rock
Hydro= Healing, good damage, crowd control, lot of status removal skills. Only bad side, without elemental affinity Hydro skills can be expensive. Rain & E.Affinity highly recommended
Geo= basically two schools in one (poison & earth), good damge, some CC (like better on undead run). (Poison) First or second runner up as the most resisted element Vs fire.
Air= Nice damage, lot of utility, few enemies resist air, stun lock, Best used if no ally is near ground zero or they too will get stunned if not careful.
Pyro= Nice damage, great for battlemage types, coolest looking (who doesn't like flames), fire gets out of hand quick but can be blessed for arena of healing. First or second runner up as the most resisted element Vs poison.
Seems Larian gift bag called Pet Power is needed for the Blood, Oil and their Cursed skill book variants to be crafted.
4 Summoner Skill books are missing on this page (possibly from Larian Crafter Kit gift bag or some patch in 2019 or 2020): Blood Infusion (summoner book + necro book), Cursed Blood Infusion (source summoner book + necro book OR summoner book + source necro book), Oil Infusion (summoner book + geo book + oil barrel) and Cursed Oil Infusion (summoner source book + geo book + oil barrel OR summoner book + source geo book + oil barrel OR source summoner + source geo + oil barrel). KEEP IN MIND NOT ALL SKILLBOOKS ARE VALID FOR THESE RECIPES! For example i could not make any of these using the Inner Demon source summoner book. Try with several different books from the adequate spell schools - it will work.
- Anonymous
Really good page, if it wasn't for the forced section on the left auto-playing a stream on each load and pushing the entire useful section so much to the right, the tooltips of the rightmost skills are not visible! Talk about a way to use ads to ruin the purpose of the page :/ At least fix the positioning...
- Anonymous
A new summoner skill was added in a Nov. 2019 patch, blood infusion. My summoner has it right now and I don't remember where I got it (found a skill book maybe?). It takes Necro 1 and Summoner 1 and is a summoner skill. I'd add it here and/or make a new page but I don't have the rights as a guest.
- Anonymous
Tooltips / Mouseovers have been reworked to play better with people scrolling through quickly. Please refresh your cache!
- Anonymous
As of the latest patch, or has been working for awhile, you can kill people with Electric Fence and they won't automatically aggro on you and with a high enough persuasion skill you can keep doing it and never get caught
- Anonymous
"thus skills that are fueled by Source points can only be cast a finite number of times"
This is technically not true since you can refill source at a location with a source fountain. e.g. The one in Meistr Siva's basement.
- Anonymous
WIki is wrong most of the starter warfare you can use staff or wand and your skills will scale i Suggest war necro or war geo if your going full int this game is much more flexable than i thought PLZ look into this and get some answears everyone
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
About that comparison image... how on earth did you assign 30 skill points into Scoundrel example on a level 20 character? You have 21 at that point.
To anyone wondering if that damage isn't too high: it is. It's essentialy doubled because of the 10 warfare points.
- Anonymous
guess not, whyever thats of interest since warfare, scoundrel and finesse outnumber that highground bonus on every occassion
- Anonymous
In the damage comparison, is the damage from hunter with highground?
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Thunderstorm seems to be missing from the (aero) damage comparison
- Anonymous
You should remove "infectious flame" from the list. There's no such spell in the game. I believe it's just the name for a spell similar to Epidemic of Fire from DOS:EE that was probably used for Epidemic of Fire earlier in the game's development.
- Anonymous
Missing a summing spell "Control Voidwoken", acquired from Mercy is Power.
- Anonymous
It missing a special ability something like sound blast. You gain it by consuming a deafening yarrow flower like plant from the garden of paladin headmaster.
- Anonymous
The skill craft system really confuses me. It says that to get an advanced combined skill you need to use source skill books, but I just got Acid spray from combining Impalement and Decaying Touch. Wtf?
- Anonymous
Whoever changed the skills menu *****ed up, it was easier to read before. People aren't stupid, now it looks like a messy layer of text. Plus you can't right click to open on new tab anymore, which the old skill menu provided. Now you have to click on the skill, open a new window and go all the way to the skills page to compare. Please change it back.
- Anonymous
Some abilities scale to their respective level, for example the Geomancer skill Fortify scales with the Geomancer level. At level 3 Geomancer the skill Fortify gives 38 Physical Armour and at 10 it gives 50, at 20 it gives 66. I assume a lot of abilities that don't scale with attributes scale the same way so I think whoever is in charge of editing the wiki should maybe put that info somewhere or add it to the [scale] box.
- Anonymous
Missing Annihilate skill, from staff weapon "And stay down".
https://vgy.me/KlhhTy.png
https://vgy.me/2reQvR.png
- Anonymous
There are additional skills missing:
Geomancer:
Living Wall - 1 Mem - 2 AP - Req Geo 3 - Vines sprout from the ground to block the path in target area, emitting poison clouds around them. (Seen on Almira in Northeast Reaper's Coast at player lv. 16)
Siphon Poison - 1 Mem - 1 AP - Req Geo 3 - Remove poison surfaces and clouds. Gain poison bonus damage to weapon attacks and weapon-based skills (dependent on size of poison area cleared). (Seen on Almira in Northeast Reaper's Coast at player lv. 16)
Hydrosophist:
Ice Breaker - 1 Mem - 1 AP - Req Hyd 3 - Sets off a chain reaction that causes ice areas to explode into water puddles, dealing water damage and setting chilled. (Seen on Almira in Northeast Reaper's Coast at player lv 16)
- Anonymous
Does it say anywhere what a point in the skill gives for a bonus? Also in game Pyro and Aero both say incease damage of Fire/Air spells but under the tooltip for Pyro it just says increase damage by 5% while Aero specifies Air spells. Has anyone tested Pyro to see if it's a flat 5% increase or just a tooltip oversight?
It's worth noting that the Warfare and Polymorph (not tentacle lash, but at least the bull charge) skills seem to scale some of their damage stats based on the primary attribute of the weapon you're wielding. So it should be possible to build a Dex/Warfare build or effectively dip into Poly (or even warfare) while wielding a staff - though the warfare/poly skills will still check vs physical armor.
Having fun with Pyro/Warefare and some staff-wielding. There's probably more effective builds you could run as well.
- Anonymous
WHAT??? Why Blood Infusion requires Summoning AND Necromancy? Can we combine non-elemental skills?
- Anonymous
Polymorph is the most useful amongst ALL classes and playstyles. Just Spread Your Wings and Apotheosis makes this skilltree the strongest. Sly is crazy mobility and ignore Attacks of opportuniy and Apotheosis makes source powers cost nothing but AP. Seems to me the most broken skill tree.
- Anonymous
Why are there no some skills that were there before release like Summon Plant Monster?
- Anonymous
please update skill level requirements for each spell please
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Time Warp should be under special shouldn't it? Its only available to custom characters
- Anonymous
Can we change Necromancer to blood mage or at least put in some actual necromancer abilities?
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Thanks for this! Still missing the source consuming skills, like overpower for warfare, infectous flame for pyromancy, and so on.
I think people underestimate the power of clear mind, especially if a party member has glass canon. It’s up there with fortify and arm armour of frost in my opinion.
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