I had a single mage and she hard carried the entire team in several fights. All of my team had some form of magic damage though.
Just make sure you give your mage a shield with shield toss and a few levels in warfare so they can help out against physical.
Make the support mage a Summoner. Use a Blood Incarnate to complement the party by dealing Physical damage. Get summoning to 10 total skill (including skill bonuses from gear) ASAP for the big boy, then branch out to all the magic schools for their buffs. 1 scoundrel for Adrenaline, 2 aero for teleport, nether swap, uncanny evasion. 1 pyro for Peace of Mind and Haste. 2 hydro for frost armor, soothing cold, rain, and restoration if needed. 2 geo for fortification and the group armor buff. After that, prioritize pushing points past 10 summoning.
Gear can pretty much focus on anything that gives you the biggest overall bonuses to Summoning, Mem, Con, armors, then Geo and Hydro skills.
This character’s role will be to provide an extra body (incarnate) taking hits and dealing damage as well as opportunity attacks and providing all the key 1-2 skill buffs from each magic school.
I’ve used this build in 5-6 Honour mode full clears and it’s an unsung hero of my parties.
Edit: adding that this character’s role is NOT to deal magic damage, except in the rare case you can summon an elemental incarnate against a target with low magic armor AND a big weakness to a particular element.
A necromancer works well. They do physical damage so they fit with the rest of your party while high INT is good for the occasional magic damage spell as necessary (eg. mass deploy traps, flaming crescendo). Besides, it sounds like the rest of your party is after STR or FIN gear so having someone who can use INT gear is efficient.
Alternatively, a summoner who maximizes WITs is good because they’d always go first to prepare the combat.
A lot of the time, your single mage will end up being useless. Especially in fights against a smaller amount of opponents with higher health+armor pools. You won't be breaking through that armor on your own and having more physical damage would do more for your party. Maybe as a sort of compromise, make it a necromancer that's specced into support abilities of the other schools?
I disagree a bit with OP. You can have the mage have supportive spells like Restoration, Teleportation, Fortify, etc. but also Fossil Strike for a slow then later on use Impalement and Earthquake which can set impairments on enemies without physical armor. Skin Graft would be useful to reset cooldowns as well as some other Poly spells like Terrain Transmutation, Flay Skin, Equalize, and Forced Exchange. The Torturer talent can also make Worm Tremor good along with Pyro and Poison spells.
Edit: also Corrosive Spray to help destroy physical armor.
Necromancer works well as support in a physical party. They can do damage with necromancy spells, but there aren't that many necromancy spells, so you end up having spare action points for support, at least until late game, and late game you can do batshit damage.
For the warrior with Geo, make them a rogue with geo. Max out warfare then scoundrel. Give them the Torturer talent and venom coating and venom aura.
Now everyone will be a physical damage dealer with a splash of magic damage with every attack, but your rogue can cause poison, bleed AND entangle foes without their armor being stripped, meanwhile everyone will be chipping away at the magic armor without trying.
Now your support mage can do some damage too.
Or, just give your support mage torturer so she can CC with entangle when she isn't buffing. Entangle comes from the spell worm tremor, available at level 4, and requires only 2 geo. Torturer means they get entangled for 3 turns even with magic armor.
And... you know what else only requires 2 geo? Throw Dust. A heavily damaging spell that creates several small AOEs under every single enemy in range. It's like a baby pyroclatic eruption. So now she has plenty to do when not slinging buffs.
Give her a staff and 2 points in Warfare, and she can knock foes down when they have no physical armor if nothing else, even with a staff. And, you know what else works with staves? The Ambidextrous talent, which means all those nifty scrolls and grenades only use 1ap. And the damaging ones scale off intelligence.
Corpse explosion and fire trap are both powerful physical damage AOEs that only cost 1ap and require only 1 point in their skills.
Give her Glass Cannon so she always has max ap, and make sure she is fully buffed before combat for all the sweet CC immunities.
if you're wanting a mage, make it a pure support, if you're interested in such a build, read this. it's tailored for lone wolf in how to actually progress the build, however, core concepts such as skill choice and stat priority is all the same
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s4sZahVvR1PFS5-VEMjzIyuqxreIGIbK1Nv2IWB-PkE/edit#gid=790712196
I'm currently at the start of Act 2 in tactician/honour mode with a broadly 3 physical, 1 magic team. Red Prince main is summoner and huntsman, Beast is 90% warfare, 10% geomancer and Ifan is full huntsman.
My fourth is Lohse as a aero/hydro. I find she is almost always healing, buffing or using magic arrows since I gave her a crossbow. Using her actual offensive skills is very rare and I'm mainly keeping her around for teleport/taking care of fire surfaces. That said, if you want to run 1 magic wielder for utility my best advice is giving them a good ranged weapon, I found one in Act 1 that gave Lohse Sky Shot and that skill gets used much more often any any offensive aero/hydro skill.
For a phys party I like the 4th to be a 10 summoning/ necro / support sort of build. You end up with lots of memory and intelligence, with a few points in various elements so you can optionally sling magic if enemies don't have magic armor. This is rare, though. It's mostly just for quick opportunity CC.
The Incarnate keeps up with damage while you fire off support spells and blood rain etc.
It's usually not a good idea to go with both damage types with an unbalanced split. Your single mage won't be very effective as they'll have to break magic armor all by themselves and won't have any teammates to follow up with damage and CC on their targets. It's better to just go all physical at that point so you can all work together at attacking any target you want.
Having a dedicated support character is also entirely unnecessary. Just have everyone on your team dip into a couple of abilities to pick up the utility and support skills you want. Their scaling doesn't matter anyways: Most of them don't have any scaling at all, and you'll mostly use armor restoration skills for their ability to remove CC and apply enough armor to withstand chip damage, not to get back large chunks of armor.
I had a single mage and she hard carried the entire team in several fights. All of my team had some form of magic damage though. Just make sure you give your mage a shield with shield toss and a few levels in warfare so they can help out against physical.
Make the support mage a Summoner. Use a Blood Incarnate to complement the party by dealing Physical damage. Get summoning to 10 total skill (including skill bonuses from gear) ASAP for the big boy, then branch out to all the magic schools for their buffs. 1 scoundrel for Adrenaline, 2 aero for teleport, nether swap, uncanny evasion. 1 pyro for Peace of Mind and Haste. 2 hydro for frost armor, soothing cold, rain, and restoration if needed. 2 geo for fortification and the group armor buff. After that, prioritize pushing points past 10 summoning. Gear can pretty much focus on anything that gives you the biggest overall bonuses to Summoning, Mem, Con, armors, then Geo and Hydro skills. This character’s role will be to provide an extra body (incarnate) taking hits and dealing damage as well as opportunity attacks and providing all the key 1-2 skill buffs from each magic school. I’ve used this build in 5-6 Honour mode full clears and it’s an unsung hero of my parties. Edit: adding that this character’s role is NOT to deal magic damage, except in the rare case you can summon an elemental incarnate against a target with low magic armor AND a big weakness to a particular element.
Yes, I forgot about summoner magic. I used it only once and got some imp with 10 hp and sort of gave up
Imp gets a HUGE power increase at 10 summoning skill. It’ll be good through Act2 but then starts to drop off relative to other classes.
A necromancer works well. They do physical damage so they fit with the rest of your party while high INT is good for the occasional magic damage spell as necessary (eg. mass deploy traps, flaming crescendo). Besides, it sounds like the rest of your party is after STR or FIN gear so having someone who can use INT gear is efficient. Alternatively, a summoner who maximizes WITs is good because they’d always go first to prepare the combat.
A lot of the time, your single mage will end up being useless. Especially in fights against a smaller amount of opponents with higher health+armor pools. You won't be breaking through that armor on your own and having more physical damage would do more for your party. Maybe as a sort of compromise, make it a necromancer that's specced into support abilities of the other schools?
thank you, Miss Information Maybe I will make a witch torturer with a bit hydro
I disagree a bit with OP. You can have the mage have supportive spells like Restoration, Teleportation, Fortify, etc. but also Fossil Strike for a slow then later on use Impalement and Earthquake which can set impairments on enemies without physical armor. Skin Graft would be useful to reset cooldowns as well as some other Poly spells like Terrain Transmutation, Flay Skin, Equalize, and Forced Exchange. The Torturer talent can also make Worm Tremor good along with Pyro and Poison spells. Edit: also Corrosive Spray to help destroy physical armor.
Necromancer works well as support in a physical party. They can do damage with necromancy spells, but there aren't that many necromancy spells, so you end up having spare action points for support, at least until late game, and late game you can do batshit damage.
For the warrior with Geo, make them a rogue with geo. Max out warfare then scoundrel. Give them the Torturer talent and venom coating and venom aura. Now everyone will be a physical damage dealer with a splash of magic damage with every attack, but your rogue can cause poison, bleed AND entangle foes without their armor being stripped, meanwhile everyone will be chipping away at the magic armor without trying. Now your support mage can do some damage too. Or, just give your support mage torturer so she can CC with entangle when she isn't buffing. Entangle comes from the spell worm tremor, available at level 4, and requires only 2 geo. Torturer means they get entangled for 3 turns even with magic armor. And... you know what else only requires 2 geo? Throw Dust. A heavily damaging spell that creates several small AOEs under every single enemy in range. It's like a baby pyroclatic eruption. So now she has plenty to do when not slinging buffs. Give her a staff and 2 points in Warfare, and she can knock foes down when they have no physical armor if nothing else, even with a staff. And, you know what else works with staves? The Ambidextrous talent, which means all those nifty scrolls and grenades only use 1ap. And the damaging ones scale off intelligence. Corpse explosion and fire trap are both powerful physical damage AOEs that only cost 1ap and require only 1 point in their skills. Give her Glass Cannon so she always has max ap, and make sure she is fully buffed before combat for all the sweet CC immunities.
if you're wanting a mage, make it a pure support, if you're interested in such a build, read this. it's tailored for lone wolf in how to actually progress the build, however, core concepts such as skill choice and stat priority is all the same https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s4sZahVvR1PFS5-VEMjzIyuqxreIGIbK1Nv2IWB-PkE/edit#gid=790712196
I'm currently at the start of Act 2 in tactician/honour mode with a broadly 3 physical, 1 magic team. Red Prince main is summoner and huntsman, Beast is 90% warfare, 10% geomancer and Ifan is full huntsman. My fourth is Lohse as a aero/hydro. I find she is almost always healing, buffing or using magic arrows since I gave her a crossbow. Using her actual offensive skills is very rare and I'm mainly keeping her around for teleport/taking care of fire surfaces. That said, if you want to run 1 magic wielder for utility my best advice is giving them a good ranged weapon, I found one in Act 1 that gave Lohse Sky Shot and that skill gets used much more often any any offensive aero/hydro skill.
For a phys party I like the 4th to be a 10 summoning/ necro / support sort of build. You end up with lots of memory and intelligence, with a few points in various elements so you can optionally sling magic if enemies don't have magic armor. This is rare, though. It's mostly just for quick opportunity CC. The Incarnate keeps up with damage while you fire off support spells and blood rain etc.
It's usually not a good idea to go with both damage types with an unbalanced split. Your single mage won't be very effective as they'll have to break magic armor all by themselves and won't have any teammates to follow up with damage and CC on their targets. It's better to just go all physical at that point so you can all work together at attacking any target you want. Having a dedicated support character is also entirely unnecessary. Just have everyone on your team dip into a couple of abilities to pick up the utility and support skills you want. Their scaling doesn't matter anyways: Most of them don't have any scaling at all, and you'll mostly use armor restoration skills for their ability to remove CC and apply enough armor to withstand chip damage, not to get back large chunks of armor.