Fire magic is trash

[KnuckleHead]

Even laying 3 fireballs into a group it barely does any damage, and given magic is a limited resource that only regenerates after resting, not sure why this school of magic is so crappy. Compared to melee characters that can constantly attack for good damage is there any reason why fire magic is so worthless?

[Citronvand]

Originally posted by Chadwick Strongpants:

Mages also bring a lot of utility, support and debuffs, which is something that martial characters have a much harder time providing. A well prepared spellcaster can easily turn the tide of battle by setting everyone else up for success (or failure, in case of the enemy team) this way.

Officer can give your whole party an extra attack(!), increased movement speed or defence for FREE. And unlike mages they can wield weapons and armor, has 2 attacks and has decent amount of HP.

[Talamarie]

Originally posted by Citronvand:

Originally posted by Chadwick Strongpants:

Mages also bring a lot of utility, support and debuffs, which is something that martial characters have a much harder time providing. A well prepared spellcaster can easily turn the tide of battle by setting everyone else up for success (or failure, in case of the enemy team) this way.

Officer can give your whole party an extra attack(!), increased movement speed or defence for FREE.

Ha nope, for the price of 2 cooldown turns.

[Frostfeather]

Dev hates magic. Or at least arcane magic. And I don't think it'll improve any time soon.

[niko]

i think a good buff would be staff/wand weapons for battle-magos. that way even if she runs out of juice, she can still be useful without wasting arrows. damage can naturally scale with int just like melee classes with str.

[Neo007]

Originally posted by Talamarie:

Originally posted by Citronvand:

Officer can give your whole party an extra attack(!), increased movement speed or defence for FREE.

Ha nope, for the price of 2 cooldown turns.

that counts as free, since its self replenishing, not using it means a lost opportunity cost (wasted opportunity to use it), whereas, spending your attunement up on the wrong battle(or spending it all) means you dont have any left when you might need it.

The short of it is having and spending cooldown abilities is a much greater value in a turn based economy.

or ...if it were a race cooldowns *might* lose to *decent* non-replenishing resource dependent ability in a sprint but anything longer and cooldown abilities would "win by a mile"...

[Axl]

I just started using flaming fists today. With Cascade I can use it three times and it seems to do way more damage than any of my melee characters.

[KipTheOtt]

Originally posted by Macro Tofu:

Originally posted by Chadwick Strongpants:

Mages also bring a lot of utility, support and debuffs, which is something that martial characters have a much harder time providing. A well prepared spellcaster can easily turn the tide of battle by setting everyone else up for success (or failure, in case of the enemy team) this way.

It's not all about damage.

Yet mages in this game have no utility either compared with a cleric. Their only special features, summoning and invisibility, can't "turn the tide of battle." I suggest you play a mage first then try to bolster it.

I don't think the above person was talking about just the Arcane casters, I think they were referring to all magic-users. And Arcane magic does still have quite a few solid spells. Air Magic is great for disabling enemies with spells like Blinding Bolt, Poison Sphere, and of course Thunder; while Earth Magic's Stone/Diamondskin spells are great defensive buffs and the summons (especially the Ooze, which are resistant to non-elemental damage) can be an excellent distraction or used to flank enemies.

Divine casters have some great spells too, and the Bonus Aura Radius feats mean that a lot of their spells can affect far more targets than an Arcane caster's, but most of their spells are short-ranged and reliant on positioning. A Hierophant will often need to contend with narrow hallways, get in the way of other party members movement, or put themselves into danger in order to use their spells, while the Guild-magos can be on the other side of the screen without losing much effectiveness.

[KipTheOtt]

Originally posted by Neo007:

Originally posted by Talamarie:

Ha nope, for the price of 2 cooldown turns.

that counts as free, since its self replenishing, not using it means a lost opportunity cost (wasted opportunity to use it), whereas, spending your attunement up on the wrong battle(or spending it all) means you dont have any left when you might need it.

The short of it is having and spending cooldown abilities is a much greater value in a turn based economy.

or ...if it were a race cooldowns *might* lose to *decent* non-replenishing resource dependent ability in a sprint but anything longer and cooldown abilities would "win by a mile"...

Honestly the game gives plenty of food, and even if you somehow run out you can just buy more from merchants. You can basically rest after almost every encounter, so the fact that spells use a limited resource isn't that big a deal. Even if you don't do that, there are so many Attunement potions (and the ingredients to craft them) that you can fill up on Attunement after almost every fight with those.

And Officer is solid, sure, but spellcasters really are much better at support than them. Being able to Inspire all of your allies for a turn or grant them an extra attack is nice, but it doesn't match the buff and debuff spells available to casters. Use spellcasters correctly and you can keep the entire party from even taking damage while they shred through the enemy team.

[MorbidBee]

Is there any way to respec? I'm a couple hours in and I've already invested some points into fire magic expecting some sick-ass fireballs.

[drago5899]

I am seriously starting to think many of you either did not play the game, or don't know how to read.

The fire spells have an effect called "Cascade" that allows you do perform a spell check each time it is cast. If you succeed then you get another free action (which can be used to cast more spells).

The dev wants you to have a risk-reward mechanic with fire. So far, (I'm around lvl 6 btw) my Battlemagos is doing WAY more damage than the melee fighters.

[BATTLEMODE]

This again.

No it's not trash, especially when you consider most of the end-game enemies are weak to fire.

[BATTLEMODE]

Another thing that bugs me is that people here seem to bang on about how artificial difficulty modifiers suck etc but when they're presented with organic difficulty options that don't use modifiers, they miss them completely and complain that "my single player game is unbalanced".

You can't really have this both ways. Do people want a balanced game? Or do you want interesting ways for the player to pick their challenge that doesn't include modifiers to AI performance?

I hate balance in single player games, it's boring, so even if the Battlemagos was weak (demonstrably untrue) wouldn't that make a good class for challenging yourself?

SMH

[Neo007]

Originally posted by Axl #FixTF2:

I just started using flaming fists today. With Cascade I can use it three times and it seems to do way more damage than any of my melee characters.

It is powerful but quickly consumes att so you have to rest or quaff potions. So it is a very restricted mechanic to play. Contrast that with a well built armsmaster or rangers rapid reload where you get free attack with criticals and you already have multiattack and critical strike.

I regulary proc 3 and 4 attacks with Iben the reason I usually dont proc more....cuz everything is usually dead by then. You consume nothing or just arrows with that setup, can strike anywhere on the battlefield and arrows are easy to come by if you let merchants restock. contrast that with limited resource and close range of flaming fists, the higher damage range for weapons, magic aptitude only increasing max damage instead of minimum damage etc... so it is potentially powerful but not as powerful as martial melee or ranged and is still limited by the resource mechanic.

You can easily get arrows by sleeping in a bed to past time or just hitting space on the overworld map while merchants restock. Mind you I dont need to do this to keep stocked up for my party I'm just giving the tip for those who might want to replenish arrows easily or are doing solo runs cuz I see regular complaints about arrows in the forums.

[Neo007]

Originally posted by drago5899:

I am seriously starting to think many of you either did not play the game, or don't know how to read.

The fire spells have an effect called "Cascade" that allows you do perform a spell check each time it is cast. If you succeed then you get another free action (which can be used to cast more spells).

The dev wants you to have a risk-reward mechanic with fire. So far, (I'm around lvl 6 btw) my Battlemagos is doing WAY more damage than the melee fighters.

You should read before accusing others of not being able to read. *All spells* have that effect including cleric spells its not exclusive to fire so its not a point in favour of the school.

While that may have been the dev's intent the implementation needs work as the damage is lower by comparison and still resource dependent- there are builds that easily achieve the "reward" without any of the risk or resource restrictions. My main party is level 12 and I have a solo run at level 9 both runs have a battle magos MC. The only reason I haven't beaten the game is I've been deliberately taking my time.

Play the game a bit more and then compare facts of performance of different classes, martial, hybrid, casters non-casters etc. The cascade mechanic is good but ranger and other characters if built efficiently are more powerful for less or no risk. See my post above if you want to see how that is possible.

[Neo007]

Originally posted by KipTheOtt:

Originally posted by Neo007:

that counts as free, since its self replenishing, not using it means a lost opportunity cost (wasted opportunity to use it), whereas, spending your attunement up on the wrong battle(or spending it all) means you dont have any left when you might need it.

The short of it is having and spending cooldown abilities is a much greater value in a turn based economy.

or ...if it were a race cooldowns *might* lose to *decent* non-replenishing resource dependent ability in a sprint but anything longer and cooldown abilities would "win by a mile"...

Honestly the game gives plenty of food, and even if you somehow run out you can just buy more from merchants. You can basically rest after almost every encounter, so the fact that spells use a limited resource isn't that big a deal. Even if you don't do that, there are so many Attunement potions (and the ingredients to craft them) that you can fill up on Attunement after almost every fight with those.

And Officer is solid, sure, but spellcasters really are much better at support than them. Being able to Inspire all of your allies for a turn or grant them an extra attack is nice, but it doesn't match the buff and debuff spells available to casters. Use spellcasters correctly and you can keep the entire party from even taking damage while they shred through the enemy team.

take your point in general but you don't need to rest with melee characters, and you can stock arrows much easier (see my post above). Resting after every battle is tedious and potions are expensive for a party.

I don't mean you just need to rest less with melee/martial I mean you can avoid resting at all if you build well and play well, they have so much sustain for e.g armsmasters have second wind, rangers have several healing sources, spell heals, regen spell, (they also have second wind) the ranger ontop of that has a heal party on kill ability which on its own is overpowered as it can proc every round - combined with their damage output talk about a favoured class. The issue is the massive power gap and how unnecessarily tedious it is to play an arcane caster by comparison with how gimped the fire school is, considering that there is no reason the fire magic school is so limited and some classes kits are so powerful without needing to be resource dependent. The game is great overall but that specific mechanical power gap is not fun, the cardinal rule of a game is it should be fun.

Btw I typically love resource mechanics and challenge runs, (doing a solo run right now for the challenge and resource management) however, in my view the mechanics are too restrictive against that school in particular and the class that specializes in it, the BattleMagos.