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Swarm of Gnats: 1-4 Damage + Aptitude - 3 attunement 12 cascade.
Magic Missile: 1-4 damage + Aptitude - 5 Attunement 10 cascade.
Poison Globe: 10% Of the targets Vitality 15 attunement 16 cascade
Some of the beefiest targets have 122 vitality, meaning poison globe gets about 10 damage per target hit (But the real kicker is, those High targets are also immune to poison 90% of the time). Most targets have 20-30 vitality, rendering poison globe worthless for damage. its stun is nice, but better spells for stunning exist.
the damage of spells is so atrocious to its investment cost that using casting is pointless unless the fight is explicitly resilient to physical damage.
Rogue can easily backstab for 70-100 damage. my strongest spell, deals 30 damage, and takes half to a third of my MP.
on top of all of this, fire, the only tree with a modicum of respectable damage, just happens to also hit everyone in range, with no ability to mitigate, making it absolutely worthless.
This isnt even considering the investment cost that most spells require 2-3 levels to learn WITH NO OTHER BENEFITS.
This is a complete and total inversion of what a mage should be doing. either the spells should be cheap to cast, plentiful enough to last an encounter and weak to balance their benefits, or Expensive to cast, Scarce enough to only use them when needed and Strong enough to decimate targets. We have Expensive, Scarce and Weak.
right now Rogue, Arms, and Ranger will wipe the floor with magos
edit: Diamond Form is very good, summons are occasionally useful, not much else worth casting in Earth. Air has much better spells overall.
Fire school spells are kinda terrible, though many of its buffs can be precast before combat (unlike the Air ones at least, not sure about Earth) so you at least don't have to waste actions casting them at the start of battle.
Frankly, Poison Globe is *only* about the AoE stun not the damage. As for "better spells exist", I can think of only one and it's also Air (and much more expensive).
Welcome to Magic 101. Unless you're playing an action RPG magic is better for things besides damage.
Currently at lvl13:
Vitality: 30
Wound: 7
Attunement: 96
Magical Aptitude: 10
Max Cascade: 3
Soak: 0 - 8
Dodge: +5
Considering that you can also regain attunement when you get a wound the first time for a quick recharge, you can do some serious crowd controlling and not be afraid to jump in the fray.
you just need to upgrade your magic skills, not to try unblock all spells.
It's true that melee classes are significantly stronger than other possible builds in terms of raw output vs resource expenditure, but it's also true that you are given two melee companions relatively early (Armsmaster and Hospitaller). This means if you bottleneck enemies at a chokepoint as an optimal strategy, stacking melee PCs harms you as much as the enemies. Bow users avoid this and have better raw output, but are extremely limited by the availability of arrows.
Enter magic users. Attunement is cheaper and easier to refill than ammunition. Spells also never miss and are a force multiplier on your front line. The fact that they never miss also works nicely with your Thief when doing things like Stun. Much ado has been made about Hospitaller's stun, but the Cleric Weapons Initiate tree doesn't let you get your second accuracy bonus until level 10 and as a result actually has a hard time actually landing Stunning Blow once you make it to refugee camp.
Like all cRPGs, the game is hardest at the earliest stages of the game, becoming easier as you complete your PC builds and improve itemization. It's just a fact that the game at the beginning is easier for optimally built casters. Champions/Hospitallers attunement pools with Minor Lay on Hands give them essentially ten times more HP than Fighters to say nothing of the ability to remove diseases early. Even Hierophant gets access to an inexpensive "never misses" stun as early as level 1 which activates Kat early in a way no other build does. Guild-Magos can outkite and deal damage with Gnats while also debuffing.
It comes down to a mix of Magic Aptitude being a flat number bonus to damage that gets added to every spell, no matter how cheap, and cheap spells being very easy to cascade and cast 3-4 times a turn to stack the flat bonus to damage.
The result is that the best way to do damage with magic is to forget any damage spell above the first tier exists and just spam the weak spells over and over. You can do a lot of damage this way, my guild-magos was one of my highest damage characters by spamming Swarm of Gnats every fight.
It's just frustrating that the higher power damage spells are basically just gimmicks you'll use once or twice and then forget about in favor of Swarm of Gnats or Fists of Fire.
*Have ability that has them hide from the beginning
*Give them the best bow and arrows you have
*Watch the gorey fireworks as people explode
As a solo mage, I ended up using a lot more spells. Gnats was the starting point, no surprise there. I should have moved into magic missiles for end game, because it does true damage and ignores all resistances (I had already reached level cap, though). I used flaming fists and flame aura when I got swamped, since they have higher damage per action (desperation maneuvers). Fire warrior was useful for increasing my strength, because I only had 80 carry capacity. It can also be used for athletics/strength skill checks.
I blasted through most of the difficult combats with inferno spam. With high enough intelligence, cascading 4 of them together is pretty common. 80 damage per turn to the entire field. 160 to deep ones. I had +2 intellect from my equipment; could have done more if I wanted to farm shops for +4.
Summon magmite was also a super important ability. You can summon them anywhere on the field and draw the enemy to them, and thus away from you. They are immune to fire and resistant to physical damage. You can have as many as you can support, too.
While I did not have access to high level earth and air spells, I took the time to look through them and see if they would be useful with my new perspective. I think invisibility could potentially be really good for kiting. Run away, and when they get close, invis and move to the other side of the field. Earth mages can stone+diamond skin themselves and be really tanky probably. Summon ooze should be very similar to summon magmite. Silence would have been useful to have in the end game, when I'm getting spammed by magic missiles, which are not affected by any protections.