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Nimbleness (T2) - good choice since you are likely to not get hit and thus never be wounded. +2 MP and more importantly +15% dodge.
Shorter Weapons (T3) - no reason to not pick this up for a Scepter hero, gives you +10% dodge and +15% accuracy with no requirements. It's always active.
The -1 skill range is irrelevant to a Scepter hero.
Relentless (T3) and Inertia (T4) - restore mp every time you use Magic Bash. It's possible to generate 4 mp per Magic Bash if you have both of these.
Specialist (T4) - I personally love this for high apoc levels. You don't have to manage 2 weapons this way and the +30% damage buff is very significant.
Most importantly, it gives you +1 charge to all skills with your weapon each turn.
BOOM! (T5) - This is the perk that really makes the Scepter OP. Magic Bash has some absolutely crazy overkill damage very frequently. This makes the splash from it hit super hard. With this, you'll go up to killing up to 4 enemies per Magic Bash... and Shocking Touch will also be splashing more.
Blessing (T5) - Only pick this up if you are struggling to reach dodge cap without using at 2 Wind Walks per turn. This increases the duration of all buffs you put on yourself. This means the dodge portion of Wind Walk will now last 2 turns instead of only 1.
Legendary Assassin (T5) - This can effectively generate you 2-3 ap each turn if used optimally.
Adrenaline Rush (T5) - If you position to intentionally get hit every turn this gives you +1 ap per turn.
Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to use multiple Wind Walks each turn. Ideally it should be used just to generate extra MP to move around.
So, ideally, you would use about 1 per turn on average.
Keep in mind, momentum is going to be doing the majority of your damage. Magic Bash itself hits somewhat hard but the added momentum damage is what makes it truly crazy.
what makes the scpeter that good is that you can add yourself extra movement and one shoot elites or bosses
imo in later nights you should use the scepter as "offhand" to kill the bosses or elites, while fighting primarly with aoe type weapons aka tome,druid staff,2h axe...
in the last night the best way to deal with boses is to actually have dedicated champ whith a weapon allowing you for hight mobility ( lets say 2h sword with the dash ) coupled with some skill range bonus (more range for the dash = dash farther = more momentum) and slap a scepter momentum skill for some 10k dmg into the boss face after crossing the whole map :p
Thank you for the detailed post. If I understand you right you're saying that Magic Bash is the most important part of the Scepter because of the momentum bonus. I get that but it doesn't do much to kill hordes (trash). BOOM! unlock quite late in a run wave 7-8 ? So even if it's fun and all it's not the crux of the run. I get the Scepter can trivialize bosses and one shot them. My question was more toward how to handle trash efficiently.
@cråck
Interesting way to play.
This is assuming you don't have Specialist (T4), BOOM! (T5), or a second weapon equipped.
Any hero should have some form of mana management to mitigate this low of mana loss per turn. Most early/mid-game nights are going to run 4-6 turns. You should be able to handle spending that 4 mana every single turn. Ideally you either have the Harvester (T1) perk which can give well over a dozen mana regen by the end of the night, or you have a couple of mana regen secondaries that you took on the hero while leveling.
Think about this, with Harvester, you gain +1 mana regen for every 4 kills. Shocking Touch hits (and usually kills) 4 targets.
With Specialist, you should be able to kill 16+ enemies per turn and with BOOM! You should be killing 20-30 per turn.
Yes, the primary benefit is that the Scepter hero is removing any threatening mob from the wave. Utilize the high mobility to selectively target things like Guardians, Bulky, Accursed, Lancers, Rippers, Splitters, and especially elites.
A Splitter can touch 3 walls at once and will hit them as hard as 2 Armored put together. This is effectively 6 attacks on your walls at once. But not if they are dead.
An enemy getting to the wall here and there isn't so much of a problem as long as it isn't a big baddie (like the ones to target mentioned above)
To summarize,
At the end of the day, you'll notice a dramatic difference in effectiveness between a hero that doesn't have many synergizing perks (mentioned in my first post) vs one that does.
Lean heavily on shocking touch.
Target stronger enemies with Magic Bash to reduce the wave's threat.
This becomes a huge factor on later maps like Glenwald and Elderlicht.
I personally would say it's definitely not god like, nor even the best momentum weapon. It's a really solid choice though, and browsing through recent threads where people have listed their picks for favourite/strongest weapon the consensus seems to be that the scepter is one of the better, but not best weapons (druid staff and hand crossbow seem to pick up the most picks).
Your assessment of the drawbacks, including having to spend a lot of AP on mobility in a way that you don't with the 1H or 2H swords is spot on - the other momentum weapons have the bonus movement tied in to attacks so you don't have to make sacrifices in killing power for mobility. They also scale mobility with skill range which is huge. This does hurt the performance of the Scepter a bit when your heroes are lower level.
When you reach level 9 and the t5 perks you can start to ameliorate the AP tax as you get access to boom (which is incredible on a lot of weapons, one of the strongest perks in game) and several perks that increase your AP in one way or another e.g. Legendary Assassin, Adrenaline Rush, Night Owl or taking Energized at t3 and capitalising once you have the mana to trigger it more often.
https://thelastspell.fandom.com/wiki/Skills
Is it "the best weapon"... I'd go that far on Elderlicht. Yeah.
On Glenwald? Top tier contender.
On Lakeburg? Shrug, its really good.
You might be able to possibly move more overall tiles per turn with a 1h sword, but you won't match the damage output of a Scepter. Given the same perks the Scepter will definitely perform better on waves especially on Glenwald/Elderlicht.
I've never seen a 1h sword kill 3 elites in 1 turn for example, but I do that regularly with a Scepter.
I'm glad to see I'm not that far off from properly using the Scepter.
There are sections for leveling, perks, primaries/secondaries to focus on, mana management, how to manage waves, build orders, and more.
Everything is geared for apoc 4+ difficulty, however, all advice is applicable on any difficulty level. You'll have 20% more gold if you are following the build order on normal to apoc 3 though.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2729860442
It's 25% per tile plus your momentum bonus per tile (up to a cap of 100% per tile). Given the Scepter may or may not get as many tiles moved as weapons like the 1H sword that may or may not result in harder hits than the other weapons, and this will vary with how much +momentum you get from gear and levels. It will also be affected by things like a desire to divert stats and perks to synergise with the build, as you described above. That includes things like the Head On perk which stacks multiplicatively as damage (making it typically worth far more damage than an additional 20% momentum in later nights), but only for weapons that deal physical damage.
In most cases with momentum weapons a lot of the damage just ends up being overkill and it doesn't matter which weapon overkills by more most of the time, meaning what makes the best weapon depends on other features.
I have no qualms with the fact you think the Scepter is the best weapon (whether on specific maps or across all of them), but at the same time I'm clear in my own mind that I don't agree. The drawbacks WarMage outlined aren't things he was doing wrong, and you will always feel them at lower hero levels with the Scepter as it naturally draws AP into using Wind Walk in a way that is not paralleled by the 1H sword, 2H sword or Pistol.
In my experience across all the mentioned maps, the Scepter is good but not quite the best momentum weapon. Multi-hit and propagation builds are also very strong and some of the weapons that naturally build around those instead of momentum tend to outpace the Scepter as well (notably the highly popular Hand Crossbow and Druid Staff). Not that I expect everyone's experience or assessment to necessarily exactly match mine!
Well, yeah, if you take perks that are good for the Scepter, but bad for the Swords, like Nimbleness, Shorter Weapons and Blessing that is going to be the case. You need to take things like Longer Weapons, Head on or Bodybuilder which benefit the Swords but not the Scepter instead.
In that case the Swords will often outdamage the Scepter, and more importantly at lower levels they can often spend more AP on attacks which means more kills per turn.
In terms of damage any momentum weapon can do this, as can a multi-hitter with a Bully+Critical Master or Big Game Hunter build. Even the pistol which is (in my opinion) clearly worse than either of the Swords or the Scepter can produce enough damage as you get up in levels and gear. The only challenge is getting 3 elites to spawn in the same hero's area on a turn. That doesn't happen much.
Druidic Staff is quite powerful as well but is outshined by a Tome if you have Mana Collector.
I'm always talking in terms of viability with ease. If it requires more setup to achieve that's points off so to speak. With the high base momentum of the Scepter you can achieve very hard hits by moving only a few tiles even without +momentum secondaries. This makes killing 3 big baddies all close to each other extremely accessible for the Scepter (you'd only need to spend 3 ap) and much more situational for others.
On Elderlicht, it is not uncommon for 3 elites to spawn on 1 side during the mid-late waves.
Realistically what is best comes down to the map you are on, the difficulty level you are playing on, and what perks your hero rolled.
TBH, it's the core of the game, you need the flexibility to dynamically approach what you are given each run and figure out what works best for the situation the game puts you in.
Sure, me too.
Obviously, as with all Propagation weapons, you kinda want the perk "Volatile Reaction" that gives +1 bounce and more importantly the diagonal bounces. With that and an incidental +1 bounce or so as well as a tiny bit of Propagation damage to mitigate the damage loss on bounces you should get remarkable results for a skill that only costs 3 mana and that can be used twice per turn.
The Scepter also has a very high overall damage due to it having a high base damage (only beaten by similar-tiered melee weapons) and being magical damage (therefore halving enemy resistances). Overall it should deal almost as much damage per AP to hordes as the Secret Tome or Druid Staff, be about as mana-efficient as the latter and be notably stronger in finishing tough single targets (like Elites or those Dryads).
The drawback is that you are kinda "melee", which means you can not skip defenses or get away with only a few movement bonuses. Overall I would say the Scepter is a very well balanced weapon that is not effortless but powerful in most circumstances.
https://thelastspell.fandom.com/wiki/Weapons
From the bits I've spot checked all the data looks accurate. Something looks weird with the Shortbow at t3, but that may be from the game itself.
From that we can see that the Magic Scepter is 7th out of the 20 main hand weapons for average damage and the individual weapon page shows data on the skills: Shocking Touch has a 120% skill multiplier and Hammer of Faith has a 70% skill multiplier.
Those skill multipliers are why the Hand Crossbow's Blaze skill, with its 200% multiplier, does more damage (on each of its two or more multi-hits) than Hammer of Faith does, despite the base Hand Crossbow damage being only about 40% of the base Magic Scepter damage.
There are five weapons with propagation damage skills currently in the game. Knowing that base propagation is 85%, meaning each bounce does 15% less damage than the previous one we can easily work out how much damage each does at base. The Hand Crossbow gets a x2 multiplier due to multi-hit and the Druid Staff does a flat amount of poison damage (57 at t5) per target that is not subject to the propagation penalty.
The results at t5 are:
If we add in Volatile Reaction at t5:
With Volatile Reaction and +15% propagation damage from a trinket or similar:
Which is interesting in several ways. Firstly the Magic Scepter is worse with +1 propagation bounces and capped propagation damage than any of the others is at base, as a propagation weapon, which probably just confirms this isn't really the Scepter's strength, to be fair.
Secondly the Druid Staff and Hand Crossbow fare reasonably well without even factoring in their strongest propagation scaling: poison damage and multi-hit respectively. If you start looking at what they can do even with just the Potent Toxins/Initiator perks their strength as propagation weapons becomes really apparent.
I'm sorry I didn't recognize you. Ever since I came back to the game, your guide's been the best source of information I've found. I've been using it ever since. I already knew half of the stuff but the other half was amazing. Especially since a lot changed since my return. Also, great work on keeping it updated, extremely appreciated.
With the initial shock gone, let me say thank you and great work.
Now, I wouldn't make anyone think their help haven't been appreciated because all comments have been very useful. I clearly see that I'm still not using the weapons optimally. As it has been stated a few times now the 1h / 2h swords are good but I've found them difficult to properly use. The fact that the movement is built into the skills is great but it require holes to use amongst the enemies in order to be able to establish a path and take out targets. I also did not focus on skill range which, as I now understand, has been a mistake. So that's my new objective... to go and try to make my swordplay better.
I'd love to be able to contribute more to the conversation as there has been quite a few very interesting arguments / facts but clearly I'm not skilled enough with the game yet ;) so sadly, I'll have to remain on the sidelines.
BTW, you guys rock. Truly. It's great to read your stuff.