Anyone else a little miffed at how much Faith gets in this game

[Titan]

Incantations get a bajillion buffs, spells that look interesting visually, utility spells, healing and other team support.

Meanwhile Sorceries are almost exclusively various flavors of "Throw blue/purple rocks at people". I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of non-offensive sorceries there are in the game. And of the offensive sorceries there's a lot of them that feel way too similar to each other (Looking at the five or six variations of glintstone pebble/comet).

[k701]

Yeah I feel the same. The sorceries are trash. I was so exited to get the twin moon but it's so bad. Ymir's magic is also garbage :(. I found the last boss way too hard with my mage so I had to respec to a greatshield poke build. The upside was that I didn't have a good greatshield nor good poking weapons so going on a quest to get those was fun.

[Vinnolo]

have you actually tried the faith spells? almost all are unusable and have trash damage, only a couple are actually decent

[TyresTyco]

Yeah Vinnolo is right. Almost all dmg incantations suck. We got one decent lightning spear .. one. Everything else is utter garbage. Fromsoft sucks with numbers.

[Knavenformed]

What? Incantations by type have the least variety
At least a Sorcerer character gets distinct spells to use inside one cosplay build

Sure if you want to throw incantations out like a fruit mix alphabet cereal sure, but you usually need to specialize to use some

It also doesn't help that some of the best offensive incants are split stat spells

With INT offstat you still get a load of useful, unique and distinct spells.

[rhoenix]

Originally posted by TyresTyco:

Yeah Vinnolo is right. Almost all dmg incantations suck. We got one decent lightning spear .. one. Everything else is utter garbage. Fromsoft sucks with numbers.

Pest Threads/Spears is pretty good, and I like Lightning Spear and Knight's Lightning Spear. Black Flame can come in handy sometimes. The rest of the offensive incantations... eh.

As for Sorceries, I did a runthrough as Dex/Int recently, using a staff and Nagakiba. True, you don't pre-buff as much before a boss, but I felt like I was encouraged to approach each situation more tactically.

As for Sorceries in the DLC, Fleeting Microcosm (you can get from Ymir) is really good, as is Impenetrable Thorns.

[Chris1]

Most incantations do trash damage but the same is true of sorceries. INT builds get blue pew-pew, faith builds get lightning, ice lightning, bleed, poison, rot, rings of light, healing, general support and recovery, black flame, dragon breath - not to mention almost every single weapon class has multiple unique faith-based weapon representations. Faith is the biggest, deepest build type in the game, the only real downside is that PvE is terrible at end game, but even than there is so much flexibility that you can still make it work (black flame especially is essentially useful no matter what).

[Krazy Wallet]

Originally posted by rhoenix:

Originally posted by TyresTyco:

Yeah Vinnolo is right. Almost all dmg incantations suck. We got one decent lightning spear .. one. Everything else is utter garbage. Fromsoft sucks with numbers.

Pest Threads/Spears is pretty good, and I like Lightning Spear and Knight's Lightning Spear. Black Flame can come in handy sometimes. The rest of the offensive incantations... eh.

As for Sorceries, I did a runthrough as Dex/Int recently, using a staff and Nagakiba. True, you don't pre-buff as much before a boss, but I felt like I was encouraged to approach each situation more tactically.

As for Sorceries in the DLC, Fleeting Microcosm (you can get from Ymir) is really good, as is Impenetrable Thorns.

Multilayer ring of light is amazing for those weak to holy. And large enemies get melted and rotted by Rot Butterflies. Messmer's boss incant is super strong against enemies that can stagger and can either have a strong charge or a super fast attack. Given that there are so many element types to choose from, I would agree faith has a lot going for it unlike prior souls titles.

Magic also has a good deal as long as you are willing to experiment. They have cold, magic, and fire attacks. Death sorceries are quite good at later levels (sucks early game) but thorns... we don't talk about thorns.

[Mander]

Counterpoint: there is only a score of enemies who are straight up resistant to magic damage, while most enemies are at least resistant to holy/fire/lightning (and holy damage is quite bad in general).
Glintstone sorceries are a multipurpose tool, able to kill almost everything with a scalable approach.
With incantations, you need buffs to pick up the slack. Which is also why incantations lend themselves more to a mixed style of melee and incantations.
With sorceries, you can completely disregard the melee part (or not, and drop the gavel of haima if you want or any variation of carian magic swords)
There is also the problem of incantations scaling with faith OR arcane. While sorceries have only INT to bother with.

In short: sorceries don’t need further buffs, because of how much utility, damage and redundancy they already have. And the latter is quite good, considering you can pick the best “blue/ purple rock” expression for your build.

[Mander]

Originally posted by TyresTyco:

Yeah Vinnolo is right. Almost all dmg incantations suck. We got one decent lightning spear .. one. Everything else is utter garbage. Fromsoft sucks with numbers.

It still leaves me... disappointed, that Gransax spear ash of war outperforms lightning incant both for range, speed and damage.
I mean... best ranged option for faith is... a spear.
Glinstone sorceries meanwhile: "what color do you want your ranged death dealer to be?"

[Marmarmar34]

Int weapons are meta tier wdym?
Look into int ash of wars

[Midnight]

I'd argue that most offensive spells are not valuable period in Elden Ring.

Outside of needing to snipe something (for which you need exactly 1 spell INT or FTH) in 90% of situations using ash is the better option. SoNaF outdamages any FTH incants by a huge margin. Similarly Moonveil and Dark Moon GS on the INT side beat all of the 99 different flavors of magic sword slash.

Still this DLC has some truly broken sorceries too. They require FTH though lol.

[Krazy Wallet]

Originally posted by Midnight:

I'd argue that most offensive spells are not valuable period in Elden Ring.

Outside of needing to snipe something (for which you need exactly 1 spell INT or FTH) in 90% of situations using ash is the better option. SoNaF outdamages any FTH incants by a huge margin. Similarly Moonveil and Dark Moon GS on the INT side beat all of the 99 different flavors of magic sword slash.

Still this DLC has some truly broken sorceries too. They require FTH though lol.

Don't underestimate Carian Slicer. That thing goes hard and swings fast

[Midnight]

Originally posted by Krazy Wallet:

Originally posted by Midnight:

I'd argue that most offensive spells are not valuable period in Elden Ring.

Outside of needing to snipe something (for which you need exactly 1 spell INT or FTH) in 90% of situations using ash is the better option. SoNaF outdamages any FTH incants by a huge margin. Similarly Moonveil and Dark Moon GS on the INT side beat all of the 99 different flavors of magic sword slash.

Still this DLC has some truly broken sorceries too. They require FTH though lol.

Don't underestimate Carian Slicer. That thing goes hard and swings fast

It has great theoretical DPS. In practice since you can't jump attack or roll attack with it against everything that has shorter punish windows (aka everything in the DLC) it's pretty bad because it doesn't chain to/from anything else.

In situations where I know I can get away with roll + roll attack, followed by immediate roll carian slicer will just get me hit. Even just one.

Meanwhile something like blinside will simply iframe me through an attack, hit like a truck and do decent posture damage. It's not even close.

[Mikoto]

Almost every faith spell is low damage unless hyper-focused so...no, they aren't as favored as you might think. They lack hyperarmor, they lack damage, the AI can see them (unlike night sorceries), and the cast times are slow.

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by Midnight:

In situations where I know I can get away with roll + roll attack, followed by immediate roll carian slicer will just get me hit. Even just one.

This was the death of casting in ER for me
So much work to use something with less opportunities than just playing melee

Meanwhile swift shard or even better night shard just add some actual damage that you can't deal with melee