Review from a Mage Player

[Midnight]

Just finished my breach play-through as a mage. You can play mostly without bonking, but you do need to do an occasional swing. Ice Staff is ofc. King.

Like many have suggested in different threads. Using the Inn and the convert rune to grant yourself full focus before heading out. Plus having alot of points in focus. Will have you set for the most part. Admittedly, when it came to boss fights. It was more of a battle of burst. Can i kill the boss before my bar runs out? So far, it worked through the main campaign but started to fall off near the level 25+.

Favourite gem will be focus decrease by percentile and max focus gems.

My only thoughts so far going forward is hopefully adding a jeweller NPC into the game eventually for gems and rings. Because as it currently stands. Player are having to make alt worlds then rushing to the general store too quickly farm the beginner rings and gems or just setting up farm worlds. Which is very tedious, even with using the return rune to immediately teleport to Sacra from the beginning of the game. I do wish they'd return regeneration focus back to out of combat, since the current changes only make it so players are travelling around with 40+ cheap food items. Then using the convert rune to refill focus. Same effect, just slightly more effort.

There was specific rings i'd wanted to use for my build, which i just frankly. Never managed to find. Band of Calmness for example. I had thought certain rings had been removed, until one dropped 70% into my playthrough.

The change in focus potions was interesting, since it did have me drinking afew of them going through areas and just beating on certain weak mobs just for the quick focus gain. It'll never be as useful as prior. But definitely something i kept afew on my person while travelling.

Lot of the cool armour-sets which you can find in certain areas, feels like a tragedy that most will never see them, since they're randomly dropped. I would propose either the tailors or a scavenger NPC be added. Which will go into those areas and collect those sets you'll never have found or at the very least. Pay them money and target an area you've cleared and they'll come back with random assortments of gear from that area. Can make it random bits of the gear, so you'll need to do refreshes if you want more money sinks. But i think this'll work nicely.

Allow for the payment to remove enchantments, since it's disappointing when you find this cool piece of gear, but it's enchantments are either unusable or just flat-awful. You can of course change the enchantments, but i'd personally want to just fully strip it and invest with infuse. If you go for the prior option of adding a way to acquire gear pieces from areas with the tailor or scavengers. You can disregard this, since you could just re-acquire them with enough coin.

At the moment, I've found that using gems when you've acquired enough to invest into a fully infused piece of gear is remarkably better than enchanting. But enchanting does have it's place for the early to early-mid-game, since they give a lot of potential good stats early on. But late game, they're not offering enough since the potential downside you'll get + random assortment are vastly downgraded from gems. Another note is that gems themselves being so rare, that when you finally commit onto a piece of armour. It's highly unlikely you'll ever change it, since the gems are so rare to find. Potentially adding a way to remove gems from armour would be nice, but as it stands. When you commit, that's what you'll stick with until the end of the game.

Boss design was incredible and i loved the content added. The Huntress boss was brilliantly done and my favourite out of the new additions. Admittedly, i think the biggest killer for me was gravity. The amount of times i'd flung myself off a cliff was hilarious. Area design was good, didn't find myself getting overly lost. Except one time at the sawmill in the meadow.

The new plague system is interesting. I think my biggest gripe was for some areas like the shallows which didn't allow me to clear it in one run, since there wasn't enough mobs.

Resources, wool, bear drops and so-on, so-forth. Those come very late into the game and even ones like wool don't have any way to access them aside the general goods merchant or the seneschal? Maybe they drop from the hill goats, but their drop-rate must be abysmal or my luck is just outright awful since they never dropped anything for me. Need some critters to farm those abit earlier.

Overall, look forward to new developments.

-- These are just random thoughts

[Oversalt]

Thanks for this, just started a mage run and was wondering if it's viable.

[Midnight]

Originally posted by Oversalt:

Thanks for this, just started a mage run and was wondering if it's viable.

Definitely viable. Think my main tip for people is unlock a second main hand weapon. So you can have more than 1 staff equipped. Have 1 staff setup for utility - Return, Convert, Repair, Illuminate etc. Then your main combat staff. On that point, Illuminate does need a duration increase.

[Scullhead]

If you are looking for a Ring, the general Trader is a good Option.

What i do is i create multiple Realms and upgrade his Shop to level 3 and queck them every day.

[Midnight]

Originally posted by Scullhead:

If you are looking for a Ring, the general Trader is a good Option.

What i do is i create multiple Realms and upgrade his Shop to level 3 and queck them every day.

Yeah, that's what i meant by farm worlds. You need to upgrade multiple different worlds just for a chance at the general store for an RNG chance at a ring. It's tedious.

Additionally, it breaks away from the cycle of gameplay if you're having to worry about making abunch of alts just to assist the main world.

[VonFIDDE]

I use whitestaff fully infused but when it comes to the other gearslots i went full purple exept one ring. To get more damage but also to get high stamina and health because of a very high focus. I only use fireball hence i wonder is there any other good singletarget damage firespells (for staffs)?

[BOT Larry]

man them wands slaps too. I started off with the wand that gives lightening dart and transitioned to ice staff but at enchantress levlel 3, she sells molten clutch and that thing slams bros. As long as you got focus that is.

[thePoison.]

I have farmed echo knight about 20 times, and i've yet to see that ring drop haha.