Best spells

[Arani]

As the title says. What do you feel are the best spells? I made a caster like I always do, and I find that damage wise they are incredibly useless. But besides the element counter thing (fire quenches ice etc) there are a few that seem really nice.

• Water - Frozen Malice seems to have infinite range, it penetrates enemies, and knocks regular enemies back. Its only downside is that it's super slow to cast.
  
• Metal - Thorny Ground is likewise amazing against most human-sized enemies. The spikes will interrupt and stagger anything running into them, letting you create a kind of defensive barrier from which you're free to issue commands to your NPC's, or just wait for fast spammy enemies to charge into them, stagger, and then be open for your attack combos. They also last long enough that you can sort of set them up as a trap that you can roll back to for safe healing when something goes wrong. Ironically it does the same job as Frozen Spear Trap but better, because it drops 5 spike traps instead of 1, while casting almost half less spirit to cast.
  
• Wood - Absorb Vitality heals for a crazy tiny little sum so it seems useless like all the other buffs seem to be, but the healing is proportional to the damage dealt. And every time you break someone and leave them open for a crit, you have more than enough time to cast this, and then do the crit finisher, which typically nets you 30-50% of your health back!
  
• Fire - Fireblast has a really bad range and has the typical soulslike target lock issue where even if the spell range were longer, the auto target cast will almost always fall short. But in short ranges it does decent enough damage and fast enough that it can be used as a great poke spell for a bit of damage, and is a good way to finish borderline dead trash enemies.

Anything good you guys have run into? I'd really be interested in utility and damage spells that actually work. Most of the damage and utility spells seem to make such a little difference even with 50+ levels and gear into them that idk why they even bothered putting them into the game. x.x

[wildcardbitches]

I'm on the 3rd act and my go to spell is the stone spell that summons 5 pillars. It does quite a lot of damage if they hit all 5, which shouldn't be hard if you're already attacking them.

[soso]

The only spell I use is the earth armour. Everything else is trash.

[awanderingswordsman]

Imposing slab is fantastic. Infinitely walls humans and does massive spammable burst damage to demons. Feind vanquisher is also really nice in the few missions where you have to fight multiple human minibosses at once, because you can just grab one and run with him to get some 1v1 time for a second. Also does ok damage.

For fire, bursting fireball is a lot of damage and fire building up but it is somewhat slow. It basically oneshots normal enemies at around 25-30 fire virtue and has solid AoE so kiting and using it can deal with crowds of small enemies quite quickly or just open a fight by instakilling one.

Aqua blink is really good. There's a lot of enemies where aqua blinking behind them just trivializes them and you can use it to animation cancel just about everything on the ground. Additionally, if you ever get cornered by multiple enemies, it can be fairly hard to escape normally, but aqua blink makes it trivial.

[Arani]

Originally posted by awanderingswordsman:

Imposing slab is fantastic. Infinitely walls humans and does massive spammable burst damage to demons. Feind vanquisher is also really nice in the few missions where you have to fight multiple human minibosses at once, because you can just grab one and run with him to get some 1v1 time for a second. Also does ok damage.

For fire, bursting fireball is a lot of damage and fire building up but it is somewhat slow. It basically oneshots normal enemies at around 25-30 fire virtue and has solid AoE so kiting and using it can deal with crowds of small enemies quite quickly or just open a fight by instakilling one.

Aqua blink is really good. There's a lot of enemies where aqua blinking behind them just trivializes them and you can use it to animation cancel just about everything on the ground. Additionally, if you ever get cornered by multiple enemies, it can be fairly hard to escape normally, but aqua blink makes it trivial.

Thanks for these! I really need to try that stuff out. And yeah I just got aqua blink and first I thought like, what's the point of such a short distance teleport? But its super fast and a ton of enemies have directional attacks, being able to just tp behind them and start wailing on them while they're hitting the air that used to be you seems incredible. :D

[Shinkiro]

The stand out ones to me are:
Fire: Blasting fire (it comes out very fast, great for weaving), Overpower Burst (boosting already strong fire spells) and Engulfing Inferno (can be cast twice quickly, good dmg)

Water: Aqua blink, Haste (mobility is great) and Ominous chill (this is probably the best spell in the game, i was doing 1200 damage per cast on the second lubu fight, i didnt even touch him with my spear. AND you get chill.)

Wood: Not really used them, Heavens Rage seems pretty good, other wise buffs dont really seem that great when you can just deflect and kill things better. Probably better in coop with a friend tbh otherwise ill pass them.

Earth: Imposing stab is awesome, rock toughness is a good slot too.

Metal: Life wither, more damage taken by enemies is great.

[Arani]

Originally posted by awanderingswordsman:

For fire, bursting fireball is a lot of damage and fire building up but it is somewhat slow. It basically oneshots normal enemies at around 25-30 fire virtue and has solid AoE so kiting and using it can deal with crowds of small enemies quite quickly or just open a fight by instakilling one.

Omg Bursting Fireball is insane! It does literally 20x more damage than probably any other spell in the game so far, some of them with much slower cast times. Thank you for this! Finally I feel like playing a caster! And I only have 20 fire stat. :>

[Arani]

Originally posted by Shinkiro:

...Ominous chill (this is probably the best spell in the game, i was doing 1200 damage per cast on the second lubu fight, i didnt even touch him with my spear. AND you get chill.)

This is even more insane than Bursting Fireball (ofc 40 stat investment but still)! It also has crazy range and big AoE, and basically cannot miss since it's not a projectile. Perfect to deal with those pesky ranged things and kills most of the big mobs in 2 casts too! I'm so glad I asked. I wish I'd known these when I was leveling.

Now finally I can play a real caster. I just really don't understand what goes on in the minds of these devs. How can some spells be so incredibly useless, while others are broken overpowered? There's no balance at all between them.