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But I would say your points are better invested in the few defensive buffs that matter and the few offensive spells that actually scratch something. :D
Absorb Vitality is very popular. While it seems useless and barely heals anything with normal attacks, if you use it before you do crits it'll actually restore a lot of your health. And in line with the above, it's fast enough that you can just ignore it and only cast it when the enemy spirit is broken, just before you go in for that crit.
Then by the time you play the game through you'll finally get access to Perfect Restoral which is a real game changer, as it simply makes the next attack that hits you be completely ignored. Including staggers and everything. While it's spent even when you block, it stays on through deflects. Against random normal enemies it's great because they tend to sneak in a staggering attack or a crit through your combos, and this lets you just keep on wailing. It turns most fights that would be a fight, into a onesided stomp. It's even better against bosses since almost every boss only has a few moves that are really dangerous and hard to deflect. You deflect what you can normally, and this will make sure that the instant or tricky red attack that alone usually kills you, will do nothing at all. After the buff procs and is dropped, you can cast it again and resume attacking faster than the boss can recover.
Imposing slab is very situational, but its amazing for getting some breathing room, and against enemies weak to earth it does a ton of hp and spirit damage.
And last but not least, there's Ominous Chill. Which is arguably the best ranged offensive spell in the game. It's really slow and requires the enemy to stay still to hit them, but it hits like a truck and with most bosses it does a ton of spirit damage AND is one of the very few exceptions to the whole status buildup issues, since 2-3 of those will usually chill the enemy (pun intended).
I've tried most of the other spells too but because we're limited to 4, these are typically the best picks I've found.
I found one use for them - but of course they are useful if you are skillful enough to apply them to your weapoon constantly during fights without capping your spirit and staggering. Which I am not.
The only use I found was applying them at the very start of the fight. I could stagger any boss with 4 hits (X) from my slashing spear ( or however it is called ), which in essence came down to a tiny sliver of extra damage.
But as you can use them forever and it costs nothing but spirit, of course they are useful if you manage to squeeze them in anytime a boss combos and you step out of the way, waiting for him to finish, or anytime he flies away or does god knows what.
I don't think you could rise it to at least 200%. Even if you somehow put 5% in piece you'll get 100 + 7 * 5 = 135. 10 * 1.35 = 13.5 so 3 seconds is not that big
It's 35%, which is a sizable increase. You can make any number sound small if you formulate like you do. :)
That said, even with no upgrades, it's still ABC for damage like in every game. Always be casting. And when you watch a boss fly away and you stand there for a second doing nothing, you could have always just applied that buff and it would never leave you worse off, it will always be better than having any sort of downtime. Always.
Magic isnt really weaker then it was in Nioh. Due to the spirit system it can be used indefinately now so it makes sense to reduce duration of buffs.
You basically presumed they were bad so didnt bother to try them and find out otherwise.
Buffs and spells in this game can be really powerful.
Each element or Virtue builds 1 status debuff. 3 of them deal damage to the Spirit gauge. Either directly or by reducing its max. 2 of them still deal damage. All 5 of them stun a boss when its applied.
Virtues also work in a Destructive - Generative cycle
It goes like this:
Fire -> Metal -> Wood -> Earth -> Water -> Fire
This means they will destroy effects of the Virtue they counter and in turn be countered by a different Virtue. Lu Bu's Fire spells are canceled with Water spells. Zhang Liao's Wood spells are canceled with Metal spells. On the other hand, if you are using Metal against Lu Bu, you will be canceled. Or by using Earth against Zhang Liao.
Divine Beast enchantments cant be canceled this way, but other powerful abilities can.
This will also destroy buffs of the opposing element. I dont know the exact list out of the top of my head with these. However there is a list in the menu that has them listed.
One example I can give is that Metal (poison) will remove a Wood (healing) buff.
This mechanic also applies to debuffs. Debuffs can be removed by using a buff of the appropriate Virtue. Doesnt matter if the actual effect of the buff is unrelated.
This mechanic can be really strong depending on the boss you are fighting.
In the 2 examples I gave, you can cancel some of their stronger attacks by using the right Virtue. And in general these Virtues are very strong against them. They have lower status resist build up to those.
Building high Water Virtue against Lu Bu also has the side benefit you will gain a lot of resistance to Fire Damage.
I dont know about that boss specifically, however each boss has different status resistance and weaknesses. On top of that, they scale with thats. This includes equipment stats both also base stats like Virtues.
Water Virtue gives much faster build up of the Chill status. Fire Virtue for the Burn status.
In addition for NG+ builds become more relevant. Bosses have higher stats.
In my NG run, spells were not useless at all. I didnt spec to be a spellcaster. The only spell I used for most of the game was Ice Weapon. That was before I took more interest in the magic system. Even so, Ice Weapon was incredibly useful for me.
Spells arent all about ''Big Damage Numbers''. Originally I was kind of like you and thought most of the spells are just the same thing. Turns out there's enough variation between to make a difference.
Actually, I suspect this is Placebo to some extend. Are you using Qilin? The first Divine Beast? It has a passive effect that restores health on a critical blow.
Being limited to 4 is imo, one of the QOL issues or downgrades compared to the Nioh games. While one could argue it makes the game more difficult by forcing a choice to be made, I still hold the opinion that we should have sets like Nioh had.
4 is too limited. It should atleast be 8.
More variation would be great to have and should be an option here.
So they were using a Virtue the boss was highly resistant too?
I do not use weapon elemental buffs because they are way too short and I prefer to have defensive buffs, Absorb Vitality and general buffs such as increased elemental debuff accumulation. Last spell is usually offensive one, I'm currently using Toxic spells.
I have a weapon with elemental damage, currently lightning, which allows me to apply shock on most normal enemies or mini-bosses.
I like the fact you can freely cast buffs as long as you have spirit but this does not work well for general clearing since even if I cast buff before engaging one pack, it will not last until another and I do not generate enough spirit in most cases. When you fight bosses, there are so many competing uses for spirit that short duration buff is useless. I prefer to cast defensive buffs or general buffs that tend to have longer duration than offensive ones. You can always dump spirit into spirit attacks or martial arts.
You know what, I don't care. I can't stand rude people. Blocked and bye.
It's a shame the war sets drain your levels (unless you go back to the village and reapply them) and are only good for when you're maxed. I would have loved to save my spells to a set and make an anti-element set for each type of element. I just had to deal with the snake lady in ng+ and she was surprisingly hard. So I specced for fire and that made her into a joke. Granted I wasn't using buffs but just those area spells that apply fire. But I can imagine when targeted against a weakness the weapon buffs can be quite good for those who can consistently score hits without getting hit in return.
Yeah I get you 100%. I mean I really like the approach Wo Long took to magic in general, that you fuel the resources by hitting the enemy, and you actually get a ton of spirit from attacking so where in a usual game like this you'd have to keep wailing for a minute to get a single spell off, it's a lot more manageable here.
But I don't think I've ever seen a game that handled buffs the way I would like them. Take Dark Souls 3 for example. Anyone can tell buffs are viable there. But they're so *barely* viable, that it's just so annoying to use them. Even if you're a fully invested caster, they only do a little bit more damage than store-bought items. And even then besides looking really pretty, they add a flat amount so they're really only useful on fast weapons. And even then, most of the time in PvE or PvP speccing for buffs will barely make a difference. I would argue that most fights you cannot win without buffs, you will probably not win with them either. Outside of twin swords that is.
I would like a completely different approach to weapon buffs in general. Like, a system where a full caster would be incredibly weak in melee with a regular weapon compared to someone who specialized in it. But buffing their weapon in addition to the pretty effect would actually add a ton of damage, literally like triple it, and thus make it really strong. And the buff would also last for several minutes so you didn't need to reapply all the time. Because even if these buffed weapons would now be incredibly strong and fully comparable to full melee user weapons or even stronger, the casters would still be dealing with far less stamina, far less various melee-oriented gear bonuses, perks and attributes and items, and a much lower armor.
Just idk. I don't like games where you have to constantly put in effort just to maintain basic gameplay. And those games where you spend 5 minutes buffing yourself before a boss fight? They're the absolute worst. Nioh 2 for example had a lot of buffs that could just have been permanent until procced, like Quickchange, or lasted 10x longer like the flaming/exploding arrow scrolls, levitation scrolls, etc. But well, this is just my opinion. Anything that lasts only a minute or so should be super strong.
but it's the REVERSE of the normal Virtue cycle.
if you apply shock (wood) for example then poison (metal) gets applied easier.
and so on and so on down the list.
so it actually makes it really easy to say for example start with Ice weapon, get the chill debuff then go into earth weapon, and apply the Heaviness debuff, then go into shock weapon apply shock then toxic weapon and apply poison which if we had a 5th slot could then go into fire weapon and apply burn.
poison also has the benefit of keeping all other debuffs timers maxed out until it wears off then they others will fall off after their normal timers.
now against something that's super resistant like Ayoe is to water it won't make them weak enough to apply chill, but if you know the bosses you can swap out the weapon buffs accordingly and basically constantly stagger the enemy ever 3-4 hits which spirals into a cycle of applying a debuff stagger boss, swap buff apply new debuff stagger boss, swap buff apply new debuff, boss gets spirit broken fatal blow and repeat till dead.