Is full mage(no summone) playable?

[Korky Buchek]

Hello, wanna buy this game and thinking about mage build.
Is there any aoe spells?
Any advices from mages?)
Or melee combat in terms of perks and skills more fun?

[bobbie046]

A few AOE spells and they can be very powerful. need to back them up with spell power perks. Scorchung Blast is my favourite, I am one shotting ogres and most bosses with it. Of course you need to clear out Silent Sila and her merry men from the Abandoned Keep to get it

[Msiren]

Went melee in the EA, just started a pure mage playthrough. I've just completed Act 1 and not only is it viable, it's hilariously broken once you get some of the stronger spells. I sold everything I could to buy the wand from the horned merchant that's on the island to your left once you wash up on shore right away and invested in perks that give wands bonus spell power.

Get your spirituality up to 6 or 7 so you can use the first set of more powerful spells, then endurance to 6 for the caster set you can get from giving offerings to all the druid shrines. After that it's personal preference. I went with practicality to 10 (reduces spell costs and boosts item sale value) and put my first 5 points into increased sale prices so I could buy all the expensive crap. Sitting on like 60k atm because of that. Will probably go all in on Spirituality and Perception now for damage and crit chance, deviating to other stats if needed to use any gear I find.

After that, almost anything in the Spirituality tree is good. Getting the perk in the General tree to boost your HP by 20% of your max MP means you'll almost never need to invest in health or Endurance other than to meet gear requirements. You can just go all in on Spirituality for mana and damage and your HP will go up a little bit with it each time.

Thus far I haven't been terribly impressed by the cubes I've found but getting 45% more spellpower while holding a wand in one of your hands makes it very easy to hit one-shot thresholds on most normal enemies. Summons are kinda garbage because of how bad their AI is but I'd still recommend you keep one summon spell handy just to create meat shields. The enemies seem to focus on dealing with your summons over you most of the time, so it can buy you time to heal up or dish out some AOE damage while your opponents deal with the goons. If you're dead set on never touching summons, get good at kiting. The AI isn't super smart, so waiting until they get close then dashing -towards- and past them actually works best because every damn thing in this game has a massive lunge attack and they will go flying past you most of the time. Always dodge sideways or forward at an angle, never backwards because of this.

[VaultKid]

Yeah i'm currently rolling over the game with my full mage build.

Once you get some good gear and understand that you can get critical chance/ Damage by just switching from regular to charged spell ( cost more/less mana activation from a perk in spirituality) it's just devastating. Currently ending chapter 2 sitting on 300% spell damage, 50% critical magic chance and 300% critical damage.

I'm one shoting mostly everything, 2 -3 shoting boss.

It even make me want to reroll to a physical build, like i was wasting the combat system.

But with every bad opinion about the melee combat system, i'm probably not missing anything.

[Jodran]

Originally posted by VaultKid:

Yeah i'm currently rolling over the game with my full mage build.

Once you get some good gear and understand that you can get critical chance/ Damage by just switching from regular to charged spell ( cost more/less mana activation from a perk in spirituality) it's just devastating. Currently ending chapter 2 sitting on 300% spell damage, 50% critical magic chance and 300% critical damage.

I'm one shoting mostly everything, 2 -3 shoting boss.

It even make me want to reroll to a physical build, like i was wasting the combat system.

But with every bad opinion about the melee combat system, i'm probably not missing anything.

Yeah this is how I feel, I've completed almost everything on the first island and I just 1-shot everything. Bosses are a joke cos I can just kite and blast them, it's almost boring how strong it is, I might try again as a full warrior build.

[M.T. Fish]

Yes. You can actually stealth attack with spells so if you have a good high powered spell you can just blow everything up before it see you. Magic crist build seems really strong.

The downside is that it's hard to loot the corpses when they go flying everywhere.