Ranged Vs Mage/Summoner

[Moonstruck]

Now, don't get me wrong I absolutely love core keeper and the community behind it, this is merely a passing remark

But what's the point of the mage/sum build If I can do so much more damage early on with a flintlock steel? I wanted to get into a mage type build but quickly came to realise it did feel a little under powered early on. Note because of this I did switch early in the game,

I didn't bring the build to late game since I haven't got to the end yet. but why would I when i can do ~1.6k with a flintlock (not fully upgraded) and it doesn't use mana

Now please correct me if I'm wrong or I'm missing something

[Lorska]

Summoner only exists to buff magic builds to high heavens (you gain insane amounts of ranged attack speed, magic damage and barrier which you can transform into extra base damage and maba per second. It's absolute garbage in damage compared to any "offensive" skill so just don't treat it as such an option.

All magic weapons currently are also ranged weapons so you'll gain quite insane numbers with all those buffs stacked up.

However you hit the nail on the head in that it's all pointless early game when you don't have any skills.
The main issue magic damage has is from a design standpoint. Mana is clearly the limiting factor to "keep it in check" so it's just awful when you have the limitation, but later on you completely remove any mana economy because you will regenerate insane amounts through barrier and critical hits give you essentially infinite mans too.

Magic should be slow and powerful and limited by its resource in exchange, instead we get a magic SMG bullet hose where you either have infinite bullets or just some spares.

[Moonstruck]

Oh okay! so I actually was missing something it is quite good with mana being the limiting factor

I'll need to checkout the late builds

Hmm okay! I mean I'd love to see what they do with the mage class in the future if anything!

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Moonstruck:

Oh okay! so I actually was missing something it is quite good with mana being the limiting factor

I'll need to checkout the late builds

Hmm okay! I mean I'd love to see what they do with the mage class in the future if anything!

I personally did not find mana such a limiting factor early on (outside of boss battles on hard), since things just do not survive very long in general and mage weapons do ~+20% more base DPS than physical ranged weapons to make up for that I guess. If you get the auto crit spam skill from ranged and the mana on crit skill from the mage tree, mana is not really a factor anymore with the 3.3 speed arcane staff.. which is pretty sad. If you use slower weapons, they might have thought players would lean more into mana reg

... but Mana reg is bugged right now and a bonus to it only provides 10% of what is written, so when you go from 10/s to 30/s, you are actually only at 12/s. You could already get a 14% reg increase in early game with Glow Tulip food, but you don't. This also makes upgrading summon items pretty annoying, since without an actual increase in mana reg and only max mana and mana cost, resummoning becomes very annoying later on. Even using mage weapons without infinite mana auto crit becomes a chore, since you just need longer and longer reg pauses with mana cost going up, because the stat to even that out does not work.

Well see how things change.

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Also keep in mind that stating the damage number of a single flintlock shot is not very impressive if you consider its 0.5 speed. It has to do a lot of damage per shot because it is so slow. The 1.0 speed wooden staff does not do only half the damage (which would make it even), but like 60% of it, which means it already has higher DPS with a crit bonus on top. If there would be a 0.5 speed magic weapon, it would likely do more than 1.9k per shoot, because magic seems designed to do more damage at a cost.

[Moonstruck]

Interesting! well thank you for the information!