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You are treating mages as though they don't do anything at all, when in reality, they are still doing damage, buffing, casting spells in active parties. Just because something isn't as effective as something else doesn't mean it has zero use; it just isn't as effective. I think you are exaggerating the casting times also. As long as you back attack an enemy, you can be sure to get off your big spells before they approach and end up stun-locking the enemy down so you can just spam spells. I can do this with my all mage party on Maze 13.
Now, I prefer not to run with any mages and agree with a lot of what you have to say, but to say mages have "zero use in active battle" is an irrational statement. Leon hitting for 400k damage with Extinction can stack up to millions of damage if there are multiple enemies. If there are 5 enemies, Leon could push 2 million damage in about 7 seconds.
WIth 4 fighters, the screen is wiped out before Leon gets that spell off though. This is not an exaggeration, this happened when I was trying to test mages out in my active battle party, and I actually had to make my fighters literally do nothing but stand there just so I could see what spells like Meteor and Extinction could do organically in a battle.
Don't get me wrong, I had a group of 3 total killers, Precis, Ernest, Opera, with those 3 a mage isn't going to get a meteor swarm or extinction off most of the time, and even in the situation where they can, the enemies will be mostly dead to the point where it's just a wasted animation. Ernest can stand at very long range and just spam bed of roses nonstop, and stuff just gets totally deleted. At the same safe distance that a mage can stand at. You can set him on AI and he does nothing but spam bed of roses back to back against any and all targets. Basically like Dias with Air Slash, just better.
I tested all the characters out, 2 playthroughs, 100%'d the game, every character is 255 with their best gear or close enough to it.
I've done meme runs/tests with 4 mages as well. My first playthrough has Celine, Leon, Noah, Rena. All the mages in 1 party. I consider that to be a gimp/challenge run of some sort, it's technically possible to still win, but it's not exactly fun, you're not really engaging with any mechanics, just standing there waiting for spells to go off, it's actually less engaging than playing with fighters. Maybe that would be different if I could cast spells while moving with a mage, and I could actually move/position/dodge attacks, and hold the spell to release it at an opportune moment. There's so much more they could have done with mages to make them actually fun to use, but they didn't.
Extinction deals like 400k-450k dmg without potion buff up to 600-650k buffed.
For boss that run away like Iseria or Garbiel mages are great but Leon is the best since Extinction is non elemental.
For normal enemies or boss that is hardly move, fighter are better.
Mages utterly destroy fighters in combat before post game, especially from early mid to end game, pre post game. The only exceptions are if you get overpowered weapons extremely early, in which cases mages still destroy them after very early game.
I will copy and paste my comparison of why this is wrong from the prior post:
"Physical users may be doing 1-5k per hit at a time and are not realistically going to go over the dmg limit. Meanwhile, an unoptimized for pure dmg Celine or Rena can be hitting 8-13k spells on all targets and the cast rate is pretty fast. If you're dealing with 3-5 mobs they're doing a total of 24-65k dmg compared to those physical dmg dealers."
Further, you're info about INT equipment is also covered in my post and you're wrong. They have several robes well before post game that include INT you should be equipping or making. They don't need the rings to pull ahead of fighters. In fact, my above examples prove that with the numbers at mid game and late game. Fighters struggle to even utilize the combat skill to break the dmg limit while mages surpass that dmg limit non-issue before post game. This is despite the fighter using double dmg boosting rings while the caster uses rings for effects other than boosting dmg.
The first INT robe you can get naturally is in Linga, still fairly early only a couple of hours into the game (start of 2nd continent). This provides +100 INT. Steal it from Bowman's wife at the counter the moment you enter Linga and you can replicate it.
Actually, Helmetbreaker and his Knuckle break attack. Sword of Life is not going to be used due to poor dmg, slow startup for interruption, and the fact you don't need the healing from it if you are playing right. It also is far lower dmg compared to using Aeterna or Mirror Slice. Sword of Life is extremely bad as a KM unless you're reliant on it for Bloody Armor cheese. Even without
You're right listening Helmetbreak. The knuckle break KM does a lot more break dmg but due to similar issue with startup delay that Sword of Life has it isn't always ideal and depends on the enemies. Helmetbreak is very versatile with being used to dodge attacks, cross a distance fast, and hits flying targets and is, overall, a bit better despite weaker break.
I'll present some more concrete examples.
Using a later game save with the skills needed to test it easily since I don't have a save back then.
Max level 3 Sword of Life with Famed Sword Veinslay / Chain of Might (+30% attack) / Berserker Ring (rage, 200% dmg) does around 25k on a single target. Due to the pitiful range and the fact more targets = more likely to be knocked out of casting / using it this is almost always a single target skill in reality. Even if it was hitting multiple targets, however, the dmg is not that good and it is a pain to actually use with too many negatives to it, but the healing helps worse players not die. This is the best sword you are likely to have around this point unless you used a guide to figure out Aerterna as finding that out without a guide is comprised of literal thousands of different crafting results (aka impossible without a guide, realistically). This actually benefits a straight normal comparison for most people vs melee Claude below.
Claude using same setup except swap Chain of Might for Meteor Ring (+1 hit) can do melee dmg of about 48k in roughly the same timeframe that on a single target or even more targets more reliably than Sword of Life if they group due to fast double attack stun effect (superior stun over Sword of Life's slower hits and better startup). If you later in the game have something like Aeterna it completely blows away his killer arts for both stunning the enemy and doing dmg due to the extra projectiles scaling with +1/2 hit bonus. I'll do the same test with Aeterna and the +1 hit accessory for a frame of reference... even though you will not realistically have this at late game (dmg is +200 on Aeterna btw). With this it does over 90k in the same timeframe. Basic attack spam is Claude's best DPS for most of the game, not his killer moves. It only gets stronger when you get the +2 hit accessory.
What about Meteor Palm fully upgraded? Using Chain of Might like first test it does fairly decent at around 50-71k but despite the visual it has worse stunlock than basic attack and could sometimes randomly knock target too far missing chunk of dmg. More often than not it hit the lower end of the spectrum because even when hugging it would push them too far away missing the last few hits. Still, a pretty solid pure dmg skill for Claude.
Claude's Mirror Blade while we're at it... using Chain of Might like first test. 67k dmg, often misses its later hits and is extremely common to see various enemies interrupt it mid way due to its slow stun from slower hits. In fact, it was so frequently interrupted I had to swap enemies multiple times and eventually settled for back attack only tests for consistency. This skill is, honestly, horrifyingly awful due to being unreliable and that 67k dmg took way longer to achieve due to the long drawn out animation compared to the other attack methods.
Testing Rena with her Star Flare, which takes roughly the same time (maybe slightly slower, barely) against 4 enemies she did 50 - 80k total (likely crit variance) and does break dmg to all targets as well rather than just 1 target like most fighters do unless you pull them into groups. She has Gravity Crush, which isn't good at late game but early and mid game is quite powerful. Overall, her dmg output against a target she does not have elemental advantage is still comparable to the melee characters using Sorcerer's Knuckles & Robe of Deception, picked for all around stats and resistances rather than pure dmg. She is using zero offensive rings, too. Despite this she competes with a physical DPS in overall dmg output as a primarily support character...
Celine tested with similar non-offensive accessory setup, using Dragonstaff + Robe of Isthar... Southern Cross did a whooping 129k dmg against 4 targets and broke all of their shields in 2 casts due to its immense break dmg. Again, she isn't even using an offensive accessory or opitmized factors, yet, to boost her dmg but she is destroying any of Claude's more optimized setups in dmg and also breaking them at the same time to all targets on screen. Claude only wins in strictly single target dmg, and not by huge margins even. The cast time for this isn't much longer than him performing a single skill so you can't claim "battle over before they finish casting" because this isn't true.
All of those tests were on the same enemies except the ridiculous Mirror Blade test due to its issues.
Around early-mid game they start getting much stronger spells. Their biggest issue is early game with spells like Fire Bolt which I swear the developer didn't even test due to its accuracy issues and when it does hit its miserable dmg still.
True. Confirmed in my testing. Very unfortunate for Mirror Blade.
No offense, but it is clear you have not actually done proper testing or paid attention to what mages were accomplishing. It is easy to overlook them since they're essentially background noise if the AI is controlling them as you slam attack or R1, etc. on Claude or whoever but the fact is they're far stronger than you have realized. Interestingly, Rena and Celine had the easiest times in the arena solo duels compared to the fighters (granted part of Rena's trick was Gravity Crush actually stuns most enemies in place during the animation).
I cannot speak for them in post game to verify your statements about them in post game, though, but I have my doubts tbh... especially seeing the sheer failure to properly gauge and analyze them on display if we're being totally frank.
Their AI is bad, but controlling Celine, I was doing triple the amount of damage my fighters were putting out while also breaking the enemies with ease. I was hitting the first damage cap well before my fighters were even a third of the ways there (although I was using Fire and Thunder Ring to be fair). Mages are powerhouses, but their AI is so bad that they just fall flat.
Post game I was doing upwards of 80k-100k damage with ease as Celine, while my fighters were hitting 50-60k on average. It's just too bad you can't configure your party's AI with more precision.
Yeah. It'd be nice if we could fine-tune the AI tactics a bit more. The best way I saw to set up mages is to turn off every spell except for their big one and switch them to "Attack them with everything" Strategy. This gets them to consistently spam their best spell.
Here's a video of what Leon can do in post game. He does more damage than Celine does with meteor storm.
https://streamable.com/n3xb7p
I bet you probably think this is good?
Let's count the cast time + animation of the spell. It's around 7s for the cast time + the animation to finish which freezes the screen.
Notice how it took around 50s to kill the arena 50 bird using extinction.
Literally any fighter could have dropped the bird in a fraction of the time.
Before Leon gets Extinction, it would have taken him even longer than 50s to kill the bird, and any fighter could have dumped that bird in a fraction of the time. Nobody can tell me mages are comparatively better vs fighters before getting their top spells and top equipment.
The value of a spells like Extinction is very minimal in team play, because nobody else can do damage during the spell animation.
Kross continent, you can steal a berserk ring from a sailor in Kurik, and Claude's damage is beating Celine's damage by a ton the moment he equips that, even if he pairs it with a shop sword, not even a sword of marvels from the goodie box. Mages never stop losing to fighters after this point.
Celine will be doing 50-100 damage ticks with Ray while Claude is doing 300-500+ with shop swords and a berserk ring using normal attacks, or per-tick with meteor palm or sword of life. And mages become even less relevant the moment you do any customization for higher tier weapons, or craft a rainbow diamond into a ring of might to pair with a berserk ring.
In my first playthrough, I went with Opera instead of Ashton, so I literally had Celine in my party until after the tournament of arms, because I had nobody else to swap in. It was Claude, Rena, Celine, Precis. Even though I equipped Celine with good quality items I could craft or customize, she lost so bigly to fighters that my initial optimism for mages just diminished entirely in early-mid game. I couldn't wait to swap out Celine and Rena both for fighters. I was even more disappointed that they didn't add a Berserk Ring or Ring of Might equivalent for mages, or something to further increase their cast speed.
It would be best to use that on a spell like thunderstorm or ravenous fiend that doesn't freeze the screen, but still has wide area and multi-hitt properties. Once you start freezing the screen with spell animations, you start robbing fighters from doing DPS.
Additionally, I believe those procs should work if you use those attacks through assault. I know HP/MP leech works on attacks from characters with those factors who use them via assault boost, so I see no reason why ailment procs wouldn't do the same.
I have never seen a Petrification Factor before. I have seen Paralysis, Silence, Poison, and Instant Death.
Why? Because by that time you have the gear and factors that fighters wreck everything, you won't need to care anymore who is better.
If you do bosses and world bosses early on, you are grateful for Angel Feather, Revive or multi-hit spells with high break damage.
Mages are the best characters on assault for the reasons you stated. They got a place early on before you got anyone else. I went with Claude, Rena, Celine, Precis as my 4 characters until after the Laquer tournament on my first playthrough, and couldn't wait to drop Rena and Celine ASAP for Opera and Ernest.
I would argue a spell like southern cross, before you unlock the damage cap is even better when used through assault, and this is something too many seem to overlook about mages early on. It does the same break damage, and the same damage, without the cast speed. Whatever mages bring to the table in an active battle party early on is more efficiently utilized from assault.
At end game, sure why not, it's fun to beat stuff up with mages normal attacking with the winged bracelet. They have some meme usages for fun later on. For example, Noah against EQ.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3090758154