Armor and Mages

[Mytheos]

Does anyone have a link to information on how Armor types effect Mages?

Or would care to explain?

From what I can tell, it seems to limit their max mana and lowers their casting % chance?

I equipped gloves that were metal on my mage and the % didnt change, however my max mana did.

Then when I equipped legs and chest my casting % plummeted.

[Mytheos]

Is there anyway to mitigate the penalty?

I have seen several people talking about fighter/mage types...but with such a poor casting % it seems pointless unless you wanted to stick to leather armor.

And I really cant see the advantage unless you kept yourself buffed, but thats quite a bit of turn and mana usage.

[wendigo211]

Wearing metal armor stops a mage's ability to regenerate astral points and it induces spell casting failure. I'm not sure of the the exact amount of failure per peice of metal armor you're wearing, I'm not even sure if each peice contributes the same amount (i.e. a chest piece might cause more failure than boots). But to capitulate, mages should not wear metal armor. That leaves the best armors for mages: leather armor, the gambeson set and the lizard leather armor in chapter 5 that has extra fire damage resistance.

The advange of a fighter/mage is speed of buffing while still maintaining a high damage output. The downside is vulnerability. It's a glass cannon playstyle that some people don't like. It's very good in the fights where you need to do a lot of damage in a short period of time (e.g. the fight with the moha spearmen where you have 5 rounds to prevent the sacrifce or the fights with the cultists in chapter 4 that do insane damage whether you're wearing armor or not). On the other hand it's not that great in the endurance fights (e.g. the fight where you kill the tentacles or the one where you have to kill 21 zombies).

You can put up your buffs very quickly with multiple mages, because you can split the buffs between them. E.g. a typical opener for my hammer blow mage would be: Round 1: mage casts Move as Lightning 3 on himself and Standfast Catlike 4, Zurbaran casts Lightning Find You 4, Aurelia casts Move as lightning 3 on herself and Hawkeye Marksmanship 3 on herself, Takate and Naurim wait until Standfast Castlike and Lightning Find you are cast and proceed to hammer blow the two nearest opponents. Round 2: mage casts Move as Lightning 3 on Naurim and uses hammer blow on an opponent targeting Naurim, Zurbaran casts Move as Lightning 3 on Takate, If any enemies who were hammer blown are still alive, Aurelia takes them out with a targeted shot, otherwise she uses tripple shot twice, Naurim and Takate each use Hammer Blow twice. Subsequent rounds are all about dealing damage and healing if necessary. If you had another warrior instead of a mage it would take you another round or two get all those buffs up and if you had a more traditional mage you would have one less attacker once you got those buffs up.

You can minimize the damage taken by your fighter-mage in a few ways, one is to use defensive spells like Duplicatus or Fastness of Body, but that wastes an action. The other way to exploit the AI. The AI tends to target (there are some exceptions who are scripted to target mages), first the nearest opponent, next the last opponent who attacked them and third the opponent with the lowest dodge/parry (which ever would be defending against their attack). If you bear that in mind, you can see to it that your armored allies are taking the hits while your mage is dealing the damage.