mages worthless later in a game?

[matlajs]

As far as i can see, later in the ToB, most of most important fights, mages useless. not that they are useless themselves, but every minion in the game is just spell imune. every regular drow in underdark is 50-50. with dragons the fight has to be as fast as possible or party will just die, so mage doesn't have time to cast 2-3x lower resistance to be effective. every demon crap is also spell imune. i don't see their use above priests in ToB.

[Armanz]

Mages are throughout the game the strongest class basically.

Their breaching spells & summons get a lot of work done and Timestop is an overkill spell except against enemies immune to it.

[red255]

many enemies late game have large amounts of spell resistance yes.

thats why about half your high level spells are for removing protections and lowereing enemy resistance and saves.

But even without that, a high level cleric can summon a planetar. the planetar (level 9 spell slot HLA) can cast 3x raise dead, 3x heal, 3x true seeing 3x restoration. I can't recall if it has chaotic commands. but it pretty much makes your cleric obsolete.

the thing carries a silver sword that kills things on hit.

but yeah, mage has a bunch of options,

you could summon big things, Mordenkain's sword is pretty hard to kill late game.

you can cast improved haste on your melee. you can cast true seeing and breach to remove enemy magic protections so your melee can murder.

Improved haste doubles the amount of attacks per round a unit makes. you can make 10 attacks per round which is the engine maximum without using greater whirlwind if you use the improved haste spell.

so really summon planetar and Improved haste alone would warrant a slot on your team.

they also can cast some powerful energy resistance spells if you are fighting dragons or other such enemies.

I run my mages as support instead of nukers. If you prepare a team of melee, with a mage it generally kills what you send it against.

[matlajs]

i don't have so many playthrough behind me, but i have always played full party runs. Recently i did finished run with aeria as main spellcaster, i know that multies are not supposed to be strong, but Anomen was capable only call Angel( or whatever) - the lesser form of Planetar. I don't see a reason to cast any spell removing magic protections, if we are talking about just resilient meeles or physical damage dealers. For those i have used lower resistances or breach in case of Marileths or similar with stoneskin. So maybe that isn't mages, who become obsolette rather than majority of spells due to creatures resistances. I wish, that it were some sort of detailed bestiary in game( like in PoE).

i am going to do solo run mage/fighter maybe + thiev. i am desperate to try something like time stop and kill enemy in meele within it.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

Arcane magic users are the strongest classes in the game. But they also require A LOT of experience to use properly.

And how you uses them can change radically depending on solo vs party vs what your party is.

What you're fighting doesn't matter, as while you could spec to hard counter what you're fighting, it's simply not nessecary. A universally useful selection of spells, and keeping wands/scrolls available for backup for more specialized problems can easily carry you through every encounter in the game even without foreknowledge of how to beat them. And that's solo play.

Using a party is largely trivial as you can just focus on buffing your party mates and let them rip through everything without effort.


Divine casters, especially clerics, aren't bad either, but their strength lies in different areas of how arcane works (they're much more leaning towards the Support magic side while their offensive magic options are less than mages get, but they're also more innately capable without using spells), and you need to get a feel for how those differences affect things with how your current situations are.

[levelworm]

IMO mages are more powerful towards the end game, simply because you need spells to remove protections, layers and layers of them, to enable your fighters to hack them to death. On top of that, some enemies are extrememly resistant to physical damage, or need very good weapons to kill, of course they are usually highly resistant to magic as well.

My knowledge of spellcasters are mudane to be the best. In most of the cases I use spellcasters to buff up the party and cast a bunch of spells to remove protections, and then my hasted fighters can damage them properly. I know there are ways to battle them directly with spells, but that requires casting a lot of lower resistance spells and knowledge of contigencies and sequences, which I rarely use at the moment. I still perfer to damage them by fighters.

Of course the spell casters produce the best fighters, the black sword and the planetars.

[matlajs]

i have really got myself to respect area dpr spells like clouds. i hate death spell( that 6th lvl one), which is able to kill almost any summon and casters do not deplete them on pc. and i think exactly the same as levelworm, because i recently finished my game as berserker and even with full party, this kit is kind of OP with its unique ability. Thanks to azure axe i didn't have problem with undead, thanks to unique + some buffs i could kill every lich but kangaxx almost immediately. this forced my mind to try a solo game, but i am playing kensai/mage/thiev and i am already feel a setback. I thought that thaco will be decreased also upon leveling other classes aside kensai.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

no. Multi-classes get the best of each stat for their class level.

Fighter has significantly better Thac0 so you only progress thac0 by your fighter levels.

you get the best saves of each class when they level.

HP is rolled as normal when each class levels up and then divided by your number of classes, with your Con bonus spread as evenly as possible across the classes. So if you had 18 Con, your fighter would get +2 HP, and the mage and thief levels get +1 hp from Con.

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Also keep in mind...the Berserker is uttlerly broken ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's rage is only supposed to protect from a tiny handful of status effects (Command, Sleep, Charms, morale break, +4 save vs stun/hold), and run the risk of going truly berserk per round and losing control of them.

But BG was all like, here, be immune to basically everything with no downside.

[Kraptor]

Mages are very powerfull expecially in BG2 but they are also real hard to play.

[callipygous_tp]

Its been awhile since I played through all of BG2 but I can't imagine how I would defeat some of the tougher fights without having at least on mage.