What's the worst sigil combo?

[Shrinkshooter]

I'm going through a second playthrough, and I'm going Ice for destruction, kinesis for control, and delerium for support.

Before, I used lightning destro, ice control, and corruption support. With the bugs and lightning chaining, things died quickly. My current combo, though, is super underwhelming. Delerium is interesting, but slows things down a bit, and really doesn't help all that much. Ice does decent damage, but because I now need to stack mastery manually (no mastery hives anymore) and also kill targets one by one (ice doesn't chain) or in a group with an extremely slow AoE charge, everything takes foooooreeeeeveeeerrrrrr.

So going off of that, what do you think the WORST sigil combination would be? I'm thinking delerium, ice, and maybe phase...not really sure.

[Campell]

In my opinion there is no bad combination, it's jsut mage that don;t know how to use it. Actually i will say bad combination is when you have 9 spells on DE, CE or MA ONLY! But when you got unique patterns there may be something like worse and better combination since you got synergies that works with 2 elements i've heard so it' s better to have those 2 equipped.

[Eunomiac]

I disagree with Campell---the Sigil system is meant to work together, and it's silly to suggest that every possible combination of three Sigils is going to be equally effective: Some Sigils work very well together, others do not.

Of course, I've only been playing long enough to pick up my fourth Sigil. I'm so inexperienced that I'm convinced Corruption is bad, Nova isn't worth the time, Trap patterns are useless, and a whole lot of other silly ideas I'm sure are at least partly wrong :P (Hell, I just figured out why Mastery is a thing). So, I don't know what Sigil combos are bad... but logic suggests they've got to be there.

[Shrinkshooter]

Corruption is awesome and it's my favorite, next to lightning and phase. Don't use it for damage (although a damage corruption pool works wonders), use it for support. Protip: make your primary fire a corruption control, and tag the weakest mobs at the start of a battle. Lock them down and ignore them for 10 seconds, then go back and kill them. Tada, battlefield-sweeping bugs. They're especially deadly towards the beginning of the game.

Novas are meh. With only charge blink and galvanize activation, they're more for defense, even though you can use them to attack, which I sometimes do. I'm not really thrilled about them.

And I agree that traps are useless; pools last longer, and impact areas hit faster. They DO home in to targets, so there's no guesswork, but I don't prefer them. Rays are almost useless. Some have great application, and they're reliable for obtaining sigil powers, but cons outweigh the pros.

And I also disagree with campbell. The balance of the game is a bit all over the place, so some combos will most certainly be less effective than others. I'm convinced that the 'worst' combination would definitely include delirium, though.

[Eunomiac]

I'm going to toy with Corruption a bit more---I think my main problem is how confusing it is to "grok" compared to the basic elemental sigils that are working just peachy for me. I don't want to waste good spell components experimenting, but using weaker spell components to experiment will likely only confirm my bias against Corruption.

As for Ray, there's at least one fantastic use that I've found: Ice Ray Control. It's the quickest way to lock down a group of melee attackers who've gotten too close, because the Freeze effect begins almost immediately upon being struck with the Ray---and you can sweep it from side to side to build up the freeze on numerous attackers as you back away, then switch to something more final.

A shame about Trap: I was really hoping someone might convince me of its merits. Given that it's a whole pattern, I assume Xaviant tested it and found at least some worthy applications!

[Shrinkshooter]

Well, next to the homing ability, they may be more powerful with burst damage than either of the others. I would need to do some testing.

[Eden]

I don't think any Sigil combination is terrible or inadequate in an absolute sense. I'm sure you can get through the game just fine with any of them.

However, my impression is that some Sgils/Sigil combinations are relatively weaker just because the basic Sgils (Fire, Ice, Lightning & Kinesis) are both effective and straightforward.

To put it simply: nothing beats killing mobs outright. Why should I bother with mind controlling ennemies, managing several debuffs, waiting for parasites to incubate, tagging mobs with this spell and then that just to spawn the right sort of minion and so on when I can just as easily kill everything in sight. There's nothing wrong with Sigils like Delirium and Necromancy, they're functional, they add variety and can be good fun. But I'm struggling a bit to see them as anything other than more elaborate ways of killing mobs that aren't hard to kill to begin with.

Towards the beginning of the game, you lack access to all the Sigils to make more involved builds. Towards the end of the game, you just don't have to! No need for clever strategies when you're the guy who brought a tactical nuke to a knife fight.

[Wayne Entrprise]

Put some time into Necromancy and you can have the whole battlefield with a army of undead at your side.

[Eunomiac]

Originally posted by Atavist:

Towards the end of the game, you just don't have to! No need for clever strategies when you're the guy who brought a tactical nuke to a knife fight.

As much as I want to disagree with your post, I can't. I've said it a few times, but I think this is the biggest problem at the heart of Lichdom: The game doesn't apply enough pressure, in the right places, to reward players for delving deeply into this fantastic spell creation system.

Importantly, this observation has nothing to do with difficulty. After all, Lichdom covers the whole difficulty continuum, from too-easy to impossibly difficult. I think the issue is a failure to include tactical variety in encounters. The terrain and the enemies are always so similar---enemies spawning and running at you across open spaces with a couple of useful choke points---that the same strategies always work.

I'd love to see encounters that, say, require using Control effects to divide a large group of enemies into smaller groups to have any chance of victory; or enemies that reflect Destruction (but not Control) effects back at you unless they're stun locked; or enemies that become stronger the more mastery you've debuffed them with---things that require changing strategies.

[A Big Hairy Monster]

I think there are a few meh combos. Though I suspect some of that depends on what you're doing. I imagine, for instance, that Delirium, Corruption, Necromancy all together might actually be pretty bad. I gather than Delirium / Necromancy dont really do damage, and I find that while Corruption's mastery/control ability is amazing, its terrble at pure destrution. So I think that combo would work really poorly in terms of speed. I imagine it would be INSANE in big fights once you got your first few kills though, but it would take time to get it up and running maybe.

[Yimgi]

I can tell you from experience that delirium, corruption, and necromancy are almost unplayable when used together, but if you are that bored you can probably make it work.

Also, delirium is not bad. You just need higher level spells to make it work properly. Once you get some status effect duration/high control, mastery augments and your "cower in fear/make it attack your mind control" starts lasting 15+ seconds and even longer.. you will find that enemies are dead long before they go berserk, because this spell also applies mastery. The destruction aspect of it is kind of useless though. I haven't found anything that hit hard enough for me to care, and reflect damage? Meh.. how about a fireball. - My favorite build so far is fire, delirium, with mastery necromancy.. I can't remember the last time I took any damage. and I should mention this synergy called bone golem.

[h3xC@]

Is this how everyone is stacking their stuff? One sigil for Destruction, one for Mastery, one for Control? I'm finding it more effective to allow each Sigil to do each effect... Nova gets Control on one, for example, AOE gets Destruction, and Targeted gets Mastery, say. To answer the original post, I'm digging Lightning, Corruption, and Kinesis, but I'll switch out Kinesis for Necromancy, most likely.

[Eden]

Originally posted by Wayne Entrprise:

Put some time into Necromancy and you can have the whole battlefield with a army of undead at your side.

Originally posted by epo:

Also, delirium is not bad.

I'm not saying that Delirium & Necromancy are absolutely bad. As far as I can tell, they're perfectly functional. My impression is just that they're less efficient than a straight up damage build. If you're up against a build that can kill anything in 2 casts, all these extra spells to mind-control mobs, spawn undead, build shields, select your permanent summons, get other mobs to attack your pet etc just feel a bit like wasted casts...