Dawn of Magic 1: Some remarks on the second difficulty level

[SmellofNapalm]

I just wanted to make some observations on the balancing of Dawn of Magic. Especially in regards to how the second difficulty plays and which aspects of the character building system seem important in hindsight.

- Health bloat on enemies (in the second difficulty) is extreme and thus every little bit of damage gain is important.

- Additional damage for spells from various sources is useful and an important consideration; but moreso on some spells than others (area of effect and spells that last for a long time).

- Spell points are useful to a point, but later on most spell levels should be acquired through item bonuses.

- Regularly checking the inventories of the various traders is the easiest way to find fitting items with the right bonuses. Unique items can also be frequently found at the traders.

- Focusing on only a few spells is important, but only investing in one or two will become inefficient because of the escalating costs in spell points. Also, eventually additional damage sources will become very useful.

- Even high spell point costs can sometimes be worth it, since it's hard to estimate where the threshold (in regards to enemy health pools) is.

- Damage over time can be countered by regeneration and healing. Especially enemies that have the Dark Path-teleport available to consistently heal themselves are a huge nuisance because of that. Melee attacks can help provide more burst damage, though it might be less of a hassle to simply bypass these kinds of enemies.

- Item requirements for stat points (strength, intellect, energy) are very high and stat points are in very short supply. Therefore I'd say that the mini-quests that award stat points are probably most worth doing (in spite of the need to finish them repeatedly to get the reward).

- Tattoos are an easy way to get more stat points and the bonuses increase after a while.

- Dark Path is extremely useful, no matter which difficulty, both in terms of conveniently moving around and getting out of trouble. The added mobility is especially useful in Act V, since the teleport allows the player to often drastically shorten the distance to his objectives.

- Another general tip: Potions can only be carried to a certain extent. Storing some of them with the trader djinni can be useful for the boss fights, but doing this too much is costly since accessing the chest costs money. On the other hand just selling the excess consistently is very profitable and frankly breaks the economy.

- Keeping track of rune words and totems (for item recipes) is a huge pain and not necessarily worth it. Rune words can result in higher requirements, which might negate the effort put into the system. Set items from what I know are worth having, but - again - are a huge pain to keep track of. Especially since set items are not marked as such.

- Alternatively it's possible to ignore all of this and just hope that you find a piece of the Rainbow set and hope that you can fulfill the requirements ;o)

[treborx555]

I solved one of your points with my mod, that disables all shops besides the summoned genie trader. Meaning you aren't able to just raid shops for good loot. In return i made alchemy recipes to craft spell scrolls more easily. I Also made it impossible to socket runes without the random rune alchemy recipe, effectively adding rng to the drops!

Itemization really is bad, especially for mages. I added lots of gear that gives spell damage because of that. I left a modding guide in case you still want to play the game. I might come back to it later, I always end up wanting to play it after a year or two away..

Oh and in case you think the game is hard, you probably don't know about 2 things. First, you don't need all set pieces to get the most important effect, extra spell projectiles. I think just 2 pieces is enough. I think the water set makes you fire 3 times the ice balls. Next is rainbow mage staff, that thing basically doubles your damage with spells as it's the only staff in the game that gives spell damage. With a set and that staff, you're doing 10 times the damage. Oh, and the iceball and ice blast both benefit from the bonus spell damage, so it scales really hard.

[SmellofNapalm]

Originally posted by treborx555:

I solved one of your points with my mod, that disables all shops besides the summoned genie trader. Meaning you aren't able to just raid shops for good loot. In return i made alchemy recipes to craft spell scrolls more easily. I Also made it impossible to socket runes without the random rune alchemy recipe, effectively adding rng to the drops!

Itemization really is bad, especially for mages. I added lots of gear that gives spell damage because of that. I left a modding guide in case you still want to play the game. I might come back to it later, I always end up wanting to play it after a year or two away..

Oh and in case you think the game is hard, you probably don't know about 2 things. First, you don't need all set pieces to get the most important effect, extra spell projectiles. I think just 2 pieces is enough. I think the water set makes you fire 3 times the ice balls. Next is rainbow mage staff, that thing basically doubles your damage with spells as it's the only staff in the game that gives spell damage. With a set and that staff, you're doing 10 times the damage. Oh, and the iceball and ice blast both benefit from the bonus spell damage, so it scales really hard.

I actually do like that I can get good items from shops. I don't necessarily mind random loot systems, but in games where items and especially unique items give + to skills/spells I'm always quite annoyed when some cool items turn out to be useless for whichever character I'm currently playing.

Oh, no worries, I'm still returning to it regularly. ;) Even limiting myself to the higher priority builds, that's still at least three or four playthroughs. At least on the first difficulty.

Not necessarily hard, but it requires a lot of kiting and the health bloat is pretty extreme. It can get pretty tedious at times. Keep in mind that the one playthrough of the second difficulty I have actually done was with Gorgon's Kiss, so no additional spell damage for me.

My problem with sets is pretty much the same as with rune words, totems and so forth. First I need to have the recipe and then I need to pay attention to not miss them. And - again - many of the recipes will not be relevant for whatever character I'm currently playing. But yeah, sets are definitely something that I will have to be on the lookout for, once I take another character into the second difficulty.

[treborx555]

What are some builds that do higher difficulties okay? You seem to have got to that part. I'm still theorizing my builds honestly.

Things I came up besides ice/fire ball builds. Those are easy:
- Blood Light mage, ray of light + bloodlust = 30%+ chance to proc wounds. Should shred bosses. Alternatively, no bloodlust but cast wounds manually.
- Bones quake-r. Seems to speed through first difficulty and then gets stuck when it can't one shot anymore without massive gear investment possibly.
- Choker. 8 radius curse mastery and choke to last 40+ seconds. Should kill literally everything.. eventually. I find these builds weird because i have to come back and collect loot.
- Bone spear, boulder. Seems a bit boring, but it should be good both for aoe and single target because of the splitting. In fact it's better at dpsing bosses when they spawn a ton of mobs around them.
- Bones tornado. Probably the oldest op build.
- Bones wave. Higher damage version of quaker but not instant. Wave sometimes fails to proc bones and i never know why.

Spells that I can't find a use in any build:
- Skull. The poor bones never hit anything, especially not the primary target, skull sometimes fails to even hit the target too.
- Poisoner. I don't think it benefits from spell damage too much? It needs the -poison resist curse so it needs to literally just do poison damage. Maybe if i can somehow cast both wounds and poison en masse?
- Blizzard. If i'm an ice baller, why cast blizzard? No synergy(besides cold damage), low-ish damage.
- Summons. I considered a light elemental build, mage/summon hybrid. But how do you get enough both damage and summon creature level? Also summons are super squishy, so build is probably just casting light elemental every 5 sec.
- The corpse explosion spells seem difficult to use, and some mobs like shamans auto explode them before you.
- circle of light. I already have radiactivity and glow which seem to do enough damage. Besides i'm casting ray all the time to proc glow. (or flash but i honestly didn't like that build, it's op but just very boring).

[SmellofNapalm]

I have only done one playthrough on the second difficulty and that was with Gorgo's Kiss/Curse Mastery, as mentioned. Worked well enough, but I was lacking range against Modo, which killed me a few times. I hadn't really noticed it until then, but Gorgo's Kiss does have noticeably less range than something like Skull or so.

The last playthrough I have done maybe six months ago or so, was with Ray of Light. But I used it with Light Mastery to get as much as possible out of the resistance reduction of Glow in the Dark. Not the biggest fan to be honest. I found one of the Rainbow items later, but I have to say, these always make me feel like l'm not playing the game properly. It feels like I'm not learning anything about my build or the game, except that tons of damage is indeed good... But I eventually found a second item to get the set bonus for Ray of Light, so I had an opporunity to test that as well. And I'm still not much of a fan. More rays just means that you are still fairly inefficient with a lot of misses.

I haven't played around with Bones. Quake did seem like one of the better options and Tornado as well, but Lightning just makes more sense for the latter as you have to level it anyway. The only weird thing I've tried with Bones is to try and place them exactly below the feet of enemies, which gives you a whole lot of damage with any kind of damage mastery. But doing that consistently would require a lot of practice.

I think Choker has less damage output than some other options (but also Chi drain), but it's not reliant on RNG. Earth Shield with Choker and Burn might be good. You can have multiple Shields running without them getting terminated. Chain Lightning or just Curse Mastery would be more reliable though.

Bone Spear: I did my one playthrough of DoM2 with Bone Spear/Lightning which was quite fun. The splinters also seem to cause Lightning though I'm not quite sure how that works.

Boulder: I might do some testing one day. I have been thinking that an Earth Mastery build might be interesting, but you'd miss out on a lot of damage. Basically, really long stuns on Quake and lots of push on Boulder. Perhaps it would be possible to throw in something else. Haven't really considered that yet.

What I'll definitely do at some point is a simple Bone Armor/Boulder combination, which will mean a lot of recasting, but more damage than with the Masteries.

I often use Skull as my cheap single-target spell if my main spell isn't something like that. I'll usually just put Alchemical Mastery on there as the secondary. That's ok point damage for almost no investment.

Poisoner: Used that on my first playthrough some years back, but it's really hard to tell how much it actually does do. It always just seemed like a bonus for Poison/Plague-builds. Might be a nice way to spend points once all the other things you need are finished or have become too expensive.

Blizzard: I thought about using it together with Water Mastery and skeletons or some other kind of summons. But I think Wave would be better for that. Otherwise it's a lot like Circle of Light so you could probably just do something similar with it.

Yeah, Light Elemental just seems a bit esoteric at the moment. So many points needed for everything. Perhaps for the Earth Golem as its Boulder doesn't level. Light Elemental could help solve that problem.

I haven't even really considered what to do with the Corpse Explosions. It's fiddly and as you say, monsters use such spells as well. I have tried Bone Spirit for a bit, but that seems like one of the most wasteful spells to spend your time and points on. It's probably one of these cases where you need to spend a ton of points before it starts working.

Circle of Light: I have played some hours in the second difficulty with that build and it works well enough, but it just means a whole lot of running circles around your circles so to speak ;) Can be a bit tedious. Also, - sadly - activating a second circle will cancel the first one.

As I wasn't too happy with my Ray of Light/Light Mastery/Glow-build I might try something with stronger focus on Glow in the Dark and Flash instead.

Things I'm fairly certain I will still try:
- Bone Armor/Boulder + Skull/Boulder
- Melee with Goliath's Shield, Fire Enchantment, Armor Mastery and such.
- Redo Tornado build properly (Tornado/Lightning combo, Lightning/Lightning for point)
- Possibly Raise Dead with Wave/Water Mastery.
- Poison/Burn + Plague/Burn (interestingly Burn transfers with Plague)
- Possibly Spikes/Alchemical Mastery (pretty much the only straight up area-of-effect spell)

Wave only procs when it freezes something I think. Similar case with Spikes. It only procs when it stuns or when it throws something into the air. A lot of secondaries only seem to work off of points such as Stun. That led to some confusion for a while. It really helps that the game displays the damage numbers.

[treborx555]

I think only the initial plague procs seconary (i usually use thick blooded). But it's still not great. i tested and came to conclusion that resistances can reduce up to 70% of the damage, and when the resists are in minus, they act as a damage % boost. So when i decreased poison resist with thick blooded with -30, i did 39 instead of 30 damage with my poison spell. (initial alchemy mastery damage tick, 30> 39).

My initial thought was maybe poison was op because intoxication damage is additive with -poison resist. But now that that's false, my poisoner is at an impasse.

Flash cooldown goes from 3 to 6 seconds, scaling with the paralize duration of the mobs. Very op, but very boring.

About stuns, i find they almost never actually stun enemies. Usually you deal some other extra damage and it stops the stun i think. I never tried increasing the stun level from 1 though. Stun also doesn't seem to proc spell damage (maybe it only does it when it actually stuns?) But definitely not every 1s like choker, wounds,etc

I'm gonna test bloodline and vampire, because i saw a guide say that's possible lol

[SmellofNapalm]

Yes, the way Stun gets interrupted by damage, it might be the best to just combine it with something that is single-target or melee. At least with long stuns. Might end up being fairly slow and annoying to play though.

Sadly, the damage of Stun seems to be fixed instead of being tied to duration. Otherwise it might have been worth using Earth Mastery.

[treborx555]

Currently playing my blood water mage and doing second difficulty fine on level 29 in act 2.
Ice shield and ice ball with bloodlust, double damage (works on spells!) and I near one shot any pack of melees that attack me even if i didn't cast anything. Bosses melt too. (on 1st difficulty, i only did mullog on 2nd). Spends so many life pots tho but probably one of the best endgame builds that also works great early too.

There are some requirements for the build though. Spell damage, but also + chi/life on hit. 4 of each minimum. Life per hit is your only survivability. Mobs attack you for 100 damage, but then your shield ice blasts all 10 of them giving you 40 life back. Otherwise you'd be dead. (the other 40 life comes from you actually casting ice ball). That's my estimation of the damage anyway.

Very happy with the build, I always wanted to make a water mage that uses blood but i always thought blood was useless! Did you know bloodlust goes from 5% chance to proc wounds to 37% i think? Did you know wounds procs spell damage every second for the entire duration? That it also benefits from double damage? It's not my main damage source but lvl 1 wounds is VERY good investment lol. I'd up it to like 15 sec duration for lategame so any mobs running away will eventually die to it.

I do wonder what other builds can proc bloodlust as good as ice shield. Otherwise it's at least great to use on bosses only by manually casting bloodline.

The russian guide said to use bloodline with vampire. I need to test that. Does it actually make your bash lifesteal on that mob? Does it work with spell damage too? So many things to test!

[SmellofNapalm]

Very cool build idea!

Weapon Mastery actually working for everything is just another time where the wording is actually pretty clear, but assumptions are in the way.

Does Iceblast actually proc Bloodlust? My first proper playthrough used Iceball/Iceblast/Bloodlust for a bit, but wasn't particularly happy with it an switched the secondary to Vampire eventually.

Also, is there a difference between how Iceblast procs as part of the shield as opposed to as a part of Iceball?

[treborx555]

"Also, is there a difference between how Iceblast procs as part of the shield as opposed to as a part of Iceball?"

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED!

/puts on glasses

You see, each spell can work differently depending on how it's cast. Ice ball's secondary activation is on the ice ball itself, but ice shield actually uses the secondary spell on each enemy hit by ice blast it procs. This is why blood mastery/bloodlust is so good with it.

I'm assuming it's because it counts the shield's effect as if you casted ice blast with a secondary yourself. But for ice ball, the blast isn't the direct spell you're casting, so of course it doesn't proc anything on the blast.


Now I have a question for you, does ice ball actually lifesteal from vampire? This is a bit harder to test as it's hard to notice due to life regen. Edit: just tested. It actually works! Seems lame early game though but now I have more ideas. For example, can you cast earth shield + vampire on your golem to let it lifesteal and actually survive higher difficulties? Or would it heal you instead of your golem because you casted it? Maybe my light elemental build can work if the minions heal as they rampage..
Edit 2: earth shield + vampire on a golem heals you, not the golem :(
Wasn't able to combine light elemental with anything besides vampire, which also heals you i think. Holy touch doesn't seem enough for golems to survive third difficulty. I tested and they dying on multiplayer 2nd difficulty at max spell levels. Idk if there's some other way you can make summons lifesteal or survive.

[SmellofNapalm]

Sorry for the late response.

I suspected something like that might be the case with Ice Blast on Ice Shield. I think I even did do some testing at some point, but it was pretty superficial and I forgot about most of the results again.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure that Vampire helped with both health and chi. Also worked on Pyromaniac, though probably not on the secondary Burn. But I don't think I did do any systematic testing on it.

Wait, were you testing Earth Shield (the aura-like spell that regularly drops stunning rocks at a good radius) or Stone Skin (the protective one that slows you down)? Just wondering because the latter is much more similar to Ice Shield.

How are you doing your experimenting, by the way? Editing game files or just through Multiplayer? I usually do testing with a low-level-character as far as possible (annoying Blood scrolls!), but of course that usually is just about the question if something works, not about how strong certain combos are with heavy spellpoint investment.

[treborx555]

I made a program that gives me a spells.mui file where level 1 spells have values of level 32 spells. That makes things way easier lol. The only problem with that one is mobs also get their spells maxed out so i couldn't test summon survavability properly.

But for most i just open multiplayer and level fast there and test.

What do you mean about earth shield and stone skin btw? Shield is good at high levels, stone skin might be decent if you have 200% speed and are too fast lol. Bloodlust and vamprie proc on earth shield, but the only thing that works on stone skin is earth mastery. I couldn't find anything else. Oh and idk if i said this in this thread, but earth shield + vampire heals you, the caster, not the golem/summon..

Oh btw, as i figured out mods can just be named "media1.bm" and be super tiny, I might just share some QOL mods like these later on.

Btw i made a discord server if you want to talk about the game: https://discord.gg/HVNCqrdCxm

[SmellofNapalm]

I see. Yeah, definitely faster :D But usually I'm fine with just testing basic functionality. It's a problem with Blood spells though.

Just thought you might have mixed up terms because you jumped directly from Ice Shield to Earth Shield. I mean because they function so differently whereas Stone Skin is more similar to Ice Shield. Just making sure that I didn't misunderstand.

I have just tried Glow in the Dark with a few secondaries and got quite confused at first. Low Resistance doesn't work on the first cast, but jumps to other monsters, but without Glow.... Seemed rather random at first, but I guess Low Resistance counts as a similar effect and so just overrides Glow.

Light Mastery works on the first cast, but doesn't transfer, but Burn, Stun, Lightning and Boulder all work reliably as Secondaries.

All of that is a bit annoying as I already have something planned for Boulder and Lightning and both should be more effective. Same for Burn. Stun might be interesting as it seems to reliably stun in spite of the damage being applied, but that's even less damage than Burn.

Casting Circle of Light and then Glow in the Dark is the only thing I can think of right now that might be worth trying. Perhaps with a Level 1 Stun for keeping them in there. CoL keeps spinning for a while and can't be recast, so that would make sense.