Do you feel that your caster classes are underwhelming?

[PsychoSimatic]

Let me preface this with saying I'm level 12 and playing on tactician mode in Act 2 of the game currently.

The question i have is basically does anyone else get the feeling that caster classes are useless as damage dealers? I totally see the value of the support spells as i have points into a wide variety of the caster abilities (hydro, geo, necro, aero etc) for things like heals, haste, teleport, regen for physical/magic armor etc. The problem is it feels like unless you have all of your characters focus on the magic armor as a damage point it just feels like a waste of time.

I cant tell you how many times i walk into a fight and the mobs have 1700 magic armor and 300 physical armor and its just like "Thank god i don't have to deal with that nonsense" and even in the cases where the split is even the magic users CC abilities are completely reliant on whittling away the magic armor (just like the melee characters) but they're left doing it alone and with far less reliability as their damage abilities are all on cool downs after a use. Where a two-handed warrior, rogue, ranger and sword and board combo will just beat the heck out of the enemy relentlessly with Cleave and tons of CC through warfare aoe stuns (that cant just be aoe countered with things that remove freeze or other magic based CC).

Essentially what I am asking is why make a magic heavy group when at any time you can just run into mobs that are either 100% resistant to magic (never happens to melee from what i've seen and most melee still can do some elemental dmg from runes or just abilities) or essentially never do enough damage to be useful before the melee in the group kill the thing?

I've used the mirror on lady vengeance to play around with a bunch of different builds and I can definitely see the fun of making a super pyro wizard, but the actual tactical benefit of this compared to a CC heavy pure single target burst DPS class seems very weak in comparison.

It seems the risk is too great to have one of your party members becoming totally useless should mobs be resistant to their preferred school and in some of the more challenging battles its an annoyance to micromanage the gear to compensate for that when you could have just punched them in the face right off the bat.

So again to be clear, I am not saying that I don't use magic, i use it constantly for its utility, but it is absolutely not my primary source of damage as I find it terribly inconsistent.

[Setharim]

I feel the exact opposite.
Fighter and Knight feel useless while my Wizard dominates everything around her.
Feels like caster get to do a lot more each turn, mainly because they hardly ever need to spend AP to move.

[Leviathan]

Nope. Wizard is awesome. Look for the Pyro spell "Laser Ray". You'll understand. My Fane is actually a wizard and the primary damage dealer with huge burst spikes AND a summon to boot.

[Efesell]

No rigth now I feel like my casters are the only ones doing work. My melee are just tinking off of everyones armor at the moment.

[Leviathan]

Originally posted by Efesell:

No rigth now I feel like my casters are the only ones doing work. My melee are just tinking off of everyones armor at the moment.

I know how you feel. I mostly use my two melees (Prince + Beast) to block off and tank enemies while I bombard everything with my wizard.

[PsychoSimatic]

Originally posted by Hitopopamus:

I feel the exact opposite.
Fighter and Knight feel useless while my Wizard dominates everything around her.
Feels like caster get to do a lot more each turn, mainly because they hardly ever need to spend AP to move.

My melee use things like battering ram, phoenix dive, teleport and the rogue teleport abiltiites to move around.

[Spear Deer]

I think what he means is that with 4AP, faster can get two attacks off, whereas when warriors have to move, even if they move cheaply, it makes it so they can only get one attack off a turn.
This is why I think 'The Pawn' is one of the best talents in the game.

[Frostbeast]

Water and fire are weak. Air has some nice teleport mechanics but the other stuff sucks. Earth is nice because earthquake and impaling spells crowd controls work when the target has no physical armor. Sommoning ist very strong. Because the pet and totems are hitting physic armor.
Necromance is only good because of the spider pet later just pick summoner instead
Ranger are DPS machines and warriors are strong too. Im lvl 18 now. with phoenix dive and and tactical retreat he is very mobile and dish out alot of dmg.

[Leviathan]

Originally posted by Frostbeast:

Water and fire are weak. Air has some nice teleport mechanics but the other stuff sucks. Earth is nice because earthquake and impaling spells crowd controls work when the target has no physical armor. Sommoning ist very strong. Because the pet and totems are hitting physic armor.
Ranger are DPS machines and warriors are strong too. Im lvl 18 now. with phoenix dive and and tactical retreat he is very mobile and dish out alot of dmg.

Fire....weak? What have you been smoking? I'm killing stuff left and right with fire.

[Frostbeast]

fire is weak if you have alot of physical dmg dealers.

[PsychoSimatic]

Originally posted by Efesell:

No rigth now I feel like my casters are the only ones doing work. My melee are just tinking off of everyones armor at the moment.

Depending on where you are in the game, the magic armor starts to scale up dramatically on enemies. Also even decked out, the casters in this game share the same maximum of 6 AP's so the number of actions is very different compared to DOS1 and from everything that I can tell the damage they deal is very comparable to melee. For example my ranger can easily hit mobs for 400-500 dmg in a single shot at lvl 11 and scoundrel classes can do quite a bit as well with the right setup. Warfare classes definitely do less damage, but the AOE CC of their knock downs (especially if you use two of them) is super powerful and almost a requirement for many encounters. I mean if you think about the strength of keeping an entire group of enemies knocked down for 4 turns and then the cool downs on Battle-stomp and Battering Ram both being 4 & 5 turns respectively, that almost ensures 100% knock down up time if you make use of the CC's on your other two classes.

[Leviathan]

Originally posted by PsychoSimatic:

Originally posted by Efesell:

No rigth now I feel like my casters are the only ones doing work. My melee are just tinking off of everyones armor at the moment.

Depending on where you are in the game, the magic armor starts to scale up dramatically on enemies. Also even decked out, the casters in this game share the same maximum of 6 AP's so the number of actions is very different compared to DOS1 and from everything that I can tell the damage they deal is very comparable to melee. For example my ranger can easily hit mobs for 400-500 dmg in a single shot at lvl 11 and scoundrel classes can do quite a bit as well with the right setup. Warfare classes definitely do less damage, but the AOE CC of their knock downs (especially if you use two of them) is super powerful and almost a requirement for many encounters. I mean if you think about the strength of keeping an entire group of enemies knocked down for 4 turns and then the cool downs on Battle-stomp and Battering Ram both being 4 & 5 turns respectively, that almost ensures 100% knock down up time if you make use of the CC's on your other two classes.

True. To be fair though, I'm lvl 18 now. So enemies usually have around 1400-2000 magic armor. My wizard burns that down within 1 or 2 turns max, however.
Much faster than my phsysical damage dealer burn down their targets.

[Frostbeast]

Its better to focus on one attack type. All magic or all phyical.

[Leviathan]

Originally posted by Frostbeast:

Its better to focus on one attack type. All magic or all phyical.

Meh. Not really. I got a wiz that's bursting in the back, while my two melees get lots of close-ups. Works amazingly well with my third companion as healer in the back.

[PsychoSimatic]

Originally posted by Spear Deer:

I think what he means is that with 4AP, faster can get two attacks off, whereas when warriors have to move, even if they move cheaply, it makes it so they can only get one attack off a turn.
This is why I think 'The Pawn' is one of the best talents in the game.

I hear what you're saying but generally i will just teleport an enemy caster into my melee and attempt to group enemies as best as possible to maximize AOE CC. Also while your knights do get to move, they also get free attacks at enemies who try to move by or away which compensates for the use of that 1 - 2AP in movement arguably. Also in the later fights the enemy tends to have the ability to close the gap on any caster you have very quickly either through teleports, polymorph skills (fly) or simply having TONS of movement. I am sure you all blinked the first time a fire slug crossed the entire map in a single turn.

[peppers]

Nearing the end of the game on tactician mode.
Only thing on my entire team that can hit higher than my mage's winter blast is my mage's deep freeze and a crit from my 2H str-pumped warrior. And winter blast/deep freeze are AOE.