Suggestion : Make enemy resistances less constant. And stop magic armor from resisting magic resistance alteration factors.

[Ketrai]

Almost every enemy in the game has natural resistance against magic. Unless it's an enemy with explicit elemental affinity, then the values are altered. Any ol random magister? 40% resistance to every element. Honestly? Doing 40% less damage with magic doesn't feel fair. Sure, the status effects are way better, but on top of that most enemies already have a high chunk of magic armor. Melee units usually have shields, rangers balanced, and mages... well.... On top of that, most major bosses have natural resistances, and a ludicrously large amount of magic armor.

Why not.... have your run of the mill enemies like magisters with less resistance? A lot of magic damage has already been nerfed. And it's only until you get rid of magic armor that you can apply stronger effects like burning, bleed fire, etc to amplify your magic damage.

Make Nullify resistances weaker, but apply regardless of magic armor. Same for bleed fire. It would be nice.

[Chaoslink]

Given the sheer amount of damage mages output, it's pretty necessary. Fire mages have it worse as their primary resistance nullify is burning, which requires armor to be stripped. Air mages can just use rain and apply wet for 20% and 10% air and water resistance reduction. Generally speaking, it's enough to deal reasonable damage. The resistance doesn't have as much of an effect as you might think, especially if you know how to combo your abilities.

[Ketrai]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Given the sheer amount of damage mages output, it's pretty necessary. Fire mages have it worse as their primary resistance nullify is burning, which requires armor to be stripped. Air mages can just use rain and apply wet for 20% and 10% air and water resistance reduction. Generally speaking, it's enough to deal reasonable damage. The resistance doesn't have as much of an effect as you might think, especially if you know how to combo your abilities.

For someone who has played through the game several times, I believe I have enough experience to say that mages, every time, end up doing a lot less damage than all the physcial builds. Spec into necromancy. use blood rain and other skills with high intelligence. If you stand i n blood they get super cheap to cast too, elemental affinity being something that doesn't work as well for hydro, aero. (aero surfaces get absorbed rather quickly, and hydro spells are inately high AP to cast, like ice fan, and hail strike.) Now if you have a buddy that can clear physical armor for you, if you don't want to do it yourself with blob, infect, and decaying touch. Once that phsycial armor is down you can do devestating combos. Death resist being vital. Just shackle an enemy you want dead, even use something like the necro ressurection spell to hurt yourselffor a massive amount, which all funnels into the enemy. Death wish to make your necro spells do even more damage. But you don't really need that. Just make sure the enemy decays, use blood rain and blood sucker for redicilous amounts of damage, especially early game, especially if you crit with savage sortilege. Throw in restoration and first aid too for that lil extra damage. Low- AP, high Damage. The only thing early game I find that rivals this are ranger builds, two handed melee builds, rogue builds. And you can buff ALL of those with death wish. Add on a shield + wand build, you can use a single shield throw to bring a lot of armored enemies weak enough for your decaying touch. In the meantime, the best abilities a pyromancer can shelf out? fudging deploy trap. Or if you're a bit further, mass deploy traps, it freaking devestates the battlefield.

Then once you get to the late game it gets redicilous. Especially if you're an elf. Be a necromancer, have high intelligence and crit chance. Use apotheosis at the start of a turn, adrenaline, flesh sacrifice. Blood storm. Skin graft. Flesh sacrifice again, adrenaline again, blood storm again. And if that isn't enough, you can finish it off with grasp of the starved. Sure, you can cast two hail storms, or two meteor showers, but the flat damage nerf (Talkin bout resistances) on top of the fact that these abilities just do less damage, and have to be aimed? (unlike blood storm, which hits all enemies in a wide area. I disregard thunderstorm here since it naturally costs 4 AP regardless as you can't abuse elemental affinity)

Whilst you bring up pyromancy is better? Look at geomancy. The damage isn't that high, but using pyroclastic eruption you can easily topple the output of meteor shower, hail storm. If you prep a little, you can cast a pyroclastic eruption with only two AP, two times the first turn you get to use apotheosis.

Lastly... what about enemies with inate element immumities, or resistances that breach 60-70% or higher? Well, I guess in that case you better hope you're prepped with a set of spells in another element.... Or a wand and shield, even shield throw, the busted ability it is, is so much better than using a staff or dual wielding wands.

All of the schools of magic except necro are definitely viable. It's just, in tacticians mode, and especially honour mode, the game needlessly encourages the use of physical damage. 40% is a lot of damage to loose. Which with a warm or wet, ends up being 25-30% Whilst physical continues to do 100%

NOTE : I haven't even talked about lone wolf yet. All of the above mentioned combos are achievable without glass cannon or lone wolf. Lone wolf is simply busted. Sure, you can reach higher damage with a four player squad if you all min max the fudge out of the system. But lone wolves have a few notable strengths. 1. they almost always get to go first. Unless you don't spec into wits at all. 2. It's harder to stun them due to double armor, so unlike in a four player squad, where team members can easily end up stunned or killed on the first turn, depending who you're facing. Wasting their potential or delaying it. 3. Double stats make it muuuuuch easier to hit criticals, and have higher critical numbers. It's better to have 2 team members with 100% crit chance, than 4 team members with 50%. You can add it up, but frequently critting means the two lone wolves will always do more damage. Especially since one of their crits, and due to how scaling works, ends up doing more damage than a crit from two non lone wolf characters. Due to the sheer damage output of a lone wolf, you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot if you don't go a magic build. Double schools means you can easily bully off pyroclastic eruption and thunderstorm in one turn, effectively stunning all but the mightiest (or furthest away) for three concurrent turns, which they probably won't survive anyways.

Why give enemies magic resistances and nerf magic directly? A lot of magic has been gradually nerfed. Why not give enemies unique damage resistance? Heck, make it lore that magisters treat their armor with special leather that's more resistant to fire and poison? If magic is so busted, why is it so hard for the player to hit that default 40/40 mix for humanoids? (Note, I do know a player can't ever hit armor values like enemies, or health without spells, but this still feels harsh on mages. If it was easier to attain elemental affinity, I would use nova so much more.)

[Chaoslink]

Yes, physical can seem broken strong, and I did only specifically mention air and fire, but to me a fire mage is generally also a Geo mage as a given, same for Aero/Hydro. Aero/Hydro being my favorite here. I will say, I've never had any issues keeping my elemental affinity up for an Aero/Hydro build. And you seem to miss the bypass for that problem. I don't worry about it, because I run single wand mages with free off-hands for use of the ambidextrous talent. It's free elemental affinity with scrolls and once you know your scroll crafting recipes you have enough for most abilities that it's not a concern.

Mages are a bit weak in the early game due to the limited spells, but by late game, the damage they deal is unmatched. I find it funny that you started comparing the final source spells of mages only to ignore the strongest in the game. Thunderstorm is literally my "I win button" that can shut down the entire enemy team in one cast for most fights. I only play tactician as classic is too easy and honor is the same with ironman mode, which doesn't interest me in the slightest. By late game, the only time I played the all physical party people say is so strong, I felt gimped so hard just because I knew that I wasn't dishing out single spells that basically ended battles instantly.

The thing you might want to try in future builds is to have your non-mage set up the elemental affinity first, so your mages aren't wasting their AP to do so.

As for enemies with innate 70-80% resistance or flat out immunity, it's generally only one element and the secondary element your mage should run generally isn't also resisted, not to mention there is often an enemy in that same fight who isn't as resistant. I personally never felt that elemental resistance slowed my damage output much, if at all, given that most spells would hit 2+ enemies anyway. Physical damage lacks that AoE to multiply their total damage output like mages can so reliably.

[Ketrai]

https://youtu.be/MmX4T3mIFh8

See the issue.

I usually see enemies with 70-80% having those numbers for all resistances. If you have to use scrolls to do well, you're doing it wrong. Scrolls are busted in their own right. Skin graft scrolls being free, and scrolls having no cooldowns to limit them. Enough skingraft scrolls and you basically nuke any battle without effort. I would like ambidextrous if only for grenades, and if grenades were viable. Right now I only like the charm and mind maggot grenades, the others once in a moonshine.