Rework Death Magic

Personal opinion incoming...

Death magic is the only magic skill tree (with Night Vision in the Moon tree coming in a close second) where you start with an utterly useless skill that you need to grind to get to anything worth adding to your hotbar.

Tap Soul? At the beginning of the game you are just trying to stay alive, why would you suck away your own life? Makes no sense when Focus regens fairly quickly.

There is a workaround however. Stand in town and cast Tap Soul until you have almost no life, then cast Healing Touch until you have almost no focus. Rinse and repeat until Tap Soul reaches 10 ( takes about ten minutes) and then purchase Death Touch and go out and do something worthwhile with the skill tree.

Just for reference:

Fire - Fire Fist (damage)
Water - Ice Fist (damage)
Air - Gust (knockback)
Earth - Stone Fist (damage)
Chaos - Confusion (stun)
Life - Healing Touch (heal)
Sun - Light (light)
Moon - Night Vision (see in dark, kind of useful -- meh)

And then we have:

Death - Tap Soul (exchange life for focus)???

I would recommend putting something a little more helpful up front otherwise people will just grind past Tap Soul, which doesn't make starting a character out in the Death tree very fun in comparison to the other trees.

Edit: Also, Death Mastery only goes up by using Tap Soul? smh

 

There are situations, even templates, where Tap Soul can be very useful...

That's not actually correct. Death Mastery will rise when you use any of the Death spells.

 

Um all you had to do was get Tap soul to 10 and lock it then you can use some more skills in the tree you like.

Also Tap Souls is very VERY effective when used properly.

 

I'm enjoying death magic myself.

Can't wait for chaos to have some more skills.

 

The primary complaints I have for the Death Tree involve Death Ray and Death Field.
Death Ray continues to be worthless unless combined with Fire Arrow to make Fiery Decay (which has been nerf'd a bit too much, BTW).
And, as Chris mentioned, Death Field has been virtually nerf'd to death (no pun intended).
Whether or not it was TOO powerful is not really relevant, what is tho is it's inability to do much of anything now other than eat a lot of focus.
Hopefully they'll restore it to some functional use when the concensus of opinion matches mine.

 

I haven't seen it happen yet. I've only seen it rise when using Tap Soul but not when using the other skills. I've been checking by keeping my skill window open.

 

That's what I did. Most boring 10 minutes I've spent in my life.

I'm not saying it's ineffective, but it should be later in the tree. Considering the amount of health it takes, it not worth using on a new character. New characters don't have much health to start. Besides, like I mentioned in the OP, with the exception of Night Vision, all other trees have a skill that's actually useful in combat for new characters and it should be the same for the Death tree as well, IMO.

 

A new character would know what Tap Soul does (hopefully having explored the tree or used the tree in the past), and would raise it (when they are capable of doing so) for it's specific purpose and understand the danger in using it on a newbie with little health to spare...

I would hope anyway......

The way it is right now, you can raise it to a level of effectiveness in the comfort of your home (understanding that it will draw from your XP pool)....

Basically, you just have to understand the tree and what you can expect from it for your template, while understanding that raising any other skill in the tree will cause it to raise as a related skill as well.

Lock it or let it raise, it's your call.

 

smh x2

Not much else to say here. If the devs are aware of this and are OK with it, then this could be one of the dumbest design decisions in the game to date.

With that line of thinking we can probably expect flying mounts by the end of the year.