Tough life of mage.

Seriously. I play casually a mage, I go out to gather stuff or get soem gold when I have to pay my taxes and other fees (scrolls, reagents, especialyl reagents!!!).

Obsidian golems are nightmare. I do at around 2 damage to them with death touch and 2-4 with searing ray. Seriously, I should use 250 spells to kill them? With my focus pool of 482 (and my health 382) that will make really long fight. It is almost as bad with undead.

My main skills are in the 60-80 range, I admit my attunements are currently in 20-40, I have not unlocked all skills yet, but I do not really have money to level those reagent requiring skills that are useless in combat at lower levels.

Undead are bit tough too, will check how my Searing Ray works on them now, but I doubt it will be that great.

What happened to slimes and other mobs that were supposed to be easy kills for mages?

And how many wolves I have to kill to be able to use magic against obsidian golems? Or is the goal to forcee mages to use other weapons than useless wands and staves? Are there plans to have mobs immune to arrows and swords in the future? How tedious fights need to be?

 

i would think so. why can i hurt a ghost with a sword?

 

Thank you for posting this.

At adv. level 64 I am now actively looking for Roving encounters (the Forest Road and Plains Road encounters that have the low level mobs) so I can mine a bit of Silver and Gold.

Otherwise I am sticking to 3 skull areas, which I can handle quite well if I am careful. If I train a single skill over 60 in a three skull area, my exp pool goes down.

4 Skull areas are very difficult now that the mobs respawn so quickly. When ganged up on by a group of mobs, my focus runs out, so I replaced my staff by a wand and sword. I don't do much damage with the sword's auto-attack (usually around 10 HP), but at least it does SOME damage when my focus is gone.

 

I love how they add huge resistances to mobs AND jack up their difficulty.

Seriously, when you are fine tuning something, you change one variable at a time.

I'm losing my trust that proper method will be used by Chris.

Didn't even increase the risk : reward ratio

 

seconded!

personally I GREATLY appreciate the faster spawn. I'm ad lvl 72, running as a hybrid necroslashytankydoodad most of the time, and find it extremely helpful keeping the life donor pool out there high. Yes, they hurt me, but they also feed me, and that makes a big big difference in my play style.

I have no clue as to you or OP's play styles, but if I may make a couple suggestions? AOE spells. Lots and lots of AOE spells. Air, Fire, Death, even Earth have 'em, and believe me they're very very useful. Anti-undead, the Sun and Life ones are pretty useful too, for that matter (whilst nerfing the benefits of the whole death tree).

Second, don't expect everything to work everywhere, especially now (R36). If fire and death aren't cutting it, having other options REALLY makes for survivability.

Just my (unsolicited) 2c...

 

Yes, you get to a point where you likely will want 4-8 mobs xp all at the same time.

Tactics tree, Heavy Armour and Earth all have excellent glyphs to mitigate damage. (chain chest is the best balanced piece atm) You can still roll with the remaining slots as Carapacian cloth for focus and crit.

Death Field really shines in this application. Attunement, Mastery and the +Death drain jewelry really scale it up nicely.

 

agreed w/ all the above, @Snazz , but I'm using plate chest & legs with otherwise cloth armor, a wand and a one-hander of choice (Dagger, here, for rate of fire). While death field is truely helpful, what's been exceedingly helpful has been corpse explosion for finishing the fight in literally 1/2 the time - just gotta make sure to hit single targets as much as pracitcal to get corpses on the ground in themiddle of the scrum.

Not saying it's the best - just what's working for me.

 

what I heared was Ghosts are almost immune to magic and you need melee to kill

 

Well, AoE spells work quite well on melee type of mobs, which are not everywhere, the chain chest and use of heavy armor goes imho against the idea of playing a mage. Also death (or any) magic is bit worse this release with resistance on many mobs.

The thing I am trying to say is that it is hard to just play the mage "naturally", without thinking about the game mechanics. It really seems I should go fight wolves for xp or bandits for gold... And perhaps give up on magic when Itry to visit mines because of all those undead guarding every single one of them (well Owl's Nest might be an exception).

 

Truth. I do have a couple ranged bits - chain lightning, for instance - to assist with that, or at least long enough for me to come a-knockin'. But the focus of this mix is definitely in-your-face-range effects.

I'm fine with it. Think antipaladin or leech, if you prefer those terms rather than 'mage'. (But see below, too !)

Agreed, which is why I suggested mixing it up. Fire, air, earth and death take longer and are more expensive to level but are much, much more effective en mass than any one of the list. IMO.

Also, knowing your preferred hunting zones, and what denizens reside within. If you're in undead areas, you're quite right, death is likely the worst choice. However, my necroslashy format is great in humanoid/animal zones, where I tend to spend a lot of time in game.

From this and your above comment about armor, sounds like our preferred definition of 'mage' differs significantly. If you're looking for the staff and cloth zot at range, you're quite right, this game will be tougher. For whatever reason, the devs seem to be pretty focussed on forcing hybridization for optimization - some melee or range with some magic. However, it *is* playable as pure mage, just need to play smarter than diving face-first into mob swarms and being careful to save up focus for when you'll best be able to use it.

Honestly, I don't want to argue with you. You've got your preferred way to play the game - and that's great! I'm glad you do! About the only thing I can really suggest is consider opening up to other schools of magic if you want to play mage only. Air has great utility - excellent damage and stun effects - and Earth has wonderful damage plus big time defensive buffs, for instance. All of 'em have good points and weak points - the whole point of it, I think, and one of the reasons it's great fun to muck about finding fun new ways to slaughter the poor npc's. Or PCs, if you're into PVP.

 

To the OP, I can neither agree or disagree with your point. I can help provide some insight and maybe direction in Avatar development. Please review the R-35 Post Mortem, fast forward to 1:11:42 (one hour, eleven minutes, 42 seconds) Evil Chris addresses the changes you are discussing and his reasoning for the changes (agree or disagree). Take it for what it is worth. Hopefully after watching that, you will have some insight to how to build your avatar to suit the current status of the game. Again, no opinion on my part.

 

With the recent changes, I believe being a pure mage that wears robes is very close to being balanced.

I think there's still imbalance between ranged vs. non-ranged (melee) and I also think that if you wear robes you should get a huge concentration bonus. But other than that, I think we're heading in the right direction.

The cover system should also help whenever that is implemented.