Introduction
So I finally rolled a mage and wanted to leave some feedback on the leveling and skills for the mage class. I did a fairly vanilla run that didn’t have me dumping my shards / gold till I hit monoliths. I did just about everything a character would from 1-70 outside of the new sanctum dungeon and arena.
Campaign
To start off the campaign continues to impress. Outside of 2 massive performance drops in the weyln areas the entire campaign ran very smooth. I had skipped the Majasa area last update as the character I was currently playing made an absolute joke of the content, warping my perception of it. Starting fresh I was able to see the content with new eyes, and am absolutely thrilled with the latest installment. The final boss fight especially had me pumped the whole way through.
Mage
As for the mage himself. I feel he is fairly well put together at least using the basic and spellblade skills i tested him with. I am running a hybrid caster using surge, zap based discharge, and mana strike with great success. Scaling the hybrid damage was also fairly easy going crit. I found it especially pleasing how easy it is to start a crit build in this game with the 3-10% base crit each tree gave. Usually you have to wait a lifetime for a crit build to feel functional in these type of games, but I hit 25% fairly early which seems to be about the sweet spot. 50% came soon after and now in monos I’m at around 80% all with average to bad gear.
Defensively the class also really shined. Flame Ward carried me on its back through so many encounters I lost count. Ward itself was also very manageable and intuitive once I got an engine together on the passive tree. The team has really delivered on a spellcaster that can stand toe to toe in melee range with proper resource management.
Itemization wise I love the new staves and armor types in general. The last few itemization passes have really proven to open gearing up. Most items if not outright perfect were good enough to not feel bad picking up. If I would ask for any change it would be for one of the weapon types to have a pure element + spell damage implicit. Melee physical damage that comes on all weapons is fairly useless to mage as they don’t support physical damage at all. Unless there are conversion items coming up down the pipeline it will always feel like a portion of the weapon is being wasted on stats I can’t use as a spellsword. Weapons power budgeted as a pure melee element ( fire, lightning, ice etc…) + a stat would alleviate that.
Skills
Lastly for skills I only have one I want to touch on, that being Discharge. Overall a fun skill with unique mechanics. Stutter stepping to get charges is a bit awkward at first but works for the most part. Sometimes the soft locking of skills does fail you, and your attempts at circle strafing an enemies to hit and run them has you just spinning in circles hitting nothing however. A hard lock-on button would be tedious as you would have to use it every encounter but may there is some in between to make the hit and run playstyle less unreliable.
The skill nodes themselves for actually discharging the static are fairly strong and impactful. The Zap nodes are what I decided to focused on however. Turning zap into lightning blast felt good. The 1 second cadence also didn’t feel horrible. The range on Zap is terrible though. Its so short it doesn’t even work on some huge boss like Lagon because even being nose to nose with them isn’t close enough to proc the lightning. Other bosses like Rootwarden require you to be so close to them to proc it you’re practically asking to be one shot as you literally have to run inside their body for it to proc. The range could stand to go at least as far out at Flamebrand. The Zap portion of the tree also loses steam about 12-15 points in. One or two more nodes would go a long way to make the last few points of the discharge tree feel worth using.
Conclusion
That’s about it. The campaign is still great. Mage / spellblade didn’t really feel deficient in anything I saw so far. Itemization could do a bit better in supporting classes that have no use for flat melee physical damage (daggers / staves come close). Zap on the Discharge tree needs way more range and a few more nodes to specialize in it. Keep up the great work and can’t wait to see what you all put out next year.