[Mages] I don't get it...
Volatile
Member Posts: 81
From the start, I've been reading about how amazing mages are supposed to be once you reach the higher levels, but I'm not seeing it. You could blame my inexperience with playing mages, but it's just not the case for me thus far.
To do some testing, I decided to create several characters in Throne of Bhaal - for the sequencers, contingency etc -, and I timed the very first fight (Illasera, the mage). Here are the results:
Fighter / Mage: easy fight. I dual-wielded the katana and saber, gave the PC a bunch of buffing spells and hacked away. Contingencies and sequencers helped halve the time to buff the PC at the beginning, but it still took some time. Did it thrice, and only got hit *once* in one try. I'd say it takes about 60-90 seconds to finish her off via F/M buffed melee. If you want to keep your distance and cast off a couple of offensive spells, it might take longer.
Mage (pure or otherwise): I did this several times, mostly with a Conjurer, but I did mix it up some. Somewhat easy fights, but a) most of them took a LOT longer than they should, and b) it hurt the PC more often than not. In fact, in one of the tries - pure mage PC -, I very nearly died, which is disgraceful in comparison to everything else. I tried sequencers with Skull Traps, Fireballs etc. Conjuration helped a bit, but again, the casting time alone made the PC vulnerable. I did buff at the start of every fight (armor, shield, spell shield etc). I did use Dispels often, but I stopped using Spell Thrust, Greater Malison etc because casting every debuff possible made the fights last even longer. Overall, it is what you could call "fun gameplay" as you get to stop the fight, consider your options, strategize etc but very ineffective and time-consuming. I'd say it takes about 120 or *a lot* more seconds to finish her off.
Plain fighter (a dwarf): Flail of the Ages and the Warhammer. Point and click once, watch it unfold. Not the most satisfying experience mechanically, but very effective at what it does. She was dead in 10 to 30 seconds tops. Mostly 10-20 seconds. No preparations other than a potion of Giant Strength when I felt like it.
What am I doing wrong?
To do some testing, I decided to create several characters in Throne of Bhaal - for the sequencers, contingency etc -, and I timed the very first fight (Illasera, the mage). Here are the results:
Fighter / Mage: easy fight. I dual-wielded the katana and saber, gave the PC a bunch of buffing spells and hacked away. Contingencies and sequencers helped halve the time to buff the PC at the beginning, but it still took some time. Did it thrice, and only got hit *once* in one try. I'd say it takes about 60-90 seconds to finish her off via F/M buffed melee. If you want to keep your distance and cast off a couple of offensive spells, it might take longer.
Mage (pure or otherwise): I did this several times, mostly with a Conjurer, but I did mix it up some. Somewhat easy fights, but a) most of them took a LOT longer than they should, and b) it hurt the PC more often than not. In fact, in one of the tries - pure mage PC -, I very nearly died, which is disgraceful in comparison to everything else. I tried sequencers with Skull Traps, Fireballs etc. Conjuration helped a bit, but again, the casting time alone made the PC vulnerable. I did buff at the start of every fight (armor, shield, spell shield etc). I did use Dispels often, but I stopped using Spell Thrust, Greater Malison etc because casting every debuff possible made the fights last even longer. Overall, it is what you could call "fun gameplay" as you get to stop the fight, consider your options, strategize etc but very ineffective and time-consuming. I'd say it takes about 120 or *a lot* more seconds to finish her off.
Plain fighter (a dwarf): Flail of the Ages and the Warhammer. Point and click once, watch it unfold. Not the most satisfying experience mechanically, but very effective at what it does. She was dead in 10 to 30 seconds tops. Mostly 10-20 seconds. No preparations other than a potion of Giant Strength when I felt like it.
What am I doing wrong?
0
Comments
One of the reason mages can be so powerful is not only de-buffs and such, but crowd control as well.
Stun-locking your enemies, or down right instakilling them with a plethora of choices.. or casting protection from evil and summoning some demon to do the job for you.. or cheesing the every living daylights out of the game by going invisible and casting area effect spells into the fog of war.. there's nothing like 5-6 ice storms raining down on a bunch of enemies who do not even bother attacking you.
However! Mages are not optimal for trash mobs, and illasera & co is kind of that.. where a standard fighter would cave in and die quite quickly when facing liches, beholders, dragons and such.. a mage would have many choices in how to defeat the cretins with just the normal effort.
That said, i never really bother playing mages.. sometimes F/M for the buffs and spells that keeps giving me a sense of char progression, where a regular fighter would be copy/paste from 2000 xp to 3000000 xp.
.. because regular mages demand too much attention and time outside of boss fights for me to bother.
Whichever Mage NPC i drag along will always be configured somewhat like this:
1 Identify+MM
2 Acid Arrow
3 Spell Thrust+Skull Trap
4 Ice storm+Secret Word+Greater Malison
5 Breach+Spell Immunity
6 Imp Haste+Pierce Magic+True Seeing
7 Summon Hakeashar+Ruby Ray of Reversal+
8 Pierce Shield
9 Spellstrike
So as you can see, my mages are mostly setup to be anti-mages... go figure.
I only use them to remove the annoying crap that stops my warriors from clobbering stuff to death.
Suuuure you could summon an army, throw crowd control spells to your hearts desire and pull off all these fancy tricks. I just prefer to make it possible for things to go splat when weapon of choice makes contact.
If a hammer-wielding dwarf can do it consistently and with no downtime what-so-ever, then there's little point in taking more than one - *maybe* two - mages in a party for the occasional Breach or some other debuff unavailable to yer good ol'Cleric.
Mages are not effective offensively. They can dish out a lot of damage, but it takes too long to do it, the charge doesn't last long, and you're dead in the water if your burst is not enough to get the job done.
At least this is how I see it after doing my own testing.
I still can't quit the f/m concept though and these days my favourite character to play is an assassin dualed to mage.
i've made my own custom scripts for the BG series, and these scripts will make it so your caster will cast any spell ( except for the mage elemental/demon summoning spells)
so with that said, i just set my mage as the crowd control/ protection dispeller and it works wonders
but as you say, you really don't need more than 1 mage, infact i have had many runs where i beat the game with half a mage ( a fighter/mage) was my only team mate and it still worked
experience with game mechanics could also be the reason why you might be struggling a bit, some of us have been playing this game for almost 20 years so we understand the game mechanics super well
i dont know how long you will be playing this game for, but the more you play, the more familiar you will get with the game, and the more you experiment, the more knowledge you will gain with the power of mages
Usually everybody assumes mages are there for DPS, and while that's certainly one way to play them, it's just not the best.
Let's take an example. Mage casts sleep. If you're not too high level to be affected by sleep, or a race that happens to be immune to sleep effects (rare), you are now dead if you don't make your save. Granted, that's not the RAW way sleep works, but that's how it's implemented in EE. It's also an Area of Effect spell.
Color spray has a similar effect but is harder to use. This level one area of effect spell will trivialize large encounters with trash-tier enemies well into BG2.
That's just level one.
Every spell level contains a save or screwed spell (and as you level up even further you get to the save or instantly die spells). For example do we *really* want a fireball or skull trap that deals 5d6 save for 1/2, or Hold Person, which has a smaller area of affect, but anybody who fails their save is totally screwed. Would you rather melf's acid arrow, which does 2d4 damage, + additional 2d4 acid per round as you level. Or just cast glitterdust? Glitterdust is an AoE, and if they fail their saves they're now blind. Blindness means they won't attack anything that isn't *extremely* close to them, and they suffer -4 penalties to attack and AC. They're screwed and will be mopped up quickly even by a lowly mage with 1d4 HP and a sling.
Damage spells of course have a role to play, but the mage's ability to just totally end the fight for huge swarms of enemies is why mage (or some combination thereof) is considered throughout D&D to be the most potent kind of character.
A fighter grunt has to stand toe to toe with the enemy and out bash them. A mage just casts a single spell and the fight is over provided a save is failed. The fighter is then relegated to either screwed people clean up or plan B when saves aren't failed.
With practice, your mage will manage several encounters between rests (if that is your playstyle) but will never be the consistent contributor that your front line durable fighter types are. Their biggest claim to fame is that it is much rarer for a mage to encounter a foe that they cannot find a way to hurt. In the later stages of the game when all foes seem to be sprouting immunities when not casting combat spells, the fighter types can feel pretty inneffectual, and this goes double for all they memorable fights with named foes.
Personally, I like to play a whole 'adventure' (at least one full map and its associated dungeons) without resting, as that is what most matches my expectation of the game - so fighter types with their steady damage output are much more important to me - although ultimately I like a balanced party of casters and a thief behind me, as long as I have a solid wall of damage going forward at the front
Because it's a lengthy subject, and I ramble, here's just the first five levels of spells, and only the simple ones at that:
Level 0:
All mages get wands. The Wand of Fire is 12d6 damage to multiple enemies in a line and is effective against the vast, vast majority of enemies in the game. It can easily be recharged in all three games, and the more enemies there are, the more damage it does. The other, more situational, wands all have their niche, but if you want to deal damage with spells, consider a wand, you can use it every round if you like. You will probably notice how very few of the following concern damage.
Level 1 spells:
Sleep: Basically kill anything that fails a saving throw vs. Death at -3 and is level 5 or under. Sleep wins entire battles for you.
Blind: Basically kill anything that fails a saving throw vs. Spell. Blind enemies are dead enemies, blind mages are harmless mages. Even better for Gnomes and their -2 save malus.
Magic Missile: Deal 17.5 damage with no save pretty much instantly. 8 casts of magic missile and Sarevok is dead. Two mages with a Lesser Sequencer each can kill Sarevok the level 15 Fighter in 4 rounds average.
Level 2 spells:
Mirror Image: Ignore AOEs, direct damage, whatever, just ignore it. Holy Triumvirate spell #1.
Invisibility: Save a party member from being killed, including yourself. Break enemy mage targeting. Flee almost any encounter safely. Also you can do the thief's scouting job now.
Knock: Open any lock free. Thief's lock picking job.
Web: Save or suck supreme. Save at -2, if you fail, you have no armour class, any attack automatically hits and hurts you, stacks with itself. Cast three webs, you roll three times at -2 and if you fail any of those saves you are helpless. Level 40 Fighter with two webs on them has a 36% chance of making both saves each round, 25% if cast by an Evoker, 16% if you preceded it with Malaison, 9% if both.
The more attacks your party makes, the harder to hit the target is, the harder hitting the target is, the more important disable spells are. Disable spells win games.
Level 3 spells:
Haste: Force multiplication, the spell.
Skull Trap: If you're not a multiclass gnome, six of these with Improved Alacrity and Robe of Vecna can output 210 average damage to every target in a group in a single round. Ten guys? 2100 damage. Twenty? 4200. AOE damage scales, weapon damage not so much.
Spell Thrust: Mages are the biggest and nastiest threats in the game. This wipes out most of their lower level anti-mage defences for cheap, including Spell Immunity so you can True Sight their imp. invisibility.
Invisibility 10': Just bypass entire combats entirely. The loot sucks, you don't need more Exp. No fight: No time or resources spent fighting.
Level 4 spells:
Emotion: Sleep, without the -3 save penalty, though there are plenty of ways to make the save harder to make. With Greater Malaison your level 40 fighter has a 50/50 chance of being dead. Ten fighters attacking? The mage basically just killed five of them for the party.
Polymorph Self: Let's not beat around the bush here, become slime is pretty much it. immune to magic, piercing, and electric damage. You can safely set off any trap that isn't the instant kill press, handle entire squads of mages alone (remember you can still use wands), and kill pit fiends with ease. You can now hide, open any lock, and handle any trap. You can also be spider for 4 APR and immunity to web spells, but generally you want other people doing lowly peon work like "hitting things".
Fireshields: Cast both. Anyone hits you from melee range takes 2D8+4 damage, no save, no MR, in two elements. The more attacks your enemy lands, the more damage they take. 10 APR whirlwind attack? They take 130 damage average. Two enemies at once? They both take 130 damage average, while the mage still gets to cast spells normally. Mage is alone against an army of melee beatsticks? This. Protection From Magical Weapons, Stoneskins and Mirror Images means that entire armies will kill themselves for you without giving you a scratch.
Stoneskin: Ignore a physical attack per skin. Holy triumvirate spell #2.
Greater Malaison: Grease for the save or sucks.
Improved Invisibility: Now you are immune to single target spells against everything except Liches and other "ignores invisibility" foes.
Spider spawn: Sword Spiders get 4 APR and start hasted for 5 APR. Combine with Web and you just created your own force to multiply if you forgot to bring a lowly peon fighter with hold immunity. Cast Strength and Improved Haste on it before sending it into your double cast web spell and it will be hitting for 80 damage per round average on the held targets.
Level 5 spells:
Chaos: A confused mage is a dead mage. -8 with G. Malaison. A 70% chance of basically killing an enemy mage while largely emasculating any sizeable group.
Breach: Bypass PfMW and Stoneskin. Just having this shaves four rounds off killing pesky mages where they could be beating on the party.
Spell Immunity: Holy triumvirate spell #3: This spell ignores aura, casts pretty well instantly, and makes you immune to whatever is about to be cast at you, including dispel magic. With these three spells alone the mage can become an almost unkillable menace.
Level 6 and 7, be looking at Protection from Magical Weapons, Death Spell/Fog for wiping out entire swathes of summons instantly, Mislead to become undispellably invisible while your image takes a vacation elsewhere, True Sight to pierce enemy invisibility and Mirror Images, well nigh indestructible Sword summons that can tank most anything, and Project Image to cast every spell in your spellbook for the cost of a single level seven spell.
Anything above 7 is overkill, but mages and mage multiclasses are by far the mechanically strongest classes in the game by the time they have level 5 spells, and this does not depend on rest spam, single spells can trivialise entire lesser encounters.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/61243/final-fight-spoiler-and-thats-why-enchanters-are-op-final-fight-spoiler
an high level mage or even better sorcerer can fight the same battle solo and with a party in many ways, he has not to go every time for high damage, but he can do it if he wants, unless he is in one of the few areas where magic does not work.
for the lower levels @Pantalion showed how useful the mage can be.
that does not mean that a hammer-wielding dwarf is not effective, they are both so.
to use one, the other or both is more related to the player's style, i like to have all arcane casters (or at least casters) in the party, and 1 of them an high level mage, others like to have more balanced parties and others like parties heavy on fighters with the minimum casting capability. all those approaches work.
but a mage with a sequencer loaded with 2x lower resistance and GM and a couple of feeblemind memorized can close a dragon fight at the beginning of the 2nd or 3rd round, having a couple of mages the battle can be won right the first round, no way a dwarf fighter can do it. playing with mages means to know well the spell system and to be willing to use some micromanagement. i have posted some time ago the yt clip where a low level arcane caster kills the high level cleric of tactics mod irenicus dungeon and his fallen deva minion. without using special gear or high level spells. i can post it again if needed as images are much more clear than words when taking of the power of arcane magic. no way that a dwarf fighter of the same level can do it, he maybe can hide until the deva expires and then take out the cleric (lev 19 if i am not wrong).
to really test the power and usefulness of a mage testing must have done only after a certain mastery is reached in using arcane spells as in every situation and at whatever level there are only few spells that can really turn the tide and other ones that are much less effective.
using fireballs you use your tactical advantage, using instead stacked cloudkills you abuse the AI weakness that make the enemies stand still and die.
You're right: the right spell at the right time can turn the tide and make a tough fight seem trivial. This I understand well enough. However, the "casting time" of most spells is too slow for an effective chain of spells in a solo encounter. I know there's magical gear to remedy this, but it's not readily available for quite some time in the saga, meaning a mage will have to cope with it for a long time, flinging spells at a very slow pace. Meanwhile, most other classes are capable of handling immediate danger without too much hassle.
And these are the main issues with mages: the casting time and the downtime from casting too many spells, leaving you stark naked in the middle of a dungeon or some other adventure.
I'll give it a second try. You've given me new ideas, and I'm going to put it to the test. First, I'll try the shields - both - for dealing with her summons. This means popping up Mirror, Blur, Spell Immunity, Stoneskin (this one before the engagement itself), maybe one of the armor spells. I don't think Immunity from Magic Weapons apply as this is a mage duel and her summons are mostly critters. I'll then Breach her, cast Greater Malison, and then hopefully disable her in some way instead of focusing on damage dealing spells straight away.
As you can see, that's a LOT of spells for one mage duel. These take time and leave you vulnerable without the assist of a party. The aforementioned dwarf - let's make it a Berserker, to trivialize the fight even more - could guarantee a kill without taking any damage in a matter of seconds.
I DID manage to get a kill without taking damage as a mage, but the results were inconsistent: the mage either lucked out or not. You are far more experienced at this than me, so whatever tactics you suggest is welcome.
You COULD scout ahead with a thief, tho. Hypothetically.
As I said, using a mage to its maximum power requires plenty of micro, but used that way, they're pretty much unkillable. I remember that a no-reloader took a simple team of two mages all the way through the final BG2 fight and the first time one of them took some small damage was deep into SoA. And it was on an install with SCS. Mages are not the best offensive class : fighters deal more consistent damage overall. However, they're the best defensive class bar none, with some crazy good damage potential when they set themself up for it (sequencers and contingencies can be crazy good).
Disabled enemies from your first spell aren't interrupting casting for your second spell.
There is also a reason why "Wand" was mentioned. If you need to solo an encounter, you can solo the encounter instantly, with fire, from level 1. The Robe of Vecna is available from the moment you first get out of Chateau Irenicus. You should have few issues with it.
Wands are available as soon as a mage gets level 2 spells in BG1. The mage has invisibility. There is no reason why any danger should be immediate, nor any danger in resting whenever you like, nor any reason why the mage can't simply scout targets, summon something in advance, then drop a few webs.
Fire Shields + Stoneskins + Mirror Image recasts are ample for most survival encounters when combined with a wand. For truly weak opposition a simple MMM or Poly Self form can handle them. You don't need Blur, you don't need Armour. Mages don't care about being hit: They hit you, it hurts them. If you're concerned about Mage vs. Mage summons, then drop Death Fog on top of her and ensuring that any summons she manages to cast have to walk through the fog. They die instantly, she takes damage and it disrupts her spells.
At ToB levels, your average level 17 mage well before HLAs gets: 5/5/5/5/5/3/3/2 spells. With Project Image, that's one hundred and twenty spells per day to handle problems. If she has contingencies, take them down with Secret Word, and strongly consider just blasting her with the Wand of Fire, or a cloudkill. She has less than 100 HP.
This is still not touching any higher level spell. If you have Project Image, the projected image can cast any spell you like without expending a mage's actual spell slots, letting the image do the fireshield tanking perfectly well.
A tl;dr guide keeping it to plentiful simple spells:
Melee enemies?
Stone Skin + MrImg: Be immortal.
Invisibility or PfMW: When surrounded and you need to rebuff.
Fireshieldx2: Kill fast hitting enemies. Especially with PfMW/SS/MI.
Crowd Control: Face fewer enemies at once, possibly while they kill each other. Things that target Spell saves work best against fighters.
Summons: Create Fighters to do the job for you. Eventually the summons are better than actual fighters.
Wands
High damage AOEs initiated from offscreen.
Skull Traps and DBFs tactically placed to start ambushes.
High damage DoT AOEs combined with disablers.
MR enemies:
Lower Resist
Incendiary Cloud/Dragon Breath
Fireshields
Summons
Bypass entirely with invisibility.
Mage enemies should generally be treated like a boss encounter. A mage is dangerous, a fighter is not.
Shield: Ignore Magic Missiles. Magic missiles are a killer, so this is generally pretty handy.
Globe of Invulnerability: Ignore various lower tier stuff.
Death Fog: Kill Summons, disrupt casting.
Improved Invisibility: Avoid direct spells.
Invisibility: Stop being targeted and gtfo. Generally combine with SI:Div first.
Spell Immunity: Cast as needed to avoid something. Necromancy isn't always a bad choice, but you also get Magic Damage protection spells to just ignore those Horrid Wiltings.
Summons: Fish out death spells with smaller summons sent to attack remotely, follow up with big hitters like Skeleton Warrior afterwards.
Crowd control. Ideally from offscreen. Even Blind kills a level 20 mage unless they have Dispel, and pretty sure later on there's PW:Blind, an instant cast AOE that works on anything for several rounds of uninterrupted pain. Things that target Death saves work best against other mages.
Magic Missiles: Disrupt their lengthy cast spells.
Wand: If their wards are down, hurt them. Wand of Fire: 27 damage average for two rounds.
The more you know about any enemy mage in question's spells the better you can tailor your loadout to handle them.
Generally:
Mislead: You cannot be targeted or made visible for the duration.
Project Image: Your image is a summon of yourself. You can drop your one Improved Alacrity/day and it can even cast invisibility on you in the pending nova before doing anything you can except scout (your familiar can scout while invisible if you know what to avoid, or the various scout spells).
Weapon selection:
Staff of the Magi for free dispel and instant invisibility.
Firetooth +3 for 2 APR plus strength bonus. Your strength belt wearing elf mage is going to deal plenty of damage on hit against all those disabled targets, and you can kite any that survive to mop up afterwards or spend a few spells taking those ones down too.
There is no situation a mage cannot handle purely with spells, but there are few low level issues they can handle simply using their basic chassis.
The opposite is true for every other class. Their chassis is better, but there are problems they simply cannot deal with without depending on items that replicate mage abilities.
Best of luck with your maging.
based on what i could gather, the scorcher part of the wand deals 6d6+6 damage with all 1s being rolled as 2s while the fireball part deals 6d5+6 damage with all 1s being rolled as 3s, very peculiar
Do any of the other wands have unadvertised perks like this?
against the skellies, who are just low level filth sometimes it takes 2 fireballs to take them out
and against the ogre mages, sometimes it takes 3 fireballs to take them out ( but i would assume that on average ogre mages have better saves than skelly filth)
so for me, it looks like the wand is dealing less damage than advertised
I can't do it straight away, but I'll post the results here.
1. Best defensive abilities in the game.
2. Best crowd control abilities in the game.
3. Best AoE damage in the game.
4. Best summons in the game.
5. Very strong single target damage.
6. Utility spells like identify, invisible, etc.
The only thing that the warrior does better than the mage is single target damage, and even then you can kill a dragon instantly with greater malison + finger of death. The mage does everything else better than the warrior.
The more knowledge you have of the game, the stronger the mage class becomes as you'll know what spells to bring to which encounter, and how to use them efficiently. The mage is just about the only class that can go through a difficult encounter naked, without taking a single point of damage.