160 réponses à ce sujet

[Sinfulvannila]

Chain lightning's advantages are:



1:It's an AOE damage spell without Friendly Fire.

2: Not many enemies have Electric resistance



So it's pretty good for a melee heavy party.

[immeyourenot]

technosatyr wrote...

immeyourenot wrote...

My top spells:
1) Mana clash - You know those mages who can give your party a hard time? Well not anymore.
2) Storm of the Century - Stand still Alistair, keep those things close to you. This wont hurt a bit.
3) Fireball - It's a funsplosion.
4) Chain Lightning - Don't panic. You're all going to die.
5) Glyph of Paralysis - Traps are fun.

My bottom spells:
1) Heal - Useless.
2) Group Heal - After much consideration I have decided to promote this to Mostly Useless.
3) Mana Cleanse - I would even put this spell on my hotbar why?
4) Flaming/Glowying/Coldening Weapons - There are so many more useful things that mana could be spent on.
5) Flame Blast - Ugh.

I'm curious to know why you'd put the heal and group heal spells on the bottom.  I found I didn't like them on my main character, but I'm not sure I could design a strategy I felt secure with that didn't involve always having at least one party member who knew those spells.

Well first of all for a start, I'm not playing on easy or normal, all of my characters have been hard and risen to nightmare, so it's not a case of "well you might need them if you raised the difficulty". The reason I don't link them is simply because there is so much more a mage can do to beat an encounter than heal.

Firstly health poltices are abundant, even on higher difficulties, these make up the entirety of my healing. It helps too that a regualar health poltice heals for twice as much as heal does. So not only are you healing your characters for more, you're also doing it without investing any mana or talent points. This mana can then be used to either do enough damage to stop any nescessity for large amounts of healing, like against a large mob of angry archers, or by using weakinging or crowd controlling spells.

Secondly, armour, armour, armour. I always make sure that my characters, my tank especially are equipped with the best I can afford to buy at the time. It really makes a big difference to buy a nice set a couple of tiers higher than hoping to find one from drops somewhere down the line. When your tank is tanking pittance for damage there's no need to heal.

It basically comes down to me not liking to waste the talents of a mage on healing. And once you can get past that it suddenly becomes apparant that mage-less parties are viable after all, and you don't have to take Wynne or Morrigan at all.

The reason I upgraded Group Heal to "mostly useless" is because a mage with spell shield and group heal is quickest way to recover from a fireball. But usually mana clash means you wont even get hit by any of those.

[Rainen89]

Tooltip says friendly fire is possible, hm, mistype?

[Misterbill]

I like both walking bomb spells...they work especially well versus groups of ranged attackers that are not close to your melee chars. Even if there is a bit of friendly fire, it seems to hurt the baddies much more than my Templar tank, Allister. The skeleton rez one is great when there are humanoids nearby you can turn into your minion...Also I like the freezing spell--the single target one....havent used cone of cold. The spell that squeezes the enemy is nice too and works even better versus frozen targets.

[scyld]

Kidshowbusiness wrote...
*EDIT:

I somewhat agree with those that think force field cheapens the game experience - I am really considering lessening my reliance on it or swapping in some weak party members to compensate for the ridiculous damage I can pull out. HOWEVER, the extreme difficulty spikes lamented on these forums almost require such overpowered tactics, and I am having a much smoother play experience now than before when I did not realize the power of certain spells. I'd say that at about lvl 8-9, if you build your mage correctly, you will start experiencing the game in as enjoyable a way as possible. No more hair-pulling, intensely frustrating, nearly impossible encounters that cause you to reload dozens of times. I can't even imagine how others are coasting through on hard or nightmare modes, are we talking about the same game here?? I know that my tactical skills have significantly improved, so maybe I will give nightmare a shot in a week or so, but still the learning curve to this game is just brutal. I've remade my character 3 times because I literally became stuck at certain points in the game. 

I'm playing on Hard, and I sort of agree with you. I've used Force Field to eek out a win when I would have otherwise wiped, but I probably could have gotten by without it on a future attempt. I personally try to minimize its use as much as possible.

But there are definitely some parts of the game where it is VERY handy, especially somewhat early on when your characters aren't yet walking juggernauts of destruction.

5. Arcane Bolt - Standard moderate damage spell. Nothing else to it. All primal spells beat this in nuke-potential... but it's understandable as a free spell. 

Except that it has a lower cooldown and smaller mana cost than Stonefist or Winter's Grasp. I wonder how much damage it does compared to these two spells, especially considering that it has no secondary effects like they do. I will have to pay attention to this next time I play.


Also, in Heal's defense, I will say this: it allows you to heal characters that are temporarily disabled and thus unable to use Health Poultices on themselves.


I don't know what my favorite spells are since there are so many goods ones, so I'll go with least favorites:

1. Vulnerability Hex: Maybe this is decent, but none of us have any idea what the base spell resistances of enemies are. Who knows if this is effective? I really can't tell.

2. Affliction Hex: You need the targeted mob to stay alive for this to really be completely effective. Aside from that, see above.

(At least Death Hex is awesome, though I wish I hadn't invest in the two above hexes to get it.)

3. Glyph of Warding: Pretty underwhelming defensive spell that has combines 3 rather mediocre effects into one.

4. All the shapeshifting line, or at least Spider. God, at least take away the super-long casting time...

5. All the first line in Spirit. "Someone else" in your party probably already has abilities that are redundant with the most important spells here.

Modifié par scyld, 17 novembre 2009 - 12:43 .

[technosatyr]

Useful

1. Sleep. I thought I'd not get much out of this spell because it breaks on damage, but I'll be darned if I wasn't using it all the way up through the last battle and being happy to have it. Huge area, instant cast, moderate cost.

2. Heal. It's one point, and has no prerequisites. In exchange you get a spell that lets you perform a function that no other class can possibly do: heal another character.

3. Telekentic Weapons. I'm doing the romance with Zev, a tank and I'm an arcane warrior, so I've got a melee heavy party. The amount of armor penetration from telekenitc weapons keeps my rogue hitting nice and hard.

4. Paralyze. Knocks an enemy out at long range



Spells I regret:

All the lightning spells.

All the hexing spells. (they're great in theory but thye've got long cooldowns, high cost and enemies resist them a lot)

Blood Control: strong enemies resist it, weak ones aren't worth controlling

Wisp: applying a fatigue penalty on all spells in exchange for a very small non-scaling spellpower buff? no thanks.

Arcane mastery: Giving up a spell for a measly 5 spellpower? I've got better things to do.

All those "heroic" spells: the duration is way to short to make these worth casting. I can't really buff up the party with them in advance, and I've not seen them contribute significantly to the outcome of a fight. The only exception is Haste, which helps with dungeon exploring, but which I turn off in fights.

Death Magic: Almost never procs for me inside of a fight. Any mana gains are offset by the huge casting penalty. Is slightly useful to turn on when you go OOM....but might as well just chug lyrium or cast a spellbloom or something.





I got chain lightning on my guy and I've regretted it ever since. I don't know about the FF part, but the damage is laughable and it takes way too long to cast. For that cast time I might as well use the storm spell. I was told once that all magical lightning also reduced the mana of enemy casters, but I've never noticed them casting less because I've been pelting them with bolts.

[Malcroix]

TOP



(1) Cone of Cold. Period.



I haven't found anything to compare to this spell.



Paralyzing the enemy is the best effect there is, especially in megaboss fights.



Paralyzing a GROUP of enemies is even more amazing.



TEN SECOND COOLDOWN. Sure, Crushing Prison paralyzes for twice as long. But it's got a 60 sec cooldown. With CoC, your two mages can keep even a big boss locked down almost permanently.



Finally, it's a 3rd tier (available by level 2), and a moderate cost.



(2) Forcefield. Shimmering Shield.



(3) Blood magic spells go here for me. They've got to be considered together. Blood Wound is probably the best possible opener; Blood Control is just freaky; and Blood Sacrifice is exceptional if you apply the fix to make it work as intended - on ALL ALLIES, including charmed/dominated ones (i.e. Blood Control, Waking Nightmare).



4. Sleep + Horror. Excellent early game combo.



5. ? Lots of moderately useful spells. Fireball is a great opener before you learn Blood Control. Fire/Frost/Telekinetic weapons (which you have as prerequisites for better spells) HAVE THEIR USES against vulnerable foes (undead fear fire, flaming demons fear cold, templars/reavers/warriors fear armor piercage). Only use the weapons enhancement that is particularly effective against the predominant enemy in the location. I run a 2 arcane warrior-blood mage/ 1 berserker-reaver/ 1 assassin-duelist party, and the weapon enhancements can be very useful if judicially applied.



BAD:



Many those mentioned before - heroic offense etc. Too little benefit for too much upkeep/fatigue. Learn to economise. In particular, I found Creation and Entropy schools both pretty lacking. Tried to run a hexer/death magician, and really, it does not work if compared to the better spells/combos. Same goes for creationists.



Anyone interested in concrete data on spells needs to look through the scripts. I did, it's a pretty good read.





Also fixed Blood Sacrifice. It's uploaded in my projects.

[technosatyr]

Is there a place to go to look at the spell scripts? I'm trapped on XBox and can't see setup files.

[PsychoBlonde]

I fiddled around with numerous mage builds before I settled on one that I like:



1. Mass Paralysis. Yes, it does have a good-length casting time, but even big bosses often fail to resist it, and it takes out whole squads of mooks without the "they're immune to damage" problem of Force Field. I got this as quickly as possible on my "final" mage and opened every combat with it. It's a shame that most of the spells you need to get it are crap, however Miasma is a good one to use if you're running a melee mage like mine (you could see her on my profile, but she hasn't uploaded for some reason ) and Paralyze is a good mage or Ranged takedown while Mass is cooling off.

2. Cone of Cold. As others have said, freezes ANYTHING for a short duration. Helps takedown big annoying bosses like the dragons and Broodmother.

3. Petrify. Used with Stonefist, takes out mages.

4. Mind Blast: For when Mass Paralyze wears off too soon.

5. Heal

Fireball gets an honorable mention because it's the perfect quick spell to knock over a bunch of enemies that are too close to your mage so that you have just enough time to cast Mass Paralysis.



1. Flame Blast: pointless

2. Any buff spell that isn't a mode and all the debuff spells--if you've left the mages unparalyzed/unpetrified/unfrozen for long enough that they have buffs up, they've probably nuked your party into oblivion anyway.

3. the various "rejuvenation" spells

4. Lightning and Shock (lightning says it has possible friendly fire, but it's a SINGLE TARGET SPELL?!)

5. Weakness--can't even tell when it's up. Only take it in order to get Mass Paralysis.

[Spirit Shrink]

technosatyr wrote...

Is there a place to go to look at the spell scripts? I'm trapped on XBox and can't see setup files.

Only thing is the toolset that I can think of but I'm not sure if you can see scripts and stuff on it unless you have a PC copy of the game to load up the files.

[PsychoBlonde]

immeyourenot wrote...

Secondly, armour, armour, armour. I always make sure that my characters, my tank especially are equipped with the best I can afford to buy at the time. It really makes a big difference to buy a nice set a couple of tiers higher than hoping to find one from drops somewhere down the line. When your tank is tanking pittance for damage there's no need to heal.

Armor is crap.  I have my arcane warrior in one of the the best suits of armor in the game (superior dragonskin armor--with the hute fatigue reduction it's actually making it so I can use a shield and helmet and STILL be in NEGATIVE fatigue penalty!  I wish they had plate with an armor check bonus like that in Dungeons and Dragons!!) WITH rock armor up AND several items that give MASSIVE armor bonuses and she STILL takes tons of damage.  

Granted, heal ain't all that, either.  Later in the game you're still healing like 50 points of damage and your fighters have 300+ hit points.

I found heal mostly useful on a support mage like Wynne because then I can have my main mage run around and obliterate stuff without Sten and Leliana biting it all the time.

[Shannara13]

Good

1. Storm of the Century

2. Cone of Cold

3. Forcefield

4. Crushing Prison

5. Stone Fist



Bad

1. All shapeshifting spells

2. Shockwave

3. Flame Blast

4. Rock Armor

5. Arcane Shield

[immeyourenot]

PsychoBlonde wrote...


Armor is crap.

I've never played an Arcane Warrior so I can't comment from the perspective of one of those but from what I've heard they are pretty much the epitomy of easy mode, so I'm sure it's highly possibly that armour makes little difference to one.

From my warrior's perspective however I've noticed that armour makes more than just a slightly sizable reduction in the damage you take. For instance, when using my two-handed Warrior tank to do the Denerim back alley quests on hard mode I found that the sheer number of enemies quickly overwhelmed me, seeing as how by that time I hadn't gotten Morrigan a decent form of AoE crowd control yet to take out those pesky archers. Seeing as how it was the last of the three areas I wasn't really prepared to go out and gain a few levels and spells  before trying again, so I upgraded my armour from tier 5 to tier 7, and what do you know, suddenly it doesn't matter because they all hit me for ~5 damage.

Armour makes quite a significant difference I find. Enough at least to make a healing-focussed mage unnescessary.

[Blue_dodo]

the area dispel effect I think is quite useful, it is nice to be able to dispelt certain irritating spells i.e curse of mortality, which is good against mages .



I have yet to test out all the spells but from my experiance

drain life - I love this spell the amount healed is normally equal to the amount of damage done...since I play mostly offensive this is wonder full

vulnerability hex- whats not to love? more damage

affliction hex - even better

mass paralyisis - cheapo

Sleep- I LOVE THIS SPELL great with waking nightmare/horrior



basically I love the entropy line there are a few I could care less about



disorient/weakness- both seem like the same and are well useless





so far thats all I dislike

[12RJK18]

Fail, read other post if it got through

Modifié par 12RJK18, 17 novembre 2009 - 02:58 .

[Hrathen]

Crushing Prison is pretty OP... prob #1

[12RJK18]

IMO Glyphs are all you need.

25 mage, I went str build for good armor, I'm a glyph mage that uses a sword and shield so I'm not much of a mage everything I do is more for melee, I haven't specialized yet.

If I had to pick I would say

1.glyphs

2.primal AOE's doing all 4 = almost guaranteed kill + massive DOT, if you use neutralization glyph you can stand in the middle of it without taking dmg

3. shape shifter - the bug things, for speed

4. force field

5. the conjuring spells, grease and the swarm

I don't feel I can make a fair worst list

[Jestert]

1, cone of cold

2. heal

3. mindblast

4. crushing prison

5. fireball



useless

1-4 the whole heoric line

5. wisp

[Socratez83]

My top:



1. Heal.

2. earthquake/blizzard/virulent bomb-combo. I can kill whole groups form range after using this. Bit lame, but fun and usefull sometimes.

3. Cone of cold. CC's quite a few mobbs, while doing dmg. and a short cd. Its unbalanced imo. Only use it when i am really in trouble.

4.Crushing prison. CC for quite a long time and dmg ot, so usefull for mages or elites.

5 Petrify. 2 shotting a mobb is neat.



Worst:



1. weakness, disorient. Why would i wanna waste mana on that, while i can just use miasma or supressing fire (archer though).

2. the 2nd or 3rd wep-enhancing spell. I got 2 mages, so 3 of these spells total. Its a bit too much and therefore a waste of talentpoint, though needed for reacing further into talents..

3,4,5. Dunno.

[Legion-001]

For those of you who don't find the Animate Dead spell very useful, try casting Spell Might before you cast Animate Dead(on a corpse) instead of a pathetically weak undead warrior you get a very tough warrior usually with a magical weapon.

[SpacelordMofo]

I haven't used enough of the spells to give a complete top5/bottom5 but I have to mention the Grease/Fire spell combo since nobody else has. The grease stops enemies in their tracks, then cast a fire spell on the grease and everyone in it burns.

[guru7892]

One of the odd things I've notices about buffs and debuffs, even for other classes like the rogue, or some of the warrior abilities, they don't seem to do much. Maybe I'm not looking close enough at the abilities (but whos realisticaly gonna sit there and compare numbers; not the average user). even when it comes to some of the stuff about enemy agression (aggro) it really doesn't seem to take all that much.(or maybe I'm using it wrong).

DAO give a lot of numbers but I'm not really sure what they all do. If there was an aggro number or something that showed how much attention each character was getting in a very acessable way that would be nice.

also some clarification on armor and defense, I know one reduces damage and another reduces the hit chance, but I cant really see those numbers when I'm activating modes and doing stuff in combat without pulling up a menu. it would be nice if I could have those numbers in the UI, so I can see how they change for buffs and to see if they are usefull, and how they react to actual conditions.

Modifié par guru7892, 18 novembre 2009 - 08:49 .

[Sable Rhapsody]

Top five spells:
1) Heal. As has been said, boring but necessary in the early game, especially if you wait on the Circle Tower to get Wynne.
2) Crushing Prison. Easily takes yellow monsters out of the fight and usually kills them before the spell even wears off. WIN.
3) Mind Blast.  This little spell has saved my mage's squishy butt on so many occasions before I picked up Arcane Warrior.
4) Fireball. My most overused spell, even when it's not really the best, just because it's so much fun.
5) Cone of Cold. I foolishly did not pick this up until later in the game, but I've loved it since getting it.
Honorable mention goes to the Arcane Warrior tree of spells. Used properly, my Arcane Warrior kicks Alistair's little templar behind.

As far as worst spells go...I've yet to come across a spell I don't like But maybe that's because I mostly play with my mage rather than Morrigan or Wynne. People have complained about the lightning tree, but it is handy because very little resists it. Also, worth it just for Storm of the Century, though the AoE of that spell is so huge and the damage so high that the friendly fire can be deadly.

Modifié par Sable Rhapsody, 18 novembre 2009 - 08:53 .

[Siven80]

How do everyone find Drain life later on?



Early levels its does great dmg and heals well yet im finding later on it barely tickles enemy.

[surrealitycheck]

Best spells:



1) Entropic Death (death hex + death cloud). Can do over 1k damage, and can be cycled between 3 mages to do about 3k damage in 4 seconds.

2) Forcefield. Just lol.

3) Storm of the century and Blood Wound (both are equally absurd).

4) Paralysis bomb - glyph of repulsion + glyph of paralysis - totally insane aoe cc.

5) Cone of Cold



Worst:



1) Shapeshifting

2) Chain lightning - it doesn't scale with spellpower, is absolutely pathetic.

3) most other spells are pretty good, really, I guess? Flame blast is pretty crap?