Quote (Maltacus @ Apr 26 2024 05:36am)
3. Concerning Skill Choices
There are several ways to pick skills to focus in for an archmage. She might want to focus in only fast cast skills so that she can take full advantage of improved cast rate from her equipment, or only focus in skills with a cast delay so that she has almost no need for faster cast rate and can dedicate all equipment to skill levels and mana and so on. Both approaches make a lot of sense. Furthermore, she could choose skills that are as similar to one another as possible, so that she can use mostly the same tactics and playstyle no matter what damage type she delivers. Fireball and glacial spike is one example. The WWW will however take a mixed approach and each pick one fast cast spell, one area bombardment spell and one support spell with a longer duration that can be cast and deal damage over time while they do something else. In addition, they will use whatever one-point wonder spells that they have together with item charges and of course a great deal of footwork. Last but not least, each will hire a fellow mage of the flamboyantly garbed iron wolves to aid her and complement her skill choices to some extent. While built to be evenly matched each will have a couple of special strengths and aces up their sleeves.
Wilma
Iron Wolf: Fire
Fast Cast Spell: Chain Lightning
Bombardment: Blizzard
Support Spell: Hydra
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Wilmas definite trump card are the hydras. Aside from being the best spell in the whole game because it SUMMONS DRAGONS, the hydras give her the ability to attack any non-immune enemy from beyond its range and from around corners. With the least powerful mercenary and lack of freezing her best option looks to be long range combat. When cornered, Wilma will be at her weakest but at least blizzard synergizes the freeze length of glacial spike which allows short time area freezing. Blizzard in itself is also very powerful against a small group of enemies and easy to use for long range bombardment. Blizzard is like the mortar of the cold skills while frozen orb is the canister shot. Chain lightning will be both the strongest and weakest component damage-wise. It can be boosted by faster cast rate and hit a ridiculous amount of enemies in ideal conditions. On the other hand those ideal conditions are rare and the casting animation is a bit long.
Wanja
Iron Wolf: Cold
Fast Cast Spell: Lightning
Bombardment: Frozen Orb
Support Spell: Fire Wall
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Wanja mirrors Wilma in many ways but seems to be a more short-ranged version. She has the most powerful mercenary and together with the large area of effect from frozen orb the chilling and freezing will be her trump card. Fire wall has a huge damage potential and can be used to attack around corners but it will be notoriously difficult to use effectively against mobile enemies. As long as they can be frozen, her mercenary will likely ensure that they stay in one place long enough to be set on fire. Lightning is better than chain lightning against individual targets and tightly packed rows of enemies but lacks the devastating power against large spread out groups. Like Wilma, Wanjas great dread would be some extremely fast cold and fire immune enemy.
Wilhelmina
Iron Wolf: Lightning
Fast Cast Spell: Glacial Spike
Bombardment: Meteor
Support Spell: Thunder Storm
Strengths and Weaknesses:
While Wilma and Wanja have many similarities, Wilhelmina sticks out with a cold fast cast spell and thunder storm as support. Glacial spike has a small round area of effect like fireball which can be better or worse than the lightning bolts depending on the situation although the casting animation is shorter which is very useful. And of course, lightning does not freeze the enemy in their place, nor does it synergize the freeze length of ice blast to dwarf any competitor in that field, and here is Wilhelminas trump card. If the enemy is immune to that and too fast, she can stay out of reach with teleport and wait for thunderstorm to pick them off, making her arguably the safest of the three. She also has the mercenary with greatest damage potential, complementing the thunder storm with fast lightning area attacks. Meteor will obviously work great if the enemy can be frozen long enough for it to fall into place. Otherwise it can still cause huge damage but the question is how successfully she can aim it against a mobile enemy.
Since the sorceress is so focused on direct damage she has fewer one-point wonder skills and support skills than the other classes. The archmages will have to make use of all she can as well as skills from items if she can make room for it among all other properties that she requires from her equipment. These are likely to be the most important.
- Teleport, the sorceress most game-changing ability. Unrestricted mobility as long as the mana bulb can handle it. The archmage is likely to use it a lot to stay out of harms way and get in the best firing position for her spells.
- Static Field is the ultimate tool for disposing of act bosses even though it requires a dangerously short range. The rune word Memory, quite affordable with Lum as the highest rune, is of particular interest to potentially boost static field range to make it useful in many more situations.
- Telekinesis can be cast rapidly and knock an enemy back but the knockback is unreliable. With lots of faster cast rate it could be an excellent tool to keep individual enemies pinned against a wall.
- Ice blast, even when unsynergized, can be enough to keep the enemy frozen with a lot of fast casting and thus opens up for corpse control even if you deal damage mainly with another spell.
- Energy Shield, even when uneconomical due to lacking telekinesis points, can be a life-saver.
- Frozen armor, for no sorceress looks complete without it and the minor freezing might be enought o help the sorceress escape a second hit.
- Lower Resist charges can obviously be of great value since there will be none immune to three damage types but quite possibly highly resistant to the third. It can spawn on staves, and an arch-angels staff with this suffix and some skill bonus from the staff itself is possible to buy and nothing to sneeze at.
- Weaken charges, obtainable from the practical Smoke runeword or gloves, or a wand if one has to be that unstylish, is a very cheap way of increasing your survivability.
- Corpse Explosion from the Black runeword makes for a huge damage bonus in the right situation and corpse control when enemies can't be frozen.
- Grim Ward charges, which are pretty rare and something of a novelty, could be useful if the sorceress could find the space to reach one corpse in time and of course as corpse control of cold immunes.
- Weapon damage and effects, while being a vulgar thing and not something the archmages really wish to lower themselves to if they can avoid it, can be quite important, especially to prevent enemy healing since the sorceress does not inflict poison damage. With no attack rating, something lowering enemy defense and preferably being fast and ranged would be preferable to stop the healing, or possibly slow the foe. A last resort for the truly desperate spellcaster.
I like how you broke the spells into Far Cast, Bombardment and support, reminds me of old RPGs.
