Also I think many of the Marksman, Scoundrel, Man-At-Arms abilities need lower cooldowns, mages have so much more diversity of short/mid/long CD options. I can drop rain down and spam 1 CD attacks that have a high chance of electrocuting or freezing enemies.
I agree to this. Many of the non-mage skills have 10-20 turn cool downs. A lot of the mage stuff is way lower. You'd think it would be the other way around since mages have it easier already.
Midnight oil is also a little bit of an overpowered crutch right now IMHO. Basically anything melee doesn't get to be a threat because it has to move through a burning oil field to reach my two mages. It carried me pretty hard through the early game - hard difficulty w/two lone wolf mages.
It can be a crutch, but pyro magic is in general. As a test I intentionally avoided it last play through. It made things harder, but fights just took longer since I couldn't fill combat with giant burning fields of death.
Alternately you can still get midnight oil and just have a mage fire staff that you attack the oil with. Though that's still cheating a tiny bit if you're trying to go without pyro.
I do think we need better low level spell/ability options as well, I'd like to be able to choose 5 or 6 not just 3, and of a larger variety. Right now it's a no brainer choosing midnight oil and flare because the others just don't compete and some don't even have real offensive spells - no option for hydro damage at all, and the geo spell is poison which is useless against the very common undead.
I agree, but on another hand it makes sense - the spells mirror the leaving system somewhat in the 3/4/7/10 vein. It would be nice to have them more spread out though. It's a long wait between level 4 & 7 sometimes.
Mostly I'm just annoyed that the majority of the spells vendor sell are spells you CAN'T use yet. I'm level 3 or 4 and looking for things like ice shard, or bless, but no, it wants to give me 90% level 7 or 10 spells. so I have to wait forever just to get the spells for my level. I find this silly as I've gone some playthroughs not getting a low level spell until I'm level 7 or 8. And this is with consistently checking the vendors every time I'm in town.
Perhaps this is just a downside to RNG. Before they had the vendors selling too many duplicate spell books, but at least you could find the spells you wanted a lot more consistently. Now I find it hard to do.
Last but not least, I am not sure how archers are going to ever be a consideration over mages if they have to manage a resource but aren't really any more powerful at ranged damage to make up for added tediousness.
Rangers are actually really powerful. I was skeptical at first, but I ran a mage/ranger combo and found it very effective. They start a bit slow (like warriors) but become pretty epic. My level 7 ranger rushed Marksman 5, so he has the 3AP bow talent. Since he has such high perception he starts combat with 12 AP, so he can fire 4 times. (his recovery AP is good as well.) With 100% chance to hit and a 25% crit chance, he crits often. And with an elemental bow (common at that level) you can do all kinds of cool effects for free, electrocute water, set fire to people, chance to bleed, blind, curse, burn, etc.
I was at first annoyed that elemental arrows cost as much as a spell book, but were a one time use rather than a permanent fixture. But between your ability to craft your own on the cheap (about 150g) and the arrow recovery talent, and that there's lots of arrows around in the world (especially the orc beach) I found I had a great supply of special arrows.
Whatever the case, mages tend to attack once or twice max per turn. My ranger could generally eliminate an enemy every turn with 3-4 regular arrows, and use special arrows as needed. They offer other uses as well since they have a lot of cure spells for all the various diseases, crippling effects and poison. And you gain a mute spell for mages later on too. Neat stuff.
Lastly between the high dex and a possible dodge talent you are very hard to hit. Their survivability is quite strong through stats (and/or a talent) without the need for defensive spells. Magic of course still hits you, but physical attacks would miss very often on my ranger.
