Having played through the beta so many times, I decide to jump right into the game on Tactician mode.
To make it interesting, I decided to go Ranger-Fighter-Mage-Mage so I can do both physical and magical damage.
The mages were absolutely useless even against low magic armour team. Nearly every fight, it was just my Ranger and Fighter taking turn dealing damage while keeping them knocked down forever and getting 3 turns of free actions in a row.
With the extra level requirement to learn stuff like teleport, they become even less useful when it comes to damage as learning those skill force them to allocate skill points into area that won't even synergize with what they're using because of changes made to each school so that they only work with their specific element.
And their damage are still so low compared to warfare even with the nerfs. Just look at warfare bonus. It now gives "More physical damage" in general. Physical also scale way better with weapon and stat. By level 4, I got the ancient sword and a green one-handed hammer from a random box and my Red Prince was dealing 70-80 damage a turn without rage while both of my mages were struggling to go past 40 with explosive synergy on every attack.
Same goes to my ranger who got the houndmaster really early and with the 2 AP cost instead of 3 changes, completely left the mages behind and those 2 were killing everything in fort joy with the mages just leaving oil trail for the slow that goes through magic armour and bug the crap out of the enemy AI in Tactician mode, making them end turn randomly without doing anything.
Half way through clearing fort joy and getting to almost level 5 on Tactician, I decide to give up and reroll because the 2 mages aren't showing sign of getting better even with the level 2 skill box showing up on the shops.
Unless they suddenly get a super strong nuke-like magic armor piercing spell on T3 skills, it's really disappointing to see a weak role becoming even weaker while Warfare still rekt the crap out of everything even on Tactician.
