The "problem" with mages isn't that you can't beat the game with them. It's that attack to break physical armor + battering ram or chicken > chaining most spells together. If you aren't a lone wolf and discounting things that give you extra turns (like Chameleon cheese and Fane's Time Warp) you will typically have 4 AP on a turn. Many spells require 3 AP and your first spell might not even break through magical armor. Your basic attack generally sucks as a mage and it usually takes 2 spells to CC someone even after their armor is broken and enemies have elemental resistances but there is no such thing as physical resistances so your DPS tends to be lackluster contrasted with a physical attacker. The three hardest hitting builds in the game are warfare ranger, 2h warfare/poly and warfare scoundrel and two of those options have superior CC as well.
That's not to say you can't win or that you can't possibly beat the game on tactician or that it's impossible to play a mage it's just that magi are "gimped" compared to physical heroes.
Lonewolf as a whole is generally "OP". You don't need to split gear so your economic situation is stronger (less reliance on lucky charm/thiever), and you get to stronger point investments earlier in the game which allows you to take key adversaries out of the fight in less turns. A lone wolf mage is inherently stronger than a non-lone wolf mage. Even with that being said, you can certainly beat the game on tactician with 4 mages but you'd be a lot better off building them against only complimentary elements (IE, hydro/aero with geo just for armor buffs) - because then you could synergize off statuses like shocked and chilled instead of having one mage casting spells into resistances. And you'd be able to face roll the game even easier if you just ignored mages altogether and stacked heavy hitting physical heroes and put a couple self-buffs on them as necessary.
Last edited by dcgregorya; 09/10/17 04:47 PM.
