Mage gameplay feedback

Wicked Feedback
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I did a mage playthrough with 2 friends, and while I think it’s good & reasonably fun, I think it needs a bit more tweaking to really feel like a fun playstyle that’d make me recommend the game to friends. Note: I have recommended this game to friends, but I wouldn’t do it based on my experience playing as a mage.

Wands:

  • damage isn’t on par with bows, which do feel like they’re in a good spot.
  • It’s not clear what kind of off-hand makes sense with a wand. I know I can use a shield (but I’m not going in melee range) or a torch (some utility sometimes), but it seems like an obvious spellcaster off-hand is missing.
  • It would be awesome if we can bind one rune to the B button so the basic melee and cast attacks are both available without holding RB
  • Weapon art for one wand in particular (I forgot the name, it’s available very early game) looks more like a fantasy axe

Staff:

  • needs a 0FP skill. It feels crazy that you can’t use a staff as a pure caster until you have a tonne of auto FP regen. With wands it’s nice: you can always do melee and basic casting.
  • It’s currently not really clear to me why you’d want a staff. The damage difference between wands and staffs seems small. The skills don’t seem better across the board either.

Eleanor:

  • in multiplayer she doesn’t sell multiple copies of the same rune, so only 1 person gets the teleport rune
  • After upgrading she doesn’t seem to have the lvl1 runes anymore, so it can feel like an unwanted change (but after the time & materials investment it should feel strictly better)
  • Infuse/enchant/… it’s not really clear what is what
  • It feels weird that the blacksmith upgrades wands & staffs, rather than Eleonor doing it.

Other:

  • the research paper thing still is unclear: so I researched 4 new wands, what now? Perhaps my tooltips were bugging out, but I didn’t see any explanation
  • Friendly fire: seems slightly random when something does/doesn’t hurt a friend
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It could be said that the actual ranged wizard’s case is not yet present in the game. The mage in NRFW is a “Battle Mage”, the runes that cost stamina are a modification of previous runes that previously had a 50 focus Cost and they inflicted much more damage, which made sense with their slow animation, for this reason they are very clunky, especially when compared to the basic attacks of bows which are instead designed as basic attacks.

I recommend you take a look at my post in this topic: Its fun to be a mage in Wicked? Because - #18 by Lombix_4 .

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Thanks. That’s a great comparison.

Its actually similar to using a bow but without a quiver, and with a delay before you can shoot again :sweat_smile:

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