This based off of my review on Steam in which a Dev responded and asked for me to put in the forums. So here it is.
Balance is really bad right now. When the advice you receive to play a caster is “just buy a bunch of potions” as the only workaround for focus issues, that’s not a real solution. Currently the only two “good” choices are playing as sword and shield with the gain health on parry build, or go uber aggressive with a dagger build and light armor. Trying to play anything else will make you want to hold your head underwater and scream since you have to melee to regain focus or chug potions over and over.
Personally, I think passive focus regeneration should be a feature for staff, with something like a delay for it to take effect. Something like a fairly lengthy cool-down timer that triggers when switching weapons. This would make it a full commitment if you wanted top go that route.
If this is too much to ask for, a less appealing but better than current game-play mechanic could be a damage reduction shield that’s granted when using a staff to melee. Not as great as the first suggestion but something has to change.
I agree 100%. This would be especially useful earlier on where it feels pointless in trying to level up with the staff and not having access to an ample supply of potions.
Thomas has commented on X that they will implement as a test where mages and rangers will be able to use basic ability at the cost of Endurance, not focus like now, Yaaaay!
I feel your pain. There’s definitely some work to be done. my current caster setup uses a regen+channel combo, but I can only feasibly do that between encounters. Having [channel] require health, in addition to locking me in place for a significant amount of time for a nearly paltry amount of focus as the only option for a non-melee build outside of potions is… not a great feeling. On the other hand, I’ve been having an absolutely great time doing a melee + high rune use build, using str/int weapons and rapid hit+focus gain infusions.
The devs also mentioned that the focus regen gem is bugged and if that goes up to 1 focus per second then you’ll probably be topped off after doing some gathering between fights.
I did that for a while too and it does feel pretty terrible. I learned to hate channel. On the bright side it made me look around to find out what I was doing wrong and voila, I missed the entire area where the potion dungeon was located.
I figured that about it being bugged. Was experimenting with it and realized something was wrong.
Thing is, as someone who is using the workaround of regen + channel, I don’t know if I can agree with that being a viable solution. Especially when melee can jump from one fight right into another. Waiting around to play the game equates to a quick uninstall / refund for a lot of people. This means a smaller budget for the developers to add new content or fix the current bugs.
This makes the game lose replayability due to being only a couple actual endgame builds instead of promoting creative gameplay and experimentation.
I was just saying what one gem can do. Staff users can also melee and they’re some of the highest damage builds I’ve played so far.
If they make it easier to get gems, either focus on focus use or focus on damage basically give you infinite casting. Plus as others have said, over the next couple of weeks the devs are going to make the basic shot use stamina instead of focus so it’s already being fixed as we speak.
I played through as a mage and actually quite liked it, but I think that might be more a me thing than the mage gameplay being finished and good.
These are the things I liked in the current implementation:
hits with staves tend to have very high focus generation, if you bonk a monster even a little you tend to be able to back off and use a rune attack as well. This could be more exaggerated so that people notice, but for me it already made the difference from standard swords.
the ease of getting channel on weapons provides an alternate path to generate focus, I like this but health does end up being prohibitive (still cool though, blood mage feels like a thing, and you cook a lot!)
Investing in focus storage is valuable because of effects that restore a percentage of your total focus. Unfortunately those effects are way too spammable.
Some improvements that occur to me from this playthrough:
I would add a channel version that consumes only stamina and make that the one offered in the early game. Keep the cast short enough to use during a window after evading an enemy attack and keep mages engaged in the combat mechanics that way. It would also be neat to be able to channel continuously until you run out of resources.
Percentage of focus gain is a great way to incentivize focus as a stat, and keeping this incentive makes mages squishier due to lower equip load and health investment which feels right thematically. I would bake this effect straight into staff focus skills like channel, have them restore 10-25% of your total focus, or 2% focus per channel tick or similar. These effects being on combat triggers from using spells is too circular, and need to go, but it would be good if the incentive to stack the focus stat remained in some way.
Focus potion consumables are quick to use and that seems much too powerful. If they remain in the game a substantial cooldown might be required, or they become a lowish silver cost to trivially beat any boss fight. Learning players don’t like this investment and are more at risk of flubbing the fight, but players with experience can just break a fight all too easily with a ranged attack and a full stack of potions.
In general casting runes off staves already does feel powerful, so the mage game mostly revolves around doing things to gain focus (and typically, distaste for simply bonking things). It would be good to have more creative ways to gain focus in combat, perhaps more 0 cost rune skills like revealing a leyline you have to walk along or summoning a decoy that grants you focus if a monster destroys it etc.
I’ve been playing dual daggers up to this point, that toon is at level 19 and its getting really easy to play. So I’ve switched up with a fresh toon using a staff, just reached level 6. Not enough experience to really make a comment about this subject yet, but I was wondering where is the “mage” component to this build.
Granted I have that flame cast (forget what its called) but there’s nothing to tell me I’m fully charged and what is it that charges the cast? Melee hits with a the staff? A mage is a range class, not a melee class (normally).
Thanks for posting as I’ll be following this, to see where it goes.
Some of the staff runes have a 3 stage charge mechanic, you just keep holding down the rune button, your staff will pulse and gain a slightly more intense effect with each stage. It’s often not super worth it but you get a bit more damage and it seems to cause more elemental status if you need just a bit more of either.
Note that a lot of staff runes can be held but don’t seem to charge. Possibly only the ‘bolt’ spells behave this way. Basically staff runes are just like any other rune, they tend to have big AoE effects or long range, but many other weapon runes can do similar things.
Caster builds are literally the strongest in the game right now, to the point where it feels like cheating.
You don’t really have to use potions. It’s easy to stack massive amounts of focus through attribute points and items. You can get 50% focus gain without really trying. Not to mention Focus on kill gets just plain silly when you have a big pool.
If you’re trying to use absolutely no melee attacks what-so-ever, the only time you might have to use a potion is against bosses because there’s not adds to kill for focus.
That being said, the game has crafting for a reason, what is so bad about using potions? I don’t understand why this keeps coming up.
What this guy said. All the staffs basically play the same, shotgun your enemies with a spread shot and if you just want to single target some have a single shot that works better at range. But the shotgun even on my level 9 character was 1 shotting the giants in crucible and doing about 20% of Echo Knights hp. Granted, she has 3 rune+ damage rings on for a total of 82% bonus damage but the game throws those rings at you and they have no level requirement.
Sure you might need potions early on, but by the teens you just get your own focus from a gem or other such part of your build.
Out of curiousity, when’s the last time you guys started a mage? The focus on focus gem got a huge nerf. Not trying to be argumentative. Heck, I’d even say I hope I’m wrong. However, I don’t know if comparing the literal endgame experience to the rest of the game as proof of it not being broken is a valid argument.
It did get nerfed, I switched to my mage earlier to see if it had an impact. It does, but only in that I can’t blink infinitely. But damage spells are still infinite due to the damage one being % still.
That being said I made 2 mages yesterday in an attempt to beat Crucible at like lvl 10 and one got close, started at level 9 and died to 2nd stage boss, hit lvl 13 by the time she got there.
