The whole of Mage feels really underwhelming

[kind trout]

Love acro, but this is a thread about Mage feeling like an apprentice mage instead of an archmage

[rich ravine]

ive only just gotten back into wynn but ive thought a lot about mage design during my break and i feel like one of the big problems is that the movement spell is teleport because unlike the other classes you can't kite with movement while sustaining damage

and with mage you really really want to be sustaining damage since you dont have much of it

[misty oar]

teleport is broken 😭

[unborn grail]

Are you referring to after the changes to its abilities or present-day.

Because present-day it absolutely does more than it did before the rework.

[slate harbor]

initial release, im aware that it does much more currently

[blissful granite]

Going all the way back to the beginning, I don't think Arcanist recasting Ice Snake is unintuitive. Ice Snake is much easier to charge the mana bank with, so recasting Ice Snake is the punishment for missing too many meteors to force its use. Lb is kinda braindead, yeah, but I think it's offset by the effort required to keep track of party members' HP and meeting them to heal mid-battle

[slate harbor]

if you can just cast tp to reset your costs youre punished significantly less than casting ice snake, doubly so with sorcery

mostly why i find it unintuitive. it's just such an unreasonably weak spell

especially with the recent nerfs just making arcanist even weaker

[blissful granite]

ngl, it never occurred to me to do that. Ig that does change things

Although I don't think that's the point I'm getting at, after thinking about it: casting teleport resets mana costs to make it easier to cast more meteors, but it doesn't directly help fill the mana bank, which Ice Snake does

[cedar flare]

Mage is one of the classes that is really "classic" in the way that everything is simple

[slate harbor]

unfortunately i dont think that’s much if an appealing factor when other classes are becoming far more modern and interesting

arcanist feels like boltslinger 0.5

it has such phenomenal concepts that aren’t touched on whatsoever and its such a shame

[cedar flare]

Riftwalker is the closest thing we have to a modern Mage archetype

timelock rift specifically

[slate harbor]

checks out since it got the most updates out of the three archetypes by far

[cedar flare]

Chronological order of updates aside, the gameplay it has is the most free form and skill expressive archetype out of the three. The other two options are just heal spam and meteor spam

[slate harbor]

it definitely has the most depth yeah

which is a shame because arcanist has so much untouched potential

[cedar flare]

It used to be just as 2 dimensional (snake - meteor spam) but the winded buff made the most useless ability in the class (Timelock) into mage's best tool

[cedar flare]

I will say though, I do like that all 3 archetypes heavily focus on low mana sustain for best results. I think it's intuitive for Mage the master of magic to depend on equipment the least to cast their spells. Thematically, they're the ones most in-tune with magic

[slate harbor]

true. i do find that mage tends to overvalue its mana bonuses though. other classes like acrobat get crazy spell multipliers and damage bonuses alongside one of the best mana-generating nodes in the game, whereas arcanist gets an even crazier mana node yet does nothing else with it aside from chaos explosion

lightbender only is allowed to focus on low mana because it essentially doesn't cast anything costly

i cant say much on rift cuz i havent played it much since the timelock mana change but i remember being annoyed over how much it relied on mana storm

[cedar flare]

Yeah, timelock is too short of an ability for you to get any serious mileage on it, so you end up heavily relying on manastorm to maintain near constant uptime. This is especially crucial after the Timelock nerf that made it have a 5s cooldown

[slate harbor]

the things i'd do to improve mage man 🥀

surely i can do that if my AT app gets accepted

[cedar flare]

u get my vote!

[lyric spoke]

Being simple isn't bad either, we can have a simpler classes/playstyles

[kind trout]

There is simple and there is lame

[slate harbor]

^

[lilac dragon]

Idk arcanist is satisfying to use still imo

[slate harbor]

it definitely is but that is because of a singular node being well designed while the rest of the tree is very lacklustre

what would arcanist be without chaos explosion? not much i'd reckon

a class being brought up by a singular node throughout its entire tree is not very indicative of a good design to me

[lilac dragon]

There are quite a few of these arguably

Like fallen where unless u path to monk its pretty bland except enraged blow

Maybe it’s just fallen

[unborn grail]

Yeah when you use the small meteor and snake resource packs

[lilac dragon]

Big meteors is more visually appealing but not playable

[unborn grail]

Should just pull a gangels and make them come out of portals around you or something

[olive meadow]

What if we call them guarding rocks and they shoot out little mini meteors at enemies that get close and they float right behind you

And casting other spells can give it special abilities like dealing more damage per shot or slowing down enemies

That would be cool i think

[unborn grail]

Well that’s too similar to bolt at that point?

[olive meadow]

U cant be serious right now