Helping the mage class continued

[Manumitted]

The thing I dislike about Fire Maelstrom is that it hurts me worse than the mobs most of the time. Something volatile--the spell effect itself?--always seems to go boom close enough to hurt me unless I run away from the instant I cast the spell, which reduces the opportunities to fireball the fish in a barrel. It's good only for crowd control.

I don't think anything hurries up a cooldown timer, even dying.

I item-farm for long enough in convenient towns and survey the merchants constantly enough that I'm drowning in spare Cast Time gloves and have a moderate oversupply of CT staves. Every caster of mine already has at least +33% CT gloves, usually +44%, often with other useful enchants (middling omnistat / omniresist / single stat or resist). If you have Hide Crappy Items turned on, you may be sabotaging your chances at these gloves, because they usually show up with no other enchantments, and the CT enchant is (still) worth just a few CP per percent.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Manumitted

The thing I dislike about Fire Maelstrom is that it hurts me worse than the mobs most of the time. Something volatile--the spell effect itself?--always seems to go boom close enough to hurt me unless I run away from the instant I cast the spell, which reduces the opportunities to fireball the fish in a barrel. It's good only for crowd control.

Could it be an earthquake? Might be hard to see with the maelstrom going on.

I don't think anything hurries up a cooldown timer, even dying.

OK so the cast time gloves are really for spammable spells, which is fine. They allow you to fire faster spammable spells if you have the mana for it, so you don't need to boost their level as much and can concentrate on other skills instead. That's a fair trade. I don't think that solves mages' (or other classes') problems. And those gloves are rare enough that we can't count on them. Also, non-mage characters (or half mages) will prefer something else over fast cast items.

While I'm on this topic, I should mention what I think masteries should be like: they should essentially be group discounts. If I know I want to specialize only in fire mage spells, it's worthwhile to get fire mastery so that I can build up more fire spells in my repertoire while spending fewer skill points. It's not as good of an investment if I want to diversify between different skill trees, say fire and ice. In that case I'd need to buy the spells at full price, or try to get a group of ice and a group of fire and get both masteries to try and save. This is how the spells should work. Instead, right now they're just used for survival.

[Manumitted]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

Could it be an earthquake? Might be hard to see with the maelstrom going on.

I moved on to a new town and figured it out. The old town had the modifier Fire Hazard, so the maelstrom would rip holes in the floor, find multiple gas leaks, and light them up. Irritatingly enough, the gas explosions never seemed half as hard on the mobs as they were on me. It's like the mobs were insulated from the explosions by the maelstrom's DOT.

The new town actually lets me clear a cave-in with fireballs without causing a bigger cave-in or explosion, and I can shoot more than two fireballs at the same mob without blasting my face off. Fire Hazard is no fun for a Fire Mage.

[Bluddy]

I started a balance thread in the mod forum. See you all there!