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Because of the way armor and shielding now works in this game as a damage sponge that has to be chipped past to get to be able to CC and debuff enemies, focusing on one type of damage is going to be way more effective in almost all cases. I've broken down the math in a different post already and Sweep had said pretty much the same thing here. Not unless something drastically changes way later into the game. On a Lone Wolf character I just don't think you can touch the effectiveness of physical dmg dealers and CC in a mixed party.

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Try to keep it spoiler free though please! I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who believes they've found a good core caster/wizard build, especially for Lone Wolf. However i'm hoping for a more permanent solution from the devs, because it seems very one-sided currently.

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But, for now at least, the best damage is being done by pointy sticks.Д«y way of a short term solution there's a couple of mods available that lower the cooldown of mage spells and also make status effects penetrate armour (so if your enemy is standing in fire he'll actually have the burn debuff instead of just tanking chip damage on his magic armour). It's a little disappointing, as magic has much more by way of creative solutions for handling enemies as a result of their different elements.

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My conclusion is that mages are only really useful as a very situational support class in a full party. Finesse based characters are even more ridiculous, to the extent that in my co-op run we're actually having to increase the difficulty to keep us engaged in combat. Meanwhile my Knight (points pumped into warfare with a few into polymorph) is absolutely decimating everything, even characters that are higher levels than my own. I'm about 20 hours in, level 10, and I've been playing predominantly as a party of two and using the Lone Wolf talent (For those unfamiliar Lone Wolf doubles your stats so that two party members can do the damage of 4) and even with double the stats the damage that a mage puts out isn't enough to compete with the enemies we're running up against. And will probably finish them off before you even get through the targets magic armour.

And again, as physical damage is all one type, while you're rotating through these spells your Fighter/Ranger/Scoundrel has already battered through the physical armour and has used his own set of much more versatile CC to disable the target anyway. Rain and tornado will remove the pools of oil and poison you drop, etc. This solves your cooldown problem as you always have something else to cast, although the spells will still clash for example if you use a hydro spell on an enemy you make him wet, which gives him a greater resistance to your fire spells. I've heard that one of the few legit ways to play a mage is to invest heavily into memory, so instead of having a few spells that deal big damage you have 20 spells that each deal a little. This is further further compounded by the fact that there's limited aggressive spells in each school of magic. They are undermined by the ridiculously long cooldowns of the most effective spells (4 turn cooldown for a firebloy fireball basically means you can only use it once or twice a fight) and is made redundant by the fact that your physical-damage-dealers are doing twice as much damage in half the time, and with shorter cooldowns. Being a traditionalist I'd have assumed that pyromancy would be the big damage dealing build, and when combined with geomancy to create pools of poison and oil you can make some pretty great, albeit still not particularly powerful, aoe explosions. I haven't spent much time messing around with every school of magic but it seems the best are those that deal physical damage (Necromancy, polymorph, and summoning). Honestly, on harder difficulties it seems like mages are pretty much useless unless they're in a support role. As CC can't be applied until armour has been removed, it's almost always beneficial to have all the damage dealers in your party doing the same type of damage.

This means, effectively, if you're hitting an enemy with both physical and magical attacks, neither will deal damage to HP until their respective armour has been chipped away.

This is something that I've talked about with a few people trying to get a good understanding of different playstyles and builds, but even after doing a fair amount of research I can't find any mage build that does damage to rival any of the physical damage dealing classes, both single target and as AOE.ДЇor those that have not yet played the game, armour has been split into independent physical and magical types.

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