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The addition of the new spells is fantastic, but darkness, grasping mire, and life drain ALL end the moment you cast ANY other spell - even simple ones like fionn's wrath and immolation.
This is keeping a magick build from being on par with other builds, and it also makes the playstyle feel substantially worse than it should.
| Category Tags | Other, Combat |
| Sentiment | Feature Request |
Notes from my current experiences with a full magick build on Nightmare in Ascended realms:
On Nightmare in Ascended realms magick is an AFK game even with full magick builds. My gear is top-tier, but not upgraded to T3 (essence is harder to farm with magick so I had to go for a ranged build for serious fighting). I use Charm of Ferocity and Charm of Brutality but the damage still feels like a bad joke.
Even with the long duration Summon Swarm's damage/tick is only a little better than a body shot with any other weapon, and since magick does not benefit from the Critical Damage multiplier the rate of damage with that plus other spells is like watching a swarm of sickly mosquitos attack an elephant with bug repellant. The health level of enemies in Ascended skyrockets, especially on Nightmare where health can go up around 1+ million for everything but the small fries and the knight, so it takes a long time to take stuff down.
This means that multiple damage sources are necessary to make combat times more reasonable, because even with a team attack magick is not very useful except when it can also stagger/stun enemies, or Life Drain for its healing effect. And those get cancelled when casting any other spells.
An alternative would be to make magick damage scale more after it hits a certain point, basically creating a "reverse soft cap" that increases rather decreases efficacy. Magick builds are not very viable on Nightmare once you reach Ascended realms because of the high health and low damage, though it viable before Ascended realms. Except vs some bosses. Then it's mosquito swarm time.
I would like to see spells like Darkness persist when other enchantments are cast, because that would actually help slightly. Slightly, though, because the increase is not that great (20% sounds like a lot, but 1.2 x 6490 is still pretty paltry), and enchantments don't benefit from Ring of Power's bonus, so the best I can do with Darkness + ice ammo debuff is around 10k/tick. By comparison, Swarm + Quake + ice ammo nets me around 22k. Which is still mosquito vs elephant level of damage late game, if you can keep them stationary to eat all the damage, and if you keep up ice debuff.
Some more things I've noticed are that Bramble Wall, Quake, and Arborist's Shield also do this. Additionally, Ring of Empowerment and Dispel... just don't seem to work. I'm not sure if I'm using Dispel wrong, but Ring of Empowerment just doesn't boost my damage output.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Summon Swarm is absolutely broken. While other DoTs like Hermetic Flame wear off after a little while, Summon Swarm simply doesn't do that. It even goes through the harpy queen's shield.