4Game

I love the new magic system in the game and it adds so much fun and versatility to the fighting. However you are basically „forced“ to also carry at least one „real“ weapon for certain situations or when your Eitr food runs out. The Blood Magic Staffs seem limited, even though they are amazing, ngl. So here are some ideas in order to enable players to be „pure“ mages and make the staffs more versatile:

Staff of Embers: the item description states that it has blunt damage to it. Not sure if this applies if you hit enemies at point blank or whatever. In these cases the fire ball gets most situations under control anyway. But you are still dependant on eitr for defense and you risk to burn fragile environment or aggro enemies you didn‘t intend to (when you fling your fireball at a flying Seeker but end up blasting at the Dverger tower who helped you out up until now). Having a secondary melee blunt attack for when you can‘t/don‘t want to cast would be nice. Or slash, since fire burns rather than „hit hard“. It could alternatively figure as a magic torch, lighting up the environment when carried and maybe applying some fire damage when used melee. This attack could also cost more durability to encourage spellcasting rather than melee, but leaving the player the possbility to defend themself in certain situations.

Staff of Frost:
– this one doesn‘t have any other damage type to it, but a secondary piercing attack would be cool and fitting.
– As secondary spell this one could have an „opposite“ one to the main one: an eitr expensive, big, slow and homing snowball/icecyle.

Staff of Protection: I reached the Mistlands too late and didn‘t have the time to enjoy its initial insane parry bonus (x20), which I think is a shame they lowered back to the lowest amount any other non-parry heavy weapon has (x2). They could have left it similar to knives or bucklers (x4-x6) or slightly higher to make it special. As it is now I pull it out quickly to shield my mates and want to put it back ASAP because that‘s all it does.
– Idea for a secondary attack: it could have an atgeir style spin2win, that maybe only pushes back enemies without flinching or damaging them.
– Other idea: let the 2nd attack be a force field, pushing enemies back (like above). Let it even cost eitr, the Staff of Protection doesn‘t have to be a melee weapon.
– Since it is a blood staff it could cost you health and heal allies around you as a second spell.

Dead Raiser: I love the skelis, if the terrain is right and they can follow you easily (not you, Mistland terrain!!). But like with the Staff of Protection, you pull out the staff, get your skelis and are done with it until further notice. UNLESS you wish to have a certain combination of skelis, then you might end up in Hel. If you‘re unlucky you spend 10 minutes bashing your undesired skeli over and over again – with some kind of melee weapon you brought of course – until the right one comes out.
If I were a Necromancer IRL I‘d want to be able to have some control over my summons, so here are some ideas that one way or another I believe could enhance the experience:

• Secondary attack: make it a blunt attack so I could bash my unwanted skelis faster.
• Secondary cast:
• let me „unsummon“ the skeli I am looking at. It would be neat if this process gave me a tiny amount of health back (less than I spent to summon one), since I return the skeli‘s lost soul back into the twisted mind vault that is my brain. Nothing too op but neat to clear an undesired skeli or in a though situation where 5 HP might save your life.
• Let me summon different skelis according to the button I push: for example primary attack are melee skelis, secondary attack are ranged ones.

So yeah that‘s stuff I would find neat if it were implemented in the game, one way or another. They could also have left the initial higher crafting cost of all the Mistland stuff, as well as the power of the new enemies if they had fleshed out the staffs a little bit more. It‘s not really a complaint, but it feels like there are some opportunities that have been missed, and the scales of what is possible/fun and what is op/imba are locked in a somewhat weird position.

What are your thoughts and ideas on this? Happy new year and never travel unrested fellow vikings!