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A1 - More MP?


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I usually play by making both characters quite skilled with both types of spells. Sometimes you really need to pour out a lot of damage. Sometimes you need to healers full time. Sometimes you just need to get all your buffs, mage and priest, set up as fast as possible.

 

—Alorael, who will acknowledge that some sacrifice of maximum ability in any one sphere is sacrificed. You do get a ton of energy in exchange, though, and the flexibility with the energy reserves to take advantage of it pay off. In fun, if in nothing else.

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Hmm.

 

I always start dual-training my spellcasters (after reaching the maximum required number of points in each characters starting role), so that by the end of the game I have a mage-priest and a priest-mage, but I find that I very rarely use my mage to cast priest spells, or vice versa. There are maybe a handful of times I would, but nowhere near the amount you guys seem to be implying when you say "two healers are needed".

 

The extra MP is brilliant, of course, and the rune reading and other deriviative skills are nice, but I could just as easily have a skill purely for pumping MP (like Exile).

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A1) The Mad Monk Squad:

Fighter/priest1; battle rage=blesses self, heals self when needed

Fighter/priest2; battle rage=blesses self, ditto

Priest/mage1; haste (party), major healing if needed

Mage1/priest1; attacks, refresh haste

 

In A2, battle rages blesses -and- hastes self.

In A3, war blessing replaces battle rage = bless and shield self, haste only works on one PC, so the mages haste themselves first, then the fighters on the second round.

 

Every time I mention this tactic, I get thoroughly castigated for 'wasting' precious skill points in such multi-classing. "You can't achieve max stats in their primary skill."

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I'd definitely recommend trying to get your mage's Priest Spells skill up to at least a 3, so s/he can learn Repel Spirit. I honestly don't think you can have too many characters who know Repel Spirit in A1. Raising it up to a 6 would give you another character who can Unshackle Mind or Mass Heal, which can also be really useful.

 

As for priests, I like to see them with at least a 3 in Mage Spells, so they can cast Haste (and the other mage support spells too, I guess, but I rarely use any of them except for Haste).

 

You can have your spellcasters multitask beyond that as well, to be sure. I don't think I've ever done it myself, but it's a perfectly valid option with many advantages, and it looks like a lot of people here favor that approach.

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Having more than one character with Unshackle Mind can be the difference between victory and reloading. Mass Heal, too. For the mage side, I'd actually say it's very useful to have your characters be able to deal damage to pick off enemies. Priests with even minimal magic get Bolt of Fire to complement Smite, and with a little more you have Ice Lances to go with your eventual Divine Fire for multiple targets. With that much you can pretty reliably inflict damage on whatever targets need targeting, regardless of immunity.

 

—Alorael, who actually often found that using mages to mop up weak foes with weak spells and leave the fighters to focus their damage on the big targets saved time and spell energy. When getting off two Ice Lances in a round lets you kill off all the minions instead of taking a round of damage from a half dozen sliths, those are skill points well (or at least adequately) spent.

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  • 1 month later...
Originally Posted By: Randomizer
I just watched my two characters with Unshackle Mind both get terrorized in the same round a few hours ago. Redundancy helps but not always.


That's why by the end of the game I always try to give all my characters six levels of priest spells. Everyone gets unshackle mind, mass heal, and mass cure. I also give everyone three levels of mage spells so that everyone also has access to haste. It hurts their physical stats, but since everyone can bless and shield themselves it evens out.
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While I am a strong proponent of Priest skill, I never bothered giving my sword fighters Mage skill. The encumbrance of the armor they need to survive a slug-fest, limits their ability to do Mage spells. There is no encumbrance penalty with Priest spells, so yeah, I load up on them.

 

I know that the people who have spent the time studying the mechanics of the game with the goal of optimizing skills to survive Nightmare (or whatever) difficulty say this is a waste of skill points, and I will concede the point. I applaud their diligence, and the data they have produced is very useful. But my goal in playing SW games is to relax from the stress of work, not to stress myself more. On normal difficulty, I see no benefit from optimizing, and for my way of thinking, considering my military training, and my duties as an IT professional, diversifying makes more sense.

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