Mage characters as of 0.9 are still very shallow and could use expansion. In previous comments and posts I have railed against evoker and the shallow nature of mages is probably the #1 reason for it being OP. In many ways mages seem very incomplete.

After a hundred turns of questing your inventory should look something like this:

Mage items are incredibly rare and most are just as useless and mage items in name only, the only common mage item being the emerald skullcap. Items like the adept robe (-0.10 spell cost +3 SM) should be an early game staple, as common as balanced axes and unlocked by techs. It seems strange that instead of allowing us to buy adept robes we instead get monk (+2 initiative) and agies robes (+5 defense), robes for warriors.

While the early game magic items are rare, the late game mage items are none existant. Here are a few mage items:

Haunters Staff: +10 SpellMastery

Banishing Staff: +10 dmg vs elementals when you hit them

Archmage Robes: -0.20 spell cost and +9 SM

Furnace Staff: Allows you to cast Flamedart

Compare Warrior and Mage items:

You can't argue that a warriors items arn't a large part of playing a warrior and that it isn't part of the fun. Mages should have acess to unique items just as much as warriors, items that allow unique gameplay instead of just reducing costs and increasing spellmastery. Also you must keep in mind that thanks to per item initiative modifiers mage items must be competitive to initiative bonuses from daggers. It would also be a good idead to make the majority of quest reward items staffs so that mage, even early game dont need to depend on armor.

Some Examples:

Staff of the Furnace 2.0: Counts as a fire shard for spells. Allows caster to cast flame dart.

Cleric Staff: Heals 1 hp per turn and increases healing spells by 20%

Ring of Will: Lowers targeted enemy resistances by 20% (Fire resistance for ex)

Summoners Staff: Ranged. +10Dmg vs elementals. Reduces turns to cast summoning spells by 1

Robes of Wind: +15 dodge vs ranged. Initiative +2. SM +6

Crown of the Elements: Counts as a shard of each type for spells. +10 SM

Ritualist Ring: Decreases cost of strategic spells by 20%

If good items like these existed for magi champions then evoker wouldn't need to be the sole source of spell dmg at +50%. Instead it could be more interesting with something like +10% and unlocks mana blast at lv3.

I realize that new mage items are on the way,I just thought i'd mention some examples of good mage items because the ones we have are TERRIBLE and rare.

Thanks for Reading