Making spellcasters more fun

I agree. I made Path of the Arcanist unlock Arcane Blast, which does per caster level damage at a cost of 5 mana. The subsequent traits reduce that cost by 40%.

i dont see the point

whatever you do, going melee at lvl 1-3 is always better, and putting a spell with a so low cost in mana is bad for later in the game imo

I must be playing quite differently. I am finding that my magic users, specifically fire shard users, have to save the day. The armies are useless, I have large armies with swords etc and they do pitiful amounts of damage - they don't appear to to do well against armoured opposition.

Also, my heroes without magic, do a little bit more damage even after a few levels of experience. But basically my wizards trump everyone, blasting whole armies with fireball and picking off major opposition heroes with flame dart. So personally I feel magic is too powerful in comparison to swords and arrows.

they are both very strong they just scale differently

magic is too op because its too easy

dart scales with lvl

traits gives immense scaling

shards are random but can improve even more

so basically without any effort and  a naked mage can do 150 dmg with 1 shot

but in some game you may be surrounded early so not having cities and much mana to cast you would feel going warriorish is still the best even for a mage, at least until you have mana to burn in combat etc

I agree that magic users are boring especially at startup due to heavy manacosts, I disagree on the solution though.

I think the chance to hit with magestaffs (the ones with 5 fire damage over ranged) should be based off spell mastery and spell resist, and they should boost spell mastery and have a slight reduction to tactical spell cost so these would be mage weapons.

Also I would love to see a few designed free spells at low levels of the spell tree, a very weak magical blast of energy to make my mage actually FIGHT like a mage.
I dunno, a lot could probably be done, but right now its pretty bland but severely powerful when you hit endgame mage hero.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I kind of like a mixture of both. I usually pair up fighter and mage champions together. The spells that win me the day are usually haste and slow. My sovereign managed to beat the Burning Lands at quite a moderate attack/defense because I hasted her, slowed Dellin, and cast sticky mud in the middle of the battlefield and proceeded to skirmish him to death.

I kinda feel damage spells go from mana-inefficient and low damage to over-powered too fast. Also, if mages are meant to be viable in the early game, the robe that reduce tactical spell costs should be available in the shop mid to early game. I keep wishing I can find one among treasures for my spellcasters. 

Also to note, Porcupine's crown is overpowered. 99% of my custom sovereign will start with it no matter whether they are spellslingers or fighters. Dropping regeneration, courage, flame blade without upkeep onto my sovereign at the start of the game is a bit too good to miss.

I think it would be better to choose the paths at level 2, because the player can sooner play his Sovereign as he wants and it would reduce the randomness of the traits, because the player would get more path specific traits. To reduce the randomness of the traits further more traits should be linked to a path.

Exactly. Magestaffs should be more than bows with elemental damage.

That is exactly how I balanced things in my mod. Great minds...

In the staff mod I am working on, spell resist and mastery determines hit or miss. The early tier staves do damage to a single unit, have no init penalty, and give a bonus to either mastery (fire staff), or resistance (ice staff). Midgame staves do radius damage and have bigger bonuses, but have a slight init penalty. Endgame staves do damage to all enemy units and also cast spells like wither or pandemonium. It boggles the mind why this is not already in the game. 

Gonna be a real idiot and say it sounds unfun to scale weapons like that, usually I just want a bigger version of the first staff.
Also I am not too fond of "all" the area effect damage, since it really just makes trained armies easier to splat.

Although I would like to try it, mostly for the spell mastery to resist part, that's the thing that really catches me, hope to see this in the game

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

It's balanced splash damage though. It will do something like 40% of the normal staff's damage to all units in a radius of 1. So you don't kill them all at once, but the overall damage is higher. It also looks epic.

Wow, that is really impressive. I can not understand why that is not in the game and why such staves or other magic items can not be bought at the Sovereign creation.

staff need a great improvement and balance in vanillla game and sean idea is very good

i agree with kong about end game staves but ofc need to see the final balance to judge

maybe add evoker bonus to make them scale better end game on champions

Would be fun to see staves with a single target version of whither, and casting chaos on the target though.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej