Good traits for mage units

The staves are only really useful if you're out of mana, or if you put them on troops as a means of dealing with the rare physical-immune enemies (like banshees).  A mage should be using buffs to enhance troops or spells to deal damage.  Very early-game a decent elemental staff might out-perform magic for pure damage, but once you have a decently-leveled mage sovereign or champion and a nice pool of mana to draw from your spells will be capable of wiping out entire armies at once.  

As a pure mage, the closest to a +attack bonus will be your spell mastery level.  The higher the level, the less chance of resisting some enemies will have.  That's about it, though.

I think he was talking about designing custom mage troops.

I pick the Dodge vs Range since those guys seem to get targeted by AI arrows.

Like you though, I can't decide if any of the other offensive traits even apply to mage damage.

I suppose you could train two different mages and play around to see if one outdamages the other.

The staff on its own doesn't have quite enough punch, but when you add the extra damage from a frost ring and a fire ring for that +2 damage, you start to get worthwhile damage. The real benefit you get from the damage is that it ignores armour. So if someone is throwing full plate mail troops at you  - get something to tank for you while your staff troops shred them to pieces.

good traits are:

accuracy, to make sure everything hits,

spell resistance, if an ai is throwing spells at you,

dodge bonus id the ai has a lot of archer and it can help against melee in a pinch, it can be worth sacrificing 1 initiative and 1 hp per troop to gain +20 dodge, then with the robe for +10 more dodge that gives you 30 dodge in total - but then you need a lot of crystal for these troops and that can get pricy - so you want to protect them - enchant them with evade spell for even more dodge, and use obscuring mist spell and the spell that protects from range, and also the precog belt.

add some tanky units, not go kill.

edit: Heart of flame enchant to a city helps a lot too.

initiave > defence> health boost enchantment.

Sounds like everyone is in the same boat

If anyone has or does test offensive traits on mage units let me know.

So far it looks like none of them increase the mage damage and all of them increase archer damage.

As has been since it started, +Attack is always +Physical Attack, and doesn't apply at all to weapons that don't have any physical attack to start with.

Your missing the point. Elemental damage is not blocked by armour, it's lowered by fire, ice, lightning resistance.

so the 6 fire, or 6 ice does more damage than the 7, physical of a bow plus trait bonuses.

yeah i think bows sometimes need the traits because of the armor most enemies will have. esp. if you did not give the archer trait to your faction to get the ram horn (50%ignore armor) bow.

i mostly go for all the inititiative i can get and then fill up with dodge on all my ranged units though, no matter if they are bow or magic damage. i then prioritize the enemies caster and ranged units which i'll mostly kill before they had their turn und then just have two or three melee tanks that block the enemies melee units from getting to my ranged ones.

if you feel your mage-units are doing to small damage, then the + fire/cold damage items and enchantments are what you are looking for. i think that mage-units are a bit overpowered already because of the ai's lack of elemental resistance, so it is imo a good thing that there are no extra traits for a direct damage increase.

You guys are all answering different questions like 'its fair and balanced and intentional'

But the question was do any of these traits work.

The traits that give +Damage clearly don't work because it would show in the unit stats.

The traits that give a percent bonus damage in certain situations should work because they are a percent bonus. So if you do 8 ice damage +50% would be 12 ice damage. I just asked if anyone has tested and verified that they work or don't work.

I agree that bows are different from staves, everyone knows that, it is not what I am asking.

The XML for the percentage boosts suggests that the bonus applies only for physical attacks (the multiplier is only applied to UnitStat_Attack_Pierce). Thus I would not expect that a unit equipped with the Incineration Staff or something like that would benefit from either Enmity or Bloodthirsty. I have not tried it to see whether or not this is correct, but the XML suggests that the +25% attack traits will not work if the unit has a physical attack of zero.

For my hopefully first completed game, I designed custom fire and ice mages.  Basically, I added the trinkets the boost the same damage type and one that increases initiative, then added and + initiative and extra damage towards lower initiative units traits.  This lets my mages attack early in the battle and easily take the down the big burly units quickly as well as deal with any melee units who try to go after them.

ok,yes.it is intentional. Originally the traits did add damage to the elemental staves, but everybody agreed it was too effective and was getting out of hand, so the traits were changed to be physical only.

Having 6 units of staff wielding units made it easy to kill entire armies on the larger size tactical maps. In legendary heroes, the maps are smaller and enemies start closer together so melee can start right away. This gives ranged units more of a sniper role instead of kill everything role.

I think it would be awesome if the traits mentioned that they only work with physical attacks.

A small tooltip change but things like that add polish.

Imo most important traits for mage units is +acurracy and initiative. For equipments, +fire or +ice damage, dodge vs ranged, +initiative.

At later stage of the game, replace +accuracy with +hp or +spell resistance. +Dodge can also be useful but in ridiculous/insane difficulty, AI usually already reach the point where they almost always research +10% accuracy which will make +dodge completely useless.

City enchantments can also be of a huge help for them. Like the +fire damage and +initiative and +hp buff.

As stated above, many +atk traits are useless for mage unit because it is meant for physical damage not elemental damage. Likewise, any spell that boost attack such as growth has no effect on mage/elemental unit which has elemental damage.

pretty sure growth will always work, I routinely use it on my ice elemental summons.

I'm pretty sure Ice Elementals have Physical Attack as well as Ice Attack, which is why it works in that case.

Doesn't work efficiently though, it just increase its attack by a few increments, because 90% of their attack is elemental, so only the 10% that get increased. This is only for LH , if you play the original FE, growth increase elemental's attack, but it changes their elemental damage to physical damage, Ice and Earth will become Blunt damage, Fire will become Cutting damage, Air is Piercing damage. For mage unit, it won't change anything.

Going back to the OP's question, the traits I've been giving stave equipped units are:
+2 initiative
+10 accuracy
+1 accuracy & spell resist per level

With a base 60 accuracy, the accuracy increases (along with an adidtional 10 from a training ground) really help.  Ranged units don't get any swarm bonus, so you need all the accuracy buffs you can.  As for initiative, more actions = more attacks = very useful

I'm surprised, i always give those traits to my mage units.

100% agree there.

THe trained unit Mages is just dissapointing , They are not mages , They can cast anything ... They just use a magical staff that any other class an use ... I think this unit needs a new aproach , they need to be able to cast some spells ... not a lot as the heroes but at least some as healing , chaos , low lvl sumons ... this will add a lot to the game and will convert this staff carries in real mages . .