Hello all,
I do agree, mages are irrelevant late game.
And as pointed out earlier, that's mainly because staff spells don't scale with weapons at all.
Having tried a (large) bunch of possible builds, all main damaging spells do scale (and quite a lot at that) with your weapon damages.
However, that's not how mages spells scale. They just don't have a stat that helps them use the equiped weapon stats.
Moreover, there's only one node in the whole tree that will help you convert physical damages, and it only applies to poison damages and up to 50% of your physical damages, which do NOT represent your whole weapon damages.
For any other kind of staff spells that wants to deal different damages from poison, you simply cannot help them with annything, other that damage spell %, crit spell %, or affliction.
But same problem happens with affliction : they are simply not enough compared to other main damage spells. Even after taking the whole affliction package and trying to go for a really strange tree that helped me get the max affliction I could, it was simply not enough to clean mobs quicly and realiably.
It is still better indeed, but not sufficient.
Finally, even if mage spells not scaling with your weapon PHYSICAL damages does make sense (I mean fire scaling with physical?), they don't scale with your weapon elemental damages either! And I do find that weird.
Let's take the following example (no runes, no tree points, no attribute points) :
you drop a staff having for flat stats : 40-71 physical damages, 121-200 thunder damages
It aslo has a bonus 16-37 thunder damages added to spells.
Let's now equip thunder strike.
That thunder strike, without the staff, deals an insane amount of... 14 average damages. Hold it ladies I know, that's huge.
If you now equip the staff you just dropped, that thunder strike goes up to 40 average damages.
It only scaled on the bonus spell damages, but not on the elemental flat damages of the staff. And as much as I understand how the game maths currently work, I still find it weird from a gameplay point of view that the spell will not use the staff's stats.
So I do believe that needs to be fixed. I would really like (and I think other people too) to be able to play a late game full mage build. Or at least to be able to use mage spells as main damaging means in my builds.
In order to do so, I do see 3 possibilities to have mage spells scale (but I'd really love to hear any other ideas) :
- staff spells also scale on weapon damages (which once again, I'm not sure having your fire spell scale with your weapon physical damages makes much sense)
- staff spells scale with your weapon elemental damages from same element (fire spells buffed by your weapon fire flat damage stat, etc...), meaning also having a better use for elemental offensive sockets (other than just adding damages to your weapon for more flat dmg)
- having nodes converting your physical or overall weapon damages to the damage type you want (already exists for poison)
Well thank you for reding that (friggin') long (and boring) post. And I hope it will help in any way to have reliable mages builds !
See ya
