Melee mage - viable?

[Madscientist]

 

With the Wiz, the focus on aoe is crippling since its hard to use effectively and not obliterate your own party. Some aoe is ok but you cant have a class thats built around friendly fire skills. Its a bit unfair that the chanter/cipher get infinite spell casting AND many of their aoe spells ignore friendly targets. Seems to me that the wizards, who work with expendable resources and have limited utility, should be the ones with more aoes that ignore friendlies.

The bigger problem is not  the friendly fire as much it is creating tactical situations where friendly fire can be avoided. The way the game works right now, we have a problem of not creating scenarios where the enemy can be huddled up in a group. The only time this happens is RIGHT at the start of the combat.

 

Which sucks.

 

 

If I understand you correctly then you do not like it when all enemies form one group.

 

In most RPGs I want the enemies to gather around my tank, the melee chars stab their back and the casters cast from the distance. Often my biggest problem was to bring the enemies together. The standart tactic was to let the tank walk around a corner and when the enemy sees him he walks back and when enemies come around the corner the party starts to open fire.

 

I admit that this tactic is bad for classes that do AOE damage with friendly fire.

[Lephys]

In v278 of the beta melee wizard was the only way to play a wizard. There's a huge thread in the beta forums about improving the wizard class, but as of right now (in my opinion, anyway) there is no good build for the wizard. At a minimum the class needs a major balance overhaul. When I start a new beta playthrough I get rid of the wizard and buy a chanter and cipher at the inn.

I believe most of the numbers and such haven't been tuned yet (across all the classes). I know that's not the whole problem, but that involves casts per day/encounter, and how worthwhile having a given spell in your grimoire is over another spell, how effective one cast of any given spell is, etc.

 

Methinks they're trying to make sure all the math is interacting as it should before they just go through and do a tuning pass on all that.