Sunday Musings: Defensive Enchantments For Mages (in General)

In light of mages having a more useful skill now (Evasion), I started thinking about useful defensive enchantments for mages. You see, on a team like mine, it benefits more to accentuate the offense than to concentrate on defense (at least in my opinion and experience).

So, I began going through the defensive enchantments in my head, looking for one that could best support a mage. For the life of me I couldn't think of a single one that benefits mages more than tanks/walls:

Protection: same for everyone, and more effective for a minion with high AC (like wall or non-ToA tank).
Ablative Shield: same for everyone, and more effective for a minion with high AC (like wall or non-ToA tank).
Guardian Angel: same for everyone, but has to be trained higher to get full payload on mages, as they generally get hit harder (lack of AC).
Vampiric Aura: absolutely useless to mages, good for tanks.
Giant Strength: absolutely useless to mages, good for tanks.
Haste: good for everyone, but only defensively for mages. Also, it would probably be better for the mage to train Evasion instead of relying on Haste. In my opinion, Haste still clearly benefits tanks more.

Two enchantments are clearly for tanks, one is almost solely for tanks, and the other three are similar for all but have a slight edge for tanks because they play better with AC.

Why is this? I see three possible defensive enchantments that would balance this out (pardon the names, I am just making them up off the top of my head):

Magic Enhance: simply increases DD attacks of all mages it is cast upon. I suppose its level could just stack with the the mages trained DD level or somesuch.
Magic Focus: increases DD level, but only in regards to its ability to ratio better against AMF (novice has been mentioning gear that would do this for some time, and I think it is a great idea).
Backlash Reduction: would effectively be like Magic Focus in that it reduces the effects of AMF, but it helps only in the realm of reducing backlash that mages experiences.

I can think of one reason against this idea: DD familiars. Casting these enchantments could seriously help a team with a large mage and large DD familiar (like mine *smile*), whereas the tank enchantments usually only really help the one large tank on the team (few teams have more than one "real" tank).

Other than that, I can't think of any reasons why mages don't have decent, specific defensive enchantments to support them. Thoughts?

But... this is Tankblender. We can't help out those pesky mages! :P

Really though, I think mages probably do need a boost. During the free untraining time, I tried training a mage with all XP into MM, and the damage he could deal was pathetic compared to that from my ToA archer.

Speaking as one who is determined to keep using his solo UC character.... mages don't need no darn boosting. :P

Actually AS is great for mages, especially if using a ROS. It lets you train less hp for your mage thereby increasing your DD spell level and/or evasion level. I did exactly that and have a high MM and evasion.

Protection is great also for mages. I believe protection is better for lower AC minions as the total damage you will take will be far less.
IE 20 protection protects 20%.

So tank with 200 AC will take let say 300k damage vs a mage with 100 AC taking 500k damage.
With 20 protection the tank takes a total of 240k or 60k less while the mage takes 400k or 100k less----> more effective in reducing damage to the mage than the tank.

I agree with you and GA, it needs to be higher due to the AC as you stated.

GS, VA and Haste are for tanks only. Haste may help but a mage team should not train it. If a mage is on a tank team, it may have a side benefit.

I do 100% agree some sort of mage enchantment is in order. Your 3 ideas are all nice, I would like to see at least 1 get Jon's approval.

Excellent points one and all (yes, even you,PK. :P)

I am off to paint, will be back this evening to see/give more thoughts...

Backlash Reduction is gotten through a ToE. this is not a flame though i like your ideas, maybe some armors that don't penalize DD besides MCM and leathers that would solve the enchantments that are shared by tanks and mages but given and edge due to AC

rather than mage "enchantments" how about an offensive/defensive DD spell...

I'm not the most creative person in the world so someone else would have to pretty it up, but think along the lines of a spell that wraps the caster (or team) in a protective magic cocoon, while sending a magical wave to damage opponents.

Could have it act just like other spread damage spells, where the more minons that are being protected, the less protection it offers, but as it is cast every round, would get stronger as minions die....

No idea just a hungover notion that popped into my head.

Long Live the lightsabers and blasters!

Like I've heard more than once from others Mages need Pants. How about armed pants of macabre design.You lower the back flap to fire off a rocket !

i like all three of your ideas.

Ranger - I think protection is better for a high AC team, because of virtual hit points(vhp). I define vhp as the pre - damage reduction blow that would kill a minion. ie, if a minion has 100k hp and 100 AC, it would take a 100k / (1-.21) = 126582 damage hit to kill it, so the 100 AC adds 26582 vhp to the minion. Lets say that guy as a (20) protection cast on him - now it would take a 126582 / (1-.2) = 158227 damage hit to kill it, so the protection adds 31645 vhp. On the other hand, a 100k hp minion with a 20 protection would be killed by 125k points of pre-reduction damage, therefore that protection only adds 25k vhp to the no AC minion. So each hit is reduced more for a low-AC minion like you said, but protection adds more actual survivablility to a high AC minion.

As for sutekh's ideas, I like them. Well not magic enhance so much, I can see the parallel to gs or haste, but it just doesn't seem very interesting to me (like gs or haste...). But for magic focus or backlash reduction, I would love so see some help for multi mage teams fighting against amf.

All 3 of your ideas are good, but the basic effects of them are already in the game. Magic Enhance is just like training more DD on a mage. a RoE could be used for that. Magic Focus is also like training more DD. So you get 2 spells to do the effect of 1 thing (training more DD). Backlash reduction is like a ToE, and also sort of like training more DD (less of a AMF : DD ratio, less backlash).

A tattoo that adds to magic damage could be useful as a mage alternative to a ToE.

I mean, there is a ToA for tanks, RoS for enchanters, and nothing that's really for mages except for ToE, which doesn't actually improve their strength, but their survivability, which is basically like putting more AC/HP on it for 'free'.

That's enough out of somebody who nobody knows for now.

i do agree mages need a boost, the ideas are good.

Ranger, protection isn't linear like that. base protection (4) is 4% reduction but (20) is not 20% that is too much. look at shade's tests/graphs for an idea of the reduction.

ED for Mages are the multiple minion team equalisers. If we were talking about Mage skills, it would be different.

For skills, the XP taken to train one would lower the DD of the Mage. Therefore the skill would have to be better to train than putting that XP into the DD itself, like BL is for Tank damage.

But for EDs, this allows you to use the XP on another minion to boost your Mage. Tanks already have this through GA and Haste. You can use XP on secondary minions to pump your Tank. Mages don't have this choice.

"Magic Enhance: simply increases DD attacks of all mages it is cast upon. I suppose its level could just stack with the the mages trained DD level or somesuch."

The GS of DD. ;) Have it increase damage, but not level, so it doesn't help versus AMF.

"Magic Focus: increases DD level, but only in regards to its ability to ratio better against AMF (novice has been mentioning gear that would do this for some time, and I think it is a great idea)."

The Haste of DD. ;)

"Backlash Reduction: would effectively be like Magic Focus in that it reduces the effects of AMF, but it helps only in the realm of reducing backlash that mages experiences."

I would prefer to make Endurance a skill. Backlash is the main penalty to DD. Making this an ED would allow anothe rminion to lower the amount of damage a Mage takes. Having it as a skill would limit the Mage to choosing between loweirng their DD output in foavour of less Backlash.

But.

These just make multi minion teams more appealing.

Why make a Single Mage (in order to concentrate your XP into your DD) when you can make a 4 minion team and use all the XP from three of them to boost your Mage. Giving you three meat shields in the process.

:/

4 Minions is easy mode.

Why make a single mage? Huge evasion. *smile*

Tyriel, a very good point about training more, so I will elaborate on my exact intentions here... When I hire a new minion, I want to be able to support my existing minion. I can't "hire" more experience into my mages DD spell.

But I do tend to agree, a pure "DD enhancer" enchantment would be pretty dang boring.

I agree, options for training ED on mage teams are limited compared to tanks. However AS is one of the most useful spells around, especially with PL or GA. If we are talking about augmenting a single tank in a multi minion team, haste and GS don't compare very favorably to AS/PL. They each only work on one of the damage components (ST/DX and weapon) and often do nothing/very little for the rest of the team.
Your ideas all seem ok, though like you say at the end with the capability to have 2 big DD casters the enchantment effects might have to be relatively low per xp.