I have beaten the game on Rogue+permadeath exactly once, and it was with a promethean mage. I have played dozens of games with other builds, and there's no comparison. Other mages have severe mana issues or weak aoe or no pet or a blood price. Prometheans just do sick damage and inflict burns. The dragon is a very strong pet, costs moderate mana. Early game it kills, later it is a distraction. Exploding rune completely dominates the early game, especially zoos. Two points in promethean and 0 in blood mage can clear the first few levels. The higher skills are also good. Agree?
The tree has already been nerfed repeatedly, as has been blood magic. The bigger balance problem now is not that mages are overpowered, it's that warrior and rogue builds are severely underpowered in comparison. There've been discussions on the forums about this; you can go look them up.
In fact, I've been playing this for the last few days: (Dwarven moderation, permadeath, no time to grind, realm of the diggle gods) -Promethean magic -Blood magic -Swords -Staves -Dual wielding -Smithing -Alchemy The least helpful has probably been smithing, the most, Promethean, Blood, Alchemy and the weapons (mostly to make sure I can handle one monster of two if I run out of mana/get cornered/need to finish them off without wasting mana)
I have to agree. I've beaten the game more times as Promethean mage than any other class. It's really the combination of Blood Magic and the high damage from Promethean. You never run out of mana during monster zoos. Rune of Exploding could use a small damage nerf. It does a lot of damage for a lvl 2 skill. Dragon's breath is pretty well balanced. Useful early and mid game. Mostly worthless after a few floors down. Gog's tactical pyre should be changed to something else. This will disallow Promethean from dominating single target and AoE damage. It's basically as good as Psionic's Pyrokinesis. Obvious Fireball has been nerfed a few times already and is in a decent spot. Infernal Torus is powerful but Fireball is still the bread'n'butter of Promethean. So no change.
Promethean seems to solve almost all problems the game throws at you, assuming you have some way of regaining mana quickly. As long as you have blood age/ley walker/alchemy for mana I think you could pretty much rely on promethean to carry you through the rest of the game. You might wanna add mathemagic/burglary/artful dodger for the teleport skills, at which point you should be able to win the game unless you screw up pretty bad. I don't necessarily think that promethean is overpowered, but it's definitely the cornerstone in more or less all mage builds. You get promethean for damage, and then take whichever skills you feel would suit your playstyle. The choice to take promethean seems kind of like a no-brainer in most scenarios, which is a bit unfortunate. I have very limited experience with mage builds in general tho -- it might be possible to use necro or viking wizardry to great effect, I haven't experimented enough to really be able to give an informed opinion on it. On a sidenote, I don't necessarily think having one go-to damage dealing skilltree for any character type has to be bad, although it's definitely limiting. I don't wanna expand more on that argument atm tho, since as I said I haven't really played enough mage builds to be able to pass judgement on whether a certain skill is OP or not. peace~~
One idea I had for balancing Promethean was to remove the 6. Makes it similar to Necromnicomics - you can potentially kill yourself if you aren't careful.
You must have had good equipment or something. I played a character after all the nerfings whose only non wizard skill was alchemy, and ice monsters were taking 2 hits from the fireball before death. So how were you taking on fire based monsters and one shotting them? I think my magic power was around 60 at the time.
As has been noted several times: The proper answer to any challenge in DoD as of now is open range, open fire. Promethean gives you the fire part.
magic since no monster should be able to get into melee range, the only important stat is . archaeology does wonders when it comes to increasing your magic powers. just re-roll until you get / everywhere.
ability to shoot diagonally + no need for clear LOS = fun being doubled! for a game that only lets you move/attack in 4 directions its a pretty big deal,at least archers still need clear LOS and ammo conservation. i was also amazed you could summon the tactical pyre UNDER an occupied tile,that was the moment i realized fire magic was OP,the game just became "you can SEE it,you can burn it" and it costs less than 5mp,its was just boom headshot over and over again! for reference stone soup only allows you to summon flame pillars on empty tiles right next to you,i can see why now
