Unarmed art with vampirism, little bit op?

I've seen crushing (or whatever they did) resistance once. It's always fire or existential.

You probably have far more patience than I do rerolling gear with archaeology. I want to have fun, not sit there hitting space 800 times a minute.

 

I do mess with Archaeology quite a bit. In the other thread we were talking about I admitted as such, but I tend to put all my Krong Anvils on the same item and end up with a weapon that has 80+ damage mods or a ring with a mountain of effects.

Makes it easier when you reroll an item because the chance of getting a mod you want is pretty high.

 

Promethian + blood magic is not really overpowered; yes, you can wipe out groups of enemies really really quickly, take out zoos in a snap and come out with more mana than you went in with.

But that's two skills that were made for each other. Promethian without Blood Magic might be unusable (you'd at least need alchemy or fungal to support the massive mana cost). Ley Walking is not really necessary, and Magical Training is just a nice bonus. Blood magic without Promethian is a nice bonus but not that great; most of the other schools of magic don't kill things fast enough to generate a net mana gain, at least not until you get to the last levels.

Where Promethian + Blood Magic falls on its face is in the general case, where you're wandering around the dungeon, fighting two or three monsters at a time. Without some other schools of magic or weapon skills to supplement it, Promethian will chew through your mana faster than you can replenish it. As a max level blood mage with a pretty good magic stat on level 3, my Obvious Fireball still costs 13 mana. It takes about 1.5 hits from it to kill most monsters dead (a direct hit and a walk through the area of effect fire field). Blood Magic returns about 4 mana per dead monster. This means that I need to kill an average of 4 ish monsters per set of fireballs in order to break even.

You almost never find four monsters in a tight group - at best you can kite a group around so that some of them stumble in to some fire fields, but even that's not really guaranteed.

So what do you do? Rune of Exploding and Dragon's Breath are both pretty underpowered, with RoE being situational and not that damaging and DB just not doing damage past level 1. You end up spamming Fireball, which means you're slowly bleeding mana out the whole level through - and if you try to be efficient with your mana, you're going to need <i>something</i> to finish off those dudes who've only got a little sliver of life left.

So you have to supplement it with something else. I'd argue that means it's not overpowered - Promethian + Blood Magic is a specialist setup, for dealing with crowds of monsters. That's what it's good at, and it's not very good at doing anything else. You'll rock the one or two monster zoos on a level, but beyond that you need other skills (or a lot of MP regen items, or a lot of patience)

 

RoE is an amazing skill. It is as strong as Fireball, but you have to position it ahead of time.
You are not getting nearly enough magic power if your spells still cost that much. I don't know if it was raised again, but in my old save I hit the min cost of 8 pretty quickly.

I don't remember ever stopping to wait for mana to regen on my Promethean game; at least, not after I got blood magic maxed out and found a nice orb or two to wear. ~40 magic power and ~130 mana. Drink stuff every now and then, sure, but there were never issues after level 9 or so.

 

I have to agree with Rikkard. While I have not tried a Promethean with the new patch, the old Promethean would absolutely destroy everything once you got around 30+ Magic Power. You even got a pet to distract enemies and allow you to set up RoE or clump enemies for OF.

I've been playing Single Tree Mages quite a bit and Promethean, while it is about average difficulty in the early game, quickly becomes the most powerful tree in the game. All that, and you don't even have to get Level 5 and 6.

 

@mwoody
{"Unarmed doesn't improve ranged damage. Well, it doesn't improve crossbow damage; I haven't tested thrown. It just looks like it does on the character screen, but if you watch the damage you do to enemies, it won't include the extra crushing. "}

Unarmed Combat stats from the skills,do increase the ranged damage,when you take the skills,the damage is added both in the melee and range boxes.

The extra crushing indicated with a + sign at the right of melee,is only for melee damage that is based on Melee Power stat,so of course that damage is not added,but it has nothing to do with the fact that unarmed does indeed improve ranged damage.

 

Weapon Skills that give you bonus damage are flagged to be active only with that weapon type. However, since Unarmed has no weapon type to be flagged with, the damage bonuses apply to all your physical attack types just like finding damage bonuses on other miscellaneous objects.

An interesting note is that if you hold a single weapon you do not get the bonuses from fighting unarmed, and if you hold two of the same weapon then you do not get the bonuses twice, but if you hold two different weapons you get the bonus from both trees.

 

@Rikkard

Have just had a Promethean mage myself now, with about 35ish+ magic the fireball still costs 10-11 mana, so it was raised. It was raised from 13 to 15 i think when you get it, and it seems like the mana cost reduction now needs more magic power. Also the damage was nerfed alittle after the patch (mobs that took 1 firball + 1 walking in fire now generally needs about 2 fireballs, or 1 fireball and 3ish walking in fire rounds.

@Tacroy

Yes, if you are going to play promethean now after the patch, you really need to have patience. With a mana regen of 1mana per 2 round, i still had to stand still and regen mana from time to time when i didnt meet alot of monsters. But to place 1 more point in blood magic (3 mana back per kill), if you are able to kill 3 monsters with 1 fireball you wont have much of a problem (and most of what you meet in lvl 5 should die of 1 fireball unless they are witchy's since they got a fuckload of hp compared to other mobs in that lvl)


Edit: after som looking through the XML files, i found this:
<requirements mp="16" magPowBonus="0.15" mincost="6"/>
In other words, it cost 16 mana now after patch

 

@afterstar

I still disagree. As I said earlier, it DOES show up in the ranged box. It just doesn't actually show up when you hit an enemy with a bolt. It's a display bug.