feature discussion - halve mage damage mana

[PowerDiver]

I assumed that. I also assume Haradrim xbow is pretty rare, and you were lucky to find it. Maybe that's a bad assumption?

That particular one is rare, but when you include the whole class of xtra shots, xtra might with big plusses, lothlorien, and whatever I forgot, in total you probably get something of significant strength around the time for MB7 I would think. I haven't paid that much attention. Oh, also toss in the artifact launchers for more chances.

[Tobias]

So, I just played a pure mage until I found MB8 (dlvl 57 clvl 40). Great fun.
Had some bad luck with bows, so my spells were always better then nonbranded archery.

Killed almost everything (even most uniques ) with spells. Mostly fire/acid bolt for the normals, and acid bolt, meteor and rift for the heavies.

[Pete Mack]

!Restore mana is sufficiently common that you can spend it on the occasional unique.
Together with Runes, night-move LOS cheat, and Rift, a mage is plenty strong to take on the most dangerous uniques short of Morgoth.

And it used to be worthwhile vs DROP_GREAT uniques, since you were pretty much guaranteed to get artifacts. Now, not so much...

Against uniques like Saruman (or most notably Ungoliant--huge bag of HP with breathe Darkness), the biggest problem isn't mana, it's dealing out sufficient damage before you run out of HP. I've never managed to kill Ungoliant as a Mage without LOS abuse...if you rest to heal and recover mana, she recovers faster. And she would require resources similar to a final boss to kill otherwise.

[Nielos]

I just played a mage on the nightly- I've played a ton of mages on 3.0.5 and 3.1.0 and this with the halved spell costs was by far the most fun. I enjoy using as much magic as possible, so it was awesome to actually be able to kill things. I used to just magic missile and phase door and then pretend that I was a warrior with a ton of !oCure Serious. These are definitely some great changes.

Some notes: I think that Frost Bolt could be lowered to 2 mana and have tha damage similarly decreased. It's nice to have a 1, 2, 3, or 4 mana spells depending on the monster HP and mana points, instead of frost bolt just becoming obsolete in three levels.

But, absolute blast to play, got myself to the top of my high score chart pretty quickly (with some artifact luck.) Thanks for the changes!