Has anyone else noticed that Charmers have like...the best spells in this game for Mages?
Dischord in on itself is hella powerfull, if someone else has summons in your party then Grand Finale is a great damaging option and also the only spammable Encounter spell in the game, Bolstering Dance is one of the best at-will spells ever and it only gets better if your Willpower is high.
AND
If all of that wasn't enough, getting romantically involved with Livrea grants you the Aria of Waves spell which is just Dischord all over again but better/with shorter cooldown.
Just...why all of these Charmer abilities require Willpower instead of Presence? My Blackmage & Whitemage are forces to be reckoned with and neither of them has a SINGLE spell of their class in the deck because Charmer skills are just so much better on Mages lol.
If we're hashing out on why charmer has willpower scaling spells, it's because Presence is already an aggressively loaded stat that scales leadership which itself scales directly with the
powercreep powerscaling of higher level summons and occasionally new sets.
Now that stances are auto abilities and you can essentially go first without low agility investment (thanks to Panoply of whatever), you start your fights either being impervious to damage via deflect or, if early game, singing songs that heal every round.
There are some presence scaling offensive abilities (and items) but they're not particularly good.
- Charm Spell should have been buffed years ago.
- Banshee wail remains a mystifyingly awful ability and terrified remains a status effect that is mostly useless in the games current form
- Psyshock is betrayed by it's poor base scaling and additional requires very high spellpower to reach it's heights
- Warsong still sucks and should never have been an encounter ability
Actually now that I'm on it, on a different scaling tangent
Soothing Dance didn't survive the resolve crunch either. No matter how you invest your character it's still far inferior to tossing out heal.
It's also how like Black mage has the passive that scales summons better and it really shouldn't. If spellpower scaled with presence (like Sorcs do with Charisma) then yeah sure. But that's not the case. It scales with leadership and many good leadership items (big exception being the guldring) aren't good spellcasting items. Helm of Heroes (10) and Conqueror's Breastplate (20) don't have a scrap of spellpower on either of them. While the one exception the Guldring has 5 power and pen.
I wouldn't think too hard about it. The combat system simply isn't well enough designed to warrant much thought.
