Do you use spells that seem useless?

[Yokai]

That.

Some spells, either Arcane, Mage or Priest, seem useless or so specific that the rarelly will be used.

Have you found any of those "rarely" used spells more than "rarely"? Which one? Why?


Actually, I'm playing as a priest. There is a spell that I use a bit: Pull.

As a melee class, there are some combat situations where trying to defeat several enemies at the same time is impossible. Or there is an enemy that is firing at me from an unnacesible place for me.
In such cases, I use the Pull spell to "attrack" the enemy towards me and then kill him. I find Pull spell very useful.

Other spells that I find very useful and I use all the time are the spells Holy Water and Holy Bread, that create water and bread to drink and eat. Instead of carrying with me an extra load of food and water, I just create them when I need, so I can carry more useful things either to use or to sell.

In addition, I find the Life Water (creates a +10 HP potion) quite useful. It may seem a spell that is underpowered and useless, because it costs 20 mana to create a +10HP potion, while I can heal that same amount with just Rejuvinate Spell with less mana. Well, actually, they are different things. I use the Life Water spell when I start the map (and if I am out of these potions) to create some potions. During the quest, sometimes my mana gets really tight after hard battles, so I need mana for something else that is not healing, for example, protecting myself, curing poison, enchanting my weapon, etc... So here is where those potions are very handy, I can heal quite a bit without spending my mana. And also, I don't need to carry a lot of other potions because I can create my own when I need. Of course I carry 3 high healing potions for very harsh situations

[peewee_RotA]

I'm trying to tackle the limitations that make these spells less used.

One thing that keeps them out of the rotation is experience points. Mage classes are more likely to try to blast away at enemies for XP than push or pull them into lava because they get not XP from the kill that way.

The biggest thing that changes spell usefulness is casting speed. Rejuvenate heals at 1 hp per mp spent and can be cast so fast that it eliminates the usefulness of the heal spell. With a slower casting speed, rejuvenate can't be used this way and heal is the only way to recover so quickly from damage.

Many of the utility spells don't work well. Pull and push work as expected but things like silence don't have any use due to the stealth limitations of the regular game. Angry word and confusion never work on the first shot. (So they lose their usefulness).


I'm trying to address these things in my own mod. I haven't done any testing with priest, but changing the casting speed made a world of difference to a mage.

[Yokai]

Confusion spell works perfect.

I use it a lot and it makes the enemy to randomly look somewhere else. The problem is that it may randomly look almost to the same place it was looking before, so it may seem that it didn't work.

[peewee_RotA]

That's the thing. Most of the time you don't have time to shoot and observe if it worked or not. It's easier, and cheaper, just to blast fireballs at the poor sucker from a wand.


There are plenty of other spells with no actual effect too.

For example, acid ball doesn't have the same random item destruction against enemies... so it's only useful to get around fire resistance. (But the earthsmite wand works better and is cheaper)

Mana drain only causes damage, but does not hurt the enemy in any other way... So it is only a risk to yourself.

Slow and earthbind either do absolutely nothing, or do so at such a small scale that it is not noticable.

Dispel magic does not affect monsters. It only harms yourself.

Leap barely raises the jump height, can't be used by any class before the ring of jumping is found, and does not even provide a jump as high as the rogue starts with. (Plus it does not provide the double-jump glitch that can get any player as high as leap would have gotten them.)

Only lightning damage and poison damage actually provide extra damage. The rest only go around resistances. Technically piercing damage does more damage against armored foes, but is not as useful as lightning. So it's extremely rare to use any weapon attack buff without any additional damage added.

Most resistance spells only come after they are useful. The only exceptions being blood shield and fire resistance. Since they cost a lot, it is hard to stack them together. So preparing for a next fight with these sells is hard.



All the above in mind.... I made class based skills in my mod branch that solve some of these problems! I'll post about them on my own thread though.