Boss woes

[KDR_11k]

Maybe you need to pick more powerful attack spells. Grab two high-powered spells, put them on LMB and RMB and hold both down when the boss is in range so you dish out a ton of damage per second. Hell, I just killed a shadow bat at level 2 vs level 2 by hitting it with death touch twice and finishing with ball lightning (great damage per mana BTW). Also try to pick a more open battlefield where you get a lot of opportunities to hit the bats before they reach you, expect to take a few hits and carry potions/scrolls accordingly but you should be able to wear them down MUCH faster than they can hurt you.

[c4sc4]

Energy pulse is great for fighting the dragon because it passes trough multiple enemies, so when it casts its fire breath you can use energy pulse to cut it all down at once.

[Martyn van Buren]

Yeah, I'm finding dragons and bats to be the easiest bosses, actually.  Energy pulse takes care of dragons, since they haven't got a ranged attack and the fire breath is quite slow, and now that bats get stuck on scenery I can't seem to finish a fight before they're trapped in a corner. 

So I'm wondering ---- what stops this game from getting easier as you level up?  Mana point costs stay the same as you get higher-level spells and a lot more total mana, which seems to me like it makes the whole game much easier; at the low levels, I have to think carefully before using something costly like energy pulse, but now that I'm around level 15 I can basically spam it.

[orzelek]

You can spam the energy pulse?

You are very lucky buggy to get no mana increase with spell level... my energy pulse VI costs 180 and if I spam it I'll be drinking mana potions left and right (3.2k total mana).

And dragon breaths are slow only when dragon is lower level than you. Against equal level one their breath travels quite fast and can kill you quite quickly. Using tidal pulse helps but dragons are still most annoying to fight and randomness of breaths can give you nasty one shot deaths.

And amoeba fights are simply pure randomness. It's shot will hit you or not.. that depends which pattern gets shot and with recent speed increases trying to dodge these from equal lvl (or lvl+1) amoeba requires uber reflexes or luck.

[mithrandi]

My higher level spells definitely use way more mana than my lower level spells. That still doesn't stop me spamming Energy Pulse and drinking mana potions / reading(?) mana scrolls though Actually I'm sitting on Energy Pulse IV at civ level 27 or so, so the mana use is really not all that bad.

[Terraziel]

That's the issue really, mana costs don't scale very well with civ level, my level 20 character has 6x the mana of a level 1, but level 4 spells only cost 4x as much, meaning i can fire 50% more than I would other wise have been able to.

That said damage doesn't scale very well either, the damage provided by your character begins to make up for spell levels pretty quickly meaning you get better mana efficiency by using the lower level spells without really sacrificing damage.

The only times i use my high level spells (VI) is when I am attacking a high level boss, and need it dead faster rather than better.

[Martyn van Buren]

Oh, I was clearly totally wrong!  Also think I may have misused the word "spam" --- I just mean firing as often as the cooldown allows, compared to holding back for the best shots to conserve mana.  But yeah, spell costs get a lot less noticeable as you level up and power does rise a lot ---- does the game just get easier unless you start going after higher levels, or if not why not?

[Baleyg]

The way the scaling ends up working, you're as much of a granite cannon as you'll ever be at level 1.  But if you don't grab spell tier 2 as soon as it's an option you're missing out on half your potential damage, so you can fall behind very quickly.  But your stat increase from level 41-45 is the exact same as from 1-5, so high level play tends to be very static.  If you skip spell tiers 10-12, you're still doing 75% as much damage as you could be.  Fighting mobs 5 levels above you at level 1 is suicide, at level 50 it's not a big deal (stat wise, the fact you can't outrun anything 5 levels higher is a different matter).

Same thing with potions.  A tier 2 potion is twice as effective as a tier 1 potion, but a tier 11 potion is only 10% more effective than a tier 10 potion.

The potions are actually why low level characters are so durable.  Tier 1 potions are a full heal at the starting gate.   By level 50 you can't get full heals on the surface, even if you're hunting at your level +10.  (Hypothetically, you could go 5 levels deep into an underground cavern to access gems 3 tiers above your character.  But you'd probably just level up on your way down.)

[KDR_11k]

Red Amoeba lieutenants are a pony. I'm not sure if Overlords draw from the same set of enemies but that's gotta be even worse. I had to vary between ball lightning and my rather neglected energy pulse as the amoeba moved into and out of ball lightning range.

Keep in mind that spells of different colors don't give each other as much cooldown as themselves so if you have two powerful spells of different colors you can hold them both down and fire them alternatingly to get more damage output than using a single spell.

EDIT: Just killed a crippled dragon overlord by cheesing it to death. Man, those things have INSANE amounts of HP. This one had half a million HP at level 20, that would have been completely tiring to fight fairly (and took a LOOOOOONG time even when cheesing it with my Mk8 Ball Lightning with me at level 29). The last lieutenant of the overlord was a level 29 skelebot with "only" 200k+ HP. I don't think that making the overlords take forever to kill is the right approach for making them more fearsome than their underlings.

And for all that I don't think I even got a real reward. The NPCs just whine about the next thing that oppresses them.