I wasn't talking about spells named fire, ice or lightning. I wasn't even talking about cure or anything like that. What Final Fantasy did to name their 2nd and third tier spells was to add suffixes to the words. Sometimes they added little things like -ara, -aga, or aja to words. Other words like Fire to tier 2 Fira... just dropped the e and took an a instead. They could claim copyright on those modified words since they were invented for their games. But enough on that topic now.
I've kinda had a little thing that I've wondered about for a long time now. You know how Black Magic has heal in it? Well I wonder why heal got placed under black magic instead of White magic where it's usually found in games like this (Rpgs not the porn game thing.) Well I can kinda see a connection between old dnd where healing magic was considered necromancy before they later revised it in 3.0 or 3.5 edition to make it conjuration instead. Healing just never struck me as a Black Magic kinda spell. Now if it was a healing spell that leached hp from a target. That I would agree fits with Black Magic.
Now, on to my real point here. You mentioned that these special mage bosses would really put a mage type to the test but... you kinda have perks that auto-cast the buff spells. So, beyond knowing when to heal and when to arouse. I'm kinda curious what you had in mind there? I mean the general safe tactic here is to keep the hp up and try to lust break your opponent. Arouse tends to hit harder than any lust move (short of going lust archer with 5 shots xD). You could go for the hp wins too but generally you stand a better chance of wearing them down on the lust side of things before you will knock their hp out. Unless you've leveled enough to basically obtain all perks outside of those starter perks that you can only choose one of. But that's no biggy there either since the starter perks really just impact your ability to gain stats rather than your actual combat ability in general. I've found though that using lust attacks seems to make the ai use lust attacks on you more frequently. Of course I've always noticed this behavior in CoC even from the Vanilla game. I dunno, it just seems to me that the combat magic in CoC is a little bit stacked towards the one black magic attack that deals lust damage over the actual damage dealing spells. Most of the magic is buffs anyways. I'd have to get the grey spells to see what those do though. Honestly though, the way CoC builds the champions up its' really hard to go purely mage in this game. What I mean by that is that you can limit yourself to mage gear and everything but you're still going to build stats all around as a result of that exploration mechanic sometimes training your stats up. I'd sum up CoC magic as basic spell-sword magic. None of it is really fancy or even enough to wholly stand on it's own. The mechanics force you into certain lust states just to maintain a casting ability for instance.
If I were to rate this mod's strengths I would say it has opened up ranged and lust combat as viable resources. However, it doesn't quite pull away from that inherent trait that CoC has displayed from the beginning. Not that it's a bad thing at all but it's one of those games that favors Jack-of-all-trades builds. The longer you drag the game out, the more your character will turn into one. I've tried to use the magic in this mod to fight high end foes. But honestly it gets outdone in most cases by the new archery and or the new combat perks that really go hand in hand. I mean I can dish out thousands of damage in a single hit on a pre-ascension game. Comparatively the spells are lucky to break the 1k mark even with Intelligence being my highest stat out of all the stats. I mean, my strength is a good 30 points less yet I can dish out 10k hits with single attacks on crits. The one thing those mage perks that boost your fatigue (mana pool) do is make it very easy to use the high fatigue drain moves from the other packages. All of those can do a lot more to quickly end a fight. It's almost like you train yourself to get an obscene pool of mana and then you blow all that energy instead to make yourself an insanely effective melee fighter/archer. I'd have to wait and see these new spells to see how they bring mage focused champions up to par with other focuses. Right now they purely boost the other builds to the point where it's not overpowered but it's not very difficult to weather tough enemies.
