What Makes a Good Hero? – Spellcasters

First up are the HP% skills – Sturdy, Fast Healer / Survivor / Toughness, and Juggernaut. These mostly have a similar reasoning for why you want to avoid them on most Rogues. These skills’ primary benefit is a percent boost to total health. Don’t get me wrong – HP is important and is easily the most critical stat in the game. It’s a universal rule that your DPS drops to 0 if you’re a corpse, regardless of what game you happen to be playing. HP as a stat is important up until the point that you can comfortably survive the quest 95% of the time, and then extra is fairly meaningless. These skills specifically also don’t provide any boost to combat capability (aside from the obvious “more HP” thing) and Spellcasters have pretty low base HP so they can’t make great use of them most of the time.

• Sturdy is simple as it only provides HP%. It’s a pretty big boost at 60%, but is a prime example of this point – it offers no additional combat help aside from allowing the user to take an extra hit or two.
• Fast Healer, Toughness, and Survivor all provide Rest Time Reduction as their secondary stat. This effect does absolutely nothing in battle so it’s partially wasted. Additionally, all three have less HP value than Sturdy despite being higher rarities than it.
• Juggernaut’s secondary stat is bonus Defense (75% at rank 4). This is great for Fighters but not quite as good for Spellcasters. This archetype has inherently low HP / Defense and can only wear Clothes, which typically gives them pretty low overall tankiness. Since Juggernaut directly benefits from high Defense / HP values in gear and base stats, you usually aren’t going to see massive improvements in hit-taking ability with this skill.
  • Spellblades can make solid use of this skill on a tanky build since they can wear Heavy armor items.
• Impervious is the major exception here. This skill is a direct upgrade to Sturdy and is HUGE – it offers a whopping 80% HP and +150 flat HP at rank 4. This is a massive boost to survivability and is useful on all classes. You still get the inherent downsides of “no combat capability besides more HP” but this skill basically solves a Spellcaster’s biggest weakness by itself – their low HP.

Evasion is a bit of an odd topic on Spellcasters. The pure Evasion skills Acrobatics and Blurred Movement tend to have the same problem on Spellcasters as they do on the non-evasive Fighters. They only provide a chance to avoid incoming damage on classes that inherently have 0% Evasion. These skills do nothing if the hero is attacking and they do nothing if you fail the dice roll while defending. This means that most of the time, you’re running with a dead slot. However, note that the same Evasion penalty on Extreme also applies here so it can be a good idea to use these in some situations.

Now, what if there was a way to completely avoid incoming damage without compromising your attacking power? Enter the hybrid Evasion / Attack skills: Curse, Antimagic Net, and Dance of Blades. There are some class-exclusives here too – Caltrops / Throw Daggers for Spellblades and Shadow Embrace for Sorcerers.

These hybrid Evasion / Attack skills are great. They give the Spellcaster a chance of completely ignoring an incoming attack but they crucially do NOT reduce the hero’s damage output (much). They’re not the best choices for pure damage as they range from 90% Attack (Throw Daggers) to 150% (Dance of Blades), but they’re an excellent way to give some longevity to your squishy heroes.

Weapon skills are a little more nuanced here than they are for Fighters and Rogues. For Rogues and attacking Fighters, a weapon skill is mandatory because their weapon is the single biggest source of offensive power they have. While a weapon skill isn’t quite as important on Spellcasters compared to the other archetypes, it’s still a sizeable boost to attacking strength and you still generally want to have one.

That said, there is one huge exception to this – Sorcerers.

Sorcerers have the unique ability to hold two Spell items. This means that a much larger potion of their Attack comes from these instead of their weapon. As a result, you actually get less Attack from a Common weapon skill than a pure Attack skill up to a certain threshold. The breakpoint is around 350% – 400% or so. If you have this much bonus Attack from skills, then Wand or Staff Master will typically provide more Attack than an extra Attack skill.

• Adept is pretty good, both because it provides a bigger Attack boost to the weapon (giving it an easier time at being competitive) and it has a generic Attack bonus. This skill is almost always useful on a Sorcerer unless you’re running a dedicated crit build or a Hypermax build.
• Sorcerers have access to Warlord as of update 11.0, but this typically is a poor choice for them. If a Sorcerer is holding a Dagger, it’s because they want the CHC secondary stat on it far more than the Attack of the item itself because they’re using it for a Crit build (you generally want to stay away from Dagger Master for the same reason). Warlord’s low HP% boost is handy but not super helpful considering this class has the lowest base HP value in the game.
• If the Sorcerer has two of Poison Cloud, Double Cast, or Petrify, then a weapon skill will round the set out very nicely. Any combination of two of these skills easily puts you over 400% total Attack, after all.
• Definitely make sure you’re using the Hero Simulator if you’re around this breakpoint with a Sorcerer / Warlock. The math is pretty complicated and it’s difficult to parse out a universal answer that works for everyone.

Now, notice the earlier phrase “a single weapon skill.” Double stacking Common and Epic weapon skills of the same type (Wand Master and Adept for example) works pretty well for Spellcasters. You might be wondering about how this stacks up on the other two archetypes, so let’s touch on them here.

• Defensive Fighters can do their job pretty effectively with a damage output of zero, so Common weapon skills are pretty weak for them anyway. Epic weapon skills are primarily used for their secondary effect (usually the 20% HP of Warlord).
• Attacking Fighters and Rogues typically can’t make the double stacked weapon skill thing work either because they need lots of other stats. Both are usually Crit based attackers so they need CHC, CD, and whatever defensive stats are normally required. They don’t have the space to get enough bonus Attack to make this really work.
• Spellcasters on the other hand have the advantage of simple stat requirements AND better Attack options. Wand Master, Adept, and two high Attack skills works out pretty well for many Spellcasters, especially Geomancers due to their innate skill effectively giving them Double Cast for free. Mages / Archmages can reach some impressive Attack numbers by double stacking Staff skills due to their innate as well.