It's just a great system deployed too late in the gameloop. at high blood magic skill your perpetual skeleton companions do 150dam a hit and will solo the mistlands for you. If the game had a magic progression and players hit the mistlands proficient in it (and the playstyle change) then it'd feel as clean as it plays. Instead there is zero conveyance that it's the thing to do and people are eating it trying to play in carapace armor, thinking that's the end all equipment set, then saying the mistlands unilaterally sucks.

With external knowledge that the game is suddenly about magic, the grind and tedium becomes the biggest problem. Once you have the setup for refined elitr it's just resource gathering to make it. Same for the foods. If you're doing both while using the fire/shield staffs then you're grinding your skills through gameplay, but that's still easily tens of hours of ignoring the console, not having fun, on the spreadsheet promise it makes magic the best thing in the game north of 50 skill. Assuming a friend hasn't been nolifing it since the public beta and just throws you a whole set of magic gear. The resources being so centralized and common (to a very extreme area) are going to play hell with personal progression in a multiplayer space.

Clearly the design intent with that Eitr cost is so that you can't soft-spec eitr and still use them. It's the ability people who go EE/H or EE/S get to use.

The skeletons are very strong, but they have some fundamental flaws you need to work around. You should also be giving them your barrier whenever possible. Considering they last effectively forever or until killed, I think the eitr cost is justified, especially when you consider we'll eventually have 4 of them out.

It's very clear the best combination will be 3 archers and 1 melee. The archers are extremely potent, and help offset one of the skeleton's biggest drawbacks, their slow melee speed and tendency to whiff attacks cause of knockback.

Originally posted by DeMasked:

I kinda wish that skills weren't added so late in the game but that you'd have access to options earlier.

[words]

Yall pretending like the Mistlands ain't literally just the halfway point of the game, lmao. According to the game description, there's Nine forsaken to kill. We've seen 5. Or maybe it was 9 Biomes. I don't know if they actually consider the ocean a biome or not, but assuming it does, that still leaves three biomes, two of which are known, and one is unkown.

i don't know i don't have magic yet. But i have heard it gets better with skill.

Both magic skills give up to a 33% discount on eitr- and in the case of blood magic, hp.

at lvl 100 blood magic, the raiser only costs 67 eitr to summon a skele

Some good news at least, is that if you already have a Kill pit for grey dwarves, you can modify it for a shooting gallery and have two archer skeles just pick away at the greys to level you up in a controlled environment, you get blood magic exp each time one of your skeles land a hit, and having a campfire nearby will boost the exp gain by 50% as long as you are well rested. once you have a gallery set up, you can pop some eitr food to summon a pair of skeles( and use a butcher knife to remove any melee until you have two archers and then scoot them up to where they can see the greys and they'll get to work. The skeles do not expire, and last until their HP is depleted, which is mitigated quite a bit if you make the aforementioned gallery. also, if you feel like staying engaged in this process, you can also use the protection staff to keep them shielded, but that doesn't gain blood magic exp quite as effectively, but it will safe guard your skeles against the periodic thrown rock.

Originally posted by qwerm:

Both magic skills give up to a 33% discount on eitr- and in the case of blood magic, hp.

at lvl 100 blood magic, the raiser only costs 67 eitr to summon a skele

Some good news at least, is that if you already have a Kill pit for grey dwarves, you can modify it for a shooting gallery and have two archer skeles just pick away at the greys to level you up in a controlled environment, you get blood magic exp each time one of your skeles land a hit, and having a campfire nearby will boost the exp gain by 50% as long as you are well rested. once you have a gallery set up, you can pop some eitr food to summon a pair of skeles( and use a butcher knife to remove and melee until you have two archers and then scoot them up to where they can see the greys and they'll get to work. the skeles do not expire, and last until their HP is depleted, which is mitigated wuite a bit if you make the aforementioned gallery. also, if you feel like staying engaged in this process, you can also use the protection staff to keep them shielded, but that doesn't gain blood magic exp quite as effectively, but it will safe guard your skeles against the periodic thrown rock.

I know I could do that, I just don't think thats an acceptable mechanic for any game. "Oh, your idea for change is moot, because we can just cheese it." I honestly wish these kill pits weren't a thing.
Imo, I would love for them to find a way to eliminate all skill gaining cheese, but also allow you to gain back your skill exp on death (body retrieval). That way you have to earn your skills, but also have a not so brutal death penalty.
Anyways, back to the topic. I think forcing you to get a skill to 100, so it can be balanced, just means it's a bad skill. This game needs Quality of Life, bad. However I'm aware its only 2 ppl, so I'm very pleased with what they accomplished.

Please understand, I'm not defending the way this aspect of the game is set up; I'm merely providing a *relatively* efficient solution to training the skill up, outside of using dev commands.

Skill progression in this game is rough due to how much raw exp you need, coupled with how much you stand to lose with each death. I'm definitely not a fan of the death penalty scaling up as your skills do.

apparently the dev team is all about that git gud skill meta. i was planning on going full magic but its a little scary to me since it relies on food so much.

I kinda wish that skills weren't added so late in the game but that you'd have access to options earlier.

Fishing should have lousier options either in Meadows or Black Forest at the very least while finding a Merchant would give you the best option. Either a fishing net or fishing spear and have fish be scared of you so that you have to sneak up on them while using a fishing rod the bait would negate that need.

Crossbow could be introduced in swamp or maybe black forest. Perhaps have 1 introduced bridging 2 biomes so black forest + swamp you'd have a bone crossbow requiring bones, drauger entrails, and maybe a trophy. Mountain and Plains could have one requiring obsidian, silver and lox hide and then you'd have the Mistlands one being the next tier.

Blood Magic and Elemental Magic could also use some sort of early rendition of such skills or a way to increase said skill even without eitr. Not sure how. Perhaps call Blood Magic "Blood Binding" and have some sort of healing thing you can use early on and Elemental Magic would be "Elemental Damage" and you could have fire / frost arrows increase that a bit - maybe introduce a lightning arrow.