And now the honesty, Mysticism is fuuuuuuu
What was I saying? Oh, right. Mysticism is a mess. Part of the problem is that Razor doesn't believe we have Mysticism, so any macros that use its spells don't register, nor is there a way to set hotkeys for it. This is severely disappointing, as I was counting on being able to Bombard and Eagle Strike at will. Hopefully this changes in the future.
The spells themselves. Well, right off, Enchant is out. As in, it is out of the game at the moment. It doesn't work at all and gives a message about it being temporarily removed. That's lame, but knowing how Spellweaving also sucked on a few missing spells for a while, I guess I'm not surprised.
Stone Form is also entirely useless. It provides none of the +resists, +max resists, or the curse/bleed/poison protection that it claims. It does provide all the expected ugly, and so for now I refer to it as the Nothin' But Ugly spell.
Bombard is actually pretty solid. It deals damage over two hits for some reason, but they're solid hits. At sub-GM skills, I was getting about 32~35 damage from it, while my 120 eval Ebolts deal about 30. At GM/GM, it did 20~24 with each hit, so 40 damage total. Not bad at all. It also uses the knockback effect on everything. Still, it looks like balls. Literally, a ball of stone.
Cleansing Wind is like a mini-Heal, Cure and Remove Curse in one, so naturally I love this one; no need for Curse Removal talisman, apples, or high karma!
Healing Stone is decent enough. They seem to be getting consumed instantly instead of portioning out the healing, but that may be due to my being too damaged and not having high enough skill that it would be able to portion like its supposed to.
Rising Colossus is supposed to be one of the best summons so far, but my experience is very disappointing. It has 100% or better in all but one resist, yet that resist is freaking Energy. It has 100 in all stats, so with only 30~40% Energy resist, it isn't going to last long. I'll test it further, but I doubt it will prove worth the 5 control slots.
As if to top that one, Animate Weapon is also utter crap. It takes four control slots and it... dies. It looks cool to have a floating halberd-ish weapon thing follow you around, but it does not do the job.
Nether Cyclone does nothing but stamina damage, which is disappointing for an 8th circle spell. It's supposed to do Meteor Swarm damage or better to all of HP, Mana, and Stamina. If not for the fact that it's an 8th circle spell, it might be useful in conjunction with Strangle and Pain Spike, but being 8th means it's low cast chance at just GM skill.
Eagle Strike is letting me down. Fireball level damage? Psh. It doesn't come close. It's more like a slightly amped Magic Arrow. Though I am doing this with only GM/GM Mystic versus 115/120 Magery, even at equal skill it won't make the difference; versus 0 resist, Magic Arrow was 75 damage, Eagle Strike hit for 84, and Fireball hit for 142. 20 more points of skill will not make that up. I expect that Eagle Strike might pull below 120 at Legendary Imbuing.
Sleep and Mass Sleep are like the goggles, in that they do nothing. I haven't tested Spell Plague or Purge Magic very much, but hopefully they work as they should. It would be nice to have a few new things in my arsenal, rather than just 200 more skill points to my credit.
Spell Trigger is utterly and completely FUBAR. In fact, it is how I managed to GM these skills. You see, I only own five of these spells and none of them castable below 33 skill. However, while screwing around last night I noticed that when I tried to cast the spells I wasn't getting a "you need xx skill to cast that" messages. Instead, it was just fizzling. To my surprise, Spell Trigger created the spellstone for the spell I chose. Which I don't actually own. And it worked. And it gave me skill.
So, a long ride on a boat later, I'm GM Imbue and Mystic. I made a Razor macro for "use item type/wait for target/target self" to use Nether Bolt spellstones on myself while I manually create them with Spell Trigger. At 20 skill, I switch to Eagle Strike until 33 skill. From there, I tracked down an EasyUO script that used Stone Form for me (saving me from a billion mouseclicks on the spell icon) until the 70's, Bombard to 83 skill, and Nether Cyclone to GM.
GMing off one messed up spell not impressive enough? It gets better.
Some of these spellstones aren't consumed on use. Purge Magic, Hail Storm, Healing Stone, and Cleansing Wind spellstones can be used repeatedly and with near 0 delay. I think my Cure/Heal self hotkey is about to get replaced with a Cleansing Stone self macro. If Hail Storm wasn't utter suck (read: Doesn't do anything but pretty effects), it might be worth using.
All in all, the time and skill points may prove worth it sheerly out of Bombard and Spell Triggered Cleansing Wind. Finally being able to (instantly) heal my curses and poisons is a pretty big deal, even if the health restored isn't a lot. Bombard managed to pull 148 in a single hit versus a 0 resist target, so assuming it didn't hit twice because the target died, that's 300 damage before resists; better than E-bolt, infact. However, if that second hit is the knockback hit and thus checked against Spell Resist, then it will likely not pull that much damage most of the time.
I really wish Eagle Strike was a little better considering it's also a 3rd circle spell, but if I could hotkey these spells then that would be even better. I'd take a spammable Energy spell even if it didn't quite hit for Fireball damage. Even better would be a damn Cold spell other than Wither; I may get that from Nether Bolt, but only 20% of the time. Stone Form doing its job would also be nice, since that would mean probably 73/78 max resists, possibly enough of a resist bonus to make up trading my belt for Tangle, *and* the lovely resistance to debuffs. On standard shards, having 120/120 for Stone Form apparently makes you Curse Proof versus all but special creatures. If I could have that here, I'd use Bless far more often, I think.
For now, I suppose I'll just take what I've got and hope Mysticism gets more attention than all the other Mage skills.
