1. Each spell still wastes your turn.

2. By wasting your feats on cost reductions you missed on boosting your combat. Which means you cannot as easily slaughter everything via melee. And yes it is WASTING feats.

1, Path of a mage is a waste. Take path of the assassin for better results.

2, Why would you need to reduce costs? The only spells ever worth casting in combat are haste and battle cry for the +2 to initiative each gives.

3. Yes you can kill everything with spells just as you could with melee... except that fire spells don't hurt things immune to fire and focusing on doing magic damage means not getting insane-ridiculous dodge/defense.

You have to actually micro manage every battle. With a melee sov you can actually perform auto combat. Sure it eats up ALL your mana sometimes because the AI is that bad. but you would actually win auto combat.

4. I agree that the mana system does need reworking because its godawful... but it isn't godawful because its OP. Its underwhelming... its ALSO badly designed.

Someone suggested multiplying income and most costs by 5 (I say go for 10x) and then finely tuning, that is a good idea.

@taltamir I wouldn't go so far as to say that mage talents are useless, though I agree they are measured unfairly (as it takes five level ups to max out the skill), some of which lead to spells that are not wholey useful. Most combat related abilities do not require that many and tend to get better as they get higher.

I'm also a bit perplexed at how you came to the conclusion path of the assassin is better. Are you sure you updated to .77? Dodge is at 1/4 dexterity now and you can no longer gain 1dex/level from acrobat. Do traits continue to reappear still? I mean can you choose dexterity like five different times or something?

Mage Dominates late game with the use of only four spells. What is a waste is that the game has so many useless spells. That is what's badly designed, the whole magic system doesn't quite exactly work with the current numbers. Tactical Battles are too fast, too small, too underwhelming. When I think Tactical Battles, I think Warhammer Table Top. Seriously, the developers of this game need to just sit back and spend about two weeks just playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles to get an idea on how the hell you do it.

I'd be more than happy to help with this! Heck, cheese it and download all the manuals and just play it online via http://www.universalbattle.com/ I'll even play with them if they ask!

Warhammer Fantasy sucks once you ignore the battle system. Cities? Suck! Tech trees? Suck! etc 

Agree 100% OrleanKnight

Whole Magic system is unbalanced like crazy.

+Int is basically useless unless for some odd reason you wanna try to blind dragons instead on just killing them.

+Upkeep on spells is so high (1?) that no one uses them and just nukes everything with tactical spells

+Mid lv Mage Champions can cast super powerful tactical spells with unlimited mana even though they have horrible Int due to overpowered talents.

+90% of spells are useless

+There should be SOME mana cap like Int+Shards. Even if its just really high

+Unit groups are just wierd weaker versions of champions and monsters units that cannot protect themselves from spells because resistance only protects against curses and debuffs.

+Last two magic discipline talents and multidiscipline spells shouldn't just be talent dependant, you should research to unlock them. Having Archmagi running around without even researching magic at all is annoying and unbalanced.

+Rituals Suck Hard

I don't see the problem at all!  Having a bunch of extra mana is no different than having a bunch of extra metal.  A smart player finds ways to spend it usefully!  Plus what fun is it putting a caster with every party if they can't cast one or two spells per combat?

This is one of those not broke so don't fix it things IMHO.  The only acceptable change I could see would be if the heroes had personal mana pools that they could "fill" from the main pool by praying at the shrines.  Otherwise it leeeches slowly from the main mana pool at 2MP per turn or something.

This is pretty clever actually, it has some interesting implications - a few traits/abilities of this nature and you could cast spells even early in the game, but your ability to use them continuously would be dependant on your overall mana total. I like it, particularly in combination with some form of tac mana cap

Loads and loads of people in this thread are flinging words like God-awful, really bad, terrible, badly designed and such around - without suggesting alternatives, and without in many cases explaining why they think it's bad.

Honestly I think that much of it is down to people not having tested enough. Believe me...once you get into middle and late game, you really don't worry about mana - at all.

It needs tweaking though. For instance you can use path of the mage+affinity+Mantle of Oceans to cast tactical spells for free. But it's a BETA, and I guess this all just goes to show that it's called beta for a reason.

Seriously ppl....chill with the way you phrase your criticism, and try to be constructive, mkay?

It is not that it is rare or plentiful, it is that it is too rare to make using a mage soveriegn a viable beginning strategy, and too rare to adequately enchant units. Late game it is too plentiful to the point of being exploitative.

There have been good suggestions. One of the best ones I've read so far is reducing mana consumption on the first turn/cast. This is expandable in a number of other ways. Enchantments could use fractional costs to better balance their use, overall mana pool could be capped, increased, use a casting limit per turn, etc.

Not all suggestions need to be specific either. People voicing complaints about various aspects of the games leads to discussions on how to fix them, or at the very least let the designers know there is something that needs fixing.

The Mana system works. The issues with it are Balance... you shouldn't be able to cast Master level spells for 2 mana, that just seems broken. High level spells shouldn't be cost effective. If you want to Nuke the battlefield, should should have to pay for it, as oppose to nuking one unit which should be able to be kept up all day long.

I don't want to see FE turn into MOM or AOM. What they have is a good idea that just needs some balanced and tweaks.

*enchntments are too expensive to be worth casting and cannot be made cheaper

*At game start you have no mana and at game end thousands

*magic is only unlocked by exp talents so you can have god wizerds without magic research (Also gives no good magic items)

*Focus is a fire spell. Wouldn't a talent make more sense?

*Enemy Sov and monsters don't even seem to have spells.

Magic doesn't need like a complete overhaul but it needs some work.