While I am still very much pushing my main Belgrevious the Echo Warpath Void Knight to 100, every so often I need a break. Lately, I have been tinkering with a Spellblade Mage, specifically one focused on Flame Reave, Firebrand, and Flame Ward. My friend Tam had talked at length about how much he was enjoying the Spellbade mastery and how specifically it was playing into his core fantasy of a melee mage. So I decided to give it a shot and ran up BelSpellReave to play with this. I believe he shifted his damage to Lightning, but for me setting things on fire will always be my happy place. I have to say I have gotten much faster at the campaign for Last Epoch and I think probably in total it took me around five hours to level from beginning a character to defeating Majasa and entering the Monolith. This is much faster than I am at getting through the Path of Exile campaign, and I am not even using any of the skips available in Last Epoch.
I have to admit when the concept of “Melee Mage” came up, it wasn’t necessarily this. Generally speaking, I expected to be swinging a weapon that was enchanted with magic… almost a Lightsaber for lack of a better description. What the Spellblade is doing instead is casting a very short-range blade-like spell that extends out in front of them. Essentially you have Flamebrand shown above or Shatter Strike that creates a weird strike that sort of wraps around your character. Mana Strike is the one that feels the closest to what I would have expected a Spellblade to feel like, but it feels super weak and is a default mage thing, not something attached to the specialization. It does not live up to my mental picture of what caster melee would look like, but I can roll with pretty much anything given that I am forced into the role of a caster in most of the characters I play in Path of Exile.
What is however a lot of fun is Flame Reave. By default, it is a cone that shoots out in front of you, but with the addition of the unique Sunwreath, it changes to a ring of fire that shoots out from your character. With points in the tree, you can make this ring return to your character causing it to deal another pulse of damage as it shrinks back down. It feels really good running around the map, gathering up a ton of mobs, and then firing off a few Flame Reaves to clean them up. The problem with this however is that I am constantly out of mana because I think in total I can shoot off four of these before it entirely drains my mana pool. This is one of the core problems I have with the design of Last Epoch… is that there does not seem to be a way to properly “fix” your mana problems. In Path of Exile, you can take actions that will make it so you effectively have an unlimited mana pool and never have to stop your most fun abilities. I’ve yet to truly figure out how to do this with most abilities in Last Epoch.
I realize that a lot of my current woes can almost directly be traced to the fact that my gear is a complete mess. Predictive loot is awesome for leveling a character and finding things that you can actually use… but it royally sucks for leveling alts that are of different base classes. I am wearing almost entirely a bunch of not-exactly ideal unique items because that is what I have in droves laying around that I can throw on a character. I am just now starting to get decent mage drops and I figure as I keep swapping out more of these items the character will perform significantly better. Uniques are a great boost in power while leveling… but that starts to become a hindrance as you near the end of the campaign and actually need some mana and survivability.
I absolutely skyrocketed through the campaign but hit a bit of a wall when I reached Majasa for the first time. She was simply dealing more damage to me faster than I could generate ward. I have really bad health and cannot seem to generate ward fast enough to make up for that fact. I was able to rip through Monoliths without problems and put on a few more levels and then finally came back and killed her at level 60 with fewer problems. In those few levels, I had done some swapping around of gear and talent points to try and focus more on survival and less on wholesale murder. That is one huge positive of the Spellblade though. It can certainly do a proper murder and has zero issues shredding bosses. If I can ever solve my ward woes and mana malfunctions… it will be a pretty dang fun build.
I’ve been through so many phases with this character in the last two days since starting it. I’ve fallen in love with the clear speed while doing the campaign, been frustrated with how weak the survival feels, and then reached a place of acceptance that it is never going to feel as sturdy as my Void Knight but certainly has faster-killing potential. Would I play one of these again? Probably not… or at least not without learning some significant lessons on how to fix some of its problems. I’ve never played a ward character before, and I essentially need to learn how to make them feel good. I also need to swap out almost all of my uniques for properly rolled exalted gear… which is simply going to take time in the monolith. It will be a pet project for when I get tired of spinning and winning.