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Well thankfully there are a lot of ways to balance or improve on how strong the mages are.  Arcane Weakness is a good start, beyond that the aoe range could be reduced or AI could be improved to work around it better.  Just gotta wait and see what the dev has planned for it.  It seems that Torann is already pretty aware of it and is waiting to see the max ability of mages before balancing all of them.

I like the idea that mages can't use most traditional weapons, but we'd have to wait/hope for mage weapons.  Mages would need some consistent damage, rather than just taking away their reliable weapons and not replacing them at all afterall.  A lot of the mage classes don't have reliable low tier offensive spells.

In my current heavy mage playthrough, I'm just trying to amass wealth to test mages against huge swarms of enemies.  It's pretty entertaining.  The tribals become really dangerous with common mage spawns with their high numbers.  They come with a ton of mages and fighter types, it's pretty interesting.  If I didn't have some of the aoe classes, I'd be toast.  Druid for example does almost nothing against that many enemies, at least if there aren't strong animals nearby to manhunter into them.  I just focused them on their support spells.  Poison is cool, but it's really only useful against thrumbos or something.

Oh, I don't remember reading about arcane weakness reducing mana regen, that explains a lot.

Does reducing the mana cost of spells reduce the arcane weakness penalty percent or even remove it altogether if the adjusted cost goes below 25% mana cost?  Obviously noticed the arcane weakness penalty being higher on more difficult/costly spells.  Just dunno if it's tied to base, adjusted cost, or the spell itself.  Might be a good reason to go heavy into cost reduction...especially for Priest.

Edit:  Oh it is adjusted mana price, nice.  Better go heavy into cost reduction enhancements.  Tired of my Priest always being half dead.  Now if I can just find jade, better work on drilling next.

Oh cool, thanks for the heads up.  Bard seems like it could be a fun class.  Social stuff has been pretty difficult with some of my mages.  I guess I'll just play around with my current team more and work on enchanting, then take a break till new classes or balance patch.  Most the only major issues I can find now are balance things, so not too much reason to keep testing until then.

Nice to have stuff pretty solidified to look forward to with this.

Lol, after posting this I tried raising a gladiator as an undead and they kept their skills.  I'm guessing that's not intended?  They lost the gladiator trait.  Stamina is regenerating too...well, this is useful.  They're also stuck with fortitude and Sprint activated (Says it needs to recharge) from when they were alive.  They have no "Might" tab though for leveling the skills up.  After using all their skills once, I keep getting the "Needs time to recharge", aww.

2/3 Upkeep on undead and 4/5 mp regen from skills is also not enough to maintain 2 undead without mana loss, good to know.  It seems close and is easy enough to keep up with consuming corpses though.  Wait, weird.  After a while my Necro started gaining mana with 2 undead up, no idea why.  There wasn't a mana surge or mana drain at either time.

Druid regrowth is great for tribal starts, who don't have access to electricity and bionics. The only downside is the need for mana potions, which require industrial-era drugs to make.

I'm hoping the balance pass comes soon. Pretty much every class has multiple overpowered spells which end fights, and it's no fun to get no challenge or have them used against you.

I still haven't even made mana potions, I just found nero finally so I might try that soon.

Agreed, siege's are a complete joke now.  Any of the aoe abilities can pretty much one shot them as they set up.  Most raids can be baited with a single animal or undead into halting in an aoe too.  Manhunter packs can still be obnoxious though since they charge you.

Basically the default enemy human AIs are to blame for aoes being so OP.  If they tried running out of the aoe radius, that would be awesome.  Not sure if that's possible though.  ATM I usually just try to avoid the heavy aoe classes and abilities.  I still haven't played with  the Fire/Lightning/Ice mages too much for that reason.  I really wanna make a little pyro if/when they're balanced a bit more.  That snakeing fire attack (Fireclaw) is probably my favorite offensive spell so far.  I like that their firebolt can miss too, I think most targeted abilities should be like that.

I'll now have a slave army of the undead to do my bidding, clean my fortress and mine stone for the stonecutters -my thoughts the last time I got a primitive villager raid on my colony!

really necromancer or summoner have to be the best classes early on, free labour is best labour, at the rate i get new volunteers from the villages i don't even need to worry about their health or well being, only necromancers deserve food, everyone else can simply survive on mana!

Yeah, probably my favorite class even though I don't use the death mark or corpse explosion (I might start testing them, just not really my playstyle.).  I do wish the Necromancer could bond with their undead, they must be so lonely, lol.  I really like their aoe too, one of the more balanced ones since it's hard to catch manhunter and moving enemies with it (I think it doesn't effect mechs either).  I wonder if the Necro can keep 2 undead up without losing mana now with the upkeep reduction.  I should test that soon, I almost have that and their regen maxed.

I wonder what their master spell will be, there's a ton of good options for them. 

Love Priest too, it's hard to play without them.  Their aoe heal seemed really weak the couple times I tested it, but maybe that's because I didn't have too many points into it and its passives yet.  For how strong they are everywhere else, not a big deal.  Could still be useful recovering your whole team/animals after a battle anyways.  Resurrection is just the best thing ever...

Druid master spell seems pretty underwhelming, but EPOE is to blame for that.  Would be great without it.  Bionics are usually way easier than finding and using the Druid regrow.  Only time I see that being useful is on prosthophobes.

Another issue I'm having with using a mostly mage team is everybody and their grandma has massive buffs, it's so easy to stack insane modifiers on all pawns.  I just started not raising some like Lightning Mage's AMP because I already have Priest and Arcane Mage for buffing.  Leveling my mage team's skills is also a full time job during a mana surge, lol.

Still haven't found jade to play with enchanting yet...  I dunno what the better choice is between regen and max mana (Is mp regen flat per tick or work with your max mp?).  I should check the options next time I play.

Nice fixes/additions since the last time I played.  My Necro still ended up with the "Killed Colonist" debuff somehow, even though I've been dismissing, so I guess that still counts as killing (Even though I rezed them afterwards).  At least it's more convenient.  So glad mana isn't wasted anymore on fail casting, I think the only time I had that happen since the fix is when I was trying to revive someone and my animal hauled the corpse off, haha.  Can't do much about that.  Oh, and undead portraits sometimes get stuck in the "Downed" mode after being revived, seems just graphical but figured I should mention it.

Summoner seems a lot more balanced, only issue I've seen with them is the AI dropping mines directly on your characters and them going boom before you can even react.  I wouldn't mind a delay before they can be triggered/explode (Including for your own Summoner) to give some counterplay.  They can even catch you with them while your pawns are running sometimes.  100% to insta dead pretty often.  I don't mind it being something that can kill or maim easily if you're negligent, but only way I've found to avoid it completely is stay out of its range or bait it with animals (Or undead :3) or something.  Ranged mines just seem incredibly difficult to balance though.

An enemy lighting mage also amped my characters (None of their allies were nearby), so I think it might have "Target enemy" AI instead of "Target ally", I didn't mind the help though, lol.

Now the major issue is with arcane mages.  Holy hell they're strong as hell as enemies.  I still need to test them more as allies but confusion seems nuts.  I've been testing common mages, so I'm getting a lot of first hand knowledge of how oppressive some of the ai is with some classes.  Getting an arcane mage and Summoner in a raid against you is pretty GG if you don't have sacrifices prepared.

I also don't really understand the point of enemy mages exploding on death.  It's to make it more difficult to acquire them right?  But they usually just take out most of their teammates and make fights easier, lol.  I put the aoe radius/explosion down so I can't use them as a free bomb, but it's still kinda sad to have them blow themselves up.  Could it be possible to just make them much more resistant to joining you or something?  I usually end up just savescumming until they don't explode if I really want them, kinda defeats the point.  Already have the random death rng fucking with you, seems like that should be enough.

Pretty crazy for them to OHKO all your melee attackers on death too with default settings.  That seems more like it should be the special move of a Paladin or something than the default for all mages to explode on death.  Oh, that'd be interesting if Paladins exploded on death and auto revived once a battle, hmm.

Looking forward to trying out the enchanting (Need to find jade) and I dig the max mana increase passive.  I hope the rest of the master spells are coming soon.

Oh, just noticed mana potions show up under drugs and magic items in the categorized inventory ui.

Sounds like it's almost time to try a permadeath run with this mod. 

Do you realy think it is a good idea to do a permadeath colony with mods ? :-)

Sure TMagic is pretty stable but not 100%.

Oh I don't mean actually using permadeath in settings, I mean more just no savescumming.  So far I had no idea what the balance/strength of everything in the mod was like so I've been testing things a lot.  Balance seems to be improving enough that I can play seriously is all.  The skill improvements/clarity helps too.  I wouldn't use the actual permadeath setting even in vanilla with the chance of bugs and issues.

Update notes for v1.8.3:

• Minions and Elementals should no longer generate errors from frostbite or hypothermia.
  
  
• Elemental Rift event will now end correctly following a reload.
  
  
• The Necromancer skill "Cheating Death" will also add a reduction in undead upkeep cost.  Undead should no longer attempt tasks they cannot perform.
  Feeling singled out, Necromancers have begun returning the social distaste expressed by paladins, priests, and druids.
  
  
• Mod Settings have been added to allow players to adjust the rarity of magic traits.
  
  
• The Arcane Fold, in response to increased threats against their caravans and colonies, has increased the training and equipment of their guards.
  
  
• The Magic pane displays points required to learn class spells;  spells that haven't been learned yet will no longer give the option to upgrade a related skill.
  
  
• The mana cost for Summoner skills has increased slightly. Each minion now requires an upkeep cost that reduces the amount of mana a summoner gains each turn by 20%.  Unlike undead, minion upkeep costs are not shared, and each summoner may only have 4 minions at any given time.  Summoning additional minions over this amount will dismiss the oldest minion.  The duration of a summoned minion has doubled and its cooldown has been drastically reduced.

Oh snap, crazy update, can't wait to test it out when I have more free time.  If you can change the mage appearance to 100%, this is going to be nuts, lol.  Sounds like it's almost time to try a permadeath run with this mod.  That or just put the magic user appearance to max for the improved chaos.

Been enjoying the Priest so far.  I love that they're a pacifist to balance them.  Sadly I haven't had a major raid yet or disease issue to test their full potential (Worst was a centipede that only shot one of my colonists).  Funny because I'm on Randy Insane.  Really surprised my Priest managed to resurrect a pawn without any penalty to them at base skill.  Well, she herself is puking her guts out and will be useless for a while.  Oh the pawn I res'd does have res sickness, didn't notice it at first.  I guess that'd suck if she wasn't just sitting in jail, lol.

Still haven't gotten around to testing the physical classes though.  I'm curious about the Hunter.

Edit:  WELL, nothing tests a mage team like a massive manhunter pack of lynxs, lmao.  Sure makes them seem a LOT more balanced now (Not like my normal guns could handle these straight on either).  The difference between Necro and a lot of the other classes is a lot more clear now.

Ay, managed to win by funneling them through a door so only one could come at a time with shielded Pally tanking and people sniping behind him (And Priest healing).  Fun combo.  The explosion from the Summoner turret probably did the most damage though, that's a bit nuts.

Heal spells will cancel on a target if they're incapacitated but still cost mana/go on cooldown.  Beyond the probably known if you try to cast a spell that's out of range, it will eat your mana as well.  At least the latter is easy enough to avoid.

So far the Summoner seems by far the strongest mage class I've tested.  The CD and mana cost keeps a lot of the others in check, but he's just running around throwing explosions and turrets down, and has a bunch of ways to distract enemies as well.  Necro is actually one of the most balanced classes, I thought he was pretty OP but his first spell being kinda weak direct damage helps.  Still never got around to testing corpse explosion, but the mana cost of all his spells seems to keep him in check enough.

Summoner also seems to level really quick, I guess always tossing out his minions helps that.  He's out leveling the rest of my team quite a bit.  Early game OPness of most the mage classes has calmed down a bit but he's still really strong.  Ice mage seems a bit weak so far, but I did just turn my gifted pawn into one (First time I got all spells immediately from a book).  They have some useful buffs and debuffs though, so that makes sense.

Err, my Greater Minion just ate a human corpse's leg...  I was going to revive them x.X  At least I think he did.  For some reason he's just running back and forth to try to consume corpses in my corpse freezer even though there's stuff to mine and clean.  I thought the minor ones cleaned, hmm.

Just recruited the Fire Mage finally.  Fireclaw is really awesome, nice job with that.  Probably my favorite offensive spell now.  Haven't tested it in battle but I like the rng to it.  Do mage bolt type spells use the shooting skill?  Not sure how their accuracy works with the spells that can miss.

Mage traders might be a tad overstocked.  My colony wealth just went from 52k to 135k after taking one out, lmao. 

Summoner is a wee bit strong as well with the turrets and mines it seems.  A level 1 turret was just shredding enemies left and right (the 3 shots seemed to kill or chunk enemies by half).  The mine exploded I think but stayed on the ground (Something exploded...)?  I guess that's a pretty hard event to balance for since I had so much prep time and could snipe out the most dangerous threat (Outside Fire Mage), before we even started the fight.  Going to have to nickname my Summoner "Caravan Ambusher".

I think I still got lucky, they were split between outside and inside my base, put a turret and mine outside and took care of the ones inside first (Some lived and remained trapped).  They fled real quick and I managed to gun down all their slow ass dromedary before they could escape.  My paladin running around shanking bitches and dromedary was pretty funny.

Got the Priest revive spell and a bunch of scrolls and spells to choose from for my gifted pawn, Priest, Paladin, Summoner.  Revived one of the Fire Mages with the new Priest resurrection spell (without penalty) and captured them too.  I don't think this run could be much better/easier, lol.  I'm about to have all the mage classes at this point.

Being able to take out a whole mage caravan should be a lot tougher if they're going to be that loaded.  They just got wrecked, I didn't even have any injuries.  Was surprised by how quickly they fled, I think it was partly because some were trapped inside.  Upside is the coming raids should be a pain in the ass.

So tldr:  Summoner might need some nerfing, they're incredibly powerful.  Probably shouldn't be able to summon the defense structure and mine so easily with how strong they are at least.  Mage caravan might need a bit of toning down early game as well.  They seem to have a massive stock over vanilla caravans at the same wealth point.

Tried running the event again and didn't do nearly as well, so maybe it was a bit of luck/skill.  I think them all being grouped up on the mine was the big thing.  Ay, now I don't feel so bad about winning since I was a lot more careful with placement the first time.

Mine also seems to have a lot smaller explosion radius than the blast it seems, kinda misleading, is that the max range it can boom?  I haven't upgraded it yet.

[Edit:]

Social penalty is just "Killed Colonist: -10".  There's no mood debuff, but it is hurting all his relationships and causing problems.  I can't see any detailed info on it unless there's a way with the dev menu.  Would love to see the duration if possible but I can't figure out how to.  He hasn't attacked/killed anybody but the undead.  I thought only his wife had it but it's actually all colonists.

I like that the Druid seems to have beef with the Necro over his choice of profession though.

Oh, just remembered one time I tried euthanizing the undead to avoid issues before I had consume corpse and got penalties for that too, lol.  Same killed colonist social hit and a euthanized colonists mood debuff.  Actually, my doctor still has that social penalty on all the colonists, that musta been a year ago at least, dang.  I don't have corpse explosion yet, but maybe that triggers it as well? Wonder about consume corpse.

Oh, cool about the items and stuff, something new to look forward to.

Starting a new colony to test out the Priest and found a Summoner quickly, this should be interesting.  A Paladin just dropped out of the sky right next to my base too, he almost took out my solar panels.  Well this is pretty dang close to a total magic squad at this point.  He joined on first attempt, haha.

My Priest has tried tending to people twice without using medicine (even though they're set to use best meds and there are meds like 10 steps away), what's up with that?  I'll try to test it more. Edit:  Didn't happen next time, hmm.  I'll try to watch for that, maybe it was because they were about to be fully healed naturally or something.

Love the Summoner minion, it's so helpful.  Though I'm contemplating changing the sprite to something more...Demongirly or imp-like, lol.

Nice fixes, didn't know if enemies not showing their mage status was just me until the patch.  I don't have to run my Necro around casting spells awkwardly every time their mp maxes, whooo.  Finally able to start leveling some of the offensive spells.

Can any heal spells heal scars?  By the sound of it, I thought Rejuv from the Druid would.  Seems tough to balance so I understand why that might not be possible, just wish it was a little clearer.

Any way to lower the cost of the upkeep on zombies?  Seems like the mana cost reduction for casting spells probably doesn't help that.  Noticed even with 3/5 regen I still lose mana with 2.  Also noticed zombies regen their missing body parts when revived, I didn't know that...I've been tossing them away when they lose a limb.  Is that new?  I might revive one of my older zombies...  I still like having one always around as a clean and misc job bot, and prepped for raids.

Killing my colonist zombie so I could rerevive them after I level the undead passive caused massive social penalties for my Necro.  A -10 with his wife seems to not be going away at all...that sucks x.x  Little thing but my zombie still carries around food too even though they don't eat.

At least I finally managed to catch a fire mage and find a Druid scroll for my gifted pawn.  The buff from the fire mage is pretty misleading at initial levels and becomes really strong when maxed.  Wish I could know that ahead of time.  I've found some spells to not scale so well.  Hard to tell where to put points.

I find it kinda odd that mana potions use existing drugs, I was hoping they'd have their own herbs and stuff.  I wanna make a little alchemy/potion/growing room for my mages, lol.  Gotta look up some mage/fantasy armor and clothes too...  I wonder if there's a caldron and witch type furniture somewhere as well.

Wonder if it's possible to make an all mage team with how rare they are.  I kinda wanna try a run where I don't use any traditional weapons unless it's their specialty (My Necro running around with a sniper rifle always feels odd, haha).  Necro would be terrible for that, but maybe Fire/Ice/Lightning could do it.  There a chance we could get staves or wands or something that do a basic magic attack instead of using firearms?  I'd love that, even if they don't have any bonuses to magic use.  Magic hunters using them instead of firearms would help a lot with immersion.

Oh my god I'm dying over here. I think Canute means well, but he has trouble understanding English.

Canute, my friend, I'm sorry but you really do have an issue of misunderstanding people a lot. Maybe it's the language thing, but you should understand that the way you come across to people, you can be off-putting. Listen, I'm no angel, but you seem to put that out there more often than not. I love you buddy, but c'mon man.

Oh...is that it?  Now I kinda feel bad if they weren't intentionally as hostile as they seemed x.x

I really like the idea that anybody could become a mage too.  But maybe they have much lower mana reserves or their spells are weakened, probably make it so it takes much longer to learn spells and/or they can't learn master spells.

Very curious.
He mention that mages are overpowered, but then he want that everyone become a mage! :-) To made them are rare is the only way to balance them.
But otherhand, if anyone is a mage, mellee fights would be very difficult when everyone can explode ! :-)

If you want every pawn with spells/abilities maybe try out the Vampire mod.

Are you dense or something?  Lol.  There are plenty of ways to balance that anybody could become a mage.  If you read my post, I listed some examples.  I didn't plan for it to be something easy/simple to do.  I mentioned it could have special requirements like items, quests, requiring special training, and have penalties to balance it.  I also mentioned that I'd want it to be optional if it happened because it could still be unbalanced, or might not be what everybody wants.

Reading is hard huh?  Why randomly pick a fight with somebody over their opinion, especially without reading their post properly?  Lmao.  You could have easily said "This isn't something I'd want", without attacking my opinion, but you chose to be a dick, why is that?  Rough home life or something?

This mod is just fun to talk about since it has so much potential.  Not like I think the dev will actually add anything I'm mentioning.  First really big rpg/fantasy type mod I've found.  Vampires is great too but it's still poorly balanced in my opinion and I get bored of it quickly.  The fact that the enemies can use spells does wonders for this mod's balance.

Well if there are different tiers of magic, you might have different ways of building it.

One build is like the Vampires mod, where if a lesser mage "consumes" the "mana/soul/whatever" of a higher tier mage, then this mage will advance to the tier of the mage they just consumed.

Another way could be everyone has a much higher chance of being magical, but the highest tiers have a very low chance of ever spawning into the game. Most people would only be a basic magic user, maybe even none at all.

Tiers of mages would be awesome.  Would be similar to everybody being born with different physical potentials.  Most people can play basketball, but without the proper height you're at a massive advantage trying to become a pro eh?

I really like the idea that anybody could become a mage too.  But maybe they have much lower mana reserves or their spells are weakened, probably make it so it takes much longer to learn spells and/or they can't learn master spells.

I don't think it should be something that's easy and there should be a price for it (Having low mana reserves would make them really susceptible to mana drain events for example.) and I wouldn't want them being as strong as gifted type mages of course, but it would be cool.  Maybe they also have to be trained by another mage or something. 

Well anyways, I'd prefer that's something that's rare or toggle-able in the options and I think you already have plans to make mages more or less common, so that's similar in a way.

In my current game I haven't managed to capture a singler magic user alive yet.  Found a gifted pawn but I haven't been able to find them scrolls or whatever is needed to class them properly.  Been hoping for a Druid because my Necro lost his eye (Can a Druid even restore an eye?).  Also waiting/hoping for a fix for Necro exp before I continue that save, that'll be so helpful.

Don't mean to rush or anything, just looking forward to it.  I was having a lot of fun with this mod.  Actually, I might just start up a different class/scenario in the mean time.  Current game just has my Necro but maybe I'll try a Druid + Pally combo in my next one...  Sounds entertaining.