Magic
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Introduction
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Magic is one of the most diverse skills in Atys, allowing for all types of player. This diversity is accomplished by having the 3 types of magic: offense, defense and self magic.

Offense magic is concerned with attacking enemy creatures or casting debuff spells on them. These spells are elemental damage spells (acid, cold and rot) or standard magic (debuff spells) (root [stops the enemy moving], slow, madness, blind, etc.) - Take note that you can only hold 1 debuff (link) spell at a time and cannot cast any other spells or attack something without breaking the link.

Defense magic is concerned with defending your team and healing them up during battles. This school gives spells such as heal, sap gift and stam gift so that you can restore your team's stats. Take note: these spells cannot be cast on yourself, they can only be cast on friendly characters (usually your team). Also this skill gives you auras. These you can cast to give the friendly characters around you faster stat regeneration. They speed up your stat regen, too. Auras have a long warmup time though, you can only use them once every 15 minutes (or longer) and only last for 30s or so. You may also only use one at a time.

Self magic is the last, and probably most useful, school for magic for any mage. This allows you to heal, sap gift and stam gift yourself. These spells are mostly used to convert one stat to another, e.g. hp to sap. These drain your hp, but give you more sap in return. This way you can restore your own stats quicker then by just sitting and waiting. This school is VERY slow to gain in. You can advance 30 levels in offense or defence without getting a gain in this skill. That is how useful it can be.

However, below skill 20 in magic, these school will not effect the new spell caster. Below this skill all magic casting gains XP in the main magic branch. During this initial period is the perfect time to test each type of spell and decide which you want to do. Or, you may decide that you want to do all 3. I, currently, have level 54 offense, 33 defense and 22 self magic. This is a fairly good combination for an offensive mage, allowing flexibility to heal people when required. You can see the magic skill tree by opening your Action Book (default key a or click on the chest in the option bar and choose action book). If you click on the + to the left you can expand the magic tree (and all the other trees, should you wish to) and see all the options available to you.

Having armour and weapons equipped can effect spells quite heavily. If you have high quality light armour (anything above 10), any medium/heavy armour, a shield or weapons equipped you will suffer range, cast time and sap penalties. You will also suffer a higher fail rate.

I want to add a special note in here about "link" spells. These special spells create a link between you and your target creature. While the link lasts the effect of the spell will "tick" once every 5 seconds or so. You will also get a circle containing the spell type above your head. If you move, cast another spell or perform any action whatsoever the link will be broken and it will stop effecting your target creature. If the creature resists the spell the link will also be broken. If the creature does not resist the spell (they get a chance to on every tick) and you do nothing, the spell should last indefinately. If you use the Link effect with damage spells, you get the Damage-over-Time spell effect; also known as DoT.

Learning New Spells
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When you've been blasting away to increase your skill in magic, you can learn new spells from the magic rolemaster in town (any town). These rolemasters will allow you to use skill points to learn new spells. These default spells are faily good and usually well thought out. You can, however, customise them to make them a lot better.

You can also upgrade your stats from these rolemasters. The Intelligence upgrade will increase your sap by 50. The Wisdom upgrade will increase your sap regeneration rate (both of these are essential for mages). The constitution upgrade will increase your HP by 50. The Metabolism upgrade will increase your HP regeneration rate. Note: Your regeneration rate is doubled when you are sitting down. You can also learn auras and powers from them.

When learning a new spell from the rolemaster, the new spell is added to the hands bar (the bar with an empty hand on either side, aka action bar or shortcut bar). From here you can cast the spells, or edit them if you wish. To cast a spell simply select a target with the mouse and then click on the spell and voila, you have cast it. In the case of self-magic you wont need to choose a target. You can use the keys 1-0 on the keyboard (and shift+1-0 for the bottom bar) to cast these spells without clicking on them.

When you learn a spell all the components of that spell, known as "Stanzas" become available to you for making your own spells. See the next section for more information on this.

Making your own spells
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If you choose to edit a spell, simply right click on it in the hands bar and click "edit action". You will notice that each spell is made up of little icons, these are known as "Stanzas". Each "brick" has a certain purpose and cost. You can use these "Stanzas" to "build" your own spell, sort of like building a house.

You start out by choosing what type of spell you wish to make. Ususally if you are editting a spell this is done for you, you simply have to change the level of the spell. For instance, you may be editting a cold damage spell. You will have a little snowflake brick and, to the right of it, a level brick. If you click this level brick you can change it to any of the levels you have learnt from the rolemaster. Perhaps change it from cold damage 2 to cold damage 4. This change will increase the "cost" of the spell. You have to pay this "cost" by adding in penalty Stanzas, such as a sap brick, which would use some sap when you cast the spell.

The available spell spell types are:

- Atysian Missile: Does elemental (acid, cold or rot) damage.

- Atysian Drain: Damage-over-Time elemental damage (very useful on the mainland).

- Atysian Affliction: These are some link (Debuff) spells, such as root, blind and slow.

- Celestial Missile: These are you heal spells.

- Celestial Affliction: These are some more link spells such as fear, sleep and stun.

- Primal Magic: These are you self-healing spells.

The available penalty Stanzas are:

- Sap: This uses sap when you cast a spell. Think of your sap as sort of like mana from other games.

- HP: This cannibalises your HP when you cast a spell. Be warey of using high level HP Stanzas as you can be killed very easily if you have low HP.

- Cast Time: These Stanzas increase the cast time of a spell. Longer cast times could be used inplace of something like sap, so if you are low on stats you can still cast a spell.

- Range: These Stanzas decrease the range of a spell. All spells start out with a range of 50m. The higher level the range brick, the less range the spell will have. Also, the higher the level of the spell the LESS effect range Stanzas will have on the spell. For instance range -5 may decrease the range of acid damage 1 from 50m to 2m, but it will only decrease the range of acid damage 4 from 50m to 40m. Range Stanzas are one of the most useful Stanzas available to you.

When you are making/editting a spell you have to make sure that the spell is fully "paid for". E.g. if you want to cast a spell that costs 50 points, you will need to add in penalty Stanzas that addup to at least 50. An example spell could be:

Spell:
- Cold damage 10 - Cost 10 points - Does 25 damage.

Penalties:
- Sap 5 (15 sap points) - 5 penalty points
- HP 2 (6 hit points) - 2 penalty points
- Range 3 (-3 range) - 3 penalty points

This would balance the spell, 10 points to cast the spell, 10 points worth of penalty Stanzas. When cast, the spell would use 15 sap, 6 hp and have a -3 maximum range modifier (50m reduced to 35m, for this particular spell). This gives 50% chance to cast the spell. If you add in MORE penalty Stanzas it will increase the chances of you casting the spell. For instance, if you changed the sap to Sap 10 (30 sap points), it may increase the chance to 60%. You cannot learn a spell unless you have at least 50% chance to cast it.

I would suggest having a play around with this, see what sort of spells you can make. Don't worry if you make a mess of them, if you right click on the hands bar and choose "forget action" it will remove the spell. If you then open your action book you can drag the original spell back onto the hands bar.

There are also a few extra options for making spells more effective, such as the area of effect Stanzas. These will add to the cost of your spell meaning you need to use more sap/hp/etc to cast them. You will not have access to these effects at lower levels.

If you wish to make a totally new spell, right click in an empty slot on your hands bar and click "new action". Follow the same proceedure as before, but this time you will have to choose the spell to cast.

Offensive Magic
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Now, if you want to be a blaster, then you will need to get to know the elemental damage spells quite well. These will be the bulk of what you are going to want to cast, because they are what damage your enemy!

You may wish to start out with something small, a yubo or similar. Get a good spell ready, target the yubo and cast it a lot until its either dead or you have run out of sap. Be careful, you may need to run away to avoid being eaten alive by these savage creatures; Mages cannot wear armour very effectively, remember. If you run out of sap you may want to run quite far away and cast self-healing magic on yourself until you are at full stats again. Then continue the onslaught until the yubo is dead. Repeat as necessary.

If you are wanting to fight slightly faster creatures you may need to use a spell such as root. This will prevent the creature from moving for a few seconds, giving you the chance of crack off a spell or two. You can then cast root again and continue until it's dead. If you run out of sap you will need to run away and heal up again.

When you are starting out I would suggest trying to cast on slow moving creatures such as Bodoc's and Yubo's. Creatures such as Capryni move quite fast may be able to overwhelm new characters. These faster monsters are best taken down when you are in a group with a melee character. These characters can wear armour and soak up the damage done by fast moving animals, allowing you to sit back and cast your damaging spells without being attacked.

If you encounter a group of animals you wish to attack it may be advisable to lure one of them away before you attack it (known as "pulling"). Some of the non-predator mobs will walk upto you and sniff you and you can lure them away like this. Or you can stand very far away from them and cast a long range spell. This will cause a few of them to run towards you. Then simply run away from them till all but one of them has given up, you should be able to kill it without a whole group of them coming to get you now. A little trick (bug?): If you heal yourself twice it will, most of the time, cause the creatures running towards you to turn back.

If you goto the mainland you will find that MANY creatures will resist all of your spells. You can work around this by using Elemental DoT (damage over time) spells. These seem to work quite well. These spells Stanzas are identified by a dotted white line around the edge of the icon.

Defensive Magic
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Defensive magic is all about groups/teams/parties. If you aren't in a group these spells are useless. If you are in a group, however, these spells become the most useful of all. Defense magic is mainly used for healing up your group when they get low on stats, as follows:

Melee characters will need lots of HP and Stamina, casting these spells on them will be very helpful.

Mage characters will need lots of sap and most likely HP too. You can make very low-cost healing spells to heal other people. If two, or more, mages cast these spells on each other they can QUICKLY regain full stats and continue helping people. You can, infact, cast healing spells with no sap or hp cost if you use large range modifiers. The minimum range is 2m, no matter what modifier you use. You will have to be touching the character to use the spell, however. They are very tricky to use on melee characters because of the "dance" which usually happens during fights. But on mages they are very effective. Remember: if you heal another mages sap/hp they can heal you too! Helping others will ultimately help you.

Example of a zero-cost spell:

- Sap Gift 5 - Costs 5 points - Heals 40 sap
- Range -5 - 5 Penalty points - reduces range to 2m.

I have found that, when casting defense magic in groups, that you gain a lot more if you are "in combat". This means that if you attack something that your group is, you will most likely gain a lot more XP, even if you only hit it once.

When your party is resting up after fighting a creature it is probably a good time to use things such as auras. This will help them regenerate quicker. Alteratively you and a fellow healer can heal the party to full health in a few seconds (remember to also heal each other or you will both run out of sap quite quickly).

Groups
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If you wish to train in magic properly you will need to be in a group. This is for the simple reason that self-heal magics can take a lot of time (compared to non-self heal magic). It will allow you and a friend to heal each other up very quickly and to continue fighting.

One trick that worked very well for me and a friend was: Attack a creature then run away till you are at maximum spell range (both of u). Continue attacking the creature till it has gotten fairly close to you, then run back past it to maximum spell range again. Then continue casting. Heal each others sap/hp as necessary.

Another trick is to have the monster attack one person, they run around in a sort of circle. The others in the group heal the person being attacked. As long as the others aren't very close to the monster it will not attack them and they are free to attack the monster with long range spells. All you have to do is keep the person running around alive.

Another way is to simply get a few melee/healers chars in your group. The healers can heal each other/you/melee chars and gain defensive magic skill. You blast the creature to gain offensive magic skill. The melee attacks the creature to gain melee skilll.
Realität ist etwas für Leute, die mit Drachen nicht umgehen können !