Mana Blast not effective on bosses

[Zieg777]

Without any "damage" components or multipliers, I can almost 1-shot the wither with mana blast (does 120 or so damage with my 9k mana pool). But when I try to fight AM2 bosses with it, it does barely any more than a regular magic damage spell (ie, 3 damage).

Related. The damage multiplier doesn't seem to work on the bosses either. With 3 damage multipliers with the aforementioned mana blast, I can easily one shot the wither. It makes no difference with the bosses. Same if I combine it with just a regular damage spell.

[Zieg777]

But the fact that mana blast (A silver skill) does less to an air guardian than a regular fire damage spell?

Mana blast uses all of your mana (9000 in this case) in one shot. Fire damage uses like 50 mana.

That being said is there a way around their magic resistance? Worth noting that according to the compendium, magic damage should in fact do more damage to them since they are mystical/summoned.

[ProfHugo]

Most bosses in Ars Magica 2 has a a function where if the damage a boss takes in a tick exceeds a certain amount, it would be reduced to a maximum threshold. This was added long ago to prevent boss farming and to increase the overall difficulty of the mod.

[Zieg777]

Ok. That makes sense to cap the damage. But still, I'm way below that cap. I can hit the air guardian for more damage with a sword than I can with Mana blast. Which mathematically should do 216 damage. This isn't just a magic damage spell. This is the silver skill that drains your entire mana bar and converts it to damage. It hits him for 3 damage. Same as my basic (first spell) magic damage spell.

My fire damage spell hits him for 7 damage.

Hmm. Looking at the code for AM2Boss.java, I see lines 180 and 182. `

    if (par2 > 7) par2 = 7;

    par2 = modifyDamageAmount(par1DamageSource, par2);

`

So reading this, since fire isn't nerfed with Air guardian, I can hit him for 7. Since magic damage is cut in half, the max I can hit him for is 3.5.. So a sword is better than magic..

Then what is the point of mana blast if it's only useful against the wither and perhaps ender dragon? Everything else in the game can be killed using so much less mana. The only things it would be useful against (bosses) get capped at 7 damage regardless of damage source.

I had thought when they were originally capped, it only applied to non AM2 spells. To ensure that people actually used spells instead of just cheesing through them all with a TiC rapier.

[ProfHugo]

Just wondering, in your opinion, is it be better for bosses to be tedious to deal with even at higher levels (like it is now with the damage cap, except well, firestorm solves everything) or be made so bosses become easier to deal with as you progresses (removing the damage cap/change to percent damage reduction and probably resulting in indirectly nerfing firestorm against bosses)

[Zieg777]

I think that no matter what, against an AM2 boss, spells should have the advantage over other damage types. Perhaps keep the damage cap for non spells. This means with mana blast, a 10k MP pool would have the potential to do 200 damage. But the Air guardian is resistant to magic. So he takes only 50% of the damage. Still 100 damage is impressive, but not enough to kill him in one shot.

Again, realize that Mana burst drains your entire mana pool. Doing that only to cap out on damage that is easily obtainable with vanilla means (not even counting potions or the fury spell) just cheapens the spells. It makes it so that things like rapiers and firestorm are the only thing to use against them besides grinding them slowly or designing arenas such that its trivial