So you want to be a Mage in Rogue Legacy

Overview

A guide on how to make the most of Rogue Legacy’s magic-using classes.

Mages in Rogue Legacy

If you’re looking for guides on mage classes, you may have seen comments about how the mage classes are underpowered, or the spellsword is the only good mage class in Rogue Legacy. I’m here to tell you that its not true! Mages are often thought of as the best boss-killers, and this guide will help to show how when you build them right, any mage class can rip through the castle with no problems.

Most players should do their first playthrough focusing on physical classes, with some plays as a Spellsword. I’ve found that most players initially feel that the spell classes suck. I feel that issue stems more from the first playthrough being about learning the manor upgrades, game mechanics, and enemies, before mastering spell use. If you’re learning how to dodge things, it’s a lot easier to do so without also worrying about how to aim daggers and axes, and how to manage your mana usage.
While I’ll show in this guide the upgrades and spell preferences that makes pure mages like the Archmage viable, in order to maximize the value of this guide, you should be familiar with the spells already. An archmage without enough points in mana cost down and siphon runes, for instance, is just a weak version of a spellsword, but a spellsword without a strong understanding of when and how to use your spells is just a weak Paladin.

I’ll go over each class in detail in the next sections, but if you just want the TLDR of how to build a mage and want to explore the classes on your own, your manor upgrades should be primarily focused on:

• Mana Cost Down: This is the most important upgrade available to all non-spellsword mages. I’ll go more into it in each class’s section.
• Gold Gain Up: An obvious upgrade that improves your returns on every subsequent attempt at delving the castle. Since this is usually the most expensive upgrade, I would pick it up every time you have a good enough run to afford it.
• Magic Damage Up: Your bread-and-butter will be to cast spells, so this is an obvious pick. Helps you kill things.
• Health Up: Boring. Necessary. I love playing a glass cannon as much as the next mage, but its just not feasible in Rogue Legacy.
• Equip Up: Equipment is generally much more cost-effective than taking upgrades, so getting the good equipment is a priority.
• Armor Up: This is an excellent upgrade, but it is really deep in the physical side of the castle. If you’re an advanced player on a second playthrough, you can focus on health and stay far away from enemies instead of trying to unlock it, but it’ll eventually probably be necessary.
• Death Defy: As above, but more expensive and less valuable overall. If you’re already in the tree, it’s good, if not, don’t worry too much about it.

Archmage: The “Pure” Mage

The general opinion I’ve found is that most people think the Archmage one of the worst classes in Rogue Legacy. Oddly enough, I think it’s my personal favorite, and one of the best.

Strengths:

• Versatility: Spell cycle allows you multiple options for the best spell to clear a room. Are you at the bottom of a room and there are enemies above? Cycle to axe. Are you on the side of a very long room? Throw a chakram and jump over it to fire a spell all the way across. Or just throw scythes. Are you at the top of a room or smack in the middle with enemies on all sides? Start spamming conflux and watch everyone die.
• Huge mana pool: Improves the values of the mana potions you find, makes missing spells forgivable, and, like in the above-mentioned conflux scenario, you can fire off a lot of spells rapidly to clear enemies faster and reduce the threat of damage.
• Siphon: While this may seem strictly worse than the spellsword’s mana steal, there is one extremely important advantage: it triggers off of your spell kills. This is where you start seeing the mana cost reductions pay off: a dagger that costs you 9 mana with one upgrade, refunds 6 baseline or 8 with a single siphon rune means you’ll get a kill for a single point of mana. With further upgrades or siphon runes, or even just a mana potion every 20-30 kills, your mana becomes virtually infinite.

Weaknesses:

• Health: You are a master at killing things at range, but killing things doesn’t always stop you from dying to spikes or projectiles.
• Lowest str: If you want to play an archmage, you need to commit to the ways of magic. A full 50% reduction of your str leaves little in the way of plan B. Make sure you’ve got those mana cost reductions.

Strategy:

The archmage is the “pure” caster. Mow down all enemies with spells, don’t get close to hit things unless its an easy/weak opponent and you’re just trying to leech back some mana.

Spell Value:
With the largest spell list, and the ability to cycle, archmages have the most options. Unfortunately, you really can’t tell which spells you’ll get ahead of time, other than the first.

Skills, Runes, Equipment:

• Mana cost down: I can’t stress this enough for this class. With this skill increased enough, you regen mana on kills, and rarely have to worry about having to get in melee. That being said, if you recognize easy enemies you can kill over a few seconds without taking damage, grab the free mana from it.
• Siphon vs Vampiric: You want one, maybe two siphon runes. Everything else should go vampiric. With your huge mana pool and low health pool, the linear gains will be more effective from vampiric than siphon, though you want enough to make your cheapest spell sustainable. Remember that with 3:1 health to mana baseline, potions start off 3 times more effective than meat for the archmage, while vampiric and siphon runes are 1 to 1.
• Limbs are your “weapon” for the archmage. Use the best limbs you have, as your damage/str will be almost completely irrelevant towards later parts of the game.

Spellsword: The Hybrid

This is the most “hybrid” of the magic classes, and the one that uses strength the most. Potentially the best boss-killer due to its huge magic damage and constant mana regen.

Strengths:

• Empower Spell: Make a spell bigger, stronger, better. More expensive though. Since it’s just double damage for double mana cost, the only advantage you’re gaining is casting time. When something will survive the normal spell, empower it. Less time spent casting, more time spent dodging.
• Siphon: Spellsword’s siphon is pretty simple. Hit a monster with your sword, get back mana. Valuable in situations where you won’t be able to get your mana back from kills, like some boss fights. Effectively allows you to have “infinite” mana.

Weaknesses:

• Health: Reduced health, but not as much as the archmage.
• Str: This really sucks because your mana regen is based on your damage output, and you need to hit things with your sword to regen mana.
• Mana pool: Opposite of the archmage’s strength, your tiny mana pool means you can’t frontload spells to make space and clear enemies quickly. Offset by high regen.
• Hybridization: I consider this a weakness, though some people may like the playstyle: splitting your stats between magic and physical damage results in you being sub-par in both, though you aren’t as useless if you run out of mana.

Strategy:

Use spells to clear monsters from a room initially, then engage the remaining targets with your sword to recover mana.

Spell Value:
Spellsword has mostly the same spells as the archmage, but without spell cycle, the value of several of them change. You lose time stop, which sucks because that would have been the best spell on spellsword, as opposed to the archmage where it’s useless. It also would have allowed a int-less caster class, which would be pretty interesting. You also lose conflux, but the high mana cost would’ve been unappealing to the spellsword anyhow until very late in the game.
Keep in mind that with the spellsword’s low max mana pool, the spell value changes dramatically when your pool can support more frequent casts of more expensive spells. Flame barrier in particular shoots up in value with max mana.

Skills, Runes, Equipment:

• Mana up over mana cost down: Unlike the rest of the mage classes, increasing your mana pool is much more relevant on a spellsword, and reducing the cost of spells much less so. Since your mana pool starts off low, and the spellsword strategy is to cast to reduce the number of enemies on-screen, then finish the rest with melee, you’ll want to increase the number of casts you can make in sequence.
• Siphon vs Vampiric: Siphon is pretty pointless on a spellsword. Everything should go vampiric. When you have higher max mana, you may want to increase your siphon amount, but early on your focus should be survivability.
• Hybridization: You need both str and int on the spellsword. Balance the two out based on whether you’re having more trouble with killing off enemies early or late into a room.

Lich King/Queen: The Tank

The Lich King/Queen starts off very weak, and eventually becomes very tanky. A pretty high-risk hero, unlocked in the melee tree, but you can get some insane successes with the class.

Strengths:

• Growing health: Every kill increases your health. Try to know what your base max health is (whatever the max health of your “Paladin” class is), since it will stop growing after that point. You should use your conversion ability to change some health to mana when you hit that max, until you get to both maximums. Don’t hit your special ability key by mistake!
• Highest intellect/max mana: Lich King/Queen has the highest intellect multiplier. After you’ve grown your health and mana pools up, you actually have the highest stats of all the caster classes.

Weaknesses:

• Weak start: Vastly reduced health and mana to start (35%/50% respectively).
• Str: Low strength, but no lower than any other non-Paladin/Hokage classes.

Strategy:

Play conservatively early on to build your health and mana pools. The Lich King/Queen grows to become the most powerful spell class in the game stat-wise, but starts off very weak. You have the option of either playing the spellsword hybrid style, or archmage style if you have enough siphon.

Spell Value:
The Lich King/Queen has a very small spell list from the other classes, focusing exclusively on room clears/multikills. The mana costs are very expensive, so this class really doesn’t start getting stronger until you are quite a bit later into the game. Unlike the other classes, I’m not going to rank these spells, since their value changes based on your talent build.

Skills, Runes, Equipment:

• Mana cost down: With the extremely high mana costs on the Lich King/Queen’s spells, mana cost down makes a pretty big difference. Its not quite as critical as it is on the archmage, but it should go along with magic damage up to maximize your spell efficiency.
• Siphon vs Vampiric: Siphon is very good on the Lich King/Queen. You’ll want several runes if you want to be able to maintain any semblance of chain-casting. Since your power gives you max health AND current health, it gives you quasi-vampiric baseline.
• Luckily, all of the Lich King/Queen’s spells are very strong. However, you can’t avoid fighting the tougher enemies with melee, so hybridizing to some extent may be necessary. At the very least, make sure your sword is up-to-date.

The Dragon: The Dragon

The Dragon is a Dragon. He’s a caster, for sure, but doesn’t play like any of the other classes. Truthfully, I don’t recommend even unlocking him. Not because he’s bad, but because you’re going to spend countless runs through the dungeon, and the dragon fundamentally changes how the game’s played. All that muscle memory you’re building up goes for nothing. That being said, here’s the guide:

Strengths:

• Flies: Woo the Dragon flies! Fly over spikes! Weave through projectiles! Show your amazing skillz!
• Rapid mana regeneration: No need for siphon. Mana cost down or mana up is useful to increase how rapidly you can shoot, but you’ll never have to worry about going out of mana. If you lock down a previous castle and get a different spell, like conflux or crow storm, you can trivialize every non-boss room. (See strategy section)
• No strength: Your attacks don’t use strength. Makes your upgrade choices pretty easy.

Weaknesses:

• Flies: Woo the Dragon flies! Until you get hit. Then you fall. After which point, your ability to get back into the air is pretty slow, and you can find yourself getting “combo’d” by enemies. Flying is slower than jumping, and if you aren’t accustomed to the dragon’s movespeed, it can be pretty bad.
• Extremely low health and mana: 40% HP, and 25% MP.

Strategy:

Fly around, shoot things, dodge stuff. The dragon doesn’t have a particular strategy, because there’s no real options with this one. If you find a spell as a non-dragon and don’t take it, and then pick the dragon as the descendant and lock down the castle, you can return and change spells. This lets you be a dragon shooting knives from your face, and stuff like that. Since Dragon Fire is just about the worst spell in the game, it’s probably better to switch it for anything but time stop. (Unless you want to play a pacifist to collect treasure until you die)

Spell Value:
The dragon has the smallest spell pool in the game.

Skills, Runes, Equipment:

• Mana cost down: While an argument can be made for mana up, the 75% reduction on your mana pool may make mana cost down preferable.
• Siphon vs Vampiric: Siphon does nothing of value. Vampiric all the way.
• Ignore strength completely if you want to play dragons. In fact, if you want to play a dragon, you should completely ignore all upgrades on the left side of the manor except architect.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading my guide, and I hope it will provide some help to you. Unfortunately, I can only discuss strategy here, the actual hard part of the game is learning how to dodge everything coming at you. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them, and I can adjust the guide to cover anything missing.