How do you think IS should handle the mages?

[Fala]

Here are my thoughts:

Fire Mages should have access to staves and can promote to Sage.

Thunder Mages should have access to dark magic and given a branch promotion allowing them to promote to Druid or Sage.

Wind Mages should have access to swords and be able to promote to Mage Fighter.

[Gold Vanguard]

Thunder Mages:

- High damage

- High Critical hit

- High HP

- Very low accuracy

- Heavy to wield

- Low STR cap

Fire Mages:

- Medium damage

- Medium accuracy

- Has balance caps

Wind Mages:

- Low damage

- High accuracy

- High MAG cap

Dark Mage

- High damage

- Low accuracy

- Medium to wield.

- Low SPD cap.

Bishop:

- Very low damage

- high accuracy

- Has high SPD cap

-High RES cap

Edited December 8, 2012 by Royal Guard

[FrostyFireMage]

Fire Mage: Highest Magic but lowest Crit. Balanced in everything else.

Thunder Mage: Highest HP, Defense and Crit, but lowest Magic, Resistance and Accuracy.

Wind Mage: Highest Resistance, Speed and Accuracy, but lowest Defense and HP.

[Byte2222]

I'm thinking of something more radical: magic ranks for anima, light and dark but two trinities of magic, like FE13 had fire, thunder and wind all under the same rank. There can be three class lines: Mage (anima), Monk/Priest (light) and... I've never liked Shaman as a name so Warlock -> Sorceror (dark). Balancing them is probably better suited to someone who's not me but IMO magic classes (especially with stat caps) need to be more like FE4 (where Sage has the joint highest speed cap and Sety kicks ass) than FE10 (most Mages had crap availability or crap stats and all magic users had appalling caps for no reason).

As for why only three ranks but 5 types, in FE10 raising tome ranks is really hard, they all really do the same thing and having three anima classes didn't play well with the cast of player mages but I like the tactical richness of having 5 types to exploit. As much as I'm bashing FE10's magic system the effective bonuses were really good at differentiating the anima types and maybe that needs to be brought back (with a minor/moderate statistical nerf) with FE13's beast, dragon and flying types. I don't know if any of these are good ideas but I've had them and don't immediately think they're bad.