Well, I was wishing for a challenge at the end of last run, so why not take a look at the game's second, and only other attack mage? Meet Leon!
Leon is essentially a darkly flavored mage, most of his spells are darkness elemental and he gets instant death and debuff spells. That said, he starts with a few water elemental spells, and those give him a decent alternative element to tap into.
Leon starts at level 30, and with level 2 Alchemy. He also has the grace of starting with 500 SP and 350 BP. Now, this isn't as big as it sounds, especially since 120 of the SP has to be spent on Determination, but it's nice to have some flexibility building him up at the start! He also joins at the start of the Hoffman Ruins arc, and is a guest until the dungeon is cleared. This puts him under the same restrictions as Celine - he can't swap any equipment until he joins "for real". No armor, no weapons, no accessories, nothing.
Speaking of weapons, Leon uses books as his murder tools. Yes, books. They're more effective than you'd think, as he summons monsters from within to smack his enemies. He can also create them through Writing, making this skill quite useful for him!
Well, time to kick this off.
GALAXY
I spent little effort investing into Leon's starting skills - Determination got maxed first, then he got a smattering of everything, with some more focus on his Writing and Herbology. Godspeed got pumped as high as it could.
I was pretty unimpressed by his spells - most of them took long to charge and did very little damage.
His regular attack was better, having pretty generous range and vertical coverage. However, it had little power backing it, at least with his current equipment, and took a while to play out.
Well, if this was going to be his skillset going into the Hoffman Ruins, I didn't have much hope! Time to grind up something better, I guess.
Grinding took forever and was a complete chore. As if to add insult to injury, the Starry Nights he was throwing out were better than his own version of their spell! Not only did they cast significantly faster, they also consistently did 150 more damage per hit!
At level 57, he finally brought Familiar to level 9. That, and Replication at level 7, would let him keep a steady supply of spellcasting paintings. This may sound excessive, but I really didn't know how else he could get past any serious fights! I also copied over that save over for his Universe run later, I didn't fancy doing all of that grinding again!
The Halfnyxes fight was nothing short of torture, even after all the grinding. Leon had very pathetic damage against the bosses. Shadow Flare did 5100 damage, and this was with hitting their weakness, after it had been upgraded! Even so, it was still the best tool he had against them, outside of Starry Nights and The Screams. Meanwhile, the bosses, with their truckloads of HP and their innate Super Armor kicking in, had little trouble smacking him around! Leon eventually won against them, but only through sheer perseverance.
So now it was time for Leon to joi-lol, just kidding. He leaves the party for the entirely of the Lacour Front Base arc, and only rejoins at Eluria. The party has to face the stone gargoyles and Cynne's first form relatively underleveled. Granted, they aren't all that threatening, but it speaks ill of him all the same.
....Ugh. Whatever. Let's just assume his journey starts at Eluria, and give him a second chance. I made a copy of a save at this point here on Universe too, to cover all my bases.
So, now that Leon could swap gear, was he better?
Well, kind of. Doing 4400 damage per swing instead of 480 was definitely a big improvement! On the other hand, this wasn't really any stronger than the swings Rena or Celine could deliver, and Rena had the massive benefit of poisoning things with her strikes. Thankfully, he did have two of her powerful buffs on hand - Haste and Power Up. Those made him a decently effective hit and run fighter, although really, he was mainly relying on the Berserker Ring and Meteor Ring the party had already picked up!
Leon created his ultimate weapons with little trouble. Writing could only create Symbology Dictionary at its best, a mid tier weapon with 500 attack on it, but repeatedly forging it with Damascus got him decently powerful books - the Book of Confusion with 950 attack, 80 hit and dark element, and the Book of the Ancients with generally lower stats but no element on it. He could also use a piece of Mithril to forge the Sacred Tome instead, the light counterpart to the Book of Confusion with slightly lowered stats. The Book of Confusion was the best usually, as it had the highest stats, but it did have the non insignificant drawback of disabling post battle recovery. In situations where the dark element wasn't desirable, he would fall back on either the Sacred Tome or the Book of the Ancients. The Sacred Tome in particular was noticeably effective against things like the gargoyles or the knights of the Field of Might.
As for his combat performance...well, he was a worse Rena. The range on his regular attacks was nice, but Rena's faster swing speed was actually more useful in many fights, and a 1220 attack weapon was just better than a 950 attack one. :P Especially when it didn't shut off post battle regeneration.
He also had some weird equipment restrictions. He couldn't equip any dresses or earrings, and this locked him out of some great equipment, like the Mithril Dress from Armlock's blacksmith or the Earring of Frenzy from Narl's secretary.
Well, what about the rest of his spells?
None of them so far had been very impressive, but Ravenous Fiends seemed quite usable. Even with no ranks in Hasten Speech, it casted decently fast, hit multiple times for passable damage, and most notably, did considerable damage to shields. I would keep it in mind for later, when he could afford maxing Hasten Speech.
For now, he was basically a gimped Rena. As such, he was visibly rather underpowered, even after stacking his buffs. He struggled to deal with any minibosses that granted regeneration to their minions, and when he wasn't hitting a weakness, his blows only dealt about 5600 damage total. Umm, he's going to have to make up for that somehow! And this is still just Galaxy difficulty!
For now, he was basically a gimped Rena. As such, he was visibly rather underpowered, even after stacking his buffs. He struggled to deal with any minibosses that granted regeneration to their minions, and when he wasn't hitting a weakness, his blows only dealt about 5600 damage total. Umm, he's going to have to make up for that somehow! And this is still just Galaxy difficulty!
To be quite frank, I was struggling to find anything interesting or worthwhile in his run. I was mostly waiting on his spell list, hoping to see something good pop from there. At level 90, I gave up - even if he got an utterly amazing spell afterwards, the game was already almost done. So, his run shall remain unfulfilled, there was very little to really talk about or see here. Apologies for disappointing you all.
Next time, we tackle the final mage of the cast, and a theoretically interesting hybrid one, at that. See you then!
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