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Mandragora’sSpellbinder is the classic fantasy mage in just about every way: High damage, no armour and a strange fascination with the colour purple. With impressive damaging spells, the main thing the class needs to worry about when planning a build is how to survive while their automated tornados and beams do the hard part of killing enemies.
A good build for the class looks to augment those obvious strengths and minimise their weaknesses without diverging from their class identity. Here’s a Spellbinder build that will see you safely from the Crimson City to the ends of entropy, while keeping on theme through the journey.
Spellbinder Abilities
As a magic-focused class, theSpellbinder places a lot of emphasis on their active abilitiescompared to more martial-focused characters. The spells you use regularly will have the biggest impact on your playstyle. Of the nine spells your class gains, six stand out enough to be used throughout a large portion of the game.
For most of the game, you’ll probablykeep one of your attack slots for your weapon’s light attack, possibly on both ability slot sets. This means you have four or five slots available for your spells.
Single-target damage
Early-mid game
Chaos beam is your go-to damage spell through pretty much the entire first act of the game and beyond. It’s got the longest range of just about any spell and full control over its aim,letting you hit enemies before they spot you.
The beam is both mana hungry and requires continuous channelling.
Multi-target damage
mid-game
Chaos Storm is your standard tool for handling groups or enemies with large hitboxes. It’s fire-and-forget, so you can throw it out and then focus your efforts on evading any counterattacks. Try anddodge in a way that keeps enemies in the storm for as long as possible, or corner them against a wall so they’re trapped in the area.
The spell’s weakness is a reliance on positioning and environment for it to work. Sometimes, the map layout renders the spell ineffective.
Early-game
Shadow Shards is your early game attack spell until you have Chaos Storm. It casts quickly, so you canweave it into a sword comboto save on stamina or use it to shove enemies into pits.
Mid-late game
Splintering Sparks is theapex of boss-killing technology.You’ll get an overwhelming amount of damage for a very small investment and can focus on defending yourself while the spell is at work. It’s one of the rare abilities whereall of the upgrades are worth getting,rather than picking out the ones that fit your playstyle.
The spell’s damage is slow, so you can’t take advantage of staggers or obvious openings.
Supplementary damage
Shadow Wisp fills the same role as splintering sparks, but there’s no reason you can’t use both. While it has less attack power, the wisp follows you and can be kept in yourpocket to automatically target hidden enemies and ambushes.No more checking the ceiling constantly when the wisp can do it for you.
The wisp can only be summoned during combat, unlike other summon abilities.
Survivability / Multiclassing
It’s a good spell for dagger builds in the Nightshade class, since it gives an escape tool and some damage mitigation. In a traditional mage,it sees its best use when upgraded to give you shields. You don’t have access to a healing spell, so shields are your best alternative.
It requires upgrading to be useful in this specific build.
The remaining spells are either too situational or just havebetter alternatives by the time you unlock them.
Talent Build For A Spellbinder
A bigfocus of the spellbinder is passive damage, which is a bit strange because it’s their two adjacent classes that inflict damage-over-time effects.
You already have spells for dealing damage without direct intervention.Once your splintering sparks are set up, you’re able to spam dodge rollsuntil they kill everything or need recasting. The direction we recommend on the talent tree builds on this identity, letting you kill things faster and survive until that happens.
Three talents will account for thebulk of your non-spell damage:
Survival Talents
We augment these with survival-focused talents. The spellbinder has no direct healing abilities, so you’ll be largely limited to whatever consumables you prepare and your crystal flask. There are a few different options for stretching those healing supplies further or taking pressure off you.
Multiclass Talents
We want to multiclass to Flameweaver, but we aren’t going to take a fire relic or any class spells.We’re picking out the best passive talents. Our base class has a few options for magical defences, but the flameweaver is swimming in them. Along the way, we can get some extra power nodes for increased spell damage.
Following the talent path from cripple we can pick up thetwo synergy passives, Shadowmelt and Shadow Burn.These give us extra fire damage but don’t require us to cast non-chaos spells.
This inserts us onto the Flameweaver tree very close to all the skills we want to poach.
Equipment Loadout For A Spellbinder
The best equipment for this build will change as you unlock new options. A few options stick around long enough to be continuously relevant, especially with thelimited pool of weapons that scale to magical power.
For armour, you gain a range of options depending on the specifics of your build and your progression in the game.
The most important slots are the cloak, helmet and torso. Cloaks have the best passives, whilehelmets and torsos have enchantment slots. Gloves and leggings are for when you’ve got a few levels in vigor and can afford to spare the crafting materials.
The feathered cloak is available relatively early and is generally good. Its movement speed bonus will never be obsolete,and the bonus to equip load makes up for a poor strength score.
Other cloaks are more closely designed to fit a mage build, but the feathered cloak is the best all-rounder. You might choose toswap in specific alternatives to match the resistance of a boss fight. The velvet wrap, for example, gives bonus fire resistance and has aspell damage buff that fits the mage well.
On the Armour sets, it’s hard to go wrong as long as you look for bonuses to power:
The starting spellbinderbarely has the equipment load to wear your starting outfit. When you find useful gear, you may need to go pantsless to make space for a better helmet.
