A Strange Guide to Arcane Combat
This is a basic introduction to M:tA2e combat-oriented casting. It is not a definitive guide (a *lot* of spells have potential combat applications), but it should help you speed up your combat choices and make better use your character’s arcane loadout.
Why Direct-Damage Spells Actually Kinda Suck
1. Arcanum dots matter a lot (aka “A weapon is usually better”)
When it comes to direct-damage spells, you need a minimum of 3 dots in an arcanum to do anything. 3 dot spells do Bashing, 4 dot spells do Lethal, and 4 dot spells with an additional Reach and a point of Mana do Agg.
For reference, a mundane weapon almost always does Lethal damage. For a lot of characters it may simply be easier for you to employ some movement boosts and/or defensive boosts and a melee weapon than it is to attack someone directly with a spell.
2. Reaches matter even more (aka "You’re really not as powerful as you think”)
Any spell you cast has a number of paradox-free Reaches based on the highest arcanum in the spell. It’s a simple formula:
That means your highest level spells have one free Reach, you next highest have two, and so on.
However casting a spell without a (potentially) hours long ritual requires one of those Reaches, so you’re automatically down one Reach on all your spells when in combat. You also need to use another Reach to avoid having to Aim the spell (Gnosis + Athletics/Firearms roll to actually land the hit). For a Disciple-level mage (or even an Adept) that’s a rather significant barrier.
Additionally, going over your free Reach limit in combat risks Paradox. Having to contain Paradox will quickly end combat as you’re actively doing damage to yourself almost every time you do it (and there’s no chance to heal that in combat rounds). Having uncontained Paradox will make your spells go awry and potentially taint you with a Paradox Condition. So ideally, don’t exceed your free Reaches ‘cause that’s almost certainly regret territory.
But, if you have spare free Reaches to work with, one scale Reach will immediately bump you from 1 target to 5 targets without a dicepool penalty…
3. Your dicepool is important but your total successes probably aren’t (or “Combat magic takes SO much maths”)
For those used to normal combat or 1e's spellcasting, this will seem counter-intuitive. You want a big casting dicepool… so you can subtract dice from it, not so you can get a lot of successes.
First, attack spells almost always use Potency as their Primary Factor. A spell’s Primary Factor can be increased from 1 to [your dots in that arcanum] before you factor any other increases and it costs nothing to do it, so lean on that, it’s worth it. Then for every 2 dice you reduce your casting pool by your spell’s Potency can go up by another 1, and the only cap is your dicepool (although reducing yourself to a chance die is probably a bad idea). Every point of Potency over your target’s Withstand is a point of damage if the spell goes off. An unprepared target won’t have Withstand. A prepared target almost certainly will. Adjust accordingly.
Additionally you can double your spell’s targets for every 2 dice you remove from your pool (up to 16 without a Reach, up to 160 with a Reach).
These two spell factors are really the only ones you’ll focus on in combat-round casting as nothing else will provide you any benefit in that time scale… unless you’re effectively at greater than Gnosis 25 (which really is a thing, just… difficult and therefore rare).
You can also increase your dicepool with yantras (up to +5 over your starting pool worth bonus, so you can entirely counteract your dicepool penalties) to make life easier. You can automatically add one yantra to a spell without increasing its casting time, every additional yantra adds an extra round on an instant-cast spell.
One success is all you need for your spell to go off. More successes than that rarely nets you a benefit. You could get an Exceptional Success on 5 successes which can step up your Primary Factor by one or earn you an additional free Reach but Exceptional Success is too unreliable to count on as a strategy.
Basically you want to reduce your casting pool as small as you feel you can comfortably guarantee that one success, so you can spend all those dice on bonuses.
How To Make Magical Combat Better For You
The simplest piece of advice to give is simply to prep OOCly - write down your go-to attack spell for future use.
That’s as simple as writing down your starting dicepool and your base Potency (even a Disciple can ramp that up to 3 automatically) and your default yantra(s) and chosen spell factor penalties and their effects, and then your final casting pool. Have it on a card, it’ll seriously save you time every round and make it easier for you to adjust what you’re casting if you need to. All the maths will be there for you.
The next simplest piece of advice is to prep ICly:
Support Spells
The single greatest arcanum for directly improving your magical combat effectiveness is Prime.
At Prime 2, you can cast As Above, So Below which lets you specify a yantra that gets 9-again (or with a Reach, 8-again) while AA,SB is active. If you want to be lazy, cast it permanently on a magical tool and buy the Enhanced Item merit for it. X-again on combat spells ensures reliable casting, it is absolutely worth it both in and out of combat.
Also at Prime 2 is Wards and Signs which grants you Withstand against hostile magic equal to WaS’s Potency. This can entirely nullify weak incoming magic. Again, absolutely worth it.
Fate 2 can potentially substitute for Prime 2 on both counts but it does so incredibly inefficiently by comparison and realistically needs you to be at Fate 4 or higher to pull those effects off safely (have a read of the Boon/Hex options at the start of the Fate spells section if you want more details).
Attainments
Attainments make significant differences to combat spells.
Particularly applicable attainments are the Prime mage armour, any Defense-based mage armour (sadly only for being hit with Aimed spells), the Life 4 attainment (reflexive option to spend Mana for a Clash of Wills against an incoming damage spell), the Space 4 attainment (spend a Mana instead of a Reach to use Advanced Scale), and the Time 4 attainment (spend a Mana instead of a Reach to instant cast).
Also making your own combat rotes means rote action quality as well as rote casting pools. Double bonus.
Order Benefits
Contrary to general opinion no Order is better than any other at throwing direct damage spells around. All of them have benefits that allow them to throw damage spells around with about equal dicepools and Reaches given the same level of arcane ability.
However the Adamantine Arrow have a unique benefit that can significantly improve their chances with magical combat: the Adamant Hand merit. This allows them to use a mundane (non-Firearms) attack as their free yantra, or to count their previous round of (non-Firearms) combat as a yantra. Effectively, they get the best of mundane combat and magical combat simultaneously – it doesn’t make them any better at casting damage spells than anyone else, but it does mean they can effectively make one mundane and one magical attack per turn if they want to. Faster killing is always better killing, and the AA are the best Pentacle Order at killing.
Relatedly, Free Council can use the Techné merit to pick a specific combat-method as an Order tool. This allows them to use their own use of that method as a yantra and any Sleepers engaging in that method as a separate yantra. Sadly there's no mention in this merit of same-turn casting so arguably you'll probably only get to use it to alternate between mundane and arcane combat, and the 8-again bonus from this merit only applies in ritual casting circumstances.
Other Merits
Obviously the Fast Spells merit is great for anyone with the Time arcanum as it makes Aimed spells relatively easymode, which can save on Reaches.
How To Make Magical Combat Terrifying For Everyone Else
So everything up to now revolves around optimising your attack spells and making them cost you less OOC time and brain power. But magical combat is a lot more than direct damage spells.
However, the thing that makes mages terrifying is not their ability to murder a character magically. It’s their ability to make a character irrelevant.
This can be achieved with either preparation or lateral-thinking uses of other spells. For example:
- A Fate 3 mage can use Shared Fate to bring combat to a grinding halt by making any attacks on them also be attacks on their enemy.
- A Forces 2 mage can simply blind everyone with Control Light.
- A Space 3 mage can use Ban to end direct combat entirely, forcing everyone onto Sympathetic magic.
- A Time 2 mage can use Hung Spell to hold a bunch of attack spells to unload on someone all at once. Just takes a downtime action (which means less Reaches required on each attack spell), and maybe some WP points (not dots) to reduce your Spell Control load for the month. With Fate 2, these spells can even fire themselves off without the caster needing to decide to do it.
And so on. The higher ranked you are in an arcanum, the more of these sorts of options become available (leaving this plane of existence, making an enemy the "down" for everything in the area including nearby cars, making someone's mind simply stop and so on). This is why you shouldn’t mess with Masters – most arcana have a combat ender option, and most Masters can simply opt out of combat with them... usually leaving their opponent significantly disadvantaged in the process.
Conclusion
Direct-damage combat magic is really annoying to use without having made some effort beforehand to simplify it for yourself. It's also not that great unless you've got very specific kinds of magic available to your character. It may simply be easier to prepare your character to resist that kind of magic and use a different method of combat, since the synergies that make you better in magical combat also make you better at resisting it and using different magic instead.
But if you want to use magic that way, it works and is less likely to hit a magical invulnerability barrier (like "no metal can cross this line" spells or "the only direct line between your gun and me passes through your head" spells and so on) than mundane combat is.