I took advantage of the levelling event to take a look at both classes and decide which one I want to play, see if there is any pitfalls, and so on.
Spoiler: they both are kinda s**t.
Wizard C3
Both FF & Warlock are based on Wizard C3, for no particular reason. I already knew that Quickcast and Magic Missile are good and work great with Linker, so that’s where I went to keep things simple and easy for myself.
First Wizard invested heavily into Energy Bolt and Earthquake. Second Wizard auto-attacked for three circles. Laughably, there was no appreciable difference.
Reflect Shield does actually prevent stagger which occurs after you are hit, allowing you to move more freely, but the number of hits that it holds is just pitiful, and so RS disappears from the bar pretty quickly.
Sleep is very useful all the way, a definite 15/15. Annoyingly, does not seem to work on flying/floating mobs for some reason.
Didn’t even try Lethargy. Seems like a total waste of time.
Linker C2 / C3
First Wizard, the Featherfoot one, went Linker C3, the second one stopped at C2. After trying both I’m confident in saying that Linker C3 is a waste of a circle. C3 adds 2-3 targets to Joint Penalty (3 if you party with a Cleric), and that is pretty much all that is useful in C3 compared to C2. Extremely underwhelming.
Sharing buffs and stats sounds like a great skill to have the first time you hear about it. The punchline comes when you realize that nobody actually wants your buffs or stats. If someone really needs Surespell, or Gung Ho, or whatever, chances are good that they already have it, without your help. Same thing with stats: if someone needs lots of STR, they already have lots of STR.
An argument can be made for sharing the highest CON in the group, which sounds like something that would be universally useful in any group. Unfortunately, the buff/stat sharing link also happens to break incredibly easily, rendering the whole mechanic completely futile even if you actually manage to find a use for it.
Rune Caster
I took RC almost at random, to fill up the void left by lack of Linker C3 on my second Wizard. Don’t really have much to say about it, it’s OK. Gives you something decent to cast when Joint Penalty is on cooldown. Just a couple of nukes that are completely unusable without both Quickcast and Surespell, and the Rune of Ice, which I imagine is the actual reason to take RC (if you have any ice spells, of course).
Finally, the moneyshot.
Featherfoot
First thing that strikes you as a freshly minted FF is the fact that something like two thirds of all the mobs in the game are immune to full effects of you main C1 spells. (I know it’s not actually 2/3 of all the mobs, but sure feels like it!)
Blood Bath is especially horrible. Not only it fails to heal you if the attacked mob is of the wrong type, but it also fails to apply the bleed effect, which is the bulk of the ability’s damage (something that the skill’s tooltip completely neglects to mention). Oh, and the bleed is not of poison property, only the initial hit is, making that Joint Penalty’s poison attribute a waste of SP.
Blood Sucking is slightly better in a sense that it at least applies the damage even if it fails to heal you, and the damage actually is of poison property. Otherwise, it’s pure s**t. It’s hard to aim (especially while levitating), has very small AOE, easily interrupted (even with Surespell), and, for the damage it does, it drains ridiculous amounts of SP.
C2 opens up Blood Curse, your main nuke, and Levitation.
Levitation pretty much just makes the game harder to play, especially in a chaos of a party, while increasing damage that your main enemies, archers, do to you. It also disables your melee-like skills, such as Blood Bath & Nga, and friendly links, if you’re still using them for some reason. Why would you bother with such a piece of s**t of a skill then? I’m glad you asked!
Blood Curse, your main nuke, requires an active levitation to work. (Again, something pretty major that the skill’s tooltip completely failed to mention.) And so it goes: you levitate and link up some mobs, which you party promptly murders. You find the biggest bunch of survivors and cast Blood Curse over them, leaving you more than half dead just from the cast alone (and god help you if there are any archers in the pack). You try to use Blood Sucking to get some of the HP back and miss horribly, since levitation messes up your judgement pretty bad. Now you got no HP, not SP, and you can’t use the rest of FF skills since you’re levitating. You put down the gamepad, click off the levitation buff with your mouse, pick up the gamepad and go looking for something alive to stab with Blood Bath in a last ditch effort to get some of your HP back before you have to crawl back to your Cleric and beg for a Heal.
F**k you, Featherfoot. Bad, bordering on unusable.
Warlock
I didn’t get much time with Warlock, but I feel I got the gist of it. Warlock is all about spirits. You use spirits to kill things, and you need to kill things to get spirits. Starting to see a little bit of an issue yet? Yup, it’s classic Catch-22.
It’s not that bad, definitely not as bad as FF.
You can use Dark Theurge, Pole of Agony and maybe even Mastema (didn’t try) to get some initial murderin’ done, get some spirits. It’s all very random. Sometimes you fail to last-hit much of anything and get just a couple of spirits, and sometimes it’s a glorious chain reaction of st just blowing the fk up. But mostly it’s just a few spirits, often with nothing left to sick them on. Unreliable.
Another annoying thing about Warlock is odd, pretty lengthy delays after casting DT and Invocation. DT fails to apply any damage for a second or so right after being cast, and Invocation just nails you to the ground for a while. With a bunch of other short-term buffs to cast this becomes enraging pretty fast.
Spirits also interact with the terrain, meaning that if there’s a slope, a wall, or a step, or anything at all on the ground, your spirits, while commanded by Evil Sacrifice, will make sure to blow up on that instead of doing anything useful.
TL;DR: I’m playing a Cataphract now, and balance slowly returns to my soul.