It never ceases to amaze me. Just when I think OSI is about to make a few steps forward, they take a huge fucking thermonuclear rocket powered leap backwards. I mean, for the most fleeting of moments I was excited about the concept of character specialization. Come on people, how many of us ever played a real RPG where our mage was also a warrior/archer/thief/notary public/carpenter/tailor/gynecologist (ok, so maybe you did try to play doctor with that little hottie half-elf once, but that’s another story)

The addition of armor-based meditation, the promise of evaluate int, etc made me dig out my old mage on Lake Superior that I hadn’t played for months. I figured what the hell; a "pure mage" might actually be cool to roleplay, so I started whipping her into shape.

Now I knew going into it that spell interruption was a joke. A Grandmaster mage who has the power to summon demonic creatures from the very earth itself and possesses tremendous arcane powers might as well kiss his ass goodbye if he gets trapped by a pack of rats in covetous. "Your concentration has been interrupted" Just what the fuck is that?? I can summon massive, deadly bolts of energy from thin air but somehow I am no match for these SuperRats? OSI’s answer? Wrestling! Yeah baby, that’s the bottom line. Its Merlin "The Stone Cold Mage" Austin comin’ at ya. Now suddenly to be a mage you also gotta sport 18’ pythons like the Hulkster and be able to administer an off-the-top-rope suplex to a lizard man in order to cast a spell with any sort of accuracy. Yeah, roleplaying at its finest. Maybe instead of a fighting pit in Jhelom, we need a Steel Cage so we can have those groovy pay-per-view cage matches.

Anyway, as retarded as the whole spell interruption/wrestling crap is, it's been tolerable. (oh yeah, and don’t forget all those wonderful tactics skills wrestling gives you also) Most skills require you to waste valuable points on other accompanying skills (stealing/snooping, swords/tactics, healing/anatomy, etc) so why should magery be any different. Now just when you think that things have gotten as stupid as they possibly can, in comes the latest patch.

Thought that only those super-spell interrupting snakes and rats were the bane of mages? Heh, guess again. Now any apprentice swordsman with a 4th circle mana drain scroll can make you his bitch. Now not only are you left standing there wearing only a robe with 0 AR, you have been rendered about as deadly as a Chia Pet now that you have 0 mana also. Who knows, maybe you can get lucky and wrestle your opponent to death now, just hope he started his new character out with 15 str instead of 45.

Ah, and don’t even THINK of trying to resist that spell (not like it matters, everyone has about 20 wands of mana draining laying around) since you can no longer learn magic resist in towns. This above all, takes the cake as the most moronic and lame-ass thing I have ever seen come out of the dev team. Just what the hell does OSI feed their employees in their cafeteria, lead paint chips?

Magic resist has long been one of the hardest skills to gain in the game, if not THE hardest. Hell, while they are at it. Why not make it impossible to learn ANY skills while in town. In fact, why even have towns? From now on, rather that seeing "You are now under the protection of the town guards" just make everyone see "Connection Lost" instead that way they don’t have to worry about town anymore.

What's the moral of the story boys and girls? Simple. Spend many months and many hundreds of thousands of gold pieces building a pure mage and then you will discover you would have been better off playing Solitaire, since all you will have now is gimp character with a really cool title that melee players with 25 magery and meager combat skills (as well as those ever deadly SuperRats) can eat for lunch.

All I can say is that I thank the Gods that these people at Origin decided to get into software design rather than medicine. Had they been applying their short sighted ideals, lack of vision, forethought and planning and general incompetence to saving lives rather than designing games, I would fathom a guess that there would be a whole lot of dead motherfuckers in Austin.