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Mage Arena gives players access to many tools if they go searching and study its mechanics, but even just the Spellbook all players spawn with offers a lot in terms of utility. This guide helps break down the basics of your Spellbook, including what spells it gives you and how to make the most of them.
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The Basics of Your Spellbook
While the Tutorial of Mage Arena explains the very basics of the default spells, it arguably doesn’t do a great job explaining the utility of each spell and their use cases (and does an even worse job explainingflag capturing). To summarize with some more detail than the tutorial offers, the Spellbook item lets you cast the following four spells by turning to the relevant page:
Fireball is the spell most players end up using as their default attack option, with the spell produces a fiery projectile that moves moderately fast, travels in an arc, and explodes on impact. This explosion deals damage in an area around the impact, hurting everyone in range (including yourself), pushing them back and also lighting them on fire, dealing a small amount of damage over time on top of the initial explosion damage. Targets lit on fire tend to be a bit easier to see and track.
This spell has the secondary effect of making a pretty large amount of smoke, which can genuinely obscure parts of a battlefield, especially if multiple are cast in a small area.
The Freeze spell is a ranged spell that shoots a small projectile that does some damage and freezes a target in place on a hit, leaving them highly vulnerable to follow-up attacks.
Many players use this as a “backup” spell, firing it mostly when out of other attack spells, but it’s great for stopping a player from dodging and can devastate if you’re quick to swap spells after a hit or if you have allies that can immediately punish a Freeze once hitting the target is almost guaranteed.
A two-part spell, you’re able to think of this as the “Worm” and “Hole” spells. First, you can summon an initial portal with “Worm” and then, later, another portal linked to that original portal with “Hole.”
The most obvious use of this spell is to link two portals together for quick traversal, but it can be used in other ways too. For example, it can make it what are essentially small barriers, with portals able to block sight and stop some attacking spells while also making it a bit awkward for an enemy to travel through the area the portal was placed in. Fireballs can also pass through linked portals, potentially allowing for some interesting trick shots if you can place your portals in a clever way.
Magic Missile
Magic Missile is a simple but useful spell that fires a set of slow projectiles that track enemies, seeking them out for a short time and dealing a decent but not huge amount of damage on a hit.
This spell usually isn’t as effective in combat as Fireball but has a few uses that definitely give it a combat niche (beyond the fact you literally can’t just spam Fireball in combat due to it needing to recharge). For one, Magic Missile doesn’t explode and only tracks enemies, so it is much safer to use than Fireball if you or your allies are close to a target. This also means it’s very useful in the biomes where you might encounter NPC enemies, like the Lich and Lava Mages, as many of these areas require that you fight in pretty tight spaces where you may not be able to stay out of your own Fireball range.
Magic Missile can actually be somewhat useful for tracking enemies when you lose sight of them or when they’re mobile and there’s ariskof losing track of them, as you can watch the direction they travel towards a target they’ve locked onto.
Some spells look like they’re either misspelled or intentionally written out strangely (it’s possible it’s a non-English language, but, if true, the language couldn’t be determined). Regardless, the names used in this article “correct” the spellings for clarity and to make it a bit more obvious what you’re expected to say, even if it’s usually already pretty obvious.
Tips for More Effective Use
A common mistake players are likely to make in Mage Arena is learning Fireball is an excellent combat spell (which it is) and trying to win every fight by just casting it, running around as it charges, and then casting it again. It’s also easy to forget that you must have the book opened to a spell and the book in your hands to cast that spell; even if you memorize your options, you still need to “ready” a spell.
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It’s important at more advanced levels of play to cast several spells back-to-back, creating lulls in your casting only when it makes sense (such as when you lose track of an enemy, and it’d be a waste to just cast whatever is currently charged). You may even want to rebind your spells so it’s easier for you to intuitively switch to them; in testing, it was found that making Wormhole the “4” spell and Magic Missile" the “3” spell was helpful, as then all damaging spells are grouped together with the portal spell as the last numbered spell in the book.
You can also experiment with “half reads” where you only speak part of a spell to cast it more quickly. In testing, reading the last part of a spell (“ball”, “missile”) seemed most consistent, but “fire” and “magic” also seemed to at least sometimes result in a cast. This technique produces mixed results, especially when trying to speak clearly while in tense magic fights, but it seems itcanbe faster than reading a whole spell.
Adding to Your Toolset
Keep in mind that your Spellbook, while an essential part of basically any strategy, can only do so much. There is a wide variety of items and soup effects that can be used to supplement your arsenal and give you options in combat and traversal that your default spells can’t.
Some of the most notable tools you should look into acquiring are the game’sTorn Pages. Each unique page provides access to a spell not in the default book, with many of the Torn Page spells producing some powerful effects. Divine Light and Thunderbolt are two especially strong options that can radically change your efficacy in combat.
Crafting and soup can also give you some interesting options. For example, making the Frog Stick lets you disarm players and can even be used to steal their spellbooks, potentially leaving them without any way to even attack. Dedicated players may even be able toreforge Excalibur, an extremely powerful melee weapon that can radically shift the tempo of a round.
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