Magic Skills

Dark Vision

Dark Vision is basically an amped-up gamma shift. When cast, it’ll light up the dark areas around you, but turn your entire field of vision blue, like night vision. It’s purely utilitarian, but every character gets it for free at the start of the game, and it won’t require any mana to cast. Use it often. It’s best to bind this to a permanent key near your left hand on the keyboard, just so you don’t have to go to great lengths to cast it. You’ll be putting it on and off nearly constantly in some areas of the game.

Flame Arrow

Flame Arrow is basically the magical equivalent of a pea-shooter in Dark Messiah. It’s not going to be of much use against enemies in the early going, since you won’t have much mana to use it with; you’ll be better off sticking with weapons instead of trying to use this on enemies. It is, however, quite useful as a replacement for bow attacks, at least when you’re trying to fire at stuff like ropes that hold up traps, and the like, since it flies straight ahead and can even be steered manually if you hold down your casting button.

Fire Trap

Fire trap is a tricky spell to use properly. When cast on the ground (be sure to hold down the button to avoid miscasting it when your view bobs around), it’ll place a small ward that glows. Any enemy that walks into the fire trap will set off a large fireball that’ll deal damage and knock around anyone in the area, including you.

The trick is to get the enemies to walk over the fire trap. Since the casting time takes a couple of seconds, and you’ll have to herd any prospective enemies back over the firetrap to set it off, so in general it’s best to place one on the ground as soon as you spot an enemy, then get its attention with a flame arrow or bow attack and lure them back to the trap. Most enemies will die after impacting it, although creatures with demon blood, like orcs, will be more resistant to the fire effects.

Freeze

Freeze is an interesting spell with some not-so-obvious uses. When cast on an enemy, it will cover them with ice, temporarily preventing them from blocking or attacking or moving at all, giving you plenty of time to queue up a power attack or kick them off a cliff or something. After a few secondss, the ice will break and they’ll be right back on your tail, however.

Freeze is fun, but not dramatically powerful.

When cast on the ground, however, Freeze will create a slick spot of ice where you aimed it, causing any enemies that walk over it to fall to the ground. This is obviously a hilarious way to make your foes go through a number of pratfalls, but as with Fire Trap, it can be more amusing than useful at times. Paired with a fast weapon, though, like daggers or a short sword, you can take advantage of your enemy’s fall by finishing them off with a power strike as they’re on the ground, which is usually an instant kill on most enemies.

Adrenaline Effect: Freeze will permanently freeze your target when cast when you have a full Adrenaline meter, essentially killing them.

Fireball

Fireball, when unlocked, will be a powerful offensive spell against humans and animals, who are weak to fire. It’s essentially an upgraded Flame Arrow spell; you let it charge up for a second, then chuck it out in front of you and guide its progress through the air with your mouse. When it hits, it’ll deal a good amount of damage to anything it strikes, as well as the enemies nearby, and hit them all with explosive force great enough to knock them around a bit. Thus, it can sometimes be useful as a quasi-rocket launcher; just aim it at the ground next to an enemy to make them fly away and over the edge of a cliff, for instance.

Best of all, fireballs are cheap, cheap enough to let you cast an almost continuous stream of them after you get Mana Regeneration. Unfortunately, the large flaming ball in your hands will obscure a good amount of the screen and kind of fade out whatever’s left, making this a poor choice as a spell to keep queued up all the time.

Adrenaline Effect: When you have full Adrenaline before casting Fireball, it’ll often completely demolish your target, rendering them into a dew, or at least a fine mist of blood and gristle.

Lightning Bolt

Orcs, goblins, and cyclops are all considered to have demon blood, which is odd, considering the orcs accost you halfway through the game and lament your "demon taint". (Which in another context would be a hilarious accusation.) All of them are supposedly weak to lightning bolts, and indeed, you can usually instantly kill goblins by casting this at them. Orcs will be a bit more resistant to its effects, usually taking at least two bolts before going down, and since there’s a couple of seconds of casting time before the bolts come out, that’s usually enough for them or their friends to get some good whacks on you. Stick to weapons or fireballs for Orcs, in other words. The fireballs won’t do as much damage, but they’ll knock the orcs around and let you blast them off cliffs and such.

Against Cyclops, lightning bolts are going to be a mage’s best friend, although you will still have to aim your bolts at your target’s eye in order to deal good damage. It’ll take a lot of bolts before you manage to stun a Cyclops, and when you do, you should still switch to a strong weapon for a power strike.

Adrenaline: Lighting Bolts on adrenaline cause chain lightning, meaning the bolt jumps from target to target in a given area. Great for clearing out low-level enemies. The bolt also seems to do more damage than it usually does, so it’ll more often cause an instant kill.

Inferno

Inferno is the most expensive offensive spell you can obtain in Dark Messiah, although honestly, for the skill points and mana you’re going to invest into it, it would’ve been nice if it was a bit more effective. Basically, it’s a flamethrower: when you activate it, it’ll shoot flames directly out in front of you, roasting anyone standing there and eventually killing them entirely after a few seconds. You can hold the button down as long as you like to keep the stream flowing.

Unfortunately there are some problems here, including the cost. Just activating the spell costs 20 mana; keeping the button depressed will cause you to rapidly lose more mana to boot. Also, when cast against enemies that are closing to melee range, the spell will begin to damage you, as well, since it has nowhere to go. This, combined with its short range, make Inferno rather inflexible and expensive compared to its effect. With the preponderance of cliffs and spike traps throughout the end of the game (which is where you’ll be before you can unlock this), you may just want to spend the skill points on something like Endurance, use your regular spells when necessary, and simply kick enemies to their deaths rather than expend huge amount of mana on Inferno.

Adrenaline Effect: Deals even more damage! Wowzers!

Heal

At a one skill point cost, this is effectively a no-brainer for every character in the game, whether you’re a warrior or a mage. It’s simply, really: for ten points of mana, you get 15 health. That effectively means that even the most non-magical warrior can convert a mana potion into 30 health after casting two heals on himself. Since warriors won’t be spending much mana on spells, this will give them something to actually use their mana points (and mana potions) on. You’re going to be finding a lot of mana potions in your travels, so using them to heal yourself up during downtime will let you save your health potions for the important fights.

Telekinesis

Telekinesis is expensive enough, mana-wise, to only be useable by serious mages as an offensive skill. You can pick up potions and small items for around five mana, but if you want to pick up something heavy enough to actually kill an enemy, like a crate or a stone, you can expect to be laying down 15 mana all told, making it something that you won’t want to do very often until you get Mana Regeneration to rely on. That said, when you can bust out Telekinesis as often as you like, it’ll be the most fun you can have in the game, since you’ll be able to use all the objects in the environment to chuck at your enemies.

In mundane terms, Telekinesis can also be used to solve puzzles and flip switches, although it’s somewhat twitchy at this last task. It’s perhaps best used by non-magicians for picking up potions and items that are out of reach, or that rely you to crawl around to get them.

As a weapon, Telekinesis is best used when cast on unbreakable items, like stones and bales of hay, that can then be targeted at your enemies and sent flying at them. (Press the cast button again to fling the object away from you at warp speed.) Almost anything can be used, really, but crates will break when they impact, and smaller items won’t deal as much damage. Stones are usually the best, when you start finding them, usually in chapter Nine and the Epilogue. Keep in mind, though, that you can also cast Telekinesis on enemy corpses and throw those. Hot.

Adrenaline Effect: You can pick up and throw living enemies while your Adrenaline is full.

Charm

Charm will greatly help weaker spellcasters when dealing with mobs of enemies.

For fifteen mana, this spell will enable you to temporarily take over the mind of one of the enemies in the area, forcing them to fight on your side for around 30 seconds, or until they die. For spellcasters, this is one of the best spells to have queued up when you’re running around, unsure of what’s behind the corner. If you stumble across a single enemy, you can use charm to simply brainwash him and run past him before the spell runs out, or get him into position for a kick off a cliff. With multiple enemies, charm will cause them to attack each other, thus also letting you either run past them, or watch them eliminate each other and make your life easier when the spell runs out.

Keep in mind that charm will end if you damage the charmed opponent, so be careful when firing arrows or spells into a melee involving one of your slaves. Necromancers are especially good targets for charm, as any foes they’ve resurrected, or zombies they’ve summoned, will be in thrall to you as well.

Sanctuary

Your standard god mode, sanctuary will render you temporarily immune to damage when cast. It’ll cost 25 mana, and will last for around 20 seconds, but can be a big, big help in some of the tougher fights in the game, especially since it doesn’t prevent you from attacking or moving or anything like that. You can even cast it while falling to eliminate all of the falling damage that you might take. (You’ll still die if you fall into a bottomless pit, obviously.)

This is probably going to be more useful on hard difficulty than on normal, but it’ll be useful any time you need to avoid some damage.

Weaken

Considering how deep it comes in the skill tree, we were hoping for a bit more from Weaken. When cast on an enemy, it will essentially just temporarily cripple them, temporarily turning them purple, reducing their speed drastically and reducing the damage that they deal to 1 point per attack. It's less dramatic an effect than most of the magical spells that you can cast, but it has the benefit of being castable on multiple foes when dealing with large crowds, giving you a better chance of outrunning your opponents.