A couple of questions regarding techomages

Hello, I'm thinking of building a Mech summoning based technomage and was wondering if you folks could help me out with the following questions:

Do mechanical minions get their damage output affected by my low TA/ high MA?

Do Mechanical minions have trouble using magic buffs such as Tempus Fugit?

What level of MA/TA is the minimum to stat enhancers, such as charged rings to act at full power? Currently I'm using a pair of charge rings on my 6 MA half-elf and each only provide 1 agi.


Thats about all of it, I reckon, thanks for your time.

 

1. Mechs are regarded as NPC's (with certain differences), so they have their own aptitude. I do believe they have sometimes trouble hitting highly magickally adept characters since they are considered to use "tech weapons" - confirmation needed.

2. Temporal spells do not scale with aptitude - so if you cast "Haste" on an Automaton, it will be sped up like a normal NPC. Mechanical creatures cannot learn or cast spells themselves, of course.

3. I am not sure, but I think the threshold is either 33% TA or 50% TA. I am inclined to believe the latter (my reasoning is 100%-33% MA: +0, 33%MA-33%TA: +1, 33%-100%TA - +2), but I might be WAY off. I never really took notice to this, since my characters were always technically adept enough.

 

I guess your minions won't be affected by your technical aptitude, as they're creatures of their own. Also because they game most likely addresses them their own aptitudes it's largely based on the minions themselves (and their respective aptitude) how high the chance of spell failure is on them. So let's say your Medical Arachnid has an aptitude of 0 (I think that's actually the case by the way), then it's of no interest if your own is 100 TA, 100 MA, 23 MA or whatever when you cast any spell on it. However, that's only my understanding of the matter at any rate.

It depends on the enhancer. Eye Gear needs less TA than a Googled Helmet I think as it is less complex. Charged Rings in particular require something between 11 and 15 TA (I've tested it with 10 and 15, which resulted in a bonus of +1 and +2 respectively) to give you the full bonus.

By the way, you might want to keep in mind that kills and damage caused by your followers and minions - or only your minions if you don't think highly of your followers' feelings... - don't yield you much exp in the former and no exp at all in the latter case. Therefore a summoner and/or party oriented non-combat guy is rather hard to play as you level very slowly. And that means that in return your followers don't level up either.

 

Thank you for the fast and enlightening replies.

Yeah, I knew already that if I don't do direct damage to the mobs I don't get most of the xp, but I really wanna try it.
I was counting on minions to overcome that problem but now that I think on it, I reckon this begs another question:

Do minions follow the same leveling rules that followers? I mean do their damage output scale with experience or are do they always do the same damage?

 

Mechnical minions have set stats and 100 Technical Aptitude (due to being machines, and all that). It is quite difficult to directly affect one with magic. Furthermore, though they level, they don't level as followers do. They just stockpile CP, so what you get is what you use for the rest of the game. Technical items always give the full bonus, but don't try to equip one with a high Magical Aptitude, as it will increase your chance on critical failures, which is bad news unless you use only spells and melee after getting master training.

It is almost the same with summoned creatures, but you have more limitations (fatigue drain, max 5 spells at once) and not all summon-type spells are as useful. Succour Beast (Nature college) is the king of summon spells, with a Vorpal Rabbit if your MA is 100. This also serves to illustrate my next point, being that a higher MA means you can summon stronger creatures, so in a sense the summoned creatures do "level up".

Sorry to ramble, I get that sometimes.