It seems to me, that the Intelligence attribute, by itself, is severely underpowered. It doesn't do much, other than help skills rise faster (controlling attributes are not a deciding factor for me when I create a party). It does give a small Mental realm resistance above 80, but that isn't important (You get +10 Mental resistance for maxing Intelligence).

Attribute points are precious. You get your stats upon creation, depending upon your race, plus 60 points (some of these points are diverted to meet profession requirements). You also get +5 permanent points to Intelligence upon answering the Trynton Fountain riddle. After this, you get 6 stat points per level-up.

Knowing this, the tried-and-true method of maxing Strength and Dexterity, then Speed and Senses, seems to be almost universal (except for full casters).

The Specialists (Fighter, Rogue, Bard, Gadgeteer), gain no benefit from Powercast.

The Hybrids (Lord, Valkyrie, Ranger, Ninja, Monk, Samurai), suffer from a -4 caster level. Putting points into Intelligence comes with a huge opportunity cost, as they won't be as good as what they were originally designed for (melee and ranged damage), before they gained magic.

The only argument here would be for the 5 casters (Bishop, Priest, Alchemist, Psionic, and Mage), to max Intelligence, and gain Powercast, as their melee and ranged abilities are secondary.

With layered/stacked magic, a few casters can form a powerful MDP (Magic Damage Party). This will make them powerful though most of the game, especially if overlevelled.

Of course, on Ascension Peak, with enemies matching the party's level, ranged combat is the way.

It's not so much that enemies match the party's level, but more the fact that, past level 24, magic doesn't scale well. The fact that you level your characters to higher levels than the game was balanced for is what's causing you to experience this.

Also, I think melee might still be better than ranged, at least once you get into melee. This is notable if the enemy is mainly a melee attacker, and in a situation like the Dark Savant, I believe there isn't much space, making melee quite feasible here.

The hybrids have a -4 caster level penalty. Take my level 20 Valkyrie, for example. She would be treated as a level 16 caster, for all intents and purposes. This matters early on, but quickly becomes unimportant as you overlevel the enemy. It's questionable whether PowerCast makes up for this difference. Regardless, my goal is to create powerful parties, as the party is a reflection of me, and my party building abilities.

I take great pride in my parties, and try to 100% the game. This includes fighting all bosses (my Lawful Good party allignment allows me to whack Crock, and all Rattkin).

Crock: By whacking him (which the game may have intended, since most parties might be angry with him, before or after the Brekek side-quest), I avoid any kidnapping, don't anger any factions, and get access to his chest. Just make sure you fill out your check-list before whacking him.

Rattkin: The Rattkin are clearly designed to be scum (no RPCs here). The Rattkin Common start out as Neutral, with no way to make them Friendly to the party. The only 3 Rattkin NPCs are Rattus Rattus, Milano Calzone, and Don Barlone. None of these characters are good. You have a travelling scumbag, who sets you up for a bank robbery (and could possibly result in a party wipe). Also, you have a mob boss and his subordinate. Whack them all, get the Astral Dominae for free, and do the Trynnie (and the world) a favor by cleaning out the Sixth Bough.

You have Rock/Paper/Scissors here:

Melee Combat is essential for a few battles, especially against bosses like The Rapax King, Nessie, El-Dorado, Al-Sedexus, Pee-Wee, and the Dark Savant. Advantages: Best single-target damage, especially with melee-heavy classes like the Fighter, Rogue, Monk, Samurai. Disadvantages: You usually waste a turn or two moving into melee range.

Ranged Combat is essential for enemies resistant to magic (especially on AP), who are at or above the party's level.
Advantages: You can hit any enemy from long range. Disadvantages: You have to stockpile ammo, which may encumber the party.

Magic Combat is very useful (though not essential) for 95% of the game, before AP. This gives you the quality of life bonuses: The very useful buffs of Light, Missile Shield, Armorplate, X-Ray, Enchanted Blade, and Magic Screen. Advantages: AOE damage, allowing you to completely clear out early, middle, and late game areas (before AP), with ease. Disadvantages: Late game, enemy resistances negate magic, particularly bosses.

But, if you're in the low twenties, particularly level 23 or 24, magic is actually really good against non-bosses,

Even then, in the Rapax army fight, I've seen videos of that fight where one of the two boss fights would succumb to Death Cloud relatively early in the fight, taking out one of the big threats. (Worth noting this was on Expert difficulty.)

1 point of Powercast results in 0.25% additional dmg, so 25% if skill is 100.
The bonus dmg goes on top of a spells default dmg.
PC also increases duration of spells.
Last not least PC helps to overcome the targets realm resistance, and a higher lvl if that applies,
which effectively amplifies the higher dmg output if target lvl or resistance is significant.
( btw, note that Wiz8 monsters have 4 lvl values,
and the one you see in info is not the one that affects magic resistance etc)
So yes it makes perfect sense for casters, while pie imo does not,
you get far more mana from school and realm skills, and they can be trained.
My fav 2nd attrib for casters is Spd.

Regarding melee/ranged, ofc melee at least appears to offer higher dmg
but there are some not so obvious limitations.
Ranged attacks get only half the dmg bonus from str,
so it makes sense to try going for Spd instead of Str if we focus on ranged.
With hvy focus on spd we go 1st in most encounters and apply side effects before monsters even move,
and we dont need to charge in order to be combat effective.
The need to charge results in an loss of opportunities to do dmg or side fx,
while being affected to enemy attacks, unless attackers are melee only.
I.e. potential loss of party HP and or affected by debuffs,
The effective dmg caused by an attack:
No monster is immune to paralysis, e.g. mystic arrows have 35%, medusas 20%,
lower tier ofc far less chance to defunct an enemy, exept the fear bolts.
Anyway every time the side effects of attack comes into effect before the enemy can attack,
a fast party needs less heal or debuff removals or loses less attack potential from side effects,
effectively increasing dmg or buff/debuff output
If enemies are even disabled by paralysis etc,
the excess dmg of a potential melee attacker should be accounted to the parties ranged attacker who disabled the target,
on top of that we must attribute the damage drom all ranged and melee attacks
that would have failed without the attack bonus for the disabled target
to the character who disbled it or caused another debuff that allowed to hit.
Last not least a melee weapon can carry only 1 bonus for To Hit, Ini etc
and has only 1 option to assign a chance for the 16 potential side effects,
while boni of ranged weapons and ammo stack, as do the side effects.
There is one more potential benefit of ranged attacks,
ranged party stays safer if the monster does not charge to melee on its own
has long and thrown ranged attacks and the ones at thrown range are potentially devastating.
E.g. unicorns come to mind.

The whole calculation appears pretty complex,
it would also require to know the actual rolls to evaluate the number of hits due to disabled enemy.
This can be done e.g. with the v1.0 exe and cyber mans wiz trainer,
find a link in message #51 of the "downloads and helpful links" sticky on postcount.
However i can tell from playing that both ways work fine, also in quite tough mods or themed runs.
The ranged battles tend to last significantly longer in real time
unless you drastically speed up what delays them most, the flight time of projectiles.

Do you have any evidence that this works continuously? For all I know, the mechanic could be something like 4 points give 1%, or 20 points give 5% (the latter case means 19 would provide no bonus over 0).

Empiric evidence, after noticing a character with PC caused dmg above the spells default range,
i set up tests with artificial characters which had different PC values, from 0 to 125 in steps of 25,
and targets of increasing lvls with realm resistancies from 25 to 255 in various steps.
It gave me ~0.25% linear increase with some expectable deviation, iirc the actual avg number was 0.247nnn%.


btw associated tests revealed that a realm resistance of 255 makes the target literally immune to a spell,
unless the target lvl is far below caster level
or the spell has an insanely high amount of SP/PL assigned, like from 150 or so on.
The only exception from that is death cloud,
it did kill everything within 13 turns under the effect that does not have the "immune to crits" flag set,
regardless whether targets lvl is much higher lvl and target has 255 resistance in all realms
(just in case it had not been air, to which the numbers point)

Absolutely whack all Rattkin upon sight. Seriously, how can anybody argue that an ugly, Italian-American stereotype, lazy f*ck like Rattus Rattus would be allowed to live? (He sets the party up for failure, with a stick-up note). Also, a mob boss and his consigliere? Whack them all.
Powercast is for full casters. I can't remember a party where I had a Ranger with PC. With the hybrids, it's a waste of time.

Did you test Toxic Cloud or Firestorm, by any chance? (Also Acid Bomb and Ring of Fire.) If you want an absolutely perfect character, and are willing to level up past 50 to get it (apparently that's possible), you're going to get Power Cast anyway.

If the character has no spellcaster levels, you're going to want to get the skill sooner rather than later, or you won't be able to hit 25 Power Cast by the time you max out that last stat. (You have no way of training the skill by use with such a character.)

(Of course, this is really just theoretical, as Power Cast isn't actually useful for such a character.)

Assuming Humans (45 base attributes):

By level 31, any Human would max 4 attributes (including the Female Human Valkyrie, who would have 100 Strength/Dexterity/Speed/Senses, 55 Piety and Vitality (profession requirements), and 50 Intelligence from the Trynton Well).

It would be theoretically possible, although nobody (myself included), would want to test a level 50 character. Assuming such a character exists, they could max Intelligence, and unlock Powercast, though this would come at the cost of sacrificing an attribute (pick Intelligence, Piety, Vitality).

A level 50 Human should, after visiting the Trynton Fountain, have maxed 6 attributes, and the 7th is at 74.

Problem is that. once you max 6 attributes, you only get 3 attribute points per level, so a truly perfect charafcter would only have 5 maxed with the other 2 being about the same, until the remaining 2 max out at the same time.

I tested Acid Bomb, pretty sure also Firestorm, probably also Toxic Cloud but pretty sure not the Ring.

So, in other words:
* Most cloud spells work as you'd expect, being more powerful if you have Power Cast (and less effective against higher level high resistance enemies)
* Death Cloud does not follow those rules

So, is this correct, to your understanding?

Unfortunately, this means I can't treat these test results as authoritative, as they were done on a modified version of the game, in particular one that changes the exe, meaning there are code changes.

For me to consider the results to be authoritative, I would need them to be done on an officially releaed version, probably 1.24.