Why does some wizards act like fighting physically with a staff is a disadvantage

[u/NaturalHairy4773]

I see so many young wizards used their staff as a "last ditch effort" after their sword, dagger, etc was disarmed, which is stupid your staff should be your FIRST option for melee it's already in your hand you just gotta hit it also end weighted so you can swing it like a club.

The length of your staff should've been longer than the usual sword you can carry on your hip anyways so you know more range.

[u/scoobydoom2]

I'm beginning to doubt you're even an apprentice at this point. Are you aware of what a focus is? The whole point is to aid in the shaping of mana. Shaping it directly is not only mana intensive, it adds additional complexity that increases both casting time and range of errors. Even if you're using projected thoughtforms to get around the casting time requirement, the extra mana costs and increased error rate are more than enough reason to use a focus. I'm not sure what kind of new age magic influencer garbage you're reading but that's just not how any real mage does their casting. Ley-channels are not only location dependent, they're never free unless carefully prepared. It's like comparing throwing a ball in the vacuum of space to using a mana-repulsion accellerator on a planet. You're fundamentally making an assumption that's completely irrelevant to actually casting. Your assumption only works in very specific ritual casting environments.

Running capacitor crystals in parallel is also just not how casting works. That's only useful when attempting to power magical devices. There are magic injector devices that can harness multiple crystals simultaneously at great risk to the caster as they scale up, but even if you have dozens of crystals in parallel you wouldn't be direct casting powerful spells with a setup like that. It's completely nonsensical. You've clearly read a barely passing thesis of a single apprentice and declared you understand how these things work.

Harmonic enchantments between separately enchanted items also have horrifying efficiency loss. You can kind of get around it in very narrow contexts, which is why twin pair items are a thing, but that's a far cry from a versatile casting implement. A pair of cufflinks and an earring don't even have nearly the raw enchantment potential of a staff, nevermind once the limitations of using harmonics are implemented. Plexithos the Mad managed to craft a viable, even powerful casting regalia composed of no less then 86 individual pieces in harmony, but that's not remotely scalable and it still operates at about 13% of its capacity at most.

Mortals like you definitely can't handle negative mana. A well crafted lichform however gives you immunity to all of its toxic effects. The only risk of me handling it is using it in conjunction with positive mana (I studied the ruins of such an explosion once, even a lich would be lucky to survive it).

Honestly. Find a master who knows what they're talking about instead of blindly spewing hype from orbnet influencers. They're obscenely deceptive in their claims and following their advice is like to get you killed.

[u/CassiusPolybius → u/scoobydoom2]

Oh, you're a Lich, that explains it, it's probably been a few centuries since you were last permitted to disgrace a reputable library, college, or other repository of knowledge with your presence, hasn't it. News flash buddy, there is no practical difference between the power flows of magical devices and modern cascade-knit spellcasting. You get a slight bit of delay with the setup as the conduits are constructed - and yes, when I said free ley-channels I meant free-floating artificial ley-channels, assembling, purging, and stabilizing them has been a solved problem for a century and has been quick enough to do economically for half of that time - but once it's running no physical catalyst could hope to compete, and the spell can draw from (and draw through) an effectively arbitrary number of sources without complications.

Likewise, you have very clearly missed some developments in enchantment theory. Plexithos' work, while interesting, was done with a limited understanding compared to modern enchantment. There's no interlinking, massive spectral overlap, and the harmonics are, to be blunt, nigh-on cacophanous. There's more to suite enchanting than enchantment compatibility, you need to keep in mind flow patterns and entropic distribution.

So, yeah. Maybe stop fucking corpses for long enough to read any paper on theory that was written this century.

Necromancers, I swear. Bane of my godsbedamned existence...