Have you ever noticed the same thing??? Even some characters who are considered mages like Alhazred for example...after a certain level where you can have your weapons up to 16 level,and some of them have 3 free rune slots available their physical attacks are stronger than their magic.

In Alhazred's case...i had a rage rune and a magical rune attached on him and when he casted the final flame spell with sorcery formation,he could go for...3,5k per enemy (which means 1,7k without the chain magic)

Then,i put him out these runes and attached him a double-edge,a power and a boost one.
With these runes his main damage could be 1,7k (as good as his final flame spell)....and if he goes for critical hit then it would be 3,5k (final flame with sorcery's chain magic).

Surprisingly Alhazred can get a 2nd blow sometimes,and if you are lucky (chances are very low of course...about 1%)....he could go up for 10k damage with his book...believe it or not!!!


So,my question is why magic fades away,after a certain point of the game....and why you cannot make it more powerful like physical attacks?


PS. I've always been a fan of magic in Suikoden series...and i prefer using it more than physical attacks

It's all matter of game concept. Magic is great at early stage of the game but will become less useful in the end. Many mmorpgs and some rpgs still employ this concept:
Magic= easy to obtain+early availability - low potential power in the end...
Physic= very high potential in the end - slow start - late bloom - hard to improve(farming, grinding,sidequests)

There're 4 main reasons why magic can't compete with physic in the end:
1.Because of the fixed damage and rune version hardly get upgraded any higher( fire->rage...the end)
2.Viki is the only one who can do chain magic to hit twice while there're many fighters can multi hit, up to 5 hits.
3.Magic can't critical hit while physic can and even double critical hit
4.There're not many power up methods for magic, the ones exist in other suikodens are very lame as wizard or alert rune, S5 presents magical rune which is a good one but not enough to be compared to boost/dbl strike/power/fury/killer/multistrike combo

really, the only reason physical damage is so good in suikoden is that there's several physical damage enhancing runes and equipment, but no similar quality enhancements for magical damage. Without those however, magic and physical damage end up at about the same amounts of damage.

After experimenting with different characters,all of them attached with double-edge,boost and crazed/power (the power one is a little hard to find)...i came to the conclusion that the rune slot thing is the most important thing for a character...

Characters who have 3 free rune slots plus a couple of swings,are better than characters who are considered strong by default...for example Norma with Double-edge,Boost and Power Rune,makes Georg looking like a pussy.