It's true — magic sucks. It demands way more investment, easily two or three times more, just to get the same results in survivability, damage, or versatility, compared to the other two viable builds in the game.

You're afraid of enemies, you need setups just to make things function properly, and by the time you finally start scaling when say around 30 WIS — surprise, surprise! You're still completely helpless against any boss or mobile enemy. Even a pack of wolves will tear you apart 80 times out of 100. You simply don’t want to play as a mage.

Yes, the sea witch exists, but in my personal experience, even in this case, there's little point in investing in WIS — you’ll be significantly stronger if you go down the right-side tree instead.

Overall, even after cheating myself the best possible wizard setup, I was left disappointed. The entire middle path is just a letdown

Probably last reply I'll make to this post, but felt it worth mentioning. after playing with magic some more, i found that even water scepter more often than not also goes right through enemies instead of hitting them like charged fire scepter attacks. it also does very little damage, unless you cheat wisdom like mentioned above. that means that both fire staff and water staff have a chance to just miss enemies you're aiming at directly. both fire/water scepter basic uncharged attacks does so little damage, i end up needing to use my off hand which gets me into the next issue.

this issue is, none of the magic items are good in a pinch in my opinion EXCEPT water book. for whatever reason, that book's aoe ability is overpowered at 40 wisdom, and can kill most enemies in three hits. fire book skills have to be charged (except for bombardment, which doesn't do enough damage or stun long enough to set up mainhand scepters), and lightning book is designed around stealth as actually hitting the tesla coil with the lightning while dodging enemies is nearly impossible (hitting urself is all too common if you do manage it). so you're basically locked into the water book in any combat scenario, especially when you aren't initiating the fight. BUT because water book does too much damage, and mainhand uncharged scepter attacks do too little, cheating in wisdom makes using the water book unfun because at higher wisdom that thing SHREDS.

i don't want to sound overly critical, i genuinely think the system in place is great but these issues make me miss the false god slayer sword everytime i run into them, so i hope changes are made or items are added into the magic build-line that can make it fun to play. 

some suggestions (not a programmer but just throwing out ideas): 

1. make fire staff uncharged auto stun longer if the stun happens, buff damage
2. water staff have a longer slow or good knockback like water book (even just a percentage chance)
3. lightning rod not need to charge/fixing issues with its charge being so easily interruptible. maybe let lightning rod zap and stun enemies that hit you while you're using it.
4.  remove wall of fire from firebook and add a flamethrower option. flamethrower go brrr.
5. let lightning book act as the tesla coil and have you yourself be zapped as an aoe to harm enemies at the cost of more stamina. (this is more a personal suggestion as its boring to use the weapon IMO but its not a bad book)
6. lower water books aoe damage, but buff scepter uncharged auto attacks damage. the balance between mainhand and offhand feels bad with this specific book.
7. add defensive magic as replies above this one suggested earlier
8. allow acolyte divine items and magic to be used at the same time, at the cost of not being able to take timid/nympho/strong traits. also not allowing juicing or high quality weapon traits for balance reasons. being able to heal and use magic would make the magic in the game feel better, and accidentally harming companions with magic can be remedied with healing! (assuming they don't beat you to death after you've friendly-fired them lmao)

apologies for the long post but i absolutely have been having a blast playing this game and i really want it to do well. its audacious of me to leave suggestions and critique a game i could never dream of making myself, but i hope the creator takes my input into account and makes this great game even better. until magic is changed, i plan on just playing my abomination false god slayer sword run, so none of these issues are putting me off from playing the game itself!

thanks again for reading :)