Magic is overpowered
 

I just wanted to share, if just for amusement, how you can totally fail to enjoy the game by making it too easy.

The mage path happens to have regeneration of mana and a rather cheap spell called Ice Lance. After you got them… you can go anywhere and beat anything. Absolutely anything.

It must be one of the cheatiest implementation of magic in all games.

If you want to avoid using that single spell for the remaining of the game I would strongly recommend getting Ice Explosion. It may not deal with the balance or lack of variety but it will provide you with an alternate animation and a different effect.

I stopped playing long ago, to be honest, the game was too boring like that. I mostly just wanted to share what happened, so that others wouldn't take the same path if they're starting to play. Or just to share.

Magic seems to be a poor choice anyway, Gothic games are much more interesting to play with the sword.

Doesn't the community patch add an "alternative balancing" mode or something to make things more challenging?

I balanced my character with swords, ranged and magic as it was the best way that I found particularly during the first encounters where magic was in fact under powered.

I only managed to get mana re-generation after about 70 hours of playing.

Even with mana re-generation you will still run into trouble when facing large mobs as re-generation takes time, especially if you are using more exotic spells.

I think that the game is balanced well so that you will only get mana re-generation (if you specialise in magic) after so many hours of gameplay and that it is indeed required for the later portions of the game (e.g. Nordimar, liberating villages from orcs, raiding tombs .. etc.).

How big a mob should be to be really big? I remember having no problem with mobs, they were easy to deal with with the Ice Lance.

And that city behind the "magic wall", for example, Ice Lance was all required for it and I did it quite early on.

I do not remember when I got regeneration, but it had to be quite soon? As far as I remember, there was some belt that helped with it, too.

P.S. I actually played the game long ago, just posted in Gothic 2 forum, saw this one and remembered about Gothic 3. So some details of that playthrough are lost.

With the latest community patch, there is an alternative balance mode that can make the game considerably more difficult than what the original default version was.