Magicka/YMMV

• Crowning Music of Awesome: For a lighthearted, comedic action-adventure game, the orchestral score is surprisingly epic, especially the various boss themes and At World's End.
• Demonic Spiders
  • The Yetis, oh-so-very-much. Big and tough as a troll, almost as fast as a Wizard with Haste, and capable of a One-Hit Kill if they catch you and stuff you in their mouths. Thankfully, they can be killed quickly with two Lightning Bolts, provided you have a ready trigger finger - until you fight them indoors...
    • It is possible to get them to drop you once they pick you up... by setting yourself on fire. Arrowhead really missed out on a possible achievement for doing this...
    • Luckily, while they are fast and deadly, they can't take more damage than a regular troll, so enough focus fire can kill them quite quickly. Plus, you can avoid being picked up if you just keep on moving (so long as you don't move towards the Yeti).
    • A possible tactic might be to cast Charm on the yeti to pacify it first, then attack with your strongest spells. Charm is also thankfully easy to memorize, being W-E-D (Life-Shield-Rock).
    • Another useful tactic is to buy time with a stone wall (ED), then use water and frost one after the other to freeze them. Once they're all frozen, you have enough time to smash them with rock, then re-freeze them before they can move.
  • Dwarves are among the toughest Elite Mooks out there. They're as armored and tough as Orcs, they have Arcane resistance that severely diminishes the power of Arcane beams, and they can cast spells. Among these spells, they'll often use Teleport to avoid your mine traps or to box you in, and use Earth element spells to launch rocks at you that, if you don't have a shield or armor up, will One-Hit Kill you. Thankfully, they're also extremely slow, so it's not all that hard to keep your distance and hammer them from a distance, if you have the maneuvering room.
  • Malignant Beholders are also living nightmares. While they aren't nearly as fast as Yetis and can't take as much damage, they more than make up for it with massively damaging ranged attacks. Their lightning bolts can drain personal shields very quickly, and if you decide to drop your shield and go with lightning resistance, it'll use its main eye to insta-freeze you, then insta-gib you.
• Game Breaker: Given the nature of the game, there are very, very many features that can be exploited to your advantage.
  • Arcane beams, oh so very much. They have practically infinite range, fire instantly, do massive damage, cause enemies to explode when killed and damage any nearby enemies, among other things. The only downside is that they're slow to turn while firing...only you can conjure elements while you're beaming enemies to death and thus drop the current beam, take advantage of the instant cast, and blow away that enemy attempting to flank you with another beam. The result will naturally be Beam Spam.
    • In fact, Arcane beams were severely nerfed in duration in the PvP patch, but by equipping the Daemon's Arm Staff, you can remove the duration restriction, allowing you to fire beam spells indefinitely.
    • In multiplayer, you're likely to cross opposite beams by accident and kill yourself and your friends, so that can serve as a disadvantage.
  • Then there is also the M60 you get at the end of Chapter 3, if you manage to keep and maintain the weapon, you get the benefit of both high DPS, the ability to shoot through barriers and overall, the feeling of bringing a machine gun into a knife fight. Although you do have to earn it, and there can be only one, so if you lose it, it's gone for good.
  • Thunderbolts. Full Stop. If you're outside (and you almost always are), you can use thunderbolts. They do 5000 damage, more to iron-clad enemies, and the damage is doubled when they're wet. Furthermore, you get it really early in the game, so there's nothing stopping you from spamming it. Even the first Grimnir fight in Chapter 6 is trivial with the thunderbolt. Get him wet with a steam beam, spam QFASA, and Nullify his ghosts and shield when necessary.
  • Heal mines are quite effective at healing yourself and teammates, given that a single mine can heal 599 health (more or less depending on any robe attributes you may have), and an AoE cast drops twelve of them. When fighting in a group or reviving teammates, a circle of life mines can keep your allies in the fight for that much longer, or quickly get a wizard back on his feet.
  • Until the PvP patch, personal shields were pretty effective. Sure, you got knocked around a lot by physical attacks and explosions, but until they broke they completely blocked all incoming damage, and prevented you from catching fire, getting wet, freezing, and repelled beams. Not to mention, self-heal and life mines could be used to almost instantaneously restore it to full strength, or one could simply grab the life staff to gain a Halo-style shield that regenerated on its own. In the event that your shield broke, it was simply a matter of healing yourself back up, eliminating any status effects that may have accompanied the shield breaking, then simply hitting E + Mouse3 to get a full-strength shield back up.
  • Combining Rain and Blizzard spells slows everything (including your computer) down to a crawl. The spells themselves are easy to cast (QQF and RRQR, respectively), and their only drawbacks are that you're immobile for a few seconds while casting. But, if you can pull the two off in succession after casting a quick personal shield or successive resistances, you'll wet down everything on the screen, and then encase them in a block of ice for the next 10 seconds (not counting the thawing out or casting another Blizzard when the first runs out), making them vulnerable to easy follow-up. Enemies with water resistance will be slowed to a third of their normal speed by the Blizzard, and the ones with frost resistance are set up for easy follow-up with lightning attacks.
  • With the PvP patch, the Tank robes can be pretty deadly in the right situation. By itself, the Tank is pretty balanced, until you realize that it has enormous physical resistance that can shrug off projectiles... like the guns that the goblins use in the Vietnam mission.
  • For even more fun, there's ice and rock armor, which covers your wizard in rock/ice plates that absorb ablative damage. Your wizard moves a lot slower with armor on, but it essentially triples your life bar, only you can re-cast it at will and get another full set of armor in a single spell. And let's not even get into combining it with the Tank or Zombie robes for even more damage resistance...
  • The Tron robes deserve special mention as well. On the surface, it looks like a Joke Character since its Life immunity prevents you from being healed at all. But, once you look past that and see the Lightning absorption, you'll see that it means that any lightning attacks cast at you will heal you instead. This means that if you get doused (especially if a Rain spell is active), hitting Lightning causes you to heal yourself instantly without having to hit the cast button, and it turns the Useless Useful Spell Thunder Storm into a Lethal Joke Weapon, as any lightning bolts that hit you will restore you to full health while killing or knocking down enemies.
    • The robe in question is also weak against Arcane damage... Unless you equip Vlad's Gauntlet, giving you immunity to arcane damage, with your own life resistance cancelling the weakness to life it gives you. To sum up, this combination gives you immunity to Arcane, immunity to the otherwise-painful Life vulnerability you'd get from the gauntlet, lightning absorption...
  • The Rogue robe is basically this if you're a speedrunner. You're already way faster than a normal wizard, but your standard staff is a staff that teleports you backwards, allowing you to skip large parts of levels until you get the Teleport magick in Level 7. But even if you're a normal player, the Rogue's speed (especially when using Haste) and his weapon that inflicts poison (dealing damage over time and slowing down enemies) make him one of the best robes. That is, of course, if you can avoid damage because you have half the normal wizard's health.
  • The Space Marine robe. Period.
• Goddamned Bats: Goblin archers. The arrows they shoot don't deal too much damage, but they do have this tendency to knock you down if you're using a shield. And by the time you get up, they have another one notched, ready to knock you flat on your ass again. And this is only with one; against multiple archers you may as well just lean back and let your wizard's shield drain. Gives a new meaning to Annoying Arrows.
  • This is even more telling in the Vietnam DLC, where firearms will knock you down, and unlike arrows, do not have a travel time, so having a personal shield up means you'll be spending more time on your back than actually casting spells.
• That One Level: The Caverns Challenge map is arguably the hardest one available. The first basic thing that makes this level hard is that it's set on a very small platform that makes maneuvering very hard. Since it's set underground you can't use weather spells, Lightning Bolt, Summon Phoenix, or Napalm, which means that collecting those spells from treasure chests becomes useless. You also have to face waves upon waves of Dwarves, and Malignant Beholders. And to top it all off, the enemies will sometimes use the elevator in the center of the stage to attack, which means that if you're not careful you'll find yourself being attacked from all directions at once, including from below.
• Unfortunate Implications: Magicka: Vietnam. The enemies are pretty much the same as in the normal game... meaning, you're running around Vietnam, mowing down hordes of short, ugly, stupid, yellow-skinned goblins. Um...