How Forspoken magic works and the best spells to use

Knowing about Forspoken magic and the best spells will really help you get to grips with complex parkour and spell-slinging combat. Frey has a good selection of spells at her disposal, from deadly attack and surge spells to a variety of supportive abilities. However, you'll unlock even more spell sets as you play, massively expanding the suite of spells available to her, adding new methods of dealing with enemies, powerful combos, and more ways to traverse Athia. While there are loads of spells for Frey to unlock, they all ultimately fall under a few umbrellas that are important to understand if you want to master combat in Forspoken. Here's what you need to know about Forspoken magic and our recommendations for some of the best spells.

Forspoken magic types 

As well as the spell types that Forspoken features, it’s worth noting that there are four broad colors of magic that you can switch between – Forspoken Purple Magic, Red Magic, Blue Magic, and Green Magic. These are the different spell sets that Frey will pick up through the course of the game, and they all function similarly, each with unique spells and skill trees, but have specific elemental associations.

However, all of these magic types feature the same four types of spells: Attack, Support, Surge, and what we're calling "Utility" magic. All four are essential to playing Forspoken, though Attack and Utility – specifically magical parkour – are easily the most necessary types of magic in the game.

Attack Magic

Attack magic spells are Frey's regular damage spells. Each color of magic has a couple of these, and they can be upgraded multiple times for improved effects. On the PlayStation 5 controller, these are used by pressing or holding and releasing R2, while R1 allows players to sort select another attack magic option depending on the current color/type they are using. In the Magic menu skill trees, these are indicated with a single circle pattern and are usually on the right side of the screen.

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Support Magic

Support Magic is exactly what it sounds like on the tin: supportive. It’s not as directly impactful and damaging as attack magic, but it does things other than just attacking. These spells can involve manipulating the environment in such a way as to make it beneficial to Frey, heal, remove status ailments, place exploding trip mines, charge at enemies, or apply status ailments to enemies such as binding them in place. Support magic is used with the L2 button on the PlayStation 5 controller with L1 bringing up the spell menu for your current magic type.

Unlike Attack Magic which can be used endlessly, each Support Magic spell has a specific cooldown, but nothing’s stopping you from cycling through every single available support spell as you like. There’s even an accessibility option to do that automatically.

In the Magic menu skill trees, these spells are indicated with a double circle pattern and are typically on the left side of the screen.

Surge Magic

Surge magic is limited to a single spell per Magic type, and these charge up over time depending on how you use your other spells. When fully charged, you can let your Surge Magic attack rip with L2+R2 on the PS5 controller. Surge Magic spells can be upgraded at a significant Mana cost and generally cause a massive amount of damage over a specific range, making positioning and timing incredibly important.

In the magic menu, these are indicated with a double circle pattern featuring four twists on the diagonals.

Utility Magic

For lack of a better catch-all term, Utility Magic encompasses everything that isn’t the above. That includes, but is not limited to, magic parkour, passive crafting powers, and switching between sets of spells. Each color/type of magic includes a handful of the above. The parkour spells are often necessary and sometimes unavoidable while everything else is… well, neither.

In the Magic menu spell skill trees, these are indicated with a diamond pattern for parkour and a shield-like pattern for crafting.

How to unlock spells in Forspoken 

There are, effectively, three ways to unlock new spells in Forspoken:

• Unlock using Mana: Mana is earned by levelling up with XP or by simply finding and running through Mana Pools out in the open world. Open the Magic menu and you can spend your Mana on unlocking new spells.
• Progress through the story: As you play through Forspoken's story, you'll unlock new magic types, giving you entirely new spell sets and magical powers to play with.
• Founts of Blessing: Look out for these founts as you explore the open world to get a new spell or ability at each one.

Forspoken best spells 

Excluding the magical parkour spells, some of which unlock automatically and are basically necessary to complete the game, so much of Frey’s arsenal unlocks so late that the basic abilities are really all you need. But if I were pressed to pick some of the best spells Forspoken has to offer, these are the ones that I’d recommend folks grab sooner rather than later.

Burst Shot

While technically one of the automatically unlocked spells from the beginning, the upgraded versions of Burst Shot are incredibly useful. While I frequently found myself defaulting to Scatter Shot facing normal enemies, Burst Shot’s upgraded abilities were a godsend against bosses and more powerful enemies, allowing me to quickly charge up and deal major bursts of damage all at once like the name implies.

Legion

This bit of support magic might not seem awfully meaningful at first – summoning two fiery helpers is pretty boring, right? – but its usefulness cannot be overstated. While they won’t do a ton of damage, these summoned pals will distract plenty of enemies and last for a good amount of time. Any hit not being made at Frey is a good one, and while their damage output isn’t incredible, it’s not nothing.

Cataract

While surge magic relies heavily on positioning, I found Cataract to be the easiest one to get the most bang for my buck. Plus, sucking various enemies into a whirlpool allows Frey to focus her fire regardless of what spells players decided to use as a follow up.

Pulse Dart

The upgraded version of this green magic spell is a favorite of mine. Using other green magic spells to mark a bunch of enemies and then firing this off – which seeks out all of those marks – is extremely satisfying. It’s not going to be a spell that anyone uses all of the time, but when you’re up against a huge crowd it is invaluable.

Arc Slice

So much of what Frey can do is, by necessity, at range, but plenty of combatants want to get up close and personal. That’s why the upgraded version of Arc Slice, which produces a fiery sword that swings in (as the name implies) a giant arc around her is incredibly useful. It’s not going to do much against, say, flying enemies, but it will easily keep you from being swarmed.