Spell Penetration

What I would like here is simple, and I actually thought of 3 possible concepts while talking with someone else about this. Mage Mobs in this game have very high magical resistance, and apart for fire which has about 4 or 5 sources of reducing resistance, we do not have many options available, and they are not really all that strong most of the time. Also, with the warding skills and warding gear, mages can take some time to kill stuff that has high magical resistance, meanwhile any physical class has 1. very low actual resistance against physical damage for the most part, and 2. some ignore armor skills.

What I would like, is to have a way to have "spell penetration", an actual way to Ignore magical resistance in some way. Here are my two ideas :

1. Penetration Combo, Focus Tree active Glyph (like Juxtapose). By combining The Penetration Glyph with a spell, you could have a "Penetrating Spell", example "Penetrating Ice Arrow", which when cast, would ignore Water Resistance. Balancing this is somewhat easy, 1st off it is a combo, so you need 2 slots to actually make use of this, and then you could play around with the cooldown so that you can't make a penetrating spell on every single cast. Also, making a stacked version of a penetrating spell would be pretty slow and require a lot of concentration due to the current combo system, so this would not help spells people like to stack like Meteor Shower or Ring of Fire too much.

2. Penetration Buff/Stance, Focus Tree Active Glyph (like any other stance). By using your penetrating Stance, your spells cast during the duration of your stance would ignore resistance. This one I like a bit less, because it means you can charge/stack freely, and you can simply refresh your stance every x amount of time, so every mage would be using this pretty much constantly... Not my prefered choice.

3. Penetration on next cast, Focus Tree Active Glyph. This one I'm not sure if the tech would already be ingame to do this, as I don't think we have a skill that works this way, but what I was thinking was you cast this buff, and the very next spell you cast ignores resistance. This could be a bit like Chaotic Shield, 1 glyph only, and a second glyph upon reaching 80 Focus Spec. The cooldown could be something like 5 seconds once again, and this Cooldown could be the source of the balancing (making the cooldown longer = less chances to cast it = balance if too strong, shorter cooldown = more chances to cast it = balance if too weak!)

These could also start with a % of penetration, which could be buffed up with specialization, OR specialization could add a lingering effect a bit like glancing blow or dodge (100% penetration on impact, 10% reduced resistance for 5 seconds after). Actually, there is many ways to play around these potential skills and the impact of Focus Spec on them!

So voilà, my little idea for spellcasters!

 

Interesting. I don't play magic so I don't really run up against this often but I do see where it could be largely annoying for caster types. The only thing I would say is that I would hate to see those values being applied in PVE against us. As it stands now if I get hit by a fireball from a mage in the rise at a decent distance without cover (and with 100 points in fire resist + fire resist gear + douse + ice shield) I am getting hit hard as hell, imagining that they also had a chance to completely ignore all my magic resistance or a % of it with that fireball would be lights out for me especially if it were to crit.

 

Agreed, this is mostly for players, not a skill I would see mobs receive as well. Right now my biggest issue is that my water magic and air magic are too weak to effectively take down casters in Tartarus or The rise, so I have to change up for a physical build every time. Fire magic has a ton of ways to shred for resistance from specialization and combos, so they can run around and kill what they want, meteor shower is considered physical damage, so it's fine too, but the other schools are stuck with spells that can be resisted, and very few means to reduce resistance, as an example, as a water mage, I have Ice field which drops 20 points of resistance, sure it is AoE, but it's short duration, a some mobs ease to get out of it means I am constantly recasting it, meanwhile a sword user uses a sword, simple as that. I think options 1 and 3 offer the possibility to stay as a water mage if I decide to put the effort to create my combo or cast an extra spell before casting my damage spell, which would not break the game

 

Spell Penetration is a pretty good idea. You mentioned on another thread that "1" and "3" would be your preference, and that you don't like "2". I would vote for option "1" with the caveat that once you do combo the skill, it's still based on an RNG "Crit" chance. This would mean that even at GM it would not work 100% of the time, which I think makes it less harmful to the game overall.

 

How about varied resistance on mobs? Strengths/weaknesses and vary the resistances through a range. That way fire wouldn't be the only way to kill mobs. Life was nerfed the wrong way and the other magics just aren't as useful as fire.

 

I feel like many of the mage type mobs have high attunement in all schools, and the higher their level, the higher their attunement (makes sense), the issue is unless they have a specific reason to be weak to a school (undead vs sun/life, burning skeletons vs water), these resistance/weaknesses are not tweaked any further. If it was the case, it would solve some issues, but a way to ignore resistances would be fun either way. Option 1 pushes into some kind of dynamic gameplay if you want to reap the benefits, meanwhile option 3 allows for any style to benefit but can be harder to balance. I would truly enjoy these!

 

While mob resistance is a good thing overall, I think they went overboard. Speaking only toward Death/Air, which are my chosen specializations, the fact that a majority of the mobs are Undead AND that they have an obvious resistance to Death and got high resistances toward Air, well that fubar'd me. It's counterintuitive that a game touting that you can be anything would make me impotent for toward a large portion of the mobs that are out there. I've said in other posts recently (and in "Wishlists" in the past) that adding some utility in Death/Air could help me and I am sure others, without basically castrating a player.

Examples: "Manipulate Undead", allowing me to turn an undead to help me - requiring a high level to even think of affecting the higher end Undead. "Tornado" or some such - basically a higher level "Gust" that could either debuff or crowd-control, maybe with some damage to help. Just some thoughts.

 

All creatures have damage resistance (DR) and magic resistances but have no physical damage resistance. DR work on reducing both physical and magic damages. Together with the additional bonus of magic resistance, melee and ranged attack are the best build for adventuring as mages except fire are having difficulty to kill these creatures.

Only fire resistance debuff scale well with fire spec level and the level of evaporate combo skill. They can reduce target for 300+ fire resistance. But for other magic schools, they either have no resistance debuff or they only reduce 10 resistance for any specialization skill level. This make all mages except fire unable to enjoy in most adventure.

All creatures should have a variety of physical damage resistance and magic resistance instead of a high value of all-round DR and all magic resistance. Adding a separate physical damage resistance is good for balancing as well. In addition, they should fix the scaling of magic resistance debuff for all magic schools.