Reagents should be removed, they are a double penalty.

I think Reagents should not be in the game. The idea behind them is simply fundamentally unfair, and here is why:

Mages don't get to wear heavy armor. Mages have to spend most of their time running away while frantically trying to assemble a spell worth casting in the quickbar from hell.

Reagents are a penalty mages incur because they don't have high repair costs from item damage.

The thing is... Mages were never given the option of having that high repair cost. They aren't allowed to wear heavy armor and simply stand there while thinking the deck system is a cute touch to an easy game.

Repair cost is the penalty for having armor that makes survival easy.

If you survive the hard way, why should you suffer similar costs?

Not being allowed to wear armor is already a penalty on mages. It's not right to add a second penalty because they didn't suffer the downside of the item that was prohibited by their first penalty.


The only exception I can see to this are summoning spells, since summoning a monster to take the hits for you is kind of like having a pocket platemail-fighter.

 

I would be fine with reagents if the spells did same damage like melee does, only over a distance. The thing is, reagent costs should be about tenth of the currrent amount, probably even less. Arrow costs 1-2 gold, reagents costs 10 times of that and some spells require several of them. The damage is not much different. I think that cost of arrows and cost of reagents should be quite similar.

 

Regents should be in-game. In the same way arrows should be in-game.

Its more about ensuring that Mages/Archers are balanced properly...........at the moment they are not, at the moment a mage is easier to kill than a wolf spider.

 

I completely disagree with OP. +1 for reagents.

 

Simply saying reagents should be in the game isn't an argument as to why. If you look at all the RPGs released over the last two decades probably 99% of them don't have reagents and work just fine.

 

Currently using skills in a locked slot increases the focus cost.

WHAT IF?
locking a skill caused it to use reagents instead?
a healing touch in a locked slot would then consume a reagent ?, while if you got it from random in deck it would not consume any?
using a Bow skill consumed a arrow (if locked) and no arrow (if from deck)
weapon attacks uses no reagents as far i know but could be so locked (each attack had a chance to reduce durability)

 

True enough! I too enjoy reagents for magery, largely because I like the idea of magery being rare and powerful. As it stands currently, it's rare because it isn't powerful, but at least it's rare. Well-balanced games, where roughly equal portions of your playerbase play each combat style, can be fun too, but magery never feels as meaningful in those kinds of games. Take UO for example - magery was the best, and everyone used it. It was a blast, but there were no mysterious Fondorlatoses performing eerie magic in towers far away.

Reagents act as a barrier which prevents some players from using magic, which can (and sometime cannot) be a good thing. Considering the fact that RG and SL are old gamers, it's likely that they want to bring back the original mystique that magic had in old games, and that would explain all the barriers they've put around magic. I'm replaying Skyrim currently, and installed the SPERG mod for similar reasons. It starts everyone with -100 magicka, so you can't casually pick up magic, and to offset that, magic is more powerful. This is great for a single player game, but can still be problematic (especially when NPC mages have infinite magicka and can one hit you/blind you without even hitting you), but in an OPO game, magic needs more modern balancing to prevent it from being terrible (SotA) or from being overpowered (UO).

I suggest that reagents be kept, and that magery be boosted in other areas. The high cost of reagents is a barrier that will make magic more rare without unbalancing combat, which is why I support it.

 

A simple DEL key auto stack feature that stacks all of the like glyphs on your tool bar will be a nice touch... especially for mages.

The deck system itself is great in my opinion, but if you have to stack all of your glyphs so that they work, then that is not so great.

Reagents cost way too much to use period. They are not common enough to harvest from the environment. Personally I'm glad we can cast without them. At this point I see no need to buy them, and I'm glad because the mage is not powerful enough to hang with the melee people yet anyway.

Say you have 50 of each reagent. It doesn't take long to cast 50 spells especially if you are using similar spells each time. Also if you are required to use reagents for spells like fireball and other higher level spells, then players aren't going to use that spell if they can cast lower level spells instead.

I would like to play a mage but I don't want to spend my cash on reagents. It is far more expensive than the repairs on armor and weapons at this point. If we had to use reagents then at least make mages as powerful as their pocket books. This means mages should one hit kill most players in PvP, because I've been killed in one strike more than one time (after the patch to lower crafted weapon damage).

 

I am all for keeping reagents. Apart for the nostalgic effect from Ultima/D&D, they can definitely be a fun, refreshing, interesting mechanics.

The point is: they should (and I am sure will) be rebalanced. As of pre-Alpha release 12 they are pretty much just an overly expensive drag. Rare, overpriced, have limited use since Alchemy is not implemented (and neither is half of the spells), plus the spells requiring them are so weak that it's not worth the trouble.

Also, why a mage is "not allowed" to wear heavy armour? Fizzle chances are reasonable if you melee 50% of the time.
It's awesome that there are no classes, and as soon as the skill trees get completed/balaced, I trust we will be able to come up with thousands of different builds to suit different playstyles, inlcuding armoured battlemages.

 

In order for reagents to make magic rare they have to be very expensive. That doesn't make magic mysterious though, it just makes it a tool for the people who grind the most. If you want magic to be mysterious and rare and such it'd be much better to ask for a system that requires the player to learn some magical knowledge, rather than requiring the player to carry expensive magic ammo.

What exactly is fun, refreshing and interesting about ammo? That's all reagents are. From a nostalgia standpoint I would find words of power more interesting than having to keep a bunch of random stuff in my backpack.

I mean, when you look at something like the Elderscrolls Alchemy system, where different plants have different properties and experimenting with them and finding combinations lets you create potions with varying effects and so on, that I could understand as an interesting implementation of magical reagents, but simply consuming items to use your skills isn't interesting to me.

 

Ammo that has some lore and requirements to harvest. Though right now its pretty easy to get all you need from the NPC vendor, and probably in the future you'll be able to still buy things either from NPC or PC vendors, the best option will be to go in the wild and harvest it, and probably the reagent list will be expanded so some you need to harvest and can't find in stores. At least it will be for alchemy. Certain reagents you'll have to go on adventures to find, others appear only under certain conditions, like under a new moon or during rain. So mages will have to be be scholars and naturalists to some degree.

You'll have to learn magic in the game (go to trainers, etc) but for the most part this will work exactly the same as learning weapon skills, so it won't be special or different. And then, once you learn, if were no reagents, you'd just go out and fire your magic like a machine gun.

Btw, if the game is balanced right, not all fighters will want wear heavy armor, some will wear light armor, and will have to spend a lot of time dodging, using stealth, and even running. Ranger and rogue type characters. Otherwise, there's no point to light armor skills and they might as well remove them from the game.

Situation isn't different with mages. Besides fireball and lightning and the like being buffed up to do a lot of damage, hopefully mages will be able to rely on utility spells like root (Earth magic), and invisibility (Moon magic) to give them advantages over their opponents. And hopefully there will be other protection options, from spells, to alchemy, to enchanted equipment. And wands that are worth using.

There are a lot of more interesting ways to make mages better than to remove reagents.

 

Having to farm for ammo doesn't make me feel like a scholar. Actually having to know stuff does.

 

There is one big issue even if they do ballance out reagents. How are we expected to maintain a good supply of them. Say a wizard can beat the heck out of people with reagents. Is there an option to NOT use reagents against weak opponents? WE NEED THAT OPTION. We only need to do massive damage to powerful enemies. I don't want to have to run back to the bank 3times per dungeon crawl.

 

You have to know stuff to 'farm' stuff. (Though it shouldn't be as simple as 'farming')

 

this is an interesting idea me thinks

 

I dont.

Tbh the only spells that people will have locked are heal ones that dont require regs anyway. After people get used to the glyph system I dont expect many will operate on an all fixed basis.

 

the idea has its issues but its the first new idea ive heard in a while regarding this.

 

Thing is the cost of regs isn't really set in stone.....I expect them to be cheaper eventually. To me its all about getting the bang for you buck so to speak.....ie magery actually working

 

That's what it ends up being though. I mean, this is like game design 101, in games whenever you want to use scarcity to balance something the critical factor is the maximum of that thing the player can have, not how hard it is to obtain. That's because the difficulty in procuring a rare item just moves the threshold at which players have enough time to grind for them. It actually unbalances the game by giving people who spend more time farming an even bigger advantage. All you're really accomplishing with a system that makes the basis of magic stockpiling lots of items is giving the biggest functional advantage to the people who spend the most time gathering those items, nothing else really. That kind of thing is OK when it comes to stuff like player housing, where it makes perfect sense that the people who play the most have the biggest houses, but it doesn't make any sense to me as the basis for a magic system.

 

@Aetrion,

Simply gathering materials isn't farming imo. Going around a scene in a constant cycle (grind) where materials respawn is farming. Same thing with monsters... its a grind when its just a cycle of knocking down respawning monsters, like whack-a-mole.

And you'll be able to purchase them too, and you have to know what you're purchasing and what's good for what spell, which adds knowledge to the process even if you aren't gathering. Its just a matter of balancing it so the magic is worth it through being more powerful. Easier to come by reagents will also start to be cheaper when players are selling them through their vendors and undercutting prices.