Great Game: Bad Magic

My point wasn't only about damage, it was about INT affecting any magic at all. Having double the INT should make quite a noticable difference on how your spells work, considering how much it costs to get INT up 20 points, but according the numbers I wrote down, the difference is very little - it definitely doesn't scale with the enemies. And since at higher levels both other players and other enemies have more hit points, and do more damage, being stuck doing and blocking the exact same amount of damage at high levels as at early levels is a problem, because this game isn't setup to give you more powerful spells later on, just different spells that do more interesting things (like AOE spells).

And buffs, debuffs, defensive blocking spells, utility spells, heal spells.... heck, we even almost have the blocking spells you want, they just lower the damage from elemental attacks rather than weapon-specific attacks.

 

We don't have any of that on the magic side of the house. There are several skills that reduce damage on the combat sigil. I think you're confusing "active" skills for BLOCKING.

Right now, if someone casts a fireball at you, you have three options.

1. Take the damage with no reduction.
2. Take the damage with a slight reduction.
3. Take the damage and use douse to stop additional damage.

That's the dumbest system EVER. Any system that starts and ends with "you take the damage" is just blindly simplistic. Do you not see what I'm talking about? Every skill we have works like this. The only thing we can do is "take the damage AND..." which creates a DPS war. Heck, we can't even move out of the way of attacks because it's all auto targeted (with the exception of player cast fireballs, which because of the short range makes it near impossible to avoid).

Is that what you want, a DPS war? Because we've got it right now and it's not fun unless you happen to be using the "best build".

 

Just want to re-emphasize that statement.

Currently magic is not magical. It is "Fighters with Laser Beams".

That is not magic; i.e. Spell swords aka Battlemages are not just mages with swords.

Detect Magic
Detect Poison
Resistance ****
Ghost sounds <-- where are the illusion/distraction spells? at all?
Disrupt Undead
Open/Close (we have no locked anything so far? ....)
Charm
Hypnotism
Floating Disk!!! so I can bypass having to pump anything into strength as wasted points for more "carry weight"
Disguise Self
Cause Fear
Expeditious Retreat!
Dark Vision!!! to make the dark not so dark and NOT dependant on LIGHT!
Fox's Cunning
Levitate

and on and on and on....

These are just the ones off the top of my head from AD&D that ARE NOT blow me up with sparkly particles.

WHERE IS THE MAGIC FOR MAGIC USERS?

Cheers.

 

I'd also love to see some data (hangout or post, whatever) from the team in a wider perspective (not just about magic) about what combat mechanics are solid and what are changeable approaches. I've seen and participated in many discussions which gave interesting concepts that i consider could improve the current combat system, and knowing what aspects of combat are susceptible of change. For the sake of recalling some of the fields where i think improvements could be made... Impairment effects, defensive skills (active counters ftw!), layers on the progression system, health and focus loss/management, and viability on pure classes.

Lots of what i consider good ideas are against what i perceive as the current direction of combat (needless to say my vision of combat and magic is quite similar to the one Drocis has), but knowing how much we can go against it is valuable. Trowing in a personal example, if i'm told current layers on the progression system are final - Deck management (focus tree) and Attributes in the same layer of skills - I'll stop thinking and suggesting ways of changing it, in the same fashion we know full loot is not going to happen, even if we don't exactly know how the loot system is going to work.

I really appreciate all the work and effort the Devs are putting both in the game and in keeping us informed, and maybe giving us that kind of information is asking for time they can use in other stuff... but in order to be more helpful, that kind of information can help us focus our ideas. I know that we've been told that at the moment nothing is set in stone... but maybe there's something engraved in clay (and you know, clay hardens).

 

Amen.

 

Exactly. Sure, combat is the focus and they need to work on that, but it's come at the expense of narrowly defining what magic is in SotA. We need more of these types of mage skills that can be used with equal importance in and out of combat.

 

Yeah, 1st time player and I agree with almost everything OP said.

Right now I can't kill a regular Wolf. I either run out of Focus and run away or run out of Health and die.

Doubling the damage magic does would be a good start. You can spice up magic with flavor (aka utility spells) later.

 

Back in UO the mobs runs much much slower than players. We could technically kill monsters even with low level Magery spells like Fireball or Lightning if we use the "hit n run" technique.

In SotA all the monsters are running the same speed or slightly faster than the players, the "hit n run" method simply does not work anymore. If you cannot dish out enough damage quickly, Mages die very quickly with the little to no armor that they have.

It is pretty hard to balance magic. I certainly hope not all mages become glass cannons; I hate glass cannons since they exist in almost all MMOs. I certainly hope we can figure out a way to work something out for pure magic users without going down to route of making them all glass cannon style.

Perhaps requiring reagents for all spells and in return increase the effectiveness (in terms of both damage and buff) and the focus cost of spells.

Or perhaps increase the varieties of buff spells, currently we do have some buffs but they are all scattered around different trees and we don't really have a lot of varieties.

Or maybe buff spells that would only work on light/medium armors? This way it would somewhat increase the survivability of mages.

Or a "Magery Tactic" tree (Evaluating Intellegence lol?) that is able to increase the effectiveness of all spells in different aspects (i.e. damage, buff duration, casting time and etc.)

 

I was talking about magical skills, we DO have all of that - it's spread around the skill trees but if you look there are a number of buffs, debuffs, defensive blocking spells, utility spells, heal spells . For example, before a fight I like to cast two spells, to buff my intelligence and my overall defense (and since that's an ice spell it also blocks some damage from fire). As I said, we don't have ones like "lower damage from blade attacks", but we have ones that lower fire or ice damage, that kinda thing.

Seems to me having a spell which blocks ALL damage is far more simplistic and overpowered. I mean, if I cast a spell which blocks all damage from blades for the next 15 seconds, and the guy I'm fighting has just a sword, well, I've just won the fight, he can't do a darn thing, has zero chance of winning.

 

No, you're wrong. If you look at the skill trees there's no "spells" that do any of that. There are ACTIVE skills that raise SOME damage as much as 20% but that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's just MORE damage tweaking. It doesn't balance anything.

If someone casts a fireball that does 5 to 20% more damage, and you have a 5 to 20% fire resistance...WHO CARES? You're just trading DPS. It's the exact same mechanic spread all over a bunch of "different" skill trees. It's DPS wars. You're acting like there are all these different spells to choose from and there's not, it's just the same spells over and over again with different names on them.

If someone only has one form of attack, then they're kind of asking for someone to counter them. That's the point of having counters. Also, I'm all for risk verses reward, so if they made a spell that blocks all bladed weapons for a short period of time then I'd suggest that that makes the caster vulnerable (takes double damage) from blunt weapons and water and sun magic and doesn't allow the caster to move from the spot they're in. (something like that)

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. What do you mean "ACTIVE skills"? Those are spells, you cast them during a fight. For example, if I cast the Ice Shield spell, that improves my defense and gives me some protection against fire for something like 30 seconds. Are you talking about something else?

 

That's a good example of what I'd like to see across all the spell trees. (not limited to this however)

Why is the water school the only one that has a spell like that? Also, note that it doesn't block anything. It just reduces damage. So if someone crits you for 60 damage, you might shave off 20 of that. Whoopie! That doesn't force your opponent to come up with a better plan. It just means they have to hit you one more time.

 

Exactly - please refer to my previous list as to real SPELLS.

Everything we have now are either damage increasers (either direct or indirect to a character's stats) or damage mitigators (with the same mechanism).

IOW, every single "spell" is combat oriented, and those are 100% focused on damage (either offense or defense).

Lets just take 2 simple examples from the tiny list I posted:

Cause Fear <-- ZERO DAMAGE SPELL yet results in being able to be used in MULTIPLE situations.

Like for instance, doing the tour guide quest in the shuttered eye. Instead of fighting your way to the top, you could cast Cause Fear on groups of mobs, making them scatter away from the path you needed to climb.

Instead you either run up as fast as possible, chat the robot and die, or slaughter everything on the way to the top.

Blunt object for every problem.

Charm is another one. That can be used to the same style of effect above, OR, could be used on say NPCs to decrease the sale value of certain items, maybe through extra dialogue after being charmed, or add new responses based on their likability to you, etc...

For the umpteenth time, magic is more than combat; it is the very essence of creative problem solving.

Everything is a nail in the game. And Magic is simply another hammer.

We currently have a whooping SINGLE problem to solve, and obviously, magic is not creative even for that single problem (combat).

It shows a lack of real creative thought on the design process for magic honestly.

 

I agree that magic is a bit frustrating at this point. You need to spend about 14k to have 100 of all reagents. So you need to support the herb habit to optimize spells. Plus you opt to wear cloth or leather to optimize your spell casting efficacy as well, and with all this, even the optimized spellcaster falls short. Why spellcast when melee attacks are much more effective? I read somewhere that magic was made much more effective for release 12 but i have not seen this as of yet.

 

hehe, this is why i keep up with how you and the Cult of Spears bring balance to the world... only way to do that is with lots of testing and adjustments between tests....

 

Agreed. But Chris stated they were aware of the situation and would eventually address it.

With regents, I'm just waiting to see the balance between regent costs and repair costs.

 

Expectations are low then.

That's ok, I'm in this for the long haul. As long as we get it right by launch (in Fall of 2016).

I'm being serious about this though, I'm fine with waiting. I just want a great game as I know all the developers do too.

 

I agree with the OP.

I had to give up on magery, because in Plate I am nearly invincible against some creatures and I deal 5x more damage or so. It takes so long to level up as mage. You either have to be party healer or at least use a bow...

PvE is really mage unfriendly, jsut try challenge dungeon as mage. Lichs do 100+ crits to you, root you stun you, and you cannot fight back.

In PvP it is slightly better because as a mage you can almost always run away. However what is the point...