Drains need to work on the undead or death magic needs to be reworked

It seems to me that the change to make drains not return life when used on undead is a bit shortsighted and will break a playstyle many are interested in. Three major points:

1) You need to heal in combat, especially soloing.

2) Currently there are two ways to reasonably heal in combat, the Life tree heals and the Death tree drains.

3) Going for a full on Death tree build with death attunement largely removes the ability to use the Life tree heals as it makes them far less effective since your death attunement subtracts from your life attunement.

Combine those three aspects with the widespread undead monsters in the game and the removal of healing from lifedrains and you can see that anyone trying to go all-in to the Death tree won't be able to effectively solo a huge chunk of the content. In return for this they get, well, nothing. Death magic is no more effective than any other type of magic against anything. Without the health return they're just exceptionally poor damage attacks.

The heals from draining undead either need to go back in or Death needs some kind of benefit somewhere to offset such a large drawback. I'd suggest making the damage done vs. undead be 2-3x higher but I'd bet that would lead to a lot of exploit corner cases. If there were death spells that only did damage then you could swap the effects when fighting undead or something similar but that means adding skills and reworking the tree.

 

Except it's called ... Life drain...

 

Maybe the undead are animated by corrupted life energy! Really, the lore can (and has been in other games and fiction) spun any way you want to match the game mechanics. You can't reality check magic.

 

Unless Portalarium is willing to create non-linear growth for skills, I don't see a viable path forward, other than: don't fight undead, if your only way to heal is via death magic.
And I'll be "that guy" and point out... you can always use heal potions. (yes, I'm aware they're cost prohibitive).
An innovative mechanic would be a proc on drain if you're >50% invested in Death, to create essences that could be used to make cheap heal potions, but I doubt they'd do it.

 

Can't drain or leach life from an dead char, wait until they flush out resistances there should be places where if you are using s single focused template like Crazy Strong Earth Tree and walk into an area with Air Fighters you should get beaten down. Learn what to fight and where, they are making this a thinking persons game not a run anywhere with any style and survive. I cannot wait for these to actually start appearing and will giggle at all the "i went there and got mangled . . . . " threads, because players will refuse to accept that they cannot go every where with the styles they chose LoL

Keep it up Devs, get more styles out there so we have to start Playing this game with some forethought and planning. It is getting old just running thru the wolves mangling them over and over.

 

I'm pretty sure the cooldown on potions make them a non-viable option even if they were free. Not that I've really tested them a lot.

The difference between this for the death tree and any of the others tree, magic or not, is ALL of the others allow you to still heal via the life tree. Sure, you may not do as much damage but and may need to swap decks and use your second best attack tree but that is far less painful. Deep death attunement can't get fully effective heals at all.

The other thing is undead are easily ten times more common than any elemental creature. I'm guessing they are the most populous of any monster type in the game at this point. Humanoids and Beasts are the only other contenders I think, and I doubt either of those will have any significant resistance or vulnerability to any of the adventuring trees.

 

Quote from the notes made by @Gix at the Winter Telethon https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/telethon-transcript.43631/#post-486488:

"//54:10
Too many undead for death magic users?
team doesn't want you to blindly use the same skills over and over so they like the idea that death users can't drain life from undead but that might be a little too hardcore so there's some adjustments. but they initially thought death was a little too overpowered.

they don't want one school to do everything that the others can. maybe death attunement can overcome the shortcomings slightly."

It sounds like the inability to life-drain undead with Death magic is intentional, but adjustments may be made. Maybe Death magic attunement should make Death magic wielders less susceptible to attacks from Undead (if they aren't already)?

On a side note, Death magic is not exceptional in its inability to easily master every situation in the game. Melee builds have problems combatting archers. Archers have problems combatting groups of mobs. Fire mages have problems trying to outlive mobs hit by DOTs. The list goes on. Most builds have a hard time if they don't compromise and add some skills from different skill trees. I know that a lot of people say you need the Life tree to survive, but not everyone wants to use the Life tree to heal in battle. I'm using Earth and Fire spells and have such low level Life spells, that I don't bother to use them in combat. My major challenge at adv level 65 is not my lack of Healing skills, but the fact that I avoided levelling up AOE spells (because they use up reagents too fast). That was a mistake that I will correct in R26.

 

@Kara Brae Not only that but:

"//1:14:10
changes per school. subtle but important. aggro improvements.

small differences. examples:
death: lower your health, more powerful you are."

So I think they're playing with the idea that you wouldn't WANT to keep yourself healed up as a death user.

And then there's also:

"//1:08:00
Command undead? Charm for death users? cool idea. Trying to avoid duplicates like charm and tame but they'll look into it... maybe that'll address the issues with all the undead in the game.

charm = change faction. you can't control but it'll fight on your side."

From what I gathered from the Telethon is that the dev team is keeping track of the performance of the various schools of combat/magic.

Some people (like myself) like the idea of a character that doesn't use magic at all.

 

Yea, I believe their intent is to have weaknesses as well as strengths for every play style. Attunements are proof that this is the case. It's OK to be really good at one thing... but they want that choice to mean it adversely affects the opposite "school". It's a way to balance everything without really having to make them all the exact same.

As to the issue with not being able to heal (life drain) vs. undead, there are and/or will be other options that you may need to use to supplement the lack of heals:

1. Food Buffs - They will be introducing many new recipes in the next release and future updates that will help with (among many other buffs) improve health regen and/or max health. These are said to last "hours" so using them before entering combat with undead will help.
2. Health Potions - As already mentioned. Cooldowns may not make them a viable substitute alone, but when used with the other options can help you survive.
3. Death Attunement - We've only seen the first iteration of the attunement system, but the intentions are that if you raise it higher than the undead you are fighting, then your death attacks will be stronger than theirs and theirs will be weaker against you. Think of this as a resistance check that you can win if you improve that skill. This won't really be a "heal", but in the end, it protects you from undead damage and is a means of overcoming the lack of a life drain against a school of magic you are highly invested in.
4. Better Armor - New recipes for armors have been promised to come in soon. Besides the possibility of having better damage resistances and avoidances, perhaps they will give us the ability to enchant armors with death-specific resistances or attunement modifiers or perhaps even a proc with a percent chance to return health upon being hit? Maybe they will give us weapons that can be enchanted to proc a health increase too?
5. Bandages - They noted in the telethon that they are open to the concept of using bandages to heal in battle. This would likely be a craftable item that you could use in lieu of a death drain or a standard heal spell.

There are probably even more that I haven't even thought of yet that could help make up for a lack of a life drain vs. undead. But those are the major options that are highly likely to be available. IMO, if there is a weakness, there will always be "another way" to get by. You just have to find it.

 

I disagree. No solo player should be completely excluded from particular game content because of their chosen skill tree. It doesn't have to be easy, but it should always be possible given high enough skills. We were sold on the ability to play SPO, and we shouldn't be forcing people into parties if that is not how they want to play the game. Keep in mind that those playing offline will not even have the option to join a party.

 

Disagree all you want, but if you choose Death tree, and ONLY death tree and have its attunement maxed out, and that is your only way to heal . . . then you have also chosen to avoid undead. Unless you can kill them without taking to much damage.

Offline is going to be so much different and not combining with online so I imagine that changing skills will be easy there, as will a lot of other things.

That is part of playing the game - not gaming the game. One template will NOT work everywhere.

This is the main point about my post about as to when are we going to see different mobs that actually fight with different methods - all we have is ((basically)) Phy/Fire/Death. If / when we have a variety of mobs to fight player will either have to generalize their templates or stick to fighting what they can handle - as it should be.

 

Honestly the concept of "life drain" has never worked out in a balanced way in any game outside of some PvE applications. Even in WoW where it's been a major feature of warlocks since day 1 the power has never been considered to be a mainstay of winning a PvP fight or contributing to a PvE group, and even for solo content there are faster ways of killing enemies.

You simply cannot have a life-drain power that provides enough damage and enough healing at the same time to actually do either job well without being overpowered. The closest thing there is to a well balanced class that uses life drain as its major mechanic would be the Chloromancer from Rift, and that class can only direct it's maximum drain amount to other characters, never itself.

As with everything in MMOs the usefulness of any given ability is not purely determined by how high the numbers it produces are, but by the thresholds that are created by it. Healing for example has a threshold it can cross where it outheals all incoming damage and you simply can't die at that point. The second that threshold is crossed it becomes the ultimate ability. If you can't cross that threshold however, abilities that require you to chain heal are no longer useful, because you're now shooting for a different threshold: How much time can my heals buy me vs. how much time does it cost me to use them. That means when you can no longer survive indefinitely you're much better off with heals that have cooldowns, instant casts, or happen as a component of some other ability as with straight up heals that you need to chain cast, because those would soak up all your time, meaning they are only useful if they counter all the damage.

Hence why lifedrain is sort of broken by default. When you have healing rolled into a damage power it can never be allowed to cancel all damage, because a character that can heal all damage while at the same time killing things is simply overpowered. At the same time though, if you find yourself in the "healing to slow down your death" category then a healing spell that is part of a damage spell doesn't have any other cost than how much less damage that spell does vs. anything else you could be casting. Since that means the spell has to do relatively little damage that in turn makes it easier for the enemy to outheal you completely and the result is a power that even when it looks balanced on paper is crap in reality because it sets the threshold for your opponents to easily walk all over you too low.

There are just some power concepts in MMOs that really cannot be good without being overpowered. The second life drain provides enough health to be a total heal + damage it's OP, and the second it provides enough damage to be a great attack + bonus health it's also OP. When it provides middling damage and healing it's easy for your opponent to slip over those thresholds where they dominate you in either direction.

 

I don't think you'd be 100% death tree, just 100% death attunement. Right now that means your life college takes a big hit and you will be in cloth or leather armor with no shield as death is one of the trees that gets hit with the maximum penalty for wearing armor or equipping a shield. That still leaves open the other non-life magic trees but as far as I have seen there are no effective heals in them nor significant damage reduction. That could change but I doubt it.

You may get some reduced damage from death magic with high attunement but there are plenty of undead that hit you with swords and arrows too.

Balancing life drains is definitely a hard thing to do. They could add "bone armor" which would be an absorption shield charged by your attacks or some other entirely different mechanism. The main thing is whatever they change it to needs to make up for closing off the life tree heals and be available all the time for solo and offline play.

They could also add some self healing to another magic tree or trees, water already has an AoE heal. They could even use the combo system to have some water+death = heal spells. The Sun tree also may be a good place for them.

 

I disagree. I ~HOPE~ that choice is going to matter at least at some point (if it doesn't matter in the starting scene). There are other solo player games where you can choose either path A, or path B, but you can not consume the content on path B if you have chosen path A. SotA is already far, far too forgiving and ambiguous in that regards.

 

If the path to "adequacy" wasn't 6-12 months, your argument would have more weight, to me, Logain.
But as that's evidently the design goal, that's far, FAR too long to "string someone along" or "bait and switch" them, or "make them suffer the grind".
If the character isn't viable, immediately, or they can't undo their "bad" decisions, immediately, they'll just stop playing and never come back.
Punitive mechanics, in 2016, do exactly one thing: remove that customer from your target demographic, forever. Punitive mechanics in 1998: Please sir, may I have another? Times change.
You haven't seen rage yet, until you've seen a death/moon/water spec'd pure mage be unable to complete the final main-storyline scene because they aren't life/sun/fire/pet/heavy/polearm , because that's what 90% of the players pick.
Put another way, SotA doesn't have (nor is there any indication they will for EP1) a viable, complete and "alternate" content path for those that prefer a bit of challenge, difficulty, or self-flagellation, depending on your point of view.

 

I'd say it depends on how that content is being excluded.

If there's a quest about saving a little girl's cat from the tree which ends up being a giant chain quest about you being the hero of the village, I can imagine that little girl not wanting to ask a Necromancer in the first place. Just like a shady guy from that same village won't be asking a Paladin to eliminate someone either.

As for combat-related troubles, I'm okay with it so long as the skill tree has the tools necessary to overcome the challenges. If Death school of magic can't drain life from the undead, then the Death tree needs another spell to compensate... like "charm undead", for example.

If you don't have access all of the Death spells, then you have other skills from the other schools of combat to rely on.

Make choices matter but don't make the player feel like he's chosen "wrong".

 

They could add to death magic so you got some temporary health bonus each time you kill someone (not stacking)

 

The 'design goal' is far less than 40-50 hours, since at that point in time Chris wants you to be competitive with the 'high end finished' characters. If that is actually working right now can be discussed, but that's the goal.

You're right. Then again, I was under the assumption that this game was targeting a 'niche old school' audience. If it's targeting the WoW youngsters, it's in deep trouble, because these expect different graphics, an explanation mark levitating over a 'quest giver',...

I would never imply that somebody should be unable to complete the main storyline because of a choice in combat layout. Sorry if I triggered that image with you. I'd certainly like to see people unable to consume ~ALL~ content based on their combat layout though (read being unable to solo specific, non main storyline areas).

 

Why can't life drain, with maximum attunement and maybe gear that further improves the attunement, or even gains additional buffs for NOT having other attunements for instance, be overpowered in certain situations?

I think if a system is in place that an individual can buff themselves to focus on a single tree, not just death magic, and it crosses a line of "overpowered" for a specific situation and completely useless for another, is it really overpowered?

If a type of gear is created, lets say blessed or reinforced with gems or whatnot, that buffs X magic school or attunement yet reduces everything else, is that really an issue?

Or should basically anyone who trys to play a niche like all-death magic be placed in the Roleplay category and phased into uselessness for the min-maxers who have a cookie cutter spec that is useful in every situation (IE: How it is now) ?

 

What you're looking for would require non-linear advancement in the face of non-linear XP requirements. Right now, it's linear advancement with non-linear XP requirements (yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a fanboy will be along momentarily to defend this illogical design choice, don't worry)
There's no indication Portalarium is considering the feature required to offer what you seek, so at the moment, it's unlikely to change.
And I don't blame them. With possibly ~120 working days to go? They're running out of time to be futzing with such basing things as the combat system. (you know, without the hue and cry of the players )