Mandatory Magic

Thank you for all the gracious replies.

My thinking is that this is a community online rpg... and that this community, more than most, is interest in role play. Many people here have strict ideas about how they want to build the identity of their character.

In UO, RP guilds had many rules about which skills you could have in order to be a part of a particular guild. Within guilds one often had to gain rank within the guild to be allowed to access specific skills.

A system in which certain skills are virtually essential to being able to play would mean fewer options for people who want to be strict about their characterization.

For me, I play a pure mage and will be reasonably happy either way, but I could see a lot of people feeling frustrated that they're not getting the character identity they're looking for right now.

For all I know the dev team is already aware of this and working on it from a design perspective, but it's great to see so many people supporting the thread. Thanks again.

 

Re: Bandages. There should be an injury system, where you get injury on death (max health cap) and sometimes during battle. Bandages should heal injuries over time. This is fine to do out of combat. We have potions too.

Warriors should be able to avoid damage somewhat effectively just using their active defense skills. If not, what's the point of the active defense skills? You should be able to survive battles pretty well just by dodging, blocking, parrying, etc.

1st-tier spells should be tied to reagents, and have the reagent use reduced by wands and staves of that school. If a warrior wants to cast a heal that's fine; it'll just use him reagents.

In order to make potions useful after battle, you have to slow down auto-heal to a rate that you can't depend upon. In order for food to be still used with a slow rate of auto-heal, you need hunger

See, its simple

 

I play a paladin class lately so I go completely down the healing tree to get to rez. The damage over time is fine for the bandages. I just feel we should have the option in the game and yes during combat, but perhaps they work better out of combat. Also there are not a lot of defense skills for bludgeons and the 2 handed axe I always use. I would love to see some interesting stuff come in for this type of play. Sure I can parry and absorb dmg, and glancing blow helps a little for starters.

 

This is a good way forward by balancing the current system.

To be honest I hadn't even thought of using the current active defense skills. I guess that's because I've never seen a massive result from them. If you could actually mitigate the majority of damage through active use of these skills at a high level then there's no need to have warriors self heal with bandages in combat.

 

i personally can't stand having to do 'x' in order to do 'y'


...........

bandages should do very little and be interuptable

surgery should be required for more substantial wounds

and magic healing is the cop out for all modern video games, not just this one, whether they call it magic or not.

...........

this has all left a bitter taste in my mouth regarding paladins.... hmmmm, death to paladins! I make anit-paladins from this day forth.... henceforth.....

 

Fully agree with the damage over time idea!
Bandages in general will help bring back part of that Ultima Online feeling we all miss!

 

Definately god infused paladin and cleric powers in SOTA. More variety the better (Y) it is part of ultima and I missed it in UO.

Definately bandages, but not as powerful as in UO, exept under magic or paladin protection, so in a group someone could protect the person applying the bandages and they (the bandages) should combine with clerical and paladin spells, a magically infused bandage can magically heal wounds even in D&D.

I agree to the hardcore perspective some of you seem to incense but it would make sense only on a siege perilous shard. On there bandages should be worth not much exept to stop bleeding, and I'd be more in favor of ultra realistic rules then. Whole structure would need to be changed for sure.

 

If I was to design this game from ground up (which I didn't ) I would have used two resource pools that oppose each other just as the opposing magic trees do. One resource for magic (focus) and another for meelee trees (energy). The current system of using the one focus resource for both magic and meelee skills is a roadblock for this as I see it.

 

Wait, and...LOL..."magic" healing is perfectly realistic? It's a video game where healing is going to have to take seconds, not months. There isn't a realistic solution. Maybe the bandages are coated with a "magic" healing concoction?

 

We have potions for that, though

There are other uses bandages can have in the game, still, without them being magical and just duplicating the effect of potions. I suggested one above.

 

Some kind of non mAgic attunement would be interesting. It could provide bonuses to physical skills and lower effectiveness of all magic

 

Thats a good idea Dreamo, they could also have the disadvantage to fall off when wet and to hinder movement a lil indeed.

 

To caveat off of Lord Dreamo, instead of just lowering effectiveness, change it to a percentage based magic resistance and also, make that innate lower your ability with all magic, since melee is technically the opposite of magic. This way, for the purest warriors, you get magic resistance, some sort of physical bonus and your own magic use drops.

 

That's what I thought. Except alchemy seems to be on its own. Because of the long regeneration you can't usually use it more than once during the battle. Life spells can be cast quite a few times, but they don't provide as much healing at early levels especially. Potions are more potent but they can't be used often, so it's kinda balanced, I guess. If I am not mistaken, bandages could only be used outside of combat in Ultima, or were they?

When you start mixing magic with pure warrior skills and put on plate armor, that's not a warrior any longer. Warrior with life skills - is a paladin. Pure classes shouldn't need to borrow abilities from the magic trees, that's why fizzle increases drastically especially if you use plate armor. You'll be fizzling like crazy.

I like that we can mix and match everything we want and create custom classes based on how we like to play, but the penalties seem to be inadequate to the advantages we get from mixing trees together, unless they are of completely opposite element. You can train quite a few innate skills from tactical trees (passive abilities) that don't require casting, thus avoiding the fizzle (STR, DEX), but as soon as you start borrowing into magic trees, the penalties you receive, while wearing plate armor and trying to cast that same heal from life tree will gimp you more, than if you'd wear mail armor and still use the abilities from the weapon and armor trees.

In the end, I think that it's all somewhat balanced, but requires some extra attention, which I think will be given to all the trees and crafting before the final wipe.

 

To me, it's just another skill.

 

I've actually wondered the reverse of this thread, is melee required for magic to be successful.

Some games have melee skills like 'catch breath' etc. that provide little heals to melee players that don't feel like magic.

I think there is room for glyph expansion in the trees in this game and maybe something like this could be considered.

 

Nope. Staff user, full magic here. fwiw could everything use improvement? Yes.

 

I am kind of concerned, myself. I have never cared much for MMO wizard classes. Even in the original Ultima Online, I just had friends cast fire field spells so I could run in and out of them every day so as to build up my melee fighter's magical resistances. While magic is certainly super important to be perceptibly superior, it is just a game and there should be some sort of realistic chance for non-magical characters to prevail in combat without having to fear an instantaneous death from another player who is significantly less developed but happens to have learned how to spam a lightning spell.

 

I understand and respect the desire for some to RP a specific character and his/her abilities. To do this for a "purist" aspect so that you feel you are truly building a specific character class/role is understandable if that sort of thing is important to your gaming enjoyment.

But, I see a lot of people referring to using potions or bandages in lieu of "magic" healing. To that I ask, what is the difference between drinking a "potion" (which one might argue is a magical concoction) or using a "bandage"? The potion is something that elicits magical properties to recover hit points. It's not a can of spinach that makes your muscles pop out of your arms as you consume it!

And bandages are supposed to instantly recover you from wounds or perhaps provide a heal-over-time effect? I can see them stop the bleeding and prevent further damage when used... but it's still not realistic that a piece of cloth and some herbs or medicines will be able to bring you from near death to fully healthy in seconds or even minutes.

So IMO, anyone trying to substitute a magical heal with a bandage or potion is not really being "pure" to building a warrior character and is still using some form of "magic" to quickly heal wounds that would ordinarily take you time to recover from. Just because it's not a skill in a magic tree doesn't mean it's not magical!

The only way to build a true warrior would be to not have ANY healing methods at all and instead, focus on ways to bolster defense, armor, and also improving your melee attacks so that you kill things faster so they don't have an opportunity to do as much damage to you. Basically, you would need to substitute healing with just being more protected and prevent damage to begin with.

But, as Bowen and others have mentioned, this is a classless system where people have choices. If they gave us better defensive options for a melee, it would potentially be unbalanced because there is nothing stopping a non-pure warrior from taking those benefits along with healing options too. It's a no win situation because you can't give melee a reason to need less (or no) heals without also including a penalty in other areas (healing or other magic) as a tradeoff.

I think Bowen was on to something with the attunement reference. If they could implement some melee specific skills that in turn made you less effective to magics (of any kind) then it could work and be balanced. Unfortunately, I don't think there are enough players who would go this route so it would be a lot of work for a small portion of the customer base. Most people will prefer the variety and diversity of the hybrid system just because it gives them more options.

 

~My Melee Avatar Sucks & is Very Fun to Play~
The only magic my character has is of course, the healing touch. He wears light armor with x2 wielded blades, a little subterfuge (the 2 weapons enhancing innate), and that's all his skills except for fishing...

' So... I don't agree that there isn't a way to have a melee without magic, just close your eyes and imagine ~HT~ is bandages... But I do agree it sucks up my health bar as I die playing my Avatar this way. The melee challenge is difficult within our game, yet easy is not what I ever wanted...
"Cuz that's the way I roll"
~Time Lord~