Death Magic Broken?

I have been working with death magic recently because this release it had some interesting changes. It is only healing like 2% of the time? and I have not seen any difference weather im low on life or full life...

 

I was fooling around with it just a moment ago and I clearly saw a difference when I was low or high on health.

The thing to remember is that in this combat system we're talking about ranges of damage. So if you roll poorly (behind the scenes) you may do next to no damage (or healing) even though you're at low health. Likewise you may roll perfectly and see high damage even when you're at high health.

It doesn't mean what you're seeing isn't bugged, but for the hour or so I used Death Touch it worked fine for me.

 

Its defiantly not healing. I have just used it for over an hour and was seeing healing yesterday but not after the patch today...

 

My body slam skill is not working either. I just run in place when i use it and i never stun the enemy. Maybe its just my client? I have tried loging out and back in tho.... any suggestions?

 

Looks like it's half and half. I'm an idiot because you can't life steal from skellies. The skellies spawn in north ravenswood is definitely broke however. Body slam doesn't work and is bugged as a result of the skellies being broken.

 

i actually had Death Touch up to like 95 during the QA with like level 70ish Death Mastery and Death Attunement.

The new feature definitely works. But not enough to be worth it. Death Magic is broken at its very core. It was brutally nerfed back in r22 or r23. It is just not a good school of magic to be doing. if i recall correctly, at level 95ish Death Touch, i was maxing out at 44 damage. And that was with having 10 or less HP. Death Magic is sad. I would avoid it if i were you. Corpse Explosion is decent. But even at GM it maxes out at like 110 damage when running around with less than 10 HP. Stick with Air and Fire. they are FAR superior schools of magic and the devs have thus far proven completely close-eared about taking another look at Death.

Honestly, i wish they would just remove the entire school of magic if they are not going to fix it. Although, in my humble opinion, they are completely off mark with the direction they went with it anyway. id rather see some of those life steals removed and replaced with some high powered debuffs. Dont just be death. Be Death AND decay. DoTs and Debuffs would be MUCH more fun to work with.

 

What was your INT at?
Were you fighting against undead, other players, what?

 

Int was only raised to around 50ish i believe. not much time to get it a lot higher. and it was sometimes against undead, but not often. i typically dont even use death magic against the undead as it doesnt work well. but i used it a lot against spiders, bears, wolves, and bandits.

 

Makes sense. So in comparison to Air and Fire, what kind of damage would those schools do with stats like you had?

 

i have personally had a chain lightning hit me multiple times for over 450 combined damage from a single cast.

 

I think they need to increase the effectiveness of being lower on life and death magic doing more damage, right now death magic doesn't do enough damage to be effective on its own even as master. I would also suggest removing the cast I'm from the ranged life tap Skill. This would allow death magic to be bursty which would play in to an increase effectiveness as you got lower and health and thus made something out of now currently a dismal magic school.

@Chris

 

I have a hard time seeing where any of that would balance...anything.

The way that our combat system works. If you make Death Magic "more powerful" then you are simply making something else "less powerful". You guys get this right?

If you guys are all using Air Magic to do 450 points of damage because that's the "best" way to win. And I'm using Death Magic and it's only doing 110 points of damage. Now they raise up Death Magic to do 450 points of damage. So Air and Death both do the same damage, great. But now someones says, but Water magic doesn't do enough damage! It's not going to end, we're just going to keep adding or lowering damage.

I like how the death magic fluctuates based on hit points. But Air, Water, Fire, Earth...where's the player skill at in those? Really until we have more fluctuation based on something other than "character" skill, this kind of balancing is a waste of time, imo.

 

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was this adjusted during or after the QA, @Chris, because i can assure you that "50%" is not even CLOSE to the results i was seeing. I saw more like 20-25% TOPS. and that was at 10% or less health.

also, i just want to point out the dangers of running around with such low health to begin with. this is VERY high risk for not so much reward. At 50% or less health, especially in pvp you can be killed instantly a multitude of ways.

 

ok, @Chris , I stand corrected. I dug up my post from QA:

This is at level 96 Death Touch...
at 100% HP it deals 9 - 29 damage.
at 1 HP it deals 13 - 44 damage.

This i hope is not the "ball park" that you want to play in.

currently, my level 12 Earth Fist does 8-23 damage and i suspect by the time i raise it to 96 it will do significantly more than death touch. i will keep you posted.

 

There's some interesting comments in this thread, and the one about attunement and whether that's working, and today I was reading a comment from someone comparing SotA's combat to UO's combat.

It makes me wonder if we shouldn't have all these schools at all, and instead just have a "Magic" tree with all of the spells - like a spellbook, a lot more slots instead of just the 10 a deck allows, and some sort of failure rate to cast based on something in the Focus tree (intelligence?). Keeping or ditching attunement is up in the air - I still can't tell if it's worth it to allow specialisations that restrict half of the spellbook.

Seems like that kind of thinking might fix a lot of problems.

 

I agree, I so want to be a true necromancer. Give me a life tap, but I want dots, debuffs and more damage.

 

Yes, I don't like attuning and loosing the ability to effectively use another school; like Earth and Air. I think magic needs to pull from many schools to be effective and penalties on use are too restrictive.

Melee have too great an advantage. It need to even out.

 

You don't have to use attunement. Personally I like the fact that in order to getmore powerful in one school you have to sacrifice power in its opposite school. It makes for meaningful choices in character development. I'm sure once the balance has been worked on a little more then more schools will be used more often. It keeps all mages from being the exact same thing.