Reagents should be removed, they are a double penalty.

Well, I totally agree on that. At the moment high level spells are too weak to justify the cost. And if they were just the same as low level but more powerful I wouldn't like that either - I'd rather cast the low level verson twice for the same effect at basically no cost.

I am still of they idea that both issues can be resolved without removing reagents, though. Make high level spells powerful and completely different. Add more Ultima-like spells (Clone anyone? That was cool!), and add some variety! Where is my Telekinesis spell? Animate was also quite fun, but pretty much useless. And Incognito from UO, another lost gem!

 

I just really don't see the point in making people stockpile hundreds and hundreds of reagents.

I distinctly remember my first time playing Ultima Online. I had my spellbook, I had my Magic Arrow, and I had my reagent pouch with 10 of each reagent from starting the game. I was convinced that this spell must be pretty damn powerful. I mean, hell, if you need components for every time you cast that thing and they only give you enough for 10 spells... that must be some imense power! So I went to the forest and saw a deer. Perfect I thought, this should be an appropriate target for such a mighty spell. In Por Ylem! zip! piff! Oh ****, that deer's health bar barely moved! It's coming straight at me! I don't have enough reagents to kill it! Run away! Oh no, all that wood I chopped is slowing me down! Walk away! Spent the next 10 minutes walking around being chased by a deer yelling for help.

As much as that's a funny story, when I realized that reagents were meant to be consumed by the hundreds and thousands it kind of made magic seem a lot less cool. It wasn't a system where you mixed ingredients to unleash fantastical power, it was just Diablo with ammo.

 

Spells never should be more powerful than beeing hit by a twohanded weapon. At least not by a huge margin and not without a cost. The toolset mages offer in most games is just to big for also having more burstdamage then any nonmagic "class". Kiting a melee into oblivion and bursting him down without paying a heavy price should not be possible. I get the feeling this is what most mages want but this is not acceptable in my humble opinion. The Devs already mentioned that they are looking into normalizing the numbers. As soon as this happens reagents will be fine.

Before anyone complains about me beeing a "stupid platewearer" I tend to play a magic based skillset myself but I do not want it to be the same overpowered easymode it is in most other games.

 

I agree with you that the game needs to be balanced in terms of how much damage things actually do. That's exactly why mages will most likely have to cast a half dozen spells on most common encounters, and that in turn is exactly why I find counting reagents so extremely silly. You're easily going to cast hundreds if not thousands of spells in a day of playing which will turn sourcing reagents into exactly the same crap it was in UO, just hustling from one NPC to the next buying up the whole stock.

 

Combat, especially magic should be slowed down drastically.
And it should not be possible to cast one spell without having reagents.
What we see now is a focus on action and combat going away from a roleplaying game. The system we have now is Quake with fantasy-elements. Magic is like a machine gun, mages are like soldiers wielding this machine mgun. If it is called magic or guns it doesn't matter. It is the same. What I see in combat imho is absolutely nothing like a roleplaying game. It is a shooter disguised as an RPG.

 

The problem is that in games where fights happen in real time it doesn't take an hour of rolling dice to bring down a few orcs, so the number of enemy encounters it takes to fill a playsession is usually significantly higher.

I mean it's really easy to say that magic shouldn't be so common, and spells should be expensive and powerful, but actually designing a system where that's entertaining and balanced as far as I know has never been managed by anyone for a video game.

 

sounds like you need to find a new DM if it takes a standard fight an hour to resolve.

they should not take an hour offline, and they should not take 15s online.

The speed could be slowed down by half to make combat much more rewarding in and of itself.

making everything require reagents, for spells, is a horrible idea. spells can have multiple components, reagents being only one possible requirement.

making them all require reagents would need to seriously redress the amount per cost.

 

Only encounters filling a playsession? No exploration, story, puzzles?

 

If a person is flagged for PvP that person will always be on guard unlike a PvE player. Also the PvP mage will likely choose to carry a medium number of reagents due to the chance that they might get looted. A PvE mage could even choose to max out his encumbrance on reagents knowing that he will have more room in his pack to loot stuff as he burns through his reagents.

So it would be nice to have a switch to activate or deactivate reagent usage. Right now I don't see a need for it, but later when reagents become more useful we will run into the issue above for the PvP mage. Even PvE mages might want to use spells without automatically burning through his or her reagents.

 

Again, very easy to say, but unless you have actual design ideas on how to make that a reality it doesn't mean anything. All the adventure zones currently in SoA are one big, non-stop fight with monsters. What would you specifically change to give people enough exploration, story and puzzles there to replace all that? Can you name a game that is a good example of an persistent world RPG where fights are not the primary challenge and bulk of the system? Keep in mind, in an MMO all content has to still be fun when you repeat it.


Any system that allows you to toggle reagent use on or off for more power would be extremely unbalanced too. How would the devs go about designing boss encounters that fighters can meaningfully participate in if the power of mages goes up by a drastic amount whenever something is on the line? Since fighters can't go to turbo mode by making every swing cost garlic how would the game stay effectively balanced in between standard encounters and boss encounters where throwing the best you have at them is expected?

 

I expect, and hope, that this is just because of the pre-alpha state. Currently, monsters are just standing around in the same pre-set locations waiting for you to come and fight them, then respawn in the same spots. That's horrible and hope it changes by the time of the final game launch.

Most MMOs aren't good games, and that's why I don't play MMOs, so I'm not going to take that challenge. However, there have been a lot of single player games that are playable for other things besides the story and this works in different ways for different games. Some rely on the fact that the combat is tactical and fun even if its not non-stop, others have generated quests, others have survival elements. Though some MMOs, like UO, also give players a ton of other things to do besides combat.

If it turns out the game is just non-stop fighting grindfest like so many other MMOs, that doesn't make the game worth playing to me. So I'd rather not define the standard down to that, because its not a standard worth meeting.

 

I don't begrudge you your high expectations, but I don't think they are realistic. I mean, I completely get where you are coming from, but I can't think of any way they could change this. Even Ultima Online essentially just came down to killing tons and tons of monsters that endlessly respawned, and I'm not seeing any indication that things will be different in this game.

I mean, let alone the fact that the entire skill tree for this game is about combat tells me that combat is what you are meant to be doing in this game.

I mean, the kind of magic where I would understand reagents would be like: Someone is raising a crop on a field, and the game has a system that simulates the weather. The game decides it hasn't rained for two weeks and the crops are close to dying. You bring in a water mage who prapres a ritual circle and uses an armload of paraphernalia and sacrificial goods to conjure up rain for the fields.

I mean, if you know the Dresden Files, it's like the difference between evocation magic and thaumaturgy. Evocation is just throwing a fist full of fire in someones face, thaumaturgy is assembling a complex ritual. Only the latter makes sense in the context of spending significant amount of time searching for components. Basically, when casting the spell becomes the goal of your adventure it makes sense for the spell to require you to find a bunch of stuff to work. When the spell is merely your tool for getting past run of the mill enemies there is nothing interesting about slapping random costs onto it.

 

I agree the current way they use reagents has to go. The idea of having them be consumed slowly by spell use has merit, but really it's still just making it so you have to mouse over the item to see your current ammo level.

I think they should either remove reagents for most commonly cast spells or make them not consume the reagents at all when cast. It sure looks like mages will have weapons of some sort in hand, make those take the durability hit so you don't have a totally different system to balance vs. the other combat trees. I think they can keep some spells as consuming reagents like the summon spells and raise dead. You're not going to be casting them a ton most likely and so you won't need stacks and stacks of the reagents for them to stay effective.

When playing table top games we hand-waved all the cheap reagents for the most part as well. If it wasn't a major expense or hard enough to get that it's basically a quest on it's own then you write off some gold and move on.

 

@Aetrion,

Well, even as it stands, you can't exactly stay in a scene and kill 300 enemies in a row without your armor and weapons wearing down, and perhaps running low on potions, if you're using potions. So reagents would be just one more reason to go back to the nearest town to restock.

I personally hope this will apply to other things, like torches, and I hope the penalty for hunger is strong enough to encourage people to find food if they don't have any. I think those types of survival elements help give a rhythm and a flow to the game besides grinding. You have to think of your character as living in the world, have to prepare for an adventure or expedition, and have to think about your own needs.

Then, I'm hoping that the random encounter system is a big part of how we find battles, because this is what made some older DOS games a bit less tedious than the modern MMOs that rely on re-spawning. Essentially, in U5 the fun was in travelling and exploring the world, and only running into monsters in between your adventures, and dealing with them interrupting your travels and your sleep (during ambushes). I would really love that "adventuring" feel coming back to gaming.

I'm also hoping that players can work on a lot of suggestions on how to get their own content in the game, so there will be continuously new things to do and player-created challenges to solve. I don't know how much hope I should hold out for generated content, but that would be a good addition, too.

Those are all hopes, but I think that's a good direction in the game to go for.

Reagents were in all the Ultima games and it never was a problem, either, btw. I think the main concern the devs have with increasing the power of magic is really with the multiplayer aspect, not the single player aspect. I believe they're concerned a PvP fight wouldn't be fun if someone could kill you instantly with a fireball.

 

The material component in D&D spells isn't supposed to actually carry a cost unless it's specifically listed on the spell. The reason why spells have material components in D&D is more so that when the party loses their equipment it affects mages just as badly as it affects fighters. They are basically fighting unarmed without their reagent pouch. Of course the way equipment is viewed has sort of evolved over the years too in D&D, with the idea of a level appropriate "item budget" being an integral part of the balancing, so writing adventures where your equipment is liable to be lost or destroyed has fallen out of favor.

Just because players put up with a system doesn't mean it's not a bad system. I mean, let's be fair here, having to do the grand tour of Britannia and recall to every reagent shop on the map to check if it was stocked when you needed reagents was a huge pain in the ass, and certainly not some kind of enjoyable adventure that made you wish every game would do it. (Which is why no other game does do it)

The fact that the cost of reagents was essentially static while the income of characters increased exponentially also meant that what was a crushing financial burden at character creation just turned into a nuisance for veterans. What reagents meant to playing a mage was in absolutely no way consistent, it simply started out as forcing people to find some other ways of earning money to the frustration of thousands of players and ended up with having five figure stacks in your bank that people specifically purchased so they did't have to ever think about reagents again.

Ultima Online also had tamers who had by far the biggest income out of any character type with zero cost, so you can't even make the argument that reagents were part of some greater scheme to make every type of character in Ultima Online have similar expenses. Characters that had practically no expenses at all existed in the game, and it didn't implode as a result. If anything people probably used those characters to farm for the money to buy reagents.

Reagents also did nothing to make mages rare. Reagents never stopped people from learning magic on all their characters once they could afford it, they just stopped people from enjoying the game if a mage was all they wanted to be. It wasn't hard to afford the training for a veteran who already had other profitable characters. The only people the system actually held back from becoming mages were people who were so passionate about playing a mage that they didn't want to make other, more profitable characters first. Being dedicated to something shouldn't make it harder!

Lastly let's not forget that as much as people malign EAs takeover of UO, they still have a dozen populated servers and the game is still generating enough revenue to have regular expansions. They added gear you can put on that eliminates reagent cost years ago, which is far and beyond the most popular thing to wear for mages in the game now, and isn't breaking anything. So Ultima Online itself is proof that the reagent system does nothing other than annoy players, and turning it off is both popular and not damaging to the game.


And yea, the reason why we'll never see super powerful and expensive spells in combat is because it would break PvP, and to an extent also any of the PvE content that's meant to be a challenge for people. But I don't think there is any way around that. Games need a certain balance to be fun. What game balance ultimately represents is the ability to express yourself without being penalized for it. If someone wants to be a fighter they shouldn't be eternally in the shadow of ultra powerful mages, and if someone wants to be a mage they shouldn't be thrust into a financial hole they can't climb out of using the skills they want.

 

I can think of a simple solution to this problem. It is what we did when we went on long adventures in Ultima Online. You would bring more reagents, increasing both risk and reward simultaneously. I think reagents are an excellent idea, if you are brave enough to risk losing hundreds of reagents deep in a dungeon then you should be rewarded well.

However, in situations where you are in PvP you bring enough reagents for short durations and then go restock after consuming them.

 

In early UO mages were quite powerful. The regents were a penalty but were off set by the reward......besides it became a skill to know how to get the reagents you needed before the shops emptied and you had to jump around and collect the long hard way .

Later the reagents got much easier to get but the mages lost power.

I'll work for the power given the option and if not will weigh wheather it's worth playing that class.......kind of like any game (g).........but then that's just me.

 

Well the reagents in SotA now are a bit expensive.
If they can lower the price of reagents to where UO was (i.e. 6 gold for Moss and Pearl and 3-4 gold for the rest)
it should reduce some burdens from a magic user.

 

There was nothing wrong with the collection method. It was great for the economy and created a gold sink. It also increased the risk and reward as I already mentioned. The problem with games like Wold of Warcraft and similar games is that mages are easy to play and in my opinion boring. You click on a target and simply press whatever key corresponds to the spell you want to cast. You watch while the monster's health decreases. Repeat. It is a process which is easy, but not fun.

Ultima Online was not an easy game and collecting reagents was difficult. However, the solution is not to make the game easier by eliminating reagents. I knew people who ran around Britannia picking up reagents off the ground and never purchased a single one. Sure, most people did not have the patience or will power to perform such a task. Most players resorted to the option of just purchasing reagents in bulk (myself included), but money was not scarce in Ultima Online. This was a problem with the economy, not reagents. Players duped gold in the early days and there were several other exploits for monetary reward.

Many people are not interested in playing a game which is difficult. It is the same reason in my opinion why World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games around. The popularity of a game does not indicate whether it is successful or not. The goal should not to be to gain as many players as possible, it should be to create a game which is fun. It is amazing when I see people speak about Ultima Online, I never see anyone speak of World of Warcraft with such passion. I may have a biased opinion when it comes to the game because it struck such a major chord with me. The music in Ultima Online was like no other game I have played since, the towns were designed elegantly, and every place was unique and fun. The dungeons were places of actual adventure. The lighting disappeared and you could still hear the groans and grunts of the creatures which lurked within. It invoked fear and anxiety while you grasped around searching for the magic light spell "In Lor" or you quaffed a nightsight potion, or found a scroll to illuminate the dungeon.

There has been nothing which has stood up to the test of time Ultima Online has endured and no other MMORPG has always seemed to be missing something. It is the reason I have given up altogether on that genre and now play mostly MOBAs.

 

Well, that is completely how one measures success.

I'd wager that Blizzard and the WoW developers, running around bathing themselves in stacks of cash, find it perfectly successful, along with the throngs of people still dumping time and money into it, its 3rd party product spin offs and its mega convention.

Because you don't share a subjective agreement with its success being in money, doesn't mean it is less so to those that do.

Just as with this game, people measure its success on whether they can full loot, or have no instanced zones, or buy a plot of land and play dream barbie dress house.

To them, that is either successful or not. You obviously like challange; difficult/adverse experiences in your adventure. Other's do not. Does that make this game more or less successful? Depending, again, on who is measuring, maybe longevity or populace or money will tell if it is.

I digress:

Reagents are overpriced, and Mages are underpowered -- I welcome challenge too, not at the expense of a ridiculously overpaid amount of time invested and in the end, not at least be equal in power to my melee counterparts.

Cheers