Reagents should be removed, they are a double penalty.

Discussion in 'Skills and Combat' started by Aetrion, Nov 30, 2014.

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  1. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    I still don't really see any any compelling argument for why magic is balanced when power and reagent cost somehow intersect in the right way. Whether or not magic is balanced power wise doesn't depend on reagents in any way, it just depends on all the other abilities in the game. Whether or not reagents are balanced cost wise also doesn't depend on the power of the spells, it purely depends on all the other comparable expenditures in the game.

    The giant problem with reagent systems is simply this: The only way they matter to the game is if they restrict you. Per use cost for abilities happen to very specifically restrict new players, and players who are dedicated to using those abilities. There is simply no good reason to restrict those groups in particular. If you want something to not be used all the time there are way better restrictions you can implement that affect everyone more equally and can't just be outmaneuvered by throwing enough gold at them.
     
  2. Ultima Aficionado

    Ultima Aficionado Avatar

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    Magic is rare, thus it should be powerful. It is that way in Dungeons and Dragons and in most traditional RPGs. I never heard or read that the developers intend to make melee fighters inferior to magic users. However, there should still be reagents and powerful spells should be cast with reagents which rare. This make sense and makes using magic interesting, akin to collecting more powerful weapons in melee combat. Your argument is like saying rare, magical swords should not make a melee fighter more powerful. There should most certainly be reagents.
     
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  3. Duke Death-Knell

    Duke Death-Knell Avatar

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    Magic is not rare. At least not in NB. Magic should be as powerful but more flexible then melee.

    As is regents are useless as magic is useless. But Chris is already working on making magic more balanced with melee.

    The one thing I have always stated. I have no issue with regents. But the regents a mage needs should be no more expensive then it is for a warrior to maintain their weapons.
     
  4. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    I think the best way to make cost equal across all characters is to base armor degradation on death, weapon degradation on ability use, and have magic use up some kind of focus item that functions as the magic's weapon.
     
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  5. MalakBrightpalm

    MalakBrightpalm Avatar

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    I think the real problem with reagents is coming through right here.

    In one of the first games I (and I suspect many of you) encountered reagents, D&D (back when there was only one edition, if you are old enough) they existed to make spellcasting more interesting. Also, to restrict and balance certain very powerful spells.

    But what many of us found while playing was that things like sulpher and bat guano could be far more irritating than the gaggle of orcs they removed. Of course, that all depends on the availability of such things, and that in turn depended on the GM. Sadly, one of the most popular GM decisions I saw was to mostly do away with reagents, handing out quasi-magickal "reagent pouches", which had an endless supply of lacewing fly wings, sulpher powder, charcoal, and other minor reagents, as long as you didn't look at it too closely. The only reagents that were then needed were those costing more than 100 gold. This version was SO popular that I've seen it printed in subsequent editions of the game as a suggestion.

    The point of this maundering is that even in the game that TAUGHT many of us about reagents, the novelty wore off, and we all started downvoting them.

    As @Aetrion and @Death-Knell have pointed out, what we have here is a limiter situation. Reagents limit access to magick. Right now, that blows because magick is barely worth having. Later when magick IS worth having, reagents will limit access... or will they? Since reagents can be harvested and sold and bought, and merchants carry them and monsters drop them, they only REALLY limit access when the would be mage doesn't bother to stockpile appropriate quantities. Once any given player can afford such a stockpile, they will have reagents for whatever. So not really a balancer. Where it will be felt most is, yes, noobs. So new players won't get fair access to magick, which serves no purpose I can think of. Aaand the flipside of this is that having and using reagents will justify making magick POWERFUL, cause you have to use reagents, right? Only... powerful is really a value judgement that only exists via comparison. So magick becomes powerful only when compared to the alternative, which is in this case all the other methods of combat. Blades, bows, polearms, shields... all will wind up being powerLESS to make magick powerFUL. 'Cause swords don't use reagents, right?

    Reagents are optional fluff. That's where they really belong. Give us an optional system, one that allows magick to work without reagents, but those who want to use them to gain a bonus. Make magick balance against the alternatives TO magick, such as maces, knives, and arrows. Make the costs of magick balance against the costs of the alternatives, such as item repair, arrow costs, poisons.
     
  6. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    I think the main thing is that when you design a system that uses a limitation to something as a balance factor the maximum is just as essential as the mechanism for refilling uses if you don't want the limiter to be breakable.

    Let's for example compare Fallout 3 with Bioshock. Both games have stimpacks as a primary mechanic for keeping your health up, and in both games searching your environment carefully is how you get more stimpacks. But there is a significant difference: In Bioshock there is a hard limit on how many you can carry, while in Fallout 3 you can more or less carry unlimited stims, and stockpile them somewhere if you end up with so many that the weight does become an issue. This leads to what a lot of people consider one of the big flaws of Fallout 3, because once you hit the point in your adventure where you are easily finding more stims than you are expending they simply pile up, and if you do run into a tough fight you can expend dozens of them to just power through and still have a huge amount. The sense of scarcity and need to scavenge and conserve health that stimpacks created early in the game simply vanishes. In Bioshock on the other hand if you hit the point where you find more stims than you need the limit simply transitions from "How many can you find" to "How many can you carry", which ensures that after a tough fight you will once again have to find more, and you need to beat every fight within the limits of the maximum.

    That's why reagents aren't a good system for limiting total magic use. They don't have an effective upper limit, so their value as a limiter is prone to eventually breaking down if any player ever manages to gain reagents faster than they spend them. Even if there was a hard limit on how many reagents you can put in your backpack, this would only limit how long you can adventure before having to return to the city, which again adds very little to the game, and arguably isn't needed because bags filling up already make you have to drop off loot every so often if you don't want to waste a good chunk of your potential income.
     
  7. MalakBrightpalm

    MalakBrightpalm Avatar

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    I think it's also crucial to remember that there is a deeper flaw in the reagent system. When a spell costs reagents, especially LOTS of reagents, rare and expensive reagents, it's very tempting to then say "Yes, the reagent cost is balancing the power of this spell."

    But it isn't, because it can't.

    In order to achieve balance, things of equal weight must be placed in opposed positions on a freely swinging scale. Cost is not the balance to effect.

    A powerful spell is only balanced when there are other, equally powerful abilities, scattered evenly throughout the trees. A powerful combo spell is only balanced when there are other, equally powerful combos, scattered evenly throughout the trees. If you have a spell that can kill me instantly, even though I'm ten levels higher than you, wearing comparable gear, and the 'balance' is that you have to expend a fantastically rare reagent to cast it, that isn't balance. It's selling indulgences. "You pay time and energy and invest in this super rare reagent, we the game devs will give you an instant kill button on an enemy player of your choice."
     
  8. Arkah EMPstrike

    Arkah EMPstrike Avatar

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    I believe there are some in the game that have already took it upon themselves to use a third party to Auto-Stack ;)
     
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  9. TEK

    TEK Legend of the Hearth

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    hah, see that is a statement the sums up the sad state of affairs of "modern" games with magic. Magic does not equal melee or archery. All combat styles should be unique, with unique costs. I know all the EQ/WoW clones dumbed down magic to be cheap, easy and "balanced" for use for even by newbs, but as an spiritual successor to all things Ultima and Ultima Online, SotA should not and will not be that kind of game. Regeant requirements are going nowhere.
     
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  10. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    They already added active use abilities for all weapon types. In the most fundamental way they already added a parallel system that works the same way as EQ or WoW. Every skill tree or magic school has roughly the same number of active use abilities that are all powered by focus, and activated through a hotbar that is populated by the deck system. The systems are already the same in pretty much every way that matters. The only difference between two abilities in SoA for the most part is only what they actually do, and that's exactly how it should be.

    Your argument is incredibly self defeating, because you're basically calling 95% of what the SoA devs already did dumbed down, cheap, easy and balanced for noobs to make some kind of roundabout argument for why we can't just go one step further and use a parallel system for the cost as well.
     
  11. Isaiah

    Isaiah Avatar

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  12. Ultima Aficionado

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    No, that was not his argument. Go back and reread it please: "I know all the EQ/WoW clones dumbed down magic to be cheap..."

    This is an argument Garriot has made himself and one I agree with. It is not difficult to balance reagents and create a system different than those aforementioned games. It does not limit a new player's ability to play as a mage. The reagents required to cast spells new players will be capable of casting are more common. This does not impede in the new player's ability to play the game. It does require you to do a little more work to perform great feats of sorcerery, as it should.

    Mages should not have an instant kill button as some of you have mentioned. The most powerful spells in the game I am assuming will not instantly kill another player. In Ultima Online these spells were things such as earthquake, resurrection, and mostly summoning creatures such as elementals and daemons. This did not make a mage incredibly powerful and most mages never used circle 8 spells against other players.

    It was not difficult to defeat a mage in combat. A melee player had it easy and had far less at stake than a magic user. It was easy to equip a deadly poisoned katana and carry potions along with trapped pouches to kill a mage easily. Mages will be powerful and so will warriors with rare, hard to find equipment. It not only makes sense and adds another element to magery, but it also adds a level of immersion.

    I remember when I saw a Grandmaster mage in Ultima Online that meant something. It meant that the character was indeed powerful and has traversed the realm of Britannia and subsequently had a great amount of experience. It was more difficult to become a Grandmaster mage than a Grandmaster warrior, which was a great part of that game in the early days. It was the same way when you saw a warrior with a silver, vanquishing weapon. It meant that person could easily slay liches in Deceit and make a tremendous amount of money; assuming he wasn't PK'd and lost it.
     
  13. enderandrew

    enderandrew Legend of the Hearth

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    I'm late to the thread, but these are some really interesting ideas here.
     
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  14. Joviex

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    if your intent us to punish users of the locked system, yes.

    this is about reagents, someone above said it best.

    make magic as powerful as melee, from the start.

    reagents should be used to empower those spells more.

    The extra cast time, and the extra good sink for buying them, offsets the additional power a reagent imbued spell brings, without destroying the balance of standard magic vs melee character builds.
     
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  15. enderandrew

    enderandrew Legend of the Hearth

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    A locked bar is easier to play with, so there should be trade-offs. Right now the trade-off is increased focus cost. But there are other possible trade-offs.
     
  16. Joviex

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    how exactly is it the users fault that the random deck is harder to play?

    so they get punished for our design decisions, or unless they take the forced road of random skills?

    if you want to eliminate the play style, remove the choice. don't make it some basterdized version, out of spite, to prove a point i.e. look how bad we think modern static combat is cause we can't design it better.
     
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  17. enderandrew

    enderandrew Legend of the Hearth

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    Because there is PvP, you need to adequately balance the different systems. A locked bar is far easier to play with. You can macro a rotation. You know exactly where your skill is and when it will come up again. If there was zero trade-off, no PvP player would ever use the random deck. They have to be balanced with each other, as is the current design where locked skills have an increased focus cost.
     
  18. Aetrion

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    If one input system is significantly easier than the other that doesn't mean it needs to be penalized until they are even, it just means that the other system needs to be made more user friendly.
     
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  19. MalakBrightpalm

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    Making magick be comparable in cost and power to archery and melee isn't dumbing it down. Nor would such actions rob it of it's uniqueness or special qualities. If anything, equalizing the costs and power would REVEAL that the random ability tile deck system homogenizes all forms of combat.

    Reagents aren't making magick special. MAGICK makes magick special. Working in ways that other power bases cannot.

    If you really want magick to be special and require unique skill, then make magick special and require unique skill, not stacks and stacks of vegetables.

    How about:
    There are NO spells. None. Every ability from every magick tree is without function ALONE. All magick is done through combos, and if you don't do random draw you cannot cast. Then have a mage's capacity for casting be based on the size and speed of his draw section, and the quality of his spells be determined by the types of casting tiles he puts into his "deck" and his skill at combining them.

    Or:
    Magick isn't something you should design in the field. Players can spend time building massive spell forms in advance, preparing themselves for the task ahead, and then can use those spell forms to create actual spells as they adventure, but cannot change the types of magick available to them without sitting down and thinking out new spell forms. Thus a powerful mage is marked by the number and complexity of the spell forms she can carry, and a skilled player by how well her spell forms work, how well they interlock to provide situational coverage and response, and how well she manages them.

    Or:
    Magick is chaotic and random, and control over it is built up slowly by intense focus. Being able to summon up fire at all is a massive achievement, but you cannot predict in advance how the flows of local magick will vary from moment to moment, and thus if your summoned fire will be a quick burst or a column reaching to the skies. An indicator is provided for each type of magick a character has some mastery over, constantly fluctuating higher and lower. Some areas are likely to be stronger or weaker in certain magicks. A mage's power is based on his maximum capacity in each type, his skill is measured in how well he times his casting to the shifting rhythms of his environment.

    What we have now is:
    Mix these ingredients and push this button, and a fireball pops out. Stack your deck heavily with fireballs and stockpile enough ingredients, and you'll be a push-button-fireball/lightning-bolt-dispenser. A mage's power is based on how many copies of various "good" spells she has, her skill is apparently in how well she's prepared her inventory, and she just clicks each "good" attack spell as they come up on random draw.
     
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  20. enderandrew

    enderandrew Legend of the Hearth

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    It is literally impossible for a random system to be as easy and predictable as a locked system.
     
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