What is your vision of Attunement

For those that skipped over it, here are the two official topics on it:

A Note on Magical Attunement: Attuneing yourself to an element by purchasing and advancing the appropriate passive skill has many benefits. Elemental attunement also carries significant penalties when it comes to facing spells and attacks based on the opposite attunement, or trying to cast those opposing spells yourself. While it may be possible to remove existing attunements in the future, as of this release they are as permanent as any other passive skill. Keep this in mind when deciding to develop an elemental attunement or not. (source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z-svq1OvcZwViqGxFCKdjH3NCn2LTfLuGny5qaAqjTM/pub)

Attunement: As part of the above, each magic school now has an innate skill called Attunement that increases the affinity for that magic school while increasing the vulnerability in the opposing school. For example, if you have a high attunement to Fire magic then you are more vulnerable to Water magic. Also, the attunement of both the caster and the target are used in calculating the effect of magic. For example, if both the caster and the target have high Life attunement, then the target is healed for much more than normal. NOTE: This has not yet been propagated to NPCs.
(source: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/release-23-instructions.39570/)

Attunement Spectrum Picture:

Fire = Water
Death = Life
Air = Earth
Sun = Lunar

So attunement adds a very interesting feature to the game. Certain combos will be much harder to pull off, like using death magic and resurrecting a tamed pet through the life tree, or healing fellow adventurers. Likewise, if a particular set of mobs do harsh death magic, and you wear plate and favor life so greatly you have a high attunement it could spell disaster.

Eventually though attunement may come to mobs, with skeletons having high death/lunar attunement making drain life and such a poor choice, or kobolds having mixed attunements in fire/earth for example.

Some situtations I see with this - if a person prefers to play single player as a necromancer, they can run into some serious situtations without a backup spell/weapon. Though this may be remedied later with more spells or companions.

Overall, with the path that attunement has laid out - what visions do you have for it and feedback?

Personally, I think it is a step in the right direction for both single player and mmo aspects, as your choices will have direct consequences. Players that focus on being a jack of all trades will be a master of none, verse an individual that decides to solely focus on one elemental aspect. PVE will be interesting, if you know that a particular area has enemies that have a high attunement and resistance to some spells, you may choose to avoid that area - or it will be your go-to farm spot. PVP will also find some influence, if you know that your preferred targets all have high life for healing, focusing on death to do damage may come in handy.

Thoughts? Opinions? Other influences you would like to see?

 

I think attunement should provide resistance to both the same school and the opposing school.

Design reason: There will be a smaller spread of resistances to balance for.

For illustrative purposes, let's take an extreme example. 100 Life/0 Death=100 Life Attunement/-50 Death :: 100 Death/0 Life= 100 Death Attunement/-50 Life Attunement. That is a 150 point spread to account for.

In my suggestion both Schools give positive resistance. (Arbitrary numbers follow): 100 Life Attunement/0 Death Attunement=Current equivalent of 100 Life and 25 Death Attunement, but only for resistances. It would still provide the current 100 Life Attunement bonus to casting Life Spells and the -50 Death Attunement for casting Death spells. So, when compared to someone who has 100 Death/0 Life, it would only be a 75 point spread for resistances.

Clearly this creates situations where someone could build 100 Death attunement, then switch and get 100 Life Attunement, effectively giving them 50/50 Life/Death Attunement. In this case, the higher of the two would take precedence, thereby giving moderately increased resistances and casting ability from both Schools, which, I think, is perfectly acceptable for anyone who took the time to level both attunements skills to 100. (i.e. Using my arbitrary 100/25 example above, a character with 100 Life would have the equivalent resistances of 25 Death Attunement. Once that character began training Death, both resistances would begin to drop until the character reached 17 Death Attunement, when Death would finally take over. Supporting math below.)

There would need to be a graphic in the UI to track this, of course, unless the formula for resistances was provided (which, immersion-wise, any good mage is going to know how her magic works. Magic is a science, after all). Since I don't know the actual resistance numbers, I will just say [1 Attunement = 0.1% Resist]. Using my suggestion would provide the following scale of resistances:

Attuments = Resistances (Bear in mind, these numbers represent attunements, not how many skill points you have in said attunement)
10 Life/-5 Death = 1% Life / .25% Death (Here resistance to both Life and Death goes up, but casting Death Magic becomes weaker)
50 Life/-25 Death = 5% Life / 1.25% Death
100 Life/-50 Death = 10% Life / 2.5% Death (After this point, the character locks Life Attunement, and unlocks Death Attunemet, i.e. 100 points in Life, 0 in Death)
95 Life/-40 Death = 9.5% Life / 2.375% Death
90 Life/-30 Death = 9% Life / 2.25% Death (100 points in Life/ 20 points in Death)
85 Life/-20 Death = 8.5% Life / 2.125% Death
75 Life/0 Death = 7.5% Life / 1.875% Death (100 points in Life/50 points in Death)
70 Life/10 Death = 7% Life / 1.75% Death
67 Life/16 Death = 6.7% Life / 1.675% Death
66.5 Life/17 Death = 6.65% Life / 1.7% Death (This is the point when Death Attunement takes over, as it now provides higher resistance to Death than your current Life Attunement. 100 points in Life/67 Points in Death Attunement)
60 Life/30 Death = 6% Life / 3% Death
50 Life/50 Death = 5% Life / 5% Death (100 Life/100 Death. Not only are you only moderately resistant to both Life and Death Magic, but both your Life and Death Magic are more powerful.)

Still using the arbitrary [1 Attunement=0.1% Resist], this method provides a maximum difference of 7.5% in resistances that the Devs have to account for when designing how much damage/healing a spell does, as opposed to a possible 15% in the case of a 100/-50 Attunement. Additionally, in the case of a 100 Life Attuned Mage using Healing Touch on a 100 Death Attuned Mage, the healing would only be lowered by 2.5%, instead of 5% (Not accounting for the boost in effect provided by the Life Mage's attunement). This makes balancing slightly easier, as the possible ranges of effect would be smaller.

In the case of someone who wants to accrue attunement in all schools, or has 100 attunement points in all schools of magic (which is theoretically possible), they would thematically be the complete opposite of a Chaos Mage, as they strive to bring order to the magical energies around them. This could be the only way to gain resistance to Chaos Magic, as even a Chaos Mage isn't interested in controlling, or perhaps isn't able to control the forces she wields.

TL;DR- This method makes balancing easier as the min/max ranges of spell effect are slightly smaller. I can math.

 

That is a solid idea. The one issue I have might be not what you want to hear - but how would it factor into a Role-play/lore theme?
For example - Should a fire mage really become more resistant to water, even if he is fully attuned?

I think it would be interesting if you could completely "master" a tree for additional bonuses - if you were willing to sacrifice more for even further gains in a particular tree.

Also - how about some sort of "attunement" for crafters // weapon masters?

 

Conceptually, I hear what you mean regarding Fire versus Water, but the bonus is small and can easily be explained by your Fire magic being strong enough to evaporate some of the Water magic being used on you.

The metaphor I used in @Chris 's thread was that using the same school to resist is more about finesse, teasing apart the magic because you know how it works. Using the opposing school is more brute force, like holding up a shield to block the high pressure water.

 

I really like the idea of Attunement, because I like the idea of specialized characters. I don't like the idea of attunement creating weaknesses to certain types of magic though, since that just means two opposite attuned casters kill each other twice as fast.

 

So as you get strong in 'earth' magic, for instance.. you are more resistant to earth magic, but also more vulnerable to air magic, right? Doesn't make sense to me.

I think Fire should be vulnerable to Earth, Earth vulnerable to Water, Water vulnerable to Air, and Air vulnerable to Fire, in a circle.

So resistances should naturally go around the other way: Fire is resistant to Air, Air is resistant to Water, Water is resistant to Earth, and Earth is resistant to Fire magic.

likewise, Death should be vulnerable to Sun, Sun vulnerable to Life, Life vulnerable to Lunar, and Lunar vulnerable to Death, in a circle.

So resistances, again, should naturally go around the other way: Death is resistant to Lunar, Lunar is resistant to Life, Life is resistant to Sun, and Sun is resistant to Death magic.

If you only do 'opposing forces', they'll just cancel each other out, and feel pointless; going in a circle makes a lot more sense to me. So if you focus on Fire and Death magic, you'll do great against Lunar and Air, but watch out for Earth and Sun magic! etc..

 

I don't plan on using any magic at all.

With that said so long as:

• one can survive (and be effective in combat) without casting/receiving the healing spell.
• resistances don't "magically" go in the negatives because you decided to attune yourself in a particular school of magic.

It makes more sense if you think about it in extremes:
As earth, you're a tough rock, other rocks don't hurt you. Fire and water can hurt you but you're a rock, you can deal with it so long as you're not slowly being melted or eroded over time. Air, however, can tip you over and blow you away... lightning can shatter you in half. That's bad news for a rock.

 

I'm not sure basing it purely on opposing schools necessarily makes sense, because from my perspective there are a lot of character concepts that embrace a duality of opposing forces and that shouldn't be entirely disallowed. For example, if someone wanted to play an Elementalist who masters elemental magic but doesn't really care about the celestial or animistic axis of the magic wheel they should be able to do that. Likewise if someone wanted to play as some kind of stargazing celestial caster who understands the heavens during both night and day I don't think that concept should be invalidated.

So from that standpoint, attunement could really be a lot more flexible in the sense that in order to cast a certain type of magic you need to be attuned to it, but the game simply limits the number of attunements you can make. You can always have one, and as you get deeper into the wizard/priest side of things you eventually can make up to 4 attunements at the same time, but you get to freely pick which ones. That way if your character concept is "The priest of the cycle of life and death" you aren't locked out of casting both life and death magic, you just have to give up some other magic types.




I mean, it's tempting to view magic attunement on the axes of the wheel, or as something that moves around outside of it, but I don't think the magic wheel is thematically built for it. Those kinds of attunements should IMO be much more mechanically specific and fundamental things like "Creation" "Destruction" "Truth" "Deception", than things like "Fire" and "Water" which do have a certain opposition, but also represent a whole under the concept of "Elements". Likewise "Day" and "Night" are only opposites inside of the greater category of "Sky".

Every axis of the wheel also represents a greater concept to me.

Fire / Water (Ice) make an "Energy" axis.
Air / Earth make a "Matter" axis.
Life / Death represent a "Animism" axis.
Day / Night are a "Celestial" axis.

Since when you look at it that way they don't represent opposites, but only flipsides of the same coin it kind of makes more sense to let people attune freely than to say that any character that deals in these greater concepts rather than single magic schools is invalid.

 

That would be a neat complexity to work with in combat

 

Well Earth has the best passives, hands down for melee. Plus a strength buff spell. The mitigation buff is pretty good, but surpassed by Water Shield (although higher fizzle and potentially long time to open up)

Kinda messed with my build that uses AoE electricity for CC / light damage, although you can lock one at 10 as prerequisite.

Wind is also the best PvP school for control spec.

It is kinda cool that speccing into Death Touch for self heals nerfs your ability to take full heals from Life school

 

I don't get how attunement versus opposing magic schools works.

An example: If I take water magic, I thought that was supposed to already counter fire, in general. And indeed the water tree has Douse, a spell that reduces fire damage. So the tree is already countering fire.

Yet if I take attunement in water, that attunement not only improves my strength with Douse (reduces fire damage), but also increases my vulnerability to fire? That makes no sense.

 

Agreed. I don't think vulnerabilities are a good idea. Making the magic that you cast from an opposing school weaker seems reasonable.

 

I've some concern that life attunement will make already OP healing (at least in last release, have not tested healing much in this release) even more powerful. It all depends, if the heals are seriously weakened so they do not work well at all unless you have attunements on both ends? The latter seems unlikely, so I am anticipating even more poweful healing than ever before, making me feel even more strongly coerced into focusing on in-combat healing (mind you a mechanism I pretty much have no liking for conceptually, with no basis in reality, swords-and-sorcery/fantasy fiction, or even mythology, and as an unfun mechanism for extending fights and undoing well-delivered attacks).

Otherwise I find attunement interesting at this point, though not clear on what happens if attunements can be balanced out (say you have 50 earth and 50 air attunement - is this the same as having no attunement in either, or is it impossible in the first place, or would there be some advantage to such?). I'm assuming the attunements would just cancel each other out in effect and be pointless other than as a means of undoing an attunement no longer wanted. It should be interesting to see how it plays out, I've some testing ahead of me

 

It means that you have a way to protect yourself against fire but you need to actively be protecting yourself instead of having it as an innate ability.

You can; you just wouldn't be as good as a pyromancer since you'll be focusing on multiple elements.

In D&D, you had a thing called "Specialist Mages" which completely locks you off from an opposing school of magic. But that didn't stop you from NOT specializing.

 

I would like this to go a different way. Specializations. The more you specialize, the more powerful you become in that school of magic. The more you spread out, the least powerful you become in any type of magic. This would force you to make active use of turning off abilities. The same could go for weapon combat also.

 

That already exists. That's what happens when your skills level up when you use them. Even if you cap them all, you wouldn't be able to put them all (effectively) on your action bar and, given the current attunement system, most of your spells will cost more focus and not be as effective compared to someone who's focusing entirely on a single school. That's also the same with your weaknesses not being as potent.

The whole deck system discourages hoarding all your skills...

 

One thing that I don't understand about attunement right now is if there is a downside to attuning to chaos magic? All other schools have an opposing school, but chaos doesn't seem to have one... or is it all of the others?

I raised chaos attunement a few levels and didn't notice a negative to any other schools attunement.

 

Aren't Chaos spells supposed to backfire on you?

 

Yes, but attunement lowers that chance. Perhaps they figured Chaos already has enough drawbacks.

 

They got rid of that with 5E, you no longer arbitrarily get locked out of certain magic schools, instead you just pick one set of school specific bonuses.