Good timing. I was just composing my own suggestion along similar lines. My suggestion is to be able to specify where the mana is coming from. For instance, ">prep bolt 15 cambrinth" would take 15 mana from my cambrinth and none from attunement (assuming I had 15 mana stored).

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This idea may have worked in another time and another place, but here it immediately fell on its face and went "Durp durp." - Armifer

Have one little issue with this idea.. I don't really believe it's more efficient.

At upper levels of magic, I almost always tend to prep a spell at minimum and harness up to the cap. It's always going to be easier to do it that way, imho. It's already possible to draw only a certain amount of mana from cambrinth (if you charge a camb orb to max, or 105ish mana, it will only draw out 70 if you're casting a spell that caps at 70), you're just hindering yourself by saying only "X" amount of mana can go into "spell".

The way it is right now allows me to easily figure out exactly how long I need to prep a spell to cast it <at cap>. For instance, as a cleric I know it takes me roughly 10 seconds each to cast MaPP at 45, MPP at 60, Vigil at 70, PFE at 55, but that I need full prep to cap Benediction or Murrula's Flames.

As far as prepping spells at whatever mana that I would like to see would be the same thing at the high end as at the low end, i.e...

>prep pfe
Since you're not feeding enough power into the spell pattern to make it coherent, you quickly work your way to the minimum required.
You begin chanting a prayer to invoke the Protection from Evil spell.
=min prep

whereas

prep pfe 300
Since you're feeding too much power into the spell to make it worthwhile you quickly work you way down to the maximum.
You begin chanting...
=max prep

Would clear up some of those horrible typos on prep that you don't notice that suddenly leave you with 5% attunement.

Segmere
Shadow Priest, Baron's Own Militia

"The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep." ~WC Fields

>>Isn't it intentional that you CANNOT cast a spell solely from cambrinth?

It may be, and if so I'm curious as to why. It's never made sense to me that we can store power in and draw power from cambrinth, but no matter what we have to use X amount of attunement to power the spell.

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This idea may have worked in another time and another place, but here it immediately fell on its face and went "Durp durp." - Armifer

>>It may be, and if so I'm curious as to why. It's never made sense to me that we can store power in and draw power from cambrinth, but no matter what we have to use X amount of attunement to power the spell.

I play almost exclusively barbarians and thieves lately, so take this with a grain of salt I suppose.

I'm pretty sure the concept behind it is that in order to create the basic spell pattern, you have to use direct manipulation of the mana streams (or something like that).

It's essentially analogous to the concept of being able to operate an automobile engine with any number of combustible substances in theory (similar to powering a spell with cambrinth or from harnessed streams) but you still have to begin the process by using a spark drawn on power from the battery. Minimum prep is simply the lowest amount of energy you can use to establish that basic pattern, and beyond that you can fuel the established pattern from whatever source(s) you want to. The idea is (I think) that you can't manipulate spell energy stored in cambrinth, or 'held streams' in a fine enough manner to produce the subtleties needed to actually establish a spell pattern with them.

At least that's my understanding.

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Ogdaro

Gotcha.

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This idea may have worked in another time and another place, but here it immediately fell on its face and went "Durp durp." - Armifer

>Whether or not cambrinth/held mana contribute to overcoming MR depends on the type of spell and the type of MR.

I don't belive they contribute to the BMR/undead MR type.

I'm not sure what other kind you're talking about, unless you mean barrier spells.

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Magic's Death Caraamon Makdasi, Gor'Tog Barbarian
Hunta Talna Kortok, built by Gor'Togs, for Gor'Togs
http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/caraamon/home.html
Blunts for Sale:
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I've never done extensive testing casting at barbarians, but as far as I know BMR is just the same MR everyone has - just bigger numbers?

Undead MR is different from generic MR and generally a lot more restrictive in what will break it. The ghist is that harnessed mana breaks MR and Undead MR in particular except for certain classes of spells like non-lethal area-of-effect spells, where additional mana does nothing.

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

>>The way you prep spells isn't fundamentally changing, although the prepping over max putting it down to max is in fact happening.

Was there any benefit at all to preparing above the mana cap anyway?

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~Leilond
http://www.elanthipedia.com/wiki/Leilond
http://soundsoftime.bravehost.com

>The way you prep spells isn't fundamentally changing,

Dang. Will cyclic spells work similarly? Will you set a pulse number, which is how much is drawn from attunement each pulse, and then any held mana or cambrinthed mana will be added on top of that?

>Dang. Will cyclic spells work similarly?

The Cyclic prep will work more like you were describing, where you set the value and then your sources of mana contribute to make it happen each pulse.

-Z

>The way you prep spells isn't fundamentally changing, although the prepping over max putting it down to max is in fact happening.

Will cambrinth auto-cap itself? It's not a big deal when I typo 'prep pfe 300'. It is when I typo 'charge gold armband 300' and get 2+ minute RT.

We'll do a more informative post on this stuff shortly, I'd rather make it in the GM announcements folder so it's easier for people to find down the road instead of answering a lot of piecemeal stuff.

-Z

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Zeyurn.

I don't like this idea because it makes it harder to fine tune your spell once you've prepped. For me it actually gives you less control of how you cast your spell.

It just seems like a suggestion to make it easier for lazy people to control how much goes into their spells so they don't accidentally backfire.

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* Sahfra was just struck down!
Tachid smugly says, "I'm telling Lyras. We should replace you.

>>Making it easier to manage things isn't a bad thing.

It doesn't make it easier to manage though. It just changes how you have to manage it while removing fine control after you've prepared the spell.

>>It would also let you use a large cambrinth device and draw only what you need on each cast.

This I can see merit in, just not done the way suggested(seems this is how the cyclic spells will work). Maybe using another command to say how much to take from your cambrinth.

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* Sahfra was just struck down!
Tachid smugly says, "I'm telling Lyras. We should replace you.