>>It's something we tried, and failed, to do in Magic 3.

Out of curiosity, how was it tried?

>>Out of curiosity, how was it tried?

Warding was originally conceived as an active defense skill. The major problem we ran into was finding ways to train it in a game with relatively few magic-using critters. To be reasonable as an active defense skill, it needs to be something only taught in combat, but at the same time we didn't have nearly enough or broad enough coverage of magic using critters to let people train it up the ladder.

And part of this falls into the "is it fun?" territory. Even if we had made an effort to make a magic-user ladder, we'd have condemned virtually everyone to ignore what diversity does exist among critter choices because keeping your magical defenses up would be a necessity in PvP.

Ultimately we decided the problem was unsolvable within what we were willing to do to the game (and bear in mind we did a lot to the game with 3.0) and abandoned it for refurbishing the SvS model.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

>Well, no. I am totally willing to let guilds live and die based on their skill set placement. Whenever someone suggests a Thief or Barbarian use a non-magic skill to power their let's-not-kid-ourselves-this-is-magical abilities, I counter-suggest giving Moon Mages generous +tohit +dmg bonuses to moonblades.

Not trying to be difficult, but doesn't TM make that a moot point? TM is a perfectly reasonable means of generating offense, even physical forms of offense. Debilitation is as important as being able to hit someone with a sword or spell in 3.x.

I watch mages rely exclusively on TM to win fights every week against people who fight the same creatures. Hell, outside eliminate-backstabs, weapons don't come within a mile of matching cyclic TM + aimed TM + preloaded TM damage. Not even dual load can touch it and dual load can do some nasty damage.

I always tell people to train at least 10 weapons if they want to PvP, but that's not because I think they'll use all 10. The best clerics I've watched know don't ever pull out weapons and the best warmies I've watched only pull out a weapon when they want to toy with someone. Moonies might be the exception, but I often only see even them use weapons as nothing more than TKT fodder nowadays.

TM isn't as weak as it was in 3.0, not by a long shot.

As a side note, one discussion we've had internally is that it's possible the damage numbers themselves might not be out of sorts so much as mana might need a review for how effective it's being as a limiting force, especially for Cyclics. Something to think about.

Our initial intention behind Cyclics were that only the most advanced MUs could cast normally and keep a Cyclic up, most people would have to dedicate themselves to the Cyclic to keep it up and effective. That obviously did not happen, and soon we'll need to decide whether to rebalance due to the status quo or pound on Cyclic costs until they're where we originally envisioned.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

That really is the main issue IMO. Being able to cast 3 spells or so and then being completely out of mana is not at all enjoyable, and is a large part of why magic feels so ineffective in PvP. You either cast not at cap, and hit like a wet noodle, or you cast at cap, and only get three or so good casts. It's analogous to you having to wait 2 minutes every three bow shots.

- Starlear, Warrior Mage and Lieutenant of Ilithi's Crystal Vanguard -

Ah, the delicate dance. We don't necessarily want people to do 100 mana preps all the time, and system-wise the "balance point" is not at 100. That is, you're getting an even shot / normal damage at some point below 100 and anything above it is an -- honestly, modest -- advantage. Of course, people will choose 100 prep over 50 prep for the same reason they choose kertig over steel.

I'm not sure how to disentangle expectations from mana balance from damage values. Not without a Magic 4 that does away with variable mana altogether.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

<<I've rolled in a change to the random factor that should help keep things more reasonable for folks in the higher stat ranges. I've also changed the range that the random affects to shift it a little closer to neutral. It's still skewed toward the defender, though slightly less so.>>

Thanks for adjusting it. The result of this tweak is that I'm able to affect the drakes with NB at 35 mana pretty consistently (compared to 30 before all this and 55 before the tweak. It's possible that I might have been able to get away with less than 30 before, but hadn't really experimented much). I've regained the ability to affect cabalists with Innocence and missile-range Compel some of the time, but not always. I'd consider it pretty reasonable where it sits, but I obviously don't know how far toward the defender's favor you were intending to nudge things.

And if anyone's keeping score, I was mistaken in my guess at how Innocence works before. It seems to be a periodic pulsing contest against engaged things rather than only checking on the act of starting to advance. Turns out it's easier to tell what's happening when you've only got one thing trying to engage you.

Thanks,
-Life Sustainer Karthor

I think moon mages might just be in a worse position re: mana. I think nerve damage may have been a more fair limiting aspect.

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>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

>If I had to choose between one cyclic spell and several standard buffs, I would probably stop using cyclic spells while hunting. :-(

It almost sounds like that's the intention?

We may have a fundamental disagreement on this part, but I don't consider it particularly onerous to ask players that want to play at peak efficiency + keep cyclics up to step outside of combat once every 30-40 minutes to recharge their buffs and get their cyclic going again.

I love you all but I never promised you uninterrupted combat scripting.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

<<IMO most players (including myself!) tend to be more the "target spell"/do a bunch of other combat stuff/cast-types. We don't like to "waste" those few seconds doing mana management when we could instead spend it on two or three combat moves.

This is me. I used to add cambrinth and harness to tm/debil casts, but it seriously slowed down the rate my weapons locked so I stopped. The extra trickle of arcana and attunement experience was not worth the loss of weapon bits.

<<fundamental difference

I don't think that's what I'm asking. SLS effectively shuts down the use of debilitation spells while in combat, because I can't maintain the cost of both. I've already sacrificed buff strength while using SLS because I use only about half the mana I would normally put into it which is already less than my cap. How I run with mana is I set a threshold of mana where if I drop below it I don't cast again until I regenerate past it. In order to give myself some room to cast emergency spells I set this at 40%. Using SLS even at min prep makes me reach this threshold fairly quickly (unless it's one of those rare 19/21 across the board lunar mana days) and once I drop below it barely ever goes back above it even when I don't cast other spells.

I.e. the situation isn't use a cyclic and sacrifice the strength of your debilitation and buffs, it is use a cyclic and sacrifice using all other spells. Sure I could go buff every half hour and regenerate mana, but I still wouldn't be able to use debilitation. At least this is the case at my skill levels of most magic 550-600 with tm/debil just shy of 400. Maybe that's not considered 'high' but it's not exactly low either. If cyclic are meant to be a high level ability and high level is defined as 1000+ ranks, then so be it. Hopefully that won't be the case, however. And maybe this is just a moon mage thing/concern to the cost of our only truely useful debuffs and one cyclic spell combined with mana levels that are mostly out of our control.

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>>DR-Armifer: I seriously wish I could find it. The methods I've contemplated late at night are all either ineffectual or too draconian.

Unfortunately, it seems like attempts to curb uninterrupted combat scripting just end up frustrating more casual players without affecting power players. (For example, with mind murk, the power players just added a sleep mode to their hunting scripts, continuing to rack up kills and loot even when experience was taken off the table.)

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And I'm almost scared to ask where Bards are in all of this talk of cyclic costs. They are rather more cyclic dependent, although I suspect they are given a bit more leeway in terms of cost since cyclics are their thing and a lot of their cyclics are lower tier.

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A major issue with cyclics imo is how extremely variable their mana costs/limitations are. You have a spell like SLS with extreme limits on casting that at the same time eats mana like a fat girl eats cake and then you have other cyclic spells that are not mana hogs (in comparison) without any other limiations save the single cyclic restriction. SLS in particular should probably cost about 50% less mana when considering all the limitations on casting.

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Circle 80 warmage(300s skills), cyclics are not worth the trouble to utilize them in combat. Keeping cambrinth charged is an annoyance, roundtime i'd rather spend on swinging a weapon and maintaining balance. The learning is so abysmal from using them (and the damage being very minimal) that I don't bother anymore. charging/pulsing out of cambrinth moves Arcana decently, but i can do that out of combat just as well. Nerfing cyclics further just means removal from spellbook instead of occasional tinkering.

Cyclic spellcasting should be a slightly less than optimal teaching method vs regular spells.I would trade not being able to cast spells with cyclic spells teaching say 80% of what regular spells do (including multiple critter hit bonuseS) ala huge upkeep/mana requirements. They could also be made a bit more fun with the ability to fine tune(i.e. slower/faster pulse).

Warmages have plenty of damage capabilities from martial or magical sources. Adding a little more damage to eat up precious mana and gain minimal experience just isn't worth it.

Back on subject of SvS and PvP, Debilitation ranks should count towards success at a base 10% vs their stats, with bonuses on mana added and relevant caster stats up to 1000 ranks, after that diminish the returns to say 1%. The idea is your 40 <stat> ranks should be equal to my 400 debilitation ranks, but give me a little bonus as attacker, capping my mana potential, and full prep. Snapcasting debilitation spells in PvP should require a gross disparagement between player skills/stats. On equal footing, if i dedicate the time to a full prep instead of doing spell damage(double loss for loss of damage spell prep time), i should have the same chance as i would with an equal amount of target ranks (roughly) to hit that same target. Higher skill ranges could also demand that full prep to have a chance of success (since we're looking at 100+ stat vs 1000+ ranks.

Also, hunting with debilitation is too easy.. fast learning, easy to script, and can nearly snapcast (about 5-7 second wait) minimum preps to mindlock all day (and setup easymode for weapon training ala tingle/mark of arhat/vertigo/ice patch/frostbite. I should only want to cast 1-2 impairment spells when killing a critter, not snapcast 5 because it's so fast and easy.


tl:dr buff cyclic damage/xp (not nerf), include skill parity in debilitation pvp, nerf pve debilitation

p.s. after reviewing, had the idea of overprep for increased success chances with debil in pvp. thoughts?

It concerns me a bit when we talk about lowering damage more. The general consensus among people I've talked with who engage in PvP regularly is that damage is too low already outside those few holy crap abilities. From my own observations, TM seems to be around bow damage at mana cap which seems perfectly reasonable.

My point regarding debilitation being equally necessary among all guilds doesn't stand on TM damage being what it is. At high ranks, 1k+, people have near or over 200 defensive stance points, 100 in most or all stats, can cap all their spells and have every spell they need to function optimally in combat. A couple of weeks ago, I watched someone with over 1300 base ranks in a weapon (~1600 buffed) struggle mightily to hit someone with ~1k unbuffed (~1200 defenses) while under the effects of vertigo. Yes, dispel is a thing but I've had people come right back at me with another tremor immediately after the dispel to keep me under its effects for virtually the entire fight, so I don't think it's the solution.

We were told that the reason it's tough to hit something or someone until weapons surpass defenses by some margin is PvE and that we're expected to use debilitation to make up the gap. If debilitation becomes a magic rank heavy thing, then that would likely render it unusable for magic tertiary guilds in at-level combat creating more imbalance. The current mana + SvS system kinda balances things.

The PvP balance problem goes deeper than AE, BG and the other couple of nutty abilities in the game. It's deeper even than barriers and it's not because of normal TM spells. Some things just never made sense, like a spell that causes opponents to fall over and debuff offense (because collapsing is not enough of an offensive debuff?) in the hands of a guild that can buff all defenses (while on the subject of tertiary weaknesses...). Other things just need a diminishing returns mechanism to prevent abuse.

Are people trying to keep cyclic spells going full blast or are they finding a happy medium?

I don't know if cyclic spells notably changed since the mass spell preview went away, but I had very little issue running USOL at a touch or two about min prep and tossing debils left and right. I also keep RoC (or try to keep, damn anti-magic rooms or typing release and losing my cyclic) up at all times at 12-15 mana and still run my normal magic training script.

It would be a different matter totally if I'm running my cyclic at cap full blast, but I can't really do that infinitely so I don't do that unless I have some real reason to.

IMO the hardest part of mana management is still just finding a room that has good mana. Once you're there you're golden. I never really have to step out of combat to rebuff or anything, because I just prep min, harness 20 x whatever, then cast. Tossing up a full suite of spells only tends to take 2ish minutes, and I don't even leave combat for it.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

Lol, I was starting to feel good about approaching circle 70-80, now Im hearing that circle 110+ is also low circles. Game is gonna be closed down before I get to high level.

>Lol, I was starting to feel good about approaching circle 70-80, now Im hearing that circle 110+ is also low circles. Game is gonna be closed down before I get to high level.

Meh... You're in the golden circles. DR has never really been about chasing end game. It's not like you get to farm your uber purple gear once you hit 150th circle or you get some super amazing 150th circle ability. Just enjoy the ride, and PvP and do social stuff. Organized PvP is generally matched on what people hunt, so you get to fight people around your skill and it's just as impressive beating someone at 80th circle as it is at 150th circle. I've seen some really great fights among people around 200 ranks.

The game gets old quick if all you do is circle chase.