I haven't been very engaged with all the information about the change over to 3.0 so I spent the last couple hours going through the forums. I'm still at a loss for the issue I'm having with dealing Damage with TM.

With the TM feats and 809 targeted it's taking me around 22 targeted casts of 30ish mana burn to kill a super celpeze. It's taking me 12 attacks and way way way less time to kill one with 609 ranks of large edged. I'm not seeing much of a difference in damage dealt as I increase mana put into the spell. I know that killing isn't supposed to be as fast as it used to be, but right now my melee skill that is 200 ranks lower is FAR more effective at putting out damage.

TKS and TKT seem to do better because of their multi hit functions. PD is iffy where sometimes it seems to outperform burn and sometimes it takes just as long.

It seems to me like the damage I'm doing with single shot targeted spells is quite low. Is that the case? Do supers just happen to have good resistances to that type of damage? Am i just doing it all wrong?

I know for training TM TKS is obviously the way to go, but I still want to have a handle on how to deal damage with our single target TM spells for situations where I can't just attack everything in the room.

-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

Ah, okay. thanks.

-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

The problem with TM damage is that it requires so much mana to DO any real damage. Even as a 100+ mage you still can't keep up that kind of mana expenditure for very long! You can kill a critter with a sword a lot faster than you can charging to 100 3 times to kill it. The mana caps on TM spells should be lower as they are meant to be cast over and over and over.

Right now the only spell I would really think to use for hunting is SLS and that one isn't even available at the moment.

His observation wasn't about learning.

I was talking about the damage of the spell, not learning speed. I can lock the skill with smaller casts, and never kill anything. I am talking about the raw power of the spells. Right now it seems that magic is so far disconnected from using a real weapon for combat that I might as well just go back and pick up a sword.

I have been doing further testing with PD, TKT, TKS, etc tonight against things like elba Darvager's and oshu and the like. (none of them teach me TM at all, so they should be very easy, right?) It seems that there really isn't a lot of difference in spell power between a 30 cast and a 98 cast. In all cases I did a full target.

TKT is the only one that seemed to worry about mana above 30...as I got more hits more often (5 shards fired more reliably) but the damage of the impact never went above 6/23 at the highest...mostly 4/23 - 5/23 in damage (this was using shards from a broken moonblade) So really it came out to an average of 5 casts per kill...with anything over 30 mana.

prepping DO at 20 mana took 6 casts to kill on average. 60 mana cast. averages to 5 casts to kill. 90 mana casts are 5 casts to kill on average

prepping pd at 20 mana takes about 6 casts to kill on average. at 60 mana it averages to 5 casts to kill. 90 mana casts are 5 casts to kill on average.

given the sheer amount of time and mana the extra mana (anything above 20 mana) just doesn't seem worth the effort. The damage certainly doesn't scale... or if it does the sheer amount of time we have to wait for the next "full target" negates any of the stuns that were caused from the previous round.

with the same critters, with weapons more than 300 below that TM I can kill with about 10 swings (averaging 3 seconds per swing) for about 30 seconds (let us give it 50 seconds in case I got a lot of 4-5 second swings in there). Even with the magical feats for faster targeting and combat spell prep I am still looking at at least 1.5 - 2 minutes per kill... and these don't teach me anything. it only gets worse if I hunt at level.

so from my testing, magic doesn't scale to mana put into it. and magic is not comparable to using a weapon...at all.

Then give it a smaller mana range and have it scale accordingly. if we have walls, then there is no point to scaling... and if I can't get above 6/23 damage on things below my skill, then something is wrong. I shouldn't take 3 times longer to kill something with magic than I do with a pointy stick.

>>Then give it a smaller mana range and have it scale accordingly. if we have walls, then there is no point to scaling... and if I can't get above 6/23 damage on things below my skill, then something is wrong.

You can get above 6/23, often with a near-snapcast. Go into rats and try it out. You just need a much higher variance of skill to break the damage caps now than you did in 2.0, where it was often either miss or hit for 20/23. Mana ranges are a nice option to have, especially for stuff like PvP barrier spells.

>>I shouldn't take 3 times longer to kill something with magic than I do with a pointy stick.

It's only taking 3x as long because you're casting at the absolute cap, which is not necessary or advisable unless you're trying to overcome a ward. Keeping in mind that anything above X mana is only getting you longer casting time for no additional damage (because of the cap), try putting in about a fourth of the mana. Suddenly you're doing the same damage and killing much quicker.

>>The main issue to the OP (with burn) is that Celpeze are 100% immune to elemental damage, and burn does something like 75%-90% fire damage.

AFAIK, they have a strong resistance to Fire. Not immunity. Not Elemental in total.

---

TG, TG, GL, et al.

"Disagreement with the fundamental plan at this point is akin to supporting Richard III vs the Tudors."
-Raesh

>>AFAIK, they have a strong resistance to Fire. Not immunity. Not Elemental in total.


100% immunity to cold, electric, and fire, as I was told by a GM when testing WM spells on the test server.

rezzing my thread here..

"What you're experiencing is not poor damage scaling for mana expenditure, but a hard cap on damage."

Could you elaborate more on hard cap on damage? Playing around with a little PvP tonight I found myself really frustrated by the damage output I was able to do. I posted the worst of it under complaints where a capped TKT was unable to kill a 10th circle ranger with less than 50 defenses with 800 TM on my side. However, PD was hitting like a wiffle bat too. Right now weapons are WAY out performing my TM damage on players and monsters at hundreds of ranks less.

-Serc

""It's a hell of a thing, killing some text. Take away all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's got, and all the numbers and letters and punctuation it's ever gonna have." -- Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven."-- Bahb.

<<Right now weapons are WAY out performing my TM damage on players and monsters at hundreds of ranks less.>>

Same, and with standard weapons because I'm a cheapskate.

>>Yea, can't really say I understand the recent downtweaking of magic, considering weapons are pretty blatantly OP, both in terms of damage and training.

There are two things going on which can seem like they run to contrary purposes:

1) Does a spell fit relative to other spells?
2) Do all spells fit relative to other forms of attack?

The nerfs yesterday were driven by #1. TKT, for example, did far more damage than any other multi-shot spell due to a quirk in its design. The goal was to normalize TKT so that when we address #2 (which, by all accounts, is problematic), we are doing so with a stable, coherent, and known set of values.

The last thing I want to do is try to address a global problem with spell damage on a spell by spell basis. But to address it at a system level it first behooves me to make sure the system is in order.

-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

>>Or has TKT damage be disconnected from ammo enough that damage caps can be reached regardless of what ammo is used?

This. TKT ammo determines what kind of damage it does (slicing/impact/piercing), but the extent of the damage is now controlled by the TM templates instead of the item.

-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

>> This. TKT ammo determines what kind of damage it does (slicing/impact/piercing), but the extent of the damage is now controlled by the TM templates instead of the item.

Very cool, definitely saved a lot of the flavor. Does piercing have lodge mechanics?

<<TKT ammo determines what kind of damage it does (slicing/impact/piercing), but the extent of the damage is now controlled by the TM templates instead of the item.>>

How does this work for non-weapon TKT ammo, or slivers? How do you know what damage type it's doing? Is there a default? Some basic logic to the type of item in question? It seems like it would be, or would have been, an insane process to code all TKT-able items with a physical damage type.

Say you have base damage of the spell of 100, driven by the TM template, then one ammo item (Item A) that appraises 100 puncture, 0 impact, 0 slice, and another item (Item B) that appraises 10 puncture, 30 impact, 60 slice... If you cast at that capped base damage level of 100, item A and B both do the same damage? Does Item B do 10 puncture, 30 impact, 60 slice damage, or does it default to 100 slice damage?