fate wrote:t3st3r,
thanks for the feedback! Your suggestion (regarding healing spells) indeed is one of the options that we're considering.

Nice to know. It could be not a perfect solution, though. At least I can see one disadvantage: this will make spell more similar to lum. As for me, any solution is fine as long as it does not causes unfair discrimination, too artificial things and does not hurts overall usability too much. So if someone can offer a better solution or at least something which will both allow you to balance things if needed and will not cause headache and frustration, I guess it's welcome to post their proposals for dev's review as well, yeah? I'm just bothered myself of thinking how to achieve goal of ability to rebalance things if needed and still not annoy players too much.
Then conclusion has come that instant healing is quite unnatural and haves large abuse potential and too hard to control without resorting to extremely weird and/or annoying limitations which seems to cause more problems than they solve. Also, as for me, it recovers a way too much HPs in one shot for a free spell, while consuming quite few MPs, finally saying "good-bye" to balancing and welcoming it's abusive usage. For example you can quick-heal a warrior several times so warrior survives even most horrible places of TMW without any issues. Let's say, I noticed that at least some high-level warriors already suffer from lack of thrill and challenge due to lack of challenging monsters in good quantities and places where it's really possible to die anyhow easily. And instant healing makes this even worse, because it allows warriors to survive even in most horrible places without issues.
As you noted, the instant-healing property of lay-on-hands (which, by the way, is supposed to also drain the caster's HP-- a bug that we hope to close soon) makes it easy to abuse.
As for me, I would prefer such spell to consume a reasonable amount of MPs rather than HPs. Mages are already weaklings and have problems surviving in monster-populated places. And with such implementation I'm afraid that mages will die too often and quickly to be a really usable in parties/groups heading to monster-crowded places, etc. After all, there is no any use for dead mages. So I guess mages should have some options to survive even in crowded places. This surely should be challenge and thrill and should require some skills and tactics which are differ from warrior's style, of course and failures in actions sequencing should lead to mages deaths of course

.
The `failure rate' that you are referring to is in fact not a failure rate, but rather a timed (and very deterministic) limit on how frequently this spell can be cast between two people.
Surely. From dev's point of view that's 100% correct

. And that's why there are testers existing in the world, sorry

. The problem is that from
user's point of view right now all this looks like just spell which fails too often to really rely on it in a tight battle conditions in crowded places and some set of strange, tricky and not completely fair rules which seems to be too artificial and somewhat frustrating.
There may be another bug here; we'll be looking on that when we fix lay-on-hand's other issues.
Well, if we will talk about bugs, I also noticed than lum tends to delay before getting in effect after casting, sometimes up to 10-15 seconds or more, especially in crowded places. Not just I have only weakest spell to heal myself (and this seems to be quite stupid, IMHO), but also it's predictability so poor than I can't really rely on it, especially in a real battle conditions in crowded places. So I'm getting dead due to inability to heal myself for a long time, then bunch of people who relied on my healings are doomed to follow me soon this way as well (unless they're high-level warriors who not really needs healing at all most of time). And in such scenarios failure root cause is not really my faulty and wrong actions applied in wrong times but rather overall weird magic system behaviour. From my side there is basically nothing wrong with sequencing and timing magic according to events and players states (which is very challenging on it's own, especially without proper UI shortcuts). But there is so bad predictability of output that I'm completely frustrated - it's very sad when sequence of actions which expected to do things right just miserably fails.
Btw, lay-on hands seems to be better in sense of lags issues. You may want to investigate why this happens with lum.
Outside of transmutation spells, there are no spells right now that have a failure rate, and even for transmutation that rate can be overcome with practice.
As for me, that's actually quite good and funny behaviour. I have nothing against of it and I surely had some fun learning to use these spells and improving them. The only minor issue here is that you're better to give more clear and visible hint to players at earlier phases of game that player have to vary spells. Surely I can resort to "read source Luke" but usual player can't and from my experience players are often learning this from other players rather than from in-game hints. While this is good, so important hint is better to be reworked to be more visible. I'm personally found how spells xp points counted in sources after suffering from troubles with magic bugs like 733 what forced me to learn how all this works to understand if I see desired behaviour or not. And only much later I encountered proper hint in game, while I guess it should be exactly opposite. As for me, it could be also not so bad idea to award some (much smaller) spell xp points for repeated casting. Smth like upscale whole system say, 5 times and reward 1 point for repeated casting and 5 for spells who were rewarded by 1 point, 10 points for spells who were worth of 2 points, etc. This will relax missing hint to being just several times slower in learning magic. As for me, that's enough to punish those who fails to read hints
We may reconsider that (this is magic, after all, not some predictable thing), but the failure rate would be in the less-than-1% range.
I can imagine something like this: say, you're just starting to deal with lightnings while you're virtually nothing as spellcaster yet. Lightnings are dangerous and tricky. I see no reasons why they can't harm caster or fail at the begin of mage's way. After all, bow and sword fails to hit hard monsters in begin of game until player raises stats and getting familiar with it. Same could be somewhat OK for some magic I guess, though failure rates and principles probably should be a bit different (if implemented at all). And failures for offensive spells are not very annoying (after all people lives with a non-perfect weapons and takes it as granted). However frequent and numerous failures of healing spells (while I'm actually seems to be quite skilled spellcaster) seems to be too annoying for me.
For higher magic level(s) I can also propose something funny like a "thunderstorm" spell (basically inspired by arrow hail and chain lightning from HMM). I.e. some lightning-based spell which will be an area-effect (like an arrow hail but much more powerful and feared). Of course it have to be expensive, hard to cast and also dangerous for caster (and maybe even other players?). Surely caster can be occasionally hit by bolt while staying in the middle of thunderstorm but in exchange it could be a real fun to cast this into large bunch of nasty monsters and then try to escape this mess without getting killed, getting not so bad XP for killing a bunch of nasty monsters if all this succeeds.
We've almost finished collecting data on the gameplay and will soon be able to alter the game content again.
Wow! You have managed to measure things like XP growth rate, etc anyhow? Are there any options to know what you've learned from collected data? (that's just to have unbiased view of current in-game things and will not be abused by me for any personal gains - actually it's easy to notice it looks like gaining XP is not my top priority in game now - I'm rather just trying to have some fun

).
As you suggested correctly, changing lay-on-hands is a bad idea, but we're hoping to have some measures in place that will allow magic users to continue playing even though 3/5 of their planned career-specific content is still missing.
I understand it's challenging and can cause numerous balancing issues and need to re-balance things lots of times and I'm not going to blame anyone for this on it's own

. I'm simply against making things too artificial, too unreliable, discriminating people for no good reason or simply hardly usable in total. You can notice, I attempted to take these things into consideration when proposing above changes to lay-on hands, do not know if I succeeded though. By reading sources I understood that magic system allows implementing levels sequentially and this surely challenging task in term of keeping things balanced.
I can't predict what exactly we will do, since we don't have all the data yet. But it is possible that we will add some explicitly temporary features for magic users, i.e., features that will vanish or change their behaviour as soon as magic level 3 is released (or before that if we choose to redesign, of course.)
I can understand this. Now you actually have to make it possible to play as if there were all 5 levels while having only 2, so it's tricky and surely requires changes when new parts are getting implemented. And I have nothing against this on it's own and even can understand that some requirements could be uplifted and readjusted, some spells re-balanced (including making them worse), etc. I'm only have something against overall usability issues and only certain changes and I'm trying to argue why I have certain point of view

.
Though as for me it will be nice if you will post expected changes and learn what people think about them before applying them. I do not know if this will work fine though.
There is one question that I have for you, though: do you consider lifestone usage a serious issue? When playing, I never seemed to have trouble finding components for them and still have a fair stock of lifestones on my character, but I haven't had any time to participate in hour-long `grind-fests' lately(nor am I sure whether I could justify spending time like that in the first place).
No, finding components for lifestones not seems to be a real problem, especially after learning magic to create them from easy and cheap items (and I consider learning some things via quests is a part of in-game fun). But some problem with them is that they could end in the middle of battle if you're careless or battle is long. You will have to attempt to create them, use them and not to die in same time and this will unlikely to succeed in crowded places since it requires much time and spells seems to be rate-limited and then healing spells failing on their own due to introduced changes. Then, when you will die due to lack of healing in fruitless attempts to handle all these tricky things when your magic constantly fails to work and you're under monsters attack, other people will follow you soon to their menhirs. If your healing has been anyhow really required for them. And I see no clue to try to heal people who does not really needs it (btw, this seems to be a problem with high-level warriors).
I concede that we will have numbers that will answer your question more objectively soon, but you may have insights here that might escape our statistical analyses.
-- fate
Statistical analyses can't catch overall usability issues (and that's what annoyed me most with recent magic system changes). I have nothing against fair re-balancing game on it's own - balanced gameplay is what we all want to have, I guess. But analyses can provide a lots of useful info for balancing and ideas what to rebalance so it's great you're doing all this. If you can share some numbers or conclusions, so I can have more neutral and unbiased view of in-game balance, this will be great.