Spell casting has usability dropped below acceptable limits.
Posted: 20 Sep 2009, 03:13
With recent changes overall spell casting usability has finally dropped below any acceptable limits I can manage to tolerate.
Most annoying things are:
1) Discrimination of targets. IMHO, that's UNFAIR and STUPID way to balance things. Traditionally, friendly spells are usually working the same way on any target, including caster himself with same effect (so caster can benefit from own spells as anyone else can). This is completely fair, reasonable, balanced and does not requires stupid artificial explanations and traditionally implemented in most magic systems. Furthermore, I'm finding that healer who can't heal himself looks like an complete idiot, after all. Can you imagine, say, medic who fails to heal himself? Or maybe, veteran firefighter who is unable to eliminate small camp-fire while fully equipped? When someone who practices some kind of art or job fails to apply it for saving his own life, that's what we all would call "epic fail", actually. Why all mages should look like a bunch of losers and idiots? As for me, that's clear sign of some things have gone a way too artificial. Too rough and questionable methods of balancing. Please re-think this?
2) Failure rates of spells. Well, as for me, while I'm being a proficient mage in game, but I fail to heal people most of times in a real in-game scenarios. Most of times healing spell does not works at all. Should I mention this is extremely annoying and frustrating? Well, to be honest, with all these changes healing is well below any acceptable usability limits.
3) As a related issue I can see problem that healing dummies does not gives a proper rewards at all. Actually, cooperation, helping newbies and saving someone's life is are all thing worth of proper reward. Not just some "20 XP" which are useless so almost nobody will bother gaining them, right? Saving an almost killed newbie is a bold and challenging task for any healer, don't you think so?
Well, problems are outlined, some analisys are following:
As for me, major problem seems to be that "lay-on-hands" magic is virtually instant. So it haves tremendous abuse and unbalancing potential which is hard to control, especially without imposing stupid and artificial limitations on players which seems to create more troubles than solve.
My proposal is something like this: revert these changes, removing both of these concerns and replace "lay-on-hands" with spell which is an non-instant healing which is:
1) Haves devs-controllable heal rate (but noticeably better than lum). Maybe dependent on target stats and caster level, if you want to, etc.
2) does not req's lifestones (so there is reason to learn it, after all).
3) Once cast on target, further healing does not fails but also not causes useful effects except maybe adding some extra healing time or HPs to heal (a bit like rain spell, etc) but not changing heal rate, etc (so mages still have to be extra-careful in crowded places, etc - no matter what, if damage rate exceeds heal rate too much, mage would not last for a long time and can't avoid this fate without being really careful).
4) Haves simple and clear rules and works most of time.
5) Does not suffers from server lags (lum seems to have severe problems here and often delays too much due to server lags, lay-on-hands not seemed to have this problem).
6) Does not really discriminates people (i.e. works for any target, including caster, maybe with a various efficiency depending on target and it's stats though).
All this will allow mages to suffer from their weak nature in tight battle conditions without a proper defense but will eliminate all these "this thing never works right" epic fails.
Also, I bet healing should give much more XP for healing newbie who has been almost dead when you've healed him (which is a very hard but bold and brave task for any real healer, I guess). And healing a high-profile warrior from 80% HPs to 100% HPs should give much less XP points than it does now. This can be naturally explained - healing almost dead people always harder and gives more XP than healing just some minor damage (minor means that damage value small compared to overall HPs value). So as for me, you may want to re-think some healing formulas?
Also I can also propose to make lightning a bit less powerful (as just L2 spell when there is 5 levels planned AFAIK) BUT then increase iron ore amount in game (i.e. increase it's drop rate, etc). This will not help to gain anyone too much ore easily due to increased demands and numerous iron ore hunters. And this will allow people to have more fun in game and less of boring and monotonous killing of stupid yellow slimes while having just approximately same amount of XP in same time frame - just in a bit more funny and less boring manner (so there is more lightnings casting and less slimes killing involved). And for L3 I can offer to implement lightning which does not requires iron ore as a mandatory ingredient but somewhat weaker without ore, randomly fails to strike without ore or even sometimes hurts caster itself without iron ore so it's much more risky and tricky for incompetent caster (all these effects of course depending on caster's proficiency with magic I guess so skilled wizard should not look like an incompetent dummy but this should take a time, resources and efforts to get to these results).
P.S. Excuse me for angry and long post - I'm just really frustrated because all these "epic fails" caused some of my friends to die in a battles because of my personal failures as a mage and I consider these as my own "epic fail", actually. Either I was not able to heal them in a timely manner due to overcomplicated spell rules, or they died because I died myself while trying to deal with these a-way-too-tricky rules and ouch-never-working-spells, retrying (non-working) spell casting until finally falling eaten by monsters while trying to save someone's else life which has been almost hopeless with current rules of spell casting causing massive failures in spell casting anyway.
Most annoying things are:
1) Discrimination of targets. IMHO, that's UNFAIR and STUPID way to balance things. Traditionally, friendly spells are usually working the same way on any target, including caster himself with same effect (so caster can benefit from own spells as anyone else can). This is completely fair, reasonable, balanced and does not requires stupid artificial explanations and traditionally implemented in most magic systems. Furthermore, I'm finding that healer who can't heal himself looks like an complete idiot, after all. Can you imagine, say, medic who fails to heal himself? Or maybe, veteran firefighter who is unable to eliminate small camp-fire while fully equipped? When someone who practices some kind of art or job fails to apply it for saving his own life, that's what we all would call "epic fail", actually. Why all mages should look like a bunch of losers and idiots? As for me, that's clear sign of some things have gone a way too artificial. Too rough and questionable methods of balancing. Please re-think this?
2) Failure rates of spells. Well, as for me, while I'm being a proficient mage in game, but I fail to heal people most of times in a real in-game scenarios. Most of times healing spell does not works at all. Should I mention this is extremely annoying and frustrating? Well, to be honest, with all these changes healing is well below any acceptable usability limits.
3) As a related issue I can see problem that healing dummies does not gives a proper rewards at all. Actually, cooperation, helping newbies and saving someone's life is are all thing worth of proper reward. Not just some "20 XP" which are useless so almost nobody will bother gaining them, right? Saving an almost killed newbie is a bold and challenging task for any healer, don't you think so?
Well, problems are outlined, some analisys are following:
As for me, major problem seems to be that "lay-on-hands" magic is virtually instant. So it haves tremendous abuse and unbalancing potential which is hard to control, especially without imposing stupid and artificial limitations on players which seems to create more troubles than solve.
My proposal is something like this: revert these changes, removing both of these concerns and replace "lay-on-hands" with spell which is an non-instant healing which is:
1) Haves devs-controllable heal rate (but noticeably better than lum). Maybe dependent on target stats and caster level, if you want to, etc.
2) does not req's lifestones (so there is reason to learn it, after all).
3) Once cast on target, further healing does not fails but also not causes useful effects except maybe adding some extra healing time or HPs to heal (a bit like rain spell, etc) but not changing heal rate, etc (so mages still have to be extra-careful in crowded places, etc - no matter what, if damage rate exceeds heal rate too much, mage would not last for a long time and can't avoid this fate without being really careful).
4) Haves simple and clear rules and works most of time.
5) Does not suffers from server lags (lum seems to have severe problems here and often delays too much due to server lags, lay-on-hands not seemed to have this problem).
6) Does not really discriminates people (i.e. works for any target, including caster, maybe with a various efficiency depending on target and it's stats though).
All this will allow mages to suffer from their weak nature in tight battle conditions without a proper defense but will eliminate all these "this thing never works right" epic fails.
Also, I bet healing should give much more XP for healing newbie who has been almost dead when you've healed him (which is a very hard but bold and brave task for any real healer, I guess). And healing a high-profile warrior from 80% HPs to 100% HPs should give much less XP points than it does now. This can be naturally explained - healing almost dead people always harder and gives more XP than healing just some minor damage (minor means that damage value small compared to overall HPs value). So as for me, you may want to re-think some healing formulas?
Also I can also propose to make lightning a bit less powerful (as just L2 spell when there is 5 levels planned AFAIK) BUT then increase iron ore amount in game (i.e. increase it's drop rate, etc). This will not help to gain anyone too much ore easily due to increased demands and numerous iron ore hunters. And this will allow people to have more fun in game and less of boring and monotonous killing of stupid yellow slimes while having just approximately same amount of XP in same time frame - just in a bit more funny and less boring manner (so there is more lightnings casting and less slimes killing involved). And for L3 I can offer to implement lightning which does not requires iron ore as a mandatory ingredient but somewhat weaker without ore, randomly fails to strike without ore or even sometimes hurts caster itself without iron ore so it's much more risky and tricky for incompetent caster (all these effects of course depending on caster's proficiency with magic I guess so skilled wizard should not look like an incompetent dummy but this should take a time, resources and efforts to get to these results).
P.S. Excuse me for angry and long post - I'm just really frustrated because all these "epic fails" caused some of my friends to die in a battles because of my personal failures as a mage and I consider these as my own "epic fail", actually. Either I was not able to heal them in a timely manner due to overcomplicated spell rules, or they died because I died myself while trying to deal with these a-way-too-tricky rules and ouch-never-working-spells, retrying (non-working) spell casting until finally falling eaten by monsters while trying to save someone's else life which has been almost hopeless with current rules of spell casting causing massive failures in spell casting anyway.