New Spell Ideas and Revisiting Older Ones

[bell chick]

new spells can be a worry anyways because as the game stands now mages are by far the most powerful class. adding to this power without giving the other 2 classes anything could be a bad idea

[mistergrey]

That is biased, I'm sorry. Any archer with the speed skill, and especially the banshee bow, can take out any mage easily unless caught by surprise. When against mobs, archers have the highest potential damage per second due to their speed. A mage, even with 100 agility, cant cast fast enough to match that damage, especially with constant criticals which mages can not ever get.

Magic level 3 has been delayed long enough, and I have avoided adding More powerful attacks or hugely unfair advantages. Instead, I've chosen to give both paths of magic a distinctive theme to their spells, which can be exploited by opponents. Light mages will not be much more powerful damage wise, though they will have more support magic. Dark mages will have very little in the way of support/defense magic, and most of that will come with a price.

Since the Illia quest, I can't really agree that mages are by far the most powerful, at all. If anything, warriors could use some boosts and better equipment/weapons, but leaving magic to stagnate while improving the other classes will only result in a lot of disappointed players who prefer to play with magic, but have gotten bored of only 2 decent attack spells.

[tsukinokage]

I think everyone can agree that we owe thanks to tsukinokage, who seems to not be an active developer here, but a player... ?

No, I'm not an (active) developer, I was an active player as a mage, and commit a few bug fix ocassionaly in the past. I never had the mood stronger than now to help, still I won't become an active developer, I'll always be an ocassional contributor.

Your ideas of add sfx to magic is great, I like it, I may test your sound and give feedback(I can only say "like it" or "don't like it" regarding this topic I think) when I have time.

I haven't looked at the patch yet, but please make sure you're working off the 'test' branch, not 'master'.

It would be better to add a new function to magic-expr.cpp (which is functions that return a value) rather than changing the signature in magic.stmt.cpp (top-level operations, that don't return a value).
The function should be general ("get master id") and the check against actual player id should be done in the magic script.

Ok, thanks, o11c, for your information. I'll work off the test branch, and add new function to magic-expr.cpp to fix the bug I mentioned in the expand of #itenplz when I spare time to look into this.

as well, I don't believe magic exp is cumulative when levelling. I could be wrong.. but even if you have 400% experience, that will still only level you to the start of the next level as far as I know. If anyone knows better, feel free to correct me.

Sorry, that was not 400%, was above 450% according to the wiki page. And about cumulative, I've read the script about the mana seed when helping LOF developers to enable level 3 magic, and I actually test it, so you're wrong here, the magic exp is cumulative.

[mistergrey]

Sorry, that was not 400%, was above 450% according to the wiki page. And about cumulative, I've read the script about the mana seed when helping LOF developers to enable level 3 magic, and I actually test it, so you're wrong here, the magic exp is cumulative.

Well I haven't had a stable server to test things on, and being on Windows atm, it's been a pain every time I've had to set the server back up when I reformat. If magic exp is indeed cumulative in the next level, this again brings me to something I said earlier: How fun will the new magic levels be, if every mage has just built up enough m exp to instantly go from magic 2 to 4 or 5? The new spells give larger amounts of magic exp than the ones in game now, and this was to compensate for the wait and higher amounts needed. As well, dark mages have thus far been kind of screwed compared to light path mages, so while light mages will surely breeze through those levels, most dark mages will have to do it all from the start, on top of the long time they've waited for any benefit to being dark mages.

I feel it is more practical to release the levels one at a time, since that way spells can be made that plan ahead for further levels. As I said, lightning in particular is free at higher levels, and numerous spells have such a condition included. While enabling magic 5 may not break balance, it still requires spells being written with the intent to change them again when the next set of spells comes out... either that, or mages will just sit with level 5 magic enabled, but no way to access the next levels until someone adds to the mana seed script/enables that part as well. At the very least, allowing players early access to levels 4 and 5 would mean lightning would be drastically decreased in damage to compensate... or would just never be made free.

[o11c]

Anyone with full magic experience will automatically gain a level when touching the Mana Seed. It is possible that some people have enough experience to go all the way up to level 5. But remember, experience is only gained when alternating spells that consume something.

And the experience required goes up a LOT - 40000 to go from level 4 to level 5, compared to 1200 to go from level 1 to 2. And there is still the quirk that after you level up, you are less effective than on others ... though that's only applicable for a few spells. I *do* think some of the scripts are buggy since the transition cost from 5 to 6 - even though it won't be available - is 0. So, do not attempt to release level 5

At level 3, flar is free, which is reasonable, but ingrav is not, so I think level 3 only would be a good goal for a first release, and only release level 4 much, much, much later. Of course, you still need to look into how this integrates with skill focusing.

My guess is: level 3 in one brand of magic comes when you are level 3 in general magic and have focused on level 3 in that branch. Level 4 comes with mastery (aka level 10 in a skill).

[tsukinokage]

I introduced pc_id() and mob_master_id() functions into magic under https://github.com/qiuhw/tmwa/tree/expand_magic
and fixed the bug I mentioned regarding the change of #itenplz.

test and feedback is welcomed.

[o11c]

I introduced pc_id()

There's already fun_hash_entity for that.

[tsukinokage]

There's already fun_hash_entity for that.

Ok, thanks for the info. Just did another commit both in the server repo and the server data repo to eliminate the pc_id() function I added.