[EV][LY] The Future of Magic

Content and general development discussion, including quest scripts and server code. TMW Classic is a project comprising the Legacy tmwAthena server & the designated improved engine server based on evolHercules.


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jesusalva
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[EV][LY] The Future of Magic

Post by jesusalva »

This is a discussion thread for developers to give me their thoughts as Hello=) been poking me about, which I would usually do on the private section but there's no secret here so it makes no sense to make the discussion public for sake of transparency.

Keep in mind changes may or may not be backported to TMWA. Legacy/Evolved are theoretically the same game, after all, but Evolved has more support than Legacy to go ahead. Nothing here is final, they're still concepts. And as any conceptual work, final implementation may differ, and will only go live after testing.

The TL;DR is: Rescuing Fate's original plan trying to purge as minimum content as possible, even if that means partially purging player progress.


Changes to Magic Schools

  • Transmutation is merged with crafting. Items are always crafted with magically enhanced ore, so the process of producing an iron ingot for armor is no longer just "use an oven" but "use transmutation magic, or have an NPC use it for you".

  • Therefore, crafting will be restricted by your transmutation school level.

  • Dark Magic ceases to be a Magic School.

  • Astral Magic is branched in "Nature Bias" and "Dark Bias", which are current astral and dark magic schools respectively.

  • Poison dart is moved to Nature Magic

  • The other differences in the biases are ruled by https://git.themanaworld.org/evolved/se ... #note_3446 (aka. current consensus)

  • Life Magic may also have the same biases from Astral Magic, see note below

Changes to spell acquisition

Apart from a couple spells like "hug", all spells must be learnt before being used.

You are thus forced to do their quests in order to use them, instead of just looking up at the wiki.

The five special spells (Joyplim ─ teached by the mana stone ─ and the herb summons) will likely be either learnable by magic scrolls, or be allowed to use regardless of "learning" them, but likely the scrolls as it is also done on Evolved.

Changes to #jande and #manatez

They're added to Astral Magic, and are learned by going to the library and reading the history of TMW. Maybe we can have a quizz you need to respond before learning the spells.

Changes to Mana Seed

Original Fate's plan predict five mana seeds, one for each tier of magic.

This means that mana seed will start informing this ("this mana seed can no longer give you any power"), and there'll be maps with magic restriction (can only be accessed depending on your Magic Skill level), where the higher tier mana seeds are (Fate did left their sprites behind, no worries here).

Changes to Betsanc, Asorm, Runners, and all support magic

  • No longer work on non-party members.

  • When used, causes the timestamp and magic used to be recorded (including #itenplz)

  • If any party mate kills a monster nearby and you used support magic (based on timestamp), you receive a bonus experience

  • If you attack or use war magic, the timestamp is reset.

Changes to offensive spells

I don't know if TMWA can or cannot have an elemental system. But otherwise, they'll be refactored to use the same logic as Moubootaur Legends:

One single target, one area of damage, and one nuke for each element.

Fate had planned several skills, but most of them will either be surpassed by this, or were already hacked on a lower tier. Only fire wall will be missing and if implemented, will be an Evolved exclusive skill (possibly replacing 'hide').

Changes to magic level up

There are four things you can currently advance on:

  • Control (#abizit)

  • Magic Level

  • School Level

  • Spell Level

Evolved supports spell levels while TMWA doesn't. As usual, advancing on school level will reduce the spell costs and eliminate the need for reagents. School Level cannot be greater than general magic level. Control determines the odds of the spell failing or backfiring. Therefore, only spell level (which affects power) is undecided.

This however has a major balance flaw: Getting stronger in game makes obtaining reagents easier and increases your MP bar. So further reducing the need will both affect economy as increase too much the disparity. So it can't be done as is. And if nerfed in a general way, then raising school level isn't useful.

This requires more discussion. And please, don't ask for impossible fixes this time :lol: :lol: :lol:

Changes to Specialization

As originally planned by Fate, at Tier 4 and Tier 5, starts mastery. At first you must decide a general branch you'll follow (you can only bring three of the five schools to T4, and you can't combine both astral + war), and only one school can be advanced to tier 5.

Changes to Nature Magic

Nature magic is where most of the buffs (e.g. #haste) are. I think it'll need some refactoring in overall, or it'll fall short.

Changes to Focus

They're simply too strong. A nerf is necessary, but it is low priority and I'll not disclose here what my plan would be as there's none. As an example, ragging may start raising double attack instead of critical, that would already be a nerf. But regardless of how the nerf is done, a nerf is needed to several of them.

Nerfs are annoying, but they'll like happen Fate-style (one day, players woke up and BAM! Their spells were dealing 90% less damage. But if they maxed out Astral Soul and gave up on trying to recover e.g. critical rate, they could recover this damage. That's partially how focus was implemented btw).

The fact that all focuses are affected by a "primary stat" is also a source of woes in case of speed focus, for example.

Changes to Tutorial

Confringo is removed.

Morgan is removed.

You learn the basic non-elemental magic attack (...which, currently, is confringo) with Tanisha, compulsorily, instead of needing to add 5 intelligence points. Same goes for Slingshot. So yes, prepare to need to help Tanisha three times.

Life Magic & Necromancy

In my opinion, even necromancy belongs to Life Magic. UnLife is still a form of life.

So Life Magic has either the use of reagents e.g. Lifestones, or the use of your own vital force e.g. necromancy.

Meaning that Life Magic may also have a Nature Bias vs Dark Bias. It would be the same as currently, but when/if you decide on the dark magic bias you would lose access to lay on hands. (But Orum or Waric would be ever so kind to teach you a replacement, and right now, it would recycle the same quest for poison dart which is going to be moved to Nature Magic).

General Thoughts

In TMW, I want everyone born a mage, knowing basic spells and magic as common knowledge, just needing to decide to pursue this knowledge or leave it in second plan. Even the most average NPC is supposed to be able to do basic magic tricks and just not doing because they have better things to spend their time on. Because they never put their mind in learning or improving magic, it obviously won't be useful in practice, but the general knowledge and sensation is there.

No immediate changes to grey bar, but I'm not sure how I'll do for Evolved (if we'll keep grey bar there or not). I am thinking I'll end up being forced to add MATK bonus and implement grey bar, unfortunately.


Discussion is now open, and the developer discussion ticket is: https://git.themanaworld.org/evolved/se ... -/issues/5

Please keep specifics (e.g. exact values) on the ticket. Forum is for more general discussion.

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Re: [EV][LY][DIS] The Future of Magic

Post by Hocus Pocus Fidibus »

jesusalva wrote: 31 Oct 2022, 13:03

Changes to Betsanc, Asorm, Runners, and all support magic

  • No longer work on non-party members.

  • When used, causes the timestamp and magic used to be recorded (including #itenplz)

  • If any party mate kills a monster nearby and you used support magic (based on timestamp), you receive a bonus experience

  • If you attack or use war magic, the timestamp is reset.

Would need some easier/faster way to form parties.
I would even go further (and make it easier at the same time): Make all support spells only work on party members and activate mandatory XP sharing (so no tracking and timestamps needed and more freedom for everybody to either be offensive or support, including roles as tank etc.). To allow sharing between players further apart in level, low level chars gain less XP then high level chars.
Also all dropped items should belong to a random party member (again, higher level players have a higher chance to get an item). That way support classes have no more disadvantages.

A way to get around the party thing is to let all players in the area just share XP in general as long as they are active (after every spell/attack a timer gets reset. Who idles or does not do any actions will get no XP after some time)

jesusalva wrote: 31 Oct 2022, 13:03

Changes to magic level up

There are four things you can currently advance on:

  • Control (#abizit)

  • Magic Level

  • School Level

  • Spell Level

Evolved supports spell levels while TMWA doesn't. As usual, advancing on school level will reduce the spell costs and eliminate the need for reagents. School Level cannot be greater than general magic level. Control determines the odds of the spell failing or backfiring. Therefore, only spell level (which affects power) is undecided.

This however has a major balance flaw: Getting stronger in game makes obtaining reagents easier and increases your MP bar. So further reducing the need will both affect economy as increase too much the disparity. So it can't be done as is. And if nerfed in a general way, then raising school level isn't useful.

This requires more discussion. And please, don't ask for impossible fixes this time :lol: :lol: :lol:

Maybe let the player decide on higher school levels if he either want reduced spell cost or reduced reagents maybe. Or school level reduces reagents while spell level instead of more power reduces mana cost.

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Re: [EV][LY][DIS] The Future of Magic

Post by jesusalva »

Forgot to mention, but for sake of easing the transition, we'll, at a later date, add all TMW magic skills to the skill tab. This allows us to anticipate the chat commands deprecation. They'll keep working for the foreseeable future, but deprecating before changing the behavior is always a good idea.

Keep in mind you can drag'n'drop skills from the skill window to the shortcut window.

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Re: [EV][LY][DIS] The Future of Magic

Post by Hello=) »

Actually its rather complicated topic. Whether dark magic is something on its own right or twisted version of other magic is a subject of heated debates across mages. Since it tends to be forbidden lore, origins of dark magic obscure at best either. Same could be said about necromancy, eventually. Whether "crafting" and "transmutation" are same is another complicated debate, it's matter of pespective. Making bow hardly "magic". Making unorthodox artifact capable of shifting planes using principles nobody understands? Alright, maybe its "magic". Um, well, merely looking on how ppl struggle to decode e.g. bitmasks used by ancients...

I doubt necromancy belongs to life magic. Its not natural thing and more like "more evil version of animating golem" or so. Golems and so on are usually said to be non-living as such, and kept animated by powerful magic. Probably comparable idea applies to skeles. At least many descriptions of necromancy I've met would be like that.

Spawns probably could be viewed as "astral/dark" and "astral/light" tree structure, but I do care it not to be 100% exclusion to let "eventual" crossing of domains so "most powerful casters" can (try to) tap into "wrong" domain - so more spawns in arsenal. Ofc entering wrong domain is dangerous, all kinds of odds to expect (my rework of jande/manatez just gives harmless hint but can eventually do some more fancy things instead, including succeeding at requested spawn if caster is proficient enough and luck on their side today).

Yet, what about offensive spells? Say poison dart surely got nothing to do with "astral" (its not about plane shifting or so?!) but got something to do with dark. That's where astral/dark and astral/light idea doesnt holds as is.

IMO, for flexibility it makes sense to have relatively flat structure:
Astral is whether one could summon, generally. TMWA magic is a bit weird in this aspect, I think I like jande/manatez in this regard, it allows more flexible and versatile approach in the end.
War is about offensive spells, and nothing wrong to have war/light and war/dark subflavors, e.g. light mages would consider poison "too low", etc.
Dark is more like "flag" hinting if person got corrupt mind or not and particular spells could have their own idea how to deal with it.
...

Actually I could be a bit tempted to view schools more like "affinity" that define "How likely this to succeed?" being sorta probablistic instead of hardwired decision. I have ideas how to do that on TMWA but no idea if this doable as "skills". Skill either could be used or not, and its quite a binary.

I also like TMWA approach where ppl can learn spell by "side channels" outside of game content context. It sorta more realistic and gives room for some stuff to enhance interactions between players, so e.g. seasoned mages can hint "apprentices" and so on - and eventually play together instead of ppl just questing alone in the dark, bringing 50 rat tails to yet another dumb NPC instead of having some fun together.

Still, necromancy typically split into separate (usually forbidden) domain and in many cases "light" mages "hate" that. Its a bit strange some spells don't e.g. do enhanced (double?) damage to undead/golems/etc. I think TMWA seriously lacks in this aspect of mechanics.

Code wise, checking vs independent school can probably make checks easier. As for branched approach it makes me wonder if this locks out some interesting ideas. In principle mages could have more interesting options like "soft" split rather than "hard" mutual exclusion. While to my taste TMWA generally bad, I think me and HoraK converge on 1 thing: its magic system is fun, unique and gives a lot of room to maneur compared to just plain boring "use skill" thing (even if I'm surprised most spells were ported to that). Mages are flexible by design. So legends say some light mages managed to venture into dark aspects without being corrupted much. Or even some unique necromancers were able to learn more light kinds of magic, eventually even becoming less evil. Looking on current jande/manatez in TMWA I even have some basic ideas how to facilitate that. My patched versions already do, they abort on wrong kind of mage but give decent hint to use other flavor of spell. Instead, it could be just arbitrary logic with some fancy/unexpected/whatever effects tho, when capable caster enters relatively unfamiliar domain of magic.

party I'm not huge fan of this limitation. Actually as mage I'll really hate it. TMW ppl just dont use parties the way you think, to begin with, so this limitation going to get a lot of woes and IMO rather going to ruin MMO aspect. Many games allow to heal completely unrelated players - and its very good way to start player-to-player interaction. The more obstacles on the way the more "MMORPG is a community" idea suffers. So um, well, my estimation it could outright ruin ingame community building and interactions. I'd prefer this to be on ML, rEvolt, or something, not on TMW. And, guess, I wouldn't play this as mage ofc. Just because I'm not into all this railroaded experience "for teh greater good". Actually, idea to railroad mages into doing something is one of most stupid ideas to have IMO. Furthermore, IMO idea to railroad mages just doesnt fits mage class nature at all. Has it ever came to you there can be much less intrusive ways to achieve it? Like rewarding fact spell put on player, etc, etc - ofc this needs some nonlinear logic to ensure its ok on both low and high levels and I can't even say I've fully explored this idea - but no apparent reasons why it wouldnt work.

TL;DR: IMO TMW so far
1) Attributes some spells to strange schools.
2) Hardwires/mutually excludes some things a bit too much.
3) Some spells just totally unrewarding/OP/UP/expensive/unusued and eventually not in use not even 'coz they're inherently bad.
4) I'm tempted to experiment with grossly nonlinear amendments and strange stuff like MagicXP (maybe compute it like Total Magic XP, accounting for levels). And I sense at least some spells belong to Lvl 3/4/5 as such.
5) Some players moaned on overspecialization and I'd grant they had some point IMO. In 2009 I've played as hybrid of mage and archer and its been quite okay. Now it isn't really option. Yet I've met at least some ppl who want to be "all arounder". Some game mechanics could give 'em that but its not TMW. Guess it should be possible to focus on >1 thing maybe. Yet it comes with huge risks of imbalance.
6) I actually like TMWA magic system with chat commands. Quite a fun departure from railroaded experience that gives some fun room for unusual experiments/lore/player-to-player interactions. Like "you can not find this spell anywjhere but players can tell you - or you can read the source". And it could be intentional - to either facilitate community interaction or reading source, either outcome is "useful".
7) Seems I had some ideas somewhat similar to Hocus but called it like "non linear shaping of spells" or so. In a sense, I'm quite sure "buffs" and other support things should be much more rewarding. Except I had entirely different ideas vs trying to railroad everyone into party, force XP sharing and do other stupid unnatural stuff. IMO its rather act of spell casting that should give rewards, actually, not just XP but Magic XP and Magic XP could pretty much be a reasonable gauge to estimate caster's abilities in some places, etc.
8) As such I can imagine there can be several MagicXPs per "school" or "affinity" making it even more like "flexible choice of way", and magicXP can be reward on its own right eventually improving spellcasting if spells estimate "total caster's proficiency" or "area of expertise proficiency" or so. It could be a bit too far off the track on TMWA, but in principle it can be done without major intrusive crap and railroading anyone to parties or something.
9) Its very vague and poorly thought, I dont think I can readily architect magic system from scratch and even ensure its balanced, etc.

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Re: [EV][LY][DIS] The Future of Magic

Post by jesusalva »

Yes, adding more experience bars is not doable on TMWA due to the way it stores data.

Unless, of course, if we do a purge and keep a low experience limit (e.g. up to 255). Then it should be light enough to get another variable.

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Re: [EV][LY][DIS] The Future of Magic

Post by Hello=) »

I'd say experience bars are nice to have "visuals" but ppl used #abizit as such to get coarse MagicXP and this, already existing, magicXP could be (mis)used as estimate of caster proficiency, then look if they got right school or an outsider to adjust outcome/probability/etc. Compute of "overall caster experience" in scripts can be like (N * general magic leve) + current Magic XP (it already exists, no extra RAM needed) to account for fact it reset upon touching seed, and eventually clamping magicXP to not 255 but maybe like 65535 or a bit less (e.g. to fit u16) can be good idea anyway to avoid OP casters who both hit max magic lvl and then gone really wild grinding magic XP badly (i.e. no formula should go up in unlimited manner). Ofc per-school XP is more interesting idea but on TMWA storing it would hog some RAM for the real (maybe not too bad, needs computation) and, overall... that's likely where WildX ideas on "shouldn't depart too far from original TMW" maybe starting to make sense.

p.s. and yep, I'm not so bad at debatable hacks and inventing ways how to do whatever I want using whatever I got around :P

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