The Mana World Forums

We came up with this topic today.

Elements are important for monsters, magic spells, weapons, armor and other things.
TMW currently lacks depth in elements and it's also bad documentated how elements work.
Therefore please let's have a look at those questions:

• Which elements does TMW currently have? (e.g. 0 = neutral, 1 = fire, etc.)
• Which element is effective against others and what's the factor? (e.g. fire attacks do 50% damage against water type enemies)
• Which element isn't effective against others and what's the factor?
• What else do we need to know about elements?

Those questions will become more important in the future.
Therefore I will create a wiki page about elements after gathering enough information.

Thanks! ♥

I just remembered something: viewtopic.php?p=139937#p139937

o11c wrote:The current element names are:

Code: Select all

neutral = 0
water   = 1
earth   = 2
fire    = 3
wind    = 4
poison  = 5
_holy   = 6
dark    = 7
_spirit = 8
undead  = 9

...could we change that?

Implementing elements was also one of my suggestions to TMW. Elements can be used in no of ways. for example we can have monsters which are resistant to certain type of element and a weapon using an opposite element would be more effective. One of my suggestions is to introduce elements to items also. We can add a quest which will give elemental properties to already existing items like Ilia items for example. Also, a mage on light path and a mage on dark path would have different elements.

That's exactly why I came up with this topic.
TMW has far more potential with elements.

Meanwhile some suggestions:
IMO we don't need elements such as poison, spirit and undead.
Poison really isn't an element.
Spirit could make sense to Wisps, Poltergeists, Spectres and Mana Ghost, but I'd rather make them holy elements or dark.
Undead isn't a real element either, I'd rather make such mobs (Zombie, Skeleton, Reaper, ...) dark elements.

On the other hand IMO ice, thunder and wood shouldn't miss.
Ice is sometimes connected to water in RPGs, but with mobs like Ice Skull, Pollett, Ice Goblin and Santa Slime or Weapons such as the Ice Gladius it should be an element on its own.
Wood is for mobs like the Log Head or our plants.
Thunder for Ball Lightning and #ingrav, plus it has more potential (pretty much a standard element in RPGs as well).

Opinions?

Yes, why have holy and spirit a underscore in front of their name? Does it has a special meaning? If not, why not remove the underscore?

Im not sure about the ice and thunder elements. I would prefer to see something like metal then, which is also sometimes part of the alchemy elements. Of course we do need the pixelart for that then...

Thunder can also be put under 'air' (in your example, wind). If you keep wind and thunder separate I think the wind element will be quite boring. By combining these two you can have far more different kind of attacks, magic, monsters, etc. Same for water and ice.

EJlol wrote:Thunder can also be put under 'air' (in your example, wind). If you keep wind and thunder separate I think the wind element will be quite boring. By combining these two you can have far more different kind of attacks, magic, monsters, etc. Same for water and ice.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that too.
I dislike them being combined because IMO a lightning and a tornado are totally different things.
But I just came up with the idea of naming a combined element of those two "storm"... how about that?

If we can have more elements metal would make sense too.
But then I want a moon element (Moonshroom!) too, Secret of Mana like

Storm sounds too 'chaotic'. Wind can also be calm, like for example a sleeping spell. I would go for something like 'Weather' then. Though that might touch water (rain) to much.

A wind-based sleeping spell?

Yes? Golden Sun featured one:
http://goldensun.wikia.com/wiki/Sleep_%28Psynergy%29

Now this might not be possible with the TMW server yet, but I like to think big

Nice, thanks for the reference
Reminds me that I wanted to play Golden Sun...

I love the Pokémon system:
Normal, Fighting, Flying, Poison, Ground, Rock, Bug, Ghost, Steel, Fire, Water, Grass, Electric, Psychic, Ice, Dragon, Dark, Fairy

As far as I know we can have as many elements as we want, up to 256. no need to remove some

But keep in mind that the more elements we add the more complex the system will be, making it harder to understand or remember by players.
For example: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Type#Type_chart
^ there is no way someone can remember this full table of combinations

While talking about the Pokemon system, is it also possible for us to have 2 or more elements assigned to monsters, spells, etc?

EJlol wrote:While talking about the Pokemon system, is it also possible for us to have 2 or more elements assigned to monsters, spells, etc?

It is possible to have as many elements as we want for spells or items but for mobs we would have to modify the server to add a element2 field to the database.. or maybe just shift the element uint8 by 4 making two 4-bit integers. This would mean if we allow for a 2nd element we can only have 16 elements, not 256

maybe we could also change the uint8 to be a uint16 instead so that we could have 2x up to 256 elements or 4x up to 16 elements

Well for sanity's sake, I'd prefer somewhere between 4 and 16. We can always add more later. Our current amount 10 appears to be nice number to start with.