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[Jack-Nader]

I've been messing around with ideas on how to deal with the lack of synergy amongst the mage spells.  I am sure many of you have noticed that a lot of the spells do not make any sense and also completely render other spells obsolete.  Mana clash is the most obvious as it nullifies the point of taking atleast 6 other spells in the game.

Arcane line

Replace the entire arcane spell line.  I suggested in another thread that perhaps we could kill two birds and give the staff a functioning mode.  For instance, instead of being able to raw damage a target with the staff you could opt to select a staff mod that repulsed the target instead or perhaps increased mana regen.

an example...

Tier 1 -> Repulsion
Tier 2 -> Increase mana regeneration rate
Tier 3 -> Increase spellpower
Tier 4 -> Increase chance to beat the likelyhood of spell resist

(mana regen would be great in boss fights, repulsion would be good to kick back the odd pesky melee unit without expending mana, Spellpower to do large amounts of damage, Spell resist would be good vs bosses.)

Primal

Fire -> I am happy with the entire fire line, others may not be, suggestions?
Earth -> Earthquake is the obvious problem here.  Pehaps a cone spell that kicks up dust doing damage and blinding the target?
Cold -> good line except for blizard
Electricity -> Add chance to stun to all electrical attacks or pehaps a static affect that works like a mini glyph of attraction (opposite of glyph of repulsion) , increase power of chain lightning.

Creation

Heroism and the heal line really should be merged into a  single buff line.  I suggest maybe...

Heal, Heroism (increases offense and defense for a medium duration, Stamina rejuvination, regeneration

Glyph of repulsion, Glyph of vulnerability( removes immunities ie. fire demons can be damaged by fire), Glyph of repulsion, Glyph of slaying (instantly kills the target on trigger.. "bosses immune")

Summon creature 1, summon creature 2, summon creature 3, stinging swarm

grease, resist magic (party immune to magic/elements for short duration ), corrode armor (lowers armor rating), haste

Spirit

Spell shield, Dispel, Spell strike, Mana clash

mind blast, , walking bomb, Fade form (% miss chance vs caster), VWB is powerful enough to be a 4th tier spell

Force field, Telekinesis (increased weapon knockdown chance, Crushing prison, Vortex (Sucks all units to a central point )

Entropy

Fatigue ( increases % fatigue), paralyze, Miasma, Mass paralysis

Affliction hex, misdirection hex, Luck hex ( same as death hex was ), death hex (kills the target in X amount of time if not dispelled)

disorient, sleep, horror, walking nightmare (sleeping targets take large spirit damage)

Drain life, Death magic, death cloud, curse of mortality ( increase damage)


Feel free to comment or add suggestions...

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 06 janvier 2010 - 07:16 .

[soteria]

Mmph. I thought mage spells already had pretty good synergy, although you have a point about mana clash.



Primal:



Earthquake is a little weak. I'm not sure what could be done to improve it; it feels like a weaker clone of blizzard. Speaking of blizzard, why don't you like it? It's a great spell. Over the duration it kills most weaker enemies, and keeps them frozen for most of the duration, with a huge radius. I stopped using it because it felt like cheating.



Creation



I don't see them doing such big changes. I don't care for the heroism -> haste line, but oh well, some like it. The glyph spells are great, and work well together already. There's like, two immunities in the whole game, and you want a glyph to deal with it? A line with four summons sounds pretty boring to me; maybe others would like it. The last line looks interesting enough.



Spirit



Your fade form should be tier one, and force field definitely shouldn't be tier one. I already liked telekinesis; it's pretty strong as is. Vortex sounds interesting.



Entropy



Fatigue... meh. Would anyone use it? Only bosses would matter, and do they even have to follow rules about stamina/mana?

[Jack-Nader]

Oh.. i'm sorry, this thread is actually a spin off of Ancalimohtar's thread.



I'll give a quick summary of the part of his thread that this refers too.



The point was raised that DA has very linear enemy units. There is no discernible difference between humans, dwarfs, darkspawn, etc. They all fight the same, do the same things and are always grouped with similar units. To add insult to injury the mage spell "mana clash" is an instant hostile dispenser. This isn't a problem with mana clash per say but an inherent flaw in mage scripts. When you encounter mages grouped with enemy mobs they never have defensive spells enabled. Spell shield is a sustainable spell and as such there is absolutely no reason that mages should not have the spell enabled before the encounter. What this means is that you should really have to take the effort of stripping away spell shields before you can cast mana clash.

The main issue I have with mages is the spell lines do not make sense.



In BG contingency/triggers allowed mages to instantly up their defense. A lich would cast spell shield meaning you had to strip the spell before you could damage it with magic. Dragon age really falls short here.



eg.



The Anti Magic spell line should actually look more like this

Tier 1 -> Spell shield which grants 100% magic resistance but drains mana as it is damaged.

Tier 2 -> Dispel which removes buffs but has no effect on a shielded target (except the obvious mana drain)

Tier 3 -> Spell strike which completely dispels the spell shield instantly

Tier 4 -> Mana clash which is an instant mage killing spell to unshielded mages.



Instead DA has implemented it into 2 trees with mana clash making 6 out of the 7 spells obsolete.



The arcane line is another example where the 4th tier talent offers a 5 spellpower bonus vs the 1st tier summoning spell, spellwisp which is roughly a 9 give or take spellpower bonus. The defensive spell arcane shield is rendered obsolete by all the offensive CC spells and also by glyph of repulsion. Staff Focus gives 33% more damage to the staff but who the heck is going to use a staff over mage spells? There needs to be a point to using the staff. The staff mode suggestion which I mentioned earlier would do the trick here. ie. You could enter the repulse staff mode and attack a hostile knocking it back or flooring it if it fails a resistance check. Perhaps another mode where your staff attack leaches mana or hexes the target allowing for a quick spell beat down.

Also the point was raised about immunities. BG had plenty of immune creatures that all had to be handled a specific way. You could choose to attack them with an alternate form of damage or you could lower their spell resistance/elemental resistance. This is actually why I added the glyph of vulnerability in just in case the devs decided to actually spice up variety by utilizing immunities.

[termokanden]

[quote]Replace the entire arcane spell line.  I suggested in another thread that perhaps we could kill two birds and give the staff a functioning mode.  For instance, instead of being able to raw damage a target with the staff you could opt to select a staff mod that repulsed the target instead or perhaps increased mana regen.

an example...

Tier 1 -> Repulsion
Tier 2 -> Increase mana regeneration rate
Tier 3 -> Increase spellpower
Tier 4 -> Increase chance to beat the likelyhood of spell resist[/quote]
Not bad. However, since spellpower already increases the chance to beat spell resistance AND increases damage, then perhaps that should be the top tier, and something else should be tier 3.

Regarding mana regen. I like the idea, but I think currently noone would use it. If there was an actual struggle for mana, it would be a brilliant thing to have.

[quote]Fire -> I am happy with the entire fire line, others may not be, suggestions?[/quote]
The first spell is rather poor I think, but then again it's tier 1. Yep, the fire line is generally good. Fireball in particular is a spell a lot of us oldtimers like to see again, and the knockback it has now just makes it fun.

[quote]Earth -> Earthquake is the obvious problem here.  Pehaps a cone spell that kicks up dust doing damage and blinding the target?[/quote]
I don't remember where I read it, but armor spells in general are rather pointless in this game. So I think Rock Armor needs to go, honestly. Earthquake is indeed somewhat weak. It's not nearly as bad as people say though, and I think it would be quite easy to make overpowered.

Then again, just a bit of damage on earthquake wouldn't hurt. I'm not too keen on having yet another cone spell to be honest.


[quote]Cold -> good line except for blizard[/quote]
Blizzard is actually quite good.

[quote]Electricity -> Add chance to stun to all electrical attacks or pehaps a static affect that works like a mini glyph of attraction (opposite of glyph of repulsion) , increase power of chain lightning.[/quote]
Good idea. Electrical attacks are currently too weak. For example, the first is basically just a weaker version of Winter's Grasp. The cone effect also sucks compared to Cone of Cold. And yes, Chain Lightning definitely needs a boost.

[quote]Heal, Heroism (increases offense and defense for a medium duration, Stamina rejuvination, regeneration[/quote]
Yep, wouldn't be bad. I also like having Regeneration as top tier. It's really very good.

[quote]Glyph of repulsion, Glyph of vulnerability( removes immunities ie. fire demons can be damaged by fire), Glyph of repulsion, Glyph of slaying (instantly kills the target on trigger.. "bosses immune")[/quote]
I don't know, the last one seems a tad overpowered. On a single target it's not necessary, but if it works on yellows as well, it's just silly.

[quote]Summon creature 1, summon creature 2, summon creature 3, stinging swarm[/quote]
Fine by me, and it definitely fits "creation". However, if the summoned creature kills something, you should get XP as normal and it should show up on the screen as well

[quote]mind blast, , walking bomb, Fade form (% miss chance vs caster), VWB is powerful enough to be a 4th tier spell[/quote]
Perhaps something should be done about its "viral" nature. I've used it plenty, and it has spread maybe twice. This whole "chance to do something" is a bit sad. But then again, the spell is powerful even without spreading.

[quote]Force field, Telekinesis (increased weapon knockdown chance, Crushing prison, Vortex (Sucks all units to a central point )[/quote]
Vortex sounds very cool indeed. Good with AoE.

[quote]Affliction hex, misdirection hex, Luck hex ( same as death hex was ), death hex (kills the target in X amount of time if not dispelled)[/quote]
Good choice. Only one hex for for reducing resistances is necessary. Death Hex also seems more fair against yellows this way than Glyph of Slaying. They would have to have some way to dispel it of course.
[/quote]

Modifié par termokanden, 06 janvier 2010 - 09:36 .

[Jack-Nader]

I don't like blizzard, it is a long duration cast and does pitiful damage. The only good thing about it is the freeze effect but there are plenty of other spells that freeze the enemy and do a far better job of it.



Heroism I changed because it is an absolute pain in the ass to use. It is ok when used by party member scripts but terrible if you are the one actually casting it. They also split it into 3 spells which really should have been merged into 1. On top of that glyph of warding does virtually the same thing as two of the spells.



Telekinesis I changed to being able to knock down the enemy. Armor penetration doesn't make a lot of sense with that spell. I introduced the third tier "corrode armor" spell to bring back armor penetration functionality to single targets. This also means that the rogue's armor penetration trait isn't nullified.



Summons I added because the spell line is called "summons," however the only summoning that actually occurs in this line is stinging swarm. Personally I am not a big fan of summoning but there are plenty of others who are.



fatigue would work quite well vs archers but thats about it. Would I use it? No, not unless they make archers a heck of a lot better than they are. I'm sure others might be able to suggest a better solution.

[Jack-Nader]

I was actually toying with making glyph of slaying (glyph of regeneration) but it would detract from the healing line. Perhaps someone can think of a better solution?

Yeh I am all for removing rock armor from the mage.  Personally I would like to see mages punished for failing to control the crowd.

How about "glyph of equilization" as the 4th tier talent. What would happen is that any damage the hostiles do to your party while in the glyph is transfered to them as well.  eg.  a revenant hits you for 60 damage and also takes 60 damage (reduced by armor of course.)

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 06 janvier 2010 - 10:27 .

[termokanden]

Indeed. Mages should die if someone gets close to them. They are not meant for melee combat, and it should be felt that they are not trained soldiers.



I don't know what the last glyph should do. Your suggestions sounds like fun, I'm just wondering if they AI will get to understand that. If it did on higher difficulties, that would be quite cool. It would then either have to dispel or select another target first.

[Jack-Nader]

It might be a bit OPed tho.. Could you image casting it on an ogre who is in the process of grab/punching you. It would literally beat itself to death   It would also be devestating to unshielded mages.

Modifié par Jack-Nader, 06 janvier 2010 - 10:35 .

[termokanden]

Well that'll teach them to stop using overpowered abilities. I wouldn't mind doing that to the spider that overwhelmed my mage in the circle tower store "room".

[Jack-Nader]

lol.. a fair point

[Stahl33]

Hmm on a different note, I reckon that they should make getting spells in the same school more important.... so that if you have a full line (4 spells) in one school, it would increase the spellpower of others in that school by +2, and if you have all spells in that school, it would increase all spells in that school's SP by +4 or something like that... a good reason to stick to a particular school I reckon..... or even give you a title once you have completed a school, and the ability to wear certain robes (robes of creation etc....)



Just a thought.