Here?s one that no one mentions much why is there no interplay between magic and combat. We have spells that do things via physical means but we ignore them as acting that way. It?s always magic vs. magic resistance rather then looking at it being the effect of magic vs. ac, dr, and dodge. Should some magical spells be subject to the same rules combat is?
Examples of the types of spells I?m talking about: Boulder, Vine strike, Acid Jet, Ice breath, Fireball, Dragonfire.
Some spells could be made dodge-able even if they are still resisted by MR. While other could be physical resists. Spells where you are aiming to hurl or conjure something at a player should be subject to AC as well.
Quote from: The Crazy Animal on November 17, 2006, 10:53:56 PM
Here?s one that no one mentions much why is there no interplay between magic and combat. We have spells that do things via physical means but we ignore them as acting that way. It?s always magic vs. magic resistance rather then looking at it being the effect of magic vs. ac, dr, and dodge. Should some magical spells be subject to the same rules combat is?
Examples of the types of spells I?m talking about: Boulder, Vine strike, Acid Jet, Ice breath, Fireball, Dragonfire.
Some spells could be made dodge-able even if they are still resisted by MR. While other could be physical resists. Spells where you are aiming to hurl or conjure something at a player should be subject to AC as well.
Some spells you should be able to dodge like a boulder flying at you, fireball, etc.(unless you just stand there) A meteor storm/hellstorm well good luck with that. :)
Some spells like boulder and vine strike are more physical and not sure how MR should come into play like it is. (magical boulder or magic vines maybe)
I?d like to see it where you could set a few variables for handling the combat aspects of magic. Dodge difficulty and Hit Accuracy being the main two. The other big one would need to be the option to set the resist to be damage on armor which would let the targeted player soak the damage like it was done via a weapon.
As far as magical or physical manifestations of spells go I don?t see why there can?t be both. One spell might create the likeness of a boulder out of mana while another spell might conjure levitate and hurl a boulder. It would give use a little more variety while making spells which is fairly important when dealing with large numbers of levels.
As far as area spells go I don?t think they should be dodge-able but they could be made so they miss you based on AC or you?re able to physically resist them via damage on armour. For example I summon a small tornado into the room and it hurls objects around at you each round your AC might let you not get hit and if you do you resist it based on your dr.
There is an ability in dnd called evasion (or improved evasion) that basicly lets you make check to see if a spell like fireball you could dodge the intended area to be scorched. it start so that when you pass the check you take half damage and if you fail you take full but the improved ability is if you pass you take none if you fail you take half. Thats not balanced for this game but you could work it so that if you encumbrance is below a point you can have the ability to move outta the way. It could even be an extra ability to make classes like the ninja/thief better at avoiding traps or damage. To throw out a basic, i have no intent to check how well this works, formula you could do something like:
evasion % = (caster level*5-character level)*100
if they evade then damage taken = damage delt - (characters lvl/2)
like i said verry slapped together formula (too tired to think) but it could be an idea
I'd be down for making evasion(spell dodgeing) into a ninja/mystic ability. And possibly granted by a bard spell.
I agree an evasion ability would be cool.
Just need to figure out how it will work, cant be dotarded like the spell immu ability.
The spell immu ability needs serious work...
What I would do is use a two ability system. One ability on the spell that matches up to the evasion ability on the character. The ability on the spell would set the default difficulty to evade the spell. That would then get subtracted or added to characters ability and we'd go from there since that would give use a fairly variable number to play with which could even handle negative evasion scores for the use in curses. As far as damage reduction goes theres so many ways we could do that. I won't get into it now.
What are the conditions that you would want to effect how evasive a character could be if they have that ability?
ENC...
Agil...
what else...?
Wisdom, Enc, Agility. Lets try to keep it simple.
Ok sounds good. I'll come up with some formulas for it.
I was thinking about this. I mean, a mage gets one damn swing.
one
that shouldnt be dodged.
fuck that.
They don't have to get just one swing though... Look at meteor storm to name one in particular and there isn't any reason we couldn't have more spells like that.
I guess. yeah mete is one of the best spells. comet and that odd fireblast spell forget what its called are based upon it being a good thing.
I still say dodge % if it is available should be a small chance. like max of 25%. i mean, if a level 20 something shoots a hot blast out in pvp, it shouldnt be an empty round for that mage without a good fight.
Well, some spells you should not be able to dodge. room spells obviously. Effect spells as well. I mean put it in but I think it makes mages not bother to pvp ever as the chance for a complete miss of a round is pretty strong, strong enough to stop the attempt for some good pvp.
I want to see mage vs warrior pvp. really, the fight should go to the mages if they get the first volley. they should be incrediblly offensive and always growing scarily in that power. defense should be based upon tricks and deception but raw AC like it is in mmud now doesnt make much sense. mages with 88/6 ac is kinda freaky, yet they cant do as much damage as a human mystic to a monster.
that should never happen ever.
Quote from: El_Jefe on May 01, 2007, 01:24:27 AM
I guess. yeah mete is one of the best spells. comet and that odd fireblast spell forget what its called are based upon it being a good thing.
I still say dodge % if it is available should be a small chance. like max of 25%. i mean, if a level 20 something shoots a hot blast out in pvp, it shouldnt be an empty round for that mage without a good fight.
I'd like it to have a difficulty to dodge based on spellcasting. As this would add to value of good character building and in some cases item collection.
QuoteWell, some spells you should not be able to dodge. room spells obviously. Effect spells as well. I mean put it in but I think it makes mages not bother to pvp ever as the chance for a complete miss of a round is pretty strong, strong enough to stop the attempt for some good pvp.
I think this was something that was agreed upon for the most part. The trade off though for being able to miss more is they could then potentially get a damage boost on those dodge-able spells.
that sounds good.
I thnk that SC should be the main factor in spell damage. makes sense! It is a good balancing thing. A mages sc rating could up faster per level than a warlock's. I think that could be an easy way to balance their power. Things like dented wizard hats would be of utmost value.
Magic attacks suck because if you run outta mana you're dead, it's resistable, mana regen is really slow, and you don't get near as many attempts compared to combat. Granted dmg potential / hit goes up and spell circles can minimize resistance BUT making it dodgeable seems too much. It's like being a mage and getting dragonfire just to find out everyone resists it. Or like deathtouch where it's almost always resisted unless you have significant levels over the monster / npc. From a logical standpoint, some spells could be seen as dodgeable but they really shouldn't be.
How about we forget about dodging spells (resistance is good enough) and allow me to cast spells from one room into the next????
heh well if dodging spells went in the ability to resist spells would probably need to be reevaluated to balance it out. Your right you wouldn't want to make it to hard to cast spells however adding ways to avoid damage increases the varience in combat which is good for keeping people intrested in how their characters develop.
We did talked about doing room to room combat with ranged weapons but we haven't talked about it for spells yet. I like the idea though.
Don't like this dodging spell idea. So if they dodge spells, but have more multiple-hit spells like mete/magm or fury or word, how do they keep up with the fighters' crits? Hell one upper-end crit does the same as most one-shot spells - and they've also got 4 more swings vs. the caster's none. Comet's cool as sh!t, but any other 1-h class can match that dmg/rnd.
Varying combat sounds nice. I just want to be sure that magic gets reworked before you add spell dodge. Are there any attack spells besides room spells that wouldn't be dodgeable?
To start out I?d really like to get away from the idea of completely non-dodge-able with the exceptions of room spells. If the mechanics of it are able to work as I picture it, it would be a variable difficulty based on the coding of each spell. For example fire ball and boulder might carry the same difficulty to dodge based on the assumed mental image of the characteristics of the attack. However a lightning bold and a necromantic beam however might be nearly impossible to dodge because of the speed of the attack. Each spell should have characteristics that make it valuable for different situations and scenarios in the game. Such as is dodging 100 small rocks harder then 1 large one. At the same time though the game is very risk oriented so the more ways there are to ovoid damage then the greater the damage can be when it finally hits.
Keeping up with the damage has to do with balancing dmg rounds for spells in comparison to combat. Single round spells need to do as much avg damage as an avg round of combat and then a small amount over do to the risk involved in less swings. In the case of multi hit spells damage needs to be equal to avg dmg per amount of swings a weapon would get of equivalent power. As far as addition dmg given by crits really has to do with how resists work in the game no player or mob character should be invulnerable to all types of magical attacks. In addition to that crit damage and combat all going to be reworked as well. High level crits are just too high right now across the board. There?s a lot of other illogical combat mechanics in the game that really need to be reworked as well. The same goes for some of the mechanics within magic however they at the moment aren?t as interconnected with stats and dynamically coded.
One of the other things I?d really like to play around with is improving the defensive abilities of magic. Why can?t a magic user block a combat strike with magic or erect a shield to fend off arrows. Magic in mmud was looked at almost entirely offensively with the exception of a few stat manipulations like ac/dr which is very bad, something like a fire shield shouldn?t just provide a shockshield effect but should also provide a way of warding off damage as well. Magic vs combat, combat vs combat, and magic vs magic all need to work together well enough that it becomes almost like a dance, if you can dodge a weapon you should be able to dodge a spell; If you can block a swing then you should be able to block a spell. The reverse is also true if you can do these things physically then you should be able to do these things magically.
I really like multi hit spells as well but I think they need to develop more along the lines of the way a character does when picking up a slower weapon. I can?t think of a single other reason why getting a new spell should instantly grant you 5 hits chances unless it?s a less difficult spell then the level of the caster could master. It would be much more pleasing in terms of a player?s character development if there were assignable stats that determined the speed of new hit chances when dealing with this type of spell. Having it work in this method it would also make it more closely be able to mirror the dmg capabilities of weapon combat. Not every spell should work this way but I?m sure you can see the how and why of what makes this a better method when in comparison to the growth in power that weaponized combat achieves.
As far as matching the extra damage of crits this really has to do more with the ability to create a learnable system of how resistance affects characters. Then when a magic user figures out what a character is weak to spells that work with that weakness should amplify the damage and allow an average advantage based on that, which should match fairly close the extra damage give by crits. For example you have physical and metaphysical spells, if you hurl a bolder at something that has good physical defenses it should do less damage. However if you find that they are weak to say fire then fire would do more damage. Or another strategy might be to weaken those physical defenses first prior to hurling the bolder. Every character should have some weakness that they develop that is exploitable to a degree and works to balance out the smaller inconsistencies that ultimately develop within the type of game this is.
One of the other things that I think this type of change will accomplish is to really start to make more spells viable for use across a larger span of levels. I look at this as one of the big problems mmud had when dealing with magic as most players in mmud end up only utilizing a couple of spells because magic yields very base line results in the game. At which point all spells ended up looking like just more powerful versions of prior spells simply because they only able to generate a couple types effects mainly being a damage increase. So how they do their damage needs to be just as important as the damage they are able to do if you get what I'm saying. Also when you get a new spell in MMUD the first time you cast it you know for the most part what it is able to do and that's very bad for keeping people at keys. When you learn a new spell in greatermud I'd really like encourage players to wander around learning what and how it affects things in the game. This is the type of thing that even if it?s just for a little bit each day might get people back at their keys each time a new spell is found as well as each time they travel into a new area.
Hope that answers all of those questions though I'm sure it will probably bring up a handful of others.