- Status Unconfirmed
- Percent Complete
- Task Type Feature Request
- Category Engine → Magic System
- Assigned To No-one
- Operating System
- Severity Medium
- Priority
- Reported Version
- Due in Version Undecided
-
Due Date
Undecided
- Votes
- Private
Opened by Erodare Lenizus - 16.11.2013
Last edited by Davide Vescovini - 18.11.2013
FS#6221 - Over-charged Mana Cost
1) For damage capped spells, sliding the power bar above the point where max damage is produced, mana cost is over-charged against the character, in addition to lowering success chance and increasing casting time more than appropriate.
2) If the kill shot (magic) produces more damage than needed to finish off the target, full mana cost is charged even if not needed.
I think it would be more appropriate if the mana cost was down-scaled to the net effect:
- if target only has 30 hit points left, a 60-point damage spell should only charge half the mana
- if target only needs 5 hit points to be fully healed, a 60-point healing spell should only charge 1/12th of the mana cost
- for area spells, calculate against sum effect on all impacted targets.
- if you’re going to cap damage, should also cap mana cost and not over-penalize in success chance and cast time when the slider is set too high
Where I’ve referenced the magic power slider above, same should be true for spell commands that explicitly have a power value
- i.e. “/cast 90 Taste of Death”
Justification: The mage should be able to determine if a “light touch” will suffice, but players have no way to turn down magic power to improve success chance and/or reduce mana cost and casting time.
Taking this a step further, practice and experience perhaps should be similarly down-scaled, with the possibility of giving none if no actual effect is the result (this would impact spam casting for power-leveling).
Putting some sort of governor on the power bar so that you can't pump in more than can be used makes sense although increasing the chance of a catastrophic back-fire, instead, in the same circumstance also would work.
Your second point makes less sense to me as intentional overkill for effect would not be possible. You could always use a lesser spell for the coup de grace if you want to be economical with your mana, say a flame burst or summon missile instead of that fist of the volcano. If you only need 5 points of healing you could always just wait a minute to regain them without magic.
I've always been against useless spell-casting for training purposes but it has long been required due to an incomplete roster of spells in some of the Ways. There hasn't been much appetite for disallowing that.
The catch is that as players we don't know how much power is needed. We don't see numbers, just bars for rough percent of hit points of the target (other than our own character), and it's not reasonable to have the player try to do the math even if the numbers were visible on the fly in combat and adjust the power slider effectively.
We agree on spam-casting for leveling, and hopefully at some point the various magic ways will get better balance, both in power at given levels, and in their respective rosters.
I find the power bar kind of useless, I rarely change it from 0. I also don't change combat stances very often. Both are more trouble than they are worth to me. You can watch the system window to see how much damage you are doing and how much of the opponents health bar is affected to judge fairly well how many more castings it will take to finish the fight. I think this is more of a feature request than a bug.
my two cents worth of time has just about expired :)
I'm setting this as a feature request.
Typically a mage could switch to a low realm spell for this.
In terms of mechanics, I don't really see a problem.