PlaneShift
Support => Complaint Department => Topic started by: SynergfyFlo on December 26, 2007, 09:56:29 am
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hey folks,
i really like the idea of researching different glyph combinations to discover new spells.
however, the spells i have come across so far are hardly worth the effort of researching.
summon missile generates little more than an annoying pinprick, and freeze is hardly noticeable.
anyone with a breadknife is more dangerous than a mage who has quested far and wide to develop his powers.
without a trusty-rusty sword to fall back on, very few mages in this world would have even half a chance of living long enough to become powerful.
magic should be frighteningly powerful and intimidating, especially if it is mysterious and difficult to learn.
ok, just my opinion again - i really like the game and can't wait to see it grow and develop!
thanks, devs,
Flo
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It is known and being worked on soon (tm) .. believe it or not but magic used to be worse :P
I wouldn't expect it to be what you want it to be though, if magic is frighteningly powerful it will not be mysterious anymore. It will be the thing everyone learns just so they can kick ass. Magic needs to be on equal foot to other combat mechanisms and preferably a bit more versatile. This makes up for the time and effort spent acquiring glyphs and the ability to wield them.
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First, I second that magic has (at least at lower levels, I don't know about higher) a weak effect.
I personally like the thought of strong magic. I can imagine that a powerful mage can cast a spell that has great[tm] effect and is then able to cast a few weaker (still stronger than weapon hits?) spells. He then has of course to rest and is pretty much defenseless for a long time, so he _has_ to defeat his enemies with these few spells.
This is not what I want to see implemented, it's rather a thought about how magic can work.
The other, and propably some day implemented, way is, that magic spells have a somewhat similar effect like weapons at an equal level of training.
Anyways, Im glad to hear that corrections are being worked on :thumbup:
Sen
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"It is known and being worked on soon"
well, im the next one waiting for it.
as well as for above i wait for penalty taking place when you wear heavy type of armor (or any armor at all?) and cast spells.
ps. sorry for my english.
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yeah, but the fact that things are being worked on does suggest that the discussions we are having may unfold some influence on the shape the game takes.
frighteningly powerful is still my preference. with the spell power bar, one could introduce variable risks, depending on your skill, your ambition, and your present situation/condition. such risks could take similar form to the process of glyph research - damage due to failed attempts.
other ways to balance overly-powerful spells might include spell mishaps, e.g. an entirely different spell effect, or a spell effect unfolds on a different target ("sorry mate, didn't mean to turn you into a turkey..."), or equipment is damaged due to an uncontrolled discharge of magical energies...the devs' imagination and ingenuity is the limit. ;)
also, the process of spell learning could be something run via other player characters. this could encourage the development of realistic rp-like mage guilds and hierarchies of teachers, practitioners, students, novices, etc who learn from each other - up to the point of secret traditions of guild-specific spells.
i think the entire magic field provides huge opportunities to introduce player-driven mystique and dynamic politics into this aspect of the game without devoting too much focus to how spells compare with weapons as a combat strategy. magic runs much deeper than this.
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:whistling: Crafted Glyphs anyone? Just a thought.
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:whistling: Crafted Glyphs anyone? Just a thought.
no way http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=29666.msg340069;topicseen#msg340069
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:whistling: Crafted Glyphs anyone? Just a thought.
Um, the glyphs are crafted by Talad (http://www.planeshift.it/history.html), and nobody can hope to even come close to the power and skills needed. It also looks like there are more powerful glyphs crafted by Vodùl, but even the relatively weaker gods Talad and Laanx can barely use those.
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granted that the glyphs are mysterious items whose crafting lies beyond the ken of ordinary mortals...
however, they do provide yet another avenue by which pc's can become involved in the economy and participate in roleplaying scenarios relating to magic.
whence do they come? who finds them? who transports them? who supplies traders like levrus with his stock?
perhaps there is a glyph that enables one to locate other glyphs? perhaps there is a secret order of mages whose calling it is to brave the wilds and find the glyphs? perhaps the glyphs appear in this world through portals that also allow other, more sinister forces to enter...?
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The skills to find glyphs somehow might be nice at least...
But anyways, magic isn't really weak, it just lacks the ability to progress smoothly that combat has. It's getting closer with spell power and such, just not quite there yet. The low level spells are, for the most part, fairly useless... and those that aren't useless lack the ability to generate tria and progression points at a reasonable rate. However, this is just a lack of content, something you can expect in a beta.
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My main character has 160 Charisma, 20 Crystal Way, and I can use up my entire mana on Energy Arrows—a second realm spell—and not even kill a single rat. Meanwhile my other character with mediocre sword skill and two random short swords can kill one in two blows. To me, there's no question—magic is ridiculously underpowered.
If I recall, it was actually better for a time, though still not great...I think the armor computations on monsters may have been corrected, and magic likely wasn't bumped accordingly.
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Yeah, you're right Nilaya .. just before the monsters became stronger magic was doable. Then they made the monsters stronger but didn't boost up magic as well.
As for the glyph crafting thing ... definitely a no-no but what you can be, and one of my characters is, is a Glyph hunter. They don't make the glyphs, they just search for them. According to the settings glyphs can appear in many unexpected places including on plants, rocks and even the skin of creatures. A Glyph hunter is simply a person who makes it their job to search out glyphs and sell them.
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Not a bad Idea zan. . .
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Yeah, you're right Nilaya .. just before the monsters became stronger magic was doable. Then they made the monsters stronger but didn't boost up magic as well.
As for the glyph crafting thing ... definitely a no-no but what you can be, and one of my characters is, is a Glyph hunter. They don't make the glyphs, they just search for them. According to the settings glyphs can appear in many unexpected places including on plants, rocks and even the skin of creatures. A Glyph hunter is simply a person who makes it their job to search out glyphs and sell them.
Not exactly. If you read it says that mages transfer the Glyph's energy to small ez to carry stones; It is these stones that could be crafted.
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/me looks at the people crafting stones and picks up a rock and casts his glyph onto it.
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I think the biggest part of "glyph crafting" would be actually finding the glyphs, which is hard as they can appear almost anywhere.
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Crystal hunting reborn! Now with purpose!
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But... crystal hunting was so much fun... I distinctly remember guilt-tripping Jekkar into giving me a diamond.
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I remember that you horrible man.
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My main character has 160 Charisma, 20 Crystal Way, and I can use up my entire mana on Energy Arrows—a second realm spell—and not even kill a single rat. Meanwhile my other character with mediocre sword skill and two random short swords can kill one in two blows. To me, there's no question—magic is ridiculously underpowered.
But also, some magic is ranged.
An Ulbernaught can kill my char in two hits, if it can catch him. But it won't usually catch him, so he can climb up a rock and rain ineffectual destruction on it for a few hours [game time, I think it's down to a hair under an hour real-time] until he kills it or someone stronger wanders by during a lull and kills it [or the server crashes, or I get dragged away from the computer, or...].
Even given how long this takes, it still seems to give better PP (and tria, since it's in a gold mine) than when he takes a sword and hunts Tefusangs and other things his own size.
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The first thing that disgusted me was when I bought the flame glyph and learnt the spell and it turned out to be a circle of flame around you that does 2% damage to a rat. What I think would be SUITABLE is a single target touch-range damage with a 10 second cast time that will kill a rat in 2-3 hits. Call it 'Burning Hands' maybe.
It would be a simple 20 minute job to type up some code for new spells that deal damage at an equal rate to a guy with a knife who's only been playing for 5 minutes
unfortunatly, as it is, guy with knife will kill the s#!t out of an experienced mage every time.
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/me thinks you should talk to knowledgeable people in game about magic and find out that there are other spells that are more powerful.
also, if you think its only 20 minutes, you're free to DL the code, compile and install your own test sever/client, write up a new magic spell, test it, create all the appropriate graphics for it, and submit it to the team for review. call it a hunch, but I think I can guarantee that it'll take you more than 20 minutes.
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please, please, folks :(
let's get this sorted - i progress much faster with swordsmanship, probably also because it is much more feasible to use a blade in an encounter - so it's much more difficult to gain pp with magic.
and i'd really like to find out which glyphs can be combined well for new spells, but i have not met anyone in-game who is willing to chat much about this kind of stuff - heck, i've even tried to find a suitable guild...no response yet...
pleeeze! :sorcerer:
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You should not need to look further than the guild thread to find a guild that can help. As for characters in game you could always try to follow the incessant tinkle of magic and ask someone standing around wasting their mana practicing this spell or that to no effect. I ran into a couple of them yesterday in the winch, one was casting a fire spell I did not recognize at a pillar beside the fire mage, and the other seemed to be casting the healing spell repeatedly. The healer may have fallen off a rock and stubbed his toe but I doubt it and the fire guy had no target I could see so I guess both were just "training." I like to train effectively (i.e. use spells for a purpose; heal, or cause, actual damage; but admit some ways can appear pretty useless at times.
Anyway Phinehas has a mage guild and the empire has one too but I suspect that both have qualifying restrictions to weed out those they deem undesirable. Mostly to ensure you role play, I think, and not completely arbitrary, but I have not tried to join any guild so I may be wrong. I recall there were a few others too but they may be defunct. The guild forum is still your best bet.
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/me thinks you should talk to knowledgeable people in game about magic and find out that there are other spells that are more powerful.
also, if you think its only 20 minutes, you're free to DL the code, compile and install your own test sever/client, write up a new magic spell, test it, create all the appropriate graphics for it, and submit it to the team for review. call it a hunch, but I think I can guarantee that it'll take you more than 20 minutes.
As someone who has written more than a few lines of code in my life, I understand and appreciate your ire at Gravemind for saying something as ignorant as, "It would be a simple 20 minute job to type up some code for new spells..." However, I think that it would be valuable to take his overall sentiment seriously: many of the spells in this game are underpowered to the point of uselessness, such that a new player who has chosen "mage" as his concept must still rely on physical combat in every single fight. As a general rule of thumb, the spells available to a magic-using character with a particular amount of experience should do about the same amount of damage over a given period of time as a fighter-type character can do with a sword over a similar period of time. To put it another way, an almost-brand-new character with a frost spell should be able to kill a rat just as easily as an equally new character armed with a short sword. This is clearly not the case. While I will not make ridiculous suggestions that it should be "quick and easy" for the devs to whip up some all-new spells, I will say without hesitation that if the devs have been writing tight code and following good programming practices, fixing this imbalance should be as simple as altering one or two constants per spell to change the amount of damage they do. This might require repeated tweaking over time to get the balance just right, but that is simply all the more reason to define such numbers as constants at the beginning of a file so that they can be easily changed later.
As for the actual balance that is to be sought, there is certainly room for much debate, as there are many ways to approach the issue. I, for one, am of the school of thought that magic-users should generally be great on offense but lousy on defense: if a highly experienced magic-user takes on an ulbernaut, he had better kill it before it gets to him, or it will kill him in one or two hits, and he'd better hope there aren't too many around or he will run out of mana after killing the first one or two and be easy prey for the third. That being said, there are other, perfectly good ways to balance magic with physical combat. Unfortunately, magic is currently nowhere close to being in balance. It is possible that it becomes useful for very powerful magic users, but it needs to be useful from the beginning.
I will finish with this offer: if nobody else has the time or inclination to fix this problem (and it definitely is a problem), and if the source code is well-written with clear comments (as opposed to spaghetti code with no comments, unintelligle comments, or meaningless comments--I have actually seen code with comments that said things like, "for-loop to go through every possible value of variable A21 and check for the best fit" what is A21? what are you fitting it to?), then I will be happy to go through the code for spells myself and tweak their power. I propose adjusting once a month to allow time for feedback from players, especially from PVP (to get both sides--ideal balance will probably come when we get equal numbers of "too powerful" and "not powerful enough" complaints).
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If you can code and are willing, apply for the team.
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Sorry, as far as I know the reason for this is that the code is messy and buggy, I'm guessing from what I've heard that at least one dev has tried and not figured out how to fix it. I suspect the developer that wrote the system is not around anymore.
I tried to make a new spell with svn once and it didn't work, though admittedly I didn't really persevere with trying. But I'm not exactly a newbie at setting up the database.
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Xordan is the only one with the task to work on magic and it's not the only thing he's working on.
From what I got, he's on a complete rewamp of the system and is not interested in doing "quick and dirty" fixes since they eventually need to be redone over and over. So once he's done (which won't be anytime soon), there will be a lot of spells (and I mean a lot) to discover that also should be balanced by then.
If you're experienced with this kind of work and up to it, you'd be more than welcome to apply for rules dev and help.
Edit: From what I got, spells are all DB based (math scripts, etc.), so little engine code to change there.
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A complete overhaul sounds good to me. From the 35 or so spells in my book I use maybe 5 or so on a regular basis. Half of the spells I found do not even have an animation or effect on targets. Other spells have gotten way too powerful due to people exploiting bugged spells to level CW, causing an unbalance in gameplay.
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Half of the spells I found do not even have an animation
This is a known issue, and just like all other art ingame the art department has to make the effects, give it time and you will get the effects you want. Also you dont have to report missing effects on the bug tracker we know they are not there. No major work has happened on spell effects in a few years.
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Also you dont have to report missing effects on the bug tracker we know they are not there. No major work has happened on spell effects in a few years.
ok, noted. btw i'm a fan of the way magic as a whole is set up in game, just needs some .... adjusting :)
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Lucasjung, pretty good summary there. It essentially stated what I agreed with so far. One thing that I personally do get annoyed about is the spell "Life Infusion" which heals the player or targeted player. This spell would almost seem to be overpowered to me, at least in a few certain ways. The first is that it is obtained from a quest that is almost always one of the first ones done by new players, and thus everyone has it. The second is that instantly after acquiring it and preparing it (purify, put it in the glyph bag, etc.), anyone can use it as it doesn't require any skill levels in the Crystal Way (I believe that it works at 0 although most have atleast 1 to start with). Third, it often isn't fast enough for use during combat which I agree with, but most have enough mana for even a player with less than 4 hours of play can easily heal a good 60% of their health.
With a combination of these three things the result is fairly annoying. Since it is essentially one of the few useful spells it is depressing to see what little useful things a mage can do performed by even the most uneducated person (in-game I am sure they are not uneducated in their actual life). Unfortunately the only way to get the spell more useful isn't available until level 80 in the crystal way. I am not sure how this would be balanced but it just seems that this spell is way to powerful for how you gain access to it.
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One thing that I personally do get annoyed about is the spell "Life Infusion" which heals the player or targeted player.
Definitely too powerful. :woot: When I tried to heal myself with this after I boosted all my stats to 5000 I killed myself instead! ::|
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That must have really bugged you. At least when you exited the DR you had 2500 health! 2500 health in one shot is not too shabby, in a round about way...
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Me exiting the DR through the portal.. what a strange thought ::|
I don't need that stupid curse :P