* neko kyouran 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).
