Post:Re: 3.2 Backlash Rates - 08/01/2016 - 17:47

Re: 3.2 Backlash Rates · on 08/01/2016 05:47 PM CDT	3801
>>So symb indirectly increases the backlash potency? Interesting. >>Symb is a really great training tool, and I know all of my characters switch to it as soon as they are able, to save mana while training. I'd be sad if you couldn't use it with sorcery, but I do understand sorcery is meant to be difficult and punishing. Yes and no. What happens is that the symbiosis pushes up the min difficulty by a flat amount so you get weird situations like casting an intro spell with a symbiosis at 1 mana is as hard as casting an esoteric spell without a symbiosis at 1 mana. And then Sorcery goes in and throws a multiplier on that based on how bad the mana mix is and suddenly you're trying to cast a spell with a difficulty off the charts at even 1 mana. You lose your granularity. The backlash rate itself does't go up but the harder you challenge yourself with sorcery the more the system will smack you down. If you're operating in a safe range you're going to get fairly tame and with a symbiosis it's very easy to put yourself VASTLY outside of a safe range. To use some rough numbers (ie: Please don't go quoting these as gospel, they're subject to change and I'm not even referencing them in game right now - they're ballparks to demonstrate the point)... you may have a situation where the difficulty for a spell is something like 1-400 ranks and once you stuff in the sorcery penalty it's like 2-800. So if you're casting at low mana values your difficulty maybe something like 2-100. Now you throw in a symbiosis and suddenly your difficulty before sorcery) is something like 250-1150... and after sorcery it's like 500-2300. At low mana values you're increasing the difficulty by one OR TWO orders of magnitude. Boom. I'm not saying don't combine them. I'm saying be aware that combining them is VERY hard. You're taking a system that is designed to be hard and punish overestimating your capacity and mixing it with a system designed to make everything harder.
This message was originally posted in Abilities, Skills and Magic / General Discussions, by DR-RAESH on the play.net forums.