Post:Some Changes to AOE Multishot spells - 01/16/2014 - 00:51

Some Changes to AOE Multishot spells · on 01/16/2014 12:51 AM CST	619
After reviewing what AoE multishot spells do, I realized that they are absurdly overpowered. They need to be brought in line for technical AND balance reasons. The first thing we're doing is reducing the number of shots that an AoE multishot spell gets. They'll start with 1 shot and extra mana can scale them up to 3 (per target). This means that extra mana is awesome for these spells. The second thing we're doing is instead of hitting everything at the specified range, up to N targets in range are randomly selected (N is currently 6 but we're still balancing that number). This won't affect 90% of the people using the spell (how often do you have more than 6 creatures on you?), but it WILL significantly reduce system strain during events when, say, everything is clustered into one room and some yahoo casts Fire Rain with CAST AREA. Hitting 100 targets with 3-5 fire shards at once murders the game engine REALLY BRUTALLY, and we have to fix that. I've tested these changes and rolled them into Test for, well, testing. I'll continue monitoring and tweaking to make sure things didn't get too neutered.
This message was originally posted in Dragon Realms 3.1 Test \ Magic, by DR-SOCHARIS on the play.net forums.