Post:Magic 3.0 Goals - 1/16/2010 - 16:52:44

Re: Magic 3.0 Goals · on 1/16/2010 4:52:44 PM	11602
>>It's always been a pet peeve of mine with regards to FS vs Fireball. What's the practical difference? Part of what's going on here is that back when Magic 2.1 and the idea of Global Caps were introduced, there was this notion that the global cap was something that should be sacred. Spells and abilities should not just immediately be at the cap (or even ever be able to cap), but instead that should define a limiter under which every ability in the game should fit, as best determined by an enlightened Guild Guru/Advocate under the eyes of an all knowing and ever attentive core systems / administrative staff. This idea may have worked in another time and another place, but here it immediately fell on its face and went "Durp durp." Our new schema is fairly simple: we assume any spell a guild gets is going to be "at the cap." If Empaths get an Escaping bonusing skill, then we assume that spell will be the pinnacle of what we want Empaths to boost Escaping to. From here is born the idea of "spheres of influence," where we say that, for example, Hiding is a skill that the ]Moon Mages should focus on, but not the Clerics, then the Moon Mage hiding boost should be stronger than the Cleric hiding boost (which may even still remain 0). TM will work largely the same way. While guilds may have different spheres of influence within TM, within the same sphere a spell shouldn't be fundamentally weaker and stronger than the other. If Aether Lash and Aether Lance do the exact same thing, but one completely dominates the other, what is Aether Lash except a waste of a spell slot? For TM specifically, we want the diversity of TM to be based on two things. 1: Aesthetics. If you're a weeeeeevil Tezirite that wants to use the dark shadowy magic of Dinazen Olkar as your thing, you should not be disadvantaged over the weeeeevil G'nar Pethian that wants to use Partial Displacement instead. The core functionality should be the same, but with variety for flavor. 2: Widgets. TM spells should be doing different types of damage, and have different little quirks (DFA, AOE, multi-shot) which make having a full suite useful for something other than scaling the tiers to your one, true 4th tier killer. If a TM spell doesn't meaningfully fulfill one of these roles -- if its only meaning in the game is a stepping stone to a "higher tier" spell of exactly the same thing -- it should stop existing. -Armifer
This message was originally posted in Abilities, Skills and Magic (4) \ Magic - Suggestions, Discussions and Thoughts (16), by DR-ARMIFER on the play.net forums.