Spell balancing and the new client.

After checking out some of the various spells and testing their overall effectiveness vs single and multiple targets, I am now of the opinion that there needs to be some major tweaking to the spell system next client.  Here's a small list of a few thoughts that came to me as I was playing around with the various spells.

Spells schools and resistances

Currently, most monsters and some armor pieces have too much resists against some or all schools of magic, especially when compared to the amount of actual damage certain spells do.  I suggest that all spell schools be streamlined, with:

1. semi equivalent spell types in each class
2. balanced to monsters having specific and individualized resists
3. damage scaling based on the type of spell. 

This would allow players to decide to stack heavily into onto one school of resist(which is done currently with lightning) or mix and match.  With actual monsters, there should be specific resists but never full resists against magic(with the exception of specifically designed multiplayer encounters).  As it stands, the choice of what spell to use is far too easy and is almost never situational.

Certain spell schools need tweaking, in general.  For example, poisons tick for way too much damage when compared to the damage done by one hit of another spell in an equivalent school.  One possible option in this situation would be for each instance of poison tick off damage for a shorter amount of time but still do slightly more damage overall than a single spell of other classes due to the ability to use a potion or cleanse it.

Types of spells need to be brought in line with the overall difficulty of completing an attack

Here's a crude list of all the types of damage dealing spells currently in game placed in the order of what i feel should be highest to lowest damage.  It would also be great if the damage done by different spells within the individual catagories would scale up at the cost of increased mana consumption to help keep the different spells in the different schools from being so homogenized as well.  Unfortunately, given the vast differences between player levels, this might prove to be impossible due to the greatly varying mana pools and regen.

Single target ranged(Fireball, Icebolt, Lightning, ect) - Given the fact that it takes a much higher degree of effort to target a player with these attacks, it would seem obvious that these types of attacks should deal the greatest amount of potential damage per second, per target.

Single target(Ebolt, Flame Strike, Poison Cloud, ect) - While a little more easy to hit a target with, it's still single target and should deal the second greatest potential damage per second on individual targets.

Short ranged or stationary area of effect(Fire Wall, Blizzard, Burning Rain, ect) - These spells are a little more effective against players and monsters and have the potential to hit multiple targets but only within a small area making them a little more beneficial than single target spells but not quite as effective or as easy to just spam as full on AoE attacks.

Full area of effect spells(Nova, Chain Lightning, Earthquake) - Some of these spells currently do way too much damage for the range and the amount of potential targets they can hit.  Most spells like this need to be scaled down a little and some need to be scaled down a lot(see Chain Lightning).

Summoning spells

The improvements to pets were interesting this client.  It was nice to get actual usefulness from summoned pets at the cost of being able to spam an infinite number like the last client(although I so miss summoning slimes all night for stars and uniques).  I think that in an attempt to make summoned creatures useful, they ended up going from the underpowered side of the spectrum to the completely overpowered side.  I would really like to see the maximum amount of summoned pets cut down significantly.  It cannot be denied that summoning 18 slimes or spiders is just too much, especially if you actually scale the other spells up to a proper level.  Taming shouldn't dictate the amount of pets you can have, in my opinion, just the strength of the pet you can tame.  Pets should only be allowed to be summoned once and not be summoned again until the timer runs out and they despawn.

Of course, you can't just take slimes and expect mages to still be effective.  In my opinion, adding more slows(for example add a slow effect to Icebolt) and stun spells(similar to ghouls touch enchant last client) would be the best way to manage players and other monsters.  In order to balance things and allow warriors to be able to still get inside on a mage, certain crowd control spells should be dispellable by using potions and/or berserker skill.  Adding different slows and adding more crowd control would help give more variety to gameplay that would go beyond simply spamming 20 slime and spamming crit to kill players or monsters.

Last edited by pennywise (April 14th, 2010 5:04 PM)