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Comments
Really it's gotta be either:
- flesh them out in areas where they're weak
- emphasize what they're already strong at
I like the idea of specialising a class to be useful for something, and that'll fit multiclass better so you'll have to pick a class that's good for raids vs one that's good for 1v1. So emphasis on multi-target combat would be good to see in my opinion.
E: Sorry, the first and last word?
Alternatively obliterate could be changed to crystallize. Same mechanics only it turns the target into a solid crystal corpse. Which can then be used to draw X number of crystals from.
Just ideas. Don't get mad. Ideas lead to better ideas!
Ooo. Oooo. Obliterate could make the target explode into a bunch of random crystals!
Magi are prep and damage based at the moment, with some hindering to help achieve that. Outside retardation the hindering is limited use. They either need an adjacent monolith cancel and solutions to other hindering issues, or just need more prep power to supplement their damage. For example fire staffstrike and efreeti apply burn, which is a useless affliction and actually blocks a level of freeze. I'd like to see fire do more damage to aflame targets so that prepping a limb with it could be useful.
In fact, some difference between the staffcasts' uses besides which resistance the enemy has least of, especially since that can be hard to determine. (Trolls resist ELECTRIC, Rajamalas resist COLD, dwarves resist MAGIC, FIRE, and COLD, dragons resist everything but ELECTRIC is the least)
Then you have defenses:
Electric - (enchant, galvanism)
Cold (enchant, frost)
Magic - (enchant, constitution, ring of the magus)
So the most commonly useful will be cold and electric for damage, but how about fighting a Rajamalan Sylvan with chargeshield? Then they would take equal damage from about everything. It would be cool to see strategies to amplify different damage types. MAGIC for dissolution and vibe damage, FIRE for holocaust, efreeti, firelash, and scintilla, COLD for hailstorm and horripilation, ELECTRIC for lightning, stormhammer, and uh.. other lightning.
Electric/Air strategy could also be based around defense stripping.
Fire would be based around more damage.
Cold based around hindering.
I guess things like this could be accomplished by intently channeling a specific element, beyond the initial channel which becomes a boring routine after a while and nothing else.
Time Pause:
Would work kind of like dodging or weaving, except that you are essentially stopping time for the few moments it takes to completely side-step whatever is coming at you. Once activated, would have a random chance of firing on any attack made at you. What separates it from the physical dodging that other classes possess is that it would enable you to dodge -any- type of attack. Would include attacks from entities/loyals. Could include voicecraft (it'd be like plugging your ears at the appropriate moment). Would -not- include passive damage/affliction generators like vibes/harmonics/scytherus relapse/progression of voyria/heartseed.
To balance it: Give it a heavy mana and/or willpower drain, and/or increase overall EQ recovery time by a second or two while it's up (since part of your concentration is being consumed by periodically seizing hold of Time itself and moving yourself out of it). (Or make it generate a lot of flux very quickly, see below).
Aeon Glasses:
Give magi the ability to create miniature versions of their time-altering abilities in the form of tiny hourglasses. Each would hold a few charges/seconds of speedup/slowdown of BAL time, EQ time, sip time, etc. (I'm talking like, 5-7 seconds or so...long enough to be useful, not long enough to be insane). Destroyed upon use. Could be "consumed" by a player or thrown at another player/at the floor. Players could only use (having one thrown at you doesn't count) 2 or 3 per Achaean day (easy restriction) or each one used during a single day gives an ever-escalating chance of it backfiring into amnesia/confusion/stupidity...at around 10 in one day, that chance would be nearly 100% (and thus no one would be reasonably using more than 5 or 6 per day). Rules apply to everyone, even magi (but as magi would possess the actual versions of the skills, presumably they wouldn't need the glasses as much). A magi could only create hourglass versions of the skills he/she actually possess (like you can only dampen vibes you know how to spin).
Time step:
Jump forward/backward in time to a room you haven't yet visited/have already visited. Basically this would be a short-range teleport skill that would throw you into a random room three or four rooms away from the one you're in. Pros: Gets you the heck away from whatever/whoever is attacking you. Cons: You don't control where you end up, and you're off equilibrium for a suitably long time. Wouldn't work while prone/paralysed/asleep/etc.
Flux:
If the whole Aeonweaving idea gets too overpowered, I could almost see putting the whole skill on a reverse Devotion/Essence system, where every ability generates points of "flux"...little ripples/eddies/instabilities in your personal timestream. The more powerful the ability, the more flux it creates. The more flux you generate, the more likely your Aeonweaving will backfire on you. At 50% flux or so, half of your Aeonweaving attempts are backfiring. At 100% flux, Aeonweaving ceases to function altogether. Aeonglasses could generate flux as well, to put it all on the same system, and I imagine having a Glass thrown at you would give you a fraction of the flux the thrower generated for him/herself by throwing it. Flux would dissipate naturally over time, and maybe there could be flux-reducing skills/artifacts?
Hmm, the more I brainstorm on this, the more I'm tempted to steal it for the tabletop game I've been developing
What actually happened was that a number of abilities in Chivalry got split off and expanded upon. And, on top of that, their offence was pretty one-dimensional before the addition of the new stuff (DSL, DSL, DSL, DSL).
Magi and Sylvan have quite a few abilities already. They could maybe use some more strategic variety, but it's not like they lack variety right now - they still have tons of damage, vibes, hell magi have limb damage abilities, something that was pretty unthinkable in years past.
Them just getting a whole solid extra skillset worth of abilities would be pretty ridiculous - it's not like they're totally useless right now.
What would be interesting is seeing part of Elementalism split off and expanded upon similar to how parts of Chivalry were split off and expanded upon.
One thing that I could definitely see is taking this as an opportunity to eliminate the Magi-Sylvan Elementalism split. Now that Runelore is gone from Shaman, having two skills that are largely the same, but have substantially different abilities in them seems like something worth fixing. The skills that differ could probably be moved into new skills for each class and form the basis for the new skills.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
That'd be grossly overpowered.
Magi already has several travel abilities... Way more than most classes.
If you're asking for unstoppable fast travel a la Raido etc, that's just ridiculous. The implications of how that could be used with retardation are pretty obvious:
1 drop retardation on full vibes
2 use your "escape/mobility" abilities (note: you can already do this with sonic portal, with a target)
3 wield bow, and use it
4 post to forums about how "skilled" you are at combat.
This pretty much matches up exactly with my opinions on the class.
In my own words (but pretty much the same thing) - I'd love to see magi become something more than what it currently is*, but it's virtually impossible to add anything to a class that has access to retardation and already massive damage spike potential.
Added RNG + retardation = would be even more "random" luck based, which everyone hates.
Added Affliction pressure + retardation = affliction pressure is arguably already too much.
Added damage pressure = Magi already has some of the highest DPS and damage spike potential as is.
Added hindrance + retardation = would be insanely overpowered (obviously?), particularly since magi already have access to vibes, icewall, frozen ground, blocking, torc, and superfast brazier, as is.
Added mobility + retardation = would be highly abusable (and in fact, already is). Various forms of fast-travel (wings, earrings, empress, portals) are already incredibly OP for magi in 1v1 combat, and in groups it completely removes what might be considered the only balancing feature of retardation (that the magi is also in the vibe after they embed it). Adding "better" mobility/evasion would only serve to make ret+LoS even more ridiculously OP (and it's already one of the most OP mechanisms in the game, as it is).
The point is, the thing that makes upgrades to virtually any aspect of magi combat out of the question is a single ability that is Retardation. If you remove or alter the vibe to not be so insanely powerful (particularly in group combat) then the class would be much, much more flexible for potential changes/classleads.
stand by for (another) retardation post
There are several things I think need to be addressed with the vibe, each of which is really its own discussion, and has several possible solutions:
1) Ret traps. As is, if you are walking around totally uninvolved in combat, and walk into a retardation trap (retardation + frozen ground + alertness + delphinium arrows) without metawake up, your chances of survival are extremely low.
Solution: Perhaps there could be some kind of delay when you walk into a room with retardation. This would be disadvantageous for a magi who would currently be affected by retardation itself, but I think anyone unbiased/knowledgeable regarding magi combat would agree that totally unprepped retardation kills shouldn't be so incredibly easy. It should be a finishing tactic, not a portable guaranteed room. (this suggestion would in no way affect how retardation would behave when dropped on someone currently in the room).
2) Leaving the room. The concept of retardation is balanced around two concepts:
- The magi who drops the vibe is also affected by the vibe. This makes things "fair" since the vibe requires absolutely no prep-work to use, is uncurable, and is completely unpreventable (unlike similar abilities like Aeon).
- The vibe disappears if the magi dies.
The problem with magi being allowed to drop retardation and the leave the room is that it completely removes both of these "balancing" features. There are countless ways to "arrange" for your opponent being in retardation without the caster being in it as well, and as is, most active magi center their entire combat strategy around this (ie. turtle on full vibes, drop retardation when your opponent enters the room, walk/tumble out, rely on vibe RNG to prevent them from walk/tumbling out, and attempt to delph arrow them to death. If it doesn't work, rinse and repeat until it does).The solution to this is simple: If a magi leaves the room, retardation should drop.
3) Groups. Retardation is dramatically more powerful than pit ever was. If you don't agree, then I would be grudgingly willing to pull up logs of tailsweep/trample, Naga squads, or various other moronically simple strategies wiping out massive groups of players. While it's a "neat" aspect of combat, it's completely imbalanced. You can't see retardation in a room, so the only way to predict it's in a room is literally to "guess".
Solution part A: First of all, retardation should have a room description line, like gravehands, etc. It's 100% silly that it does not, given that its presence in a room means almost certain death for everyone that walks into it, if "used correctly".
Solution part B: Magi should only target a single person, and should also affect the magi. For example, if Jonesey used: embed retardation for Ernam only myself and Jonesey himself would be affected. There's absolutely no reason why a single vibe that has no drawbacks whatsoever when used out of room, should be able to be solely responsible for wiping entire raid groups. Yet it does. All the time.
You address all these things, and you'd have yourself a magi class that'd be much easier to "tweak" without making it incredibly OP. In fact, if you fixed all these things now, you'd have a magi class that was much less OP (but would probably be in need of significant classleads to give them some viable kill setups).
Until then, high tier magi (or vs magi) combat is going to continue to be what it currently is: A coin flip, that can be repeated ad infinitum, until it lands on what the magi wants it to land on.
Any skills you have take an extra second to go through in retardation. The cool thing is that you can start a single skill 1.1 seconds before you get EQ/bal back, and it will go through right on time. So it mainly serves to slow everybody's curing, making otherwise tame vibes suddenly more potent. There are two issues with retardation as I see it:
1: LoS attacks
Namely envenomed arrows and breathstreams with status effects
This has been brought up numerous times and is one of the most despised aspects of Retardation, either when the Magi has the bow, or his opponent. Suggested fixes:
* Arrows entering the room become slow enough that the target can dodge ~100% provided they are unhindered
* Arrows are delayed 1.1s+ upon entering, so that the shooter is on regular balance but their arrows still respect retardation (the better option to include breathstream & others)
* An anti-arrow vibe/defense for the Magi (not preferred, since bad mages are the chief culprits)
2: Vibe stacking
Not effective enough outside Retardation, too effective IN Retardation.
Possible changes:
* A) double the proc rates outside retardation, with embedding retardation slowing all vibes in its room to 50%, the current speed
* B ) There are 22 vibes. Limit the max to 12 per person + retardation/cube kill vibes half as quickly
* B2) Allow more than 11 but with increasing decay rates for each additional vibe
These changes would encourage more specific strategies instead of stacking and hoping for the best. Having to keep buffer vibes is irritating since there are only about 6 or 7 effects I'm really concerned with having. (Plus Reverb/Retard, and 3 buffers/secondary, instead of 13)
@Xith really good ideas.
Forcing magi to stand in retardation traps, making them and anyone with them free kills for enemy LoS (compare propped totem, which isn't as self-defeating since it doesn't hinder you), is a terrible solution.
Adding a delay on LoS into retardation seems like an okay solution from a game balance perspective and a nice one from a flavour perspective.
Adding a room description for retardation so people can just avoid it (still leaving it useful for area denial) without eliminating the punishment if a group does foolishly walk into it seems like the best solution.
@Tael I think we're pretty much in agreement, but I'd digress on one bit - That I really do not believe, at all, (having been on both ends of them) that "Retardation Traps" are necessary or even acceptable, at all.
My suggestion wasn't that magi should have to sit in their own retardation, it was that they simply shouldn't use retardation, at all, as an initiation of combat, in any way. It's simply way too powerful to be able to use without any preparation or opportunity to avoid, whatsoever.
Now also seems like a good time to remind everyone that alertness + two snipers is a 100% guaranteed death* - a fact that several active magi use on a regular basis. The fact that this strategy is typically used on people who are speedwalking or bashing just makes it even worse. [ * unless you like bashing with metawake up ]
"It's lame, so we should shun this behavior" is not a viable fix for imbalances like this in this game. If there's one thing we've learned about Achaea in the last decade, it's that people are going to abuse the hell out of web/axk, enfeeble/absolve, ret/delphinium, relic trade, etc, until, eventually, it gets a hard-coded fix.
A pre-set trap plus two players is essentially a 100% guaranteed death in plenty of circumstances already. Add a couple more people and you have a 100% guaranteed death from all of them just mashing their bashing attack against you. This is hardly unique.
If you're speed-walking or bashing and there's some reason that three people might all be conspiring to kill you, that's sort of your own fault. I don't think it's totally reasonable to suggest that that should be unacceptable. If anything, I think that's probably desirable - actions have consequences and when a gank squad comes for retribution, unless you play your cards very carefully, you should probably die. You shouldn't expect to be able to autowalk around and bash with impunity if you've done something that's going to lead to people trying to gank you.
But I wasn't really intending to talk about random traps - I mean during raids. Retardation traps add something to raid strategy that I really wouldn't want to see removed. Is it strong? Yes. But it's not like any faction lacks access to magi or like retardation is the deciding factor in every raid right now. The fact that it's strong does not necessarily indicate that it should be nerfed into obsolesence.
...
A delay on LoS (not just arrows) seems pretty reasonable though.
This is not actually true, at all, and has been actively targeted and eliminated, repeatedly, as they arise. See: Every single thing I listed, as well as many others (which have all been "fixed").
2v1 should not be a guaranteed death, ever, particularly instantly. If you choose to stand and fight 2v1, sure, you shouldn't bitch about "balance", but walking into the wrong room (with no LOOK warning on squint, any other form of warning whatsoever) should never be a guaranteed death.
Edit: I have retardation ganked three times(all solo) as a magi, one of which turned into a positive role-play experience, so I am not even an abuser here.
Edit: double post, whoops