Making various school spells useful

[Lord Estraven]

Seeing as these ideas will never be accepted into the T2 main branch, I figure I may as well propose them for T3...

Let's start with the Mind school.

- We're getting rid of Z-style Mindcraft in T3, but that doesn't mean we should just transfer Mindwave and whatnot to the Mind school and leave it at that.
- IMHO, Stun and Confuse should use STUN_DAM and CONF_DAM (or their T3 equivalents) instead of just stunning and confusing. Also, there should be the possibility of backlash from high-level undead and demons, as with Z mindcraft. Trying to assault a foe's mind directly should have nasty consequences, for them and potentially for the player character.
- Finally, Melkor, being evil, should love it when the player uses Mind spells, and absolutely adore it when they use such spells against good-aligned opponents. Eru, on the other hand, should not like you messing with others' free will, so Mind spells should be a piety hit for him.

Water school...
- Let's make Geyser GF_WAVE (or T3 equivalent) or get rid of it. Even with the occasional boosting it's gotten, it's quite useless.

Earth school...
- Earth is mostly very useful utility spells, but Strike is kind of a lame attack spell. How about making it a beam instead of a ball at high levels? That would be more useful and more tactically interesting.

Temporal school...
- Slow Monster would be more valuable if it used Inertia at high levels, actually doing some damage.

And finally, Music...
- Please, let's get rid of the PVAL limitations! Being unable to use most spells because you can't find a +5 instrument is ridiculous.

[bigfoot]

The mind school is pretty useless I think, it never works at higher levels. But mindcraft, that was awesome.
Yeah, Geyser has never been my offense. A cone shape area of damage would be neater. I've always thought that perhaps water should quench balrogs and other nasty fire monsters, since I was always given that impression in the books.
Earth is great, stone prison is very useful. Strike I've never actually used, since if I have that, why not just manathrust for greater damage?
Slow monster is okay, I'd leave it alone.
Music, I agree. That is the one reason I've never gotten one off the ground for any distance, I get bored looking for one of those instruments.

[LordBucket]

Making various school spells useful

I propose that magic be re-written from scratch.

In particular, let's not invoke Contractual Boss Immunity to create Artificial Difficulty.

There's no point in having spells that are only effective on creatures that you'd never have any reason to use them on. If you're going to have slow/paralyze/mind control/etc. effects, there's no need to have uniques all magically immune to them. If you're going to include these effects, simply design things in such a way that they do work, but they're not game breaking.

As I recall, T2 magic was loosely based on the old DOS "Magic" turn-based strategy game. Which was generally pretty good for its time. But it did have a lot of absolutely useful spells. Let's not do that.

there should be the possibility of backlash from high-level undead and demons

Agreed on demons, but I would say undead should generally be immune to mind magic. What mind do you intent to affect on a skeleton?

mind school is pretty useless I think, it never works at higher levels.

So change that. Make it actually work. Or eliminate the school completely. Just because it existed in T2 doesn't mean it needs to exist in T3.

why not just manathrust for greater damage?

I highly encourage that manathrust be thoroughly nerfed. It's very poor design for the very first spell you get to be the most damaging and most versitile spell you ever get. Manathrust does huge damage and is irresistable, whereas many higher level spells aren't as damaging and many monsters are immune to them. So as you say, why bother with anything else? Poor design.

[Lord Estraven]

Yeah, I have to agree about Manathrust. It is a bolt spell, maybe magic users and heavily armored monsters (e.g. dragons) should be able to reflect it?

(And I must say I kind of miss the spell system from T1. Granted that the vast majority of spells in it didn't do a lot, casting Anarchy Wave against the trolls at Nirnaeth Arnoedad was cool.)

[Elkan]

Lordbucket.

I just spent five hours following nested chains of links on tropes.... damn you.... DAMN YOU!