Arcane Blade ideas

[SageAcrin]

Initially, when I was going to post this, I had a fairly involved writeup describing the issues of Arcane Blade.

That they are, fundamentally, a class of a massive support skillset, but very few active skills.

However, one statistic really shows off that AB has issues right now, more than any other.

Around 13000 Arcane Blades have been made online. Five have cleared the main Adventure mode...except two were using the Arcane Blade retool(which is an entirely different thing) and two were made before b30.

So, honestly, how much of an argument do I *need* to make? Arcane Blades have issues.

So, I whipped up a low alteration set of ideas for them, designed to (hopefully) make them more of an effective fighter/mage rather than a conversion to something new.

Any other suggestions along those lines(Which DarkGod has said he wishes Arcane Blade to be, IIRC; A physical fighter with standard spells) are welcome, obviously, as are any critiques for the ideas.

Ideas, in order of what I think their importance is;

Categories:

-Unlock Conveyance and Aegis. These are major reasons to be playing an Arcane Blade, strategic advantages in melee combat that other, more traditional fighters don't provide... yet they are behind a two Category Point wall, for some reason. They should be obtaining large, long term benefits(hence the several suggested locked categories, also Stone) instead of using their category points for basic needs.

-Add Battle Tactics(Locked, I would suggest 1.3). This fits amazingly well; Arcane Blade is meant to be a tactical fusion of physical and magical damage, and both Greater Weapon Focus and Bleeding Edge are good skills no matter what your weapon is, with good synergy with the class. The only reason to have this locked is because it is a higher level skillset, but that's probably a good enough one, especially with the change to the two Generic categories.

-Add Earth(unlocked). This gives you a very nice lower end support synergy skill(Stone Skin), some excellent area handling skills like Dig and Stone Wall, and generally does everything for Arcane Blade that Archmages don't even need it for.

-Unlock Dirty Fighting. If this fits anyone that isn't a Rogue, it is these guys, and it's a .9 category anyways. Who pays a category point for .9 Dirty Fighting? Especially on a class with already good mobility options? This would, at least, give a base Arcane Blade something universal to spend Stamina on.

(-Everything below this line is less important, as far as the categories go, but still strike me as good ideas.)

-Add Superiority(Locked, probably something like 1.0). Would largely be not useful...except for Shattering Impact, which fits them like a glove, granting them large amounts of non-weapon-specific burst damage off the Stamina they don't use nearly as much.

-Add Water. (I waffle on suggesting it to be locked or unlocked.) Not as synergistic or neat as some of the others, but Water would make it a full set of the basic four spells(and only one of the higher end ones, along with many other missing spellsets, so Archmage still is dominate), and it would give that damage boost to Cold that Frost Hands has something to actually *do*...

-Remove Two-Handed Maiming. It is rather odd that the class has a specific class of skills for twohanders, even though in theory it is meant to be a non-weapon-favoring class. To boot, this is the support class of physicals, rather than the heavy hitter damage skills. It just isn't going to sell people on twohanders. Balancing that is best done elsewhere, if attempted. And it honestly misleads newbies. Still, I don't feel too strongly on this either way.

Skills:

-Replace Arcane Destruction. It isn't very good. This would be an obvious place to try to distinguish weapons; I was thinking along the lines of an Arcane Repel skill that would grant small amounts of defense to a dualwielder, higher defense to twohander wielders, and highest defense and some elemental resistance to sword/shield wielders. This isn't the only way to do it, obviously; I seem to recall the Elemental Blade idea had some flavor of spell deflection that could be used instead of elemental resistance.

-Have Frost Hands and Fiery Hands boost their damage when wielding two-handers. I don't know how easy/hard this would be to do, though. Even better would be causing their damage to have on-hit retaliation effects for shield wielders, as well. Arcane Combat getting on-block retaliation chances and a higher odds of procing when a twohander is used would help there, as well.

These aren't the only ideas I've come up with-some of the odd ones included giving them Shield Defense at .9, locked, and giving them Fire Alchemy(both of which have decent enough synergy but lead to a very dull playstyle and a very odd flavor respectively, so I don't suggest them). But in general, I think this set of ideas would be enough to make Arcane Blade competitive without it being overpowering.

[Grey]

Mostly good ideas. Arcane Destruction used to be very powerful, but in the mechanics changes its become pretty pathetic.