Evasion should apply to projectile spells

[Grey]

Well ice shards would fall under the remit of this proposal then :)

[wobbly]

If you wanted to include some sort of dodge for AoE, you could always have dodge for 1/2 damage. Sort of diving for cover. I've always found mages perfect accuracy in tome a little strange, so I like the idea. Just suspect it would be a major headache to re-balance a lot of talents.

minirant: Am I the only person who dislikes Evasion conceptually? I think the proper way to portray someone being harder to hit is well, more Defense. It just feels...odd to me to sidestep this mechanic completely % of the time(critical successes and failures aside).

Yeah I dislike it too. There's just no way to get round it when playing a melee character. You'd think perfect strike would counter evasion/duck 'n dodge but no amount of accuracy makes any difference with a straight % mechanic.

Edit: As far as evasion goes, I remember seeing this idea: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=3 ... ck#p140828

[Frumple]

Freeze is an instant attack, yeah. No travel time. Frozen shards is what white crystals use, and it's a pretty good example of a completely worthless projectile attack. It's actually possible to dodge them, and then just walk up to a crystal and murder it before it comes off cooldown. With a base movement speed character. Good thing to use in scint. caves, meaningless on any NPC afterwards. Humans can use it alright, but that's only because they know when to use the damned thing (i.e. point blank. If you happen to have some projectile slowing effects going, it's not impossible to sidestep the bloody things from literally one square out.).

As for evasion apply to projectile spells... mostly whatever, imo. Projectile spells are already pretty much worthless vs. the player, especially at higher levels, and vs the enemy the computer's generally too stupid to intelligently use evasion to avoid them. It'd make projectile attacks slightly more of a non-threat to the attentive player, so... whatever.

Defense, other folks have said it. There's just not really many powerful projectile attacks, and certainly few you'd rather be using instead of beams, instant, or AoE attacks, most of the time. Travel time is a nasty weakness already. Making them (even more) utterly useless against a (larger) subset of monsters or player builds is... eh.

Basically, if we actually do this, we'll be doing it more for the thematics than the balance. Which... I'd be okay with, and I don't really mind nerfing the already comparatively weak projectiles. I don't rely on 'em much

[Hachem_Muche]

Sidetrack:

minirant: Am I the only person who dislikes Evasion conceptually? I think the proper way to portray someone being harder to hit is well, more Defense. It just feels...odd to me to sidestep this mechanic completely % of the time(critical successes and failures aside).

I've uploaded an addon that lets you try out the alternate evasion mechanic (turning on/off "Limited Evasion" at any time in game) so you can judge the results for yourself. (It also has options for improving saves and a more flexible hit function.) http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/altern ... anics-tome
/Sidetrack

I like the idea of applying evasion/defense to projectile spells (using spellpower vs defense) both conceptually and from a game play perspective. Game balance wise, I don't think it will help the disparity between ranged casters and melee very much. To do that, either ranged magic must be nerfed (not a fan of this option) or melee must have a better way to mitigate damage from beam/aoe spells.

Mitigation can be at least partially achieved by applying part of the defender's armor bonus to the spell damage (before multipliers, the same way melee attacks are handled) so that heavily armored opponents are more difficult to hurt with magic. This makes a lot of sense conceptually and thematically, but doesn't help low armor melee (like rogues) very much. To handle that, you could apply evasion/defense as a kind of saving throw against the damage using a system of graduated saves (much like my proposal for improving saving throws, see http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=36715) so that highly defensive characters would have a reasonable chance to avoid some of the damage. I think this could be handled in the projector code by passing targeting information and probably wouldn't be too difficult.

[HousePet]

It would be nice to be able to dodge spells in some way. It is annoying that physical attacks have to get past defence and armour in addition to the resistance check, whereas spells just get the resistance check.

How about a defense save vs spellpower(or mindpower) for half damage against projectiles and beams?
Same for being hit by the edge of an explosion.

To balance things out a bit:
Projectiles and beams will continue to their full range, rather than just stop at the target position.
Spellcasters automagically pass the defense vs spellpower check when they are hit by the edge of their own explosion spells. (cos the symmetric fov change makes it harder to use those safely in close quarters)