Rethinking Mages 2: What should elements have in common?

[HousePet]

Well these categories kinda suck a lot for Arcane Blade as you've basically moved all the utility to the locked categories.
I strongly disagree with the positioning of the resistance penetration talent: Their side effects are pointless without the locked category and if you aren't taking the locked category, you aren't really focusing in that element so investing in resistance penetration is a waste.

[Atarlost]

Well these categories kinda suck a lot for Arcane Blade as you've basically moved all the utility to the locked categories.
I strongly disagree with the positioning of the resistance penetration talent: Their side effects are pointless without the locked category and if you aren't taking the locked category, you aren't really focusing in that element so investing in resistance penetration is a waste.

Only Pure Aether's rider is pointless. Wildfire's is less useful when Fireflash is the only self damaging spell, but not useless. Dazing spells, saves, and iceblock penetration are useful with only the first tree.

The riders aren't really important anyways and most of them did not have them when first written; they came later as a convenient place to dump a fix for something broken in the tree like burning wake killing you or iceblocks ruining your damage dealing potential. Penetration needs to be moved earlier to make the elements that face early resistance viable for a focused build.

[HousePet]

Focussed builds are not viable anyway, as you need to spend points in another element or you have only one talent to start with.
Investing 5 points into the basic attack of another element solves the resistance issue and the lack of talents issue. Moving the Respen talent to slot 4 of the unlocked category helps with the resistance issue, but makes the lack of talents issue worse.

[0player]

Atar, I think this shapes up to be a really neat idea. If you need help with making this come to life, you can always find the people that'll help you on Rizon IRC on #tome channel, and here on the forums, I suppose. Looking forward to it!

[edge2054]

I really like this. I think it's cohesive and well thought out. I like the move of resistance penetration. The new talents look fun and it looks like all elements are supported better.

[HousePet]

The better attack spells in the unlocked categories is really good, but having little utility and giving the respen talent in that category makes them much worse for Arcane Blades (except, of course, for Crystalline Focus).

I hope a lot of those 'dunno's in the locked categories are going to be filled with useful offensive talents, or mono-element builds aren't going to have many offensive options.

[donkatsu]

It looks like meta can either start unlocked or disruption shield can be nerfed or replaced so it's no longer the default archmage defense. In the latter case it looks like Phantasm has to take up the slack.

You could remove disruption shield entirely and give Archmages nothing in return, and they would still be the tankiest class in the game. There's not really any slack to take up, except for flavor/fun purposes, because Aegis is pretty bland.

Focussed builds are not viable anyway, as you need to spend points in another element or you have only one talent to start with.

Not viable until level 4, anyway, at which point you just respec out of the off-element tier 1.

Advanced trees, of course, need to have at least one damage spell each. I don't think making the advanced trees consist of four utility talents was ever on the table.

Exactly what utility do you think Arcane Blades would be losing with the new trees that would make them so much worse than the old trees? The only one I see is Stone Wall, and Stone Wall is a talent that's strong enough to require a cat point.

[HousePet]

Stoneskin and Featherwind.
They aren't that good, but it is still a decrease.

The level 4 talents tend to be more debuff/utility than damage. Waiting til level 8 for two decent attack talents is too long.

[HousePet]

Double Post!

I'm wondering what the impacts of having the respen talent available 10 levels earlier will have regarding rares.

[anonymous000]

With darkgod probably won't change archmages and that the thread is about Rethinking Mages, I see there is huge room for proposing drastic changes and there is no need to confine our ideas to the existing archmages talents/structures, unless we have a solid reason to stick to them. Some existing talents are more like offensive fillers (like Lightning and Earthern Missles), I would suggest we use the idea generated in Rethinking Mages 1 and assign extra utility/fun to all spells.

Aside from archamges talents, I would like to see Arcane Blade completely reworked with new mechanism. Triggering spells randomly upon melee attack is a dull mechanism and I can never find what makes Arcane Blade special. Casting spells sometimes, melee (and random flame/lightning/earthen missles) most of the time, but these two elements don't really get woven into one interesting mechanism. As they are now they are more like Arcane & Blade rather than Arcane Blade, or wyrmics with less utility. I also don't think forcing archmages spells to them being a good idea, as you would be forced to accommodate the spells for two highly different classes, instead of making the talents most fun/useful to one class only.

[edge2054]

Stoneskin and Featherwind.
They aren't that good, but it is still a decrease.

The level 4 talents tend to be more debuff/utility than damage. Waiting til level 8 for two decent attack talents is too long.

In exchange for Featherwind they get ride the lightning and they get it earlier.

On normal getting to level 8 usually isn't an issue. On Nightmare it happens pretty quick anyway from getting higher XP. On higher difficulties, well, most players don't even do their first dungeon until level 10 :/

Double Post!
I'm wondering what the impacts of having the respen talent available 10 levels earlier will have regarding rares.

I don't think them getting resist pen early will have much effect. Most players don't have much resistance to penetrate early game anyway. That said I think frontloading all of the damage in the trees is going to make mage rares a lot scarier. But, they're not all that scary right now anyway outside of an unlucky lightning bolt crit.

I'm pretty much sold on moving the penetration sustains to the ends of the unlocked trees which means disruption shield and stone prism and probably a burning wake independent version of cleansing flames will become the first talents of the locked trees. That means arcane is completely skippable, but aether becomes a must unlock. That's a 3 talent for one category trade. I'm not sure I like that. Meta is frequently a must unlock and I don't really have plans for changing it. That would screw over any locked tree that needs spellcraft (eg. storm unless hurricane gets removed or made safe). It looks like meta can either start unlocked or disruption shield can be nerfed or replaced so it's no longer the default archmage defense. In the latter case it looks like Phantasm has to take up the slack. I can think of three ways to nerf disruption shield off hand: It can reduce your mana instead of increasing it, it can only convert a fraction of damage into mana, or it can be a timed effect that will always blow up in your face.

I'm about to head out the door and I'll try to contribute some more concrete ideas when I get home and have a chance to look over the current mage talents.

First of all I agree with Donkatsu, I don't think mages need disruption shield. They're already incredibly tanky. I think mana steal is a good thought but it might be a bit too limited in focus. If it literally works like mana clash (i.e. on lots of different resource types instead of just mana) I think it can fulfill the utility of Disruption Shield's mana regen (though it is a situational spell).

I also think you're right that Phantasm can pick up the slack and I think (as I've said probably a few times) that it could really work as a defensive/utility tree.

I don't think Meta should be unlockable by default, partially because it is a pure utility tree but also because new players aren't going to start with all of the advanced trees. IIRC they get Aether, Meta, and Temporal. On top of this they start out with a lot of unlocked trees already. Adding meta to the mix is going to be even more overwhelming for new players then the class already is.

Spellshaping could be made to be better by simply not handing out free seflfire avoidance. Or, another route would be to give some actual elemental summons as capstones and have Spellshaping apply to friendly fire too. So you could go deep fire, meta, with a touch of arcane and spellshaping would let you shoot mana thrusts through your fire elementals or through escorts. Or it could be replaced with a different talent (dropping the sustain cost and just leaving it spellshock on hit is another option).

I think your suggestions are going to encourage a lot of tri-beam builds for new players. Which I don't think is bad. It's actually a really solid strategy and would let new players ease themselves into the class while they start unlocking new trees and exploring the talents. I like that you moved the stronger utility talents like Stone Wall into locked trees. I think it's going to prevent a lot of cheese and encourages players to invest point into talents they'll actually use rather than going 1/1/1/5 Earth like many currently do.

I think Stone Skin can be rolled into Body of Stone. I think Body of Stone should lose the self pin.

I think Tidal Wave and Geyser don't need physical damage. It makes sense thematically but as the person that suggested it I can say that when I suggested it resist penetration wasn't a thing and earth had no physical damage. At this point I'd prefer for Water to stay focused on cold.

I'm not a big fan of nova blink and I think there's still a ways to go with this idea. But I really think you're on the right track

[donkatsu]

I think Stone Skin can be rolled into Body of Stone. I think Body of Stone should lose the self pin.

So far, every self-pinning sustain has basically failed: Aim, Last Stand, and Body of Stone. Part of it is that giving up mobility is a huge loss, and designers seem to be reluctant to give these sustains a proportionally huge benefit, but also, having to turn a sustain off before you can start autoexploring again is a big drag, such that even if the talent was suitably balanced, it would be tedious to use. I really like the idea of Earth/Stone being immobile though, and there is one immobility sustain that has been successful: Dreamforge.

I propose making Body of Stone like Dreamforge. Each turn you remain stationary, you get a Earth-related buff that stacks up to 3 times. Armor, physical resistance, stun/freeze immunity, cooldown reduction on Earth/Stone spells, whatever you want to put on it.

In order to make Shivrogoth Form compelling, it has to either work alongside damage shields, or be so good by itself that giving up shields and using Shivrogoth Form's affinity-healing instead is a significant net gain instead of a net loss. Since the latter option would involve giving Shivrogoth Form like +20,000 max life and I doubt anyone's going to sign onto that, I think the focus has to be on the former.

[donkatsu]

Double post because Housepet started it!

With darkgod probably won't change archmages and that the thread is about Rethinking Mages, I see there is huge room for proposing drastic changes and there is no need to confine our ideas to the existing archmages talents/structures, unless we have a solid reason to stick to them. Some existing talents are more like offensive fillers (like Lightning and Earthern Missles), I would suggest we use the idea generated in Rethinking Mages 1 and assign extra utility/fun to all spells.

The problem with changing too much is that you might as well make a new class at that point without scrapping an old one.

Although actually, now that you mention it, since we're dreaming anyway I'd like to directly address the elephant in the room: Aegis. It's difficult to say anything power-related about Archmages with a straight face as long as Aegis continues to produce five-digit damage shields. And this isn't something incredibly difficult to fix either; it's just a case of runaway multipliers. Aegis multiplies way too many things together to get its final result. The math that results in the abomination that is Aegis is actually really fragile, in that it would only take the removal of 2-3 multipliers to bring it back down to a sane level. So here's the actual suggestion:

1. Arcane Reconstruction has its healing amount and cooldown halved.
2. Arcane Shield takes the heal value before it is multiplied by heal mod.

It's simple, and cuts down optimized Aegis shielding by a factor of about x5 without really hurting the players who think Aegis isn't that great. In fact, the halved cooldown Arcane Reconstruction might even seem like a buff, if you're the kind of person who actually uses it for healing instead of solely for generating overpowered shields.

[Atarlost]

First of all I agree with Donkatsu, I don't think mages need disruption shield. They're already incredibly tanky. I think mana steal is a good thought but it might be a bit too limited in focus. If it literally works like mana clash (i.e. on lots of different resource types instead of just mana) I think it can fulfill the utility of Disruption Shield's mana regen (though it is a situational spell).

I'm not finding non-disruption mages incredibly tanky. I don't see the crazy heal mods on normal. I do mean for mana steal to pull the same resources at the same ratios and conversion rates as mana clash.

I don't think Meta should be unlockable by default, partially because it is a pure utility tree but also because new players aren't going to start with all of the advanced trees. IIRC they get Aether, Meta, and Temporal. On top of this they start out with a lot of unlocked trees already. Adding meta to the mix is going to be even more overwhelming for new players then the class already is.

Spellshaping could be made to be better by simply not handing out free seflfire avoidance. Or, another route would be to give some actual elemental summons as capstones and have Spellshaping apply to friendly fire too. So you could go deep fire, meta, with a touch of arcane and spellshaping would let you shoot mana thrusts through your fire elementals or through escorts. Or it could be replaced with a different talent (dropping the sustain cost and just leaving it spellshock on hit is another option).

My concern is that certain spells are practically suicide to use without spellshaping. (In the current plan I think the worst are aether beam, hurricane, aether breach repurposed as earthquake and maybe aether breach sticking around as itself since I'm low on ideas for that tree. The large radius balls are also sometimes hard to use safely without spellshaping, but at least they have well defined edges.) It's not that it's too weak to be a locked tree, but that it's too mandatory to be a locked tree.

I think Tidal Wave and Geyser don't need physical damage. It makes sense thematically but as the person that suggested it I can say that when I suggested it resist penetration wasn't a thing and earth had no physical damage. At this point I'd prefer for Water to stay focused on cold.

Geyser has half physical because of the tidal wave precedent. With the penetration talent moving I'm down with making them just cold.

Although actually, now that you mention it, since we're dreaming anyway I'd like to directly address the elephant in the room: Aegis. It's difficult to say anything power-related about Archmages with a straight face as long as Aegis continues to produce five-digit damage shields. And this isn't something incredibly difficult to fix either; it's just a case of runaway multipliers. Aegis multiplies way too many things together to get its final result. The math that results in the abomination that is Aegis is actually really fragile, in that it would only take the removal of 2-3 multipliers to bring it back down to a sane level. So here's the actual suggestion:

1. Arcane Reconstruction has its healing amount and cooldown halved.
2. Arcane Shield takes the heal value before it is multiplied by heal mod.

It's simple, and cuts down optimized Aegis shielding by a factor of about x5 without really hurting the players who think Aegis isn't that great. In fact, the halved cooldown Arcane Reconstruction might even seem like a buff, if you're the kind of person who actually uses it for healing instead of solely for generating overpowered shields.

I suppose that unlike the other generic spells, Aegis is mage only so it's within the scope of the project. What goes into it? I'm not seeing even 4 digit shields out of it, much less 5. If this is something that only happens with insane/madness drop rates and single minded heal mod stacking I can't see it as a problem with aegis, but rather with Monty Haul. My understanding is that those difficulty levels were never really meant to be balanced.

That said, I don't like Arcane Shield. I don't like what it would do to inscription selection at high heal mod (mages should lean more towards runes) and it seems a bit of a trap to use it with anything but Arcane Shield at low heal mod. An actual straight damage shield talent would be more controllable from a design standpoint.

[grayswandir]

What if you rewrote all the mage spells to do 50% damage to everything else if you would otherwise hit a friendly? Like you have to spend more effort into manipulating it. Then spell shaping could just be a damage bonus, bringing it closer to 100%.

I'd be in favor of getting rid of heal->shield completely. What if you changed the talent to let heal also work on lost shield strength, somehow?