Rethinking Mages 2: What should elements have in common?

[malboro_urchin]

Because it's one part of the early game tribeam setup, which yields dependable and consistent damage, all for a negligible amount of mana.

[edge2054]

It's also another element. Running into a mob that's immune to your one damage type prior to having penetration sucks.

This is another reason why fire is such a good build, fire immunity is relatively rare early on. Lightning has the biggest issues. Cold isn't so bad on the immunity front but 50% resist mobs are still very common.

[0player]

Because it's one part of the early game tribeam setup, which yields dependable and consistent damage, all for a negligible amount of mana.

It indeed is, but without buttons to press to kill stuff Archmages would quickly degrade to being Doom-- er, extremely weak early on, rendering Expanse unpassable.

[donkatsu]

Manathrust/Flame/Pulverizing Augur is more than enough to fill your rotation with cheap, off-element damage and all of those lead into useful talents. I think the "tribeam" concept is a holdover from when a lot of people didn't have their advanced element trees unlocked, and it stuck around because of its catchy name. Practically speaking it's not a good idea, Lightning is not a good spell past like, level 3, unless you're planning on stacking +lightning damage, and you grow out of the damage spam phase pretty early in the game anyway.

You are encouraged to dip into talents outside of your element for utility, because utility is not affected by the thing that distinguishes the various elemental builds, which is +damage and +damage penetration. If you put good utility in basic elemental trees, people will take them regardless of their elemental focus. In fact, those utility talents will in practice have no elemental affiliation because everyone will get them (see Stone Wall). If you put utility in advanced elemental trees, then it really does become part of that element's identity (see Cleansing Flames). There's also the potential for explicit synergy, like that Mindslayer melee tree, which allows you to introduce what I would call true multi-element builds, because it doesn't really count as multi-element if all of your damage is fire and you just use Stone Wall and Disruption Shield.

[Atarlost]

If you had spent category points to unlock Meta and Temporal, I'd say you branched out from using a single element (thematic element, not damage element).
And since you get more than 20 class points, it appears that branching out from a single element is only possible to avoid by dying.
You can still focus in a single element by investing mostly in that element; just because you have grabbed some other spells that support your main element, doesn't mean you aren't doing a mono element build.

I define any build that does not invest in two of the five Aristotelean elements mono-element. If it doesn't have both a locked an unlocked tree it's not an element.

I would add that Flame, Manathurst and Lightning are consistently taken at level 3-4 in practically all Archmage builds since they're quite good. Ditto Flameshock (excellent utility) and more often than not, Pulverizing Auger. So single element is very much defied and will continue to be if trees have good-on-its-own spells -- and if we want early game to be suvivable, we need such spells.

This sort of thing is why I'm adamant that there be no more intentional synergies built into the class. Multi-element builds will always be viable unless we copy the alchemist infusion structure, which nobody wants to do. The alchemist already exists.

[edge2054]

Intentional synergies don't push out natural synergies. I hear you on the long descriptions but to say that trees with intentional synergies don't allow natural synergies to arise doesn't follow.

[Delmuir]

This is pretty much the exact opposite of my desired direction. I want to make the single element builds you see in non-named NPCs the default. That means getting rid of explicit synergies and making all elements stand on their own.

I'm ultimately a little baffled by this idea.

On a fundamental level, this reduces the thought and flexibility of the builds as everything becomes automatic.

More so, it reduces the play-style flexibility. With limited build flexibility, you also have limited play flexibility… everything is the same. The problem with this is that the game presents you with a lot of different problems to solve, and different ways to solve them.

I'm just not sure what the point is of reducing build options is. If you take away the decision-making and discovery from players, all you're left with is an automatic game-play and randomness. With that, they might as well just sit at home and roll a die over and over again. It'd be about the same amount of fun… certainly the same type of fun.

[malboro_urchin]

Because it's one part of the early game tribeam setup, which yields dependable and consistent damage, all for a negligible amount of mana.

It indeed is, but without buttons to press to kill stuff Archmages would quickly degrade to being Doom-- er, extremely weak early on, rendering Expanse unpassable.

My point exactly.

[Atarlost]

Intentional synergies don't push out natural synergies. I hear you on the long descriptions but to say that trees with intentional synergies don't allow natural synergies to arise doesn't follow.

The existence of natural synergies make intentional synergies unnecessary. Strong intentional synergies make builds without intentional synergy too much weaker than designer approved builds. Weak enough intentional synergies to not drive out unplanned build possibilities aren't worth writing down.

[HousePet]

That assumes that natural synergies are evenly spaced and are of equal power.
How do you even define a natural synergy? Does it just mean one that the designer didn't think about? Cos that sounds like a terrible way to design.

[anonymous000]

The existence of natural synergies make intentional synergies unnecessary. Strong intentional synergies make builds without intentional synergy too much weaker than designer approved builds. Weak enough intentional synergies to not drive out unplanned build possibilities aren't worth writing down.

Intentional synergies might be unnecessary from a purely game-beating standpoint, but it adds a lot of depth into gameplay.

Your thread of "what should the elements mean?" is about differentiating each element and I feel it is a great direction. But considering that was step1 I feel very little of the ideas generated in that thread is used in this thread. To make each class stand on its own why don't we do that by creating strong synergy within a tree, instead of forcing the same talent in each tree? Here I mean synergy in gameplay, not number boosting like +x% damage per talent level. And I gotta say passive damage boosting and resistance penetration talent never add anything to gameplay, they are simply a necessity. Best to remove them and give the passive bonus with the increase in talent level

On top of that we could add intentional cross-tree synergy as well

[Mex]

I gotta say passive damage boosting and resistance penetration talent never add anything to gameplay, they are simply a necessity. Best to remove them and give the passive bonus with the increase in talent level

This is a good point and would solve the issue of some elements being hard to focus on due to high enemy resists, however it would hurt as you need to put more points to get more res pen, which I think I generally dislike. Also it makes sense thematically that you have become so skilled that you can overcome the enemies natural resistances to your element of choice.

[anonymous000]

I gotta say passive damage boosting and resistance penetration talent never add anything to gameplay, they are simply a necessity. Best to remove them and give the passive bonus with the increase in talent level

This is a good point and would solve the issue of some elements being hard to focus on due to high enemy resists, however it would hurt as you need to put more points to get more res pen, which I think I generally dislike. Also it makes sense thematically that you have become so skilled that you can overcome the enemies natural resistances to your element of choice.

The key point lies in synergy, if the in-tree synergies are well developed then players would be naturally motivated to specialize in a tree, with stronger raw damage as a benefit. While we could design the cross-tree synergy in a way that would offer excellent utility at the cost of lower raw damage.

[malboro_urchin]

I gotta say passive damage boosting and resistance penetration talent never add anything to gameplay, they are simply a necessity. Best to remove them and give the passive bonus with the increase in talent level

This is a good point and would solve the issue of some elements being hard to focus on due to high enemy resists, however it would hurt as you need to put more points to get more res pen, which I think I generally dislike. Also it makes sense thematically that you have become so skilled that you can overcome the enemies natural resistances to your element of choice.

If you're specializing thoroughly in a tree, it's easy enough to make passive res-pen bonuses scale with talent points spent in a tree, Wyrmic-style. Just have the scaling roughly approximate various levels of talent investment in the current sustain-based res-pen talents we have.

[HousePet]

I think this thread is drifting a bit.

As for the penetration talents, I think they are good as is. Because they give you a big penetration bonus for little investment, and it also gives you a choice about whether you want it. A mono element build needs it and gets the most out of those talents, whereas for a multi element build the effect is basically useless. Therefore, making it a passive bonus spread over all the talents is less functional and gives it to builds that don't want it.