Rethinking Mages 2: What should elements have in common?

[0player]

Pretty much everything else can be boiled down to telling me to abandon the exercise because enabling functional single element builds is badwrongfun.

A friendly reminder that you do not own the thread and that the thread title implies that your way of pondering it is not the only thing that is going to be discussed here.
People have their own ideas because archmages have been like this for a long long time. It is impolite to shut people up.

And people telling me I'm not allowed to pursue balance without wading through pages of naysaying is civil?

You are more than welcome to pursue the balance without readin the thread if you cannot read the thread comfortably.

Ahem.

My thought on Phantasmal Shield + Blur Sight was to add an on_death effect to it that deals light damage in a radius. Targets with Phantasmal Shield would be immune to this.

Edge, pay your due diligence to this http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=42425 addon (I should as well). It contains some nifty ideas similar to yours.

What really needs to die, though, is stat sustains. I'm going to list them: Arcane Power, Stone Skin, Blur Sight, and, to some extent, Feather Wind. Your mana is quite literally your health after all, and you cannot afford to trade it for mediocre stat boosts!

I tried to change Arcane Power in this http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=42466 addon, giving you a dynamic spellpower boost/arcane res boost. Arcane res boost is aimed at aether builds, spellpower boost (which requires you to be low on mana) is aimed at Disruption Shield users. It is perhaps still weak for what it does, but it's a bit more worthwhile than providing prescaled flat boost and provides a truly interesting tradeoff.
Other things to ponder would be a built-in spellsurge (+spellpower on spell crit) or something connected to criticals. Currently, Arcane Power is bad early game because you have little mana and it's bad late game because the boost is useless. Making the bonus useful might offset that.
Nulltweaks (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=39780) gives Arcane Power a reduced sustain cost and more Arcane resist.

Stone Skin... there's nothing to be said for it. it caps out at 23 armor, and it starts with 10ish. Armor has a limited use as being only applied to melee and ranged attacks. Early game, your hardiness is crap. Late game, it hardly matters because you have shields for days. (Which is a concern with pretty much all freestats, i guess? Archmages don't need offsets in either offense or defense as both sides are very strong.)
I remember, at this point, Carbon Spikes (dynamic armor buff + bleed retaliation). I also remember flat damage mitigation. Something like all flat armor that goes down on hits (slowly) would be useful as a DoT mitigation tool and would certainly find its way into the hearts of some.
A similar idea is covered in Nulltweaks (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=39780), which gives it armor hardiness and just a flat damage mitigation.

Blur Sight... grayswandir (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=42425) covered that one for me. Projectile evasion (it doesn't stack with items, mind you) and bonus stealth for shadowblades are good. Crit mitigation too, maybe? Probably too strong.

Feather Wind... eh. It comes at a great price. 4 points for a movement speed buff? 4 for a pressure trap avoid? where was the last time you've had a problem with traps? And nowadays, you get a MS boost on green egos and every second artifact. Like Silk Current.
Mind you, levitation is good as it means automatically no pins for the rest of the game.
Moving it to second slot might help it; adding some staple like a projectile slow might, too. Fatigue reduction is strange on it as you want to spend mana because disruption shield; is it really relevant?
(As a side note, let's make fatigue affect disruption shield.)

Note that Air currently completely lacks any ways to center a build around, despite having so many amazing amazing artifacts, and there are two reasons for that. One of them is called gwelgoroths and another one is called Urkis the High Tempest which will unlock you the tree that you're never going to use because he is immune to it. So maybe the precious slot in Air is better filled with something else. Just saying!

[supermini]

Stone Skin is mechanically of more use to Arcane Blades. Poor scaling means that it's a one pointer, but 10 armor makes a considerable difference.

I like Feather wind. Well, (again) I like it more on Arcane Blades, the only problem being that the air build isn't exactly standard for them. They hugely benefit from both fatigue reduction and movement speed buff.

I don't agree that Urkis makes the air/storm build bad. Urkis doesn't give any reward for non-antimagic folks except some loot and xp and so he can be easily skipped, or delayed until you get the resistance penetration sustain. Derth gwelgoroth invasion is a bigger problem, but it can be handled with just manathrust. It's on the way to disruption shield so you might as well put extra 2 points in. If you consider that iffy, you can float a few points until the invasion is over. I'm not saying early immunities aren't a problem, mind you - even if you can overcome them with clever play, there's still a psychological component there.

To improve air/storm, I'd first look into boosting Shock as it's on the weak side. Itemization probably can't be sorted as easily, as adding a few new artifacts in the giant pool that already exists won't make a big difference.

In any case, cleansing flames is what makes fire a no-brainer, so I'd turn that into a prodigy or nerf it considerably, to allow other options to be relatively better in comparison.

[HousePet]

My thoughts for Air are replacing Lightning with a physical damage and knockback/other debuff beam of wind. Then buffing Chain Lightning a bit. Alternatively, Chain Lightning could be the first talent, but make it hit 1 target per level instead.

[Razakai]

I like the idea of Chain Lightning becoming the T1 Air spell, but lowering the cost/number of targets hit. Maybe increase the damage too, as the scaling seems really, really bad compared to other nukes. Then the empty slot can be used to give lightning builds some improvements.

[malboro_urchin]

My thoughts for Air are replacing Lightning with a physical damage and knockback/other debuff beam of wind. Then buffing Chain Lightning a bit. Alternatively, Chain Lightning could be the first talent, but make it hit 1 target per level instead.

I might be nitpicking here, but it should start off being able to target more than one mob if it's going to be called chain lightning. Lightning already has wildly variable damage, so I think this will help balance it out. On that note, can Chain Lightning deal different damage to different targets?

[donkatsu]

Actually, the lightning's variable damage should be removed and replaced with some other characteristic trait. I understand the intent of making Air/Storm the "uncontrollable" element, but hugely variable damage is not the way to express that flavor, as it heavily favors NPCs. NPCs can deal with spikes of damage, players cannot, so what ends up happening is that lightning damage is relatively weak for players while still being lethal in the hands of NPCs.

For mechanics related to the theme of uncontrollability, how about one of:
-A chance to hit the closest target instead of the one you targeted
-A chance to cast a random, different lightning spell instead
-Variable mana cost (you need the maximum cost's worth of mana to cast it)
-Radius 1 splash damage on hit that can hit the caster, like Thunderstorm's bolts

[HousePet]

How about giving lightning stuff a chance to fork and hit an extra target?

[Delmuir]

How about giving lightning stuff a chance to fork and hit an extra target?

Could include a chance to double-tap the same target if there's no other target around?

Either way, I'm on board with this idea.

[donkatsu]

Could include a chance to double-tap the same target if there's no other target around?

Either way, I'm on board with this idea.

Nah, that would bring you right back to the problem of players randomly getting exploded by spikes of lightning damage. Forks are always cool though.

[HousePet]

I'm surprised that Cleansing Flames still uses a flat scaling off raw talent level.
(It also doesn't actually check for removing curse or hex effects.)
Would changing the chance to 10-30% be okay?

[0player]

Make it check the saves on friendly targets. Hehehe.

[HousePet]

Might be worth rearranging Fire and Wildfire slightly too.
4 active attack talents in the first category, and then 3 synergy talents in the second category isn't a good spread.
Something like:
Fire
Flame:
Flameshock:
Fireflash:
Burning Wake:

Wildfire
Inferno:
Cleansing Flames:
Blastwave:
Wildfire:

Possibly overusing the word 'Flame' a bit too.

[Razakai]

I wonder if Cleansing Flames might be best uncoupled from Burning Wake, have the numbers reduced slightly and moved to Fire. It'd fit the theme of each baseline elemental tree having some very useful utility talent (Disruption Shield, Stone Wall, Shivgoroth Form) without homogenizing the trees too much. Lightning is still kind of the odd one out though, it feels like if Chain Lightning gets made the T1 talent it should get some cool utility talent like the above. Would mean that Cleansing Flames would be useful as a way to strip buffs from opponents, but still requires Wildfire for more reliable procs and self-cleanse without killing yourself.

[grayswandir]

Random Idea: Make Lightning the T1 skill - give it highly variable damage (based on critmod?), but it can't crit. It does however do a crit check to chain to another target, repeatedly, with some stacking penalty so it doesn't go forever.

Making lightning's general theme "something cool on crit" would be interesting, I think.

[Atarlost]

I'd planned to tackle the non-elemental trees along with the arcane blade and shadowblade specific stuff. It's better than the "track" the thread was on before, though.

After some attempts to play with the current lightning and a fire/water build that skipped arcane entirely, I'm really worried about how much of a difference disruption shield makes. For the former the overpriced sustains made the mana pool too shallow and the latter avoided it because both cleansing flames and gwelgoroth form rely on self-damage and neither build had the durability of a disruption shield using build that wasn't sustain heavy.

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.

On the elemental trees I'm currently thinking the following:
Arcane: manathrust; mana steal (like mana clash but instead of dealing damage it gives you mana)?; aether beam or breach; pure aether
Aether: disruption shield?; dunno; aether avatar; dunno
Fire: flame (becomes rad 1 ball instead of beam); flameshock; fireflash; wildfire
Wildfire: inferno/cleansing flames combo; dunno; burning wake?; dunno
Earth: earthen missiles?; pulverizing augur; upheaval (moves terrain like old wyrmic quake)?; crystaline focus (subsume stone skin?)
Stone: stone wall; body of stone?; earthquake (form factor as aether breach instead of terrain effect?); dunno
Water: geyser (cold+phys beam that pushes and wets); freeze; tidal wave (origin targetable, possibly only at TL 3 or 5); uttercold
Ice: shivgoroth form; glacial vapour; shatter; dunno
Air: lightning; ride the lightning (old chronomancer temporal wake); chain lightning; tempest (loses daze chance to gwelgoroth form)
Storm: gwelgoroth form (damage avoidance as lightning rune, reduces RtL and nova blink cooldown, makes air spells daze); nova (with shock's stun resist reduction); hurricane; nova blink (rad 2-1 phase door with nova but no stun resist reduction)?

Some stuff obviously gets altered to fit in its new slot. I wouldn't put earthen missiles at its current cooldown or power as the first spell in a level 1 unlocked tree. Some of the names obviously need to change like wildfire which would no longer be in the wildfire tree.

Is there any complete waste of space that I'm leaving in or any important spell I chucked?