Some more comments following review

For issues concerning magic, spells or enchanting.
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Mektor
Posts: 88
Character: Mektor

Some more comments following review

Post by Mektor » July 13th, 2021, 9:49 pm

Hello,

As magic review is wrapping up and more tweaks were made to the systems, I thought I’d give another wave of comments regarding things which, if they remain as they are, seem out of balance or make mage-play unnecessarily harsh.

I’ve been a mage since Act VI begun. My first order of business was to get a research kit and beginning the spell grind. After three or four months of it, most of which was active, I have gotten something between 5 and 7 epic spells (Can’t remember if one or more were gifted). None of them are anywhere near game-breaking in terms of power. Having had a look at a table made by another player in a previous act, which indicated which spells were of which quality, I believe there is a problem in what is available.

I will not be addressing Legendary spells much, except to state it is sad to know so many good spells seem out of reach. That being said, the comments which follow regarding epic vs. rare spells apply to Legendary spells.

I am really unsure whether the scarcity of higher level spells is good design for the new meta of magic. In short, the new meta is that mages are slow-paced and very vulnerable physically (vs when spells were super fast and buffs were 5x what they are now). There is also imbalance in the strength of different schools that, in my opinion, go beyond a simple matter of playstyles. This meta makes it so being a solo mage can be quite challenging, if not impossible. This may be an MMO (on a private UO shard, the “massively” is quite relative), but there are still a lot of times when solo play is necessary because there is no one else around, or because you’re a mage and everyone hates you.

One thing that hurts non pagan/diabolists is the lack of summons. In a meta where mages are much weaker physically and much weaker in terms of DPS, summons should, in theory, be a bigger part of the mage play to enable solo play. Right now, however, summons are limited to paganism and diabolism by design. General arcana has blade spirit, 5 slot, not very tanky, no dps. That’s it. Energy Vortex (80 skill?) and Animated Weapon (33 skill?) are both legendary summons. Archmagic has Summon Fiend (33 skill), an epic-level skill which is epically bad (3 slots, no dmg, gets 1-shotted). Elemental summons are Legendary. Divina has Fire fly (5 slot imp which does not fight). Elemental summon is legendary. Perhaps those legendary spells should be brought back to epic, with adjusted stats, or new (hopefully viable) summons created for rare levels.

This is also just an example of what seems like unwarranted scarcity in some spells which seem almost necessary to make mage play a bit easier. I can handle my own. But I have about every rare spell from my schools, very high skills, and fairly good gear. Still, I have no viable summon, and no efficient way of regenerating mana (I have 5 items with max mana regen (that’s a lot of enchanting points), but that is nothing in comparison to diabolism and pagan pets).Mana vampire is also an epic level spell, yet a spell which would go a long way toward fixing mana issues of non-diabolists/pagans (remember not all mages have 3 schools).

Overall, I just think a lot of the epic spells should be downgraded to rare, and maybe a few rares upgraded to epic to benefit from the new formulas. It also seems to me epic spells and above should be reserved for truly unique spells such as time stop, magnetic pull, or special summons such as Daemon or Energy Vortex, but that everyday dps spells and summons should be more accessible. The viability of mages comes through the RNG of spell research, which is itself limited and ungrindable (unlike, say, making tons of armor to get a EO/MW, or enchanting items -- things that can be farmed without being locked by infusion gains).

For instance, among the auras Fire aura (divina) is a rare spell, while Holy Aura (General) and Ice Aura (Archmagic) are epic spells. Aura damage is so low that extra spell damage or spell penetration is pointless. Gotta also wonder why some damage auras are rare while others are epic. Summon imp is soooooo bad, yet is epic. Mass teleport is epic, yet is overall useless as it can easily be replaced with Call, a rare spell. Fire storm is an epic level DOT-damage from divina. With the latest changes, it does about 100-125 dmg over 15 seconds, but with the nature of damage vs. mana and the duration of fights, this is still worse than poison and I don’t think it is very useful except in very specific fights.

Those are just a few examples to say the rarity of some spells probably deserve to be reconsidered.

I’ve briefly addressed mana regen above, so I won’t go again into it, but it is definitely one of the big issues which makes divine arcana pale in comparison to other schools. At least it now has some personality through healing spells modifications, but one has to wonder why poison remains so powerful, yet is nearly incurable by the healing school. If things stand as they are once the review is over, I will probably change school altogether because of how weak it feels.

Final global issue remains AOE. It was recently said that the AOE dmg for Auras was changed so the damage begins splitting above 3 or 4 monsters. I think this should be done also for all AOE spells, hopefully for more than 3-4. Perhaps it should be a higher number when the spell requires more skill or has a different rarity. Right now AOE spells deal so little damage against a group I just use my lowest-rank divine spell hoping for a perk proc so they can burn themselves with the 1-3 dmg from fire over time. Bigger spells are absolutely not worth it.

The main use of AOE spell right now is to bypass spell reflect, which is the final point I’ll address. Dispel lets you dispel spell reflects. It became a must-have spell when minimum spellcasting time passed to .75 and mana cost increased with the loss of whispering. It became very slow and costly to spam low level spells before you could start damaging an enemy. The main issue is that a lot of monsters have an uncanny amount of spell reflects (which boggles the mind, really), and that dispel costs more and more mana the more reflects they have.

TBH I think the issue lies in the amount of spell reflects. Dispelling a Chad Archer literally costs all of your mana pool (100+). Some strong monsters (revenants, spectral ill, zealots) have 1-3 charges of it, while others like Chad archers, lingering visage, or neopagan drudges (seriously what’s up with those?) seem to have 10 stacks. Without dispel, it is so painfully long to get through those stacks, and with dispel, you just drain your whole mana pool. The better fix would be to lower their charges to a normal level of 1-2, rather than adjusting dispel cost. I would also note these monsters are examples why AOE is mostly used as a single-target tool rather than an AOE tool.

On a final note, it seems like the review is leading mages toward a balance more like newer MMOs where everything has to be standardized and completely balanced. Rock paper scissor and so on. At the moment, I am really not sure I would be a strong contender in a 1v1 with a warrior, though more testing would be required (remember I'm divine, I got a hunch diabos are doing well). That being so, we have also drifted away from the whole "Mages should be powerful, but not OP -- that is the price and reward of the beast". I'd place myself on par in PVM, and maybe below in PVP, from a mechanical point of view. Balance aside, the normalization of everything, especially buffs, made the game duller (rebuffing every 5 min) or took away things that were simply fun, such as Incognito. I do not wish to argue with admins about where they wish to bring the shard -- it is theirs to do with as they please -- but it does make me sad whenever something is limited or removed that did not have a gamebreaking impact on fighting and which actually made the game fun.

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