Magic and Arcane Review - Part One of Three
Introduction
One of the larger concerns of our playerbase as directed to us in numerous reports, complaints and feedback sources is that of the Requiem Magic System. Magic in Requiem is undoubtedly one of the most customized and heavily iterated solutions to Magic and the Arcane that has graced the RP circuit of UO shards. Clocking in with nearly three hundred spells, numerous customized progression systems, and over a half-dozen related skills, we have come a far way from Corp Por and Kal Vas Flam. With such an ambitious, expansive and deep system, however, comes a lot of baggage: playtesting, balancing, iterating and bug fixing are part of any addition to this project, but Magic is one that is especially difficult to “get right”. Regardless, we acknowledge that Magic has been a sore spot for the prelude, and thusly have spent the past few months working on this total review to bring it more in line with our core values of design.
We have evaluated the system from three major points of view for this very large and all-encompassing review. First and foremost, we have documented and compiled the feedback that our prelude players have given us in regards to how interactions with Mages felt as someone on the mundane side of things (spoiler alert: they weren’t enjoyable). Secondly, we spent a lot of time simply observing the behavior of our Mage players and how they used their characters and to what effect - through many of these observations, we found mechanics that were far overtuned, not working as intended, or simply overpowered beyond belief as comparatively speaking with other mechanics. Last, we wanted to look at Magic with a fresh pair of eyes and compare it to other mechanics on the shard, ensuring that it didn’t outpace mundane counterparts in utility, and at least had a semblance of balance in other facets.
As we all know, magic and the Arcane in Requiem’s lore and story is considered very powerful - described essentially as the literal building-blocks of creation itself. It should come as no surprise that this inspiration transfers over to our in-game design. Historically speaking, this has led to mechanics often being on the higher end of our spectrum of balance versus starting low and working upwards - thus resulting in a power curve that resulted in some pretty powerful results. This great power, of course, has it’s caveats; mainly in the form of two main conceptual designs we have striven to bring to life in Requiem.
The pursuit of Magic within the confines of the game world is conceptually designed to draw parallels to that of how Magic is written about in our lore and game-world. Magic is a shunned, often misunderstood power that requires sacrifice, investment and resolute dedication to master, lest the aspirant Mage fall victim to the masses who look upon their art as wicked and evil. This lore concept, in turn, translates into the mechanical evolution of a character mage; starting weak and getting progressively stronger as they unlock more power words, mantras and progress through the Magery system. This journey from fledgling to master represents our second conceptual design - Mages have been pitched, time and time again, as “glass cannons”, with a limited pool of power that, once gone, leaves the Mage practically defenseless. By the end of the arduous journey a player character takes during their journey down the path of the Arcane, a Mage develops into a veritable powerhouse that, conceptually, if caught unaware or with a single misstep, may be dispatched fairly easily. This concept is important to the Magic system as it relates to the shard and playerbase as a whole - while Mages may be intended to be strong, they also require drawbacks and weaknesses to help keep the balance; equity amongst systems, power and utility is imperative when we, by design, do not seek to introduce equality between a Magic and their mundane counterparts.
In Act VI, we believe that we have met the mark with one of these concepts, and have missed it rather completely with the other. Progression through the magic system for Act VI has been made more accessible through the addition of new mechanics such as Dusty Tomes, yet a player character still has a lot of work to do to move from fledgling caster to apprentice Resolvist. The difficulty and investment required to be a decent mage is considerable, and far more than a warrior or archer for instance. In this specific case, we feel fairly good where the “path to Magedom” leads and how many twists and turns it takes to get to the end of it.
As for our second concept - the idea of Mages being glass cannons - was not realized by our initial launch systems. While we may have gotten the “cannon” part of “glass cannon” right, Mages in Prelude have shown us many glaring issues with not only individual accounts of spells and combos of them, but the core of the system as well - often times leading to the absence of the “glass” prefix. In numerous instances in prelude, Mage survivability has been very overtuned. These instances of survivability and utility were only exacerbated by the Mage’s obscene levels of potential DPS - as many say, the best defense is a good offense, and often times the Mage’s defenses weren’t even coming into play due to their offensive capabilities. And in the rare instances that a Mage was able to be dispatched in PvP instances, we found that the sheer amount of utility available to the Mage allowed them simply to vanish from the RP situation, much to the utter frustration of others.
With this all said, the staff of Requiem understand that there've been a lot of problems in the past with Magery and it remains a part of the project that elicits many passionate feelings. With perma-death and potentially hundreds of hours of character development on the line for people involved in the never-ending strife of Hunter vs Witchkin, these passionate feelings can oftentimes lead to negativity, cynicism and anger. In this act, and specifically over the past three months, we’ve taken an assertive effort during the Prelude to fix the issues and bring Magery in line with the initial design we had envisioned for it before launch. We had recognized very, very early in our evaluation of the Beta that Magic was not in a state we were comfortable with. From it’s damage, to its utility, to its survivability, Magic was over-tuned to the point of being greatly imbalanced even when accounting for equity among systems. In keeping with transparency and honest communication with our playerbase, Prelude/Beta has lasted a lot longer than it was intended to so that we could take our time in re-evaluating Magic and it’s accompanying sub-systems so that they would more closely align with our intended design concepts.
With all that said, we’d like to start sharing these sweeping changes with the player base at large in so that everyone can begin referencing our changes with Magic and its related subsystems. Summarily, Part One of this three part review has focused on three major mechanical design concepts: utility, survivability, and damage. These three concepts have been reviewed with the mundane professions and combat equivalents in mind. In almost every case of evaluating a Magic skill’s “meta”, we've removed instances where a mage spell was equal to or better than something that has its own skill tree (poisons, potions, skill buffs, etc). In the case of combat, we've kept mundane equivalents in mind when approaching damage, cast times, and mana cost. And as for survivability, we have introduced many new mechanical changes that help even the playing field when it comes to implementing weaknesses and handicaps to Mages in order to make RP and PVP less frustrating overall.
Utility
As stated above, a major issue we addressed with this review was the sheer amount of utility available to a mage. Things like teleporting around will always be an available option to mages that don’t have a direct mundane equivalent, but it is unfair and unintended for mages to be the best in all aspects of the mechanical portion of the game; we envision them to be a jack-of-all-trades but master of none when it comes to anything outside of damage. As part of this review, the development team has gone through all of the utility spells (spells doing effects other than damage) to bring them in line with their mundane counterparts. Our goal in the review was to have mundane methods be twice as strong as what is available to mages - i.e., spells are only 50% effective as their mundane counterparts.
Some of the most obvious and immediately identifiable of these changes comes in the form of nerfs to buff duration and potency, both of which have been reduced across the board. Additionally, the removal of instances of applying higher-tier poisons for free (as opposed to the mundane equivalent of crafting them) is another change in this category. Furthermore, we have removed instances of mages being able to summon higher-tier craftables other players have to craft (cureables, bombs, etc).
Crowd Control, or “CC”, is another issue we addressed. As part of our initial Act VI launch additions, a “root immunity” mechanic was added to all CC related instances as part of addressing historical problems with “chain-CC”. We have further evaluated the micro of Magic to address more specific problems of CC as it relates to removing player agency and fun. The paralyze effects instituted by various spells have been brought down to a range of between six to ten seconds on average, down from 30 seconds, 1 minute, and even permanent in some cases. Lesser forms of CC were brought down from an average of 12 seconds to 4-6 seconds depending on the spell. Mana cost for crowd control also went up across the board. As to give back more player agency in PvP situations, all paralyze durations can be lowered by having invested into the Arcane Resist skill, reducing these durations by up to 60%. Lastly, as part of quality control, we have gone through all CC related spells to ensure that they are properly inheriting and applying the Act VI “root immunity” mechanic.
Survivability
Survivability, our second concept and focus of re-design, was considered our second most important issue of prelude. As we have stated above, when the staff conceptualizes a Mage, the last thing on their list of defining qualities is that of “tank”. As part of the generally agreed upon “rules” of Magic development, Mages are entitled to enjoying good damage and a variety of utility at the explicit expense of being a concept that can be easily and quickly dispatched if caught unprepared or out maneuvered. Unfortunately, due to many spells and interconnecting mechanics of Act VI, this expense was hardly realized.
The teleport spell is one of the most visible examples of this imbalance before our review addressed it, allowing for a mage to utilize it in such a way that resulted in a completely imbalanced and unfun experience. Major nerfs to the spell havd summarily been introduced for this review, such as increasing the mana cost of the spell, and adding a 20-second cooldown timer. Now, using Teleport will also place [Sprint on cooldown (20 seconds), and using [Sprint will lock out teleport for 20 seconds upon completion of sprint. Teleport can no longer be casted while actively sprinting.
Teleport, of course, is only one example of our efforts in reducing the obvious superiority Mages enjoyed in terms of general survivability. As part of this review, we’ve removed or changed nearly all spells that turn the user invisible, removed or nerfed spells that gave resists, removed spells that gave the user skills such as Tactics, and have introduced a plethora of other changes that allowed for Mages to be simply too hard to pin down and kill in many PvP situations. While Mages still have some tricks up their sleeves, the most egregious of these imbalances that led to outright frustration of other players have been addressed and rectified moving forward for launch.
Spell Damage
The third concept of re-design we have addressed in this review is that of Magic damage. It is no surprise that we have considered this concept as the most critical of issues that required our attention. Plainly put, Mages in Prelude were doing too much damage. While in some cases they continue to exceed the damage output we ultimately want from the system, the damage potentially of magic has gone down dramatically. Overall, our estimates place Magic as a whole in doing about 50% less damage as it did on launch. This is more evident in what we have referred to as “spell outliers”, spells in which were badly coded or working improperly, which in some cases have been reduced by up to 90% of their prior effectiveness.
We’ve also increased the mana cost across the board for most spells. The development team along with several player testers have gone through spell by spell and brought them closer in line with what we envisioned for the system. With nearly 300 spells in circulation, the system is still not perfect and always has room for improvement, but from our perspective, it has improved dramatically.
Mana changes and individual spell reviews were furthermore combined with sweeping system changes to what we refer to as the “core” of our system. A new damage formula has been implemented to Magic on a global scale to better calculate damage, along with introducing longer cast times for heavier hitting spells. The design concept of these changes in particular hope to achieve the idea that Mages will have to remain stationary and vulnerable if they wish to do large bursts of damage, whereas before, this condition sometimes did not exist.
The default damages listed below help to illustrate these new changes to our damage calculations. The cast times listed are for when the mage has exactly that much required skill. For example Tsunami cast time is calculated with a mage that has 80 INT. The required Skill is also the Required Int.
- unnamed.png (85 KiB) Viewed 6640 times
The implementation of this new global damage formula has allowed us to reign in our nearly 300 spells under a singular umbrella of design versus having 300 separate and individual calculations to account for. Moving forward, this further allows us to continually and more easily evaluate damage outputs of the system, making changes where we may need with more efficiency and transparency.
Damage - Details
Further helping to optimize our spell engine, we have re-coded much of the internal functions of core in order for us to better and more cleanly calculate bonuses to spell damage in a way that is more obvious and less obfuscated. All bonuses to spell damage are now calculated into a singular variable, known as Spell Damage Increase (or SDI). SDI has existed prior to this change, but has now been expanded to account for all sources of bonuses to spell damage.
More specifically, we have also introduced the following intricate changes to our damage calculations as they relate to spells:
The global formula for calculating spell damage is as follows:
Damage = ((RequiredMana * ((-0.01 * RequiredMana) + 2)) + (RequiredSkill / 10)) * ratio;
This Rolled Damage number is then randomized by a dice roll:
(Rolled Damage - 10%) + random 0-10%
Rolling 10 damage would be randomized to 9-10
Rolling 23 damage would be randomized to 21-23
Rolling 81 damage would be randomized to 73-81
Rolling 100 damage would be randomized to 91-100
etc
Each Arcana has been tweaked to allow for different default spell damage and healing amounts, this includes spell rarity having different levels of damage.
The damage bonuses for spell rarity are as follows:
Low Rarity Recipe bonus = 0
Medium Rarity Recipe ratio = 10
High Rarity Recipe ratio = 25
Artifact Rarity Recipe = ratio 40 (no artifact spells are available to players currently)
SDI bonus (global capped at 50)
Yelling/Whispering Bonus (added into SDI, global capped at 50)
Rarity Bonus (added into SDI, global capped at 50)
Arcane Empowerment (added into SDI, global capped at 50)
SDI cap of 50 checked
Arcane Linguistics BonusDamage
INT BonusDamage
Reaper Form BonusDamage
BonusDamage scaler
Arcane Incantation scaler
In the case of AOE damage, the amount of damage done for more than 2(or 3) targets is divided up by the number of targets.
In the case of Damage-Over-Time effects “DOT” the damage is divided by the number of ticks.
The remaining damage is then lowered by the targets resisting effects (in the case of Medium(10%) and High(30%) rarity spells, some of the damage bypasses this by Spell penetration)
INT Every 10 int is 1.5 % damage reduction
Arcane Resist: Every 4 skill is 1 % damage reduction
The damage is then reduced by the targets Armor resist values.
By default Divine, Archmagic and General Arcana spells do Energy Damage.
By default Paganism and Diabolism spells do Occult Damage.
Spellbooks can modify the damage type to be more Corporeal Damage.
To help walk through these changes, we have also implemented debug information to the “combat messages” debug system. [combatmessages will now toggle on the details of spell damage line by line so players and staff can spot problems and understand it better.
Damage - Low Tier Spells & “Fast Casting”
One of the glaring flaws we observed during our evaluation of the magic system during Prelude was the efficiency of lower-tier fast casting spells when compared to the higher-end spells. In many cases, the repeated casting of low-tier, low mana cost spells far surpassed the potential DPS of longer, more mana intensive spells.
With the implementation of the new damage formula listed above, this problem is now easier for our development team to address, through both decreasing the efficiency in fast casting spells as well as increasing the value of higher-end spells. The newly added spell penetration mechanic offers more function to the higher-end spells, making them more appealing to mages. The overall concept behind these changes are that mages will have a larger spectrum of “risk vs. reward” in that higher-tier spells will be more rewarding, but more dangerous, whereas the relative utility and safety of “machine-gunning” low tier spells are less effective.
Damage - Auras
Auras have gotten a lot of negative feedback from both players and staff alike during prelude. Conceptually speaking, Auras as a game mechanic are not something that the majority of our playerbase has expressed as liking. Numerous complaints concerning the agency that Auras remove from players were reviewed by our team, citing that counter-play to these spells were oftentimes too difficult, unfair, and nearly always unfun.
There were many mechanical problems at launch with Auras as well, ranging from having far too great DPS potential, to being too mana efficient, and in some cases, being stackable with other effects to create damage potentials far outside our intended ranges. Some Auras were so imbalanced prior to this review that on the high end, some were doing an average of 23 DPS (15-30 damage a tick at 1 tick per second) for a fully automated, mana efficient method of damage.
Aura damage, on average, is now normalized to 3-6 damage a tick, ticking once every 2 seconds, for a new average of 2.25 DPS, a decrease of approximately 168%. Furthermore, we’ve removed the ability to use auras while stealthed, changed them so they drain mana regardless of if a target is present for it to damage, removed a Mage’s ability to use multiple auras at the same time, and lastly added a 20-second duration so players can no longer keep it running for extended periods of time and must stop to recast it.
Auras now are meant to be a small AOE damage bonus to supplement a Mage’s normal spellcasting, not the end-all-be-all spell for mages to use. We will continue to tweak and address auras until they are in a place we feel comfortable with, but rest assured, the significant DPS of Auras are no longer a mechanic in Requiem.