Kiryan wrote:mages are supposed to be front loaded damage where melee is steady good damage. I agree with that. But because mages mem so fast and mobs cant have more than 30k hps there is never a long enough fight for melee to come out ahead even if the damage rates werent comparable. ( I still advocate bringing back some sort of memming penalty, like the 30 second mem penalty) alternatively maybe we could up the max hps to 2.4 billion.
Corth wrote:Kiryan:
I agree with your take on how mages should be front loaded heavy damage and melee should be more steady damage, and that meming out of fights quickly messes up the balance between the two. However, bringing back the 30 second mem penalty is a worse idea than extending res effect time. It is a timesink of epic proportions. Frankly, it is just not fun.
Here's a question. Why cant we have offensive spells miss their target a certain percentage of the time? That would seem more realistic... and it would help bring magic damage down relative to melee over the long fight while preserving the idea that a spell which hits should hit much harder than a round of melee from a ranger/rogue.
Corth:
I agree with you that the 30 second mem penalty is a horrible horrible time sink and that I am not quite sane in advocating it.
The "problem" I am trying to solve is how do you make an invoker do 5x melee damage for 20 rounds then be disabled long enough for melee to catch up and do 2x as much total damage before the mage is ready to nuke again?
With very short mem times, the power of 5 force missiles, and the sheer number of "decent" spells 5 meteorswarms, 4 infernos and 7 incendiary clouds....and being able to bring multiple invokers. You can't exhaust their "good" damage spells, and if you could they mem them back so fast melee couldn't catch back up (if spells did more damage than melee which today they don't).
My thoughts on the subject are:
1. Increase single target damage, reduce chant, increase mem time for a net effect of 0 change in total damage done in same time period in an average fight. This should result in more damage at the beginning of a fight, but same damage overall which is already starting to lag behind melee damage. soon single target caster damage will be meaningless.
To alleviate the issue of spellups / utility spells taking longer, change the code so that you can specify how long it takes to mem a spell of a particular circle or type. For example make all offensive spells take 2x as long to mem, or make all single target offensive spells take 3x longer to mem.
2. Area damage provides massive amount of damage quickly if there are a lot of targets, so it supports the "burst" damage model.
however its somewhat ineffective because while doing massive amounts of area damage may "shorten" a large fight by some amount, its only preferable on EASY fights. In a hard fight its preferable to kill one mob every 20 rounds for 100 rounds than 5 mobs in the 80th round ESPECIALLY if you only have the staying power to be in for 15 rounds at a time.
Because of the need to kill mobs to reduce incoming damage (which is almost always spell damage); in harder fights you'll find an emphasis on killing a mobs (casters) rather than doing a lot of damage which seems strange.
If character / mob power was reduced as their HPS were reduced, there might not be so much emphasis on killing a single mob.... A step away from 1 spell out fights and back towards area which should be a casters strength.
Someone suggested once before that you scale "effectiveness" of spells with a stat, specifically HPS. I was against this, thinking of this only in a positive way for players, but what if it worked both ways or worked only for mobs in a negative way?
3. A set of spells that do X*Y damage to a single target where X is the base damage and Y is the number of mobs in the room would support the "burst" model in large fights.
4. improving melee damage doesn't help the "burst" damage vs steady melee model. Mages should do more damage at the beginning of a fight and melee should do more damage over the length of a fight.
Force missiles was pretty comparable to 2xKhanjari or archery... Melee probably has quite an edge on damage now with the new tiamat eq. But the point is that if mages and melee do the same damage, then mages are never ahead in the damage curve... with the possible exception of areas and we discussed the problems with that in #1.
5. Eliminate the "burst" model. Make "situational" damage a mages forte. Fire spells on trolls, cold spells on fire based mobs, positive material plane spells against negative material plane mobs, ect ect ect (homelands had this). That way mages and melee are similar damage (although not sure how you can keep this balance over time with melee eq escalation), but situationally mages can wreck mobs and can shorten up easy fights with areas.
I'm a big fan of situational damage because it makes you prepare and cast the right spells instead of just FM FM FM FM, INFERNO INFERNO INFERNO. However, the number of spells in each damage type should be limited so that you can't rely on it as a single source of damage. So a group walks into a fire elemental, mages dump 4 cold spells each doing 5x melee damage, but then revert to forcemissiles which is equivalent to melee damage, instead of being able to mem 5 different cold spells and keep up the double+ damage forever.
However, this was way overdone in FFXI, it became impossible to kill mobs unless you were packing their bane and skillchaining to produce their bane. Players could combine skills and spells in skill chains that would produce amazing damage of a specific type, so fights went like this... tickle tickle tickle for 40 hits then stat the skill chain tickle, slap, punch, complete devestation, dead.
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regarding spells missing:
I don't think that making mages miss targets would help the burst model as I describe it unless they missed less at the beginning of a fight and more towards the end of a fight. Regardless of how "missing" happens or at what rate, I'd think that mages would need to do significantly MORE single target damage per spell than melee damage in the same period of time...
But, I think you actually trying to create a reduction in spell damage vs melee which I dont think is where we want to go because invokers will then truly have only one unimportant function area damage... If you could figure out how to make area damage more important
Also, realize that stacked melee damage is faster damage short and long term compared to force missiles today today though it was probably not true when you played more actively.
But that is an interesting thought to make mages miss spells. What if you couldnt chain cast all your spells and land every single one of them?Expanding on that idea, what if were dependent on something else like mana. What if mana was drained for every spell you cast and you had to not only have a spell memd, but the mental energy (mana) to cast it. Then +Mana eq would "increase" a mages "power" without affecting spell damage/effectiveness... Additional synergy with bards for restoring mental energy.
I've always thought that the number of spells mages get is just sick, you can have like 120 spells memmd and cast them all one after another, but what if as you cast your 8th offensive spell, you started to lose clarity and to crack under the pressure, started missing with your spells, stopped chanting them as quickly, ect until your "mental energy" had recovered.... Different spell types could have different draws on mental energy.
It would give you one more thing you could use to control and differentiate spells other than what chant time and circle they are in (which dictates how long it takes to recover them).