I wanna to continue discussion of TomeNET’s magic system. Today I wanna talk about making _offencive_ magic spells more diverse, to give players more choice of gameplay styles.
Currently TomeNET got pretty straight-forward way of killing monsters with magic – direct damage. It could be AoE and single-target.
Also you could apply certain debuffs on monsters, but they are used in rare occasions because it’s much easier/fastest/effective to kill monsters than use most of ‘control’ spells. By ‘control’ spells I mean: sleep, blindness, confusion & etc. The only exception is using ‘control’ on archers/mages or monsters who run away. Such spells are pretty dull also because there are a lot of monsters which are resistant/immune to ‘control’ effects; that’s why most of players taking ‘Holy Defence’ school.. It’s the most popular magic school atm – paladins, shamans, adventurers.. Actually everyone who could get this school – would take it. Why?
Because it’s much easier and profitable to buff yourself _before_ battle than debuff monsters _in battle_. When player using buff _before_ battle – they just increase speed of killing monsters or surviving. At the same time debuffing monsters is a waste of time in most cases. It give us situation when there is no point to use curses/debuffs spells.
So if we would just add curses and more control spells – it won’t change situation. There should be another approach which would make applying curses worthwhile.
Suggestion:
- add ‘Curses’ magic school which would have various debuff spells with DoT (‘damage over time’) damage like spells. It would weaken monsters and the same time would apply slow ticking damage to them.
- DoT damage from curses could be buffed by ‘Aura’ skills: Aura of Death/Shivering Aura/Aura of Fear cause atm no one use this skill, they are useless. ‘Traumaturgy’ also coudl give certain bonuses to DoT.
- add DoT effects to some other magic schools, like ‘Shadow’ which got now 4 curses:
Cause Fear (I – fear; II – AoE fear)
Blindness
Veil of Night (I – sleep; II – AoE sleep)
Darkness (AoE blindness)
Lets some of them have some DoT take make them useful? (especially ‘fear’) - The same thing to some other magic schools; they also could be more diverse and interesting with DoT mechanics.
- make monsters who resist ‘control’ (sleep & etc), resist it differently. EX: mob is resistant to sleep. Make it sleep 1 turn then and then awake even if it resisted the spell. There are still would be immune mobs, so making resistance less powerful doesn’t make everything too easy.