A Song of Magic and Staves 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Nayru Al-Saiduq]

Thanks in no small part to the suggestions of members and a lot of arguing hard work, we've done another pass on some aspects of the overall magic system to open up a few new opportunities for creative roleplayers or people who just want to roleplay Naruto, believe it. Staves are the main focus of today's exercise in blatant mod power abuse 'balancing,' so let's start with what's changing with them!

• The Warp staff has been almost completely reworked; in return for drastically more utility and control over what goes where (you can finally teleport wherever you want!), it got a few possible edge abuse cases removed and a couple limitations added to general use as well - overall a significant buff, but it has definite weaknesses to work around, or for enemies to abuse.
• Barrier's Basic stuff mostly just got wording tweaks to better specify what it actually does, but the Advanced ability traded off duration in return for a major increase in power.
• Nightmare went to the garbage can where it belonged. Sorry folks, just had too much overlap and some cost-benefit concerns when compared to existing tomes. We try stuff and sometimes it just doesn't work out well. If you had a Nightmare staff, PM one of the mods for a full refund.

Yeah yeah no one cares about minor balance changes for the weapon type that no one uses sorry Remus, but we kinda had to take another pass at them to balance things out for the next item on the list, the big one: staff magic weapons! Yup, you can now duct tape a magic staff to your sword and hit people with heals, or I guess if you're boring you can spend 3000 gold to be able to teleport on your sword guy, or enforce absolute silence in your vicinity when sneaking around as a thief, you know boring stuff like that. And yes, you can finally buy Strength magic weapons again. A few notes though;

• Staff magic weapons can only be upgraded with one Magic Seal, gaining the Basic effects of that staff, but never the Advanced ability. Not as bad as it sounds - most Advanced abilities just dabble in ranged stuff that magic weapons aren't good at, the Basic abilities generally have the stuff that's actually useful to the user.
• A few staves simply can't be bound to weapons, specifically Physic and Fortify. As touched on in the last section, it's a concern of fine control of magic at a large range, and magic weapons just don't work that way.
• Strength staff weapons just gives you physical strength; they do not include the speed buff of the actual staff.
• The usual magic weapon rules apply; you should always identify what your magic weapon does in a character journal post, they follow the same general rules of acquisition and crafting, so on and so forth.

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Last but not least, the Fire basic tome of Anima magic will be replaced with Trinity to reflect the fact that most novice mages receive training in more than one element of magic; since Fire, Wind, and Lightning are the 'light' elements and considered easier to summon and manipulate than the 'heavy' elements of Water and Earth, it's basically just base-level Fire, Wind, and Thunder tomes in one item. If you want to just keep using Fire, or only use Wind, that's fine - you can play your character the same way you always did, this change is just to support people who want to be able to use weak wind or thunder magic at chargen.

Please note that much like Fire->Volcanon, Trinity doesn't free you from having to buy Thoron/Bolting or Excalibur to do more complicated magic, like Excalibur's ability to boost your jumps or Thoron's ability to turn yourself into a walking Tesla Coil. We're talking small gusts/blades of wind and relatively weak shocks here people; this is a buff in versatility, not power.


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If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to post here or PM the mods for clarification. Have a great day folks, and remember that Generals can now teleport into your face and beat you to death with healing swords.