Magic Rework!
Jun 1, 2017 20:01:32 GMT -6
Post by Nayru Al-Saiduq on Jun 1, 2017 20:01:32 GMT -6
It is my pride and joy to introduce the newly revamped magic system, an evolution on the previous that is intended to remedy some of the flaws that the old suffered from - some really terrible tomes, a lack of clarification, and a lack of real mage scaling or unique identity past 100 posts. We also added in a few new tomes because why not, right? For those used to the old system, most of the basic concept is unchanged - it wasn't bad or broken, just unpolished; the Basic and Advanced magic paradigm still exists, Volcanon is still the fire boomy tome, tomes are sidegrades rather than a strict progression, etc. So don't get too stressed. However, there were several major changes worth noting...
-Advanced magic is now earned by promoting to an advanced class, a la Sage or Druid. The old 250 post thing just wasn't working, and it really hurt magic prepromos and made trainees weird as hell too.
-Stressed the fact that magic has a cost, paid directly by the user. Also added some RP potential in the (semi-optional) secondary costs. You aren't going to get banned if you don't make your shaman monotone or bipolar after every cast, it's just one way to make the roleplay effects of casting more interesting! The magic cost thing isn't optional though. If you're casting legit nukes left and right you should probably reflect that in roleplay.
-You can now repurchase tomes to unlock new Mastery and Supremacy upgrades to tomes. No relation to the original Mastery magic, rather than a massive flat power boost these upgrades typically add interesting active abilities that help define each tome as a unique approach to combat rather than just whatever flavor of boom you want to use.
-Summoning magic is now TENTATIVELY a thing, though free access is locked to 500 post mages and a couple of tomes. We'll see how that works. It is very possible that it will be changed in the future due to balance concerns.
-The long-range tomes have been partially revamped into the tentatively renamed Super-tier magic, focusing on differentiating each of them while offering a major mandatory cast time and cost to balance their incredible power boost. Bolting wins at burst damage, Purge has ridiculous sustained damage, Eclipse has crazy crowd control and still some damage.
There are also several tome reworks, removals, and additions that will be summarized in short here.
Anima
-Floral magic is now a thing! Granting the ability to control natural, er, flora to a degree, its upgrades allow it to offer defensive and even healing utility, or turn it into a monstrously powerful offensive tome for a short duration
-Other tomes are pretty much unchanged, they just got extra power from Mastery/Supremacy. Fimbulvetr is now officially ice AND water though.
Light
-Thani (formerly Shine) is now better defined as the laser disco tome, losing the vague 'force' stuff, but it is now perfectly usable as lasers and light nukes from the moment you buy it rather than some bullshit flashbang grenade thing at Basic magic.
-Lux Aeterna is a new spell that allows light mages to create hardlight constructs, probably best known from the Green Lantern similarities or maybe the Halo series. Physical magic has been a thing since Ruin, and this tome may need some tuning later, but it sounded fun as hell so yolo.
-Imperium is another new tome, which could best be described as Force Push: The Magickening. A mixture of utility and damage, it may not hit as hard as 'real' offensive magic but has a lot of utility and unpredictability going for it.
-Divine was completely reworked from a joke of a description that no one ever understood to a specialized summoning tome that allows the user to create light spirits to aid them, and later on summon a much stronger guardian einherjar that mimics their magic. Because really, who DOESN'T want a couple of adorable idiot blorbs or a bitchin' angel following them around?
-Aura remains about the same on a base level aside from more clarification, but Mastery/Supremacy upgrades drastically increase its lategame power... maybe too much, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
-Luce was removed entirely. Conceptually broken from the perspective of roleplay combat magic, its effects trivialized character development and decisions regardless of whether you were getting hit with the good or bad effects, and the vagueness and uncertainty of its effects led to it being nearly autowin or literally useless depending on how you read some of it. It's possible that some remnants may return in the future in a different form, but don't hold your breath.
Dark
-Mire lost a bit of its versatility in return for stronger focus on its identity. Minor Althea nerf I guess but lol whatever. It was a good tome, just did too much, so it was split into Mire and...
-Luna, completely reworked from the hot trash it was originally! Now the magic of Nether lasers and boom, with Mastery and Supremacy upgrades that emphasize its anti-magic capabilities, Luna should be a lot easier to actually use now. Having heard complaints from pretty much everyone who owned it... yeah I don't think old Luna will be missed much.
-Fenrir is another entirely new tome which could be loosely summarized as a mix of homing and summoning magic that makes up for its hybrid strengths with high costs and slower projectile speeds - it's NOT autohit. It does however allow for another classic dark magic approach to combat that I hope people enjoy.
-Nosferatu's changes were mostly subtle; the cost was reduced from 4000 to 2000(!) but its default range was HEAVILY nerfed, setting it up as more of a risk-reward tome. If you get in close to the other guy you can seriously mess them up, but at longer ranges it falls off hard.
-Worm was removed entirely for similar reasons to the old Berserk staff and more recently Luce. While it's a fun concept, in roleplay it is EXTREMELY difficult to balance and more importantly destroys player agency. If I can just control what your character thinks, even with limitations, there's not a lot you can do to stop me, and that's not fun to or with or against.
Staves
-Very little really got changed too much, but I did clarify some common questions on their mechanics.
-Silence was however removed. Put frankly it was only ever really useful for Assassins/Rogues putting it in their magic weapon, no one else wanted it, not even Remus, and the Advanced ability was either too strong or too useless to be worth the gold.
Magic Weapons
-Currently untouched, magic weapons DO NOT benefit from Mastery and Supremacy abilities, though in the cases of reworked tomes (ex. Luna) they may be more viable now, and yes you can tie the new Divine to a magic weapon. Purge and other long range magic is still limited to bows, and no you can't tie Nosferatu to a magic weapon. There will be minor changes and clarifications for magic weapons upcoming soon, but for now these changes really just add Luna, Fenrir, Divine, Imperium, Lux Aeterna and Flora to the list of possible weapon enchantments.
Due to both the changes as well as some significant backend item reworking, everyone who had posted enough to earn and buy a tome or staff was refunded the full value of those purchases. If you still want to use Luna, that's cool, if not you can re-use that gold on Fenrir or Mire or whatever now.
If you have any questions on how a tome works or how to deal with a change or if I missed your refund (rip prepromos), feel free to ask here, in cbox, or via mod PM and we'll do our best to take care of you. At no point was this rework intended to screw over anyone and we will do our best to aid members who are confused or inconvenienced by these changes!
Special thanks to my main man Remus for helping me work out a lot of this!
-Advanced magic is now earned by promoting to an advanced class, a la Sage or Druid. The old 250 post thing just wasn't working, and it really hurt magic prepromos and made trainees weird as hell too.
-Stressed the fact that magic has a cost, paid directly by the user. Also added some RP potential in the (semi-optional) secondary costs. You aren't going to get banned if you don't make your shaman monotone or bipolar after every cast, it's just one way to make the roleplay effects of casting more interesting! The magic cost thing isn't optional though. If you're casting legit nukes left and right you should probably reflect that in roleplay.
-You can now repurchase tomes to unlock new Mastery and Supremacy upgrades to tomes. No relation to the original Mastery magic, rather than a massive flat power boost these upgrades typically add interesting active abilities that help define each tome as a unique approach to combat rather than just whatever flavor of boom you want to use.
-Summoning magic is now TENTATIVELY a thing, though free access is locked to 500 post mages and a couple of tomes. We'll see how that works. It is very possible that it will be changed in the future due to balance concerns.
-The long-range tomes have been partially revamped into the tentatively renamed Super-tier magic, focusing on differentiating each of them while offering a major mandatory cast time and cost to balance their incredible power boost. Bolting wins at burst damage, Purge has ridiculous sustained damage, Eclipse has crazy crowd control and still some damage.
There are also several tome reworks, removals, and additions that will be summarized in short here.
Anima
-Floral magic is now a thing! Granting the ability to control natural, er, flora to a degree, its upgrades allow it to offer defensive and even healing utility, or turn it into a monstrously powerful offensive tome for a short duration
-Other tomes are pretty much unchanged, they just got extra power from Mastery/Supremacy. Fimbulvetr is now officially ice AND water though.
Light
-Thani (formerly Shine) is now better defined as the laser disco tome, losing the vague 'force' stuff, but it is now perfectly usable as lasers and light nukes from the moment you buy it rather than some bullshit flashbang grenade thing at Basic magic.
-Lux Aeterna is a new spell that allows light mages to create hardlight constructs, probably best known from the Green Lantern similarities or maybe the Halo series. Physical magic has been a thing since Ruin, and this tome may need some tuning later, but it sounded fun as hell so yolo.
-Imperium is another new tome, which could best be described as Force Push: The Magickening. A mixture of utility and damage, it may not hit as hard as 'real' offensive magic but has a lot of utility and unpredictability going for it.
-Divine was completely reworked from a joke of a description that no one ever understood to a specialized summoning tome that allows the user to create light spirits to aid them, and later on summon a much stronger guardian einherjar that mimics their magic. Because really, who DOESN'T want a couple of adorable idiot blorbs or a bitchin' angel following them around?
-Aura remains about the same on a base level aside from more clarification, but Mastery/Supremacy upgrades drastically increase its lategame power... maybe too much, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
-Luce was removed entirely. Conceptually broken from the perspective of roleplay combat magic, its effects trivialized character development and decisions regardless of whether you were getting hit with the good or bad effects, and the vagueness and uncertainty of its effects led to it being nearly autowin or literally useless depending on how you read some of it. It's possible that some remnants may return in the future in a different form, but don't hold your breath.
Dark
-Mire lost a bit of its versatility in return for stronger focus on its identity. Minor Althea nerf I guess but lol whatever. It was a good tome, just did too much, so it was split into Mire and...
-Luna, completely reworked from the hot trash it was originally! Now the magic of Nether lasers and boom, with Mastery and Supremacy upgrades that emphasize its anti-magic capabilities, Luna should be a lot easier to actually use now. Having heard complaints from pretty much everyone who owned it... yeah I don't think old Luna will be missed much.
-Fenrir is another entirely new tome which could be loosely summarized as a mix of homing and summoning magic that makes up for its hybrid strengths with high costs and slower projectile speeds - it's NOT autohit. It does however allow for another classic dark magic approach to combat that I hope people enjoy.
-Nosferatu's changes were mostly subtle; the cost was reduced from 4000 to 2000(!) but its default range was HEAVILY nerfed, setting it up as more of a risk-reward tome. If you get in close to the other guy you can seriously mess them up, but at longer ranges it falls off hard.
-Worm was removed entirely for similar reasons to the old Berserk staff and more recently Luce. While it's a fun concept, in roleplay it is EXTREMELY difficult to balance and more importantly destroys player agency. If I can just control what your character thinks, even with limitations, there's not a lot you can do to stop me, and that's not fun to or with or against.
Staves
-Very little really got changed too much, but I did clarify some common questions on their mechanics.
-Silence was however removed. Put frankly it was only ever really useful for Assassins/Rogues putting it in their magic weapon, no one else wanted it, not even Remus, and the Advanced ability was either too strong or too useless to be worth the gold.
Magic Weapons
-Currently untouched, magic weapons DO NOT benefit from Mastery and Supremacy abilities, though in the cases of reworked tomes (ex. Luna) they may be more viable now, and yes you can tie the new Divine to a magic weapon. Purge and other long range magic is still limited to bows, and no you can't tie Nosferatu to a magic weapon. There will be minor changes and clarifications for magic weapons upcoming soon, but for now these changes really just add Luna, Fenrir, Divine, Imperium, Lux Aeterna and Flora to the list of possible weapon enchantments.
Due to both the changes as well as some significant backend item reworking, everyone who had posted enough to earn and buy a tome or staff was refunded the full value of those purchases. If you still want to use Luna, that's cool, if not you can re-use that gold on Fenrir or Mire or whatever now.
If you have any questions on how a tome works or how to deal with a change or if I missed your refund (rip prepromos), feel free to ask here, in cbox, or via mod PM and we'll do our best to take care of you. At no point was this rework intended to screw over anyone and we will do our best to aid members who are confused or inconvenienced by these changes!
Special thanks to my main man Remus for helping me work out a lot of this!
Kirala-Daughter
