Mage skills

Nexus Discussion Mage
1

Magic skills:
Fire magic
Water magic
Air magic
Earth magic
5th would be required cover general Magic resist, stun, attract, teleport, summon ect.
Perhaps even 6th (mentioned below)

Previously, mages received certain damage boosts on certain level with the biggest one was at 20 when they become Weavemaster and the spell damage pretty much doubled.

If we remove the hard caps/increases and add spell skills you could add cool mechanics like:
You cannot learn Flamefill (5th tier) unless you are at least Refined + the general level requirement which was 16 for mages.

Remove the flat bonuses for certain levels and instead get incremental bonuses per skill in certain realm:
The further you progress into the skill, the more damage you do with that realm.
Something in the line of +11.5% increase per skill level resulting in total of about +140% increase in based damage of the spells from that realm, having more or less the same effect as you become Weavemaster

(exact math to be subject of balancing)

I can’t think of a sensible way to gain experience in the 5th realm to cover general magic though. Please do share your thoughts.

With the above said we might end up with Faith magic skill as well to cover healing magic. I wouldn’t expect mages to progress into that much, but should cover Priests/Paladins.

2

As far as the fifth realm, it could be a generalized magic skill that’s increased based on ALL of the elements and provides an increase in damage to ALL realms. maybe not as much as a specialized magic class, but an increase

3

Hmm, sounds like sensible suggestion:

Specialized realms give +9% increase per skill level and 5th adds another 2.5% per skill level (combining to a total of 11.5% per skill level)

10% from each realm exp gores into the 5th
A mob yelds 100 exp, you killed it solo so you get the full experience and used only Fire.
You gain 90 points experience into the Fire realm and 10 points into the 5th

4

I like this idea, mainly in respect that it gives mages something interesting to work towards instead of trying to get exp to level up. Before the faster a mage just rushed to 15 the better off he was. With an idea like that the mage may want to take his time a bit more to work on his skills so he can cast. And it might be a way to tone down insane magic damage from Weavemasters.

I don’t think you need a spell realm to cover resists and support magic, and I don’t think you got exp for casting those, if you did it was negligible and would take forever. Just let those ones stay based on intel. The length and strength of a resist spell should be based off intel, that way mages would probably cast the best resists and priests and paladins would prob want to take a moderate intel.

Speaking on intel, I think before it gave you damage bonuses on your mage, but if you add in skills to do that, what do you do with intel? leaving it giving you extra magic damage might put you right back into doing insane damage per cast (especially if it effects base damage and gets multiplied), but there should be some incentive for mages to have intel since its their primary stat. Only thing I could think of is to perhaps reduce the cast timer as your intel goes up (but that could be tricky to figure, you can’t have mages casting on like a 4 sec cooldown) or maybe letting mages cast spells above their tier if with certain intel caps.

Something like this would provide a lot of class balancing from the other casters though.

Also, the only other spell that casted offensive magic on any consistent basis was bard, so making any of the other classes have to skill up in offensive magic to be useful I think would suck, so perhaps the skills stayed Mage only, so you would only need the 4 elements. Might be the easiest solution and just don’t worry about having skills on any other class but mage, other classes could get damage bonuses off intel, and just leave out faith magic and support magic.

OR you could have mages skill up slower than the other classes but make the other classes damage bonuses less per skill, but that wouldn’t make much sense from an RP perspective that mages would scale up slower, if anything they should go faster.

You did get exp for healing but it wasn’t great, and if you added a faith magic skill. You would maybe have to make faith magic scale a lil differently than the elemental ones. If you make it too easy you might have mages sit there and heal until they were near viable offhealers or something. You could give a faith magic skill to priests and paladins, but bards might need it as well to scale their heals up and it doesn’t make as much sense from an RP perspective. Plus Faith magic should be more piety based. If you have a skill factor scaling up heals as well you might end up with people casting vigor for like 400 or 500 and basically full healing off the lowest tier spell, it might not give much incentive to actually attain the higher tier healing spells and ever actually use them.

So in recap, it might be simplest to have the elemental skills be Mage only and just limited to the 4 elemental ones and mages can get different perks for intel, while the other classes can get spell damage from intel.

5

First I wouldn’t worry about mage’s picking off heal as they were only capable of learning Vigor and Mend-wounds. Second even if they skill into it, they wouldn’t get the bonus effects from the skill levels. Problem solved.

Faith magic bonuses I would reserve to be viable only for Priests. Paladins and Bards might get only certain % of those bonuses with Bards having certain % bonus damage from elemental as well, to maintan balance and still have them viable support role.

Same goes backwards with elemental realm skills. Other classes simply do not get the bonus damage increase, or get small % from it (mainly viable for Bards I’d say).

With regards to Intel I would balance it on few fronts:

  • Intel determines your natural mana pool (not the regen, that comes from piety)
  • Spells have base/minimum intel requirement
  • Additionally certain intel caps could be left in place. For example at 16 int in you receive only 50% from the skill bonuses, 20int you get 75% and 24+ int you get the full bonus.
  • I wouldn’t go for lowering cast timer (aside from perhaps potential bard song?).

You don’t really need mage with 22 int to cast fireball and be Master into manipulating fire. However things like Hellfire you won’t be able to learn with 16 int for example.

Reminder: mages had access to the same weapon skills as all other classes, but didn’t really received any perks into training into those.

All those skill suggestions I’m outlining here are simply to even and distribute the bonus damage for the mages as you level up and develop your character. Rather have hard caps as Garender mentioned and everyone rushing for lvl15 or 20. That said, It should not remove/hinter the base damage everyone else that were capable casting the spells.

6

Ah yea intel determining mana pool was the obvious solution lol. Yea the cast timer thing would have probably been more broken than the damage. I guess I was thinking piety determined mana pool but it only determined regen?

So theres 5 weapon skills, then 5 magic skills, the elementals and faith if you want to do that, and if you want you could lump the resists and neutral spells in with faith, but I don’t think many of those really need to scale since they are just resists. They probably don’t need to be affected by skill, just int for duration and potency, or a combination of int and piety so that priests can cast solid resists as well.

And no other class gets fighter multis, so no other class would get the bonus % damage from elemental skill. That sounds pretty good. Maybe bards could get way other than skill to increase their casting damage, or like you said only get a portion of the bonus damage.

7

This was more for the offensive spells realy. Fire resits falls into fire realm naturally, Earth into earth realm and so on.

Unfortunately I still think we gona need 6 realms
Fire,Water, Earth, Air would be the primary elemental.
Faith to cover healing and certain resists.

However you still need 5th elemental to cover:
Summon, Reflect, Attract, Dodge, Polymorph and so on spells.

as the 5th elemental realm goes, given that they are non-combative spells or at least no direct damage I wouldn’t worry about bonus multipliers. It would be there for consistency rather than something else. Or perhaps you’ll need Expert to learn Summon.

Which brings me back to my original thought of the 5th gaining exp to be % of your primary magic use. Would take forever to level up, but then again we didn’t had that many mages capable of having Summon or other neat spells. That was for different reasons ofcourse, but adding the above mentioned mechanics would certainly not change the original concept/feel.

8

I don’t really get why there HAS to be a 5th element.

Without anything that does arcane damage or something that would just be either unfun to level, or awkward. Even the faith skill would be along the same lines but at least you got exp for healing so it would be more feasible.

The more complicated you make the system too, the longer it would be to make it playable.

9

Generaly to have it consistent really. Unless we could somehow fit the other spells I mentioned above somewere else and to make sence as well within the Nexus universe.

With regards to Faith Magic suggestion. Who says we can’t have some offensive magic for Priests and Palainds and leave elemental for mages/bards.

Doesn’t have to be complicated, just consistent.

10

Please… No…