Spell Pass Preview - Chaaannggeee!

[Kadagan]

Not only are you (turbine developers or whatever person[s] are responsible for the Firewall nerf) forcing us to change our play style by letting mobs save against one of our bread and butter spells, but you are also making it more difficult (expensive) to cast..

It's like giving your kid a toy... seeing that they enjoy it too much and stopped playing with some of their other toys... so then you half break the new toy and encourage them to play with the other ones....

I want to say something that will get me banned... but let me say this instead.

... I'm a ****ed off customer (at least for now)..

[Zachski]

No save on PWK.

PWK targets one enemy, doesn't it?

Wail targets multiple enemies.

[Siskel]

PWK targets one enemy, doesn't it?

Wail targets multiple enemies.

That is where I was mistaken. Seemed too good to be true.

[Zachski]

Not only are you (turbine developers or whatever person[s] are responsible for the Firewall nerf) forcing us to change our play style by letting mobs save against one of our bread and butter spells, but you are also making it more difficult (expensive) to cast..

It's like giving your kid a toy... seeing that they enjoy it too much and stopped playing with some of their other toys... so then you half break the new toy and encourage them to play with the other ones....

I want to say something that will get me banned... but let me say this instead.

... I'm a ****ed off customer (at least for now)..

*facepalm*

As people have repeatedly pointed out, the save is only for the first tick of damage, to compensate for the fact that the AI will just blunder into the firewall - it's meant to simulate an attempt to avoid the firewall. They'll still roast fine just sitting in it, with no saves. Not to mention, as people have said repeatedly as well, reflex saves are generally the lowest saves enemies have. You'll still be seeing your full damage frequently enough.

Your toy is not "broken" in any sense of the word.

[LookingForABentoBox]

You left out an important one.....any changes to blade barrier (cool downs, damage)?

Well the new favored soul angel of vengeance prestige class will allow you to do more damage with blade barrier

[Calebro]

Well the new favored soul angel of vengeance prestige class will allow you to do more damage with blade barrier

There's a whole thread on that.

[jortann]

Here are some sample changes to the divine side of things…

Nimbus of light: reduced to 4 SP.
Command: reduced to 6 SP.
Cure Light Wounds: reduced to 8 SP.
Cure Moderate Wounds: reduced to 12 SP.
Bestow Curse: reduced to 10 SP
Searing Light: reduced to 8 SP.

Contagion: Cost reduced to 8 SP. Diseases provided by this spell that do ability damage now do it at a rate of X stat damage every 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds. Slimy Doom now does 6d6 acid damage every 6 seconds. As before two saves apply, one against damage, if successful save again to end the effect.

Glyph of Warding: reduced to 6 SP. 15 second cool down.
Divine Power: Now uses a faster cast animation. Cost unchanged.
Holy Smite: reduced to 15 SP.
Implosion: Cost & cool down unchanged, but now does 4 – 6 pts of untyped damage per caster level on a successful save to the target. Failed save results in death (still!).

and some Bard love...

Shout: Cost reduced to 6 SP, uses faster casting animation. Change shared with wizards/sorcerers.

Great Shout: Cost reduced to 15 SP, uses faster cast animation. Change shared with wizards/sorcerers.

Hey Torc LIVES!

I thought he was ignoring us....

I still want to know what changes are coming to the metas.... will it cost 25sp to maximize a 6sp scorching ray? or will this be more relative to the base cost of the spell. I don't want to have to be switching maximize off and on in this new era of wizard spell casting.


And as for you clerics... now its your turn to be upset... oh.... uhhh... eerrrr.. wait all your stuff got better... nevermind

[Lifespawn]

No save on PWK.

single target

[steelblueskies]

dumbing down: if the spell changes result in almost every spell setup being equivalently viable then there is no way to fail, therefore no thinking required. this in and of itself could be a good or bad thing depending on perspective. but would generally be in line with fixing things as a more abstract goal. hell w.o.w. had regen, and they had to up it TWICE at least in starter areas. there's slow to catch on then there's slow to catch on, if you follow.


how many parties moan and whine because they cannot see thanks to spell effects as is- dancing ball, web, cloud spells, wall of fire, hypno orb, and more all get this quite often, especially when spammed multiple times. yes it is their machine not keeping pace, and yes its the engine handling a "pretty" effect poorly. only applies to persistent effects however. guess one way to fix this was to shovel everyone towards singletarget bolt/ray/blast effects, and instagibs.

the real drawbacks to some alternatives come in with cast times. i've seen incendiary cloud proposed as a firewall replacement. this has an extended cast sequence. think how it would have changed wall of fire if that long cast time applied to it as it is otherwise. not to mention its **** damage that still looks to be **** damage after, nastier graphical effect(see above), and well nigh impossible to visually judge position( yes its about the size of a blade barrier, and dome shaped).

i also find it ironic that a warforged wizard with rogue splash was common for new players and recommended to them. not for the boost to casting, but for the versatility in skills, improved survivability and added self healing. ditto for the second recommendation there involving pale masters( which drive many healer types to frustration mind you, not to mention aura nastiness). yet the changes to make arcane easier take a totally different direction.

so you wanted to fix the spell system. good. you had to make some changes to fix some content. you had to make other changes to fix your ideas for a sorc pre, fine. you still have item properties to rework based on that as is too. and of course rebalancing EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF OLD CONTENT around the new spells, or else leave mobs with separate versions of the same spells( i.e. the old ones). in the process you will either have to essentially give out the equivalent of free lesser reincarnations to a pair of classes, if not several to accomodate the changes, or else tell the playerbase " yes we did this, give us money to work around it, or reroll" with the latter being pretty definitively a d*** move. but we get something out of it, at least potentially. it of course has yet to be seen if that something will be a new system that is better in some way, or just a lateral move as it seems.

and yeah without that rebalance or schism between monster spells and player spells, this is going to be a nerf to melee as well. a nasty one.

this new thing, it is not bad per se, but if it isn't good, then the effort wasted on it instead of other things IS BAD. but hey it's not like we are doing the work or wasted effort. we simply clamor for more things to do, more content which takes months to put together, and watch you rebalance the entire game system. it seems like its paving the way for a more fully implemented crafting system at the same time, and potentially making epic viable for builds not specifically crafted for epics. again, this could be good or bad depending on perspective.

as to boring. pnp like. etc. firewall is boring. anything can be boring when used/done enough. running the same content on every toon with the only variables being latency, mob health/damage, and party composition is boring. this is why new content is something we clamor for.

changing it to require vertigo inducing fps style pew pew? or necessitating multiple casts to accomplish the same result? or simply changing from cast and run, to stand and spam? seriously, how is this an improvement? it's different to be sure, but again lateral move not improvement. if we wanted hard pnp faithfulness we would buy wotc's dnd online system for dm run play via pc. it comes with subscription to some online content system they have for dnd too.

this has always been different, due to its engine, and while one could argue that modules created with input from people such as gygax(delera's) would be different if they were asked to work on it with these changes in place as opposed to the old system, remember that pnp module's were guides, and could be modified by gm to suit anyway. so no issue there in truth.

hell some of the most ANNOYING IN PRACTICE things like acid cloud or melfs constantly ticking and interrupting at lower levels just got worse. and for use on mobs, well enlarge built in means higher end systems will have more advantage then non ultra high draw distance players. (see hound of xoriat no trash strategy), and the affected mobs even at range will still not get nearly a full run before melee hack them to pieces. and this type of seeming uselessness riddles what HAS been presented so far.

again i say: what tactics do you dev's actually see/use that you are making these changes to ensure are viable. provide examples, and tell us you tried them in person, rather then on a whiteboard. game design and engineering is a wonderful thing, but with no real world experimentation, all the whiteboarding in the world can leave you with some very very ugly oversights. i and other's i am sure appreciate the usually painful thing that is sharing details of plans ahead of time with the community, but let's face it, we all have to live with what goes live, so the concerns are real, and we all have varying degrees of vested interest in this being workable. you guys miss something glaring enough to kill playerbase, and we might lose the game altogether due to lack of finance, so those of us with time and money invested here have even more concern.

are spells misfiring( ie mob runs past and spell fails to cast but eats sp) getting fixed? how about phasing/burrowing creatures causing misses and sp loss? ray spells still missing? things like these were also bars to usefulness to many spell types as they cost efficiency.

then there's consistency. we can take 15 minutes for a mage to cast a portal spell in weapons shipment, to bring in the big hurt, but almost everything else goes off in 6 seconds or less? tossing a meteor swarm should wreck everything, but it should cost, both in cast time and sp, not be just another quick moderate damage nuke. power word type spell with long cooldown? its instant by design, so that makes some sense.

wall of fire. the sp was fine. the duration was probably fine as was the ability to extend. damage was iffy. problem was it was a near instant cast. if you must quicken it or have a screen of melee for a few seconds to get it off, else cast it and pull mobs to it due to cast time, that would have changed things too. heck making it cast like most could spells would have done it. it still wouldn't have been useful in much beyond vale.

ah well. i yield. torc, kudo's to posting it at all, and the same to fernando and eladrin. keep up the work on having the brassies, and working towards the good.just remember to keep an ear and an eye open to the feedback, and play it before you toss it out. that's all we can ask really.

p.s. guess hold for reinforcements just go oh so much more special. mr instagib coyle, vs improved mephit burning hands. yay. (shoot me now).

[Aashrym]

Will shout and greater shout have CL-based, uncapped damage? If not, that's not really much bard love as they won't hit the DCs to matter and the damage won't scale with caster level. I'm curious how many bards actually prep shout/greater.

I carry greater shout on a CHA spellsinger. It's more a toy than anything else.

With the SP cost down I might do it more. Since it's the only real direct damage spell available and I have sonic spell enhancements included with healing I use it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother, and normally only use it soloing when I do need a burst of damage to a group. Maximized and Empowered it normally hits anywhere from 350-750 damage per target for an outrageous cost.

Stunning some mobs does help, but the spell could really stand to have the same stunning effect as melee with the helpless effect coming up.

I never waste a slot on shout.

[Zachski]

I will admit that 240 seconds is too long of a cooldown for a single target spell, even if it is a no-save insta-kill.

I'd honestly rather it cost an obscene amount of SP. Perhaps 100? 200?

[voodoogroves]

*facepalm*

As people have repeatedly pointed out, the save is only for the first tick of damage, to compensate for the fact that the AI will just blunder into the firewall - it's meant to simulate an attempt to avoid the firewall. They'll still roast fine just sitting in it, with no saves. Not to mention, as people have said repeatedly as well, reflex saves are generally the lowest saves enemies have. You'll still be seeing your full damage frequently enough.

Your toy is not "broken" in any sense of the word.

No, the reflex save doesn't break anything. It is still lame.

Even if you drop the damage it's still a good damage over time spell.

What it really means though is that we won't be kiting epic trash through the wall, the wizard will be perching or hanging from a platform. 'cause that's not lame either.

[Asketes]

You left out an important one.....any changes to blade barrier (cool downs, damage)?

/sarcasm
240 second cooldown, reflex save set to a permanent 10 to negate all damage
/sarcasm

[darksol23]

You left out an important one.....any changes to blade barrier (cool downs, damage)?

+1 Inquiring minds want to know!

[Zachski]

No, the reflex save doesn't break anything. It is still lame.

Even if you drop the damage it's still a good damage over time spell.

What it really means though is that we won't be kiting epic trash through the wall, the wizard will be perching or hanging from a platform. 'cause that's not lame either.

So, basically, your complaint is solely that you might have to... *gasp* make a new strategy for a change.

Oh how terrible, I see your point.

[PopeJual]

/sarcasm
240 second cooldown, reflex save set to a permanent 10 to negate all damage
/sarcasm

Cool, my Soul Survivor will get a boost in DC for his BB's!

[voodoogroves]

So, basically, your complaint is solely that you might have to... *gasp* make a new strategy for a change.

Oh how terrible, I see your point.

No. That's an old strategy. And it's lame. Seriously you've not run epics and seen this?

[Aerendil]

and some Bard love...

Shout: Cost reduced to 6 SP, uses faster casting animation. Change shared with wizards/sorcerers.

Great Shout: Cost reduced to 15 SP, uses faster cast animation. Change shared with wizards/sorcerers.

Any chance of some further Bard love via expanded spell lists?
Bards, via enhancements, specialize in Sonic and Healing spells.

Right now there is *1* damaging Sonic spell of use to Bards at endgame - Greater Shout.
So all that sonic/healing damage from enhancements, as well as sonic lore and resonance/cacophany items - all to boost one spell.

Some new spells (i.e. options) would go a long way. And plenty of candidates available as well - some quick examples, in NWN2 Bards could cast "cacophonic burst" (think upgraded sonic burst) and dismissal, or in Complete Adventurer there are a slew of spells as well (bladewave, dissonant chord, sonic weapon, wail of doom, cacophonic shield).

[voodoogroves]

I will admit that 240 seconds is too long of a cooldown for a single target spell, even if it is a no-save insta-kill.

I'd honestly rather it cost an obscene amount of SP. Perhaps 100? 200?

This is good ... as this represents a CHOICE. Cast multiple times and dump SP? Choice with a cost.

Cooldowns don't. They lock in behavioral scripts.

[Zachski]

No. That's an old strategy. And it's lame. Seriously you've not run epics and seen this?

What, you thought I was talking about the perch strategy?

If you're still relying on Wall of Fire after this update, you're doing it wrong.