The Thoughts of a Rambling Mage.

[kellendir3000]

Hail and well met my fellow casters, i come here in the hopes that i might rest a spell and perhaps crack open a tome or two with you my fellow scholars. As you may well know the road from one to twenty is fraught with danger for one so robed as i. As such, my travels have given me some interesting insight into various quirks and problems that we magic users should well take note of lest we wander to our unprepared doom in some dimly lit crypt!

Here in this post i shall be discussing ideas pertaining to primarily the Wizard and Sorcerer classes with the caveat that some of these ideas would/should effect casters as a whole. Almost everything that i shall cover here will be directed at either the heroic levels/the new player experience or the low epics because i do not have enough experience with the higher epic levels to feel comfortable messing around with suggestions aimed at that area of game-play. This post shall be broken into more easily handled sections with roman numerals dividing sections topics and lowercase lettering subdividing those sections into their minutia. Further breakdowns shall be demarcated/enumerated numerically. Nowhere in this post am i trying to say that other classes do not have their issues nor am i trying to denigrate the troubles new players have in acquiring the diverse sets of skills needed to master other play-styles. I am also not out to hurt or imply incompetence on the part of the game devs. Making an mmo is an insane task to undertake and it takes a brave person to then willingly try and balance the messy aftermath. I appreciate the crazy kludge of old code and intertwined mechanics you ladies and gentlemen delve through to daily to expand and tend to this game that we all love so much. So without further ado.

I) What Troubles the New Caster.

When discussing the idea of the 'new caster' we first must make one key distinction. Is this a new caster being piloted by an old and steady veteran of many incarnations? Is this a wet behind the ears milkdrinker who has yet to learn the ropes? Or is this person somewhere in between the two? Well we can easily say that, should this be a new caster in the hands of an experienced player, we need not fear for her. She knows the tips and tricks, what feats to take and what feats to avoid so on and so forth, in short, we don't have to worry about her ability to experience and enjoy the content and as such we are NOT talking about her. Are we then talking about the milkdrinker? She who thinks it a grand idea to take the combat casting feat because after all, who would want to be interrupted while casting!? Yes, yes we are very much so talking about her. It is not her fault that she does not know about the damage scaling that will render Combat Casting useless. Nor is it her fault that she has trouble keeping her blue bar from going the way of the Dodo. These are problems we all once had, and not all of these problems should be thought of as steps up a steep learning curve.... Some of them are simply poor design, poor scaling, and/or poor implementation. Now about that intermediate player, She who jumps around like a blurry rabbit yet sometimes still incinerates her own web spell; this post is somewhat applicable to her plight. She has already begun the journey of adapting to the the mechanics of a ddo spellslinger, but it is not yet natural for her, and perhaps these ideas can help.

What hurts the New Caster? Is it the limited spell points or the lack of easy healing? I personally think that the culprits lie deeper within the fascinating lolth like web of ddo mechanics. Firstly i would proffer the idea that this problem comes to us in two different forms... That of the player who understands pen and paper dnd and the player who does not. The latter category can be further subdivided into the player who has/has not played an mmo before. The player who has played pnp before will often have the following problems.

a) Not understanding that building good spell dc's is generally more important in ddo than in pnp. In pnp there are fewer ways to add to spell dc's and generally if you don't even bother with enhancing them, many of your spells will still land on mobs. Also in pnp the magnitude of spells is much greater. A well timed un-maximized chain lightning can clear many a room and the evil green ray of a disintegrate can rip away a good chunk of health from an adult dragon. This power is balanced by the fact that a caster has precious few spells in pnp which in turn is balanced by the fact that you generally face fewer combat encounters in a day of pnp than in an hour of playing ddo. In ddo having monsters make their saves hurts you much as much or more, because the damage lost equates to lost spell points (because you must now hurl more spells) and sometimes more importantly lost time (i will discus the importance of this in the pro/con section).

b) Picking feats that work well in pen and paper but do not work/scale well in ddo. For instance, Combat Casting is often a wise feat to take in pnp... but when getting pounded out by enemies who can deal more than a hundred points of damage it just cannot keep up. Depending upon ones concentration/luck you can even see it beginning to falter by levels five through seven.

c) Thinking that they can rely upon low level defensive spells that simply don't exist in ddo at this time. In pnp you have Mirror Images, Ghostly visage, Improved Mage Armor and so many other useful defensive spells that you simply do not have access to in ddo. This problem is frankly exacerbated in the later levels when a mage would normally be using spells like Premonition to avoid damage. WE do not feel this problem because we work around it, not because it does not exist.

d) Not taking enough constitution/defensive precautions. In ddo Con is much less of a dump stat for a mage than it is in pnp. Furthermore a moderate dex score, which would give you some decent protection in pnp, does not hold up as long in ddo. This extends to both bulking up saves and to amassing a larger health pool/effective methods of healing. The fact of the matter is that a classic robe wearing mage can see her health chunked down very quickly and as such one need to build a character accordingly.

e) Dealing with cc immune mobs and those mobs who are bags of hit points. As this is a problem for many casters who are no longer new to the game it should come as no surprise that this is an issue for people who are used to bosses who simply have higher dc's than normal mobs. These encounters also often stress the defenses of a mage and many of these players find their mages lacking in this area.

Now that we have covered what i believe to be many of the core problems given to the pnp veterans, let us turn to the plight of the new player who has never before rolled a d20. Unsurprisingly we will see some of the same problems crop up, if coming from a slightly different angle. A player who has never played pnp before will often have these problems.

a) Like the pnp veteran they shall struggle with making good feat choices. This will happen for the very obvious reason that not all feats are created equal... Some are, as admiral ackbar would say "a trap". While this is a challenge that all new players of ddo will face, the fact of the matter is that many early levels of a caster build can be made much easier/more fun via the availability of useful feats (for example, the usefulness of meta'd SLA's is really unparalleled during the early to mid heroic levels).

b) As listed above, not taking enough CON/defensive measures. I would argue that the idea of a glass canon caster in ddo is frankly not generally viable for a truly new player. This is not to say that defense must be your first thought at all times, far from it. I just think that in today's ddo you need a measure of self sufficiency that is incompatible with the idea of a glass cannon. The one place were a new player might be able to avoid this is were they are always playing as part of a well knit group. But even then, some level of self sufficiency would no doubt be appreciated by the poor cleric you keep line of sighting.......

c) Once again, bosses, red names, and champs are going to be solid problems for these players.

d) Not grasping the importance of the half hour buffing ritual we mages undertake when entering a dungeon. We take it for granted, but most newcomers have never played a game with even a sliver of the buffing a ddo caster can reasonably expect to undertake.

e) Not realizing that in dnd similar magical effects do not stack. This can really screw up early caster gear acquisition as someone who has come from another mmo may not realize that wearing four items that each give a +1 enhancement bonus to evocation dc's will only give you a net total of +1 and not +4 to your dc.

Now that we have covered some of the divergent problems these new players face, we can look at some examples of problems both types of players will face from roughly the same perspective.

a) Your cleric hireling may technically be capable of healing you... But it will behave exactly the way you would expect someone with an INT score of six to behave. That is to say, your hireling is an idiot and nothing you can do will change this!

b) the stat layout is hard to navigate and frankly, many new players will have trouble figuring out that you can view spell-powers and spell crit chance via your character sheet.

c) Useful spells to pick up are not always apparent and both pnp vets and newcomers alike often have trouble selecting a good roster of spells for ddo because its encounters and demands on your magical toolkit are so different from many other games.


I believe that these underlying issues are to blame for creating many of the symptoms we see in new casters such as the rapid loss of spell points, and frequent death syndrome... I don't think that these are the only issues, just some of the contextually important ones. As i continue to study this matter and talk with you guys this list will no doubt grow and i will begin adding things i believe would help alleviate this problem.

II) Spell Scaling.

When you first step out onto Korthos island and begin your adventure of cautiously meandering your way into crypts and tombs after all manner of cultists and xenophobic fish people you may notice something interesting. The numbers your spellcaster sees line up adequately with 3.5 dnd. Yes i will admit that things don't line up perfectly, but the number bloat is controlled enough so as to make levels one through three very close to the pnp caster experience. Burning hands will mess people up pretty badly on a normal difficulty and the world seems in balance. As we continue to level this slight numeric disparity will continue to grow in a few ways.

a) Enemies will gain health at a somewhat faster rate then your spells gain damage on normal difficulty (We are assuming that the player is running quests at their level). This is in and of itself not a problem as the ways you have of increasing spell crit and spell power more than make up for this.

b) As you change difficulty this health shift begins to magnify in rather beefcake like ways. Such that as you increase the difficulty of encounters you get to the point were you have Kobald tribes who clearly execute anyone who misses leg day. We know this because they are the swolest most physically robust Kobalds you have ever seen. This means that they become spell point sponges as their response to a fireball is to just take some Tums and walk it off. This is not inherently good or bad, i am simply stating it because it is important to know when looking at the scaling of spells in ddo.

c) As lower level spells stop gaining damage dice the scaling they get from spellpower becomes less efficient. Let us say (hypothetically, based upon 1d6 damage per spell level) that your average lightning bolt at level eight does 24 points of damage. Let us then say that your spellpower amplifies this by an additional 40%. You would at this point on average deal 33 damage with your lightning bolt spell. At level ten you would deal 30 base damage and 42 total damage. But this growth of three damage per level stops at level ten for lighting bolt meaning that from then on you are only adding the additional spell power you acquire (which multiplies off of the base spell damage). Thus if you gained 20 more spellpower past level ten that 30 damage, with your new and improved 60% spellpower amplification, would give you 48 total damage from your lightning bolt. While the numbers i chose were arbitrary, and from an arbitrary spell, the ratio of damage gained based off of damage dice VS damage gained via spellpower is the important point i am trying to convey. Combine this with the fact that saves scale up at a far faster rate in ddo as compared to pnp and you have a situation were past a certain point low level spells are saved against so often/have poor enough scaling that most of them are not worth the time needed to cast them. One might then say, "but these low level spells are very spell point efficient" and this is indeed correct. The problem is that the time you would spend casting many lower level spells will wind up costing you more in terms of health loss/healing, Displacement time/bufftime, and time spent vulnerable to cc and stat loss then it will generally make up to you in spell point conservation. You will also wind up spending more spell points in order to survive while casting all those low level spells where you could have solved the initial problem with a chain lighting or three. This is not to say that low level spells are useless later on in the game! I am simply saying that the scaling mechanics of the game wind up disadvantaging these spells more than i think is good.

d) While there exist many ways in which a spell caster can increase the maximum number of spell levels added to their spells (and thus make them scale more efficiently) This ability is not equally available to all classes and for instance makes life more difficult for caster Artificers then perhaps it needs to be (though said problem is not as apparent in the heroic levels).

I understand that this problem does not actually NEED to be solved because we can already pump spell damage numbers up to the point were we can detonate the meat-sacks of enemies and leave their smoking corpses upon the mountainside. But i would argue that we could benefit from some more uniform spell scaling. For starters i Would suggest a feat be added called Skilled Arcanist. I would add a spell level and a max spell level to your spells for every two spell levels you knew above said spells level. For example, if you are a wizard with access to all nine wizard spell levels your level one spells would gain +4 to their spell level and max spell level because there are eight spell levels above them and half of that is four. While this sounds like a lot at face value, the fact that this would not change the spells saves, and just the shear meat-sackery of some mobs at higher difficulties would mean that while useful to some, this would not be an overpowered feat. One thing that it would do, is that it would be a very nice feat for a new player who wants to play as an evocation specialist through the heroic levels.

III) Caster Pro's and Con's.

Spellcasters in ddo (specifically Wizards and Sorcs) have an interesting set of advantages and disadvantages. They are simultaneously some of the most potentially powerful and most potentially dead characters in the game. While not all caster builds fall into categories so easily, i believe we can generalize spellcasters into a few groups. First we have the DC/SP casters these are the spellcasters who specialize in piercing the spell resistance of their target (should they have any) and then beating the creatures saves usually with the intent of instakilling or controlling it. Then we have the DC/Blast casters. These casters do not neglect their DC's but rather go for a 'good enough' DC so as to cc most (and maybe instakill some) mobs. They then take advantage of the mobs helplessness to blast them with damaging spells. Next up we have Nuke/cc casters who are most often (but not always) sorcerers. They like to build up a few devastating nuking spells/spell combo's and then maintain an adequate enough cc DC so as to survive/gather their foes.


I am sorry to pause the post here for now, but it is seven in the morning were i live at the moment so i really need to go to bed. I will be back to writing this evening!



IV) Giving Offense.

V) Defending Oneself.

VI) Caster Healing.

VII) Spell Points.

VIII) the Wizards Staff.

IX) Variable or Viable.

X) This Sounds Familiar.

[Katalissa]

Well, making an effective caster is certainly a challenge - a lot more so than making an effective melee character. For those familiar with PnP but not DDO it can be a trap because things don't always work the way you'd expect. Spell Power, for example? Most first timers aren't even aware it exists! Maximize - what's that? Why would I need it?

Casters have a few issues that spring to mind.

1. The damage dice for many spells have been effectively "written in stone" from the early days of 1st edition D&D, and many haven't changed much since then! Now in 1st ed an adult dragon might only have 50-100hp - even Zeus himself only had 400hp in the early Deities and Demigods/Legends & Lore books!
Your fixed 6d6 fireball spell could certainly make an impact, averaging 21hp damage to all within range. Now the DDO fireball, with its max 10d3+30 is only doing an average of 50hp. Even with maximize and 100 fire power, that's only, what, 175hp damage. But there's monsters with thousands, if not tens of thousands of hit points... Meanwhile melee classes are doing the same damage or more with each swing, and they can do it faster than you can cast, and keep doing it all night, long after your blue bar has become a thin blue line.

2. Damage metamagics like maximize don't scale. At level 1-2, that extra 150 spell power is AWESOME, WOW! At level 20, still getting the same extra 150 is a bit, meh? whatever... Precisely because the monster hp have scaled exponentially, while your spell power has been a slow, linear progression.

Now the player from PnP who thinks they know D&D is in for a nasty surprise, but they'll only discover this too late, once they've levelled up and find their evocation spells gradually becoming more and more useless.

So you delve into the theory, trying to maximize spell power, spell critical change, critical multiplier, caster level, etc. Can you be effective? Maybe... but it is a difficult and complicated task. Eventually you find why everyone at higher levels says play a DC caster instead, and focus on crowd control and insta-kills. OK, back to the drawing board, young wizard. No-one ever said magic was the easy option...