Developer Diary: Creating the Illusionist

[Cordovan]

Read our latest developer diary from Lynnabel on DDO.com and feel free to comment about it here. Thanks!

[Epicsoul]

Would like to read more of these. Enjoyed the insight!

[Arkai]

Awesome content and writing!

[grudgebear]

Whoever decided to add imbue weapons with force material should get a Nobel prize.

It overrides old hardness of bis leveling weapons and you can use them without of fear of breaking them while in a quest. Drow weapons, Sky Pirate's Dagger, Oathblade, Fellblade, etc... You can use them at will and they no longer break like toothpicks.

Thanks for insight about developer's approach to things. I appreciate that.

[jerray]

Wait....there's an illusionist tree?

[Komradkillingmachine]

Still doesn't explain why it had to have Familiar stance active in-order for Charisma to-hit and to-damage to work.

None of the previous universal trees had that requirement, so we know this was a "design" choice. Well, none of the previous universal trees required a feat tax to unlock it either, but whatever.

Major QoL downgrade for Charisma builds considering the stance gets disabled with death (just like the bird stance in falconry). Have to turn it back on every time.

[Memnir]

Interesting read. Nice peak behind the curtain.

[Valerianus]

thanks Cordovan for pointing us at it and thanks Lynnabel for the write up, it was really nice and interesting to read!!


(sorry, but i also really want to say about the familiar, the deactivation of such a "stance" when e.g. you die, since it's the prereq for other things to work, is highly impractical. and i really like my sparkling cat familiar, it is funny and it cheers me up)

[Xgya]

Love the insight.
Lyn's commentary as one of the most vocal devs always has been.

Like the story behind the various iterations, behind not wanting to make it Archmage 2.0

The tree itself isn't anything to write home about, but it's fun, has many practical uses and very thematic.
This is basically exactly what I'd want from a universal tree.

Going 41 points into a universal tree shouldn't feel empowering - it should feel UNIQUE.
Feydark does that to an extent, Falconry DEFINITELY achieves that, Vistani is a bit too deep on the "empowering" side, but not to the point I'd readily complain about it in the end.
The two outliers are Inquisitive, that definitely feels like a power move all its own, and Harper, that feels like it has absolutely no theme and just a few +s added ragtag to your character.

[Artos_Fabril]

Read our latest developer diary from Lynnabel "It was a thematic niche we hadn’t really explored, it opened up illusion spellcasting to more casters in general, and it expanded upon Force damage, something that has historically had badly scaling spells that were generally underutilized. We knew we were close, we just had to finish the job."

What I find interesting (and really sad) is that there doesn't seem to be any recognition of the reasons illusion is "underutilized" like there are only 7 illusion spells, and the design of DDO doesn't really support the sorts of play than make illusions useful in PnP. Of those 7, only one of those is offensive, and one other is "CC". The offensive spell is an instakill with a double save, and the CC is "soft" - especially bad for a game that has been increasing tilted towards AoE damage.

Even adding a "hard" CC option in greater color spray, whose Daze is actually a stun, and 3 additional damaging SLAs leaves Illusion with only 50% more spells than Divination, and 20% of the spell selection of Conjuration or Evocation and 25% the selection of Transmutation and Necromancy.

So after all the cool conceptual work, Illusionist is the "Cha to hit/damage" tree

[Captain_Wizbang]

cool