feature discussion - halve mage damage mana

[Derakon]

This seems like a good first step to me. Definitely we'll need to follow up, though, because damage-per-round is a crucial statistic for determining a class's viability, and this doesn't directly affect that. I agree that missile weapons need to be nerfed -- but at the same time, are we going to nerf the enemies, or boost other means of attacking? Or are we just going to let the game get harder?

In other words, I favor a holistic approach to balancing the different ways of dealing damage, and don't see why we should have to wait until missile weapons get nerfed before we start considering other changes.

It's been ages since I played a mage in V, and a big part of that is that I like to play blast mages, who rely on spells to deal all (or almost all) of their damage, and that's simply not feasible for V mages. It's feasible in ToME, and IIRC it's feasible in Z; I haven't tried FA or DaJ or however you capitalize that one yet, so I can't comment on them. It'd be nice if it were feasible in V too.

Mind, if we do make a shift towards blast mages who don't need melee weapons to deal damage, then we should consider adding more items that take up the melee slot and provide useful non-combat abilities.

[fizzix]

In that case, post band-aid, shouldn't mages be further penalized for using archery .

not really. The idea is for magic to be competitive with archery. You don't want to eliminate the option entirely, because then you have a boring class that only spams one or two spells the entire game. A change like this and a uniform nerfing of archery should approach something reasonable.

[buzzkill]

not really. The idea is for magic to be competitive with archery. You don't want to eliminate the option entirely, because then you have a boring class that only spams one or two spells the entire game. A change like this and a uniform nerfing of archery should approach something reasonable.

I'm not really interested in the ultimate outcome of this debate. I'm not replying for any other reason than to air another opinion. For mages, shouldn't archery be (much) less than competitive with magic. The proper solution to the 'spamming two spells problem' is to make the spells more varied, and effective versus different types of enemies, as suggested earlier in this thread. While it's inevitable that higher level spells will deal more damage, graduating low level, situation specific spells may help. To this end, introducing vulnerabilities in monsters would help A LOT. A few extra spells in each book, for added variety, wouldn't hurt either. Shouldn't mages have a wider selection of spells than the other full casters?

[Marble Dice]

I would be happy with this kind of change.

r1831. Obviously this doesn't close #533 and #564 but it should help a lot in the mean time.

[PowerDiver]

At clevel 35 there's no way you have nearly enough mana to take out anything with meteor swarm. Furthermore, chances are you have arrows that output around 80-90 damage easily with similar fail rates. There is little reason to cast this supposedly powerful spell.

At CL35, you typically do not have access to that much in the way of branded ammo, and only shoot tough foes half the time, so I'm not sure about your 80-90 damage. OTOH, I'll stipulate it, because I don't care. My point is not to make spells competitive with archery. Hopefully archery will be nerfed, and I don't know enough to suggest changes to specific spells. I just want it to be feasible for mages to kill things with magic.

My char killed a few tough things with meteor swarms plus a lucky early staff of the magi. You don't have to worry about matching against a resistance hole either, which is a benefit.

I'm just sad that someone with a clue suggested dropping the mana cost by less than half on that particular spell. What a way to mess with ucky details. My proposal was so clean!

[Nick]

I'm just sad that someone with a clue suggested dropping the mana cost by less than half on that particular spell. What a way to mess with ucky details. My proposal was so clean!

And we all admire your mathematical idealism.

[Marble Dice]

I'm just sad that someone with a clue suggested dropping the mana cost by less than half on that particular spell.

Are you talking about me? I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

I thought 14 mana would be a good choice since Meteor Swarm is irresistible, and this way it's less efficient than the nether-elemental Rend Soul. At 12 mana, they would have very similar efficiency after level 42. I'm probably bonkers for trying to preserve some sense of coherence with the current broken and (seemingly) arbitrarily designed mage spell set, but call me OCD, I couldn't help it.

[Magnate]

Are you talking about me? I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

I thought 14 mana would be a good choice since Meteor Swarm is irresistible, and this way it's less efficient than the nether-elemental Rend Soul. At 12 mana, they would have very similar efficiency after level 42. I'm probably bonkers for trying to preserve some sense of coherence with the current broken and (seemingly) arbitrarily designed mage spell set, but call me OCD, I couldn't help it.

I just love how the development of this game works: year after year of contortions to improve the operation of fundamentally broken arbitrary designs ... until at long last somebody implements something redesigned from the ground up, at which point everybody shouts "nooo!".

[cofresi]

Some Idea's I've had while playing my mage (some silly, some well thought out).

Mages get by a lot on trickery, much like rogues. Their skills lie in avoiding trouble, getting out of tough spots and securing vantage points. In that aspect mages are set, however they do need better magic damage as raining manastorms from an asc does get boring (though effective).

First off, I'm very much in favor of decreasing spellcasting costs, it saves consumables and would likely wean a mage off from bows. It may be very useful to increase the mana regeneration rate of mages (and perhaps other prime casters such as priests).

Someone was reworking on damage output of devices, kudos to that though decreasing mana costs may make this counter intuitive. Still I would like more powerful devices that would make picking them up worthwile (and carrying Tenser's for that matter).

As to making the mage more of a caster than a bowman/brawler while leaving options open:
1- make the branding spell in Tenser's unavailable to mages (but not rangers). Instead add a weatherproofing spell to protect magic devices (and equipment?).
2- bring back a GOI spell (of sorts). [note, I only experienced GOI once playing a mage in Z, so it's fuzzy]. Make it a GOI that actually decreases magical/breath damage by a percentage, a magic buffer zone if you will, but at the cost of greatly decreasing melee/bow skills (and perhaps AC).
3-Create a high end elemental ball spell for kelek's that does steady high damage but less than manastorm. When casting, give this spell an option to choose what type of elemental damage to use. The idea is to fire this spell instead of branded bolts against a target's elemental weakness.

Side note (silly): One could make this a dragonbreath(wizard breath) spell basing damage off a percentage of the mage's HP (which means gnomes would be lame while HT mages would rule if they pull it off)
4-!GET rid of Bedlam... What a joke on mb9. Replace it with the above spell or just change the spell so that it stops breeders from breeding(& limit summons) thus living up to its name.

[Marble Dice]

I just love how the development of this game works: year after year of contortions to improve the operation of fundamentally broken arbitrary designs ... until at long last somebody implements something redesigned from the ground up, at which point everybody shouts "nooo!".

Obviously we should all just quit V and go make a variant.

[Magnate]

Someone was reworking on damage output of devices, kudos to that though decreasing mana costs may make this counter intuitive. Still I would like more powerful devices that would make picking them up worthwile (and carrying Tenser's for that matter).

That would be me. It's next on my list, but not sure if it will be in for 3.1.2. The basic idea is that the normal damage of a device will be multiplied by a % bonus which is (device skill minus device difficulty), if that is > 0. So you still get full damage if you manage to activate a device above your skill level, but you get a bonus to damage from devices when your skill goes up. It should also keep lower-level devices competitive a little longer.

It might not make it into 3.1.2 because although it's not overly hard to code, it might well require some rebalancing of devices, either for damage output or difficulty or both.

Rebalancing spells is a longer piece of work. Marble Dice has applied the band-aid in the meantime, and this will hopefully allow us to gather useful feedback during the life of 3.1.2.

That said, I do wonder how many people actually play any versions other than the nightlies.

[Djabanete]

It would be great to see mages using high-end magic devices as primary sources of damage against uniques. Bring on the wands of Annihilation, Disintegration, Fulmination, and Rockets!

[Marble Dice]

That said, I do wonder how many people actually play any versions other than the nightlies.

Among the forum users, most people probably play nightlies. I'd expect the proportion to be much lower among the wider Angband population though. It seems like we get a lot of new "Been playing Angband off and on for years..." posts over time, so the number of people that play but aren't involved in the community is probably somewhat large.

[Nightmarjoo]

Well, the way I played my last mage (which won) was basically as a warrior. I hit dl 98 with something like 166 hp, and stayed alive using shield and resistance, (and carefully carefully picking my battles), and it was almost too easy. This was aided by the awesome randart weapons I got, but I never really had a need to use my magic offensively, all my magic was going into making shield and resistance last forever, along with detecting and teleporting and stuff. I only used magic later in the game on really scary things like Ungoliant and Morgoth, and the fight vs both was a fairly dull manastorm over and over, use magi staff, manastorm over and over dance.

Just seems like the proposed changes could make a mage too easy. With real ways to turn your mana into exp, you're potentially hitting dl 98 faster and more comfortably, meaning you're getting all the nice stuff that comes with surviving to 98 easier/quicker to get. Instead of going from this tiny little frail twig of a character running from everything until finally you're able to use your magic to make yourself invincible (GoI not included), you're this monster of a archer whose arrows go through things, explode on things, and regenerate over time, and then finally you become invincible and you don't notice the difference. I'm probably exagerating the effect of the specific changes proposed, but I think the path these changes lead to could make what I'm talking about reality if you're not careful.

[Derakon]

It sounds like the problem you're having, Nightmarjoo, is that killing things with magic isn't very interesting (to you, anyway). Why would you say that is the case?

Keep in mind also that your use case (dive to 98, and do all your powering up there) is atypical and effectively skips most of the spells that are affected by this change. I see the big changes as being that frost bolt, fire bolt, etc. would actually be worth casting for general damage, instead of being a "dump most of my mana at the enemy before he enters melee range" type of thing.