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I disagree with "a mage should". There are countless mages in fantasy literature. Mages who are master swordsman are almost as common as pure casters. Gandalf uses a sword more than he casts. The d&d versions isn't a pure caster (spells/day). As to sorcerors they don't necessarily take a radical rebalance. They exist in other variants.
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Let's consider a few scenarios:
1. The mage has a spell for every occasion, and the spells are cheap enough (or the mage has enough mana) that they don't need to be carefully managed. The mage does not need to think carefully about what tools to use for solving their problems, though they may have other sources of pressure (e.g. low HP) limiting how they deal with things.
2. The mage has a spell for every occasion, but spells are expensive enough that they cannot be used freely. The mage will need non-spell options to deal with most situations, as they won't have the stamina to solve every problem with spells. That means using magic devices, bows, melee, etc.
3. The mage does not have a spell for every occasion, but the spells they do have are cheap. They can readily solve some problems and have substantial difficulty solving others, which must be solved with non-spell means (devices, etc.) or not at all.
The old Vanilla mage is very roughly a type 2. It sounds like the new mage Nick made is more of a type 3.Comment
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It sounds to me like there's a fairly high demand for a Type 1 mage, in Derakon's terminology. There were some older posts in this thread to that effect too. Any particular reason why there shouldn't be one? After all, not everyone has to like playing every class.
As a side note, one could make different races support different playstyle mages. For instance, hobbits and gnomes are very similar at the moment. But if, say, hobbits had +0 Int and +50 magic device, while gnomes had +5 Int and +0 magic device, then hobbit mages would naturally be device-oriented, while gnome mages would be spell-oriented.Comment
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I would guess the resistance to having a Type 1 mostly boils down to "it would be significantly stronger than the other two types, and thus less interesting/fun to play." It's not clear that a Type 1 mage could have tradeoffs that give a similar level of involvement as the other types, in other words. Consider that the current mage already has a d0 hit die (i.e. only gets native hitpoints from the racial hit die) and STR/CON penalties. What are you going to do to the Type 1, give it aggravation?
Of course there's no reason why the classes have to be balanced, but each class should have a clear set of "this is what it's good at" and "this is what it's bad at." When you have a spell for every occasion and no real limits on using them, there's very little that you're bad at and plenty that you're good at, so where's the tension?Comment
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I never played them in pos but my understanding was that it was worse hps & a massive AC penalty. That's dependent on melee range being much more dangerous & hardier to avoid though.Comment
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As wobbly said, you can penalize HP or AC. You can also reduce carrying capacity, either by further reducing Str or creating an extra flag for mages that halves their carrying capacity. Or increase their exp level costs. Or make them permanently afraid. Or not be able to carry a weapon (or armour/shield/bow or anything that weighs more than 10lb). Or unable to use gold. Or reduce their speed. Or make them allergic to icky things. Failing that, give it aggravation.
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A tear shed for the lowly mage. Always these inroads against their power. Resenting their endgame abilities shortchanges the difficulty of getting them there in the first place.
“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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I would be fine with a class that uses only ever uses mana to damage monsters, so long as they don't really use their mana to do anything else. They could have great variety in terms of elements and such, but would have mage-level melee and archery, and maybe priest or ranger device skill. No detection spells, no teleportation (to make keeping out of melee easier, have some of the offensive spells push monsters back), no buffs, no recharging, no banish or destruction, just various forms and shapes of direct damage. Maybe they even get to have dispel all, and cones, and 0-radius balls and other esoteric formats of damage, to keep stuff varied.Comment
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A quick look at recent mage winners on the ladder indicates that, besides books and ignoring attack wands for now, the main things carried are:- Healing items
- !Restore Mana
- Mapping/Enlightenment items
- Restore life items
- Object detection of some sort
My guess is that for the new mage speed items would need to be added to that list, but not much else. Have I missed anything?
As for attacks, the new mage has certainly lost some attack spells (and gained a couple), but has it's endgame damage output actually been reduced?One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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Playing latst version as a Paladin: I learn Heroism at level 12, but when I cast it... it does nothing. Turns out it has a duration of... -2!PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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"Heal 10HP and cure fear" is a pretty underwhelming spell even at level 12. Why not fix the UI issue by actually granting the full Heroism effect from the get-go? I mean, we're only talking about temporary fear resist and +10 to-hit; these are not exactly gamebreaking buffs. They can be replicated by a common low-level potion that costs less than 50AU.Comment
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Since my @'s last ignominious death in the feature branch comp, I turned my attention to reviewing the edit files of the feature branch.
A few things for Class.txt:
'name' description includes "class number", which is no longer used.
description for 'info' is obsolete. should describe the now broken-out line items (i.e., 'hitdie', 'max-attacks', 'min-weight', 'strength-multiplier').
description for 'flags' should now be 'player-flags'.
description for 'book-graphics' says, "...as used in object.txt." But that is no longer the case, is it? Aren't the books solely described in class.txt now?
Note: Still can't have a class that uses books from more than one realm (e.g., an arcane, magic book and a nature, nature book) - the game just crashes, or rather, won't open. (However, you can use (insert) the spells from any realm, provided all the books for a @'s class are defined as being of one realm).
Will "effects" end up in an edit file at some point? It would be nice to really understand what all these great new spells actually do. That might be too unwieldy or impossible, though, from a coding perspective.Last edited by Ingwe Ingweron; June 1, 2018, 23:36.“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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Thanks for these.
OK, that shouldn't happen; I will follow up at some point. Keep reminding me
The short answer is no; for the most part the effects are smallest possible bits of code that can be given parameters in class.txt (and other data files). That said,- some of them can be further refined (for example, maybe DETECT_EVIL, DETECT_VISIBLE_MONSTERS, etc can become DETECT_MONSTERS with a parameter) and
- there should be documentation somewhere of what all of them do and what parameters they take.
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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