Increasing Spell Power

[chris]

I'm in the process of adding a new flag to Hengband: SPELL_POWER. Rings of Spell Power will have a negative pval (-2 to -6) and will effect Str, Dex, and Con stats. The upside is that the power of spells will be boosted by 20% to 60%, and spell power stacks, so you can wear multiple rings if you like.

But I am wondering about game balance here. Biffing Con is huge for a mage and there is the opportunity cost of the ring slot. I'm curious, have other variants attempted this?

Spell power effects damage, of course, but also improves spells like recharging, genocide, etc, and often increases the radius and duration of spells.

Thoughts?

[Derakon]

ToME 2's spells all scale in effect with level to a greater or lesser extent, and it has a spell power effect which increases your spells' level. For example, if a magic missile effect gains 1d4 damage per level, and the player currently casts at 10d4, then getting +4 spell power would mean they'd cast at 14d4. It would simultaneously increase the radius on their detection spells, mean that haste-self might grant an extra point or two of speed, increase the duration on Blessing, etc.

Of course, ToME 2 isn't what I'd call "remotely balanced".

[chris]

ToME 2's spells all scale in effect with level to a greater or lesser extent, and it has a spell power effect which increases your spells' level.

That's an interesting idea, and pretty easy to implement. However, in Hengband, some spells just have hard coded damage. Also, some are only weakly influenced by the player's level. For example, the Blood Curse spell just does 600hp, Hellfire just does 666hp, while something like a Mana Storm does 300 + 4*lev. So if I understand you correctly, increasing level by 4 would add 0, 0 and 16 damage respectively, which would be a weak effect Of course, many other spells would work nicely since damage is more sensitive to player level.

The calc I am currently going with is:

static int spell_power(int pow)
{
	if (p_ptr->spell_power > 0)
		return pow * (10 + p_ptr->spell_power) / 10;
	
	return pow;
}

Where spell_power is just the negative of the sum of all pval's for objects with the SPELL_POWER flag (and I assume they always have negative pvals).

So, sucking up -4 to Str, Dex and Con (which is about the limit of what I think is desirable), a 500hp Mana Storm would dish out 700hp. That seems rather strong, but for me, -4 Con is a huge penalty (-100 to -150hp). I can tweak the power boost of course if that seems too high.

Of course you could go nuts and wear 2 Rings of Spell Power (-6) and then you would have 120% boost to spell damage (Mana Storm would do 1100). But -12 Con is virtually impossible to overcome, especially if you sack two ring slots to do it.

I guess its just one of those things you need to try out to see how it works?

Of course, ToME 2 isn't what I'd call "remotely balanced".

Hah, but its very fun, no?

[Atarlost]

What I'd do is go to multiple pvals, or two copies of each pval flag for positive and negative relations. +spell power -physical is fine for the ring, but you'll want to add it to artifacts that may want to have positive pvals for things like int.

Consider that +attacks is something like an additive +17% per pval and doesn't have built in negatives. Boosting your effective level for casting, even if you also dropped fail rates, is weaker than an extra attack at its weakest starting from level 6.

Spell Power if it's just a level boost is like speed in that +1 is trifling. Unless your spells scale quadratically you need to get around +15 spell power to be as good as +1 blow and are never likely to approach +1 might.

And spells scaling quadratically would really hurt the non-magic classes.

[Djabanete]

In Heroes of Might and Magic III (and possibly other iterations), there's a skill called "Sorcery" that just ups the damage of any spell you cast by a certain percentage. You could have the "Expert Sorcery" skill contributing 30%, and an item contributing 15%, and all your damage spells would be 45% more potent.

If you're looking to increase the power of pure casters, all you need is damage. Casters already have tons of utility spells and it scarcely matters whether those are marginally more or less powerful. It appears that the simplest solution is to not artificially alter the character level (since different spells respond differently to that), but rather to put a stackable, >1 coefficient on spell damage output. That's also a lot easier for the player to grasp conceptually than "spell power", which is a bit obscure.



I'm glad you're embarking on this project! If you ever release it, I will beg you to implement a couple of things unrelated to this

[chris]

In Heroes of Might and Magic III (and possibly other iterations), there's a skill called "Sorcery" that just ups the damage of any spell you cast by a certain percentage. You could have the "Expert Sorcery" skill contributing 30%, and an item contributing 15%, and all your damage spells would be 45% more potent.

If you're looking to increase the power of pure casters, all you need is damage. Casters already have tons of utility spells and it scarcely matters whether those are marginally more or less powerful. It appears that the simplest solution is to not artificially alter the character level (since different spells respond differently to that), but rather to put a stackable, >1 coefficient on spell damage output. That's also a lot easier for the player to grasp conceptually than "spell power", which is a bit obscure.

Originally, it was just as you suggest: A Ring of Spell Damage. Hey, warriors get rings of damage, why not wizards? But then it occurred to me that increasing durations and other things might be useful as well. So I renamed it to Spell Power. It definitely increases damage, and the current calculation is a 10% increase per point. But it also makes recharging more effective, genocide more effective, makes spells last longer, makes teleport other, banish and charm more effective. Basically, any existing spell that has a notion of power gets scaled as well. Its a huge boost, probably game breaking, so it really needs a stiff downside. It will probably need balancing over time, but the amount of scaling can always be tweaked.

I'm glad you're embarking on this project! If you ever release it, I will beg you to implement a couple of things unrelated to this

I'll open a new thread for this ...

[chris]

What I'd do is go to multiple pvals, or two copies of each pval flag for positive and negative relations. +spell power -physical is fine for the ring, but you'll want to add it to artifacts that may want to have positive pvals for things like int.

I really like the idea of multiple pvals ... not just for this case, but in general. For example, extra attacks always caps the pval down to 1 for Holy Avengers, but there is no reason to limit the Wisdom boost in that way. However, this might be too hard for my limited coding skills

Were I to build a variant from scratch, I would not use flags at all, but would rather use property lists. So a ring of strength +3 would have a property "strength" with a value +3. Then there is no reason why you couldn't have objects with multiple properties of different values.

[Nick]

Were I to build a variant from scratch, I would not use flags at all, but would rather use property lists. So a ring of strength +3 would have a property "strength" with a value +3. Then there is no reason why you couldn't have objects with multiple properties of different values.

If you're interested, this is how FAangband does it.

[Atarlost]

Except it's not a huge boost. The non-damage boosts don't actually mean that much. Except maybe recharging if you can get it to zero fail. At least not unless a lot of effects get saving throws in Heng that don't get them in V. Remember, you're competing with all rings, not just damage.

The highest fighter on the Hengband ladder is doubling his damage output from a pair of rings of extra attacks. Late game that's what you're competing with. +5 from a ring of spell power is comparable to +3 attacks.

The highest character I see on the Hengband ladder to use a +damage ring (slaying and heroism) that isn't also +attacks or a ring of power is a priest who is getting more than +25% damage from a ring of slaying (+15, +15).

The median warrior has a ring of slaying (+10, +9). It boosts her damage by about 26%. Pure rings of damage at the same level should be significantly better.

[chris]

If you're interested, this is how FAangband does it.

I am interested, and will definitely take a look. It might be awhile, though, since I'm struggling thru tasks like changing the variant name and version number ...

[Nick]

It might be awhile, though, since I'm struggling thru tasks like changing the variant name and version number ...

It gets better