What Utility Magic Skills do you want to see?

Brujo

I really love magic in games especially when the magic affects a quality of life skill. Runescape and Mabinogi come to mind.

In Runescape, you have lunar magic (and now Arceuss) which interacts with the farming skill. If your crop dies you can use magic to resurrect it (with limits) or magic to fertilize.

In Mabinogi, you could use alchemy to create localized rain which would increase your life skills' productivity. You also had the typical life skills such as cooking, fishing, carpentry, animal taming, etc which interact in certain ways with your magic.

I would love if we had a really complex life skill system that interacted with your magic proficiency or say some magic scrolls / knowledge you have to go around the world to gather that would aid in your life skills.

As for magic skills in combat, I absolutely need to see AoE magic shields (think an impenetrable magic bubble around the user that blocks in coming damage for everyone inside).

Sengarden

This is an interesting concept, because as far as I know, every player will have some connection to The Essence (Ashes of Creation's primary magical source concept) in contrast to games like WoW, where some character classes are "magical" and some aren't, where there are different sources of magic, etc.

Reference: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/The_Essence
Check footnote 51.

From this perspective, there isn't necessarily an on/off differentiation between the various combat classes' connection to The Essence. Everyone has access to it through the simple nature of their existence, and everyone's class kit will utilize some form of magic. With this in mind, I think it would be wise to include a set of universal life skill talents utilizing player connection to The Essence, similar to what you described. Skills that aren't combat related, but that could affect our experience with professions, navigation, etc. Universal skills.

I wonder if religion will tie into this sort of thing at all, since the religious deities are all granted power through The Essence (unless I'm mistaken). So depending on what deity you choose to worship, maybe there are different life skill trees that your devotion could give you points towards furthering?

PherPhur

Brujo wrote: »

I really love magic in games especially when the magic affects a quality of life skill. Runescape and Mabinogi come to mind.

In Runescape, you have lunar magic (and now Arceuss) which interacts with the farming skill. If your crop dies you can use magic to resurrect it (with limits) or magic to fertilize.

In Mabinogi, you could use alchemy to create localized rain which would increase your life skills' productivity. You also had the typical life skills such as cooking, fishing, carpentry, animal taming, etc which interact in certain ways with your magic.

I would love if we had a really complex life skill system that interacted with your magic proficiency or say some magic scrolls / knowledge you have to go around the world to gather that would aid in your life skills.

As for magic skills in combat, I absolutely need to see AoE magic shields (think an impenetrable magic bubble around the user that blocks in coming damage for everyone inside).

I hear ya, an AoE magic shield is one of those things that are so cool that i'd be really dissapointed not to see it.

They already have something I wanted to see which is a black hole for the mages. I would like to see an augment to it from somewhere that causes it to also suck in projectiles and another that increases it's duration though.

SongRune

It's important to remember that utility magic can't give a strong advantage to any particular class outside of a group setting. If a Mage can cast "Rain", all the top farmers will be Mages, and the Fighters of the world will have to level Mage in order to compete at the higher levels of farming.

What I'd like to see is group synergy utility spells, like Tractor from FFXI, which allows a specific Mage class to drag/teleport the corpses of allies out of dangerous positions so they can be resurrected safely by another. Spells like these improve the capabilities of your group, and your value as a member, without automatically giving any particular class a specific advantage in non-class-related solo activities.

Rather than creating or enforcing a meta (or requiring extremely careful and fragile balance, which often then ruins the spell in order to avoid it), focusing on spells that provide utility to a group, rather than providing an exclusive advantage to solo activities like life skills, this type of spell improves everyone's experience, not just players of a particular class.

Warth

Imo, give every class a utility type spell thats not mandatory but extremly beneficial. Whether its a "light" or "unlock door" spell is just semantics.