Mage hunter idea

Botagar

Hello AoC community~!
As someone who usually plays mages in most of my games, suggesting this pains me, but I think its an interesting idea.

Take the sub classes of Templar, Spellsword and/or Nightspell, there is potential that they can take on a role which is a dedicated/semi dedicated mage hunter.

The idea I'm putting forth is the ability to seal the mana of their target by also sealing your own.
How this would work is that say you are a Nightspell who has 100 mana with no investment in sealing, and there's a mage that needs to be subdued, you would seal off 90 of your own mana to seal off 90 of your taget mages mana.
This means that now both of your mana pools are temporarily reduced by 90 mana. This might be enough to break any combos the mage is pulling off or make "ultimate" spells unusable.

But say you've now invested a fair bit into having gear that gives you mana and your mana pools is now 150, you can now seal off up to 150 mana from the mage, basically making them unable to cast anything other than their most basic skills.
And if you've also speccd into having stronger, better default attacks, that mage is now as good as dead without help from others.
This however comes at the drawback in that you've now got +mana taking up one or more of your gear stat lines which could be something more useful for non mage hunting roles such as health or agi or some damage modifier.

What do people think?

Any other mage counter play/skill ideas?

Ludullu

Would love this as one part of the overall mana manipulation gameplay system

maouw

I like this more than silences, but it still needs a little more counter play...

Some ideas that could add extra depth:
- sealed players can still cast spells while sealed, but pay life if they run out of mana. That way, a mage isn't completely locked down but certainly still in an uncomfortable spot. It also lets a mage do a final kamekaze nuke if they're about to go down.
- design sealing as a stackable debuff, so the mage doesn't suddenly lose all their mana at once - sealing becomes a sort of battle of attrition.
- give mages high-cooldown abilities that allow them to bypass mana for some time - the tactic becomes focused on making mages use these abilities earlier than they want to.

I also want to see ways in which other classes could intervene to free their mages from seals.

Botagar

Building ontop of the mana sealing idea, raid bosses could do similar things.

Let's say that during a good boss spanking session the boss determines that this particular raid groups magic damage is particularly potent, it throws down a totem which starts to inflict everyone with a debuff where each stack of this debuff seals 5% of the players mana.
In this phase, you'd need to burn down that totem quickly otherwise you'll find yourself without much damage output or heals.

Speaking of heals, something like this could be used to shut down healers too in group pvp.

Botagar

maouw wrote: »

I like this more than silences, but it still needs a little more counter play...

Some ideas that could add extra depth:
- sealed players can still cast spells while sealed, but pay life if they run out of mana. That way, a mage isn't completely locked down but certainly still in an uncomfortable spot. It also lets a mage do a final kamekaze nuke if they're about to go down.

It could be interesting if perhaps ALL skills across all classes could use health instead of mana if mana is out, but this option needs to be enabled ie. Enable Blood Cost [Yes|No].

maouw wrote: »

- design sealing as a stackable debuff, so the mage doesn't suddenly lose all their mana at once - sealing becomes a sort of battle of attrition.

There could be different investment down the sealing tree, where early on maybe its in a form of a debuff and lower down the tree you get access to the instant cast version

maouw wrote: »

I also want to see ways in which other classes could intervene to free their mages from seals.

I think having this seal remain active would require the sealer to be relatively close by. So other players could either root the sealer in place giving the mage the time to pull distance and break the seal, or maybe force pull/push either party away to break seal.

maouw

Oh yeah - I can see it working at melee range, means the team needs to reposition if a sealer gets too close.

I like it.

How do you make it impactful against NPCs without disabling them?

Kilion

I really like the idea and also thought about something similar only from the magic classes perspective. If they could "exhaust" physical classes by forcing them to use more stamina or have a debuff that increases cooldowns and reduces movement speed.

In general I think maybe as part of "PvP specialized gear" or PvP oriented skills or the bounty hunter profession having debuffs - in some form messing with the opponents resource mechanics should absolutely be available. I wouldn't even be made if these mechanics were exclusively poison effects for primary Rouges.

Dygz

In Ashes, all the Primary Archetypes wield Essence (magic).
(But... this would be great for all those Fighter: Hammer Strike haters.)

Vaknar

Interesting thoughts and ideas happening here! Keep up the fun discussion

Solvryn

Dygz wrote: »

In Ashes, all the Primary Archetypes wield Essence (magic).
(But... this would be great for all those Fighter: Hammer Strike haters.)

But what if Essence is no longer mana or stamina.

It's just essence!