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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
First off make mage AOE damage hit friendlies, this means mages can't just indiscriminately drop nukes into their allies' melee fights and forces a more tactical and teamwork-oriented play. This also means that mages CAN cut lose with those big nukes when soloing and have a reasonable chance to burn-down enemies trying to reach them.
Second move some of the Mages impact into battle shaping rather than raw damage. Shaping is still big area effects, things like changing the weather, turning the ground to mud or creating obscuring fog in a large area etc. Such thing should last for longer durations then most spells possibly the whole battle and are distinguished from CC because your own team will need to deal with the situation as well because the area is centered on the caster.
Avoid giving mages small zappy little auto attacks or single target spells as these not only usurp the roll of Rangers but also make the mage too flexible and hard to attack thus forcing the mage to have even lower health and die in literally 1 hit after someone survives charging through 3 lightning bolts to the face.
Make mages very poor at detecting stealthier targets like rogues. Some kind of perception stat should be involved here such that enemy characters just have to be closer before they appear to the mage. Rangers should have the best perception thus making them the natural defenders against stealth attacks. Now we have an interdependency between the two classes.
Make Mages being damaged during casting have a chance to stall or fizzle the spell. Ideally this chance would start low and rise as the casting is nearing completion, so opponents need to hit the mage at the last moment for the best chance to disrupt them. Casting animations should also more clearly communicate how close the casting is to completion by ramping up it's glow/Pyrotechnique over time. Remember mages can move while casting so they can and should use that mobility to defend themselves and get their spell completed.
Lastly all the the above effects should be mitigatable with Augments. Mages could use Cleric augments to reduce friendly damage on AOE's, Ranger augments to turn their spells into single target shots, Rogue augments for the spell casting animation to be hidden or Tank augments to prevent their spells from being interrupted.
I find these two points conflict. Either you want a glass cannon or you don't want a glass cannon. It leads me to ask what is your definition of a glass cannon?
Small sappy attacks can be on a glass cannon. I think the Mage should have at least one dot and hope to see the dots come from fire. I feel mobility and dots go hand in hand. Also, I think the mage is balanced quite well right now. It will be difficult to perform rotations in an active environment where a tank can't hold aggro.
Giving any class massive nukes only would be detrimental to the game and definitely make the mage overpowered.
I have yet to see anyone here even talk about what makes a mage balanced in an MMO where by design the game isn't balanced. Anyone pretending like the game needs to work for 1vs1 or any combination of even numbers is hilarious as that situation will never happen outside of queable content.
Or a Rift Pyromancer (at release)
Or ESO's DK (at release)
Uh-oh... I'm starting to think that IS didn't show us any of the fire abilities on purpose!
To clarify, giving mages single target attacks discourages a strait one-man charge into melee range because the mage can and will start focusing fire on that attacker to take them down before reaching melee. If a mage only had AoE attacks to launch, they become much less efficient in taking down that attacker before they close the distance and once the attacker is on them, they will damage themselves if they drop AoE's on their own location per the prior stipulation that AoE damage hurts friendlies.
Thus, a mage with single target attacks is generally made more delicate, aka glass cannon like in order to balance the difficulty of successfully closing to melee with them. Conversely a mage without single target damage spells can be allowed more health while remaining balanced. My point is that we should avoid a mage spell kit which is so defensively efficient that it paints the design into a corner and forces a delicate low hp mage as the only way to balance the class.
DoTs are fine and fire-based ones are thematically ideal, in fact a slow DoT is one exception to the restriction on single target spells, because a DoT is not an efficient way to take out a charging melee attacker so more leeway in such spells is possible.
The downside to a mage class focusing on AoE damage is that it makes the Mageball meta a guarantee.
Even friendly fire on AoEs (which intrepid have already ruled out) wont stop that.
A mass of mages keeping as close to each other as they can, spamming AoEs any time rivals get close enough. 30 semi-organized players are able to decimate a well organized guild of 200+ players in any game I have played where there is a class with a focus on AoE.
You can dampen the effectiveness of a mageball by doing things like requiring all spells be cast while stationary, limiting the range of AoE abilities or not giving these classes any CC at all, but these things only limit the effectiveness of a mageball rather than neutralize it, but they also destroy the effectiveness of the class when used in any manner ither than a mageball.
As to friendly fire, the corruption system makes it essentially impossible to implement. By all means though, ask Intrepid about it in one of the streams.
This.
More of the same bullshit.
Thanks for the clarification, I'd say the solution to the mage ball problem is simple. First the stealth/perception mechanics would make mages vulnerable to Rogues who would sneak in and start slaughtering them like sheep. Now I did say that Rangers would counter Rogues so to defend against this your mage ball is now a mage/ranger ball which is a step in the right direction.
Still, you need a tactic against such ranged-attack balls, having your own AoE will be devastating against tightly packed players, this is where you engage a Mage/Rogue who has enough stealth to have a good chance to get in and lob an AoE of his own before retreating. Likewise, you can employ a Tank to try to vault into the ball and drop CC or silence effects. Overlapping AoE attacks should either have a diminishing return (like repeated CC), or Tanks can have a specific skill to reduce damage that scales with the number of attackers so that focused burst damage is less effective on them. Lastly you have the option to employ Summoner pets as cannon-fodder, sent in individually they will trade more efficiently in mana consumption vs the AoE's to kill them, and if the pets are rogue like or tank like they have the advantages already described.
By the time the mageball has covered all it's weaknesses it's going to just be a balanced composition. Just like a pile of artillery pieces even self-propelled artillery is vulnerable on the battlefield alone so it's protected by infantry, tanks and airpower.
Obviously it won't resolve the issue completely, but it'll at least make that mageball weaker and might make them use other strats.
That wouldn't work, no one is using stealth near them before being blown up by random constant aoes, that is the whole point.
Only way to reduce its effective imo is to not give them as easy big aoe skills you don't need to target and can play blind folded. Reduce dmg on aoe, and increase CD times. Give other classes to take reduced aoe dmg with skills and passives. Ie tank can absorb dmg for the team and can spec to reduce aoe dmg taken by a large percent.
NiKr: Good point on the magic reflection, that's an ideal counter.
Part of a somewhat organized mageball is maintaining a perimeter. So far, in games where this has become the meta, the only successful tactic I have seen used against it (without developer intervention) is a bigger mageball.
Still the notion that a mage ball can only be beaten a bigger ball doesn't follow if there are the kinds of basic counters that were listed. Can anyone provide an example of a game which is mage ball meta and yet has the counters thus proving they dent work?
Also don't lose track of the notion that AoE nuke dropping from mages would be Megamin style, aka explicitly exhausting and thus quantity limited, they should never be cost effective against single targets and can't be spammed at empty ground. Any game which allows AoE spamming clearly already playing with fire.
The problem here is that now you are trying to create a DPS class based around their own damage having diminishing returns.
Clearly this is no longer a viable class.
I am with NiKr here. I don't think clusters of mages will be a problem. Many MMORPGs have tried bigger scales of combat, so there is plenty of data to collect to avoid stuff like that.
Just spitting some ideas out of the blue:
* Tank or cleric archetypes could have an anti-magic zone with a fairly long CD to encourage coordination. Giving it to a non-DPS class is important for small scale balance.
* Bard archetypes with intense magic resistance buffs with short duration and decent CDs.
* Clerics or tank archetypes with mass damage reduction CDs (for raid/party members).
* Intense CC reduction for a short duration for the front liners via bards or fighters.
* Short status immunity for the rogues with AoE damage taken reduction (DnD inspired).
Any of these abilities would help the enemy group get on top of the mage group (as there is a general consensus that mages should not be very mobile by default) and slaughter them, and thus the mage group will need a front-line group of their own to compete with other groups.
In order for magic reflect to kill a mageball, it would have already kill all mage classes.
I've not seen magic reflect that strong in any game in about 15 years.
I mean, you are literally saying that one class should be able to render another totally useless. That isn't a good mechanic. Again, in order to be effective, you are talking about a literal anti-mage class. Not just a counter, you are talking about a class that can withstand 20+ DPS characters all going after that character at once.
What chance does a solo mage have against this? And how long should this tank or cleric be able to hand out literal immunity to their group? I don't see how this would help. What status is it rogues are immune to here?
I mean, it's easy to come up with "counters" to a tactic if you don't try to consider balance at all.
Neither do I.
It was the suggestion of making the mage class an AoE specialist that would warrant it.
1- take every mdef gear off
2- activate your magic reflect
3- one shot the mage
take your mdef gear off
take your mdef gear off