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Thoughts on reagents?
pgt1027
Member
Since recent livestreams have focused a lot on the spellcasters, it made me wonder about something that I have pretty integral to the spellcaster experience, but seems to have been falling out of favor in MMOs. Spell and ability reagents. For those unfamiliar, items in your inventory that are consumed to use a spell or ability. For me, at least, dealing with items of magic potency is part of the flavor of of being a spellcaster, though really any class can use reagents as a mechanic. For instance, you could take a page out of the Witcher and have a fighter down mutagens to activate abilities that give them some kind of buff.
I would divide reagents into four categories:
Internal Reagents - Reagents that your class is able to produce on its own by performing some action.
Crafted Reagents - Reagents produced by one of the crafting professions.
Loot Reagents - Reagents dropped by enemies and/or found in the environment
Vendor Reagents - Reagents sold by vendors, especially a specialized "reagents vendor"
For those unfamiliar with the concept, reagents outside of internal reagents aren't typically used for core abilities, but strong or specialized abilities with a significant cooldown, or to give abilities a convenience boost (for instance, a single target buff with a 30 minute duration becomes a party buff with an hour duration).
Any thoughts on this? Good ones, bad ones, or should the whole concept be left in the past?
I would divide reagents into four categories:
Internal Reagents - Reagents that your class is able to produce on its own by performing some action.
Crafted Reagents - Reagents produced by one of the crafting professions.
Loot Reagents - Reagents dropped by enemies and/or found in the environment
Vendor Reagents - Reagents sold by vendors, especially a specialized "reagents vendor"
For those unfamiliar with the concept, reagents outside of internal reagents aren't typically used for core abilities, but strong or specialized abilities with a significant cooldown, or to give abilities a convenience boost (for instance, a single target buff with a 30 minute duration becomes a party buff with an hour duration).
Any thoughts on this? Good ones, bad ones, or should the whole concept be left in the past?
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Comments
I enjoy the economic aspects they bring in some cases, even if they are mandatory, as long as their stack size is high.
But it's just one more thing for the server/client to track. It's not a 'costly' thing, but it is one more thing.
I enjoy them when they are for use for rare special things though, so the 'special quivers' compromise mentioned awhile back for arrows, or a 'reagent pouch' for whatever else, is fine with me too.
I think
1. having a way for players to directly prepare against them
2. having significant risk for acqusition with opportunity for player prevention
3. having equally strong counterparts for other players to utilize
could help balance them to make for unique gameplay experiences, or provide an additional fun option to use for rewards.
I'm of the opinion that they are fine if used as an occasional boost, but not as a required part of a class.
I would put arrows and reagents in two different categories.
Arrows are basically an item you have to have for every attack, including auto-attacks. With maybe the exception of internal reagents, reagents really shouldn't be needed for core abilities and especially auto-attacks. Reagents would be more for specialized or powerful abilities with a significant cooldown, or on what you might describe as "convenience abilities," like making a single target buff a party buff.
You could think of them almost like potions, but integrated into your class.
It was just really annoying and nobody wanted to farm reagents to use a Spell..
I can imagine the same with crafted Reagents aso.
You just want your spells to be ready when you need them.
Yes, the mage "slow fall" spell and the priest "levitate" spell. All it really did was slow your falling speed and, in the case of the priests, let you run above water instead of swim. I can't think of a situation where you actually needed these abilities. They were just kind of cool and convenient at times.
I do like consumables, but their implementation strongly depends on the ability/effect they're linked to. L2 had a consumable that you'd use on each attack (on every class), archers would have arrows as consumables (on top of the first item), some fighter classes would have an item that would charge up their class-based resource, healers had an item for a specific strong ability, one of the mages required another item to use his main nuke and most of the time everyone had to keep a particular item in their inventory in order to be summonable by a support class.
In other words it can get very convoluted and micromanagey real fast. Majority of the items I mentioned could be just bought at an npc store, but I'd personally prefer if Ashes relied on those as little as possible, which would mean that consumables would have to be crafted by people. At which point the micromanagement of your stuff relies on other people. And if those consumables are used in some powerful spells and you happen to run out, and your usual crafter is not online - you're shit out of luck.
Imo it can be a deep and interesting system, but quite often it just goes against the day-to-day fun of the game. I remember countless times when guild gatherings (for raids or pvp) would start with 30% of people saying "oh shit, I forgot a consumable I need, give me 5 mins". And in L2 we had TPs, so it was in fact just 5 minutes. But imagine how that would go in Ashes. "Oh shit, I forgot to stock up on a very important consumable. And it's only crafted in a node 20 minutes away and I'm not sure if the crafter set up his stall for it. Do you want me to go w/o one of my most powerful spells or do you want me to go check (which will take almost an hour)?"
Actually, there was one place where the Mage "slow fall" spell was something I used consistently. The Twin Peaks Capture the Flag battleground (I hope I remember the name correctly). There was a fairly high plateau there and if you had slow fall, it became a quickish escape for you and fall damage for anyone trying to follow you. I don't consider that implementation of reagents very good.
Now, I will freely admit I wasn't good at the game, I didn't play that mode for long and this is already fairly niche. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that if you make a reagent using spell something neat and flavorful for most players and integral to players of the same class but doing DIFFERENT content, you need to make this a part of a healthy economy for your game. Otherwise it's frustrating. In other words, it should allow some players to think to themselves "the mages are probably going to care about this reagent this month for whatever reason, so I should go gather it to make money off the Auction House". The mages should then be able to decide for themselves whether that's something they want to spend the gold on, or gather for themselves ahead of time.
And even then, if you asked me to design this kind of thing, I wouldn't do it for the slow fall type stuff of all things. It means you would have to carry those reagents around for possibly months at a time until the niche situation arises. Most players will sensibly choose to make better use of the limited inventory slots and then be frustrated when the situation occurs to do something cool as the class they play, but they chose not to carry the reagent. And then you also have players who literally use it all the time because they do very specific content. The better approach imo is to make it required for something somewhat rare, but more uniform across classes and/or content. Like say... Leapfrog Potion to jump over ledges when you know a rare but notable part of exploration involves taking shortcuts over ledges. That suddenly becomes a neat cool thing for most people to do sometimes and an actual job requirement for someone making profit off exploring/gathering (assuming the game allows for this and has a good economy).
Edit: I suppose for slow fall type stuff in a game like WoW where it barely ever comes into play for most people most of the time, another sensible approach might be to introduce a second use for the same reagent, to make it something people can expect to use and need to carry around more consistently. Then it once again becomes a question of stack sizes, how well the game economy is designed and whether you feel it makes the game more fun.
So:
- arrows / bolts are good
- Reagents for combat abilities are bad
- Reagents necessary for non combat abilities I could go either way (particularly for buffs / travel spells)
I hope/wish AoC adopts the same system. Not only did their use speed up hunting/levelling, when you decided not to use them you saved money.
Crafters (dwarves) made the shots be deconstructing items so the system was a great sink for lower quality and no longer needed items. It was also a nice source of cash for the crafters. You could set up a 'shot crafting shop' and leave the dwarf online for other players to pay to make shots. If, as in the above example, someone forgets to bring shots to the raid, any dwarven crafter can make them on the spot, thus increasing demand for dwarves at raids.
Of course, others may have different opinions, but I really liked the system.
They are a part of the class kit. Sometimes an intrinsic part of it. For instance, the warlock class in WoW was originally built around the use of the soulshard reagent, which the warlocks were able to produce themselves by killing units while they were under the effect of the "drain soul" spell. This was one of the elements that made me feel that the warlock class was head and shoulders above the mage class in terms of spellcaster flavor, fantasy and actual magic system mechanics.
The items are a part of the class design, not something external to it. Now, the use of reagents could be made less irritating, such as the creation of a special "reagent pouch" slot instead of reagents immediately using up normal bag space and having soulshards stack, but the use of soulshards and other conjured items is part of what made the warlock class unique and flavorful, and part of the reason why the warlock class is now a flavorless. grey damage turret after the removal of these mechanics.
I wasn't saying that there should be a warlock class in this game, just that the warlock in WoW was a good example of reagents being integrated into a class kit.
I know all the zoomers want to do is BDO this shit and teleport around the screen in a fast paced seizure inducing light show with no real challenge, but I'm hoping for something more in AoC.
Like WoW you forget a reagent and you hearth back to town, buy a couple from the vendor, and have the warlock re-summon you. Not much of a penalty, more annoying than anything.
For AoC it can very well be a "we reminded you before the raid, try again next week"
A valuable life lesson, to remember for the 100th time that you're a mage, and some of their magic needs reagents. One more time and your raid slot could be filled permanently.
Challenges feel great to overcome, maybe not in hindsight but they do afterwards, and if they teach a life lesson, all the better.
This game seems serious. Like remember your keys and wallet serious, play with a team to win serious, own a home and grow your own food serious, pay taxes serious, ect. Remembering to do something before you can do something sticks well on an MMORPG, a genre derived from a more thought out and involved tabletop game.
I also like the idea of having reagents come from different sources. Managing inventory space and your need to put in a little time to obtain more. Possibly weaving that in to something else if your in the area. Sharing spare you got with someone who forgot them, ect. Also making the world a little more purposeful and alive.
For other kinds of reagents like high level rare alchemy reagents I'd like to see some really cool stuff like treasure map derived reagents and raid boss reagents, ect.
So what reagents do you think would suit bard, cleric, summoner and mage? I assume you don't want reagents for the physical classes.
Actually, I wouldn't be completely against physical classes getting reagents. Like in the OP, taking a page out of the Witcher and having certain fighter classes use mutagens, or having rogues use poisons.
As for the spellcasters, I don't know specifically how I would make reagents work in their class kits from a mechanics perspective because I'm still not entirely sure what those class kits are supposed to be besides an early preview of some of the lower level spells for the cleric and mage. However, I have an idea of how reagents might work flavor-wise. Mages deal in items of arcane power, and might be able to find them or even produce them of their own power, while certain crafting professions might be able to fashion reagents together with materials like various herbs and plant cuttings or gold, silver and magically charged crystals. The clerics deal in holy symbols and relics and might gain reagents by picking up items from old shrines or by performing rituals, while crafters might be able to produce things like ankhs and vials of holy water. Summoners might use things like spirit stones or extra-planar fragments to commune with spirits or beings from beyond the plane of Vera (I assume this is how this is going to work, though they haven't gone in depth on how summoner magic works in the lore) and what you need might be based on the type of summoner you are and what you're attempting to summon. Not sure at all about bards because I'm not sure how bard magic is supposed to work in the lore and I'm not even really sure how it might work.