Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Mage hunter idea
Botagar
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
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?
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?
3
Comments
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.
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.
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
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.
I like it.
How do you make it impactful against NPCs without disabling them?
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.
(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!